Lynch, Peaks, Morrison, Batman

If you went to the movies in 1986, you might have chosen to see a romantic comedy, a historical drama, an action-adventure movie, horror, sex comedy – just about any sort of thing. Or you could have seen Blue Velvet, which blew conventional genre definitions away. It opened and closed like a G-rated film. The story had a familiar structure: damsel in distress, hero, villain. But all three of the principal characters showed deep perversions along the way. The hero eventually triumphed over the villain, but not before he found in himself a perversion which spread like an infectious disease from the villain to his victim, and from her to the hero. If there was a thematic progression, it was to show that beneath the mundane and beautiful world we enjoy exist all of the troubles of the world – sickness and violence and guilty pleasures – but even when you know that, that beautiful surface is still there, waiting for you to return to it. A movie like that doesn’t sit well with every viewer. It’s not a date movie unless you plan on a real wild finish to the date. Blue Velvet was admired by critics, but was the quintessential cult movie – loved by a relatively small group of fans. And in that respect, it typifies the film career of David Lynch.

Some three years later, the ABC network made the hard-to-believe announcement that it would begin airing a television series pitched by Lynch. The discrepancy between the conventional nature of broadcast network television and the eccentric films of Lynch created a tension that doomed the show to a limited lifespan. When Twin Peaks began airing in April 1990, it was just as "strange and wonderful", to use one of its own phrases, as one might have expected. Yet, powered by some of the sensibilities of primetime soap operas and a central murder mystery, it gained enough momentum to carry it through a second season. The show's defining whodunit -- Who killed Laura Palmer? -- became one of television's most famous mysteries. Eventually the appeal wore off for most of America (not to mention the network executives) and the show lapsed into history. 

Grant Morrison's style of writing superhero comics has at times incorporated some of the elements that make Lynch distinctive as a director. While Morrison has been tremendously successful in writing mainstream hits like the Justice League, he has also done avant garde work like Flex Mentallo, which commented on the superhero genre from within a story that broke fourth-wall boundaries. In bringing such sensibilities to features like Seven Soldiers and DC Comics' flagship story of 2008, Final Crisis, Morrison has written some classics that have won acclaim while turning off some of the larger audience by violating some of the rigid structural constraints of the genre.

In broad ways, then, it is easy to say that Morrison's work has played a role within comics somewhat like that of Lynch's work within film. However, in Morrison's work on Batman, the connection has been more specific than that. In Morrison's sixth issue of Batman, he began making explicit reference to Lynch's work, staring with the appearance of a blue rose. In Fire Walk With Me, the film prequel to Twin Peaks, a blue rose was used as part of a code to communicate that an FBI case pertained to the paranormal. When that blue rose appeared early in Morrison's extended Batman storyline, which ran for twenty-five issues, it foretold a paranormal element that had only begun to show itself.

One issue later, when Batman has encountered the second of two imposter Batmen, who wear a version of his costume but operate against him, he recollects that he had previously encountered those two, and one other, one night in his past, a night he had trouble remembering and had believed to be a dream. This left him eager to locate the third one and he refers to him as "The Third Man". This is most obviously a reference to the 1949 film of the same name, but it is more directly a link to Twin Peaks. Lynch and the 1949 Orson Wells film both use the phrase to refer to a person whose identity was the respective works' central mystery, having been seen (or heard) in the same context as two men whose identities were known. The third man becomes central to one part of Morrison's extended story line, although his identity is only a stepping stone to the larger mystery that was still unsolved when Batman had met and defeated the third replacement Batman.

