THE SPOILER ALERT OF A LIFETIME
This video will completely spoil ALL of Twin
Peaks. That means Season 1, Season 2, the
Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk with Me, and Season
3: The Return.
If you haven't seen all of it (in that order)
and you have any intention to, do not watch
this video until you have. Twin Peaks is best
enjoyed when it is shrouded in mystery and
you are taking an active part in solving and
interpreting clues to try and determine the
ultimate meaning behind the show. That will
be wiped out if you watch this first. If you
have seen all of Twin Peaks, and you enjoy
diving into the mystery and trying to figure
out what things mean and then discussing theories
with other fans, this spoiler warning is for
you, too. Even you, the Twin Peaks expert,
still might not want to watch this video,
and here's why:
David Lynch, the co-creator of Twin Peaks,
makes films that are considered by most to
be impenetrable, and he is notoriously tight-lipped
about the meaning behind any of his work.
Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual
film.
Mmhmm... Why? Elaborate on that a little bit.
No, I won't. Umm...
Rather than expositing his ideas to people
in plain English, Lynch abstracts them out
into pictures and sounds and dialogue that
he uses to convey the ideas more effectively
with intuition than he could with words.
"I'm not always good with words. Some people
are poets and have a beautiful way of saying
things with words. But cinema is its own language."
It is Lynch's intention that we should "feel"
his work for ourselves, and he believes that
if we are told the meaning or the central
idea, then this will diminish our ability
to explore the idea on our own emotional terms,
at the deepest level of understanding.
This is a doughnut. It is very sweet and very
good. But if you've never tasted a doughnut,
you wouldn't really know how sweet and how
good a doughnut is if you've never had that
experience.
Another reason Lynch doesn't like clear explanations
is that he thinks they give the audience a
sense of closure, which makes us take things
for granted and keeps us from going any deeper.
We stop thinking about it, and we move on.
As we've learned from the show's second season,
as soon as you explain it, it's dead, and
after that, you're never going to get to the
real bottom of things.
The experience of Twin Peaks is about the
mystery, and what I'm going to share with
you WILL take most (if not all) of the mystery
out of the show. I know that's a big statement,
because art is open for interpretation, so
who's to say that any one interpretation is
correct? Well, as David Lynch told Chris Rodley
in an interview about Lost Highway,
"But the clues are all there for a correct
interpretation, and I keep saying that, in
a lot of ways, it's a straight ahead story.
There are only a few things that are a hair
off."
That's very interesting, that someone who
is so concerned with personal interpretation
would imply that there can be incorrect interpretations
for his work. I accept the possibility that
I could be wrong about Twin Peaks, but I have
the sneaking suspicion that once you see things
in a certain way, you will not be able to
unsee them that way. The answer has been hiding
in plain sight, and it will permanently alter
the way you look at Twin Peaks, so tread with
caution...
The things I tell you will not be wrong.
That being said, I'm of the firm belief that
knowing the secret actually enhances our appreciation
for the show, even if it goes against Lynch's
intentions, so I do recommend you continue
with me on this journey of peak discovery,
providing you've done all the thinking and
exploration and theorizing you intend to do
first.
Don't rob yourself of the opportunity to go
dreamy.
We never get to, you know, go dreamy or anything.
This is absolutely horrible.
END SPOILER ALERT, BEGIN DISCLAIMER
Twin Peaks was created by David Lynch and
TV writer Mark Frost, but for this video,
I will be focusing on David Lynch's side of
things, not so much Mark Frost's.
* Reason 1: A significant portion of the answers
we're looking for come from the film and from
Season 3, and more specifically from directorial
decisions, visual associations. This is David
Lynch's department.
* Reason 2: Frost co-wrote the third season
with Lynch and then went off to write his
second Twin Peaks book while Lynch directed
and did additional writing on The Return.
According to Sabrina Sutherland, executive
producer of Twin Peaks:
"David did keep writing on the show after
Mark left to write his book."
Also according to Ms. Sutherland, David Lynch
has never read Frost's books. So, whatever
is in them is clearly not important to David
Lynch. Are the books interesting? Absolutely!
Do they expand on the universe of Twin Peaks?
Yes, they do! Am I saying they aren't canonical?
No, I am not. Do they help to explain anything
that's going on? Not in the slightest. In
fact, they are self-admittedly full of contradictions,
and that's the point of them.
The idea was that it was all found documents,
and if you've ever spent time (and I take
it you have) researching, or exploring, or
going through old records or newspaper accounts,
the past is lathered with inaccuracies and
mistakes.
Now, this is not to downplay Mark Frost's
contributions, which are significant and numerous.
Even he admits that it's impossible to tell
which ideas came from him and which ideas
came from Lynch, and Lynch has stated that
his ideas and the ideas of his writers merge
to become both their ideas.
"When you write with somebody they become
our elements. It doesn't matter who came up
with what, initially. It becomes our stuff."
However, it's clear from their work that Frost
and Lynch have different ideas about what
they were making with Twin Peaks, at least
at the beginning, and the thread Lynch was
pulling on with Twin Peaks runs through all
of Lynch's films. I'm gonna stick to crediting
Lynch because it's easier that way, but I'll
give Mark Frost credit wherever I can. If
I credit Lynch with something Frost did, I
apologize. It's just too complicated to pick
it apart and attribute every last little thing.
END DISCLAIMER, BEGIN EXPLAINING ALREADY
So, we've seen the show, we've seen the movie,
we might have even read the books. We've had
our forum discussions, poked around on the
Twin Peaks fan Wiki, watched a few "Best Theories"
videos on YouTube... Now, it's finally time
to understand what the H it was we were watching.
I warn you, it may take awhile to actually
get to the understanding part, because this
show is so complicated that you kinda have
to explain everything before you can explain
everything. There's a lot of groundwork that
has to be laid. I'm also going to be making
some claims that you might not want to accept
at first, but I promise you that once we get
to the analysis of The Return, everything
will start to click into place.
The laying of groundwork starts with the show's
history, because the making and cancelling
and prequelizing and returning of the show
are essential, necessary, paramount to the
explanation of what's happening in the show.
It is a story of many, but it begins with
one.
In the late 1980's, David Lynch and Mark Frost
created Twin Peaks initially as a way to humor
Lynch's agent, Tony Krantz, who wanted Lynch
to do another mystery story about small-town
America in the style of his hit, Blue Velvet.
"This notion that the girl next door was leading
a rather desperate double life that was going
to end in murder came center stage. As we
figured out who she was and realized that
she was dead, everything flowed from there,"
related Frost, and the show soon developed
into a complex web of secrets unraveling into
multiple story arcs with one ongoing question
at the center of it all: "Who killed Laura
Palmer?" This format, well established by
today's standards, was not the norm for 80's
TV.
Even before the show premiered, there was
skepticism about its success, as the studio
and TV critics at the time wrongly insisted
that audiences were not ready to accept the
idea of a murder mystery continuing past the
end of an hour-long episode. 80's audiences,
it was presumed, liked their Matlocks and
their Magnum P.I.'s wrapped up before bedtime.
Despite this, the April, 1990 Twin Peaks premiere,
directed by David Lynch, ended up being a
surprise hit, with millions tuning in each
week for the next clue in the central mystery.
Although the show was primarily about FBI
Special Agent Dale Cooper's investigation
of Laura Palmer's murder, as you know, the
show played out more like your standard, late-80's
soap opera. Love triangles, plots of betrayal,
conspiracies, trysts... Aside from the film-quality
cinematography, the show's genre-bending,
experimental nature was what separated it
from the rest. We've got a soap opera playing
out inside a police procedural with a dash
of kooky sitcom, and then the real mystery
coming from the paranormal pieces of the investigation...
Dale Cooper has bizarre dreams filled with
clues that all end up coming true. A woman
that carries a log wherever she goes seems
to have otherworldly insight. A one-armed
man who might be possessed by a spirit pursues
a long-haired man dressed in denim who is
the subject of visions shared by multiple
characters...
This is the stuff that really stuck with people
and kept them coming back for more. There's
the distinct feeling that some unseen force
is driving the plot from the shadows. What's
really going on, and what does all this supernatural
stuff have to do with it? Avid watchers were
eager to see how it would all tie together
in the investigation's resolution at the end
of the first season... Little did they know
that Laura Palmer's murder mystery was the
tree from which all of these branches of intrigue
were growing, and to solve the murder would
be to tear the tree up from its roots. Nonetheless,
it was during the second season that the studio,
under pressure from the audience, made the
famously stupid decision to pressure Lynch
and Frost to answer the question that was,
famously, never supposed to be answered.
"When we wrote Twin Peaks, we never intended
the murder of Laura Palmer to be solved...
Maybe in the last episode," reveal's Lynch.
Frost responds, "I know David was always enamored
of that notion, but I felt we had an obligation
to the audience to give them some resolution.
That was a bit of a tension between him and
me... It took us about 17 episodes to finally
reveal it, and by then people were getting
a little antsy."
Lynch concludes, "All I know is, I just felt
it–that once that was solved, the murder
of Laura Palmer, it was over. It was over."
Seven episodes later, the studio, on behalf
of the audience, forced the killer's reveal
in what is still one of the most haunting
and disturbing scenes ever to appear on broadcast
television, again directed by David Lynch...
and then the show took an immediate water
skiing vacation. A costumed cartoon villain
tampers with a local beauty pageant, a new
love interest for the main character arrives
despite the fan-favorite Cooper-Audrey ship,
and the cool kid runs off to get caught up
in some incestuous black widow sub-plot that
nobody cares about but still takes up what
seems like all of the screen time... It's
understandable that that there would be a
desperate scramble to come up with something
to fill the vacuum after the heart of the
show had been torn out, and it didn't help
that David Lynch was so disgusted with the
decision that he checked out entirely. David
Lynch left the show because the studio made
him reveal the killer. If you were wondering
why Season 2 after Episode 7 is so awful,
this is it.
"I had very little to do with Season 2, and
I'm not happy with it. Up until 'Who Killed
Laura Palmer?' I was with it 100 percent,
and then it drifted away. We had a little
goose that was laying golden eggs, and they
told us to snip its head off."
"The pilot is the only thing I am particularly,
extremely proud of. There were great moments
along the way. The second season sucked."
"It got very stupid and goofy in the second
season; it got ridiculous. I stopped watching
that show because it got so bad."
For this reason, the second season is jam-packed
with, "Let's do this! That seems like something
David Lynch would do!"
Yes, I know the "Josie in the furniture" idea
was supposed to have come from Lynch, but
if it did (and it wasn't a joke), it came
from him long before he'd already left, so
by the time they were supposed to put it into
the show, he wasn't around to tell them what
it was they were supposed to be doing with
it. So, I think my criticism stands.
The killer's reveal led to an obvious decline
in quality, and the studio started messing
around with the show's time slot. These factors
drove the ratings into the ground, causing
the network to put the show on indefinite
hiatus and sit on the last six episodes. This
prompted a grassroots letter writing campaign,
started by hardcore fans and promoted by Lynch,
to keep the show on the air and show those
episodes.
If it has to end, you know, that's alright.
But if it doesn't have to end, that's even
better. And I'm asking people to write to
Bob Eiger, the president of ABC, and if I
could, I can give the address.
Oh yes, yes please. I love annoying these
network weasels.
This successfully influenced the network into
running the episodes so Lynch could give Twin
Peaks a personal send-off in the masterpiece
season finale, airing June of 1991, a little
after the show's first birthday. Through his
direction, Lynch rescued the plot after hijacking
the script, turned the Scooby Doo villain
into somebody actually terrifying, and put
the concept of mystery back center-stage with
another cliffhanger that left us questioning
the fate of poor Agent Cooper.
"You killed my show, I came back to bury it."
TWIN PEAKS CANCELLED
And such was the ending to a cultural phenomenon
that has been cited numerous times as the
most influential TV series of all time. Without
Twin Peaks, there's no X-Files, there's no
Sopranos, there's no LOST.
The number of people who cite it as an influence
has always astonished me. People from The
Sopranos to LOST to Mr. Robot, which is now
going... LOST I think they said, "Because
of the way that you were able to just not
worry about wrapping things up." Obviously,
LOST was kind of famous for doing that (or
not doing that).
Only one month after the cancellation, David
Lynch announced that he would be creating
a Twin Peaks film, and the fanbase rejoiced
that they would finally be getting the answers
that they never got in the show. It was a
point of contention between Lynch and Frost
over whether the film would be a sequel or
a prequel. Frost wanted to continue from where
the story left off and fulfill his feeling
of obligation to the fans, while Lynch wanted
to make a film about Laura Palmer's last days.
"At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn't
get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks.
I was in love with the character of Laura
Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on
the surface but dying inside. I wanted to
see her live, move and talk. I was in love
with that world and I hadn't finished with
it. But making the movie wasn't just to hold
on to it: it seemed that there was more stuff
that could be done."
So, Frost opted out, leaving Lynch to work
with Robert Engels, another writer on the
TV series. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me would
be released about a year later, in 1992...
to no fanfare.
The film begins with the investigation of
the murder of somebody nobody cares about,
conducted by not Dale Cooper, much to the
audience's dismay - Kyle MacLachlan, who played
Agent Cooper, had requested a much smaller
part, partly because of the failure of Season
2 and partly because he thought a Dale Cooper
reprisal would get him forever pigeonholed
into the role. The dismay deepened once fans
got past the opening scenes and very quickly
realized that they were not where they thought
they were. Missing was the quirky, mostly
straightforward crime drama/soap opera/sitcom
that aired on TV, along with many series regulars
whose scenes had to be cut for time and tone.
The chronicling of Laura Palmer's last week
of life, while harrowing and equally as mysterious
as the investigation of her death, seemed
to series veterans to be a rehash of things
they already knew, despite the film giving
us a fascinating deep dive into the world
of the Lodge and its inhabitants. This supports
the lesson learned from the forced conclusion
of her story; her murder had been solved,
and the audience was done with her.
It was our idea that Laura Palmer's killer
would not be found. And once you solve that,
we felt we'd be, you know, finished. And it
was true.
In the absolutely abysmal reviews the film
received, criticisms include the switch in
tone, the non-inclusion of popular characters,
Mark Frost's absence, the decision to make
it a prequel, and the Laura Palmer drama rehash.
It was booed at Cannes, it was canned in the
press, it was depressing for people looking
for answers after the show's ending, and the
response ended David Lynch's dream of Twin
Peaks. Thanks, 1992 idiots.
"And then there's often something in the air
that keeps people from actually seeing the
work for what it is. There's something else
that's maybe not real that they're reacting
to more than the work. If some time goes by,
they see the same thing again but now it's
more worthwhile. That happens sometimes.
I feel bad that Fire Walk with Me did no business
and that a lot of people hate the film. I
really like the film. But it had a lot of
baggage with it. It's as free and as experimental
as it could be within the dictates it had
to follow."
And that was the sad conclusion of the Twin
Peaks story, only two years after it began.
Over time, its popularity waned, even as its
legacy lived on in other shows it inspired.
But, the internet kept the dream alive, going
all the way back to the era of Usenet newsgroups.
Well, what's great about it is it's a show
that was driven by fan interest initially,
and it's the fans who have kept it alive all
these years. We owe them a big debt of gratitude,
because they kept the flame burning.
Why? The mystery! The Twin Peaks mystery was
so powerful that the show's cult following
had been spreading Twin Peaks around and working
together obsessively to try to solve the mystery
for twenty three years after cancellation
when David Lynch tweeted this almost subtle
hint about a possible third season...
Suddenly, it was twenty five years later.
I was old, sitting in a red room.
It was exactly twenty five years after Fire
Walk with Me that Twin Peaks: The Return premiered
on Showtime and internet streaming services.
Finally, answers... right?
The story should revolve around Dale Cooper,
but instead revolves around the doppelganger,
who is in search of a mysterious entity known
as Judy, while the good Dale Cooper is trapped
in an unresponsive state and spends half the
season staring into space while madcap shenanigans
play out around him (and it's baffling for
everyone watching). Compared to the original
series, there's a massive change in tone and
tempo. Most of the cast returns to reprise
pretty much their exact same roles (but different)
in what seem like supplementary vignettes,
and numerous confusing deadend plotlines are
peppered throughout.
Also, have you seen Episode 8? Episode 8,
am I right? It's so artsy. It's like an hour-long
art project. How did Showtime let him get
away with it, am I right?
You guys saw Episode 8, right? That's crazy.
The season culminates very conveniently in
the destruction of Dale's doppelganger. But
the show wasn't over. Where to go from there?
Dale Cooper travels back in time to save Laura
Palmer from being killed, and what happens
next is the current most-pressing mystery
of Twin Peaks. Laura disappears, Cooper ends
up back in the opening scene, he exits the
Lodge, and then he and Diane exit their own
identities. Cooper takes a Laura Palmer that
isn't Laura Palmer to Twin Peaks where he
discovers that Laura Palmer never existed.
CLIFFHANGER. I'M DAVID LYNCH, WHAT DID YOU
EXPECT?
What year is this?
And this is the current state of things. Twenty
five years worth of creator interviews, DVD
box sets full of special features, a feature
length cut of deleted and extended scenes
from the film, eighteen hours worth of extra
show that was never going to exist, and still
the mystery persists... "What is going on
in this show," we want to know? Would a Season
4 give us the answers? I thought Season 3
was supposed to give us the answers. I thought
the film was supposed to give us the answers,
and all those did was bury us six levels deeper
in questions! But, what if I told you that
we didn't need a Season 3 or 4, and that the
answers to our questions have been sitting
right in front of us for thirty years? What
I'm trying to say is, don't worry about the
ending - worry about the beginning. If we
figure out what was going on in the early
90's, we'll get Season 3's ending for free.
To understand the ending, we need to understand
the rest first.
There was a fish in the percolator.
There have traditionally been three ways to
explain things in Twin Peaks. The first way
is the Jim Belushi way, the Matthew Lillard
way. Not that I don't appreciate their work.
I love them both to death. But...
I think it's weird. Anyone else? Super- If
you're not a "Lynchian", I mean, If you're
not a Twin Peaks dude, you come in, it's a
little strange.
And you're just, you don't know- have a ******* clue
what's going on.
... Kind of like in real life.
In real life.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. It's like a realistic picture.
No, I mean, even in this scene, I have no
idea what the **** we're doing here.
No, no... Okay... Yeah...
Chris Rodley suggests, "So at times it does
seem as if you were delighting in teasing
or mystifying the viewer."
"No, you never do that to an audience. An
idea comes and you make it the way the idea
says it wants to be, and you just stay true
to that. Clues are beautiful because I believe
we are all detectives. We mull things over
and we figure things out."
Behind all things are reasons. Reasons can
even explain the absurd.
The next level up, the most common way would
be the in-universe explanations. That is,
how the characters in the show would understand
what's going on, the explanations that the
show itself gives for everything. Mark Frost's
book explanations. But, the in-universe explanations
are incomplete, obviously, because the ultimate
mystery has stood for three decades. It can
be difficult to tell which dots to connect,
or how to connect them, or what even qualifies
as a ‘dot'.
There are clues everywhere, but the puzzle
maker is clever.
The hardcore intellectual fans, they're one
step further along. They've got another way
to explain things, which is that it's all
symbolic. Anything that's happening in the
show is secretly a meta commentary on... whatever
makes the most sense to them at the time.
The problem is agreeing on what the commentary
is for each individual thing because of the
commonly-held belief that any interpretation
must be nothing more than your personal interpretation,
and any other would be equally valid. I agree
to a degree, but then what about this "correct
interpretation" business?
The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow
mistaken for something else... The WRONG interpretation
of the clues...
Come along with me and I will show you a fourth
way, the "galaxy brain" way of explaining
Twin Peaks. To think of Twin Peaks as a series
of clues that lead to the answer is actually
backwards. The solution is to look at things
from the other direction.
The "idea" says everything. The "idea" dictates
everything that follows. You just stay true
to the "idea".
Every David Lynch project starts from some
central idea, and everything in the piece
extends from or serves that central idea.
So, if we think of the idea as a projector,
shining a light through the lens will produce
the image of Twin Peaks. This dot doesn't
necessarily have to connect to this dot...
but they are connected through the point of
origin.
A simpler way to think of this is that Twin
Peaks is a message, but it's encoded in a
language of images and sounds and story, and
the central idea was the key used to encrypt
it. Trying to work backwards and figuring
out a key from an encoded message is very
difficult, but if we know the key, we can
decode the message very easily...
So, let's get to work finding the key.
My dream is a code waiting to be broken. Break
the code, solve the crime.
The first part of our key will come from breaking
down a core principle of David Lynch's artistic
philosophy... and that's an easier task than
you might think. People have tried before...
"What makes something distinctly ‘Lynchian'?
It's the bizarre mix of the macabre and the
mundane, DUALITY, the revelation that the
true fear comes from ambiguity, DUALISM, turning
small town America over to expose the seedy,
hidden underbelly, DUALISM, nobody really
knows, it's just a feeling that you see when
you feel when you get it," and none of this
is an answer, and mostly people just end up
listing things that are in the films without
exploring any of the reasoning behind them.
There's this "white picket fence", real, American,
un-self-conscious, small town, and there's
all this mud and muck and slime and horror
and perversion just underneath the surface
of everything you can see. And I think David
Lynch has always had a lot of fun with these
kinds of "underbellies".
People really think that Lynch's whole point
is to point at the good and point out how
it's secretly bad. I disagree. I believe that
Lynch's mixture of darkness and light is a
means to an end, and that is...
to show us the darkness so that we can recognize
the light.
Lynch is trying to create an appreciation
for the bad, because without it, you can't
see what's good. You have to take the bad
with the good, the bitter with the sweet,
the coffee with the cherry pie. He said as
much in an interview from 1992 with Kristine
McKenna.
"We live in a world of opposites, of extreme
evil and violence opposed to goodness and
peace. It's that way here for a reason but
we have a hard time grasping what that reason
is. In struggling to understand the reason,
we learn about balance..."
"That you find your work tranquil and beautiful
while most people find it disturbing suggests
you're unusually comfortable with the dark
side of your psyche; why is that?"
He's been asked this question numerous times,
and he's never provided the answer. But here?
"I've always liked both sides and believed
that in order to appreciate one you have to
know the other – the more darkness you can
gather up, the more light you can see too."
And there it is. Why does Lynch mix the macabre
and the mundane in his art? It's not to highlight
the macabre - it's to highlight both in order
to give us an appreciation for the beauty
of the mundane. It's to find the balance point
in any situation, and for Lynch, this makes
the macabre beautiful too. "What is the white
picket fence on its own? We need to see the
creepy crawlies under the surface, and this
will give us the contrast we need to appreciate
the white picket fence."
I think this is the key to Lynch's love of
the 1950's - World War II had just ended,
people had just been through Hell, so there
was a real appreciation for the safe and wholesome,
with a pop culture modern audiences would
consider to be boring; the darker and more
horrific a situation you put someone into,
the more beautiful ‘boring' becomes in contrast.
Philadelphia, to me, I always say, was my
biggest influence. It was a filthy city. It
had a beautiful mood. There was fear, violence,
despair, sadness, insanity, corruption, and
this kind of seeped into me and made an influence...
which I loved, by the way.
He loved it because it helped him to see negativity
so that he could better see positivity.
Why is The Wizard of Oz one of Lynch's favorite
films? We might find ourselves concentrating
on the dream aspects of it, but I think it's
actually because it's the story of a naive
girl whose simple farm life is basically perfect,
but she has to get sucked into a fantastical,
technicolor nightmare in order to recognize
that.
If we want to clearly see the Lynchian philosophy
in action, we need look no further than Blue
Velvet, which is David Lynch's version of
The Wizard of Oz, and Jeffrey Beaumont his
Dorothy Gale. This comparison has been made
before, but nobody ever explains why, so here's
why:
Jeffrey is a clean-cut kid who only knows
the tranquility of green lawns and white picket
fences, but when he naively thinks he can
crack the Hardy Boys' "Case of the Severed
Ear", he embarks on a nightmare journey through
darkness, and in doing so, discovers the darkness
in himself. Only then is he able to truly
appreciate the beauty of his dull, boring,
suburban life.
Now, of course this balance of darkness with
light might not be the only thing that makes
something Lynchian, but it's significant enough
for our purposes, and it's the first part
of our key. Let's see how it applies to Twin
Peaks directly using our knowledge of its
production history. Why would David Lynch
be so disgusted by having to solve Laura's
murder that it made him leave the show a third
of the way through the second season?
"Has the violent aspect of the culture increased
or did we just used to police it better?"
"It's way bigger now. Dark things have always
existed, but they used be in a proper balance
with good and life was slower. There were
things that they were afraid of for sure,
but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety
level of the people is in the stratosphere.
TV sped things up and caused people to hear
way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people
with more than they could handle... These
things have created a modern kind of fear
in America.
In interviews with Chris Rodley, he had more
to say about this atmosphere of fear.
"But there was craziness in the air and people
were picking up on it. It's as if the mind
is a top: it starts to spin faster and faster
and then, if it starts to wobble, it can go
wildly out of control... And you can't even
relax at home: the television is sending out
more stuff, and it's just mounting and mounting."
"It's nice when people really like something
you've done, but it's sort of like love, in
that it seems inevitable that people reach
the point where they've had enough of you...
it's like a little bit of a heartache, and
that heartache is about the fact that we are
living in the Home Alone age. Art houses are
dying. What we have instead are mall cinemas
showing twelve pictures and those are the
pictures people see. Television has lowered
the level and made a certain thing popular.
That TV thing moves fast, doesn't have a lot
of substance, has a laugh track and that's
all."
With this last one, at first it sounds like
he's just showing his anger about the show
being cancelled. But, the knowledge that he's
always looking for a balance of good and evil
and that he thinks TV accelerates an atmosphere
of fear... that colors it a little differently.
In that context, if we look at this quote
from early 1990, before Twin Peaks had premiered,
the base intention - the message behind Twin
Peaks - emerges:
"The worst thing about this modern world is
that people think you get killed on television
with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter
into kids' heads that it's not very messy
to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that
much. That's a real sickness to me. That's
a real sick thing."
This quote is the giveaway. At that time,
David Lynch believed that TV was not balancing
goodness with bad, light with dark. Remember
the TV landscape at theattime; every murder
mystery wrapped up by the end of a single
episode. The violence on TV was being made
"consumable", and I'm going to be using the
term "consumable TV violence" a lot from now
on, so I want to be clear on what I mean by
that. TV was packaging up victims for the
audience to consume and discard without a
thought to who those people really were. "Oh,
was Mr. MacGuffin a person with thoughts and
feelings and a family? I don't really care,
all I want to know is how the door got locked
from the inside...!" Viewers wanted the violence,
they wanted it to be fun to watch, no strings
attached, none of the pain and suffering that
went with it. They wanted closure so they
could move on to the next consumable victim.
