John Richardson has described Julee Cruise as providing a 'surrogate voice' (88) for the deceased Laura Palmer when she mimes to a recording of 'Falling' in the pilot episode of the first season of Twin Peaks (1990). The accuracy of Richardson's description also raises the question, who – or what - is the character Cruise plays in the series that she is capable of fulfilling this function? Billed in the credits simply as 'Girl Singer' nothing is revealed about the character's back story in this episode or in Cruise's subsequent appearances in the series. Given that possession by 'inhabiting spirits' such as BOB and Mike occurs within the world of Twin Peaks, Cruise's character can similarly be understood as a kind of vessel for a discarnate entity, in her case the spirit of Laura Palmer. Cruise's character appears to be a conduit for what Richardson calls Laura's 'dislocated voice' (88), providing the audience with fragments of information about Laura's demise, which foreshadow later revelations in the series. Cruise's character is, then, a kind of medium. This seems an appropriate role for the singer who has described herself as an 'imitator' and who discarded her normal 'Broadway belter’ vocal style to facilitate Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's ethereal vision for Floating Into the Night (1989), the album on which the three collaborated and which served as a herald for Twin Peaks (Grow: 2014). Evan Eisenberg makes a connection between the recorded voice and mediumship in his study of 'phonography' The Recording Angel (1987), describing the act of listening to records as 'a séance where we get to choose our ghosts' (46). In the context of the world of Twin Peaks, of which it may be considered a type of field recording, Floating Into the Night is layered in its mediumship: the listener hears, via the recording and play-back media, Cruise in character as the 'Girl Singer' who channels Laura's spirit from the Black Lodge.
As I have written elsewhere (2019), in her promotional appearances for the album, undertaken before the release of Twin Peaks but also serving as part of the epitext for it, as the series was invariably mentioned to introduce and contextualise her, Cruise seemed like an envoy from the world of the series. As such her 'in-character' appearances are comparable to future Fire Walk With Me (1992) cast member David Bowie's 1972 performances of his single 'Starman' on British TV in his 'Ziggy Stardust' persona. However, while both 'Starman' and its parent album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) provided, albeit allusively, further details on Bowie's character, Cruise's role remained enigmatic as Twin Peaks developed. In this essay, focusing on both the dramatic and phonographic contexts for Cruise's performances, I discuss the ways in which elements of each – such as make-up and costume design in the former; orchestration and production in the latter; and vocalisation in both - suggest aspects of her character not explicitly addressed in Twin Peaks but which nevertheless contribute significantly to its other-worldly ambience and supernatural themes. I place this discussion in the wider context of the relationship between performance and mediumship in Lynch's oeuvre, particularly the films Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) and the musical play Industrial Symphony No.1 (1990) in which Cruise plays the role of 'The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman'.
Works Cited
Eisenberg, Evan, 1987. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
