Black Lodge

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Agent Cooper, The Little Man from Another Place and Laura Palmer in the Black Lodge

The Black Lodge is a fictional place from the television series Twin Peaks. It is an extradimensional place which seems to include the "Red Room" dreamt by Agent Cooper early in the series. It has a good "twin" in the "White Lodge".

In the series, the character of Deputy Hawk says that the Black Lodge is from the mythology of his people, but the term also occurs in a book called The Devil's Guard by Talbot Mundy. In that book, it is associated with Tibet instead of Native American mythos. If that was the source that the writers used, then Special Agent Dale Cooper with his love of Tibet, would have been expected to know about it; this might explain the change.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

One entrance to the Black Lodge seems to be located in the Ghostwood Forest surrounding the town of Twin Peaks. A pool of a substance akin to scorched engine oil, which may be an otherwordly substance, is surrounded by 12 young sycamore trees known as Glastonbury Grove. It is said that the key to gain entrance to the Black Lodge is fear. This is in contrast to the key to the White Lodge, which is love. Another requirement to enter the Black Lodge through the entrance in Glastonbury Grove is that it may only be entered "....when Jupiter and Saturn meet..." When the above requirements are met and one approaches the pool in Glastonbury Grove, red curtains seem to materialize out of nowhere which lead into the Lodge. There are some who believe there are portals in other locations around the world. There is a scene from the Fire Walk With Me script that was not put in the film. It precedes Phillip Jeffries's surprise appearance in the Philadelphia FBI offices. The scene is in the lobby of a hotel in Buenos Aires where Jeffries is staying. He boards the elevator and instead of getting off on the floor where his room is, he ends up in Philadelphia. Jeffries has been missing, according to FBI records, for two years. The experiences he relates to Albert, Cooper, and Gordon Cole can be said to have taken place in Buenos Aires, because the hotel was the last place he was seen. Major Briggs and the Log Lady's experiences also show that one can be "abducted" without being at the Lodge entrance, but just being near it. The Log Lady was in the woods when she disappeared and the Major and Cooper were camping in the woods at the time of his disappearance. These events tie all three disappearances to the Lodge.

It remains unclear whether the White and Black Lodges are disparate realms. One could interpret the White Lodge and Black Lodge as one and the same place—a possibility perhaps hinted at by the mirrored black and white tiling throughout the lodge. Indeed, neither black nor white stand out conspicuously in the Lodge; the dominant colour is the blood-red drapes in the background. This notion that the two Lodges are "one and the same" is consistent with the presence of other dualistic phenomena which seem to characterise the Lodge, such as the existence of one's doppelganger in apparently the same place and time.

Another conception of the Black Lodge is that it is a realm of total evil which has usurped or absorbed its White counterpart. During the second season, Windom Earle relates a past-tense story about the White Lodge which is replete with Edenic imagery, possibly suggesting that the White Lodge belonged to a time now lost or forgotten. Earle then describes the Black Lodge in the present tense, perhaps indicating that it has replaced the White Lodge:

A place of almost unimaginable power, chock full of dark forces and vicious secrets. No prayers dare enter this frightful maw. The spirits there care not for good deeds or priestly invocations, they're as like to rip the flesh from your bone as greet you with a happy "good day." And if harnessed, these spirits in this hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts would offer up a power so vast that its bearer might reorder the Earth itself to his liking.

Life in the Lodge is difficult to describe. Time seems to have no meaning in this dimension, if it can be called that. Inhabitants of the Lodge speak in a warped dialect of English and often speak in riddles and non-sequiturs. This may be seen as parallel to some versions of shamanism, where the inhabitants of the otherworld may sometimes speak backwards.

The Red Room is described by the Little Man From Another Place as "the waiting room". It is unclear whether this implies differing locales within the Lodge or if it is, in its entirety, a place where things simply wait.

One possibility is that the waiting room is a route through which all beings must pass in order to travel between the Lodge and the human world. An oft-recited poem from the series reads:

Through the darkness of future past

The magician longs to see.

One chants out between two worlds,

"Fire walk with me."

In the final episode of Twin Peaks, Cooper meets the Man from Another Place in the waiting room before entering the Black Lodge proper. Only when the Man says ("chants out") "Fire walk with me" does the Waiting Room erupt in flame, and then descend into flickering blackness. This is arguably the moment at which Cooper has finally entered the Black Lodge.