By taking the the sadness out of the violence
to make it more entertaining, TV equated the
joy of the mundane with the joy of the violence,
which completely obscured the truth of good
and evil and upset the balance.
We see people die by the thousands every year
in series television. The people who are related
to these people get over it in a matter of
minutes. We've seen shows, a number of series
this year in which people talk about their
recently deceased loved ones as though it
was like something they saw on television.
I like the fact that that's been a running
motif almost in this show, that this death
has affected this place, and it's particularly
affected the family. And that's a rare thing
and a breakthrough, and something I consider
an advancement for television.
Laura Palmer was a direct response to mundane
violence, an attempt to restore the balance
by digging deeper into the anatomy of a murder
mystery than any other TV show would. It showed
things that were unheard of on TV at the time:
a police officer crying at the scene of a
murder, grief-stricken parents losing their
minds, an entire town deeply affected by the
tragic loss of a girl everyone knew. Love,
responsibility, community.
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 that I thought had vanished
from the earth, but it hasn't, Albert. It's
right here in Twin Peaks.
In contrast was real darkness and evil, as
opposed to the convenient, sanitized, shallow
stories audiences were used to seeing. Serial
murder, corruption, drug smuggling, spousal
abuse, teenage prostitution, BDSM, psychological
trauma...
New episodes did not bring us closer to solving
the case, but instead created more questions,
and the questions were the point. "Who killed
Laura Palmer?" More like, "Who WAS Laura Palmer?"
This was a person balanced right on the razor's
edge of darkness and light, such that everyone
involved in her life was connected to her
through darkness or light. The more we learned
about her, the more we learned about them,
and the more we learned about them, the deeper
we got into the question.
LYNCH: The analogy for that is, they say negativity
is just like darkness, and so you look at
darkness and you say, "Wait a minute, darkness
isn't really anything, it's the absence of
something." So, it doesn't matter how dark
the night has been when the sun comes up.
Automatically, without trying, the sunlight
removes the darkness.
You cannot get rid of darkness unless you
expose it to light, and in Twin Peaks, the
light was the investigation. As long as the
investigation continued, more and more of
Laura's darkness, and therefore more of the
town's darkness, would be exposed. By seeing
the sadness and pain caused by her murder,
the audience would hopefully become more and
more invested in Laura as a person, as opposed
to a mere plot device.
Most of the time, we were trying to solve
your problems. We still are. You're dead,
Laura, but your problems keep hanging around!
At the same time, things would get stranger
and stranger, which would make the audience
continue their experience beyond just watching
the show. By thinking about the show and discussing
it and trying to figure out this continued
mystery for days after each episode, audiences
would not only stay immersed in the show for
longer than just the hour it was on, but they
would have an increased chance of ‘feeling'
the point for themselves.
The point: "This TV thing is not balanced.
All you care about is the ‘whodunnit'. The
light is not bright enough to expose real
darkness, and the darkness is not dark enough
for you to see real light. You need to face
the full extent of darkness so that you can
appreciate the simple bliss of coffee and
pie with your loved ones."
Whether Lynch wants to admit that he has a
message or not, this was it, and it's the
second part of our key... Yes, the base level
intention behind Twin Peaks is only part of
what we need to understand Twin Peaks...
Balance is the key. Balance is the key to
many things.
Lynch desires proper balance, he saw TV as
out of balance and created Twin Peaks to address
the issue. His hope was that Twin Peaks would
create more desire for balanced TV.
I chew pitch gum. Runny pitch is no good to
chew. Hard, brittle pitch is no good. But
in between there exists a firm, slightly crusted
pitch with such a flavor. This is the pitch
I chew.
The Log Lady doesn't like the runny pitch
or the hard pitch, she likes the in-between.
She likes balance.
That gum you like is going to come back in
style.
The hope was that, through Twin Peaks, balance
would come back in style on TV. A surefire
way to keep people from getting the message
would be to do like all the other consumable
TV shows: solve the mystery and give people
closure.
"Closure. I keep hearing that word. It's the
theater of the absurd. Everybody knows that
on television they'll see the end of the story
in the last 15 minutes of the thing. It's
like a drug... As soon as a show has a sense
of closure, it gives you an excuse to forget
you've seen the damn thing."
This was the reason David Lynch took off after
the killer's reveal, because it was utterly
catastrophic to the central message. Much
more than just tanking the plot, it reduced
Laura to an expendable "victim of the week",
easily consumed and discarded to make room
for the next, thus turning Twin Peaks into
exactly the kind of show for which it was
supposed to be the antidote. Ending her investigation
was turning off the light shining into her
darkness. It was a contradiction at the fundamental
level, the deepest possible irony.
There is also a legend of a place called the
Black Lodge. There, you will meet your own
shadow self. But it is said, if you confront
the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it
will utterly annihilate your soul.
There are indications that the "two Coopers"
idea leading off of the Season 2 finale was
planned from the beginning of the original
series, which is why the show ended on that
cliffhanger of the bad Cooper leaving the
good one trapped in the Lodge - the people
left working on the show were still building
toward it. But, by the time Lynch returned
to direct it, the show was already dead, so
I posit that Lynch repurposed the idea to
reflect the situation. Lynch always talks
about the idea of "action and reaction" when
he's asked how he creates his art.
And this "action and reaction"... You make
an action, you see it, you react, you feel
it, and it indicates the next action. And
you react, you think, feel it, and it indicates
the next thing, and it grows. And it's a beautiful
thing.
So, is this the cliffhanger that was always
planned, or did it become the natural conclusion
of the story? This was the ending that made
itself known to David Lynch. Twin Peaks failed
to face its shadow self with courage, failed
to shine a light into the darkness, and became
the evil it was trying to fight. Dale Cooper's
investigation ended with the darkness taking
over. We thought the truth would be a good
thing, but all it brought was bad.
I only wanted to do good. I wanted to be good.
And it felt so good to tell the truth.
Leave my family alone!
Will!
Bobby and Shelly tease Heidi about being late
in the last episode with the same dialogue
they used in the first episode.
Seconds on knackwurst this morning?
Seconds on knackwurst this morning?
Too busy jumpstarting the old man, huh?
Too busy jumpstarting the old man... again!
We ended right back where we started, TV knocked
back out of balance, business as usual.
David Lynch tried to re-establish Laura Palmer
as central to the mystery with Fire Walk with
Me, and unfortunately, he was proven correct
by the response. People had gotten their closure
and just weren't interested in Laura Palmer
anymore. The film was also a last-chance dump
for every last bit of symbolism that was previously
unexplored, and this is where we are taught
the method of finding the final piece of our
key. We're not even close to being done, and
we already know the base-level intention behind
the show! But, we still don't know what the
heck creamed corn is supposed to be. We know
the "What", now we need to know the "How",
and for that, we'll slow down on looking outside
the show and start digging in.
Strange, this key shows up after all these
years...
How do we identify and interpret clues from
Twin Peaks? Before the release of Season 3,
David Lynch told Variety that Fire Walk with
Me would be very important to understanding
The Return.
But, this actually extends to the series as
a whole. All of the clues for a correct interpretation
of Twin Peaks are in the film and we just
need to know how to spot and interpret them.
Luckily, the film starts by teaching us the
method. Special Agent Chet Desmond will show
us the way.
First, something that I don't think anyone
will dispute: David Lynch, the Philadelphia-inspired
director of the film, plays Gordon Cole, the
Philadelphia-based director of the FBI - this
is the director (wink wink not so subtle,
David Lynch is playing himself, everyone's
already kinda picked up on this self-insert
already).
You fellas can reach me in the Philadelphia
offices! I'm flying out today!
Philadelphia to me, I always say, was my biggest
influence.
So, the director from Philadelphia presents
his detectives with surprising visuals that
are packed with clues. These are mysteries
that he wants his detectives to solve, and
by extension, he wants his audience to solve
them. The director presents his audience the
same clue-packed surprising visuals.
Chet, I've got a surprise for you, something
interesting I would like to show you!
If the director outside of the show is the
same as the director inside the show, could
this mean that the detectives inside the show
are the same as the detectives outside the
show? Let's go with that idea and just see
what happens.
"The mind is a detective," says Lynch.
"Intuition is the detective in us."
"[Dale Cooper is] really a very intuitive
detective."
For now, let's get a little meta and say that
Gordon Cole is standing in for David Lynch
himself and his agents are standing in for
the audience.
Do we have the time to learn the reasons behind
human beings' varied behavior? Some take the
time. Are they called detectives?
In the past, the detectives in the audience
have not been very good with interpreting
clues, so take note that, in the film, the
director presents the clues to Agent Desmond
and not to Agent Stanley.
Chet, your surprise!
Choice of character names is important here.
Unlike your average, everyday Sam Stanley
(that's us), hotshot Chet Desmond is an old
pro with his own M.O. He's an insider, familiar
with how his director works, and he's going
to teach the rookie detective how to interpret
the director's clues.
The first lesson to learn from Cousin Lil
is that we should be paying attention to what
the director is emphasizing and not worry
so much about what's going on in the background.
The rookie detective is very good with minute
details, like spotting the different colored
thread that was used to tailor the dress (or
noticing continuity errors).
The dress was altered to fit her. I noticed
a different colored thread where the dress
was taken in.
Gordon said you're good...
But while the rookie is busy with that, he
misses the most glaringly obvious clue of
them all: the blue rose. What does the average,
everyday viewer do when they play detective
and try to figure out what's going on in Twin
Peaks? They might do like Sam Stanley does.
Ignore the interesting things happening right
in front of them and instead sit there literally
ascribing value to every last lamp, chair,
and choice of wallpaper.
I figure this whole office, furniture included,
is worth $27,000.
That's great, but did you see the gorilla?
She told me that she's taken twelve pages
of notes on the show, that she has basically
broken down each episode frame-by-frame, slow
motion, fast forward, any way that she thinks
that she's going to pick up a little extra
out of the show.
Stick to obvious things shown in detailed
close-up. Not everything is worth our attention,
not every little detail has so much value.
Once we know what to pay attention to, we
still need to know how to decipher things,
and this leads us to our second lesson: Remember
what Mike said to Cooper in his dream - he
doesn't mean it like we think it means, he
means it like it is, like it sounds.
I mean it like it is, like it sounds.
When interpreting clues, we shouldn't bring
our meanings into it. David Lynch is doing
the showing and telling. What does he mean?
Describe things as they are, what they look
like, what they sound like, compare them to
what Lynch has shown and told us before, and
take it from there. Let him do the talking
through his dialogue and visuals.
Keeping these lessons in mind:
"One hand in her pocket" - she's hiding her
hand.
Which means they're hiding something.
"One hand making a fist" - she's looking for
a fight.
Which means they're gonna be belligerent.
"Walking in place" is walking in a place.
Which means there's gonna be a lot of legwork
involved.
These things are exactly what they look like,
what they sound like, but Lynch presents them
in a quirky way so that we'll take notice
of their importance. If a clue isn't obvious,
just sit tight - that's a mystery for us to
puzzle over.
A blue rose?
Good... but I can't tell you about that.
If it proves to be a little obtuse, eventually
Lynch will tell us the answer,
A tailored dress is our code for drugs.
Oh...
even if it's an answer that we could have
figured out on our own.
What's the significance of the blue rose?
A blue rose does not occur in nature. It's
not a natural thing.
If no answer is forthcoming, don't just give
up and say, "I guess we'll wait for another
season for the explanation!" You aren't trying
hard enough. You think about that, Tammy.
You think about that, Tammy.
Now, we have David Lynch's original intention
with the show (along with how that intention
failed), and we have a method of clue interpretation.
For the final piece of the key, let's apply
them to the show and see what we get out of
it.
The show was created as a response to a sickness:
the evil of consumable TV violence. Is there
something in the show that sounds like this?
There is:
Maybe that's all Bob is, the evil that men
do.
Bob possesses people and makes them commit
evil acts. Bob is the evil that men do.
He is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile,
everybody run!
Bob enjoys it. It's fun for him. Bob is "the
evil that men do" for the purpose of entertainment...
In Episode 8, we see this thing credited as
The Mother spewing out eggs in a white jelly
sauce. Bob is one of these eggs coming from
The Mother, so it's safe to conclude that
this is the birth of Bob. An alarm in the
Fireman's castle alerts the Fireman to this,
and he responds by giving birth to a golden
egg of his own: Laura Palmer. Laura Palmer
is being created as a direct response to the
birth of evil for the purpose of entertainment...
Already, we're getting confirmation that the
point of Twin Peaks was to restore balance
by fighting Bob's consumable violence with
Laura Palmer's story. Let's keep going!
We know from David Lynch that light fights
darkness by exposing it.
Automatically, without trying, the sunlight
removes the darkness.
Twin Peaks' method of fighting darkness was
the light of the ongoing Laura Palmer murder
investigation. The darkness being illuminated
was Bob's handiwork.
In the premiere of The Return, Laura tells
Agent Cooper, "I am dead, yet I live," then
takes her face off to reveal that she's filled
with white light. If light is investigation,
then Laura lives on through the investigation.
As long as the investigation continued, the
show would continue, and as long as the show
continued, the investigation would continue.
Laura is revealing that this light is what
allows her to keep living after death...
Do you feel it? We're starting to get a glimmer
of what's going on here. Don't get ahead of
me. Let's follow this through to the end.
Twin Peaks and the Laura Palmer investigation
started with her murder, so let's take a look
at the scene of the crime.
The spirit known as Bob, using Laura's father
as a host, kidnaps Laura and her friend Ronette
and takes them to an abandoned train car.
Bob doesn't intend to kill Laura; he wants
to possess her and use her body as a host
for evil.
I want to taste through your mouth.
If he succeeds in possessing her, no murder
and therefore no investigation will take place.
Ronette begins to pray that she will be seen
if she's killed. She then says she's not ready
because she's too dirty.
Father, if I die now, will you...? Kill me...
See me... Look at me, I'm so dirty... I'm
not ready...
What the heck does that mean? Is she praying
that she'll go to heaven? If so, note that
she's almost begging to be killed so that
God will "see" her. Not "take" her, "see"
her.
... will you...? Kill me... See me...
If Laura and Ronette switched places, the
big question would have been, "Who killed
Ronette Pulaski?" Ronette seems to know that
being murdered equates to this kind of attention
during the investigation. She wants to be
killed so that she will be "seen", but at
the same time, she doesn't want to be because
it means that all of her dark secrets will
be unearthed instead of Laura's.
Up to this point in the film, Laura has been
wondering where her guardian angels have gone.
Now, in this moment, she sees an angel appear
for Ronette. Ronette's bonds are cut and she's
free to escape. Laura looks betrayed, then
angered by this. What does it look like is
happening here? It looks like the angel is
taking mercy on Ronette. So, ee'll call this
an "angel of mercy", releasing Ronette from
suffering... but not Laura. This is Laura's
time to die. As if to go along with the angel,
Bob throws Ronette out of the train car instead
of tying her back up. Why would he not kill
her? Why would he throw her out like this?
As he throws Ronette out of the train, Mike,
who has been banging on the door to get in,
throws his green Owl Ring in for Laura to
put on her finger. Bob wants to possess Laura,
but something about Laura wearing Mike's ring
causes Bob to kill her instead.
Don't make me do this! Nooo!
Then, Mike LEAVES. Mike is supposed to be
desperate to stop Bob, but not only does he
not keep Bob from killing Laura, he pretty
much facilitates her murder with the ring
and then stands by laughing while it happens!
He doesn't stay to protect Ronette from Bob,
nor does he stick around to catch Bob as he
comes out of the train car! And, he has Bob
right in his clutches at the end of the film,
but he allows Bob to leave and cause more
suffering later! Are these the actions of
someone who is trying to stop Bob's evil?
Only if we look at them in a certain "light"...
Mike must know that you have to fight darkness
with light, that Bob must be stopped through
an investigation, and there can be no light
of investigation unless there's a murder...
When Bob exits the train car with Laura's
body, he leaves Ronette there on the ground.
He doesn't check to make sure she's dead,
he just takes off. This is the action that
will eventually lead to the investigation.
Why allow for that possibility?
Well, I'll tell ya, we're sure glad to have
the FBI here. Kinda lucky in a way that Ronette
stepped out across the state line.
Is it just me, or are all of these characters
acting as if they know this scene is about
Laura's murder and the investigation that
follows, and they're playing it out as if
to make it happen...?
Are you saying Laura wanted to die?
Maybe she allowed herself to be killed...
At the film's end, Laura appears in the Red
Room with Agent Cooper standing by reassuringly.
Laura is utterly lost, confused and distraught.
How could something so horrible happen to
her? Suddenly, a light flickers on her face
and an angel appears to her. Laura looks into
the light and begins to laugh.
Does this mean what everyone thinks it means?
Are the angel and the light indicators that
Laura made it to the White Lodge, that Laura
went to Heaven?
Not necessarily, because we've seen an angel
like this before. Ronette's angel was an angel
of mercy, releasing her from suffering. So,
this must be Laura's angel of mercy, releasing
Laura from suffering. The angel didn't appear
for her in the train car like it did for Ronette,
it appears here, after she's killed. So, how
is Laura's guardian angel relieving her from
suffering? She's causing the magical light.
What is the magical light, and why would it
ease Laura's pain?
Well, what does the light look like it is?
Where have we seen light flickering on someone's
face like this before? Dale Cooper when he
entered the Red Room? How about before that?
How about in everyday life?
Here comes that glimmer... How about the light
on someone's face when they're watching TV?
The angel of mercy is releasing Laura from
suffering by showing her why she had to die...
For the sake of television. She had to die
so that David Lynch could make a show about
it. Laura is watching TV and nodding with
understanding of the cosmic joke that she
is a literal TV character who wouldn't even
exist had it not been for the show about her
own murder, and people watching the show is
what will lead to the understanding of Lynch's
message of balance. This is the final piece
of the key: the meta commentary is not just
commentary, it's literally happening inside
the show!
Twin Peaks is a television show that knows
it's a television show about the concept of
television itself.
Sounds like you've been snacking on some of
the local mushrooms.
So, now we've got a key: David Lynch desires
balance, TV was out of balance, Twin Peaks
was created to fix the problem. That meta
commentary is literally happening in the show.
Therefore, Twin Peaks is a self-aware TV show
about the balance of light and darkness on
TV.
This is a key, but does it fit all of the
locks? Does it fit any lock? How can we know
if this interpretation is the correct one?
We don't have to accept it right away, let's
just start by assuming that it really is the
key to everything and use it to try to decode
something bizarre, and we'll see if the key
fits. If it does, we keep going until it doesn't
fit anymore. If it really does explain every
last thing, I think we can call it a success.
And just keep in mind, it's to not be 100%
on board with this idea right now. We're just
testing it. But stay with me, and I promise
you it will click into place by the time we're
done. So... trial by fire. What's the most
bizarre scene I can come up with off the top
of my head? How about the scene of the meeting
in the Convenience Store?
The chrome reflects our image.
Electricity.
From pure air. We have descended from pure
air, going up and down; intercourse between
the two worlds.
If this is about the literal concept of a
TV show, then what would the two worlds be?
They would be the world of the television
show and the real world. In the 90's, what
brought the show to our TV's so we could watch
it? Two things. Number 1, electricity. Powers
the TV. Number 2, radio waves, going up and
down, descending from pure air - the airwaves.
Intercourse between the two worlds; us in
the real world watching the world on the TV,
which gives birth to the experience of entering
the TV world. How does every episode of the
show end? With the Lynch/Frost Productions
bumper; power lines, crackling electricity,
and radio waves being projected outward. What
are the two parts of the picture transmitted
in that radio signal? Luminance, or "luma",
that's the brightness, the light, and chrominance,
that's the color, the "chroma". "The chroma
reflects our image." These are TV characters
that know they're TV characters right up against
the TV screen telling us through the TV static
how they are literally appearing on the screen.
... Do you believe me now? It's ok if you
don't, because I'm just getting this fire
started.
The absurd mystery of the strange forces of
existence.
Too often, Twin Peaks is called a parody of
a soap opera, and I think we can blame that
on Invitation to Love, the soap opera watched
by the characters in Twin Peaks. Invitation
to Love was written and shot by Mark Frost
as an over-the-top parody of the soap opera
medium, and rumor has it that David Lynch
was not happy with the way Frost handled it.
Invitation to Love being an obvious joke combined
with the genre blending that was happening
in Twin Peaks put the idea in the audience's
heads that Twin Peaks seemed too self-aware,
and self-awareness usually equates to parody.
When asked by Jeremy Kay of The Guardian if
Twin Peaks was a soap parody, Lynch responded,
"No, no, no, no, no. It is a soap opera."
Likewise, Twin Peaks is not a pastiche, where
imitation is done out of tribute rather than
to mock. What people are mistaking for parody
or pastiche was meant to be "metafiction",
where the work is self-aware of its own medium.
The best recent example of metafiction would
be Deadpool, the comic book character who
knows he's a comic book character and is constantly
talking about being one. Lynch wanted Invitation
to Love to be a more serious mirror of what
was going on in the show because it was supposed
to be a hint about the metafictive nature
of the show.
Can you see through a wall?
The characters in the soap opera are watching
a soap opera. The things in the soap opera
they're watching are happening in the soap
opera they're living. Laura Palmer's identical
cousin, Maddy Ferguson, played by the same
actress, shows up during the scene where we
first see that one actress in Invitation to
Love is playing two characters.
Selina Swift as Emerald and Jade.
Uncle Leland...
Jade, what a surprise! I...
The way Lucy describes the plot of the soap
opera she watches sounds exactly like she
would describe the soap opera she's in.
Thanks to Jade, Jared decided not to kill
himself...
Leo Johnson was shot, Jacques Renault was
strangled...
... and he's changed his will, leaving the
Towers to Jade instead of Emerald. But Emerald
found out about it...
... the mill burned, Shelly and Pete got smoke
inhalation...
... and now she's trying to seduce Chet to
give her the new will so that she can destroy
it....
... Catherine and Josie are missing, Nadine
is in a coma from taking sleeping pills.
This is a massive, massive clue, just like
all the other TV-related clues Lynch and Frost
were throwing in, like the reference to the
One-Armed Man from the police procedural The
Fugitive,
Moments before discovering his murdered wife's
body, he saw a one-armed man running from
the vicinity of his home.
or the echo of the famous "Who shot J.R.?"
ad campaign for the hit soap opera Dallas.
We've got the soap opera cliches of evil twins
and characters going into comas, and that
old sitcom joke of a simple bump on the head
causing a complete personality change that
can only be reversed by another bump on the
head at the end of the episode (and by the
way, let's take a look at the disturbing reality
of that situation).
A lot of it was about uncovering layer after
layer of inside references to past movies,
past TV shows, that kind of thing. Initials...
Figuring out this code.
"I call the show a cultural compost heap.
There are symbols and characters and expressions
from all the shows we saw growing up that
echo and ping down the hallways of Twin Peaks."
Twin Peaks wasn't simply influenced by these
shows, it's not simply paying homage to these
shows, and it's not parodizing any of these
shows. It is these shows, it's made of these
shows. Twin Peaks is a show about the concept
of television, and what did people watch on
television at the time? Soap operas, murder
mysteries and sitcoms, and so that's what
Twin Peaks is. It's a soap opera, and a murder
mystery, and a sitcom. It's the entire TV
watching experience in one single package.
"I still don't see what the great difference
is. To me, it's a regular television show."
More like, "All the regular television shows
at the same time." Twin Peaks is TV itself.
If the picture's giant, and the sound is beautiful,
and the people are quiet and they get into
this world... It's very, very delicate how
you get into that world. It can be broken
with the wrong sound, it can be broken with
a stupid, little screen, but if you get into
that world, it can be like a dream.
David Lynch sees film and TV as a chance for
the viewer to leave reality and enter a dream
world. A film is a dream world that we enter
when we watch it.
You know, here's a theater, and then suddenly,
the lights dim and the curtain opens, and
we can go into another world and only exist
there because of that film.
Twin Peaks just happens to be a film that's
on TV, and TV has that "stupid, little screen"
that can break the illusion and keep us from
realizing the answer to one of the bigger
questions posed by The Return:
We are like the dreamer who dreams and then
lives inside the dream. But, who is the dreamer?
An impossible question to answer unless we
know that the dream is the film or television
show that David Lynch is trying to bring us
into. Most of the scene is shot from a third-person
perspective, but Monica Bellucci breaks the
fourth wall and delivers the question directly
to camera. Gordon Cole doesn't do the same,
he's still looking at Monica. But, she's looking
at us. She's asking the question of us, the
viewers. "But, who is the dreamer?" She then
answers the question. She looks past our director
from Philadelphia and into his past, where
he sees himself as a young man. But if she's
breaking the fourth wall, what happens if
we do the same?
Monica called and asked me to meet her at
a certain cafe.
In real life, the "certain cafe" where they
meet is a creperie in Paris located right
next to a real art gallery where David Lynch
exhibited some lithography (possibly, at the
time of filming the scene). He sees a version
of himself that is the character Gordon Cole
from twenty five years ago, and she sees a
version of him that is the real life artist,
David Lynch, who created Twin Peaks twenty
five years ago. "The dreamer," the real life
David Lynch, "who dreams," creates a TV show,
"and then lives inside the dream," acts in
the TV show. The real life Monica Bellucci,
talking to us, says that we, the people in
real life, are like him. Just as he lives
in the dream, we leave our reality to live
in that dream when we watch Twin Peaks.
Take people into another world and give them
experiences. Take yourself into that other
world and give yourself an experience.
There are characters that know for a fact
that they're living in a TV show dream, like
the residents of the Convenience Store who
are flat out telling the audience how they're
literally and mechanically appearing on TV,
there are characters that come into contact
with these entities and learn that they are
part of this TV dream -
We live inside a dream.
We live inside a dream.
- there's the Log Lady, who seems like she
might definitely probably know that she's
part of a TV dream -
I play my part on life's stage.
- and then there's everybody else, TV characters
that don't know that they're TV characters,
but just feel deep down at the level of intuition
that they might be living a television dream.
It’s like I’m having the most beautiful
dream and the most terrible nightmare all
at once.
It's all like a... like a dream.
It was Laura living in my dreams
Is this real, Ben, or some strange and twisted
dream?
All I did was come to a funeral, and it's
like I fell into a dream.
Before you came here Twin Peaks was a simple
place. Then, a pretty girl die... Suddenly,
the simple dream become the nightmare.
And the scoop of vanilla on top of the cherry
pie: Twin Peaks was built around the Packard
Sawmill. All the various plotlines and story
arcs in the first two seasons seem to revolve
around the Packard Sawmill. Not the most exciting
location for a murder mystery show, is it?
