The Man from Another Place (or "the Arm") also called The Midget or “The Dancing Dwarf” is a character in the Mark Frost and David Lynch television series, Twin Peaks. He is portrayed by Michael J. Anderson. In the original broadcast version of the series, he made his first appearance in the second episode of the first season, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer", however his first appearance for international audiences was in the so-called "International Version" of the show's pilot episode, which featured an ending that differed from what was broadcast in the United States.
The Man from Another Place is one of several spirits that live primarily in the White and Black Lodges, other dimensional places which are sometimes accessed by the unwary in the woods surrounding the town of Twin Peaks. The lodges seem to represent good and evil. The living can accidentally find them and become trapped in them. The lodges are also accessible to the souls of the dead. The spirits of the lodges seem to have different purposes. Some are evil, and feed on pain, lust, and more importantly, fear. Some visit the living in dreams or appear out in the open, often to deliver mysterious warnings. The Man from Another Place has been seen to deliver warnings or shed light on mysterious tragedies, as well as mediate among the spirits, suggesting that he is a figure of balance. However, his counterpart, the Giant, has also delivered warnings and provided clues to Agent Cooper in his search for the truth.
The Man from Another Place is dressed in a sharp red suit, is very short, and talks in an odd, distorted way. He seems to reside in a red curtained room, later learned to be the White and Black Lodges.[citation needed] If nothing else, the color scheme represents fear, terror, arousal, and imminent danger. The Man dances in an odd, old fashioned way to jazzy music (the song is "Dance of the Dream Man"). There exists in the Man from Another Place the queer promise of a strange, occult knowledge that is paramount for FBI Agent Dale Cooper in his pursuit of Laura Palmer’s killer.
The events that occur in the White and Black Lodges do not always happen concurrently with the linear timeline of the outside world, suggesting that they exist outside of the regular flow of time, and can be unremembered by those who experience them. FBI Agent Dale Cooper first encounters the Man from Another Place, and the Lodges, in a dream which a caption (25 years later...) indicates depicts some kind of future events, and in the dream Cooper is noticeably older (a version of this sequence is used in the International Version of the pilot). In the movie prequel 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. When Cooper later dreams of the Lodge, he has no memory of this encounter.
The character appears in five episodes over the course of the series, as well as material from the second episode which was aired as part of the pilot episode when released as an individual release in Europe and Japan.
In the prequel to the Twin Peaks TV series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, he appears again in a dream, where he enigmatically tells Agent Dale Cooper “I am the arm.” Interestingly, another character, Phillip Gerard AKA “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 (who is "One and the same" with the dwarf, lending to theories that the waiting room is a neutral place between the shadow and the light. In the show's final episode, Cooper enters the White and Black Lodges. He again encounters the little man, as well as the Giant. The Giant sits on the couch next to the little man, and they say to Cooper, "one and the same". In this same final episode, the spirits and souls that appear in the black lodge seemed to have good or evil doubles, including, surprisingly, the Man from Another Place (both the Giant and the Midget are represented as a pair on the petroglyph found in Twin Peaks' Owl Cave).
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 cancelled the trainer and wrote more and more difficult lines of dialogue for Anderson to read.
