Man from Another Place

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The Man from Another Place (also called The Arm) is a character from the television series Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost.

The Man from Another Place (played by Michael J. Anderson) is one of several spirits that live in the Black Lodge. He is very short (hence he is also called the Arm) and wears a sharp red suit. He resides in the red curtained "waiting room", talks in an odd, distorted way and dances in an odd way to jazzy music (the song is "Dance of the Dream Man").

FBI Agent Dale Cooper first encounters the Man from Another Place in a dream which according to the caption depicts events occurring "25 years later..." In the dream Cooper is noticeably older. The character appears in five episodes over the course of the series.

In the film prequel to the Twin Peaks TV series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Laura Palmer has a dream where she sees a young Dale Cooper meet the Man in the Lodge for the first time. The Man also appears again a dream, where he enigmatically tells Agent Dale Cooper “I am the arm.” Interestingly, another character, Phillip Gerard a.k.a. Mike, is missing an arm, raising the probable conclusion that The Man From Another Place is the spiritual embodiment of the missing arm, which Mike cut off to free himself from his evil impulses, also making the Giant the spiritual embodiment of the body, from which the arm was cast. This conclusion is further reinforced by the scene that takes place in the Black Lodge at the end of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me which depicts Mike and the Man from Another Place speaking in unison while the latter places his hand upon the spot where Mike's arm used to be. In Agent Cooper's dream, the Man from Another Place also says, “My voice sounds like this”, and makes a high pitched beeping noise, like a beacon. This same noise is heard twice in the movie: when Agent Chester Desmond visits a trailer park and disappears and when Leland and Laura Palmer are driving and Phillip Gerard approaches them in his vehicle. When Cooper investigates the trailer park, he finds the words “Let’s Rock” scrawled across the windshield of Desmond’s car. These same words are spoken by the Man in the “25 years later...” dream in Twin Peaks’s second episode.

Agent Cooper is also visited in dreams by the Giant. In the show's final episode, Cooper enters the White and Black Lodges. He again encounters the little man, as well as the Giant. Both the Giant and the Midget are represented as a pair on the petroglyph found in Twin Peaks' Owl Cave).

Reverse speak

The strange cadence of the Man’s dialogue was achieved by having Michael J. Anderson speak into a recorder. This was then played in reverse, and Anderson was directed to repeat the reversed original. This “reverse-speak” was then reversed again in editing to bring it back to the normal direction. This created the strange rhythm and accentuation that set Cooper’s dream world apart from the real world.

Michael J. Anderson recalls that his reverse-speak was not difficult to master as, coincidentally, he had used it as a secret language with his junior high school friends. David Lynch was unaware of this when he cast Anderson in the part, and even hired a trainer to help Anderson with the enunciations, but when he found out he could already talk backwards so well he canceled the trainer and wrote more and more difficult lines of dialogue for Anderson to read.

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Last updated on Monday March 03, 2008 at 23:46:43 PST (GMT -0800)
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