Why, of all things, a sawmill? Because, well,
what do they do in a sawmill? They saw logs.
Sawing logs... Snoring! It's a dream!
Maybe our dreams are real...?
Occultism, mythology, theology, folklore,
alien encounters, mysticism - these are the
ways human beings try to explain our existence
on this earth, so naturally, being unable
to comprehend that they only exist because
of a TV show, these are the ways that characters
in this show try to describe the strange phenomena
that appear to have some control over their
lives. For example, the White Lodge, "where
the spirits that rule man and nature reside,"
an in-universe Native American legend. To
the characters within the show, The Lodge
appears to be the realm of the gods. Anytime
they want to go there, anytime they come into
actual contact with this higher power, it's
in the form of a dream... which makes sense.
We dream of them, and as Gordon Cole's dream
shows, they dream of us... Or more like, we
dream a TV show abstraction of their dream
of an abstraction of the real life concept
of television.
"It's so magical — I don't know why — to
go into a theater and have the lights go down.
It's very quiet, and then the curtains start
to open. Maybe they're red. And you go into
a world."
Movie theaters used to have red curtains in
front of the screen that would part as the
lights dimmed and the film began, much like
a stage play. If we look at film and TV as
a play happening on a stage, then the red
curtains act as a sort of portal, a clear
separation between the dream world happening
on the stage and the real world, where the
audience watches the dream and the people
backstage create it. In Twin Peaks, we can
see red curtains acting as exactly this kind
of portal, separating the dream of Twin Peaks
from the world of the Red Room and the Convenience
Store. Occasionally, we even get to see the
actors in this dream spotlit on their stage.
I play my part on life's stage.
See you at the curtain call.
When an actor in a play goes from backstage
to the dream happening on the stage, they
pass through the "wings" - the space between
the curtains on the sides of the stage. The
Red Room is nothing but red curtains and spaces
between red curtains, so the Red Room represents
that space in the wings that separates the
stage from the behind-the-scenes reality.
The zig-zag pattern on the floor represents
radio waves, which are a kind of ‘in-between'
that the show passes through to get from the
station to the TV.
"Well, I like the nowhere part of America.
Eraserhead is an American film, but it's a
little bit in an in-between place."
"This idea about making a film about 'nowhere'
- is The Red Room in Twin Peaks one of those
places?"
"Yes."
The entities living in this "in-between place",
like the Wizard of Oz, are the men backstage
behind the curtains, creating the story and
driving it forward. To us, they seem like
great and powerful wizards, but if we peel
the curtains back, we will see nothing but
ordinary people using machinery to create
a fantasy world for us to explore. "Pay no
attention to the men behind the curtains."
Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty
song, and there's always music in the air.
Where are they from? The world of television.
In TV Land there's always music in the air
because there's always a soundtrack. The Little
Man from Another Place gets up and dances
to the soundtrack. Then Cooper wakes up and
snaps along... to the very same soundtrack.
As for the birds singing their pretty song,
television runs on electricity, and any Naruto
fan can tell you what a thousand birds chirping
together sounds like:
and moreover, the speed of the jab makes a
"chichichichichi" sound... A unique-sounding
attack similar to the rumbling of a thousand
birds.
I can see the smoke. I can smell the fire...
Looks like a campfire. What is this?
It's not a campfire, it's a fire symbol. A
type of fire, like modern day electricity.
... Good?
It depends. It depends upon the intention,
the intention behind the fire.
Destruction, darkness, that's bad. Creating
light, banishing darkness, that's good. Fire
lights up the darkness at the same time it's
destroying its fuel. It's a power source that
has the capacity to destroy and to create
light depending on the intention of the user,
so fire has built into it that perfect balance
of light and darkness that David Lynch seeks.
The electricity that powers television is
a fire that can communicate good or bad messages
depending on the intentions of the creators.
As Hawk says, fire is just like electricity
and electricity is just like fire. They're
essentially the same thing, so we'll consider
them the same thing. Electricity comes from
the power plant in the form of AC, or "alternating
current", which alternates between an equally
positive and negative voltage in a wave. So,
pure AC current also has built into it Lynch's
perfect balance of positivity and negativity.
We can be sure that Lynch is aware of this
fact by listening to him describe a movie
he's always wanted to make called Ronnie Rocket:
He said, "You got anything you want to do?"
And I said, "Yeah, make this film called Ronnie
Rocket." He said, "What's it about?" I said,
"It's about a three-foot tall man with, you
know, a red pompadour - fake red pompadour
- who runs on alternating current electricity."
Not just electricity, alternating current
electricity. He knows - positive and negative.
Balanced.
How did a TV set utilize alternating current
to re-create broadcast television shows in
1990? A CRT television's primary mechanism
is the cathode ray tube (which is where the
television got the nickname "the tube"). The
CRT fires electrons at a phosphor film on
the back of the screen that glows when the
electrons hit it. When turned on, positive
voltage is applied to the CRT to attract and
fire the electron beam that scans across the
screen to light the phosphor. It wants to
do this automatically while powered on, so
if left alone, it will create a pure white
screen. To form a picture, negative voltage
is applied to a mesh that blocks the electron
beam, making areas of the screen dark. Positive
voltage creates light, negative voltage blocks
light to create darkness. The pictures formed
through this process become our television
show dreams.
Do you know where dreams come from? Acetylcholine
neurons fire high-voltage impulses into the
forebrain. These impulses become pictures,
the pictures become dreams. But, no one knows
why we choose these particular pictures.
In the U.S., AC current operates at sixty
cycles per second, which allowed U.S. TV's
to display sixty fields interlaced into thirty
complete frames per second.
I always say the same thing: It's about a
man who's three-and-a-half feet tall with
red hair, and sixty-cycle alternating current
electricity.
Not just alternating current electricity,
sixty-cycle alternating current electricity.
He knows what he's doing.
In broadcast television, the radio signal
containing the show that the TV received from
the station was what dictated the allowance
and blockage of light-creating electrons,
so radio waves - airwaves - were what shaped
the fire into a show. Whoever controlled the
TV show had literal control over the balance
of light and dark on our TV screens via these
radio waves, so whether the show was bright
or dark, how much positive or negative electricity
was being applied, literally depended on the
show creator's intention.
Lynch frequently focuses on images of power
lines and telephone poles, because that's
how the fire travels. Radio waves shape it
into the mystery of Twin Peaks, and this is
how the dream comes to us.
The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding
Twin Peaks.
There is an image that Lynch uses to symbolize
mystery within the show: the wind blowing
through the trees. Laura Dern can confirm
that, for David Lynch, "wind" equates to "mystery".
"All he'd say to me was, 'More bubble gum,
more wind,' and wind came to mean more mysterious,
more eerie."
As the night wind blows, the boughs move to
and fro; the magic rustling that brings on
the dark dream.
The wind brings on the dream, and radio waves
bring on the dream. Radio waves shape the
electricity, and wind shapes the fire. Wind
and radio waves are one and the same, and
we can see this direct comparison in the pilot
episode. As the show begins, we see the body
of Laura Palmer, and for a short while all
we know is that there was a murder. No leads
yet. But, as Bobby is called to the principal's
office to be questioned as our first suspect,
there's this kooky kid doing the wave in the
hall, preceding the arrival of the police
- his wave kind of brings the police in. Then,
there's the famous scene of Donna and James
reacting to the news that something has happened
to Laura, during which we can hear a wind
in the soundtrack. Then, Bobby is questioned,
and our investigative minds go to work on
suspect #1. These are the wind and the radio
waves blowing in the investigation, blowing
in the mystery and kicking up the fire. And,
I'm sure Lynch was pleasantly surprised to
find a school that had red stripes painted
like radio waves all over the walls...
How does every episode of Season 3 begin?
With the sound of wind and electricity. Wind
kicking up the fire. The last place Laura
was seen alive before she became a victim
of the violence, which is the beginning of
the investigation into her murder, is at the
'light' at 'Sparkwood' and 21. "Spark wood"
is where the fire of Twin Peaks was lit. Listen
to the Log Lady compare Laura Palmer's darkness,
the heart of the show, to a forest fire while
placing her hand on Laura's head like she's
checking for a fever:
When this kind of fire starts, it is very
hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence
burn first, and the wind rises. And then,
all goodness is in jeopardy.
The branches burn, and the wind kicks it up
until it's out of control, a forest fire of
consumable violence on TV. If the wind is
radio waves and the fire is electricity, then
the burning branches must be the power lines...
and therefore, the trees must be telephone
poles. As Jimmy Scott sings in the Season
2 finale, "I'll see you in the branches that
blow in the breeze. I'll see you in the trees."
I'll see you on TV.
And why sycamore trees, specifically? It's
probably because their branches looks like
this: white with dark splotches. Kind of reminiscent
of TV static, wouldn't you say?
So, why are the radio waves bringing in negatively
intentioned TV shows that make the fire destructive?
The cause is that "Thing in the Air" Lynch
often talks about. It's an atmosphere of fear
that the TV accelerates.
You feel a "thing in the air", and the thing
in the air is always changing. The thing in
the air.
What's the "thing in the air"?
I don't know what it is. It's, uh... In Germany,
they say it's the "Zeitgeist". They told me
that name for it. And I don't know if that
is. There's this thing that is always changing,
and it's a product, I think, of every one
of us, and it tells you something.
The Zeitgeist, the general feeling of how
things are going in society, is affected by
TV, but also dictates the type of TV shows
that we consume. The Zeitgeist is the "thing
in the air", and the radio waves that make
TV are a literal thing in the air. TV shows
are broadcast on the "airwaves". The winds
that shaped the fire of Twin Peaks were filled
with the modern fear in America that Lynch
sensed, feeding the flames of consumable violence.
The result was Bob.
Most of the times we see a literal fire or
hear someone talking about fire in Twin Peaks,
it's a destructive force that leaves things
blackened. This is the destructive fire of
negative intention, of consumable TV violence,
and Bob is its representative; his appearance
is often preceded by one of these images of
a firestorm. Bob is indiscriminate rage, hungry
for victims to fuel his chaos for the sake
of our entertainment, wearing TV characters
as a mask.
He is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile,
everybody run!
Mike describes Bob as a parasite that attaches
itself to a human host.
Do you understand the parasite? Bob requires
a human host. He feeds on fear... and the
pleasures...
As we can see in Fire Walk with Me, Leland
doesn't necessarily choose to do evil himself,
but is compelled to by Bob, by the audience's
desire for the entertainment Bob brings. Bob's
parasitism is symbolic of the idea that the
creators of TV shows are attaching evil to
"badguy" TV characters without considering
what damage that evil is causing to anyone
involved. Consumable TV violence is shallow,
so the way the victims and their survivors
are treated is shallow, and the way the perpetrators
are treated is also shallow. One-dimensional
victims, one-dimensional killers. In the same
way that it's shedding light on the suffering
of victims, Twin Peaks tries to shed light
on the suffering of perpetrators by showing
us the suffering that's happening inside Leland
Palmer.
Bob hides inside Leland, and Leland hides
behind his quiet family life. Sarah Palmer
does nothing about her husband's crimes, and
the fire of guilt consumes her. She deals
with the stress of hiding from her reality
by smoking like a chimney stack.
If I had a nickel for every cigarette your
mom smoked, I'd be dead.
Could I have a carton of Salems, please?
Salems. Because, what's Salem famous for?
"Where there's smoke, there is fire."
At the start of Season 2, Donna starts trying
to act more like Laura and gets a touch of
Laura's fire in her. Not coincidentally, she
starts smoking.
"Where there's smoke, there is fire."
How does one create fire? You're going to
need to burn some wood, and to get the wood,
you're going to need to chop down a tree.
A "woodsman" could be thought of as a "woods
man", a man of the woods... or perhaps a man
made of wood? In the Convenience Store scene,
the Woodsmen are sitting by some old, wood
cabinet, 'tube' amplified radios, and one
appears to be taking fire from them. Could
the Woodsmen be responsible for the fire in
some way? Similar to the Woodsmen is the Electrician...
Why is he credited separately from the Woodsmen,
and why does he tap a walking stick on the
ground? Well, what does an electrician do?
They create and maintain electrical connections.
How is electricity connected between two locations?
The power lines. And, what holds up the power
lines? Telephone poles - wooden poles planted
in the ground at regular intervals along a
path, connecting electricity from one place
to another, maintained by electricians. And
so, why does the Electrician carry a walking
stick? Because, what is a walking stick? A
wooden pole that gets planted in the ground
at regular intervals as one walks along a
path that connects one place to another. How
do you make a telephone pole? You gotta chop
down a tree. And who chops down trees? The
Woodsmen. And woodsmen saw logs.
In Fire Walk with Me, The Electrician and
the Woodsmen are portrayed as spirits that
create and maintain the electrical connection
necessary for the fire and the dream of Twin
Peaks to make it to our TV's. When Mr. C goes
to the Dutchman's to speak with Jeffries,
he asks for help from an Electrician, who
flips a switch to stoke the fire and plants
a telephone pole to make the electrical connection.
And then, what does Mr. C travel through to
get to Jeffries? Just like all the other times
people were sent through the power lines,
Mr. C needs to go through a whole forest worth
of telephone poles.
I think the idea of the Woodsmen had not been
fully developed at the time of the film, because
in Season 3, the two Woodsmen and the Electrician
were combined into that one character, and
the concept of a "Woodsman" was repurposed
to be a henchman that serves Bob. Now, they
are men from the woods that have been blackened
by the soot from the forest fire of consumable
TV violence.
When these guys are around, something bad
is happening, and it always has something
to do with Bob. For example, we see a Woodsman
in the hospital hanging around the body of
Major Briggs - Bill Hastings' testimony hints
that Cooper's doppelganger, possessed by Bob,
was involved in the Major's death. We see
another Woodsman in a jail cell near Hastings,
who is accused of the murder of his mistress...
who died in the same incident the Major did.
A Woodsman shows up later to kill Hastings
when he brings the FBI too close to the scene
of Bob's crime. And of course there's Episode
8... The Woodsmen are there to confuse and
conceal Bob's actions.
Fire is the devil, hiding like a coward in
the smoke.
When you try to start a fire the old fashioned
way, rubbing a stick between your hands, the
smoke comes first. At the birth of the Convenience
Store, we see smoke billow out and literally
become the Woodsmen, the first beings to emerge
from the Store. The Woodsmen represent smoke,
and "Where there's smoke, there is fire."
The Mother lays Bob's egg after the smoke
emerges. Smoke before the fire.
Is Bob near us now?
For nearly forty years.
Where?
A large house made of wood, surrounded by
trees. The house is filled with many rooms,
each alike, but occupied by different souls
night after night.
At this time in the show, Bob is inside Leland,
who is at the Great Northern Hotel, and this
is how Agent Cooper interprets Mikes description.
But, in the real world, Bob is inside our
TV sets, and this is how we should interpret
it. Consumable violence is wearing our TV
shows as a mask. Both the Great Northern Hotel
and a TV set can be described as a house (or
box) that people (or characters) inhabit,
surrounded by trees (or telephone poles),
with many rooms (or shows, or sets) occupied
by different souls (or characters) night after
night, and Bob has been there for nearly forty
years... This was 1991, and 1956 is pretty
close to forty years before that. It would
appear that David Lynch has chosen 1956 as
the year when the evil took hold of our TV
sets.
But, the Woodsmen and Bob, the smoke and the
fire, were born 11 years earlier out of the
Trinity nuclear test in 1945. Why would the
representatives of TV violence come from this
event? The answer is also the answer to another
question: Why does this "thing in the air"
result in negativity on TV rather than positivity?
Undeniably, World War II was the source of
some of the greatest evil ever perpetrated
by mankind. It's no wonder Lynch would consider
the testing of the first nuke to be the Mother
of all evil, the event that would sow the
seeds of fear in the Zeitgeist for years to
come... But, these were just the eggs, and
they needed time to incubate.
"When I was little, I used to draw and paint
all the time. I mostly drew ammunition and
pistols and airplanes, because the war was
just over and this was, I guess, in the air
still."
After the darkness of the war, the boom of
prosperity in the 50's was a counterbalance
of beautiful, wholesome mundanity.
"So, there was something in the air [in the
50's] that is not there anymore at all. It
was a really hopeful time, and things were
going up instead of going down. Little did
we know, we were laying the ground work then
for a disastrous future. All the problems
were there, but it was somehow glossed over.
And then, the gloss broke, or rotted, and
it all came oozing out."
"The gloss broke and it all came oozing out"
- the hopeful post-war period fell into decline.
The Cold War went full swing with the constant
threat of nuclear obliteration. The early
50's were when the infamous Duck and Cover
films were being shown to school children
- the media was starting to spread the fear.
The eggs had incubated long enough. They hatched,
and the evil started to crawl its way into
people.
"People just got a bug in them that they wanted
to know who killed Laura Palmer. Calling out
for it. And one thing led to another, and
the pressure was just so great that the murder
mystery couldn't be just a background thing
anymore."
"People just got a bug in them" - this is
the idea that it's the Zeitgeist, the collective
unconscious that drove the demand for closure
in Laura's case. The frogmoths we see in Twin
Peaks are the bug of modern fear in America.
In 1956, what allowed the bug to crawl into
the youth? The media. Television. From pure
air, the Woodsmen descended. Out of the Zeitgeist,
the smoke before the fire billowed in looking
for a light...
Gotta light?
... the light of storytelling, the light of
electricity, the light of TV, where the smoke
could conceal Bob's fire of mundane violence.
The Woodsmen found radio stations and began
to broadcast their evil direct to the consumer
of evil over the airwaves.
This is the water, and this is the well. Drink
full and descend.
"This is the wellspring of fear. Drink full
and descend into the dark dream of mundane
television violence." The people watching
TV fell asleep to dream their television dreams,
and this prepared them for the bug to crawl
in. Once inside, it would grow and develop
into an insatiable monster that hungered for
ever more of the violence and death and sadness
that TV would be happy to satiate.
So, why did all of this happen in 1956, specifically?
And, why August 5th, 1956, specifically? First
of all, 1956 was the year Dorothy Gale's "dark
dream" in The Wizard of Oz was first broadcast
on television to a viewing audience of forty
five million, an indicator that the audience
for TV dreams had grown large enough to count.
It was the year Reader's Digest published
an article entitled "Let's Get Rid of Tele-Violence",
quoting Estes Kefauver, a politician who tried
to link violent television to juvenile delinquency.
Yes, August 5th was the day The Platters'
My Prayer hit #1 on the charts (and what is
TV if not a dream you linger in at the end
of the day?).
My prayer...
But, August 5th was also the day after the
very last film serial was released, in the
year the first half-hour soap operas started
airing on television, so this marked the very
day people stopped going to theaters for their
soap opera dreams and started watching them
at home on TV.
Most importantly, David Lynch considers 1956
to be the year of the birth of rock 'n' roll.
In '56, yeah.
Why '56?
I don't know. The birth of rock 'n' roll was
very powerful.
"And William Burns came running toward me
from about three houses down the street, and
he said, "You missed it!" and I said, "What?"
and he said, "Elvis on Ed Sullivan!" But I
felt this was, you know, the beginning of
rock ‘n' roll for me - around the time Elvis
really appeared."
"It was happening before that, of course."
"It had been happening, but now it was locked
in."
It's the year Elvis first appeared on TV,
and also the year of his film debut in Love
Me Tender.
Love me tender...
Sailor!
1956 was the year rock 'n' roll entered film
and TV storytelling in a big way. Elvis' 'vulgarity'
was viewed as a bad influence by contemporary
critics. Rock 'n' roll was moving the youth
away from wholesomeness and corrupting them.
For David Lynch, rock 'n' roll was what started
the top spinning.
Let's rock! Everybody-
Let's rock!
This guy can really light my F-I-R-E.
"Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing.
It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity.
And smoke. And flickering lights."
As we've seen, light flashes on characters'
faces when they enter the Red Room as an allusion
to the light that might flash on our own faces
when we watch television. Lynch often makes
use of flashing lights in episodes of the
show he directed and in the film. The guy
loves to shine lights directly into the camera.
These flashes often accompany moments where
something of extreme importance is happening.
For example, the iconic scene at the beginning
of the story, in which Agent Cooper digs under
Laura Palmer's fingernail while a broken fluorescent
light flickers. What has been interpreted
as merely a comedic and quirky way to present
the scene is actually the symbol of important
information being transmitted to the audience
through the light of their TV sets. The fluorescent
light brightens and darkens our screens and
causes a flashing light on our own faces as
we receive this important clue in the investigation,
a clue that will lead to even more clues.
Later, the Log Lady makes this symbol clear
as she flickers the lights in the room at
the town hall meeting. Flickering lights is
the universally understood indicator that
everyone should settle down and pay attention
while Agent Cooper tells us about the investigation.
Light illuminates the darkness. Investigation
is the light illuminating Laura Palmer's darkness.
Flashes of light are used as a kind of "plot
magic", driving the investigation forward
and illuminating important clues that are
leading down the path of good, the path that
leads to Agent Cooper solving the case and
learning the show's message in the process.
In the pursuit of Laura's killer, I have employed
Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan
method, instinct, and luck. But now, I find
myself in need of something new, which for
lack of a better word we shall call "magic".
Lynch used this symbol liberally in the pilot
episode in particular. The flashing reflection
of light on the camcorder that leads to the
questioning of Laura's friends, the flashlight
in the train car that first shows us Laura's
broken heart necklace, the copious amounts
of flashing lights in all of the show's dream
sequences, which always contain information
pertinent to the case... If fire represents
the evil blackening of television, then the
resulting light from that fire must lead to
the message of good that viewers were supposed
to receive as more of the mystery was solved,
as more of the darkness was exposed by the
light of investigation.
We know the origin of the evil blackness of
the fire, but what is the origin of the light?
In real life, the "fire" comes from the power
plant. Is there such a power plant for Twin
Peaks' fire?
In Season 3, we find out that the Giant is
known as the "Fireman", which can have more
than one meaning. A fireman could be someone
who controls or fights fire, and this is certainly
the case when the Fireman creates Laura Palmer
in order to fight and control Bob's destructive
fire. A "fire man" could also be someone who
makes fire... Inside the Fireman's castle
we can see and hear what looks and sounds
like a power plant generating electricity,
generating fire. Is the Giant the one who
supplies the electrical fire that Twin Peaks
runs on?
To explain why this should be the case, we
need to talk about where the Giant resides.
Does he live in the White Lodge? I say no.
The Black Lodge is a doppelganger, an evil
twin of the White Lodge. Both the White and
Black Lodges are where Cooper ends up in the
Season 2 finale, and it's difficult to tell
them apart, as it should be. Here's a handy
visual guide to help you navigate. The place
where the Fireman lives looks nothing like
the Red Room. It's somewhere entirely different.
His castle is sat high on a rock jutting out
of an endless purple sea, the same endless
sea Agent Cooper ends up on the shores of
when he's ejected into non-existence by The
Arm's doppelganger.
Non-existent!
According to the show, this purple sea is
non-existence. But, what does that mean exactly?
Let's meditate on it for a bit.
Transcendental Meditation, as taught by Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, is a mental technique. It allows
any human being to dive within, experience
subtler levels of mind and intellect, and
to transcend and experience an ocean of pure
consciousness within, at the source of thought.
David Lynch is an avid proponent of the Transcendental
Meditation movement, and has even founded
an organization dedicated to the teaching
and promoting of TM. I invite you to do your
own research on the subject, as I am not making
any judgements in this video and I'm not gonna
get involved in any debates about it. I'm
only mentioning Lynch's belief in the practice
so that we can understand what he put on the
screen in Twin Peaks.
This ocean represents the ocean within every
human being. And this ocean is an ocean of
consciousness. It is unbounded and infinite.
These clips are from some of the many, many
presentations Lynch has given about Transcendental
Meditation, accompanied by doctor of physics
John Hagelin, who did some groundbreaking
work in the field of string theory in the
80's.
Hello, I'm John Hagelin, quantum physicist
and teacher of the Transcendental Meditation
program.
Hagelin's work helped to develop the most
convincing model yet for a concept in physics
known as the "Unified Field". I'm not an expert
in physics, but my understanding is that the
Unified Field is an attempt to combine the
disciplines of quantum mechanics and general
relativity to link all aspects of physical
reality in a single mathematical model. It
is yet unproven, and considered to be the
holy grail of physics. Dr. Hagelin thinks
that the Unified Field can be defined by string
theory.
As modern physics has probed deeper levels
of nature's functioning, it has revealed that
more fundamental levels of nature are progressively
more unified. The four forces of nature deep
within the atomic nucleus become three, and
two, and ultimately one unified field of all
the laws of nature, shown at the basis of
this chart.
Dr. Hagelin also happens to be the current
leader of the TM movement, and claims that
using meditation to dive into the vast ocean
of pure consciousness, as Lynch describes,
is actually our minds joining with the Unified
Field at the base-level of physical reality,
where everything in the universe becomes "One".
Meditation, properly understood and properly
practiced, is a systematic technique to experience
deeper levels of mind. And these deeper levels
of human intelligence, shown on the right-hand
side of this chart, correspond to the direct
experience of deeper levels of intelligence
in nature. This inward flow of the awareness
quickly culminates in the direct experience
of the Unified Field.
Dr. Hagelin's physicist colleagues may not
be convinced (and may have asked him to stop
comparing the Unified Field to transcendental
"Oneness"), but David Lynch certainly believes
him.
And the scientists well, they discovered molecules.
Deeper they went and they discovered these
atoms. Little electrons and neutrons and protons.
And they went deeper and deeper and deeper,
smaller and smaller particles. And then modern
science, quantum physics, discovered the Unified
Field. The scientists know this exists, but
if they wanted to get there, any one of those
scientists could practice a technique: Transcendental
Meditation. And the deeper levels of mind
and deeper levels of intellect correspond
to deeper levels of matter. At the borderline
of intellect, you transcend, experiencing
Oneness - pure, unbounded, infinite consciousness.
And so, this is exactly what we're seeing
in Episode 8 of The Return. The nuclear bomb
splits an atom, setting off a catastrophic
chain reaction, and then we dive within...
deeper and deeper into the blast, and then
deeper and deeper still, smaller and smaller
particles... until we go past the smallest
particles, and then we transcend... we go
beyond particles to the Unified Field, the
vast ocean of consciousness.
This ocean represents an ocean of consciousness.
Stars, moons and planets remind us of protons,
neutrons and electrons. Is there a bigger
being walking with all the stars within?
Everything that is a thing emerges from this
field of "no-thing". Unmanifest it is. Unmanifest
it is.
And here we have our explanation for "non-existence":
Cooper is sent out of the TV show and back
to this field of "no hyphen thing" from whence
he came, from whence all ideas come. Lynch
often compares coming up with creative ideas
to catching fish, and these ideas are swimming
in this ocean of consciousness.
