Sunday Morning! Twin Peaks: The Return
Perhaps the most tragic song in the pop tearjerker cannon is the 1962 Skeeter Davis song The End of the World.
The singer asks:
Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
‘Cause you don’t love me any more…
Throughout the song, she tries to understand how life keeps happening after we lose the person who gave our life meaning. It’s a wonder they never used the song in Twin Peaks because David Lynch has a tendency to use old pop music to underscore his themes and, as I’ve said, Twin Peaks is kind of “about” how we carry on in grief. There is a point in the first season of the show where Dale Cooper, the virtuous avatar of care, confronts the more cynical FBI agent Albert, who has run afoul of the locals’ high emotions after the murder of beloved teenager Laura Palmer. Cooper tells Albert:
“Murder is not a faceless event here. It is not a statistic to be tallied up at the end of the day. Laura Palmer’s death has affected each and every man, woman, and child because life has meaning here- every life. That’s a way of living I thought had vanished from the earth, but it hasn’t Albert. It’s right here in Twin Peaks.”
This, I think, is the core to the first season; in many ways, Twin Peaks is a middle finger to the standard mystery procedural, in which the pretty girl is murdered, the detective solves the case, and everything returns to normal at the end. I’ve said the central mystery of the show was never “Who killed Laura Palmer?” but how do we live when someone we love has been taken from us? Things don’t return to normal after tragedy; we simply learn new ways to live with it. Because, whether we like it or not, life keeps on happening, even after our world has ended.
Which is to say the third season of the show, filmed 25 years after the second season, was always going to come back to Laura Palmer.
People get frustrated by the show because it never fully resolves its mysteries; instead, it keeps creating new ones. We sense that everything has some meaning in this fictional world, although the meaning is not immediately clear. One of the key tricks of Twin Peaks, in fact, is how it plays with the way that both mysteries and dreams feature small, slightly-askew details, which we try to make sense of in the light of day. What did that man’s hat mean? Why was that woman carrying a penguin? What is the white horse? Why does that waiter say the gum you like is going to come back in style? Why is that strange girl crawling on the floor and screaming?
The short answer is don’t worry about it. Let it affect you the way it affects you, and let that be your understanding. I think enjoying the show is much easier if you don’t worry about finding the “right” answer to its strange dream logic. There are already books out there that aim to “explain” dreams- if you see a tall man in black, it means you’re going to die, etc. Personally, I hate those books. And I am none-too-fond of explanations of the show that amount to a skeleton key- if someone wears red, they are in danger, etc. Twin Peaks asks more questions than it ever answers, but if you take its weird “symbolism” as dream logic, it’s much easier to let it wash over you, rather than trying to figure out everything. (This is probably a good rule of thumb for life as well.)
But, let’s get into what happens in Season 3 anyway.
By the end of season 2, back about 30 years ago, we had learned that the person who killed Laura Palmer was inhabited by a malevolent spirit named Bob, who embodied “the evil that men do.” To say this was disappointing for some viewers would be an understatement- we came all this way to “solve” a mystery, only to find out that the real killer was possessed?! What the fish, David Lynch? In fact, Lynch himself left the show at this point and it went severely off the rails. We weren’t ever supposed to have closure. And, then, he returned for the final episode. In one of the great cliffhangers of television history, Lynch and Mark Frost left the hero of the show, Special Agent Dale Cooper, possessed by the spirit of Bob. Good was now a vehicle for evil, for the next twenty-five years.
Or, more specifically, as we return, Cooper’s doppelgänger is possessed by Bob and walking the earth coldly inflicting pain, while the true Agent Cooper is trapped in an interdimensional place called the Black Lodge, where 25 years ago the spirit of Laura Palmer told him “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”
And, we’re back!
When the third season picks up, Cooper is still in this place, where the giant who has served as a sort of spirit guide throughout the series offers him the cryptic message: “Remember 4-3-0. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone.” Now, he’s free to leave, but the Dark Cooper has to return to the Black Lodge first. Cooper says that he understands this, but we won’t understand until about 17 hours later. In between, we watch our hero’s epic journey, in which his purely malevolent doppelgänger, which some have called “Dark Coop,” spreads destruction in the world, while his good and virtuous core, embodied in the place of a man named “Dougie Jones,” struggles to remember himself and return to the physical world. It is as sharp a depiction of living through trauma as anything in fiction.
