Originally written for Twin Peaks at 30 Conference
Performance is an endlessly intriguing topic in Twin Peaks – whether it’s the performance of Bob as Leeland (or vice versa), Laura’s performance as the ‘homecoming queen’, or Bobby’s as the town ‘bad-boy’, no one in Twin Peaks is quite what they seem (except maybe Andy). But what’s less talked about is the way in which the characters of Twin Peaks structure their performances around typically gendered attributes: it’s no accident that Bobby uses aggression to mask vulnerability, that Ben Horne ties his self-worth into dominating others, or that Leo Johnson expresses his insecurities through violence. All these attributes belong to popular cultural conceptions surrounding the negative aspects of masculinity; but why does this masculine energy differ so greatly from person to person? And why do these behaviours change under different circumstances (such as in Ben Horne’s wholesome childhood or Bobby’s upstanding middle-age)? It has to do with the shifting and malleable nature of gender, and the endless permutations upon the concepts of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ that occur in a diverse range of bodies and contexts.
In her book, ‘Gender Trouble’, Judith Butler argues that gender is a ‘shifting and contextual phenomenon’, something that ‘does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations’. Butler describes gender as performative, a malleable set of behaviours and cultural norms that, when adhered to, constitute what some might consider to be ‘male’ or ‘female’ identity (steeped as these concepts are in the reductive idea of binary gender). Butler makes the vital distinction between gender as performative and gender as performed: to say gender is performed is to cast ourselves in a role, one in which we act out our gender – not unlike Catherine Martell, who performs a male role by acting out certain masculine traits (a deep voice, stiffness, emotional distance, a forceful and somewhat aggressive demeanour). Instead, to say gender is performative, is to acknowledge that no essential ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ is available for us to step into – it is the act of performance itself which constitutes gender. R.W. Connell in ‘Masculinities’ hammers this point home, pointing out that ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ are terms with endless subjective variations, making any universally recognised gender identity impossible to fully embody. Instead, performative gender produces a series of effects that consolidate the impression of being ‘male’ or ‘female’. We produce and reproduce our gender constantly. In this way, gender, to quite Butler again, is ‘a self-identical being […] achieved through a performative twist of language and discourse that conceals the fact that “being” a sex or gender is fundamentally impossible’.
Butler further situates gender as a culturally constructed phenomenon, one that shifts in accordance with contemporary cultural norms; while this is restrictive at a macro level, the performativity of gender is also potentially liberating on an individual level, since if we want to change features of our gender we can freely do so, simply through our actions. Except, there are obvious environmental factors that make this difficult, and push individuals to conform to their socially perceived gender. R. W. Connell explores these environmental factors and theorises how they influence common gendered traits.
Connell refutes the assumption that ‘one’s behaviour results from the type of person one is. That is to say, an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable rather than violent, conciliatory rather than dominating […] uninterested in sexual conquest’. Connell uses the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to point ‘beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men [and women] differ among themselves’ and argues that gender inevitably interacts with and is changed by environmental factors such as ‘race and class’. Furthermore, because gender is relational, ‘white men’s masculinities […] are constructed […] in relation to white women but also in relation to black men’. This is why, as Connell puts it, with the ‘growing recognition of the interplay between gender, race and class it has become common to recognize multiple masculinities’ and femininities.
When viewed from this perspective, the unconventional heroes and villains of Twin Peaks begin to look less like permutations upon architypes (the detective, the megalomaniacal businessman, the thug and the feme fatale), instead, the multiplicity of Cooper, Ben Horne and Audrey reflects the nuances of identity present in our own world.
Butler describes the notion that gender is cultural while sex is biological as a concession, one that conceals the way language shapes our reality, further arguing that the notion of gender actually predates that of sex in human culture. This notion that language shapes reality and personality is something we see in Twin Peaks’ supernatural spirits, to whom the fire walk with me poem and riddled speech is far more substantive and indicative of their presence than their bodies, and human characters alike, to whom facades and perceived personalities are far more prominent than their more authentic, inner worlds. It’s this malleability of identity that I aim to explore in this paper, as I suggest that Twin Peaks’ performative characters act based on a combination of masculine and feminine behaviours and pressures that are closely tied to their environment. Further, I argue that gender is such a malleable and insubstantive phenomenon to begin with, and that permutations on the male/female binary are so prevalent, that these categories become redundant at best, restrictive and oppressive at worst. The idea that we each exist within a spectrum of gendered traits and behaviours creates a much more flexible (and ultimately more truthful) picture of human experience that isn’t slavishly devoted to the limitations of personality imposed by certain rigid ideas surrounding biological sex.