And you don't go in there necessarily to get
ideas, you go in there to expand that container
of bliss. And then, when you come out all
energized, refreshed, blissful, then those
ideas are easier to catch. It's like the net
goes deeper and deeper and deeper, and you
can catch those fish.
Twin Peaks is fueled by these ideas, so the
Fireman's electrical generators, which power
the television dream, must be drawing ideas
up out of this ocean as fuel for the electrical
fire. David Lynch is just channeling the ideas
into the airwaves that fuel and shape the
fire in our TV sets.
Inside one of the Fireman's idea-powered generators
is Phillip Jeffries, who describes the interior
as, "Slippery."
It's slippery in here.
What might this mean? Is Lynch saying that
ideas are slippery like fish...? Could be...
or they could be slippery like something else...
Uncle Leland, what is that smell? It smells
like something's burning!
Dad, is the engine on fire? It smells like
something's burning.
This was a smell like... like oil... scorched
engine oil...
Jacoby!
Scorched engine oil!
Oil can be fuel for fire, and since Bob is
described numerous times as smelling like
scorched engine oil, his fire must be fueled
by this engine oil. But, oil is also a slippery
lubricant - there must be oil inside the Fireman's
machines, fueling the fire that they generate.
Can we call it fish oil...? I don't see why
not.
It's slippery in here.
But, fire makes light as well as causing destruction,
and since the oil that powers Bob's destructive
fire takes a literal, physical form in the
show, does this mean the oil that fuels the
light of investigation also takes a literal
form?
What did your husband say exactly about this
oil?
"This oil is an opening to a gateway."
Intriguing, isn't it?
The gateway to the Red Room is Glastonbury
Grove, a ring of twelve sycamores surrounding
a white-rimmed pool of the engine oil Bob's
fire runs on. In the film, we can see the
Red Room reflected in this pool before the
gateway is opened... But wait just a minute,
we've seen a similar image before! One of
the more notable things about the finale episode
of Season 2 is that it does not end with the
credits rolling in front of Laura Palmer's
homecoming photo, like all the other episodes
do. Rather, it ends with the credits rolling
in front of a shot of a cup of black coffee,
in which is reflected the image of Laura Palmer
smiling out at us from inside the Red Room...
A white rimmed pool of dark liquid reflecting
an image of the Red Room, just like the one
at Glastonbury Grove... This is showing us
that engine oil and black coffee must represent
the same thing...
You know, David Lynch has expressed his dismay
that people think Phillip Jeffries ended up
inside of a teakettle. I think what Lynch
is regretting here is that if we think it's
a teakettle, we're locked into that dead end
idea and we stop thinking about it any further,
from seeing it for what it really is. It's
not a teakettle... it's a coffee machine.
Having a fish in the old percolator is like
having an idea on the brain, and ideas fuel
the show the same way fire does. Someone once
made the joke that Phillip Jeffries was the
fish in the percolator... They have no idea
how close they were to the correct answer.
There was a fish in the percolator.
So, the form the fuel for the fire takes coming
out of the machines changes depending on the
intention. Bob's bad fire of destruction runs
on engine oil. Investigation is the light
shining into Bob's darkness to reveal it,
and what does that fire run on? Coffee. Agent
Cooper, lead investigator of the mystery,
literally runs on coffee, as well as any other
investigator in the show. He's obsessed with
coffee because he can't do his job without
it.
Who killed Laura Palmer?
Harry, let me tell you about the dream I had
last night.
Not just coffee, coffee and doughnuts. Bitter
and sweet, because bitter and sweet is balanced.
Balance is good, and good is balance.
A policeman's dream...
Yep.
What is an FBI agent? Someone who shines a
light on evil and is authorized to use deadly
force, destruction in the name of good. Balanced.
Ah! The policeman's dream.
What was the result of studio pressure to
solve Laura Palmer's murder? It allowed the
darkness to win. The cable company got in
the way of the investigation and ended it.
No more light. No more fuel for the light.
The flow of coffee ceased. But, Lynch wasn't
finished with Laura, so he brought the investigation
back. How did Fire Walk with Me begin? With
a stale pot of coffee.
Why don't you have some coffee? Go ahead.
It was fresh about two days ago.
Laura's investigation was stale and needed
freshening up with the Teresa Banks investigation.
You can start that fresh pot of coffee right
now.
The coffee was back on, and since this was
a film, there was nothing Sheriff CABLE and
his impotent show of "strength" could do to
interfere with it.
The Fireman's association with coffee is locked
in during the finale of Season 2. The Little
Man offers Cooper some coffee, the funny old
waiter from the Great Northern brings it,
then reveals himself as the Giant. The Fireman
supplies the coffee, freshly percolated in
his castle.
The Fireman's castle resembles a movie theater
and is always shown in black and white. As
we've seen from the rest of the show, black
and white sequences signify past events. Why
does the Fireman, who's in charge of powering
our visual entertainment dreams, live in an
old timey movie theater in the past? Well,
where did people get their visual entertainment
before TV became popular? They got their dreams
at the movie theater, on the big screen in
black and white. Lynch has made no secret
that he considers film to be superior to TV,
and now we know it's because film is capable
of balancing light and darkness better than
television can. This is exactly why the Fireman's
castle, a power station for visual storytelling,
is located on the infinite sea of consciousness.
This field within is a field of balance. It's
just a huge field of balance.
We may have moved from the big screen to the
TV screen, but the dreams we dream through
both have the same origin. TV is descended
from film, so its fire is still going to be
powered by those film storytelling ideas,
especially if it's a TV show created by a
filmmaker.
The entrance to the TV realm is marked by
a pool of the engine oil that powers violence
and fear. What marks the entrance to the realm
of film and balance? A pool of gold liquid.
Why would this be?
The analogy is, if you want to make a white
cloth gold, you dip it in the golden dye and
hang it up on the line in the sun to dry.
And the dipping it into the golden dye is
transcending, and hanging it on the line in
the sunlight is activity. And at the very
beginning, the sunlight burns out almost every
little bit of gold. Maybe a few little specks
stay. So, you dip it again and hang it up.
You transcend and go into activity, transcend
and go into activity, and little bit by little
bit, that white cloth gets more and more gold.
And this is why we see a blob of pure gold
floating at the center of the nuclear blast
right before transcending. Gold is the entrance
to transcendence just as fear is the entrance
to television.
As the Fireman's purpose is revealed by his
coffee delivery, he makes a "whooping" noise
and exclaims, "Hallelujah!"
Woowoowoo! Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
What the heck is that supposed to mean? Well,
what does this noise sound like, other than
a stereotyped Native American war cry? Let's
think of all the places we've heard it before:
We've heard it from the Little Man when he
introduces himself as Mike's Arm.
I am The Arm, and I sound like this: Woowoowoo!
By the way, the Little Man is the manifestation
of the arm that Mike chopped off. That's common
knowledge, right?
Mike's arm had a tattoo that allowed him to
control his familiar, Bob.
He was my familiar.
I, too, have been touched by the devilish
one. A tattoo on the left shoulder. But when
I saw the face of God, I took the entire arm
off.
We see Bob bowing to Mike's former Arm at
the end of the film, so we can see that The
Arm is still Bob's master. Bob's master sounds
like this:
Woowoowoo!
We hear a similar sound when Mike goes to
warn Laura about Bob's presence inside her
father.
Woowoowoo!
We hear that sound come from the TV Leland
smashes when he's murdering Teresa Banks while
possessed by Bob.
Woowoowoo!
And we hear it coming from the #6 telephone
pole that introduces the Convenience Store
scene where Bob sits with The Arm.
Woowoowoo!
We can conclude that in all of these situations,
the sound accompanies Bob. It warns us about
Bob, and Bob is fire... The sound isn't a
war cry, it's a fire alarm. The Little Man
controls Bob's fire, so he makes the fire
alarm sound. The Giant is the Fireman, who
both supplies and fights the fire, so he also
makes the fire alarm sound.
Woowoowoo!
Now, this word, "Hallelujah." What does it
mean? It's a Hebrew word that literally translates
to, "Praise you, God." This is said immediately
after the Giant appears with coffee and makes
the fire alarm sound, which tells us that
the Fireman is the God of Fire- BUT, he's
not the only one. The two say, "Hallelujah,"
to each other.
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
Is the Little man also a God of Fire?
We can only investigate so far as we have
clues to give us a lead. The light of investigation
runs on coffee, just as it runs on clues.
The Fireman brings the coffee that powers
the light from the world of film. He supplies
the film storytelling clues. But, it's established
early on in Twin Peaks that the Little Man
is the one who distributes them.
She's my cousin, but doesn't she look almost
exactly like Laura Palmer?
In the finale, the Little Man makes this perfectly
clear by giving us a display of his power,
showing us that he controls the flow of coffee,
the flow of clues. He starts rubbing his hands
together (like you might do if you want to
get some heat going), and at his command,
the coffee flows freely, it flows slowly,
and it stops altogether. If he wants the investigation
to move forward, he can crank up the flow
of clues, and thus the flow of coffee that
powers the investigators. If he wants the
investigation slowed or stalled, he can stop
the flow. The Little Man is in direct control
of how much light gets to shine through the
mystery.
"Light shining through" - how does a dream
appear on the big screen in a movie theater?
An electrical arc lamp shines light through
the film, projecting the image onto the formerly
dark screen. But, how does a dream appear
on your TV screen at home? As we now know,
the tube wants to make the screen bright white,
and you have to control the amount of light
being projected by blocking the light and
adding darkness to the formerly white screen.
Film good, TV bad. Film light, TV dark. The
Giant supplies the light, he's the God of
Light. The Little Man controls the light with
darkness, he's the God of Darkness. The Giant
lives in a movie theater, the Little Man lives
behind the curtains of TV - the Giant is the
god of the balanced big screen, the Little
Man is the god of the evil small screen. Giant
screen, giant spirit. Small screen, small
spirit. Together, they are the gods of the
electrical fire that powers film and TV.
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
The Woodsmen, the smoke, the thing in the
air floated in looking for a home for Bob,
a way to spread the fire. Before TV took off,
this would have been through film. They were
looking for the God of Light!
Gotta light?
Gotta light?
God of Light?
But the spirit of film, with his home located
on the sea of balance, is far too balanced
to spread evil. So, what do the Woodsmen find
instead? A mic.
The Little Man is Mike's Arm, so he's just
a part of a greater whole. The Arm controls
the violence on TV, Mike is the spirit of
TV that could be, and together they should
be balanced, but the evil has been acting
on its own. Just imagine how much bigger TV
could be if it weren't so focused on evil
and violence all the time...
60's TV series The Fugitive, immensely popular
during its four-season, 120-episode run, is
about police Lt. Philip Gerard's pursuit of
Dr. Richard Kimble, who is wrongfully accused
of killing his wife. While on the run, Dr.
Kimble is pursuing the actual killer, the
infamous One-Armed Man. Originally, the one-armed
Twin Peaks character known as Phillip Michael
Gerard was nothing more than an homage to
The Fugitive, a clue for the viewer to consider
on the path to discovering the show's literal
TV nature. However, when Lynch was forced
to write a conclusion to the pilot episode
of Twin Peaks for the international release,
that's when he came up with the idea for the
Red Room, and the homage became a resident
of this room, and therefore an integral part
of the inner workings of Twin Peaks.
"It's the same thing with The Fugitive: where
is that one-armed man? Yet each week, you
know, they hardly ever dealt with that. And
that's the beautiful thing. You keep wondering,
'When will he find this guy and set everything
straight?' But then you knew that would be
the end."
The Fugitive's One-Armed Man is an iconic
TV murderer in an ongoing TV murder mystery
that successfully ran for a long time, but
did eventually succumb to audience demand
for closure. As such, he's a perfect symbol
for TV itself succumbing to the spread of
consumable violence. Mike used to be the spirit
of TV that spread that consumable violence,
but now he is intent on stopping his former
partner's evil, and so has severed the Arm
that controls Bob.
I saw the face of God and was purified.
Mike saw Laura Palmer, balance, come out of
the face of the God of Light.
I took off the Arm, but remained close to
this vessel for one single purpose.
To find Bob.
To stop him!
Mike's former Arm is the embodiment of Mike's
former evil intent. One-Armed Mike now inhabits
the body of Philip "Michael" Gerard. Mike
is now INSIDE Philip Gerard. What does this
mean? The pursued has become the pursuer.
The Fugitive's One-Armed Man has severed his
evil to become an agent of good, the man sworn
to chase down and stop his fugitive familiar
from causing pain and suffering for entertainment.
Ultimately, Philip Michael Gerard embodies
television turning its back on ongoing mystery,
but then having a change of heart and attempting
to stop its own darkness with a new ongoing
investigation.
But, The Arm is still a necessary part of
Mike and of Twin Peaks, because the show's
method of stopping the evil is not to eliminate
it or contain it - Laura Palmer still has
to die. We still need a Bob to make that happen,
and the show must direct and control Bob's
evil to perform in such a way that we can
receive the core message of balance, so Mike
and his Arm, good and evil, are working together
as one complete, balanced spirit of TV storytelling
(at least where Twin Peaks is concerned).
This is why we can see both Mike and his Arm
laughing as Laura is killed; their plan to
cause and then expose Bob's evil in the story
of Twin Peaks begins here.
One day, the sadness will end.
The key to goodness is balance between the
darkness and the light, and Laura Palmer embodies
the concept of balance that David Lynch seeks.
She has bad aspects and good aspects in equal
measure. She's involved with drugs... and
helps Josie with her English. She sleeps around
and prostitutes herself... and tutors the
disabled. She covers for her boyfriend murdering
a guy... and delivers food to the elderly.
The people who are associated with her good
side generally can't believe she had a bad
side, and vice versa. The balance in Twin
Peaks came from an equal amount of stories
about people connected to both sides of Laura.
It's no wonder Laura Palmer was born out of
the Unified Field - she is good and bad together
as one, she is "The One", she is "Oneness".
The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer.
Laura is The One.
But, I've heard a thing, "Knowledge and experience
of combined opposites," and this is the story
of the Unified Field, where opposites are
together. They say, "Infinite silence, infinite
dynamism together in this unity beneath matter
and mind."
Any thing that is a thing has emerged from
this field of unity. It's "Oneness".
Laura is The One.
If Laura's balance is Twin Peaks, then Bob
trying to get inside her and turn her fully
over to the side of evil is the wind of the
Zeitgeist trying to corrupt the TV show like
it has so many times before. Leland turns
on the ceiling fan outside of Laura's room
every time he goes to abuse her. As Laura
stands under the fan, we can see its wind,
the Zeitgeist, entering her and hypnotizing
her to be more receptive to Bob's evil.
On some deep level, Laura knows that she was
born to eventually succumb to the evil, either
becoming possessed of it or victim to it.
In the end, Laura's struggle between darkness
and light is a metaphor for the struggle of
Twin Peaks to exist in a world with mundane
violence. We enjoy that violence, and Lynch's
hope was that Laura's tragic story would allow
us to see the evil for what it was and to
see what it was doing to us, thus breaking
the feedback loop of fear in the Zeitgeist
entering the TV to cause more fear in the
Zeitgeist.
Bob feeds on fear... and the pleasures. They
are his children.
Bob's primary goal is to cause as much pain
as is possible for his audience to enjoy.
He inflicts pain, then feeds on the pain he
inflicts, which strengthens him and drives
him to inflict more. This is a literal manifestation
of the idea that an inflictor of pain is damaging
their own soul, which might lead them to inflict
more pain. Similarly, their victims become
damaged, which pushes the victims towards
accepting evil into themselves and inflicting
it on further victims.
Pain for the victim, pain for the inflictor
of pain. A circle of pain. A circle of suffering.
This circle of pain extends to the audience
that watches television. Bob enjoys his work,
and we wouldn't watch Bob's work if we weren't
also enjoying it. We have an appetite for
pain and suffering, Mike would use Bob to
satisfy it, creating a supply and demand of
consumable violence on TV. The more pain he
caused, the more we wanted to see, and the
more Bob entered us to darken our own souls.
David Lynch sees us as suffering for it.
"That's a real sickness to me. That's a real
sick thing."
Only two types of people can see Bob's true
face.
This is his true face, but few can see it.
The gifted...
The "gifted", the characters in the show that
were given this ability by the script and
the director, characters who are in touch
with their "intuition"...
... and the damned.
... and the "damned". Mike looks directly
at the audience when he says this. He's talking
directly to us. We are the damned. We are
the ones suffering from the endless growth
of fear and negativity fed to us and demanded
by us through the TV. We are the walking dead!
Bob and I, when we were killing together,
there was this perfect relationship: appetite,
satisfaction. A golden circle.
A golden circle... A ring!
Mike calls the killing a golden circle of
appetite and satisfaction, Cooper relates
this to his ring, and so the golden circle
takes physical a form: the Owl Ring, a literal
golden circle that ends up on the ring fingers
of Bob's victims. The symbol stamped into
it is the same symbol we see in Owl Cave in
the second season, which resembles an owl
in flight from a head-on perspective.
In Season 3, Mr. C tells Ray Monroe to put
the Owl Ring on his left hand ring finger.
This is the same finger on which we see Teresa
Banks and Laura Palmer wearing it. Gordon
Cole tells Tammy Preston that the left hand
ring finger is, "the spiritual mound, the
spiritual finger."
This is the spiritual mound, the spiritual
finger. You think about that, Tammy.
A Google search for "spiritual mound" will
reveal a Wikipedia entry about Spirit Mound
Historic Prairie in South Dakota (a good portion
of Season 3 happens to take place in South
Dakota). "[Spirit Mound Historic Prairie features]
a prominent hill on the Great Plains. The
Plains Indians of the region considered Spirit
Mound the home of dangerous spirits or little
people." We see the ring appear on a hill
or mound of dirt, reminiscent of this mythical
home of evil little people, we see Mike wearing
the ring on his little finger, and we see
Mike's little person left Arm in possession
of the ring. This tells us that the ring currently
belongs primarily to The Arm, and it makes
perfect sense that the golden circle of ever-growing
evil would belong to the evil extension of
TV storytelling.
In both the film and Season 3 we see that
if a character dies while wearing the ring
on their "spirit finger", their spirit is
transported to the Red Room, where Mike and
his Arm reside. Why? Because the Owl Ring
is Mike's wedding ring.
With this ring, I thee wed.
When you get married, accepting a wedding
ring onto your wedding ring finger symbolizes
that you're giving yourself body and soul
to your spouse. When people in Twin Peaks
accept the Owl Ring onto their "spirit fingers",
they are marrying themselves to Mike's evil.
Their left arms even go limp to signify their
commitment to the one-armed embodiment of
storytelling.
Just before her time, Teresa's arm went completely
dead.
Upon death, their souls are taken to the Red
Room because they now belong to Mike. This
is all a literal interpretation of the idea
that if we accept television's evil, golden
circle of appetite and satisfaction, we become
victims of Bob and give our souls over to
the TV. Mike TV owns his audience, and we
are married to the violence.
This is how the ring used to work for these
spirits of television before Twin Peaks. I
posit that before the show, Mike's golden
circle was ONLY a golden, wedding band-style
ring with no ornamentation, and that the green
stone was affixed to the ring AFTER Mike's
change of heart. To explain why I think this,
we need to talk about the meaning of the Owl
symbol that's engraved into the ring.
The owls are not what they seem.
What does the owl symbolize? If we look to
the current prevailing theories, what the
owls seem to be are "familiars" that carry
spirits from the Lodge to the real world and
back. Somewhat of a stab in the dark, but
it's got a glimmer of truth to it. If we work
backwards from what Phillip Jeffries shows
us in Season 3, we can get the whole story.
Cooper wants to travel back to a point in
time. Jeffries shows him that point in time
on an infinite loop. The symbol for the infinite
loop of time comes from the Owl symbol, so
the Owl symbol and the infinite time loop
must represent the same thing. But, what could
it mean that the Owl symbol represents an
infinite loop of time? We could say that the
plot of the original show begins with Cooper
receiving clues from a dream of his future
self, and it ends with Cooper entering that
dream, where he waits twenty five years in
the "waiting room" to be the future self he
was dreaming about at the beginning. So we
could say that, in this way, the plot begins
where it ends and ends where it begins. All
of the time in the original plot is contained
in that infinite loop...
What can we conclude? The Owls represent the
entirety of the plot of the first two seasons,
from beginning to end and back to the beginning.
The wings on the Owl symbol even resemble
two mountain peaks; Twin Peaks, the story.
Watch and listen to the dream of time...
The Owl Ring was first introduced in the film,
which was created in addition to that story,
and this is why the Owl symbol on the ring
has an extra line coming off the top of the
owl's head. This is extra time that has been
added to the original plot.
Why was the Owl chosen as a representative
of the story? Firstly, owls have enormous
eyes that can see in the darkness like Lynch
wants us to do. Second, Lynch shows us a more
literal comparison in the final episode of
Season 3: transmission towers! Only the very
jaded can look at this and say that it doesn't
resemble a stylized, cartoon owl. What does
a transmission tower do? It props up the power
lines. The "owls" literally carry electricity!
We repeatedly see the images of owls carrying
light throughout the show.
I combined Major Briggs' tattoo with the Log
Lady's.
This looks exactly like the one at Owl Cave.
The larger symbol from Owl Cave, when seen
in its complete form, is very obviously an
owl totem pole, just like we see elsewhere
in the show. We are shown the diamonds from
the totem design during the owl to infinity
symbol transition just to make sure we know
that this is an owl totem pole. This totem
pole is topped by a fire symbol. The owl is
carrying the fire; telephone poles and transmission
towers are carrying the fire. The owls carry
the electrical fire, the plot carries the
show, the loop of time that is the plot is
the same as the owl, the owl represents the
plot which carries the electrical fire.
So, why is the Owl symbol stamped into the
green stone affixed to the Owl Ring? Next,
we'll need to ask, "What is the green stone?"
It's not jade!
This is a formica table. Green is its color.
Why would Mike's Arm call attention to this
oddly specific detail, that he's sitting at
a green, formica table? If we look closer
at the table, we can see a circular hole about
the size of the stone on the Owl Ring... The
green stone on the Owl Ring seems to have
been pulled from this green formica tabletop.
But why formica? Because formica was originally
invented as an electrical insulator, which
is a concept that works on several levels.
The design in a formica table looks a heck
of a lot like TV static, mirroring the fact
that if we literally block the signal we get
nothing but static on the screen. We're "insulating"
ourselves from the show. The ring itself represents
the "golden circle" of appetite and satisfaction,
and gold happens to be one of the best conductors
of electricity. Watching TV, marrying the
evil and wearing the "golden circle" would
allow for Mike and Bob's evil electricity
to enter our souls more easily. But, the story
of Twin Peaks was created as an attempt to
"insulate" TV from Bob's electrical fire of
consumable violence, and here, we see the
symbol of that story, the owl, is now engraved
in a piece of formica that literally breaks
the golden circle that TV maintains with its
viewers, insulating us from Bob's electrical
fire.
So, with Twin Peaks as an insulator on the
ring, Laura is marrying a spirit of TV that's
had a change of heart, insulating her from
Bob's possession, and it is hoped that, through
watching Twin Peaks, we are also insulated
through a marriage to this new, balanced spirit
of TV.
Now we have an explanation for why Leland
is so upset about the dirt under Laura's wedding
ring fingernail.
There's dirt way under this fingernail.
In this moment, Laura is not yet fully possessed
of Bob's evil and still has the potential
to put the ring on and insulate herself from
him. Mounds of dirt symbolize the Little Man,
and the Little Man is part of Mike, so dirt
under the wedding ring fingernail signifies
Mike's goodly influence on her soul.
But not a one of us is going to start eating
until Laura washes her hands. Wash your hands!
Bob abusively demands that she wash her hands
to cause her pain, thus pushing her toward
the side of evil and hopefully cleansing Mike's
influence. He doesn't succeed, Laura chooses
the side of good, marries Mike, insulates
and protects herself from Bob's possession,
and Bob murders her like a good little servant
to his little master. After the murder, Bob
goes back to the Red Room to return Mike's
garmonbozia...
Garmonbozia.
Creamed corn, or "garmonbozia", is a physical
manifestation of pain and sorrow. Evil entities
of the Black Lodge run on garmonbozia like
a fuel, and enjoy both its creation and consumption.
We know it's a fuel because, at the time they're
supposed to return to the Lodge, we can see
Cooper's doppelganger and Dougie Jones vomiting
up spent garmonbozia as its evil energy runs
out. Before Mike cut his Arm off, he would
"marry" Bob's victims with his ring, and Bob
would kill them, delivering their souls to
the lodge where Mike could harvest the garmonbozia
from them. He would can it and store it in
the Convenience Store for future use.
I had it canned over the store!
Mike and Bob, powered by garmonbozia, would
enter the world and commit murder, then return
to the Lodge with fresh garmonbozia, which
could be used to fuel more evil acts, and
so on in a cycle... until the day Mike cut
his Arm off and swore to stop the violence.
The first of Bob's victims after Mike's change
of heart was Teresa Banks.
I wonder where her ring is?
Somehow, Bob was able to steal the garmonbozia
from this kill out from under Mike, despite
Mike using the Owl Ring.
You stole the corn!
How did Bob do it? One would presume that
he's taking it from the Lodge directly, or
getting it from The Arm, who has a healthy
supply of it on his formica table. But no,
Bob is actually generating it himself using
his infamous ‘fingernail letters'. Usually,
when Bob kills someone, Mike claims their
soul by placing his ring on their "soul finger".
Bob gets around this by planting letters from
his own name deep under their wedding ring
fingernail. Mike may have claimed their soul,
but the pain and sorrow buried deep within
their soul belong to Bob, and he's putting
his name on it.
The letters under the fingernails? R-O-B-T?
Bob was spelling his name; a signature on
a demon's self-portrait.
But, Bob doesn't necessarily need the garmonbozia
from his murders; he's capable of entering
the world and causing mayhem on his own parasitically
by living on the pain and sorrow in the soul
of his host. So, why does Bob steal Mike's
garmonbozia? Is it really for the simple pleasure
of eating pain and sorrow, or is there a deeper
reason?
What really is creamed corn? Is it a symbol
for something else?
So much of the symbolism in Twin Peaks is
about different types of fuel. Oil fuels the
fire, and that electricity fuels the show.
Coffee and doughnuts fuel the investigation.
Cherry pie fuels love and companionship.
This world of Twin Peaks seems to be filled
with beautiful women! Join us for pie!
But, what fuels the audience? The obvious
answer would be, "Food,"
and that would be a pretty dumb joke if it
weren't the actual answer to the question.
Food is interesting. For instance, why do
we need to eat?
