He wasn’t even supposed to be at the meeting above the convenient store — he wasn’t in the script, and yet there he is, surrounded by smoke, showing off his teeth, and doing things backwards. A last-minute decision by Lynch, is the Jumping Man teaching the young boy magic? Is this the Magician who longs to see? Kokopelli likewise is referred to as a magician used for hunting, rain, and sex magic.

Is Jumping Man also Cooper? When Jeffries stumbles into the FBI office in FWWM, he points at Cooper and shouts “Who do you think this is there?” and right then we see the superimposed image of Jumping Man. It seems there are multiple connections between Jumping Man, Cooper, and Jeffries.

I argue that Jumping Man is Kokopelli’s tulpa, manufactured for a purpose. His connection to the frog-bug makes the resemblance even more uncanny. Kokopelli’s symbol is an artistic rendering of a blood-sucking robber fly! The flute is his proboscis.

Jumping Man resembles Kokopelli as Mickey Mouse resembles Tusan Homichi, the Hopi mouse kachina. That’s part of Lynch’s Americana: cultural hybridity mixed with imperialist nostalgia and a small dose of what William Irwin Thompson calls Disneyism. It’s no surprise that a TV show that seeks to reflect an authentic, American horror story lifts most of its mysterious characters and plot points from Native American sources. Lynch and Frost did this intentionally, but it’s also largely unconscious. Native symbols, spirits, and stories fill our collective unconscious, operating behind the scenes, from ‘fugitive poses,’ haunting our white settler narratives, surviving settler colonialism and cultural genocide.

Jumping Man may be a fleshed-out figment of an idea Lynch had while daydreaming on the warm hood of a car, but Jumping Man isn’t only a dream. He is also a creamed corn mutation of Kokopelli, a reflection of something else American, and so he is capable of pointing us to native presence.

There is dreaming in meaning, but there is also meaning in dreaming. What is behind David Lynch’s subconscious? What is behind our own? How much of our transcendental Big Mind “ocean of solutions” is influenced by our ocean of Americana? Is Twin Peaks really just an artful reflection of the horrors of settler colonialism?

We should remember that the Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks (COOP) played a tiny role in the successful fight to preserve that sacred Snoqualmie waterfall. However, historian of ethnoecology, Geoff Bil, laments that their efforts warrant “scarcely a footnote in what has been a quarter century of predominantly indigenous-led anticolonial activism; it did, however, represent a largely unprecedented confluence of interests between Twin Peaks and the peoples whose ancestral lands provide so much of the show’s scenic backdrop.”

The Butoh “Dance of Darkness” Connection

We can talk about ‘dimensions of being,’ Lynch’s psychology, how Eraserhead was influenced by the anxieties of being a father, and Twin Peaks by the anxieties of being an American. We should talk about these things. When I saw Jumping Man opening his mouth to scream (like a slow motion laugh or a smile holding back rage), I thought, hey, that looks familiar! Japanese Butoh dancers paint themselves white and cathartically bring to expression un-acknowledgeable cultural trauma through their characteristic silent screams and contemporary dance seizures.