The question is, "Where have you gone?" Waking up
after a 26-year dream, Twin Peaks drops
us, and at least some of its characters, into disorientingly unfamiliar
situations.
The first two seasons of Twin
Peaks (1990-1991) presented the viewer with sharp contrasts in tone,
unapologetically strange personalities, and intervention on Earth from a
bizarre spirit plane while keeping one thing almost totally constant: The
setting of the town of Twin Peaks. This geographical constraint was dropped in
the prequel film Fire Walk With Me,
and it is totally blown away in the new, third season. In its first eight
episodes, Twin Peaks: The Return
takes us to the fictional and somewhat Twin-Peaks-like rural town, Buckhorn,
South Dakota, and also to Yankton Federal Prison on the other side of that
state, a long days' drive south from there to Las Vegas and to East Coast
metropolises Philadelphia and New York City, with a short stop in Buenos Aires.
And yes, there is some action in the town of Twin Peaks, but far less than the
opening seasons would lead one to expect. What this all signifies is that the
third season is not about a town or even small, American towns in general but
about a phenomenon that happened to affect powerfully the town of Twin Peaks but
is broad and far-ranging in its extent. Season 3 has focused so far by
following the threads of one specific (but very complicated) story, and then
panning back – way back – to something general.
The specific story is that of three Dale Coopers – two
more than we started the series with and one more than we had in 1991. Way back
in Season 2, Episode 11, Deputy Hawk told us:
There is also a legend of a
place called the Black Lodge. The shadow self of the White Lodge. Legend says
that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. There, you
will meet your own shadow self. My people call it The Dweller on the Threshold.
… But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage,
it will utterly annihilate your soul.
Been there, done that. Cooper has met his shadow self, or
doppelganger, and survived, but their meeting resulted in a switcheroo
– Evil Cooper has been on the loose for 26 years now, while Good Cooper
has sat cooling his heels in the Black Lodge, having at least a few
conversations with friends such as The Giant and MIKE. But this situation has a
time limit, and it has just expired. Good Cooper is free to leave the Black
Lodge if he can get Evil Cooper back in. Evil Cooper knows this and has backup
plans. First, he created a third, fake Cooper named Dougie Jones who is sucked
into the Black Lodge when Good Cooper appears. That kept Evil Cooper on Earth,
but he was incapacitated and taken into a Federal prison. Good Cooper has to
kill Evil Cooper in order to remain on Earth, but Good Cooper has returned with
his mental capacities reduced to that of a toddler, stumbling – in a successful
Forrest Gump style – through the life of Dougie Jones while he struggles to
regain his memory and/or be found by his friends in law enforcement. Evil
Cooper, as shrewd as he is immoral, has backup plans behind backup plans, escaping
prison and even death to remain free and fighting for his evil life to
continue.
As they prepare for an inevitable showdown, both Good Cooper
and Evil Cooper have some supernatural assistance. Good Cooper is being given hints
and cues from some unstated source – probably MIKE and The Arm (the Man
From Another Place, now "evolved" into a walking human nervous system
that resembles the baby in Eraserhead).
These clues enable him to win big in love and business and even in a Las Vegas
casino. Meanwhile, Evil Cooper knew in advance of his incarceration how to (and
the need to) hack the prison security system and blackmail the warden into
allowing his release. Good Cooper is gradually regaining his memories and
skills, best seen when he rapidly disarmed ruthless assassin Ike The Spike. His
allies Deputy Chief Hawk and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and FBI personnel Cole,
Bryson, and Rosenfield are perhaps on his trail and will perhaps accelerate his
recovery if they find him before Evil Cooper does. Along the way, Season 3 has
picked up some very loose threads, showing us Diane (played by Lynch regular
Laura Dern) and surfacing the missing pages (except one) from Laura Palmer's
diary. For reasons that are not yet completely clear, Evil Cooper needs some
numbers and in the season's first scene, The Giant gives some numbers to Good
Cooper; there's a decent chance that those are the same numbers.
Those are the facts of the season's first seven episodes;
then Episode 8 drops the bomb, literally. After Evil Cooper is revived from
death by dark, horrible-looking men from nowhere, we jump back to July 1945,
and witness in psychedelic detail the first atomic bomb explosion in the desert
of New Mexico. Inside the fireball, we, The Giant, and a new character named
Señorita Dido witness the emergence (and possible origin, or passage to our
world) of BOB. Eleven years later, in 1956, a horrible winged bug-lizard
hatches from an egg while the horrible dark men (according to the credits,
Woodsmen a la FWWM) stagger like
zombies away from a Convenience Store (again, a la FWWM) and begin to terrorize some nearby people. A Woodsman kills a
couple of people and sends a hypnotic message over the radio, "This is the
water and the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within." Then, a girl who has left an idyllic Fifties date opens
her lips and allows the horrible bug-lizard to super horribly crawl inside her.
It seems quite probable that we have thus witnessed the origin or transition of
the entire Twin Peaks spirit world.