That mystery came to fruition in the signature story of Morrison's Batman run, the six-issue story called Batman, R.I.P. This story began with the first on-camera appearance of a character named Doctor Hurt. (Actually, based on a nameless character seen in a single Batman story way back in 1963!) Doctor Hurt, it became clear, had brainwashed three policemen into adopting alternate Batman identities and making life difficult for the caped crusader. Now, Doctor Hurt was bringing together the elements of an incredibly long-running plan that would strike at Batman and remove him from his crimefighting role forever. When the first issue of RIP moved to a close, we saw Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend Jezebel Jet (the one who had received the blue rose over a year earlier) at the grave of his parents. The scene shifts to Arkham Asylum with artwork that initially focuses on some flowers, which had very sinister-looking millipedes crawling on them, signifying the horror that was welling up waiting to come. The scene to follow showed the Joker, Batman's deadly enemy, fantasizing about mass murder just before he is contacted by the Black Glove, the criminal organization headed by Doctor Hurt. This shot of the flowers and millipedes structurally resembles an early shot in Blue Velvet, which showed the green grass of a lawn, then zoomed in to reveal a dark subsurface with beetles underneath crawling in a disturbing battle between themselves. The image above shows three screenshots of Blue Velvet alongside the two panels of RIP that capture the same impression with a similar pair of images.

The action in the story soon thereafter shows us that just as Doctor Hurt had subjected the three policemen to brainwashing, he had reserved similar control over Batman thanks to having had access to Batman over a span of ten days when Batman had volunteered for an experiment in human endurance for the US Army (the 1963 story). As a result, Batman's crimefighting personality (as well as his personality as Bruce Wayne) was "switched off" suddenly when Batman heard a trigger phrase that had been programmed into him. This resembles the plot of another movie that Twin Peaks had referenced: The Manchurian Candidate. In that film, captured US Army soldiers had been brainwashed by the Chinese and Korean Communists during the Korean War. The equivalent of Doctor Hurt's trigger phrase was a playing card that a soldier was to see before carrying out a programmed task in the service of his former captors. In essence, the trigger awakens a persona that is not the victim's proper self. This came to play in Twin Peaks in two ways: One, when the Audrey Horne character (in a plot that is unrelated to mind control) wears a Queen of Diamonds costume, matching the playing card that served as the trigger in Manchurian Candidate. Many of us who were trying to solve the TV show's mystery at the time used the appearance of the Queen of Diamonds as an indication that someone might be under someone else's control, a hypothesis that turned out to be correct: It was ultimately revealed that Laura Palmer's killer was a man (her father) who was not acting under his own free will, but under the control of an "inhabiting spirit" named BOB.

As RIP moved to its final stages, the connections to Twin Peaks became thematically and visually overwhelming. It is not an overstatement to suggest that the penultimate issue of RIP, numbered Batman #680, is a kind of remake of the Twin Peaks series finale. It will be useful to summarize that episode, which was directed by David Lynch himself.


After Agent Cooper, the hero of the series, had identified the killer of Laura Palmer, he (and the show) lost purpose until a new villain surfaced. This was Windom Earle, a former FBI agent who had a bloody history with Cooper, a brilliant though evil man who had recently escaped from an insane asylum. Earle, it turns out, was aware of the same paranormal forces centered in the vicinity of Twin Peaks, and believed that he could tap their power for his own use. In his words, to "reorder the Earth itself to his liking". In order to defeat Cooper, Earle abducted Cooper's lover (played by a then-unknown Heather Graham) and took her through an interdimensional portal into a place called the Black Lodge. Cooper follows Earle into the Lodge and has to endure a number of strange interactions before facing three enemies: both Earle and also Cooper's own doppleganger, an evil version of himself who resembles Cooper exactly, except for having glassy eyes. Finally, the true power of the Lodge was the inexplicable and otherworldly BOB, who defeats Window Earle almost trivially before setting Cooper's doppleganger on a chase to bring down the hero. When the doppleganger catches Cooper, it results in Cooper's unconscious body appearing in the woods where he had entered the Lodge. When Cooper regains consciousness, it is soon revealed that while he presents a facade of normality, he has become the new host of BOB, therefore releasing that evil into the world again. And that moment ended the series.