Most of the time, a film or TV audience is
guaranteed to be eating while we watch a movie
or TV show. Movie theaters have concession
stands filled with snacks, and somewhere between
the 50's and 90's, loving, family dinners
at home started to dissolve into dinner time
in front of the TV. When we watch a movie
in a theater, we eat the classic, quintessential
movie food: popcorn. If we were watching TV
in the early 90's, we might have eaten a TV
dinner... which might have included some creamed
corn. Corn is the common denominator; it's
the food an audience eats when we watch a
film or TV show, and so creamed corn has come
to represent the audience's *attention* and
enjoyment of the pain and sorrow we're watching
on TV while we eat our TV dinners. We give
our TV dinner eating time to the TV; Black
Lodge beings create the pain and sorrow of
a murder mystery, we dedicate our corn-consumption
time to it, they eat our corn-stuffed attention
as fuel to create more pain and sorrow for
us to pay attention to. We have an appetite
for it, and it satisfies.
Appetite, satisfaction.
Are our appetites, our desires, undermining
us?
Is this just crazy talk? Let's look for the
evidence.
Here's Chad. He's a dirty cop, so he's possessed
by evil. He's eating not one but two TV dinners
and a big bowl of creamed corn while he reads
a gun magazine. He's spending his corn-consumption
time on violent entertainment.
Here's Sarah Palmer. She shows us that she's
possessed by evil, and she spends all her
time at home watching violence on TV. Lynch
refers to TV violence as, "Animals eating
each other."
Mmm... Animals... Animals eating each other...
Mm hmm, that's what you're watching.
Yeah, it's my kind of stuff.
Animal life.
And what does Sarah eat while she watches?
The only food she buys at the store to go
with her bloody marys: TV dinners.
Here's Carrie Paige. She's involved in the
murder of some guy, so she's also possessed
by evil. What's she been eating while hiding
out from the police? Nothing but TV dinners.
Traditionally, corn is used as a fertility
symbol, and this is also true in the world
of Twin Peaks, but in a more literal way.
Our creamed corn eating gives birth to the
show - intercourse between the two worlds
gives birth to the dream. The show may be
physically run by electricity, but what keeps
the power running is our attention to it.
This works on a couple of levels. On a personal
level, if we don't give the show our attention,
the show doesn't exist for us; we haven't
shared in the dream. On a broader level, if
enough people don't give the show attention,
then the show gets cancelled and ceases to
exist for everyone. In either case, Black
Lodge entities don't get to consume our attention
unless we have seen their handiwork.
Why does Bob want garmonbozia? Because he
wants an audience for his work! If the only
clue we had after a murder was the impression
left behind by the Owl Ring, then Mike and
his Arm would get our attention, because we
see them in possession of the ring and that
would make them the prime suspects. But by
leaving his signature on the kill, we know
it was Bob who was responsible, and this keeps
our interest on his work, which further powers
him because we want to see his serial killer
mystery play out. And so, Bob gets to consume
our attention. He steals the attention away
from Mike and his Arm.
You stole the corn!
We can keep going with this! TV dinners and
creamed corn, also known as convenience foods,
are produced for us to easily consume and
enjoy, just like the pain and sorrow that
fuel a murder mystery show - TV and TV dinners
wrapped in plastic for our convenience.
She's dead, wrapped in plastic.
It should be no wonder, then, that garmonbozia
is stored in a gas station convenience store,
a place that literally stores fuel and convenience
foods.
the look on her face when it was opened, there
was a stillness...
When Mike yells at Bob for stealing the corn,
he says he had it "canned over the store"
and that there was a stillness on Teresa's
face when it was "opened" (very interesting
that the corn wasn't opened until after she
was killed). The "canning" of garmonbozia
happens when a murder is committed before
the story begins. This is potential energy
that is stored in the Store until the audience
is brought in at the start of the story during
the murder investigation. Teresa's garmonbozia
was canned and stored during her murder, and
during her autopsy scene, where we see the
stillness on her face, Bob's fingernail letter
is revealed and our attention is consumed
by Bob. This is what Mike is talking about.
So, the Convenience Store acts as a kind of
power station for the story, generating and
storing negative plot details, and this is
because we want the negativity. The oil comes
from the Fireman's castle, and our attention
and desire for negativity refines that oil
into gasoline to fuel Bob's fire. The power
station for TV's darkness is a dirty, highway
gas station full of gasoline and creamed corn
- the power station for the light of film
is a giant's castle on a purple sea of dreams
full of coffee and lantern oil... Which do
you think Lynch holds in higher regard?
The first time we see garmonbozia, it's at
the Tremond's house when Donna is delivering
food for Laura's Meals on Wheels route.
I requested no creamed corn.
Mrs. Tremond does not want garmonbozia. Her
grandson, Pierre, is studying magic, and he
moves the corn around the scene with and as
if by magic. It's on the plate, then it's
in Pierre's hands, then it's gone - very interesting
to watch and think about... attention grabbing,
even... How does Pierre's trick work? And
I don't mean, "How might he be able to pull
it off in real life?" I mean literally, how
is this magic trick actually being done when
we're watching it? Through editing! The corn,
our attention, is being moved around the scene
through cinematography and editing. Each cut
is an instant, magical move of our attention
from one place to another.
Sometimes, things can happen just like this.
And who controls the editing and cinematography?
The director! The director literally directs
the audience's attention around in a scene.
So, if the editing is the magic, then the
director must be a magician.
"I feel it takes away too much for the film
when you know too many of the magician's secrets,"
Sabrina Sutherland responds to questions about
how Lynch directed a scene.
Furthermore, this particular little magician
has David Lynch's signature haircut and was
originally played by none other than Austin
Jack Lynch, David Lynch's own son. Pierre
Tremond seems to be another David Lynch self-insert.
He's never seen without his grandmother, who
despises creamed corn. One of Lynch's first
films was The Grandmother, which is about
a little boy who grows his own grandmother
to be a source of love.
A small boy plants a seed and grows a grandmother,
because a grandmother is a source of love.
So, of course baby Lynch's grandmother despises
negativity fuel. Pierre Tremond proves to
us that Lynch is the director is the magician.
And now, we have an identity for the magician
from the famous Twin Peaks poem, and we can
fully decode its meaning:
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
"Through the darkness of future past."
What is "future past"? Well, when you make
a recording, when you shoot video or film,
you intend to watch it in the future. What
you will be watching at that time is a record
of the past. "Future past" is a film or TV
show. The "darkness" we're talking about here
is the dark dream of Twin Peaks... the TV
show.
So, "Through the darkness of Twin Peaks, the
magician" - the director, David Lynch - "Through
Twin Peaks, David Lynch longs to see, one
chants out" - the one CHANCE we have of getting
out of this golden circle of destruction.
And yes, I know Lynch meant it to be, "One
CHANTS out," with a 'T', like someone chanting.
But, we're playing a lot of games with meanings
and homonyms and "sounds alikes" anyway, so
all that matters is that it SOUNDS like "chance".
"Between two worlds" - between the TV world
and the real world.
"Fire walk with me" - this could be a couple
things, but they both have kinda the same
meaning. It could be a reference to the Electrician's
walking stick, planting those telephone poles,
walking with the fire to connect our TV's
with the dream. It could also be meant as
The Arm means it when he says it to Bob and
then walks Bob out into the world. "Come along
with me, Bob, and we will use your darkness
to send a message." The second seems more
likely, because that's what would lead to
the "one chance out".
So, when we see Pierre ordering Bob to commit
murder, he's directing the violence in a certain
direction and then, through editing, directing
the audience's attention in that direction.
He's walking with the electrical fire, using
it to create his show... Actually, no. Notice
how Pierre directs Bob directly, but The Arm
holds his hand up to restrain Bob, and he's
the one who walks Bob out into the world.
Fire, walk with me.
To understand the director's indirect control
of Mike's Arm, we will use the concept of
masks.
Bob certainly wears Leland like a mask, possessing
his body for his dark purposes. But, David
Lynch is kind of using his magic to possess
our TV's for his purpose, so can we say that
Lynch is wearing TV like a mask? The answer
is yes, but again, not directly. First of
all, David Lynch is wearing the character
of Pierre as a mask, isn't he? And then, Pierre
wears a literal mask of his own, resembling
a character in the Convenience Store known
as the "Jumping Man". This character jumps
up and down with frantic, evil glee on a milk
crate while carrying a wooden branch. We can
see Pierre carrying the same branch while
wearing the mask and jumping around in a parking
lot later in the film during a flashback,
which tells us that the Jumping Man is nothing
more than a mask for Pierre Tremond. The branch
looks like a kind of talisman, and the actor
who played the Jumping Man, Carlton Lee Russell,
says that Lynch told him his character was
a "living talisman".
David told me that my character was this "talisman
come to life", and so that's what I went with.
What the heck does that mean? Well, a talisman
is an object with magical powers. We already
know that David Lynch is a magician, and that
the magic he practices is directing attention
around through editing... If Lynch's child-self
is carrying the magic talisman, and the Jumping
Man is the talisman come to life, does this
mean that the Jumping Man is the embodiment
of the magic of editing? That would explain
his frenzied behavior. There's a lot of energy
in a cut from shot to shot. It's instant movement.
You're jumping from one place to another instantly,
from one time to another instantly. In Season
3, he's only shown in times of transition,
in that jump from the Convenience Store to
the Dutchman's. The Jumping Man's nose is
long and very sharp. What does one do with
a sharp object? CUT things with it.
So, if the Jumping Man represents editing,
then the director is wearing the editing as
a mask. The twig coming out of the forehead
of the mask grows into the director's magical,
wooden talisman - this is the director's personality,
his sensibility, his mind, his intention coming
through in the editing. Remember that the
show creator's intention is what controls
the balance of positive and negative electricity
in our TV sets - the Jumping Man's face is
painted white, like active electricity, and
like alternating current, he alternates between
jumping up onto a milk crate to make himself
taller and jumping down and crouching to make
himself shorter. He happens to be wearing
the same suit as our Little Man from Another
Place, and Carlton Lee Russell is between
David Lynch and The Arm's actor, Mike Anderson,
in height - he appears to be in a transitional
state between our director and our little
spirit of TV. All of this tells us that Lynch
wears Pierre as a mask, Pierre wears the editing
as a mask, the editing wears TV as a mask,
and TV wears our TV sets as a mask. Pierre
tells Bob to kill, and through this series
of masks, Bob receives the order from the
spirit of TV storytelling, who then takes
Bob out into the world to collect garmonbozia.
Back to the original question. Now that we
know what garmonbozia is, we can see why Bob
returns it to Mike at the end of the film.
If he enjoys the attention so much, why would
he willingly give it back? It's because he
has no choice but to give it back. He is compelled
to by the director's magic. This is simply
the part of the film where Lynch directs our
attention to the revelation that The Arm is
Mike's arm, and that it is Bob's master. Lynch
shows us that Bob doesn't act alone, which
compels Bob to bow to his master, and with
that bow Lynch takes our attention away from
Bob and gives it to The Arm, who eats it right
up.
A TV show requires attention to exist, but
things in Twin Peaks need to be part of Laura's
mystery (or mysterious in their own right)
to get our attention. If it's part of the
mystery, then it requires the audience's investigation...
and therefore, it's part of the FBI's investigation.
Special Agent? Special Agent, are you there?
Remember what we talked about before:
"The mind is a detective."
"Intuition is the detective in us."
"[Dale Cooper is] really a very intuitive
detective."
FBI agents are a manifestation of our own
detective minds engaging with the mystery
of Twin Peaks. This is why the director of
the show plays the director of the FBI, because
he gives his investigators mysteries to investigate.
Dale Cooper was the one assigned to Twin Peaks,
so he's the agent who most directly represents
the audience that watches Twin Peaks. But,
Cooper's connection with the audience, like
everything else in this show, goes further
than just being a symbol. He is the literal
embodiment of our detective intuition. This
is why he's so in touch with his intuition
and believes that his dreams are a reliable
source of information. We are "dreaming" Twin
Peaks as we watch it, we are getting information
through this "dream" and using our detective
skills to interpret it. Dale Cooper is doing
the same, and as the embodiment of our minds,
he shares our intuition with us and can "feel"
the information we've gathered as viewers,
just the same as our ability to witness his
intuition through watching the show.
How do we know this is true? Prime example:
The scene in the film where Cooper tells Albert
that he knows things about the next victim
in his murder case.
Lately, I've been filled with the knowledge
that the killer will strike again, but because
it is just a feeling, I am powerless to stop
it.
He feels that the killer will strike again
because we already know that the killer will
strike again. He's powerless to stop it because
we've already seen the result in the first
two seasons, and that's also why he feels
that Albert will help him solve the case,
because we already know that, too.
One more thing, Albert. When the next murder
happens, you will help me solve it.
He then rattles off a whole bunch of details
that he can intuit through our prior knowledge
of Laura.
A woman. Blonde. She's in high school. She
is sexually active. She's using drugs. She's
crying out for help.
What's she doing right now?
She's preparing a great abundance of food.
These are all things we visualize when we
think of Laura, and he's tapping into our
imaginings of her as part of his intuition.
But then, why does he know she's preparing
an abundance of food at this moment? Because
Lynch immediately cuts to her doing so. Our
intuition connection is a two-way street - Cooper
feels what she's doing, so now we know what
she's doing.
She's preparing a great abundance of food.
The letter that was extracted from beneath
the fingernail of Teresa Banks gives me the
feeling that the killer will strike again.
But like the song goes, "Who knows where or
when?"
We knows where and when. It's during the events
of the Twin Peaks TV show. We are reminded
of this by Agent Cooper's line. We picture
the show in our heads, and that's why Lynch
immediately cuts to the title shot of the
TV show. "Like the song goes..." Bowww...
Boww bowwwwwww...
Another example: When Agent Cooper goes to
investigate the disappearance of Chet Desmond,
Carl Rod tells him exactly what Chet was doing
and where he was doing it.
That's her trailer over there, and I never
touched a goddamn thing. Agent Chet Desmond
come by a second time and asked to see Deputy
Cliff Howard's trailer over here, which I
showed him.
Cooper has the feeling that he needs to investigate
another lot in the trailer park despite there
being nothing about that lot that should draw
his attention.
That's not the way out to Deputy Cliff's trailer,
I told ya.
I'm not going to Deputy Cliff's trailer.
Well, where the hell are you going?
I'm going over here.
What's over there?
Why would he go to that lot? There's nothing
there, and he wouldn't know that there was
anything there...
It's because we saw Chet Desmond disappear
at that specific lot. When Cooper arrives
at the trailer park, we think that he should
investigate the last place we and only we
saw Desmond alive, and so Cooper's intuition
feels this from us and tells him that's where
he needs to go.
Agent Cooper represents the detective part
of our minds, so it makes sense that any time
we see past the red curtains into the realm
of dreams, Agent Cooper must be there to represent
us in that realm, too. If Cooper's not there,
then we're not there. The first Red Room sequence
is presented as a dream of Agent Cooper's,
so we get to watch. He's there, so we're there.
The end of Season 3 reveals that Agent Cooper
was still in the Red Room in some capacity
during the whole of the third season, so we're
able to see through Season 3 and into that
Red Room dream at any moment. He's there,
so we're there. When Laura has her Red Room
dream in the film, we share her dream by watching
it, so our representative must also have shared
that dream.
Laura and I had the same dream.
In that dream, Cooper warns Laura not to take
the Owl Ring.
Don't take the ring, Laura.
It has long been wondered why he warns her
about it. Does he know what the ring is? Does
he know what it does? The answer is that he's
intuiting that she shouldn't take the ring.
Cooper has seen nothing of the Owl Ring before
this moment... but we have. Through Agent
Desmond's investigation at the beginning of
the film, we saw that Teresa Banks was wearing
the Owl Ring before she was killed, and that
Agent Desmond disappeared when he found the
ring. Now The Arm is showing it directly to
us, and we already know he's probably not
the best person to be associated with. At
this point in the film, it looks to US like
the Owl Ring had something to do with Teresa's
murder. Because we think it's bad news, now
Cooper can intuit through us that it might
be bad news and warn Laura not to take it.
Neither he nor we know at this moment that
it's actually good that she take the ring
later (and ends up dead).
One final example to hammer it home: In order
for us to see into a dream, Cooper has to
be there in the dream... but, what if the
dream is about real reality, like Gordon Cole's
Monica Bellucci dream, where he dreams about
meeting the real life Monica Bellucci at a
real life cafe next to a real life gallery
where Lynch really had an art show in real
life?
Cooper was there, but I couldn't see his face.
Cooper was there because we're watching the
dream on TV, so we are there. Gordon Cole
couldn't see his face because this was a dream
about real reality, where the character "Agent
Cooper" doesn't exist. Even so, the cameras
were rolling - the actors can't see our faces,
but we're still there inside the viewpoint
of the camera witnessing the dream. We're
there in the dream through the power of watching,
so Cooper is there. But, TV characters can't
see the audience watching them.
Cooper was there, but I couldn't see his face.
And now that we have firmly established that
Cooper is a literal manifestation of the audience's
intuition, we can fully understand the very
first scene of Season 3. The Fireman tells
Agent Cooper to listen to "the sounds". He
tells Cooper to remember, "430, Richard and
Linda, two birds with one stone." Agent Cooper
states definitively that he understands.
I understand.
The Fireman tells him he's far away, and Cooper
disappears. The internet is chock'a'block
with theories about the significance of the
numbers 4, 3 and 0, essays about famous Richards
and etymologies of the name Linda, possible
interpretations of birds and stones, and dubious
audio analyses of the mysterious sounds. In
reality, these things don't have any significance
beyond what they are in the show. It doesn't
matter what exactly made the sounds during
production, but someone who has seen the whole
show could tell us that the only other time
we hear them is when Agent Cooper goes back
in time to rescue Laura Palmer. Someone who
has seen the whole season could tell us that
"two birds with one stone" is Agent Cooper's
plan to find Judy.
Cooper told me, "I'm trying to kill two birds
with one stone."
And someone who has seen the last episode
could tell us that 430 is the number of miles
Cooper and Diane travel to cross over to some
new reality...
Exactly 430 miles.
... and that the Richard and Linda the Fireman
is talking about are the new identities of
Cooper and Diane as they cross over.
Richard? Linda...
This Agent Cooper doesn't know the names,
but someone who has seen Season 3 would recognize
the names from this very scene.
Richard? Linda?
Is the Fireman telling Cooper to remember
these things, or is he asking him if he remembers?
The only way we would understand so assuredly
is if we had seen these things before.
Remember...
I understand.
And since Cooper represents us, this must
be a Cooper from some time in the future that
has seen these things. This Cooper is a representative
of an audience that has already watched the
whole season and is re-watching it from the
beginning. The Fireman tells this future Cooper
that he's far away.
You are far away.
This is Episode 1, and we've got an entire
season to get through before we can say we
understand. Therefore, this Episode 18 Cooper
disappears from Episode 1, and if this is
our first viewing, our understanding of what
the Fireman is talking about disappears with
him into the future.
The intuition connection that the audience
has with Cooper explains the meta reason for
his growth as a character throughout the original
series. As many have pointed out, Cooper starts
the Laura Palmer investigation with boyish
enthusiasm, but over the course of the show,
he matures to become more solemn and somber.
This mirrors what Lynch hopes is happening
to his audience.
At the beginning, Cooper is almost perverse
in his enjoyment of what should be a very
grim situation, just like the TV murder mystery
audience Cooper is channeling. He enjoys it
because we do. As the story unfolds and the
darkness is uncovered, we should get closer
to the deeper meaning of the show, the reality
of Laura's tragedy. We should be no less interested
in the mystery, but we should lose our perverse
enjoyment of the suffering, and this hoped
for change is what's reflected in our representative.
He gets serious because we're supposed to.
Bob was the desire for a murder mystery without
the darkness that comes with real murder.
When the audience rejected the investigation
into Laura's mystery and forced its conclusion,
they were refusing to face more of her darkness.
They just wanted the answer, no matter what
the cost, and this was the audience becoming
possessed by Bob. This was reflected in the
latter part of Season 2. Cooper was possessed
by Bob because the audience was.
One more thing before we go on. David Lynch
has a character that represents him, and we
have a character that represents us. Does
this mean that Mark Frost has a character
that represents him? If anyone, I put my money
on Major Briggs.
Major Garland Briggs... Bobby, your father
was well aware of what's going on here today.
Many years ago, information your father gathered
brought him together with director Gordon
Cole. And that's what's brought us to where
we are today.
In the show, Major Briggs works for the government
decoding secret messages from radio waves
in space, which he interprets to the page
and shows to Agent Cooper. Mark Frost receives
idea waves from the Unified Field via Lynch
and translates them to the page to show them
to the audience. If you've read the books,
you'll know how this possible connection might
have translated into a literary metafiction
there.
Now, we've established that the show's existence
relies on attention and investigation. Therefore,
if something or someone is not part of the
mystery, then it doesn't get our attention,
and this is cause for it not to exist in the
show. The prime example of this is Teresa
Banks.
One year ago, almost to the day, in a town
in the southwest corner of this state, the
body of a young girl named Teresa Banks was
found.
Teresa was someone who, prior to the film,
got no attention. The mystery of the TV show
unfolded in Cooper's investigation of Laura's
connections to everyone in the town. In contrast,
Teresa Banks was a loner nobody; no family,
no friends, nothing important or interesting
about her other than the serial killing connection
to Laura Palmer.
No one came to claim the body. No known next
of kin.
The reason Teresa is not in the show is because
she's not connected to the show beyond that
and doesn't require further investigation,
but more importantly, the reason she's a nobody
is because she's not in the show and not being
investigated.
A basic kill. Banks was a drifter and nobody
knew her.
As a result, she is the very essence of consumable
TV violence, consequenceless murder, nothing
more than the kind of plot stepping stone
that needed to exist before Twin Peaks could
come along and fix the problem.
She had no family, no one came forward to
claim her body, it wasn't even news... until
today.
In this world where things don't exist unless
they're a part of the mystery, how does Lynch
put attention on Teresa so that she can appear
on the screen? He makes her a prostitute colleague
of Laura's that Leland was seeing, and has
her find out about this connection and decide
to blackmail Leland over it...
she was blackmailing somebody...
She even asked me what your fathers looked
like.
which results in Leland killing her and planting
Bob's letter. Now she's really interesting
to us because now she's connected to Laura
beyond just being Bob's previous victim. We
need to watch and investigate these new scenes,
so now there's a reason for the film to exist.
But this means that there need to be FBI agents
on Teresa's case representing us. Filling
in for our detective minds are Agents Desmond
and Stanley.
You can start that fresh pot of coffee right
now.
I'm now ordering you to release all pertinent
information concerning Teresa Banks, both
while living and deceased.
In addition to being a teaching tool for the
audience, Agent Desmond is also illustrative
of the fact that our director requires investigators
for his mysteries, whether those investigators
are Agent Cooper or not.
Sam, you stick with Chet! He's got his own
M.O. - modus operandi!
Notice how his part only lasts long enough
to get us through the investigation, at which
point he literally disappears, both in the
film and from the film. His disappearance
serves no less than four purposes.
First purpose: to illustrate that characters
are only part of the show long enough to serve
their purpose, and then they lose our attention
and they're out of the show. Unknown, new
character Desmond's purpose was to investigate
Teresa, find the ring, and hand the case off
to good ol' fan favorite Cooper. The second
Desmond loses our attention to Cooper, his
time in the film has run out, so the film
literally runs out and freezes on the last
frame as we turn our attention to the guy
we actually care about.
Second purpose: Lynch has to put some more
emphasis on this ring. At the time, all we
know is that Teresa was wearing it before
she died. If Agent Desmond disappears when
he takes it, that makes it more mysterious
and more threatening and gives us more cause
to wonder about it so Cooper can feel our
apprehension and warn Laura about it later.
Don't take the ring, Laura.
Third purpose: It's another hint about the
mechanics of the ring. The ring is supposed
to insulate us against the black fire of consumable
TV violence, and meaningless violence is what
the Teresa case is all about. She doesn't
know anyone, so nobody will miss her, so there's
no real baggage to unearth to show us how
sad her death is supposed to be. What's more,
she's not a very good person and is only in
the movie to blackmail a murderer and to add
to the sum total of evil in Twin Peaks.
Hello?
Hey, handsome. It's your little party girl.
Going into this case any further than we need
to would be the antithesis of the message
of Twin Peaks, so when our intuitive mind's
representative comes in contact with the ring,
the insulation from the evil begins, and the
investigation into Teresa's consumable violence
stops instantaneously. Our mind is removed
from that investigation, making room for the
fourth purpose: It's a reason to bring Agent
Cooper into the serial murder investigation.
So, Agent Desmond disappears, then Agent Cooper
goes to the trailer park to investigate his
last-known location... Well, that's how the
movie SHOULD go, but instead, after Desmond
disappears, David Bowie interrupts what would
be a logical progression of scenes to tell
us about a supernatural meeting he witnessed.
Who do you think this is, there?
Agent Desmond to David Bowie losing his mind
over a formica table top back to Cooper looking
for Desmond. It's a total non-sequitur! It's
disturbing and jarring, it feels completely
out of place, and it doesn't make any sense,
right?
The Convenience Store meeting scene by itself,
without Jeffries, contains information essential
to the inner workings of Twin Peaks, but in
terms of editing, it doesn't really fit into
the film anywhere that makes sense sequentially.
It's like a deleted scene that was never deleted.
Nonetheless, Lynch needs us to give it our
attention. So how does he do it? First, we
have to follow the established mechanics of
the show, so in order for our attention to
be in the scene, there has to have been an
FBI investigator there to represent us in
this look into the dream world of the Lodge.
Otherwise, it's invisible to us. So, Phillip
Jeffries was there on our behalf investigating
the meeting, and it's through his story that
we are able to witness the scene.
Listen up, listen carefully. I've been to
one of their meetings. It was above a Convenience
Store.
Now, the issue of getting our attention to
it. One of the ways Lynch could do this would
be to stop the movie, tear our attention away,
and give it to Jeffries so that he can tell
us about the meeting, then bring us back to
the movie to continue. But, he's already got
our attention on the film, so why tear it
away now when Lynch can just tear Jeffries
away from wherever and whenever he is and
bring him to our attention? The scene itself
is being forced into the film at a time and
place where it doesn't belong, and Phillip
Jeffries is the one who needs to tell us about
it, so therefore Phillip Jeffries is being
torn out of his own story and forced into
a time and place where he doesn't belong,
and he's bringing the whole sequence with
him. When I said David Bowie is interrupting
the film, I meant it literally.
At the beginning of the scene, Cooper is doing
his security camera dance back and forth.
On the last pass, while standing in the security
room, he sees himself on the monitor still
standing out in the hallway when Jeffries
is warped in through the elevator from his
hotel in South America two years ago. The
movie has been put on pause. Then, Jeffries
is literally brought into being by the mystery
of having been missing for a number of years.
