“I think I’m high.”
Jerry Horne is lost in the woods, literally and metaphorically. For at least three of the ten episodes aired so far, Jerry has been confused and surrounded by dense woodland. With intermittent phone reception and a mind addled by high-grade cannabis, Jerry has got a heavy case of The Fear – a deep dish of creeping dread, served with sides of disorientation and paranoia.
In The Return, David Lynch has seemingly taken great pleasure in wrong-footing viewers, subverting our expectations at every turn. So while it might be appealing to think that Jerry’s odyssey into the pines is an overture to an inevitable encounter with the Black Lodge, knowing how this new series has toyed with us, it is equally likely that he’s just high as hell.
In seasons one and two of Twin Peaks, audiences were primed to expect spontaneous visits from Jerry – the charismatic, jet-setting, wheeler-dealing enfant-terrible of the Horne dynasty. And when he turned up, he was generally bearing gifts of exotic foodstuffs to be shared with his beloved brother Ben. Whether it was smoked cheese pigs or brie-and-butter baguettes, Jerry never arrived empty handed. He was a pleasure seeker, a hedonist of epicurean proportions. Watching him enthusiastically revelling in sensory food pleasures, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine Jerry overindulging in chemical diversions.
Now, twenty-five years later, Jerry has swapped his button-down shirts for a grizzly beard, ditching his past as a globe-trotting yuppie to be reborn as a hippy woodsman, legally farming marijuana in the Washington wilderness. And contrary to Frank Lopez’s excellent advice to Tony Montana in Scarface, Jerry is certainly not shy of getting high on his own supply.
In Part 1, we were treated to a fabulous conversation between the brothers Horne, in which Jerry expounded the merits of his weed-infused edibles, revealing that he had been eating THC-laced banana bread and jam while boasting of their suitability for psychonatic excursions. Later, during the first of Jacoby’s “Dr Amp” broadcasts, the audience sees Jerry enjoying a generous doobie and chuckling as the good doctor preaches his anti-capitalist tirades.
But in later episodes, Jerry’s situation does not look so cosy. Since Part 7, Jerry has been lost among the trees. His first words when ‘brother Ben’ picks up the phone are “I think I’m high.” His wide, frightened eyes are scanning the trees as he proclaims “Someone stole my car” – a phrase that inevitably brings to mind stoner comedy movie Dude Where’s My Car? Ben Horne’s reaction to this predicament is one of exasperation rather than concern – leading us to wonder whether drug-addled misadventures are a regular occurrence for ‘brother Jer’ nowadays.
Unlike Ben, Jerry has never been a driving force in the many intertwined plots of Twin Peaks. While his brother was embroiled in triple crosses and deceptions over the Packard Mill and Ghostwood Project, Jerry was always deployed for comic relief. And perhaps that is what we’re seeing here. When his foot announces (in a high pitched squeak) “I am not your foot”, it is impossible to see it as anything other than surreal comedy, especially as the moment is followed by a sequence of brilliant physical clowning as Jerry tries to forcibly reign in his rogue appendage. In this context – viewing the subplot as a comic aside – the possibility that Jerry is just absurdly high seems a more likely explanation than possession by lodge spirits.
I’ve read a lot of fan comments on forums and social media saying: “There’s no way Jerry is just high, this isn’t how marijuana affects people.” Well, yes, that’s true – nobody in reality would behave this way after smoking a bowl. But don’t forget that we’re talking about Twin Peaks here. Just as Lynch has chosen to portray technology as a form of black magick (where phone apps can move tracking devices from one vehicle to another), so he may have chosen to take similar artistic license with the world of narcotics.
It’s also important to note that Jerry’s episode plays out against the backdrop of a wider meditation on drugs and drug abuse in The Return. From Becky Burnett’s blissful ‘Sparkle’-fuelled moment of escape in Part 5 to the destructive, violent rage of Steven’s addiction in Part 10 – Lynch and Frost are exploring the soaring highs and crushing lows of drug-taking.
And let’s think for a moment about David Lynch’s personal attitude to drugs. Many people, when first exposed to his surreal visions on film or TV, assume that Lynch must be an acid-adventurer extraordinaire. But it’s clear that he has a healthy skepticism of self-medication.
“We all want expanded consciousness and bliss. It’s a natural, human desire. And a lot of people look for it in drugs,” he wrote in his book about creativity, ‘Catching the Big Fish’. “But the problem is that the body, the physiology, takes a hard hit on drugs. Drugs injure the nervous system, so they just make it harder to get those experiences on your own.”
So perhaps Lynch wants to show the absurdity, the silliness, the danger that is inherent in taking drugs. If he did, then Jerry’s bad trip would be an entertaining, striking and memorable way to convey that message. Let’s face it, Lynch would never directly state ‘Drugs are bad, m’kay?’; that’s not his style. But this woodland freakout and Sky Ferreira’s nasty ‘Sparkle’-related armpit rash are startling anti-drug images, that fit his dreamlike modus operandi.
It is tempting to speculate that Jerry has been abducted by dugpas, or is about to stumble through the veil into one of the lodges. This is Twin Peaks and those supernatural possibilities are a huge part of why we all love the show. But all we know for sure about Jerry is that he is partial to the reefer, has a vast supply of the stuff at his farm and (judging by the way he can devour a smoked cheese pig) he isn’t the sort of guy to believe in moderation.
Whatever the truth of it, I hope we discover what’s up with Jerry soon. And I hope it ends well for him, because anyone who can be so utterly transported by the simple pleasures of brie, butter and bread, deserves a happy ending.
This piece was originally published on the 25YearsLater blog on 21st July 2017, as half of a Black Lodge/White Lodge debate. You can read the article in its natural habitat here.