To connect a few dots (or plots), here, in 1956, Leland
Palmer was about nine years old (at least, the actor, Ray Wise, who plays him
was). This allows for the bomb, egg, creature, and Woodsmen to be on the scene
when Leland, as a boy, met BOB and allowed him inside. Gordon Cole has a photo
of an atomic explosion on his office wall, indicating that he may know about
the relevance of nukes and the great menace out there facing his world. Dido is
(from the Aeneid), the name of a
woman whom a man meets on his way to a greater destiny, and this is the name of
the woman who witnesses the origin of BOB. And the horse in the Woodsman's
verse may be the one we have seen twice now (just before Maddy dies and when
Good Cooper leaves the Black Lodge), when the spirit world is interfacing with
our own.
Twin Peaks is as
much about tone as it is about plots and details, and the tone of Season 3 is
unmistakably more like David Lynch's theatrical films than the television show
that Twin Peaks started out as. Lynch
has peppered the cast with actors such as Naomi Watts, Patrick Fischler, and
Laura Dern who were prominent in his films. He has also brought, from his films
to Season 3, visual and thematic motifs such as a woman listening to a record
player, menacing and unnaturally dark men, and a world of big, bad criminality.
Twin Peaks: The Return may provide a
unifying glue to Lynch's entire career and it seems not impossible that he
could even link one or more of his fictional worlds to the Twin Peaks universe
before it is over.
It is also noteworthy how much Season 3 shares with comic
books, particularly the works of Alan Moore, whether Lynch is a fan who has
drawn upon this material deliberately, or if they simply share the same
influences. A bug infecting someone with an evil spirit by crawling into their
mouth was done long ago in Alan Moore's Swamp
Thing. The idea of a profoundly violent event changing the world for the
worse as if by synchronicity was also seen in Alan Moore's From Hell: Moore's story had the crimes of Jack the Ripper directly
triggering the conception of Hitler while Lynch gives us the atomic bomb as the
trigger that allows the evils of BOB and his spirit companions into our world.
Of course, the idea of a scientific event producing beings with special powers
is an older comic book trope, going back to the Flash in 1940 and Superman in
1938 as well as Jerry Siegel's evil "Super-Man" of 1933.
Now, preceding Episode Nine, we are truly at a crossroads.
Evil Cooper is somewhere in the countryside, evil, enraged, and possibly
immortal. Good Cooper is in Las Vegas, on the path towards regaining his
capabilities. Good Cooper's allies are trying to work out the mystery before
them. And now that we know that the evil in Twin Peaks began in 1945/1956,
where are we poised in 2017? In the past, numbers (such as the time between
Jupiter–Saturn conjunctions, and "I'll see you in 25 years") have been
important. Is there some numerology with years about to unfold, so that what
started in 1945 will end sometime soon, based on a magical number of years or
alignment in the skies? Is there predestination guiding us to an inevitable
conclusion? Or does Good Cooper have to rise up and win this as an act of will?
A key to the nature of the Twin Peaks story was perhaps
spelled out way back in the second episode, "Zen, Or The Skill To Catch
A Killer." Agent Cooper, beginning to work on the Laura Palmer case, memorably
positioned a bottle on a log and threw rocks at it from 60 feet and 6 inches
away (the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate in baseball). Cooper,
using an idea that came to him "in a dream," seeks clues in the way
his subconscious mind and/or luck affect his throws. The "Tibetan
method," he calls it. The episode was titled, "Zen, or, The Skill to
Catch a Killer." Less than one episode later, Cooper tells Harry and Lucy
that his dream (which ended the second episode) is the key to the case.
"Break the code, solve the crime." This created the juicy prospect
that the viewer, too, could break the code and solve the crime. Ultimately,
however, this was not true. Many of the clues in the dream matched nothing at
all. Others were hopelessly vague (e.g., that BOB's hair color matched
Leland's, which it did only loosely). Still others were absolutely impossible
to apply until the viewer already knew the solution (e.g., "that gum you
like is going to come back in style," but the gum was linked to Leland
after we already knew that he was the killer). In fact, Twin Peaks has never been built upon cleverness and logic and
puzzles. It's full of dreamy obfuscation and wildly spiralling complexity
without end. It sometimes makes sense after the fact, but it is not laid out according
to conventional logic, and Lynch's comments on his own artistic process explain
why:
Certain things are just
beautiful to me, and I don't know why. Certain
things make so much sense,
and it's hard to explain. I felt Eraserhead, I didn't think it.
Twin Peaks is
driven more than anything else by David Lynch's visions from nowhere. It's how
he works and it is, naturally, how his hero, Agent Cooper, works. Now Cooper
– Good Cooper – is once again in the driver's seat, and Lynch will
ask him, as Albert did twenty six years ago:
Cooper. In observation, I
don't know where this is headed. But the only one of us with the coordinates
for this destination and its hardware is you. Go on whatever vision quest you
require. Stand on the rim of a volcano, stand alone and do your dance. Just
find this beast before he takes another bite.
