Help Make a Documentary About Growing Up In 'Twin Peaks'

“There’s something romantic about martyrdom.”

May 8, 2015, 9:45pm

Images courtesy of the filmmaker, via

When the young Travis Blue happened upon the cast and crew of Twin Peaks on a chilly morning in the Pacific Northwest, David Lynch’s uncanny series gained a superfan. Plagued by vicious bullies and marginalized by his peers, Blue discovered solace and camaraderie in Lynch’s cult classic. Filmmaker Adam Baran’s Northwest Passage, co-produced by Room 237’s David Ebersole and Tarnation’s Jonathan Caouette, is a full-length documentary inspired by Blue’s fandom. The film, whose title alludes to the show’s original moniker, chronicles Blue’s thorny coming-of-age story, through the trauma, drugs, and sexual alienation of adolescence—and, ultimately, through Twin Peaks.

Over the past four years, Baran has conducted a series of intensive interviews with Blue, piecing together each detail of his youth—putting himself, as it goes, in the shoes of Detective Dale Cooper. Encouraging this parallel, Baran styles his film with a “Peaks-ian” twist, weaving the traumatic events of Blue’s childhood through the fabric of Lynch’s thriller. “Northwest Passage is an incredible story of life imitating art that's especially relevant today,” Baran says on his film's Kickstarter. “Millions of people take cues for their lives from fiction—movies, TV shows, books and more, but in Travis' case it played out in the extreme.”

After his initial contact with Lynch’s set, “Travis became fascinated with the idea that his world could be transformed into a fictional place as weird and wondrous as Twin Peaks,” says Baran. Blue was drawn, not by Lynch—neither he nor his family knew the director’s work—nor the stars themselves, but rather the intoxicating, creative power of the medium. “I didn’t realize you could tweak the world in small ways to do what you want with it,” Blue says in film’s trailer. He soon fell to haunting the annals of his home town, Snoqualmie Valley, searching for his cinematic fix.

In due course, Blue immersed himself in the communities at Twin Peaks Fan Festivals, where he forged friendships with his fellow fans, collecting allies and envy with his first hand accounts of the series’ production. The focus of his fascinations, however, landed upon the enigmatic victim at the heart of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer. “[Laura] was some kind of guardian angel,” Blue says, “I would play the Twin Peaks music and dance around my room like she would." As he matured and began to reckon with his own sexuality, Blue’s affinity for Palmer spiraled into substances and risky nights at Laura’s favorite bar. “He began to do the things she did—from using drugs to sex work—which drew him closer and closer to the show’s darker side and put him at risk of suffering Laura's tragic fate,” Baran explains.

Travis Blue and Log Lady Catherine E. Coulson (1993)

(Left) Travis and friend at the Twin Peaks Fan Festival. (Right) The Man From Another Place Michael J. Anderson dancing on a car at the Twin Peaks Fan Festival, photo taken by Travis

Both timely and tragic, Baran anticipates that Northwest Passage will easily attract attention from Twin Peaks’ devoted and enduringly active following. He also hopes that his film can transcend the legacy of Lynch’s series, appealing to a much larger audience: “Travis’ story is an important opportunity to shine a light on a host of issues which remain relevant today, including drug and alcohol addiction, teen sexuality, homelessness, and abuse,” concludes Baran. “Beyond simply exploring the impact of Twin Peaks, our film is, on a human level, the story of a gay teenager searching for himself and all the chaos, confusion, joy and fear that comes with that difficult process, told in an original way.”