The best way to demonstrate this multiplicity of gender, I feel, is with the character of Agent Dale Cooper. Where the positive attributes of most male tv detectives of his kind are tied to their masculinity, in Cooper’s case, it is his ability to break down gender boundaries that plays into his audience appeal and in-universe competency.
The Coop we know and love is, to quote Martha Nochimson [Noch-im-son] in her essay ‘Desire under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body of Reality in Twin Peaks’, ‘a boundary specialist’; he dances between the psychic and the material, and, I argue, between multiple conceptions of masculinity and gender. Nochimson, reading the mind, body connection of Tibetan method, situates Cooper’s subversion of traditional male detective characters in his relation to the male body – where most tv detectives displace the inherent vulnerability of their body onto another (most often, that of the femme fatale) Cooper ‘identifies with [his] vulnerability and transcends the ‘masculine fear of the body’. Cooper freely crosses gender boundaries, ‘merging with [Laura] – [who] tells him the name of her murderer when she kisses him […]’ and shares his dream. ‘Her illegibility is not the displacement of his own, but the corollary of his need to understand his body’. In this way, ‘the phallic energy of Cooper’s body is readily distinguished from the logical scrutiny of his detective’s eye’ which is coded as female through its close connection to Laura. Nochimson’s argument neatly highlights how Cooper’s connectedness with the world around him, inevitably leads him to performatively adapt his gender to the situation he’s in. It is this ability to tie his body to his mind and his mind to his performativity of gender that results in his deductive reasoning skills – as he says, it’s all about body language.
But while this usually results in a free-thinking, empathetic Cooper, given the right (or wrong) situation, his performativity can take on a more rigid and harmfully conventional aspect. Episode five of season one, titled: ‘The One-Armed Man’, is awash with examples of performance from the outset. The snippet of Invitation to Love, Doctor Jacoby’s golf ball magic trick, Hank Jennings’ ‘repentant husband’ routine, are all examples of performance: these are characters playing a role to either conceal or manipulate. However, the scene in which the Twin Peaks police (minus Lucy) practise their marksmanship on the gun range, and espouse some uncharacteristically misogynist ideas about the differences between men and women, is an example of how Butler’s performative gender can interact with Connell’s environmental masculinity to produce a hyper-masculine situation that hijacks our character’s performativity into something arrogant, dismissive, self-serving, and aggressive.
After the incident at the motel, in which Andy drops his gun, causing it to go off, Cooper suggests the team brush-up on their firearms training. Unlike your typical tv-detective, Cooper doesn’t pound his fist on a desk and scream obscenities at Andy’s incompetence, he instead calmly and respectfully reassures Andy that his clumsiness is a consequence of his unfamiliarity with his weapon, and that practise makes perfect. So far, so Cooper. Things only change once they descend to the gun-range, a place buried in the bowls of the station, seldom used or thought of (as evidenced by the loosely stacked Christmas decorations). Already, the gun-range is coded as a space cut-off from the rest of the station and its associations with warmth and familiarity and, importantly, it is a place where Lucy is conspicuously absent. Frost and Lynch draw attention to Lucy’s absence through the loudspeaker when she and Cooper have a surreal back-and-forth conversation through a one-way device. It’s in this space, where women are heard but not seen, that the conversation surrounding Andy and Lucy’s argument takes place.