Cooper, meet the long lost Phillip Jeffries!
You may have heard of him from the academy!
If there was nothing interesting about him,
he wouldn't be in the movie. But since he's
been missing for two years, we think he's
mysterious, so here he is. The attention-grabbing
casting of superstar David Bowie jerks us
out of the narrative and makes us pay attention
to him and forgive that he's stopped the movie
in order to bring a crazy, unrelated scene
with him, which he then describes for us.
It was a dream. We live inside a dream.
Throughout the scene, Jeffries reacts the
way our minds are surely reacting the first
time we see this confusing and disturbing
imagery that shows up out of nowhere. He's
here to tell us about what he witnessed, but
we have no idea what it is that we're looking
at, so as an audience representative he doesn't
even know what he saw. After the scene, his
purpose is fulfilled and it's time to hit
play on the movie again, so Jeffries is forced
back down the power lines into non-existence,
and it's just as traumatic for him as it is
for us because we have no idea what it was
we just witnessed.
He's gone! He's gone! Albert, call the front
desk!
The film resumes and we find out that Jeffries
was never really there...
I've got the front desk now. He was never
here.
The lady at the front desk wouldn't have seen
him because the movie literally paused itself
for the duration of Jeffries' visit. Time
in the film was stopped! But, the scene did
happen. We just watched it, so the record
of it being part of the film still exists.
He was here.
And then, Lynch emphasizes the similarity
of Jeffries' and Desmond's characters as mere
vehicles for the audience's investigative
minds.
But where did he go? And where is Chester
Desmond?
They both went the same place. Just like Desmond,
Jeffries' purpose is fulfilled, he's out of
the film and out of the dream and out of our
imaginations. And then, "Oh yeah, what did
happen to Agent Desmond?" We go right back
to the trailer park like we would have without
the interruption.
So, we can see Jeffries as a plot device,
meant to temporarily remove us from the film
and connect our attention with outside information.
It's no wonder that after he's ejected from
the film and back to the non-existence of
the great creative consciousness that he ends
up inside one of the Giant's electricity machines.
He has become literally what he was symbolically.
Just like his symbolic purpose in the film,
in Season 3 he's a literal part of the storytelling
machinery, a plot device, whose function is
to disconnect our minds, in the form of Agent
Cooper, from the show, take us back in time,
and once again interrupt the film, inserting
us into a time and place where we don't belong.
As we know, that interruption would change
Twin Peaks forever. "The past dictates the
future," and right now, with our complete
understanding of Twin Peaks' past, we have
all the pieces required to understand how
its future would unravel. Let's quickly recap
what we know.
The past dictates the future.
Twin Peaks was originally about Dale Cooper's
investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer.
This mystery was supposed to be ongoing, because
the investigation was the light shining in
the darkness of consumable TV violence fed
by the Zeitgeist of modern fear in America.
Making the darkness consumable with closure
- this was the evil that Twin Peaks was created
to fight. The studio and the general audience
were too short-sighted to get the message
and rejected it. They demanded the solving
of the murder, and when they got it, they
moved on. This killed the show and proved
David Lynch's point - TV audiences simply
did not care about Laura Palmer, they just
wanted to know who did it and what it had
to do with Bob. Ironically, Bob was the representation
of the evil of that very mindset. Bob had
already possessed the audience, and so Agent
Cooper, as the audience's representative,
reflected that fact.
David Lynch tried to fight back, again using
Laura Palmer as a weapon against Bob's consumable
violence. Fire Walk with Me would try to make
the audience care about Laura by going straight
to the source of the pain and sorrow. Did
this heartbreaking story finally release audience
hearts from Bob's clutches? Quite the opposite.
The film was a complete failure, with the
#1 complaint being that the story was about
Laura Palmer and not about Bob's possession
of Cooper. At this point, there was no hope
for the message of Twin Peaks. Nevertheless,
David Lynch brought Twin Peaks back to TV
twenty five years later.
But, for what reason? From David Lynch's point
of view, we didn't get the point the first
time, certainly not the second time, so why
bother trying a third? Well, it's really the
fans who brought it back. An incredible love
of the show had grown stronger with time,
but even more was this desire for an explanation
of what was really going on and what would
have happened next that rivaled the original
desire to know who killed Laura. Desire for
closure killed the show, and as I will be
demonstrating, desire for closure brought
it back to life... And so, that's what Twin
Peaks: The Return is really about, Twin Peaks
fans bringing Twin Peaks back from non-existence
for the purpose of closure; a resolution to
Cooper's story and an explanation of every
last bit of mystery.
David Lynch gave us exactly what we wished
for: a Twin Peaks devoid of its original intentions.
Look in the mirror. What do you see? Is it
a dream or a nightmare?
The first thing we see in The Return is a
dreamy glimpse of the past, a reminder of
how Twin Peaks began and what it was really
about. Then, the Fireman re-establishes our
intuition link with Agent Cooper. Immediately
after that, the first real thing we see in
the show is the wind in the trees... David
Lynch is making a modern TV show, so he needs
to feel the air and find out what's driving
modern TV. So before anything can happen,
the Zeitgeist needs to blow in the mystery,
and this happens as Dr. Jacoby gets his shipment
of shovels. Later, we find out exactly why
the wind should blow in with Dr. Jacoby. In
his Dr. Amp internet show, Jacoby personifies
the wind that stokes the fire of modern fear
fueled by modern media, the constant assault
of public health scares, political polarization,
environmental catastrophism; these are the
"things in the air" that TV is built from
nowadays.
Cancer! Cacterial toxins, environmental toxins!
Our water, our earth, the very soil itself,
our food! Our bodies poisoned! Poisoned!
Why is Dr. Jacoby the voice of the Zeitgeist?
Why him? Well, it makes perfect sense if we
understand who he was in the original series.
Remember, David Lynch says that everything
must serve the central idea, so what about
the central idea dictates that Dr. Jacoby
should be such a wackadoo? Dr. Jacoby is a
wackadoo because he wears 3D glasses. He doesn't
wear 3D glasses because he's a wackadoo, he's
a wackadoo because he wears the 3D glasses,
because when he was being written, that's
the kind of person that he had to be to wear
3D glasses all the time. What's the idea behind
Dr. Jacoby wearing 3D glasses? TV characters
are usually very shallow, so they're easier
to digest in a short time period. 1-dimensional,
2 if we're lucky. But, there was more going
on with the Twin Peaks characters than those
of other shows at the time. To illustrate
this, psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby is able to see
these characters as fully three-dimensional
people. For example, he almost exclusively
has intimate knowledge of Laura Palmer's dual
nature of good and bad, while all the other
characters only really know her as one or
the other.
Laura had secrets...
His therapy session with Bobby Briggs is another
example. As a TV character, Bobby is a no-good,
selfish, drug-dealing, cheating, punk teenager,
and in any other show he'd be nothing more
than that. But Dr. Jacoby, with his 3D glasses,
his ability to see Bobby as more than just
a 1-dimensional ne'er-do-well, is able to
break him down into a blubbering child who's
only playing with fire and isn't able to face
real darkness, like the fire inside Laura
Palmer.
Laura wanted to corrupt people. Is that what
happened to you, Bobby? Is that what Laura
did to you?
She wanted so much. She made me sell drugs
so she could have them.
So, we can see that Dr. Jacoby sometimes dresses
like a pimp because that's the kind of person
who would wear 3D glasses all the time because
he's a psychiatrist who can see three-dimensionally
because that ability serves the base-level
idea that this is a television show made with
film sensibilities, where the characters are
more than 1-dimensional.
In Season 3, Dr. Jacoby is the voice of the
Zeitgeist because he's the character who can
see what's really going on behind the scenes,
man. As Lynch and Frost obviously see it,
the people who claim to see what's really
going on nowadays are the conspiracy theorist-types,
hosting video podcasts about corporations
and the government conspiring and colluding
to crush the souls of the citizenry!
The same vast, global, corporate conspiracy,
different day. You can't see it without a
cosmic flashlight. Guess what? I've got one.
"And if you listen to me, you might be saved
(and by the way, buy my products if you want
to have any hope of escaping your dire situation)!"
This is your shiny, gold shovel. Dig yourself
out of the ****. $29.99!
Remember, David Lynch believes that Transcendental
Meditation is a way to dip the consciousness
into gold, and that the more gold we can retain,
the more peace, love, and unity we can obtain
to counter fear. With Dr. Jacoby in The Return,
Lynch and Frost are saying that the new media
and conspiracy theorists who claim to see
beyond our surface-level reality are capitalizing
on that "fear in the air", putting a price
tag on false hope and false solutions. Garbage
spray painted fake gold.
Two coats, guaranteed. Shovel your way out
of the **** and into the truth.
One of the people buying into this false hope
is Nadine Hurley. Why? Again, it makes perfect
sense if we understand who she was originally.
Nadine is married to big Ed Hurley, who shows
her nothing but loving care, and all she can
see is how miserable she is.
Ed, you make me sick!
She's got that eyepatch - she's only seeing
half the picture. She sees the negative but
not the positive in her marriage. What does
she think will cure her misery and bring her
happiness? Not the love of her husband...
Money. Commercialism.
We're gonna be so rich.
She's gonna sell drape runners that shut out
the light, made with engine oil - false happiness
based in TV-fueled negativity - so, of course
she would buy into that fake gold. The golden
shovel of false happiness takes its rightful
place in the window next to the false happiness
of her engine-greased get-rich-quick invention.
As for big Ed Hurley, well... The owner of
the 'gas station' is 'married' to 'negative
Nadine'... Looking at this symbolically, gasoline
is pain and sorrow, and the provider of gasoline,
the TV or perhaps David Lynch, is married
to negativity. Ed doesn't want to be married
to negativity. The love the gas station owner
is trying to get is Miss Twin Peaks herself,
Norma Jennings.
So, Norma, are they gonna honor you tonight
on your twentieth anniversary of winning Miss
Twin Peaks?
She owns the RR Diner, serving up that good
balance of coffee and cherry pie, bitter and
sweet. Everything that happens in that diner
is about companionship and love. Norma and
her diner are the very essence of Twin Peaks.
The TV, or David Lynch, wants to put out love
and positivity. This is David Lynch's hope
for TV... but the golden circle wedding ring
keeps him tied to the audience, crying out
for more of its childish desires. Notice how
Nadine wakes up from her coma with superhuman
strength thinking she's a kid again at the
start of Season 2, after the audience and
studio started pressuring for the killer's
reveal. Negative Nadine is the audience, a
powerful, crying baby forcefully demanding
to be fed and keeping the gas station owner
from true love. Anything that happened in
Lynch's absence is totally suspect, so Ed
and Nadine's breakup during Season 2 should
be taken with a grain of salt. But in The
Return, Nadine gives Ed (with his David Lynch
haircut) his freedom again!
Norma, everything has changed. I just spoke
with Nadine. She's given me my freedom.
Why this repetition? Well, she wasn't in her
right mind the first time, but this time,
we as an audience have changed.
Ed, I've come to tell you I've changed.
We love Fire Walk with Me now, we're sorry
we killed it with our bad reviews, and we
know deep down on some level that we're sorry
we demanded the death of the show.
But, I've been a selfish bitch to you all
these years. I kept the two of you apart because
of my jealousy, and I manipulated you, Ed.
David Lynch "felt the air" and sensed that
a Twin Peaks return was now viable.
Have you been watching that show of Jacoby's?
I mean, we had twenty five years to think
about it, for our appreciation to develop,
and the times just support it.
Ed, I told you, I walked all the way here.
I had plenty of time to think, turn back,
but I didn't because this is how I really
feel. And you can thank Dr. Amp.
We wanted more Twin Peaks, and we wanted David
Lynch to do what he wanted to do with it.
But, true love is giving the other what makes
them happy. I want you to be free!
What happens next between Ed and Norma is
glaringly obvious if you know one particular
detail about the production: David Lynch almost
abandoned Season 3 before production started
due to budget constraints. On April 5, 2015
David Lynch tweeted that he had, "left because
not enough money was offered to do the script
the way he felt it needed to be done." But
just a month later, after some more negotiation,
the project was back on. And so, Season 3
shows us Norma Jennings, Miss Twin Peaks,
in a romantic relationship with Walter Lawford,
who is franchising Norma's diner and telling
her she's spending too much money to be profitable.
Norma, you’re a real artist, but love doesn’t
always turn a profit.
Ed (with his David Lynch haircut) drives his
solid gold pickup truck (that's a lot of meditation
the owner of the gas station has been doing)
to the diner to tell Norma he's coming back
to her.
She's given me my freedom.
But here comes Walter, Mr. Franchise, to get
between them. No Miss Twin Peaks for David
Lynch, the studio is in charge. Ed sits at
the counter dejectedly. But! Norma tells Mr.
Franchise that he can buy her out and take
a hike!
You're making a huge mistake.
And then, it's a marriage of love, David Lynch
and Twin Peaks together at last, out of the
clutches of the studio. This is also happening
at the beginning of Episode 15, the episode
where Dougie finally remembers he's Cooper
and decides to come back from being gone for
so long. It's almost like this marriage of
love is what's bringing Agent Cooper back
down the power lines to TV...
... Or at least, that's the dream, isn't it?
Otis Redding provides the soundtrack for this
scene.
I've been loving you too long to stop now
You were tired and your love is growing cold
My love is growing stronger as our affair
grows old
What was it that we gave Lynch his freedom
to direct? Can it still be Twin Peaks after
all this time? Does it even want him back?
While Ed (with his David Lynch haircut) is
sitting at the counter, he orders a cup of
coffee (a little dream fuel), and closes his
eyes, perhaps to dream that things are really
going his way, and it's only then that he
gets to be with his Miss Twin Peaks...
Back to the beginning of the dream. Dr. Amp's
wind ushers in a variety of mysteries: the
glass box experiment, Mr. C's visit to Buella's
cabin, Ruth Davenport's murder, the Log Lady's
message that something was missing in Laura's
investigation... if there's going to be a
Twin Peaks, there needs to be mystery, right?
Everything follows the rules. Once these mysteries
are established, our representative, Dale
Cooper, is visited in the Red Room by Mike
and Laura (we'll come back to them shortly),
and then he sees the white horse...
It has long been accepted that the white horse
is a harbinger of death, or of Bob's fury...
or that it's a representation of drug use.
Or, maybe it's some other crazy thing? The
connection to the "pale horse" that Death
rides into the Apocalypse is the easiest connection
to make, though not quite accurate. Margaret
Lanterman refers to the "Pale Horse" by name
in her introduction to the episode in which
the horse appears to Sarah Palmer while her
husband is killing Maddy...
Woe to the ones who behold the pale horse.
... and Agent Cooper focuses on a white horse
inside Carrie Paige's house next to the dead
guy in her living room. But, these are only
three of the many white horse references in
the whole of Twin Peaks. The first time Mrs.
Palmer sees the horse, it's during one of
her husband's nights with Laura, after she's
been drugged, and this is where the drug theorists
get the idea that the horse stands for death
but also drug use.
The rest of the horse cameos don't really
have much to do with drugs or death. There's
a white horse kiddie ride in front of Judy's
Coffee Shop in the final episode, there's
a reference to the horse in the name of the
Silver Mustang Casino, and horses can be heard
neighing distantly at the end of the infamous
Episode 8, and it's this episode that holds
the one, true, definitive answer to our question.
What does the white horse represent? The Lincoln
Logger doesn't mince words. He means it like
it is, like it sounds.
The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark
within.
The horse is the white of the eyes. When do
you see the whites of somebody's eyes? When
they are LOOKING THE OTHER WAY. When we see
white horses in Twin Peaks, something evil
is happening. The white horse represents looking
the other way in the face of evil, and the
darkness we allow into ourselves when we do
so. What's the key feature of the evil doppelgangers
from the Red Room? White eyes - dark within.
The doppelgangers represent the idea that
every person has this evil within themselves,
and therefore the capacity to do evil, and
therefore the capacity for balance.
Before Season 3, Sarah Palmer's only function
as a character had been to give birth to Laura
Palmer, allow her to be abused and killed,
and then sit by and not do anything about
it. There's no way she was able to live in
that house without knowing the abuse was going
on for so long, even if she was being drugged,
and yet she never says a thing to anyone.
After all, if she'd reported her husband's
activities to the police, there would be no
murder mystery for us to enjoy. So, she looks
the other way, and in Season 3 we see the
end result of this willingness to go along.
We catch a glimpse of the evil that now wears
her character as a mask. Her daughter smiles
out from behind a black wedding ring finger,
indicating that the guilt of looking the other
way while her husband abused and murdered
her daughter has turned her soul black. White
of the eyes, dark within.
Agent Cooper looks the other way when he sees
the body in Carrie Paige's house. He's with
the FBI, and the object of his investigation
seems to have just committed a murder, or
is at least accessory to one. But, there's
no time to deal with that - he's got business
with this apparent criminal. He needs to take
her to Twin Peaks for his own purposes. By
this time in the episode, he's already shown
that there's a certain kind of darkness inside
of him that allows him to do this. White of
the eyes, dark within.
The white horse in front of Judy's Coffee
Shop looks like a reference to the tolerance
its staff has for the behavior of some of
its more disreputable patrons. Cooper's intervention
seems to be the first time they've ever faced
negative consequences for their actions.
The slogan "What happens in Vegas stays in
Vegas" should be all the explanation we need
for the Silver Mustang Casino's reference
to the white horse. White eyes, dark insides.
The horses we hear in the distance after the
Lincoln Logger brings the dark dream of television
to the masses are the result of the bug that
has crawled into TV viewers. Desire for TV
violence creates more and worse TV violence
to fill the TV violence hole in our hearts.
"Woe to the ones who behold the pale horse,"
because looking the other way for the sake
of entertainment may well turn our souls black...
So, knowing this, why would Agent Cooper see
the white horse while sitting in the Red Room
at the beginning of Season 3? Before he sees
it, Laura gives us our final warning:
You can go out now.
Our intuitive minds can leave now. "Last chance
to turn the TV off and walk away before we
get what we wished for."
Nadine, I want you to think real hard about
what you're saying, because you're not making
any sense. Honey, tomorrow you're gonna wish
you'd never said these things.
If we keep watching past this point, we either
don't hear Laura's warning or we don't want
to hear it. After she tells us we can leave,
Cooper asks:
When can I go?
We've already been told that we can go out
any time we want, but as long as we're watching,
Dale Cooper will have to be there in the TV.
And then Laura gives us that mysterious, whispered
message. What's she telling us? It shouldn't
even be a question. We already know what she
said.
Laura kissed me and she whispered the name
of the killer in my ear.
My father killed me.
With that revelation, we got our closure twenty
five years ago. Laura Palmer was consumed
by the fire of consumable TV violence and
Twin Peaks died with her... yet, here we are
at the beginning of a new season! We want
to know what's next. We want our explanations.
So, we look the other way. We look the other
way as Laura's essence is sucked out of the
show. The wind kicks up and the curtains rise
like a show is about to begin, but this isn't
the Twin Peaks we once knew. There's nothing
but blackness behind the curtain. White of
the eyes, dark within... and there's the white
horse. We cut straight back to the beginning
of the scene, which plays out again... but
this time Laura is missing. By showing us
the same thing twice, with and then without
her, Lynch is making absolutely sure that
we know that the darkness we're about to allow
into our hearts is the absence of Laura Palmer.
And what is the dream that we're treated to?
With the all-important Laura Palmer case dead
and buried, what's left for this self-aware
TV show to be self-aware about? Just that:
it's self-aware that it's not itself. "You
can't go home again." The Twin Peaks version
of this phrase is, "Change or die."
I only want to die or change. Bushnell, please
help me. I only want to make things right
again.
Lynch knows we're not going for Laura Palmer
Round 3, we've rejected it twice already,
so the show will have to change what it's
about or it's dead on arrival. Problem is,
this ends up being a "magician's choice",
where the outcome is the same no matter which
option is chosen. As we've already seen in
the stark contrast between Season 1 and the
latter half of Season 2, Laura Palmer's mystery
was so essential to the show that without
it, the whole thing drifts and Twin Peaks
is basically not Twin Peaks anymore, anyway!
I told all your colleagues to fix their hearts
or die.
But, the cat is out of the bag, the genie
is out of the bottle, the beans are spilt,
the bird has sung and the bell has been rung.
We got our closure, and "the past dictates
the future". Twin Peaks changed so it wouldn't
die, and now it inevitably must die.
The Return is lacking in its original purpose
so that it's unrecognizable. What's more,
it's irrelevant to modern audiences. Twin
Peaks is old, sick and dying, and what mystery
is left is being explained out of existence.
These are the persistent themes of Twin Peaks:
The Return.
When you see me again, it won't be me.
Is it the story of the little girl who lived
down the lane?
Is it the story of the little girl who lived
down the lane? Not since 1992 it's not. It
looks like Twin Peaks, it might even occasionally
sound like Twin Peaks... But, without purpose,
it's a hollow shell of what it once was, and
it just doesn't feel right. Just think about
how empty and stilted The Return feels compared
to the original series. It's probably the
first thing you noticed, almost comedic in
how lifeless it is compared to the original
show.
No. It's not about the bunny.
Is it about the bunny...?
No. It's not about the bunny.
The Return is a different show walking around
in Twin Peaks' corpse. Most of The Return
doesn't even take place in Twin Peaks! Most
of the time, we're in Buckhorn, South Dakota
or Las Vegas. As a result, the show itself
doesn't even know what it's about anymore,
and the characters in the show can all sense
that their dream has been replaced with something
it wasn't meant to be.
Your room seems different.
Well, I'm not sure who I am, but I'm not me.
I'm not me... I'm not me...
Something happened to me! I don't feel good!
I don't feel good!
Even the jerky isn't real jerky!
I don't remember seeing those beef jerky there
before...
It's the same as beef jerky except it's made
from turkey.
Twin Peaks did not return, and what did return
is grappling with its own identity. The theme
of lost identity has been distilled in Jerry
Horne's story. In the first episode, swimming
in his mind, as he says,
Swimming in my mind...
(much like ideas) swimming in his mind is
a drug that he's grown in the mountains of
Twin Peaks, a product of Twin Peaks that he
says is
... ideal for creative sojourns of a solitary
nature.
... a "sojourn" being a temporary visit to
a place. Just like us watching The Return,
Jerry visits the woods of Twin Peaks thinking
he's going on a trip to a familiar, beautiful
dream world. But, before he falls asleep,
he watches some of that new media... he watches
Dr. Amp and gets the fear-filled wind in him...
When he awakens, he doesn't know where he
is.
I don't know where I am!
He's lost in woods that he should know, that
he's been in a thousand times before. He doesn't
even feel at home in his own body!
I am not your foot.
I'm not me... I'm not me...
Dr. Amp's wind has turned his visit to the
Twin Peaks woods into an unrecognizable nightmare.
He never does escape, no matter how hard he
tries to tell himself he's in a place he knows
and loves.
You can't fool me! I've been here before!
One of the most important moments in The Return
is Dale Cooper waking up after being stuck
without a personality for fourteen agonizing
episodes. During his vacancy, we see repeated
reminders of the old show and hope that one
of them will be the thing that wakes him up
to his true identity. "Remember! This is Twin
Peaks! Remember Twin Peaks? You're an FBI
agent!"
Agent...
"Remember Audrey and her red heels? Coffee
and cherry pie! Remember!"
Damn good coffee!
But he doesn't, because the context isn't
there. We're fooling ourselves if we think
that all you need for a Twin Peaks revival
are a few Twin Peaks memes.
What does finally snap Cooper out of inaction
is a particular scene from Sunset Boulevard.
Get Gordon Cole. Tell him to forget about
her car. Tell him he can get another old car
someplace.
What's so special about this scene? Washed
up old actress Norma Desmond gets a call from
Gordon Cole at Paramount film studio asking
for a meeting.
You know better than to interrupt me.
Paramount is calling!
Who?
Paramount Studios!
She goes to the studio thinking that this
will be her triumphant return to the silver
screen. For a brief moment, it's like she's
back in the spotlight...
There's Norma Desmond!
Norma Desmond!
Norma Desmond!
Why, I thought she was dead!
But it turns out that Gordon was only calling
to see if he could rent Norma's car.
It's that car of hers, an old Isotta Fraschini.
Her chauffer drove it in on the lot the other
day. It looks just right for the Crosby picture.
Oh, I see...
Sound familiar? David Lynch, who plays Gordon
Cole, brings Miss Twin Peaks (Norma) back
to the studio. For a brief moment, it's like
the show really is back in the spotlight...
But David Lynch wasn't bringing Twin Peaks
back, he just wanted to borrow the 'vehicle'.
Cars standing in for TV shows as "vehicles
of intention" is another recurring theme in
The Return, but to be certain Lynch is being
literal in this way we first need to talk
about luck.
There is no such thing as luck in a TV show.
Occurrences that might be considered lucky
or unlucky in real life are, to a TV character,
fated according to the script. Whether a TV
character has good or bad luck is dependent
on the intention of the show's creators.
It depends. It depends upon the intention,
the intention behind the fire.
Fellas, coincidence and fate figure largely
in our lives.
Why is the first Woodsman played by an actual,
real life Abraham Lincoln impersonator? Simultaneous
with his appearance, the 50's girl finds a
lucky penny and rubs the face of Abraham Lincoln.
How and why are these related? Pennies are
made of copper, which is an electrical conductor
that made up the majority of household wiring
for quite some time. TV power comes through
copper... And we know that the Lincoln Logger
is looking for a way to broadcast his evil
to TV audiences. We've got Lincoln on a penny,
and Lincoln on the antennae. Lincoln is both
a literal and metaphorical conduit for intention.
It depends. It depends upon the intention,
the intention behind the fire.
The boy tells the girl he hopes the penny
brings her good luck.
I hope it does bring you good luck.
He hopes the intention coming through the
copper will be good. As we soon find out,
black Lincoln has nothing but bad intentions
for his audience. Bad luck coming through
the copper wire...
Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.
Consider Dale Cooper and his doppelganger,
two sides of the same coin. Dale Cooper has
nothing but good intentions. His double? Nothing
but bad. When Cooper becomes Dougie Jones
and is unable to act, what keeps him out of
trouble? Sure, there's plenty of trouble.
Yes there's something obviously wrong with
him and nobody seems to notice. But luckily,
the things he's stupidly repeating are just
coincidental enough to give the people around
him the general impression that probably nothing
is wrong!
Dougie Jones.
Is he okay?
Gee, I hope he's okay.
And we'll come back to everyone's non-concern
for Dougie in a bit. But in all those troubles,
how does he even stay alive? It's pure, dumb,
good luck that keeps Cooper safe! We couldn't
ask for a more appropriate setting for a story
about luck than Las Vegas. Thirty mega jackpots
in a row - is this an unbelievably lucky streak?
