Real-life Twin Peaks: the Washington town that David Lynch made immortal
I’m not a television person, yet I’m completely addicted to the medical drama of the moment, The Pitt. An achievement that well and truly earns the epithet “immersive” due to its unblinking realism and dedication to presenting the ups and down of modern life as an Emergency Room doctor.
There are moments in the show that truly make you think that this is a show shot in a real-life Emergency Room. Perhaps one that had been abandoned until the show runners took over, but one that at some point in the recent past saw real-life doctors tending to real-life patients within its walls. However, that’s obviously not how TV works. TV shows are rarely shot on location, especially indoors. After all, when a real-life ER is built, you don’t have to take into account where the cameras go, or what the sight lines are, or where the supporting artists will take lunch.
So it’s a pretty incredible irony that shows as realistic as The Pitt are made on purpose-built sets, while a show as proudly fantastical and dreamy as Twin Peaks wasn’t just shot on location, the majority of the show was built around a single, real-life town in Washington – welcome to North Bend, a town that David Lynch took one look at in the early 1990s and thought, “Yes, this place is just right for my story about the horrors lurking underneath small-town America.”
We’re not just talking about the incredible vistas and natural beauty of the place either, because the external shots would have always been shot on location (obviously), and all the scenes in Twin Peaks’ iconic opening credits come from the natural beauty of North Bend and the surrounding areas, and it’s just as incredible in real life as it is in the opening credits of the show, but in true Twin Peaks fashion, it goes deeper than that.
Half the locations featured in the show are real-life locations in North Bend, Washington.
What are the real-life locations of Twin Peaks?
Most famously, the Double R Diner, where FBI Agent Dale Cooper sits down for his “damn fine cup of coffee” and cherry pie, was a real-life diner in North Bend, and while filming the pilot episode, Lynch found a diner called the Mar-T Cafe at 137, West North Bend Way and decided that this would be the heart and soul of the show going forward, so much so that after the pilot finished filming and the show couldn’t shoot on location as much, the diner was rebuilt on a soundstage in Los Angeles as a damn-near exact replica.
The diner is actually still open to this day as Twede’s Cafe and does a thriving trade as a tourist hotspot for Twin Peaks fans. Tragically, though, their coffee and pie are infamously terrible – The Great Northern Hotel is also a real-life spot a few miles away from North Bend, in the form of Snoqualmie’s Salish Lodge, and many characters’ homes were also houses in North Bend, along with the Sheriff’s department, Big Ed’s Gas Farm and Twin Peaks High School.
If anything, this commitment to shooting in a real-life small town adds so much to what makes Twin Peaks so special, because despite all the kooky stuff happening, like backwards talking short people, vengeful, murdering spirits and James Hurley’s forehead, it’s rooted in a real-life community that, for better and worse, shines through on screen. All the fantastical elements get so much more powerful because, in so many ways, Twin Peaks could be any small town in America.
And North Ben will go down in history as a direct result of this.