Cooper warns Andy that ‘there’s no logic at work’ in Lucy’s distress, that, ‘in the grand design, men and women were drawn from a different set of blueprints’. Gone is the detective intimately connected with feminine perspectives, gone is the passionately empathetic and understanding friend. The conversation moves onto Cooper’s romantic past – something we’ve not been privy to before. He describes a relationship that ‘left him with the pain of a broken heart’ before rapidly discharging his gun downrange. The juxtaposition isn’t dissimilar to the actions of Hank or Leo, who also punctuate their violent outbursts or moments of menace with discordant declarations of their love for Shelley and Norma. The similarities between these attitudes are drawn even more clearly by the scene proceeding the gun-range, in which Norma and Shelley discuss their abusive relationships while at-work in the double R. It’s interesting to note that Cooper’s hyper-masculine outburst occurs in the safe, enclosed, private space of the gun range, surrounded by his male peers – while Norma and Shelley’s bonding over their shared trauma takes place in the intensely public space of the double R, where Hank ambushes them with his unexpected presence an episode later. It highlights the way in which cultural misogyny is geared towards, and facilitates, danger for women – as Diana Hume George argues in her essay Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks: ‘misogyny is fundamental to the acquisition of gender identification for males’. It’s no accident that Cooper’s rare outburst of hypermasculine violence and gloating takes place during a conversation in which women as cast as an irrational other. To Hume George, ‘male gender acquisition takes place in opposition to females’ in which ‘women and children, and especially their bodies, become property in the system of exchange between males’. Lucy’s body is recast only in relation to Andy, just as Hawk’s girlfriend’s academic achievements are recast as a sign of successful conquest on his part. Whenever we’ve seen misogynist overtones, it’s also been in the similarly private spaces of Leo’s isolated house or the waterlocked One Eyed Jack’s. This reflects the way in which cis-gendered, heterosexual male bodies have enjoyed a degree of privacy that women’s and gay/non-cis men’s bodies have historically been denied – existing instead in the public realm of legislative restrictions.
So, where is the Cooper so empathetically connected to Laura that he dreams the same dreams as her? Who’s filled with near-uncontrollable rage at the objectification of her at the hands of Leo and Jaqes Raynalt? To whom the vulnerability of the male body is an accepted (even celebrated) fact of life? I argue it’s the environment, cut-off from Lucy, Laura, Audrey, any and all reminders of femininity, and awash within the masculine-coded world of gun-violence, that encourages these attitudes and behaviours. One need only look at other prominent gun-scenes in Twin Peaks, like Bobby’s horrifying discovery of callous gun handling in season three: in which a father irresponsibly allows his son access to a loaded gun. The way the child is dressed, his uncannily harsh stare for one so young, and the father’s incredulity at the occurrence all point to the continuation of a gendered gun-culture linked to cultural conceptions of masculinity that encourage unhealthy obsessions with violence. In such a settling, the performativity of Cooper’s gender shifts to become rigid and harsh, promoting the myth of essential difference, instead of Coop’s usual attitude of interconnectivity, one-ness with others, and a subversion of gender boundaries. What this means for Cooper isn’t that he’s a secret sexist throughout Twin Peaks, rather, scenes like this highlight the way in which gender bias and patriarchal ideals are so pervasive in our culture that even the most conscientious and socially aware individuals can fall into harmful thought patterns when placed in a toxic situation. Patriarchal culture creates these situations, and these situations in turn encourage further patriarchal thought.
To Connell, ‘no masculinity arises except in a system of gender relations. Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object […] we need to focus on the processes’ by which masculinity is formed. In the gun range scene, then, we should interpret Cooper’s change in demeanour as a response to the relational nature he has with those around him. With no female influence nearby, the performative creation is inevitably hyper-masculine. We can see this occur in the villains of Twin Peaks too – Ben and Jerry Horne appear as a masculine duo, only interacting with women from a standpoint of superiority (the sex-workers at One Eyed Jack’s being literally their employees), likewise we may assume Leo’s job as a truck driver is also a predominantly masculine world, as is his life as a drug dealer. The reason a feminine influence is so necessary to curtailing harmful hyper-masculinity is the prevalence of patriarchal thought and power structures in wider society, an ideology rooted in, according to Hume George, the irrational idea of essential difference between men and women. Butler takes this a step further, describing ‘the [gender] binary [as] effectively [masking] the univocal and hegemonic discourse of the masculine […] silencing the feminine as a site of subversive multiplicity’.
So, by disrupting the restrictive structure of gender binary thinking, situating ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behaviours in the realms of personal choice and environmental circumstance creates far more opportunities for the introduction and normalisation of traditionally feminine ideals into otherwise masculine lives – thereby avoiding another generation of Leo Johnsons and Ben Hornes, to whom femininity is an othered concept to be systematically denied or controlled and instead encourage a generation of Coopers to whom empathy with female bodies and a celebration of multiple gendered traits existing within their own (and others’) being is accepted on a fundamental level.