New Bedford’s Connection to ‘Twin Peaks’

What does the real-life city of New Bedford, Massachusetts have to do with the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington?

On the surface, not much at all – but if you know anything about the television show Twin Peaks, it was never about what was just on the surface.

Today marks 35 years since David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking TV series debuted on ABC, unleashing a Lynchian take on television for which the medium wasn’t quite ready. The story of Laura Palmer, a young girl found murdered and wrapped in plastic, gripped viewers who were picking apart the mystery right alongside Special Agent Dale Cooper, Sheriff Harry S Truman and all of the wacky and weird denizens of Twin Peaks.

Ironically, at the same time, New Bedford was still reeling from the highway murders, in which the bodies of nine women (with two more suspected victims whose bodies were never found) were found along area highways between March 1988 and April 1989. The last of the discovered bodies had only occurred less than a year before Twin Peaks premiered on April 8, 1990.

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Lynch passed away back in January of this year, but his headstone was only recently unveiled in the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Like the man himself, it is enigmatic in its simplicity: just his full name, date of birth, date of death, and the phrase “Night Blooming Jasmine.”

It’s a reference to a quote Lynch once gave in which he described the feel of Hollywood at night, and how things like the scent of the night-blooming jasmine connects one instantly to Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Which brings us to another Twin Peaks-New Bedford connection.

This coming Sunday, April 13, the New Bedford Art Museum is screening the next film in its “Noir Nights” series, the 1944 Otto Preminger classic Laura. The museum’s website summarizes the film as:

For more information or to sign up for the five-film series (two of which have already been screened), you can visit the New Bedford Art Museum website.