Obviously not. The higher power of TV is making
this happen. Coop's luck goes way beyond Mike
helping him at the casino. Every event has
a way of accidentally working out in his favor,
and his good fortune rubs off on everyone
involved in his life! Even the dumbest little
thing, like Cooper taking Frank's coffee,
but luckily there's an extra green tea latte
that Frank likes even better! What unbelievable
good luck this man has! But, there's no such
thing as luck in a TV show. All this love
that Dougie spreads around and receives in
return was intended by the creators, just
like at the casino. In contrast, it's pretty
obvious what kind of luck you'll have if you
get involved with Mr. C. Everyone in his life
seems to meet a very "unfortunate" end...
Here's where the concepts of luck and intention
collide with vehicles: The good Cooper is
on his way to meet the Mitchum brothers, who
intend to kill him. By some luck, Cooper just
happens to have a cherry pie, like in a dream
Bradley had the night before...
Cherry pie!
... which saves Cooper's life and turns the
Mitchums over to the side of good.
I love this guy!
Before traveling to the meeting, Bushnell
Mullins gives Cooper a knock on the jaw.
Knock ‘em dead!
Cooper repeats the word "dead" while rubbing
his face ("heads") for good luck...
Dead.
... before getting into the back of a stretched,
WHITE LINCOLN Town Car, driven by five-star
stand up comedian Jay Larson.
Red door.
White Lincoln; good copper. Here, the ‘copper'
is a vehicle that delivers happiness and good
intentions, and so Cooper luckily doesn't
end up dead. After encountering Dougie Love,
the Mitchums have hearts of gold.
They do. They really do.
They give the Joneses a white car as a gift
and ditch their black Mercedes in favor of
riding in that stretched, white Lincoln. White
vehicles of good intention.
Earlier in the show, the bad Cooper rubs the
face of his apparently empty mechanic before
getting into the front of a BLACK LINCOLN
Town Car. Black Lincoln; bad copper. The mechanic's
face rub imparted some pretty bad luck for
him, because he ends up dead.
I killed Jack two hours ago after he wired
the car.
Mr. C uses the copper as a vehicle to deliver
bad intentions.
TV shows are vehicles of intention, and today's
TV is a world of truck drivers.
It's a world of truck drivers.
Badguys in big, black, gas-guzzlers running
kids down, wife-beaters hopped up on drugs
reving suped up muscle cars, rednecks in crappy
family minivans with crappy families causing
random gun violence.
Everybody down! Get down!
The sickness of that oppressive fear in the
air jams up the TV traffic with negativity,
only stopping long enough to sell you some
commercialized, false happiness.
Sheriff Truman, are you interested in seeing
my new car? It's a 20-
Jesse.
What we desperately need is to go home to
the message of love that Twin Peaks was trying
to spread.
We have to get home! She's sick!
But, "You can't go home again." The vehicle
was hijacked by evil when Laura's case was
closed, and now it's unrecognizable.
Someone stole my car!
Our TV's have become truck stops for gasoline-powered
evil. Or, perhaps we could call them Roadhouses?
What is the Roadhouse? It's a bar where bikers
and truckers stop for entertainment, complete
with a red-curtained stage. Much like the
TV-esque hotels and motels that are in-between
places for different souls night after night,
the Roadhouse is an in-between place for vehicles
on the road, just like the TV world of the
Red Room is an in-between place for vehicles
in the power lines. This association is affirmed
by the image of the Roadhouse's red neon sign
reflected in a puddle in the asphalt, exactly
as we see the red curtains of the Lodge reflected
in the oil. Equating the Roadhouse with the
Red Room makes it a symbol of the TV dreamspace.
In the original show, the Bang Bang Bar was
the shadow self of Norma's RR Diner, a dive
bar with rough patrons and ownership that
dealt in drugs and prostitution, but also
a secret meeting place for secretive friends
and lovers who wanted to keep their secret
business secret, a dark mirror of the open
love and friendship at the RR. The Roadhouse
band dressed like tough bikers but played
nothing but love songs. Both the diner and
the Roadhouse were, together and individually,
microcosms of the Twin Peaks experience, light
and dark in balance and alive with mystery.
This was Lynch's idealized vision of television.
And, sitting in the Roadhouse in the pilot
episode is a biker dressed strangely specifically
like Marlon Brando's lead character in the
1953 film The Wild One. Why was this film
being referenced here? The Wild One was infamous
in the 50's for the fear that it would have
a corrupting influence on the youth. It was
about rival biker gangs invading the smallest
of small towns to wreak havoc, which provokes
the locals into violent reaction. The confrontation
exposes the fear and darkness in the outwardly
good people of the town, and the only reason
any of this is happening is because Johnny
Strabler, the no-good, low-down leader of
the Black Rebels, is taken with the sheriff's
daughter and gets caught in the balance between
love and delinquency.
How the whole mess happened, I don't know,
but once the trouble was on its way I was
just going with it. Mostly, I remember the
girl... sad chick like that... But, something
changed in me. She got to me.
The film's message is exactly the core idea
behind Twin Peaks: "Via the love of a small
town girl, expose the darkness so we can recognize
the light."
The love song-listening, book-reading bikers
in Twin Peaks' Roadhouse reflect this message
of balance. This balance is no longer found
at the Roadhouse, and this is why the reference
to the Wild One comes up again in The Return.
Wally Brando is dressed identically to Johnny
Strabler, and Michael Cera is at least attempting
a Marlon Brando impression.
I came to pay my respects to my godfather
and extend my best wishes for his recovery,
which I hope will be swift and painless.
He's a badboy with a heart of gold. Balanced.
My shadow is always with me. Sometimes ahead,
sometimes behind.
But, the product of Lucy and Andy's love is
only here to pay his respects to the dying
sheriff of the dying town and then leave.
Love and friendship have no place here anymore.
My dharma is the road. Your dharma...
Sheriff truman is stuck here in this loveless
husk of a town. The balanced biker's dharma
is some other Roadhouse.
In The Return, the love takes a back seat
to violence and depravity. There's bullets
flying in through the windows - the fear is
invading the meeting place of love. The Roadhouse
is now a nexus for modern television, where
trashy people drop in with their trashy vehicles
to talk trashy gossip and fight each other.
It's good to see you, Renee.
You got a death wish?
I tr- I was just trying-
To what?
I was just trying to be polite. I- I like
her.
Replacing the hopeful love songs of Julee
Cruise are songs that are basically about
the sorry state Twin Peaks is in. The best
example is the first example by the Chromatics:
At night I'm driving in your car
pretending that we'll leave this town
We're taking the Twin Peaks vehicle for a
ride and pretending it can be something else.
We're watching all the street lights fade
and now you're just a stranger's dream
The David Lynch light of the old show faded,
and what we're left with is what the audience
wanted.
I took your picture from the frame
and now you're nothing like you seem
Twin Peaks was removed from TV, and now it's
not what it's supposed to be.
My dream is to go to that place where it all
began on a starry night long ago
But now it's a dream
No stars
We're never getting the magic that pilot episode
delivered to us again.
I was watching on the day she died
We keep licking while the skin turns black
Cut along the length, but you can't get the
feeling back
She's gone
She's gone
[Laura's] gone away
... etc. It's not even cryptic! The characters
of Twin Peaks have returned to the in-between
place, now completely taken over by evil,
and the music the Roadhouse patrons enjoy
reflects the "knowingness" that they have
inside themselves, the intuition that something
is not right.
The pinnacle example of this concept is Miss
Audrey Horne.
This is Existentialism 101.
Twin Peaks, as a 1990's soap opera that was
a product of 1980's television, does not fit
with modern television conventions or modern
audiences.
I'm old-school, Denise! You know that!
There are constant reminders of this within
The Return. Agent Cooper's hotel room key.
Wow. My god, that's an old one. We switched
to cards over twenty years ago.
Lucy's inability to understand cellular phones.
Cell phones... that means they're mobile,
punky.
The ancient-looking 80's phone that Margaret
uses to call Deputy Hawk.
Hawk, can you hear me?
Sheriff Truman's crazy motorized desk unit
he uses to hide his monitor for out-of-place-looking
Skype conversations.
Uh, do you know what Skype is, Doc?
Here's a more obscure one: Jack Rabbit's Palace...
Jack rabbits have rabbit ears. That's what
they used to call TV antennae.
Jack Rabbit's Palace.
It was our make believe world. You know, where
we made up stories.
"Rabbit ears where made up stories are told."
Nobody uses rabbit ears anymore, it's all
digital now, so you can't get a vehicle to
Jack Rabbit's Palace anymore. The road is
gone.
But, there's no road. The road's gone.
Twin Peaks is from a different time. This
is a show that's being dragged out of the
past and into a future it was never supposed
to see and where it doesn't belong. Or in
Audrey's case, where it doesn't want to be.
Audrey stands in for the part of the show
that fears its own age.
Who was Audrey Horne as a character in the
original show? She was willful and self-centered.
She didn't care about Laura, but she was determined
to solve the case for herself. Why did she
care? Because she wanted to be the star of
the show.
I wanted to help you for Laura.
You said you and Laura weren't exactly friends.
We weren't friends, but I understood her better
than the rest.
She was a go-getter, and what she went to
get was attention. She was Agent Cooper's
love interest because she was in love with
attention, and the audience had no problem
giving her plenty of it.
I'm Audrey Horne, and I get what I want.
In The Return however, Audrey is quite the
opposite. Far from being the center of attention,
her story doesn't even start until two-thirds
of the way into the season. She's still just
as willful, but she's confused about her reality,
unsure of herself, afraid to leave her own
house. Audrey has apparently settled for much
less than Billy Zane or Dale Cooper. We find
her in a loveless marriage to a curmudgeon
named Charlie, who may or may not have some
control over her life...
Are you going to stop playing games, or do
I have to end your story, too?
Audrey's goal is to find Billy, a mystery
man with whom she's cheating on her husband.
You have no balls. That's why I'm in love
with Billy.
Why Billy? Perhaps it was because Billy Zane
was the man with whom she was cheating on
the "audience" after the killer's reveal...
or perhaps not. We don't know and we don't
really need to know. Whether or not we actually
see him in the show doesn't matter. All that's
important is that there is a "Billy". When
Audrey goes looking for him at the Roadhouse,
it becomes clear to us that her reality is
not reality. The emcee introduces Audrey's
Dance.
Ladies and gentlemen, Audrey's Dance.
This is the song that played during her famous
diner dance scene in the original show, and
for this brief moment Audrey's dream is coming
true. She recreates her dance scene for her
audience, and Twin Peaks is all about her
again... until the darkness of modern TV interrupts.
Barney! That's my wife, *******!
Frightened of the nightmare her dream has
become, Audrey runs to Charlie to get her
out, at which point she "wakes up".
Where is it that she awakens, and who is Charlie
that he has this power to awaken her? Is she
really in a mental institution, as people
think? Maybe in Mark Frost's books, she is.
Is Charlie actually her therapist? Let's look
at it more symbolically.
She's looking Charlie dead in the face when
she asks him to get her out of the Roadhouse.
After the cut, she's staring herself in the
face. What if we take this to mean that he
is some part of herself, that looking at him
is looking at herself in the mirror? If so,
which part? Well, she's in a bright white
room, and there's nothing in the room except
a mirror, so all focus has to be on her face.
She's not wearing any makeup, her hair is
plainly styled, she has no distinctive clothing;
this is the reality of who she is, wrinkles
and all. She imagines she can still be the
young, sexy girl the audience was in love
with, costumed and made up and on the set
with everyone paying attention like in the
old show, but in reality, that's not her anymore.
She's old and forgotten. If we follow this
track, then we can see that Audrey looking
Charlie in the face is really Audrey looking
her own age in the face. This realization,
combined with that key line, gives us our
answer.
When Charlie tells Audrey, "You're supposed
to go to the Roadhouse to look for Billy..."
You're supposed to go to the Roadhouse and
see if Billy is there.
... it's because that is what her character
was written to do and what she inevitably
must do by the end of her story arc. When
he says, "Are you going to cooperate, or do
I have to end your story, too..."
Are you going to stop playing games, or do
I have to end your story, too?
... he's very clearly alluding to Laura Palmer.
Is that the story of the little girl who lived
down the lane?
Yes, Laura Palmer was the little girl who
lived down the lane, and her story is over.
What ended Laura's story? What made the studio
force Lynch to end the mystery? The build-up
was too great, and people just had to know.
It was the passage of time making people desire
their closure. So, Charlie must be the embodiment
of the past, or the passage of time, or time
that has passed. And his character certainly
fits; he's infuriatingly calm, deliberate,
uncooperative, matter of fact.
I have a deadline. Billy is out there somewhere,
but you're not gonna find him tonight.
There's no arguing with the passage of time.
It's emotionless.
Okay, Audrey, I'll go with you. I'm so sleepy,
but I'll go.
You can't hurry it up or slow it down, and
no matter how you rage at it, it will pass
with or without you.
Put your coat on, Audrey. It's already late
and I'm so sleepy.
His house looks like it's stuck in the past
- the furniture is old-fashioned, the decoration
is old-fashioned, their clothing is old-fashioned,
there's not a single piece of modern technology
to be seen.
In one ******* second, I'm taking my coat
off and staying in for the night. You're the
one that wanted to go to the Roadhouse, not
me.
Charlie doesn't want to go to the Roadhouse,
the nexus of modern television. He just wants
to rest, to let the past be passed.
Before she joined The Return, Audrey lived
in the past, in our memories of her character
on the show and her importance to us there.
At the start of her story in The Return, she's
still there, married to the past and living
in this "past-world". Her story is completely
disconnected from the rest of the show - she
hasn't yet returned with The Return. But,
we're watching her nonetheless... TV stories
require mysteries to draw our attention. The
mystery of Billy, who's missing and stole
someone's truck and was bleeding into someone's
sink and all this crazy stuff, we want to
know what that's all about and what it has
to do with anything, and this allows Audrey's
story to appear to us.
Audrey is cheating on the past, Charlie, who
lives in past-world, with this new person,
who she suspects is at the Roadhouse, which
is present TV-world. She wants to go looking
for him, but she's afraid of what that might
mean for her character. She senses that it
won't be what she wants it to be. She explains
it like this:
I want to stay, and I want to go. I want to
do both. Charlie, help me. It's like Ghostwood
here.
Why is it like Ghostwood? What was Ghostwood?
It was Benjamin Horne's conspiracy to purchase
the land the Packard Sawmill sat on, demolish
the mill, the center of the dream, and replace
it with something new. The Ghostwood project
was as ongoing as Laura's mystery, completely
stuck, never able to move forward, and if
it ever did, it would have meant the death
of an important fixture of Twin Peaks history.
Audrey's situation is like Ghostwood because
she's stuck between the past and the present.
She wants to stay in the past where Twin Peaks
was good and balanced and she had our attention
and the Packard Sawmill was still snoring
away, and she wants to stay in the past-world
that she's living in currently because at
least here things can be about her. But, she
also wants to return with Twin Peaks to the
present because it's in her character's nature
to crave the spotlight, even though she senses
the horror that the old show has been demolished
and replaced with something new.
I feel like I'm somewhere else. Like I'm somewhere
else and like I'm somebody else. Have you
ever felt that?
"Is it future, or is it past?" It's neither.
It's not the old show, that's in the past.
It's not the future continuation of what the
old show was about because Laura's gone and
you can't do that anymore. However, it's inevitable
that Audrey go to the Roadhouse because she's
already there on our modern TV's in this Twin
Peaks replacement.
AUDREY: I feel like I'm somewhere else. Have
you ever had that feeling, Charlie? [...] Like
I'm somewhere else and like I'm somebody else.
Have you ever felt that?
Who is Billy? Audrey's frightening, violent
new fling to replace the past she's married
to. What did he do? Stole a vehicle. Who did
he steal it from? Chuck. Charlie. The past.
The new stole the vehicle of the old. And
Chuck didn't press any charges. The past is
going along with the theft of the vehicle
because Twin Peaks is returning, and "the
past dictates the future".
Audrey is finally able to go to the Roadhouse
after talk of her friend Billy finally makes
it to the Roadhouse - this is what connects
Audrey's mystery with current TV and pulls
her out of past-world to join us in The Return.
Once she takes the spotlight, only to realize
the violent nightmare that Twin Peaks has
become in the present, she runs to the safety
of the past, but it can't save her because
there's no past to return to. Twin Peaks died
with Laura Palmer's mystery and, just like
the show, Audrey's time has passed. Like the
show, she's old and withered and cannot be
who she once was. Eddie Vedder plays at the
Roadhouse when she arrives:
Now it's gone and I am who I am
Who I was I will never be again
Running out of sand
Who I could have been
I could never be again
Wasted potential. Twin Peaks could have been
so much more if it was allowed to be, but
just like Gersten Hayward, who had such talent
and promise, the drug of closure married it
to mundane violence.
It is In Our House Now
With the failure of the original series to
change our hearts, the growth of fear has
been running unchecked since the 50's, getting
worse with each generation.
Goodbye, my son.
The corruption and poisoning of the youth
is another major theme of The Return. Reflected
in the show is the legacy that older TV audiences
have left for the new. "The past dictates
the future" - the new audience is receiving
the failure of Twin Peaks and the failure
of TV from past generations, and it's turning
our hearts blacker than ever before.
Shelly, just like us, marries the danger and
the violence, even though it turns on her
and hurts her. Since the darkness won, we're
doomed to repeat the cycle and pass it on
to our kids, just like Shelly passed her issues
on to her daughter, who's affected twice as
hard.
Richard, the product of evil Cooper forcing
himself on Audrey Horne, is probably the most
rotten piece of garbage you could imagine,
and his evil ultimately ends up killing a
poor little member of the next generation.
Look what you've done, Dick.
The Return is darker, bleaker, more terrifying,
more violent, and more uncaring about victims
than Twin Peaks was ever meant to be.
He's dead.
Today's audiences are used to much more graphic
television than early 90's audiences, and
we like it that way. Our modern garmonbozia
has been downgraded from creamed corn to fast
food and artificially flavored and colored
Corn Snax™.
It's the last bag, Hutch. It's the last ******* bag.
These are the new TV-watching foods, which
we happily enjoy completely free of any and
all semblance of empathy, compassion or concern.
Daddy!
Next stop, Wendy's!
We are like Sarah Palmer, watching the darkness
beat the light in an endless loop on our TV
sets. The evil is inside of us like the new
evil of Twin Peaks is literally inside Sarah
- that sharp, cutting tongue, like the sharp,
cutting nose of the dark spirit of Lynch's
editing. That evil now wears Twin Peaks as
a mask like it wears us as a mask, and like
it wears Sarah as a mask. She's the one who
let all of this happen in the first place,
so of course she would be the one to represent
the part of both the show and us that was
ineffective at stopping the evil and now wallows
in it day in and day out. "It is in our house
now" and we have to live with it.
Is somebody in the house?
No, just something in the kitchen.
It's not going anywhere, and it's not going
to be resolved. And that's the explanation
for all those side-stories and vignettes that
have been criticized for leading nowhere.
The evil is just festering in this town, and
there's no answer to it anymore, so we get
no satisfaction.
Beverly is married to sickness - her husband
has cancer, he uses it to guilt his wife,
she's sick of it, it's terrible, that's it.
Let that sit inside your brain for awhile.
Becky is married to violence - her husband
is a druggie, he beats her, he's cheating
on her, he kills himself, it's awful, that's
it. The end.
The characters in the Roadhouse with their
seedy stories...
"To listen in to two or three characters talking
about what’s going on in their lives in
Twin Peaks was the thing. They’ve all got
their problems, and [they’re] dealing with
them."
Why?
There is no 'why'.
The absence of balance means that the light
of investigation cannot illuminate these stories.
My flashlight's broke.
The murder of Laura Palmer, that is this beautiful
little goose, and the little goose is laying
golden eggs.
If Laura Palmer's mystery was the goose laying
the golden eggs, and the golden eggs were
all those wonderful little side-stories in
Twin Peaks that branched off of the mystery
and led to new and interesting places, then
these awful, disconnected side-stories that
lead to dead ends must be rotten eggs. The
golden eggs come from the ideas swimming in
the balanced Unified Field, and they ended
up in the gas station of the original show;
the Big Ed's Gas Farm logo is a literal goose
egg, glowing like the golden sun. The rotten
eggs that end up in the rest of the TV shows
come from the ideas spewed out of the fear-infected
Zeitgeist... Except the fear-infected Zeitgeist
is something we all feed into with ideas from
our own heads.
Oh my god!
Lynch repeatedly uses the imagery and sounds
of heads cracked open like eggs, and heads
that resemble rotten versions of the eggs
that were spewed from the Mother of all evil.
These are rotten egg heads. Our minds create
the Zeitgeist, which lays rotten idea eggs
in our TV's, which enter our egg heads to
rot our brains which spew their rotten insides
back out into the Zeitgeist. Yes, really,
the moral of Lynch's story is that TV is rotting
our brains.
I completely understand now why David Lynch
doesn't like the meaning behind his work minimized
by the smallness of mere words, because the
entire message behind Twin Peaks can be reduced
to one simple phrase, and that phrase really
is, "TV rots your brain."
But, this is where I disagree with Lynch,
because if I had told you that the message
behind Twin Peaks was, "TV rots your brain,"
at the beginning of this video, then yes,
you probably wouldn't have believed me and
you'd think it was really stupid. But now,
after all of this groundwork was laid and
the concepts stacked up on top and expanded,
the trite little phrase is bigger than just
its words. It's imbued with all that meaning
and understanding we were exploring.
"Closure. It's like a drug."
This is your brain on closure.
Fear enters the TV station, rots the brains
of the people working there, and the rot oozes
out into the airwaves, heightening the fear
in the air and turning the souls of each generation
blacker and blacker. The Arm, the spirit of
television, has evolved along with the Zeitgeist
to reflect the current state of decay: the
more evil the spirit of TV gets, the closer
it resembles its nuclear mushroom cloud mother;
a big, rotten egg on top of an electric tree
laying rotten eggs into the air. He is The
Arm, and he sounds like the evil wind of the
Zeitgeist.
I guarantee that the actor that plays Dick
Horne was chosen because his head is shaped
like one of those rotten egg heads. He is
the definition of a bad egg created by television
audiences. He's the child of the selfish attention
getter and the selfish attention giver...
which brings us to our representative in The
Return.
That is not the Dale Cooper that I knew.
If Dale Cooper is the audience's detective
mind, then the good Dale Cooper must be our
desire for Laura Palmer's continuing mystery,
our desire to seek balance through it, our
desire for good. But in The Return, our desire
for mystery is being held hostage by our evil
double. In the two-part premiere, Mr. C is
driving a silver Mercedes, a well-intentioned
vehicle, and locks it down to start driving
his negatively-intentioned black Lincoln.
He comes in driving Twin Peaks, the well-intentioned
show, and traps the good intentions so he
can turn it into a negatively-intentioned
show.
Someone stole my car!
The good Cooper is trapped, first in the Red
Room, then in the identity of Dougie Jones.
The doppelganger's goal is opposite Cooper's;
our desire for evil, our desire for Bob's
consumable violence, our desire for explanation
and closure. What we 'want' is closure. What
we 'need' is balance.
What I want and what I need are two different
things, Audrey.
What is it that the good Cooper needs to do
in The Return? We need to find Laura, to get
back to the original point.
Find Laura.
And, what is it that the bad Cooper needs
to do in The Return?
"Want", not "need". I don't need anything.
I want.
This is what I want.
Who is Judy?
He wants to find Judy. He doesn't know who
or what Judy is, he just wants it.
Why didn't you want to talk about Judy? Does
Judy want something from me?
Judy's identity might just be the biggest
mystery since Laura Palmer's killer, even
before The Return, all thanks to that Phillip
Jeffries scene. Before the Season 3 finale,
it had to be the single most talked about
mystery of all.
I'm not gonna talk about Judy. In fact, we're
not gonna talk about Judy at all. We're gonna
keep her out of it.
Who is Judy? Is she related to Josie, as some
like to think? Does she live in Seattle, or
in South America? Was it the same Judy that
Phillip was meeting with before he was transported
to Philadelphia? What was she positive about?
Judy is positive about this.
And why does David Lynch's monkey-sona bring
her up again at the end of the film?
Judy.
Does this mean that Judy actually is the key
to everything? We don't know who Judy is,
we don't know if she matters at all, and we
don't even need to know. We just want it.
Who is Judy!?
We have elevated Phillip Jeffries' Judy Question
to the status of representing the closure
that we so crave in Season 3. Judy is the
answer to all our questions (or so we hope).
Who is Judy!!??
Can we confirm that this is true? What does
our director have to say about it?
An extreme negative force called, in olden
times, "Jowday." Over time, it's become, "Judy."
"An extreme negative force" - in the context
of Twin Peaks, what has David Lynch established
as the greatest source of negativity? You
know the answer by now: The reveal of Laura
Palmer's killer. Closure. Explanation and
closure end the mystery, causing us to move
on and keeping us from balance. Makes sense
so far.
What is the meaning of the name "Judy"? There
have been some attempts on the internet to
discover the etymology of "Jowday", and the
best people have been able to come up with
is the Mandarin Chinese "jiāodài". "Jiāo"
certainly sounds like "Jow", and "dài" could
be read as "day" by someone who doesn't speak
the language, and someone who regularly mispronounces
"ai" as "ay", as is the case when David Lynch
pronounces the character "Naido's" name. Mr.
C has hidden Diane inside of this Naido person,
played by a japanese actress, and "Naido"
is a Japanese-esque way of saying the name
"Diane" backwards.
And Andy's gonna stand and let go of Naido's
hand, and he's gonna disappear.
"Nay-do's hand."
Here's the tree... right?
Here's Naido.
"Here's Nay-do."
Naido, NAYdo. Jiāodài, JowDAY. There are
many who say that the similarity between "jiāodài"
and "Jowday" are nothing more than mere coincidence,
but what a coincidence it must be, because
what does "jiāodài" mean?
To hand over, to justify oneself, to account
for, to brief, to tell about, to confess,
to make clear, to EXPLAIN, and humorously,
to FINISH or COMPLETE.
EXPLANATION. CLOSURE. Judy is explanation
and closure, and we want closure by means
of an explanation. Who is Judy? You're watching
Judy right now... I'm still not so sure how
I feel about that...
Major Briggs, Cooper, and I put together a
plan that could lead us to Judy.
Lynch and Frost, at the demands of the audience,
brought closure to the mystery.
And then something happened to Major Briggs,
and something happened to Cooper.
The audience moved on, and Frost didn't want
to help write the movie.
Now, the last thing Cooper told me was, "If
I disappear, do everything you can to find
me. I'm trying to kill two birds with one
stone."