Contrast this with the events of Batman #680, which was the fifh of RIP's six issues: Batman's abducted girlfriend, Jezebel Jet, was held as bait in Arkham Asylum, which the Black Glove had seized and turned into a trap for Batman. When the hero stormed into Arkham, he had to face a number of ordinary (and easily beatable) henchmen before coming face to face with the Joker, who is in every rendition of the Batman story, the hero's nemesis and methodological double (the Joker himself saying to Batman in this issue that they have "a yin/yang thing"). When Batman gets past the Joker, he sees Jezebel in a deathtrap, and in rescuing her, necessarily exposes himself to a toxin (earlier seen in Batman #663, but based on one that has been part of the Joker's repertoire since his very first story). As the issue ends, Batman (now unmasked) collapses, grinning and laughing like the Joker under the effects of the toxin which has killed every previous victim. Doctor Hurt stands triumphant over the scene, which also reveals that Jezebel is delighted by Batman's defeat -- she had been working against him from the beginning.


The similarities are numerous. Even before the fateful events of the finale, Cooper receives a warning from an otherworldly giant who has helped him before. Before heading to his confrontation in Arkham, Batman receives a warning from an otherworldly sprite (Bat-Mite, taken from decades-older comics) who has been helping him. Both heroes head into a tableau of danger and madness to face their evil double and an even more dangerous enemy (Doctor Hurt, the story slowly reveals, is actually The Devil). Both heroes are trying to rescue their girlfriends, who are being used by the villains as bait. Both heroes end up defeated, turned to the enemy's worldview (Cooper by being possessed by BOB; Batman through the Joker's toxin).

Even the set design matches -- closely. Compare Cooper facing off against his Evil Double in the Black Lodge with the shot of Batman finally coming face to face with the Joker. (Clicking on the images in this post will enlarge them.) Morrison (and his artist Tony Daniel) borrow the red, pleated curtains of the Black Lodge (which Lynch, apparently inspired by theatres, has used in other films) and a floor with a gaudy two-tone angular pattern (zigzags in the Black Lodge; a red-and-black checkerboard in Arkham Asylum, which the Black Glove has redecorated extensively). 


And the final blow is eerily similar. Batman, unmasked, has to break through glass to rescue Jezebel. In so doing, he apparently cuts his forehead. The last shot we see of him, he is grinning, out of his mind, seeing things for the moment through the Joker's eyes. Once outside the Black Lodge, Cooper smashes his own forehead into a bathroom mirror, then laughs evilly (BOB can be seen in the mirror as his reflection). The two scenes match even to the double trickle of blood over the eyebrow!

Of course, there is a key distinction. This is the absolute last moment in the story of Twin Peaks. (An ending crafted in response to the creators' knowledge that the network was cancelling the show.) But this was the second-to-last issue of RIP. And by no means the last issue of Batman. Cooper is never seen again. But Batman follows these events by inflicting a string of reversals on the Black Glove. It turns out that he was prepared for this event in many ways; he had an antidote to the Joker toxin already in his bloodstream, so it only stunned him. Even as he fell, he was sending a radio signal that would soon thereafter lock his enemies in. When he awoke in a buried coffin minutes later, he was able to free himself and win a striking victory over Doctor Hurt and the Black Glove. Agent Cooper, you were good, but you were no Batman.


When I first encountered the blue rose and "third man", I found interviews with Grant Morrison online, ones that preceded Morrison's work on Batman and wherein he praised David Lynch. (See here and here.) Since then, carrying on his work in the series Batman and Robin, Morrison has openly cited Lynch as an inspiration for the yearlong story, a follow-on to RIP, which is now in progress. And in terms of mood, the Lynchian feel has definitely shown up as Batman has faced such oddities as The Circus of the Strange.


To have had Twin Peaks reflected in Morrison's run has been for me greatly enjoyed. I took the mystery of Twin Peaks as a personal challenge to solve back in 1990, and I did so also with the mystery of the Black Glove's identity early in 2008. I enjoyed both stories thoroughly on multiple grounds, for their own mysteries and senses of mood. It was all the sweeter to have had one of the stories so deeply reflect the other.