The Woodsmen

A Woodsman is a man-shaped figure covered in soot or ash, dressed in dark work clothes, with a face that reads as burnt rather than made up. They move slowly. They tend to appear in groups. Across every appearance they speak a total of two sentences and one broadcast text, and one of those sentences is a request for a cigarette light.

They are credited as Woodsmen. Nobody in Twin Peaks says the word. Gordon Cole does not classify them, Albert does not describe them, Hawk's map does not contain them, and no Frost dossier issues an entry that tells the reader what they are. This is unusual even by the standards of this material: BOB is discussed by MIKE, the Fireman is discussed by Cooper, the Arm speaks for itself. The Woodsmen are the only recurring Lodge presence in Twin Peaks that nobody investigates.

What can be established is a pattern of behaviour. They are present where the convenience store is present. They attend to bodies. They remove witnesses. They transmit. Every one of those is an observed action, and none of them is an explanation.

The Woodsmen enter Twin Peaks standing at the back of a room. In the meeting above the convenience store — reported by Phillip Jeffries in the Philadelphia sequence, and shown at greater length in The Missing Pieces — the foreground is occupied by the Man from Another Place and BOB. Behind them are the Jumping Man, the Electrician, Mrs. Tremond and her masked grandson, and two Woodsmen. The room contains a green Formica table, the ring, electricity, and garmonbozia as the subject under discussion.

They do nothing. They are attendees.

Eleven years after the Trinity test, on a road at night in New Mexico, two Woodsmen come out of the dark and stop a car. One leans to the driver's window and asks the driver and his wife: "Gotta light?" The couple get away.

The same figure repeats the question at a service station and to a woman walking. It is the only line any Woodsman speaks in dialogue anywhere in Twin Peaks.

A Woodsman walks into the KPJK radio station, where My Prayer by The Platters is playing. He takes hold of the receptionist's head and crushes it. He walks through to the booth and does the same to the disc jockey, holding him with one hand and reaching for the microphone with the other. Then he broadcasts, over and over:

"This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within."

Across the listening area, people collapse where they are. In a house, a girl who has walked home that evening falls asleep, and the hatched creature from the desert crawls into her mouth.

Ray Monroe shoots Mr. C twice on a dirt road and stands where he is. Woodsmen come out of the treeline and surround the body. They work over it — hands moving across him, smearing him. Something rises partly out of his torso: a globe, with BOB's face turning inside it. Ray gets back in the car and drives away. Mr. C is not left dead.

In the Buckhorn county lock-up, William Hastings is in a cell after his arrest. In the cell opposite, a Woodsman is simply present. Its head detaches and drifts upward, and it is gone. Hastings makes a sound that is not quite a word. Nobody else sees it and nobody remarks on it.

Diane, waiting by the vehicles outside the Buckhorn site, sees one of the Woodsmen come out of the dark and walk to the police car where Hastings is sitting handcuffed. There is a sound. His head is crushed. Gordon looks in and says: "He's dead."

Taken up from Jack Rabbit's Palace, Andy Brennan sits opposite the Fireman and is shown a sequence of images in rapid succession: the Woodsmen; a utility pole; the golden orb; BOB; Laura Palmer; the woman with no eyes; and himself and Lucy at the sheriff's station. Then he is back in the woods, carrying Naido out.

Mr. C arrives at a convenience store. Woodsmen are there. They take him up, through stairs and corridors that do not behave, to a room — the Dutchman's — where Phillip Jeffries exists as a large bell-shaped apparatus that emits steam and speaks. Mr. C asks about Judy. Jeffries tells him: "You've already met Judy." Smoke rises and forms the figure 485514. Mr. C writes it down.

Set the appearances side by side and the Woodsmen are the only Lodge presence in Twin Peaks that never wants anything from a person. BOB wants garmonbozia. MIKE wants BOB stopped. The Arm wants payment. The Fireman wants a plan carried out. Windom Earle wants a door. The Woodsmen ask for a light and otherwise perform tasks.

The tasks are consistent in kind. They attend a body and restart it. They occupy a jail cell and leave. They take a microphone and transmit. They remove the one witness who could describe the site. They walk a visitor upstairs. Nothing in that list is appetite; all of it is maintenance. They behave less like demons than like personnel — the staff of the convenience store, doing the work that keeps the thing running.

That reading is built on the pattern of the actions, not on any line of dialogue, and the archive labels it as such. What supports it is that the series never once shows a Woodsman pursuing a victim for its own sake, and never once shows one acting outside the store's orbit.

The formal point is separate and firmer. Twin Peaks stages its evil as broadcast in Part 8, and that is the hour's actual contribution to the mythology. Everything before it — a house, a bedroom, a father, a daughter — is intimate. The Woodsman at the microphone is the moment the material stops being about one family and starts being about a signal that reaches everybody in range.

BOB · MIKE / Philip Gerard · The Man from Another Place · The Giant / Fireman · Sarah Palmer · Phillip Jeffries · Andy Brennan · The Experiment · William Hastings & Ruth Davenport

The Return Part 8 · Part 11 · Part 15 · The Missing Pieces · Jowday (Judy) · The White Horse