It’s a great trick too because Dale Cooper was one of the best-written, most admirable characters on television. He was loyal, virtuous, curious, and open to the world in a way that felt anyway like the purest core of ourselves. The entire third season, “The Return,” makes us wonder if he ever will return. Is there a point in which the darkness has extinguished the light? The series explains more of the mythology behind this than one might expect. The absolutely staggering “Part eight” shows how this particular vehicle of evil, Bob, was brought into the world; but the show was always about how evil exists in all of us, and how we keep it from overtaking everything else. And, in gruesome fashion, what happens when evil overfloods light.
Of course, while this struggle is waged for Cooper’s soul, life just keeps happening. One of the elements of the show that has frustated numerous viewers over the years is how it multiplies subplots, all of which go somewhere, but some of which amount to dead ends in terms of the central storyline. Charlene Yi, for example, appears in one episode as a drugged out girl in a bar, crawls along the floor among the crowd, cries, screams, and then never appears again. Is she telling us that evil is returning to the town of Twin Peaks? Or, is she just a drugged out girl in a bar? Does Ben Horne’s assistant Beverly, or her husband for that matter, mean anything to the larger story? What is Hank the maintenance man up to in the first episode? Where exactly is Audrey- in a coma or arguing with her cuckolded husband?* And why does her son Richard seem to play such a pivotal role in this series, only to be plucked off like Dick Hallorann in the Shining? Is the spirit of Margaret’s husband trapped in the log she carries around? What the hell is in that glass box in the first episodes?!
And, while she is still a prophet of sorts, Margaret, the “log lady,” is now dying, as the actress Catherine Coulson was dying in real life. One of the things I most admired about this third season was how the story doesn’t shy away from the fact that these people have gotten older and are, in many cases, trying to resolve the weight of their lives as they approach the end of life. It’s not trying to recreate something from 25 years ago, and in spite of the title, it’s not saying we can return to the exact point we left. We’ll wind up somewhere different. The scene with Coulson addressing the camera for what was likely the last monologue she ever delivered about approaching death and the transformation it will bring is beautiful and heartbreaking, and genuine.
One of the real strengths of David Lynch’s direction- and it was so noticeable when he was absent- is how he mixes up emotions in scenes: something that should be sad becomes funny; something that should be funny turns tragic; there is a heightened sort of emotional state throughout the series, contrasted with its often “cool” tone. As a result, scenes that shouldn’t work on paper are emotionally resonant in ways we can’t quite explain.
Kyle MacLachlan plays FBI Agent Dale Cooper in Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return.
But it starts to work; the doofus starts to grow on you. And then there’s a scene in which “Dougie” becomes transfixed in a plaza outside his place of business, staring at a statue of a cowboy with a gun, clearly trying to figure it out. “This used to mean something to me; what was it?” he seems to be thinking, as lonely saxophone music plays and the sun sets. It’s strange and uncanny and deeply resonant. Like so many other scenes in the series, it sticks with you.
Anyone who has ever been through grief and trauma knows that point- where it seems like some joyous core of your being, that you had before the break, will never return. In some ways, that too is the story of aging. I don’t know that people really do become more conservative as they age, but they certainly do carry more.
It’s as if some part of your identity gets submerged and pushed down by the grief and the darkness for a very long time. And then, sometimes, in the least expected places, flashes of it return- glimpses of your old self like your reflection at the bottom of a well. Cooper’s epic quest here is to recover himself from the oblivion of forgetfulness and conquer the darkness of his shadow self. In that sense, he will return. Or, at least, we hope he will.
But, we can’t undo the past. In the end, it all comes back to Laura Palmer and her murder, as Cooper tries to save her from her destiny in a scene that very consciously echoes Eurydice and Orpheus in classical mythology. When Orpheus tried to bring Eurydice out of the underworld, he looked back and she vanished. Here too, Cooper tries to save Laura from death, looks back, and she vanishes to another world entirely. He follows her there and, in the end, we realize that, even as a totally other person, she is doomed to die as Laura Palmer. She can never escape her fate. Pain cannot be undone. However, the pain now exists, once again, in balance with the pure virtue of Agent Cooper. He cannot do otherwise but try to save her, which is in itself a triumph over evil. Evil cannot do otherwise but try to snuff out the light. Neither can exist without the other.
So, okay, what does Twin Peaks “mean” in the end? The easy answer is hell if I know. But I think the final “answer” to this mystery is that pain never goes away, but neither does love.
So, what are YOU watching, pondering, playing, reading, or returning from this weekend?
(*Note: she’s in a coma until the very last shot. Sorry.)