This was the audience speaking. If the audience
is gone and they want us back, they would
have to give us what we want, which is Judy.
"You, Lynch and Frost, do what you can to
bring us back. We want two birds killed with
one season." One bird is the goose that was
laying the golden eggs, Laura Palmer's mystery.
Once that bird is explained to death, you
automatically kill the other bird - the owl
that represents and carries the plot of the
original show.
What is the symbol that represents Judy?
Do you know what this is? Huh? Did you ever
see anything like this?
Have we seen anything like this? We have:
The Owl Symbol. The Owl Symbol represents
the plot of Twin Peaks, and Judy represents
the explanation and closure that leads to
darkness taking over, so the Judy symbol is
a big black void, darkness growing to completely
eclipse Twin Peaks.
Who is Judy?
You've already met Judy.
What do you mean, "I've met Judy?"
We have already met Judy, several times! Once
when we got our explanation and closure from
the killer's reveal in Season 2, again from
the Season 2 ending that literally ended the
show. The evil living in Sarah Palmer, that
same evil we see in Season 3, told Major Briggs
that it was in the Lodge with Cooper, because
it was - Judy was in there with him; the show
was ending in there with him.
I'm in te Black Lodge with Dale Cooper.
It was waiting for Briggs because Mark Frost
is the co-creator and he needed to be there
to help David Lynch end the show.
I'm waiting for you.
Again we met Judy in the film when we got
the full chronology of Laura's murder and
the explanation of the literal TV meta. With
the film, we already had everything we needed
to fully solve the mystery, and that was closure
we didn't even know we were getting.
Now it makes perfect sense that a monkey is
whispering Judy's name at the end of the film.
Ever heard of Curious George? Monkeys are
a symbol of curiosity, and we all know what
curiosity did to the cat... Remember Lynch's
idea of "action and reaction" - he never knows
where a project might take him until he's
let the work speak to him, and with the film,
he was returning to the world of Twin Peaks
so that he could also figure out where the
show was going before the mystery was taken
from him... And this is why the monkey appears
behind baby Lynch's mask, because Lynch's
curiosity is fueling the film's story just
as much as ours is, and in the end, the monkey
is telling both Lynch and us that our curiosity
has paid off.
Judy.
When we forced Lynch to solve the mystery,
both we and the show became possessed by Bob.
At that point, Twin Peaks ceased to be the
dream David Lynch wanted it to be and became
the dream the audience wanted it to be. Lynch
left, and Twin Peaks became the audience's
dream.
The Log Lady stole my truck!
Pete, Windom Earle stole your truck.
This new dream, OUR dream, is what we brought
back twenty five years later for explanations
and closure. And since we never knew we had
already gotten our explanations numerous times,
neither does Mr. C. We brought the show back
to life to get more, and therefore so did
Mr. C.
We never really find out what Mr. C had been
up to in that twenty five-year break... It's
because the show didn't exist for all that
time. We weren't paying attention for all
that time. We were absent for all that time.
How does Season 3 begin? With a man sitting
in a room along with numerous cameras, all
watching an empty glass box 24/7. An intriguing
mystery, to be sure! What is it about this
box that requires so much attention...? We
find out later that Mr. C was the one who
created and funded this experiment. Mr. C
is a Dale Cooper that's possessed by Bob and
who comes from the in-between world of the
Red Room, so "in-universe", he knows how the
mechanics of TV dreaming work. He demonstrates
this throughout the course of the season with
his various manipulations of electronic devices.
Mr. C is actively and knowingly using his
intuition connection with the audience to
manipulate the plot of the show. Mr. C is
the audience wanting answers, but he's also
a character in the show who knows that Twin
Peaks needed a mystery to exist again, so
the glass box experiment is Mr. C setting
up a mystery by putting enormous attention
on a box in order to draw audience attention
to the "box" with the tube at the back of
it that's open to pure air.
The guy who's watching the box gets a coffee
delivery from a girl who's super into him.
The coffee is from a place called SZYMON'S,
with a cherry pie for an 'O' and a big, bold
'Z'. Pie and coffee are fuel for the love
and investigation of the TV dream that we
dream while we catch our Z's, and this TV
viewer is getting all the love and investigation
fuel he needs to stay awake and pay attention
to our dream. Then we wonder what all this
is about, so WE pay attention to our dream.
We create a demand for the mystery, Mr. C
creates a demand for the mystery. His subject's
attention to the mystery he created gives
us a mystery to pay attention to, and thus
The Return is literally brought back to life
by this recursive attention generation. Mr.
C's investigation of Judy begins after the
revival of TV attention in these scenes - that's
what we brought the show back for. Does he
find her? You bet! He just doesn't know he's
getting what he wants. Just think of all the
things explained in The Return:
What Judy is.
The origin of the fear that created Twin Peaks.
The origin of Bob.
The Woodsmen.
The Unified Field.
The Fireman.
The origin of Laura Palmer.
The importance of Laura Palmer.
The Blue Rose.
TV as a dream.
The dirt mounds.
The mechanics of the Owl Ring.
The Owls.
The fish in the percolator.
The Owl symbol.
What Laura Palmer saw behind James.
We're getting our explanations, we just don't
know we're getting them. Ergo, the infamous
sweeping scene, where we watch a guy sweep
the floor for two-and-a-half minutes.
We give David Lynch his show back, and then
we watch fifteen episodes of Twin Peaks not
coming back. But, we're trusting our director
and we're going along with it. We're patiently
waiting for something to happen, but nothing
is happening. We feel as though we're being
shown some abstract concept, but we don't
know what that might be, so we continue to
wait for it to be given to us. We think we
want an explanation, but explanations don't
hold our attention, mystery does. Very slowly,
everything is getting straightened up, every
last detail, every clue being explained to
us, nice and tidy, and that should leave us
with satisfaction, some sense of closure...
but it's not satisfactory. It's hollow. It's
nothing. All the loose ends are tied up, but
the evil remains.
I sent him two, he owes me for two. The Roadhouse
has been owned by the Renault family for fifty
seven years. We're not gonna lose it now because
of a couple of fifteen-year-old, "straight
A" students, no no.
That squeaky clean facade of closure is just
covering for the evil under the surface...
By the time Mr. C is able to bring our attention
back, the garmonbozia generated by Season
2's ending has become stale and rotten in
the show's twenty five-year absence. A lot
of people stopped caring. His time is about
to run out, as the show is back on the air
and the audience is way more interested in
seeing Agent Cooper escape the Lodge to stop
Mr. C than we are in seeing what Mr. C is
up to. So, to counter the balance, Mr. C concocts
a plan to keep our attention on himself...
I'm supposed to get pulled back into what
they call the Black Lodge, but I'm not going
back there. I've got a plan for that one.
... he creates Dougie Jones. What looks like
an existential Indiana Jones idol switch,
where Dougie is substituted for Mr. C during
Cooper's exit, is actually the creation of
a new mystery to hold our attention on the
doppelganger. The misadventures of Cooper
as Dougie Jones may be mildly amusing, but
they're far less interesting than the question
of how the double created Dougie and what
the double's dark plan might be.
Mr. C keeps our attention on himself and not
on boring, empty Dougie Jones by repeatedly
creating mysteries for us to puzzle over.
What is the information Mr. C wants? What
is the black spot he's trying to find? Why
is he looking for Judy? What is Mr. C's connection
to the Hastings family? Who is Mr. Strawberry,
and what do severed dog legs have to do with
him? What is that little "cow jumped over
the moon" box that shrinks into a rock? Along
with the garmonbozia he gets from simply having
Bob living inside him, these questions that
will never have answers are the fresh attention
Mr. C runs on for the duration of Season 3.
And why would he answer them? They are his
fuel. We want answers, he leaves breadcrumbs
for us to follow, and that keeps him going.
We want Judy, so he wants Judy, but we also
want answers about him, so the FBI is also
investigating him to represent us on that
front.
In a dream, are all the characters really
you?
These are all versions of us. And, if Dougie
is a version of Cooper, then he must also
be a representative of the audience, right?
The first time we see Dougie Jones, he's in
a development that's meant for happy families
but nobody lives there. He doesn't seem to
have any love for his own family since he's
cheating on them. He's not particularly expressive
or emotional. If Mr. C is the evil version
of us, then Dougie is what's left of the good...
There's not much of it. When the real Cooper,
the real love, returns to our TV screens through
the tube from pure air, the TV is empty because
without Laura Palmer the Twin Peaks vessel
is now empty. Once there, the love goes back
to the Unified Field from whence it came,
because what actually returned is unbalanced,
loveless evil and death that we, ourselves,
have created through the intercourse between
the two worlds that is giving birth to The
Return, the nightmare that annihilates our
souls... All of this is being foreshadowed
by Sam and Tracy here.
Hawk, something is missing, and you have to
find it. It has to do with Special Agent Dale
Cooper.
What is it?
The way you will find it has something to
do with your heritage.
What's missing that has to do with Cooper?
We're talking about the good Cooper here,
so it must be love that's missing.
That is not the Dale Cooper that I knew. It's
something here... There's something that definitely
ISN'T here.
The way to find it is through Hawk's Indian
head coin that leads him to the bathroom stall
door that contains a renewed interest in Laura
Palmer's mystery... Laura's balance. Love.
Luck. Las Vegas. We have to find the love
hidden in Dougie's Las Vegas story and inside
of ourselves - that love is nowhere to be
found in the town of Twin Peaks.
But, hold on... the love did return to the
TV, it didn't just go straight back to non-existence.
Cooper came through when Sam was out of the
room. The love was there... we just weren't
paying attention! It's still there... and
we're still not paying attention! The good
Cooper, the representative of the good side
of our detective minds, fully returns to a
life of love and happiness and unfathomably
good luck, but that's not what we wanted!
We're not returning the love that's being
given to us! OUR love never made it back - it's
still non-existent. Now, we want to see Coop
go after the badguys and win, we don't want
all this "love" nonsense, this "mundanity".
We're not interested, and that is why Cooper
as Dougie is empty, because our attention
is not there! Our attention is in Buckhorn
where Mr. C's cool murder mystery thriller
is happening. We're frustrated by these Dougie
scenes. They're corny and goofy, and we would
really rather they weren't in the show, right?
Meanwhile, David Lynch loves the mundane.
Dougie is the funniest, most heartfelt story
to him. He knows we're going to be like Albert,
patiently waiting for him to get on with it,
but Lynch is all like, "You go ahead and be
impatient and humorless over there, I'll be
over here enjoying all this mundane beauty."
Tres bon.
It's a good one!
Why won't anyone help Dougie? Something is
obviously wrong with him. Why won't anybody
do something? It's because it wouldn't match
reality. Cooper has to mirror our attention.
We're not interested, but the show's still
playing out, we're still watching it. The
story has a beginning and an end, there are
beats in between, and these TV characters
in this story must inevitably play out their
parts from beginning to end whether we're
interested or not. Think of it like a stage
play where the lead actor is being fed lines
that he can't remember the whole time and
all the other actors are pushing him through
it, trying to hold this production together,
because the show must go on.
For anyone who says they genuinely love all
of Dougie's storyline every time they see
it... that's all well and good, and I agree,
but we're in the minority and we're not supposed
to, because Lynch is trying to make a point
about what the audience as a whole wants.
We want the evil. It entertains us. To prove
it, the only time Cooper is able to act is
when something evil is happening. Then, we
snap right to attention! Base-level pleasures
like food and sex.
Coffee!
Cheating at gambling. Spotting liars.
He's lying.
Here comes the tiny hitman! Now we're in for
some of that tasty violence! This is what
i'm talkin about!
Squeeze his hand off! Squeeze his hand off!
We're suddenly paying attention, so now Cooper
is suddenly paying attention. The second the
acton's over, however, Cooper goes right back
to emptiness because we go back to not caring
about Dougie's boring, mundane life.
"Let's get back to Mr. C. I'm getting bored
here." Mr. C's murder mystery thriller in
Buckhorn is the most interesting, most suspenseful,
best acted part of The Return with the highest
production value. Of course, it would have
to be to keep our shallow, darkness-loving
attention. We can't wait for Dougie's farcical
comedy to finish. So, what finally wakes Cooper
up, saves him from Dougieland and joins our
full attention up with Mr. C's story? The
ultimate evil: closure. By the end of this
story, Dougie's job is saved, the insurance
company is saved, Dougie's debts are paid
off, the Mitchum brothers are good guys now,
Sonny Jim has his father back, Janey-E has
her husband back, the hitman situation just
kinda works itself out, and everyone loves
Dougie.
Oh, Dougie... it's like all our dreams are
coming true.
Well, that's a good ending to the story. We
got our closure. Looks like we're all done
here. Time to get on with it and move on!
Fork in the socket. Get me out of here, I
can't take it anymore.
If love hits the jackpot in the woods but
nobody's around to pay attention, are the
woods still balanced?
HELLO!
The bad Cooper didn't go back into the good
Cooper to make a complete, balanced Cooper.
Twin Peaks is no longer balanced. If there's
no balance, that means one of them has to
win and the other one has to die.
You were tricked. Now one of you must die.
I'll give you three guesses which one is which.
There's no love left in Twin Peaks or in the
audience, so obviously it's not Mr. C who's
gonna die... Except, during the climax, where
love finally and literally takes the wheel
of the vehicle, Mr. C does die.... or at least,
that's the dream, isn't it?
Light and dark are inside all of us. Evil
cannot be destroyed, it can only be beaten
by light exposing it. Even if Mr. C is vitally
wounded, the smoke dances around as Bob's
fire is rekindled by the fresh blood of violence
that literally enlivens our interest.
Then you see this guy over there, and you
lift his head up and you show him his head,
like this! You show him his head! And you
lift up the- more blood! And you put blood
all over his face, and you show him his face!
"Show him his face," because when we see Bob,
our attention is brought to life. You can't
kill Cooper with violence, because we are
Cooper and we love violence! It always brings
us back for more. So, how is it that Bob is
destroyed at the end of The Return?
... He isn't. Not really. Notice how cleanly
and completely and easily everything gets
wrapped up in this scene. That's not usual
for David Lynch, is it? Cooper's dismayed
face overlay, like a reflection of the viewer's
face on a TV screen, is such an incredibly
visceral way to convey to us that what we're
watching is not correct. It's not REAL. Something
has gone terribly wrong here.
We live inside a dream.
Twin Peaks was David Lynch's dream, but The
Return is our dream. We brought the show back
to the screen to get our closure, and this
scene is the closure we imagined, the closure
we thought we wanted. Mr. C finally gets his
coordinates, and they take him to... Twin
Peaks, the place where he'll find Judy. This
was the dream, that we would return to the
old Twin Peaks and the bad Cooper would be
captured and good would destroy the evil and
everything would be set right, right?
What is this?
Little did we know that everything being set
right is the true evil. The only thing keeping
the show going for twenty five years was that
Season 2 cliffhanger, so Mr. C's defeat brings
that mystery to a close and ends up being
Judy's triumph. The effortless destruction
of evil via Freddie's "deus ex machina" is
the true evil. Mr. C's death is paradoxical.
What does Agent Cooper do once Mr. C's story
is brought to a close? It's the time of completion!
Time's up. There's no more time left in the
show. Time to move on, because that's what
we do once we get our closure. Time and time
again, we get our closure and we move on.
253. Time and time again.
And when we move on, the mystery dies.
Walk with me on this: Laura Palmer was born
to die on TV to create the continuing mystery
that was Twin Peaks. "As soon as a show has
a sense of closure, it gives you an excuse
to forget you've seen the damn thing." If
you forget you've seen it, it might as well
not have happened! We brought Laura's mystery
to a close, therefore Laura's murder didn't
matter, therefore it might as well not have
happened. Therefore, we're in exactly the
same position as if Twin Peaks never existed
in the first place.
It's our doing, even if we thought we were
doing something good, and this is illustrated
perfectly by our mistakenly well-intentioned
representative going back in time to rescue
Laura from her fate, thus erasing the reason
for Twin Peaks.
I only wanted to do good. I wanted to be good.
Will!
The show is suffering so badly without her
that part of it even wishes she was never
born. But, you can't take it back. Laura did
exist. Her memory can't be destroyed, and
Twin Peaks is shambling along without her.
This is another paradox: The show can't exist
and then be wiped out of existence if Laura's
mystery never existed in the first place.
"The past dictates the future."
What happens next is best understood if we
first understand who Diane really is.
After the copy of Diane is killed, Tammy Preston
reasons that she was a tulpa.
That was a real tulpa.
And by the way, once we get that realization,
this Diane's story is brought to a close and
there's no mystery left in her, so we get
to hear the wind literally escaping her as
she disappears. What is a tulpa? Heck if I
know. The best description I could find is
that a tulpa is an imaginary friend that is
somehow sentient. It knows it's imaginary
and it's got its own personality. It lives
in your head, and you can communicate with
it as if it's a separate person. Somebody
gave me the example of Wilson from Castaway
if Wilson weren't a volleyball and was instead
only in Tom Hanks' mind. If this is a bad
description, I don't care.
Now, from what I understand, tulpas are not
outwardly manifested clones that other people
can see and interact with, so the evil clone
of Diane that Mr. C creates in Twin Peaks:
The Return is not technically a tulpa... Or
is she? Twin Peaks is already inside our own
heads, a dream that's the product of watching
TV. Who was Diane in the original show? Our
representative relayed his thoughts on the
case to Diane through tape recordings. He
would bounce his ideas off of and have full
conversations via tape recorder with this
person that we never saw. We could only imagine
her as a separate, sentient being. Sounds
similar to a tulpa to me. Diane is and always
was the audience's tulpa. Now, Twin Peaks
was David Lynch's dream, so only he knew what
she might look like, and only he and Frost
knew how she might be responding to Cooper.
But The Return is our dream, so the Diane
in The Return is the tulpa that we manifest
and can see in our dream.
Mr. C hides the real Diane inside of a different
person, one whom he has blinded, and who therefore
cannot watch TV and share the dream with us.
She's locked away in this identity prison.
He makes a copy of Diane who thinks she's
the real Diane for the purpose of evil. The
text messages that he sends her are the new
form of tape recordings. But, since we're
now in our imagined version of Twin Peaks,
she can respond with feedback about how far
along the investigation has progressed. He's
waiting for the climactic moment at the end
where the FBI discovers the good Cooper in
Las Vegas, the time of completion, at which
point the evil copy of Diane is supposed to
kill the investigators.
Diane is this mental projection of what we
think Diane is, and the world she's living
in is a mental projection of what we think
the new Twin Peaks should have been. So, if
we equate the tulpa that Diane is to Twin
Peaks, then we can see that just like with
Diane, Mr. C hides the goodness of Twin Peaks
inside of a different person, one who is disengaged
and unable to communicate. It's locked away
in this identity prison. The new, evil show
thinks it's the real Twin Peaks (which is
self-aware and knows it's imaginary), but
it's the equivalent of Diane's tulpa, a copy
that we created from our rotten brains for
the purpose of evil. As we watch, we wait
for the climactic moment in the end when the
FBI discovers the good Cooper in Las Vegas,
the time of completion, at which point the
evil copy of Twin Peaks kills our souls with
closure.
In this way, Diane represents Twin Peaks itself.
How can we verify this? Let's run with it
and apply it to a different scene. Intercourse
between the two worlds created the original
show, a beautiful dream with a message of
love from Twin Peaks to us. We irrevocably
changed the show when we butted our stupid
heads in demanding explanations.
One night... No knock, no doorbell... he just
walked in. I was so happy to see him. He only
wanted to know about what had been going on
at the bureau. It felt like he was grilling
me.
And explanations we got. We got our way...
We had our way with the show and took what
we wanted... The intercourse between two worlds
became forced. We forced ourselves on the
show to get the answer to Laura Palmer's mystery.
DIANE: He ***** me... He ***** me...!
In Season 3, when we get our closure, we are
getting the Twin Peaks that we imagined we
wanted. What we imagined was the real show
that we loved, the one that was gone for so
long, is finally able to return to the screen,
or so we imagine. What we imagined was the
real Diane that Cooper loved, the one that
was gone for so long, is finally able to return
to the screen... or so we imagine. Look how
happy we are to finally have our show back!
Except, this isn't real. It used to be the
real Twin Peaks, but now that we've got our
ending, it's become a tulpa that we made up
from rotten egg ideas in our rotten heads.
All this time, we've just been superficially
copying what the original show was saying
to us and spewing it back out, stupidly and
tinged with blood.
Damn good joe, huh Dougie?
Damn good joe.
Red hair and black and white fingernails like
the Lodge! Twin Peaks memes equals Twin Peaks
show, right? Wrong.
What the **** is wrong with you?
What the **** is wrong with you?
When good Cooper returns to the empty TV box,
he emerges from the tube that's embedded into
a metal section of the wall that resembles
a crematory oven, complete with wires arranged
so they look like coffin rollers. Twin Peaks
is rising from its own cremated ashes after
having been consumed by the fires of consumable
violence. After he's sent back into the oven
and banished to the Unified Field, he finds
the Diane that he doesn't recognize in a big
stone room... This is the mausoleum of the
mind in which Twin Peaks was buried. The idea-powered
generator Phillip Jeffries ended up inside
of is located in this mausoleum - the ideas
that powered Twin Peaks are just as old and
dead as the show.
When we started Season 3, we wanted to rush
straight for that climactic reunion. "Twin
Peaks is back! We gotta get our closure!"
So, we want to come back to TV through the
power lines via the #15 electrical socket
- Episode 15 is where Cooper gets closure,
remembers who he is and goes for the socket,
which is the beginning of the end. It's too
early for that, this is only Episode 3. Our
loving friend, Twin Peaks, warns us that to
go straight to the return and the closure
means certain death. Naido flips a switch
and sends us back in time a bit to the #3
electrical socket so we'll emerge in the correct
episode. If you're not with me by this point,
I have no idea how to help you.
The whole time this is happening, the Mother
of all evil/Judy/closure is banging down the
door trying to get in to Twin Peaks' resting
place-of-the-mind to destroy the show once
and for all. But, it can't get into our memories.
The memory of Twin Peaks will always remain
intact.
Our projection of what Twin Peaks was supposed
to be resides in the Episode 15 mausoleum,
but Episode 3's mausoleum houses Ronette Pulaski,
credited as the "American Girl". Laura Palmer
was the original American Girl, but this is
a Twin Peaks we've created after we've already
turned away from Laura Palmer, and the only
other American girl involved in the murder
in the real Twin Peaks was Ronette Pulaski.
No Laura Palmer, Ronette takes her place.
Now, before we return to the Episode #3 socket,
the floating head of Major Briggs reminds
us of the blue rose...
Blue rose.
... and then we see the blue rose next to
the socket on a table. At this early point,
some mystery is still left in the show. By
the time we get to Episode 15, the show has
become fully transformed by our rotten ideas,
and this is why the imprisoned Diane takes
the place of Ronette and the blue rose is
missing. By Episode 15, all traces of the
old show are gone and replaced with our fake
show.
Now, there are some things that will change.
After Laura Palmer's murder is erased from
history, the show appears to reset itself.
This is the second time this has happened.
The first time was way back at the beginning
when the mystery was still alive. "You can
go out now." Last chance to leave with the
mystery intact. "When can I go?" We're not
getting it, so we're gonna keep watching.
Laura disappears, we look the other way, and
we settle in to dream up our own Twin Peaks,
one where we get what we always wanted in
the climax. That's not to say none of it was
real - it did happen. Twin Peaks always was
a dream, we just replaced it with our own.
When ours is over, the show resets again and
we see the reality of Twin Peaks come back
to show us what we have just done to the show
in reality. Everything that happens after
this point is a recap of what just took place
in our fake dream. Now, we're back to the
real, original Dale Cooper, but this one has
seen and accepted the darkness through our
dream of closure. Mr. C is back inside. Cooper
now has the good and the bad in him, so he's
balanced and can leave the Red Room under
his own power... But, the damage has been
done. Judy has already won, and the closure
must play itself out.
We leave the limbo we've been in for twenty
five years to go back to the TV forest, where
we find the real Twin Peaks that we once knew
and loved.
Is it really you?
Yes.
We drive the old vehicle back to the "owls",
back to the power lines, trying to put the
show back on TV. Because we just watched the
whole season, Cooper's intuition connection
with us tells him that Twin Peaks might be
different once it returns to television...
Once we cross, it could all be different...
... and Twin Peaks agrees that it might not
be such a good idea.
Just think about it, Cooper.
But, we're gonna do it anyway.
Cooper drives the vehicle through some kind
of portal between two worlds, where Cooper
and Diane's infamously disturbing love scene
takes place. What's happening here? They are
moving from world to world - they are between
worlds. This is "intercourse between the two
worlds". Cooper represents us in the real
world, and Diane represents Twin Peaks in
the TV world - this is "intercourse between
the two worlds" between the two worlds, symbolizing
the return of Twin Peaks to the airwaves.
We thought that returning to our love affair
would restore the dream, but this intercourse
is wiping the show out of existence...
Except, Twin Peaks does still exist in the
past. We can watch the past any time we want
on TV. It's forever there in TV-world, looping
from Cooper's dream to Cooper's reality and
back, and that's why we are able to see Diane
way out there in the woods of television-past.
We even left a manufactured copy of whatever
good memories we might have had, if any, in
the manufactured memory of the manufactured
copy of a dream that was The Return. It too
is still a version of Twin Peaks that is in
the past but on TV for us to watch and re-watch,
looping from Cooper leaving the Red Room to
the show resetting back to the Red Room so
he can leave again. But now, after our intercourse
between worlds destroyed the show, we're moving
to a world where Twin Peaks doesn't exist
anymore, and the only place it doesn't exist
is outside of TV-world in the present... and
this is where we wake up after our destructive
dream, in the real reality of the present,
where there are no such people as Cooper,
Laura, or Diane.
Cooper becomes someone named Richard.
Richard?
See if you can guess why (hint hint, it's
because we just destroyed the future of Twin
Peaks for our kids). Laura becomes some stranger
called Carrie Paige...
Carrie Paige.
... much to our dismay.
Carrie Paige?
That's right.
And Laura's childhood home is now occupied
by the actual, real-life owner of the real-life
Palmer house. Gee, I wonder why.
Diane becomes this Linda person...
Linda?
... and ironically goes back to being a tulpa,
an imagined other consciousness.
At the in-between motel, she is occupying
the space between worlds where she becomes
this other, real-life Linda person, so in
that moment she's both people at the same
time. When she's watching herself watching
herself, she is simultaneously the real life
person who watches TV and the character who
is being watched on TV. Dale Cooper, on the
other hand, doesn't see a copy of himself
at the motel. He is us, so he remains the
"us" who is on TV while we remain the "us"
who are watching ourselves on TV.
During "the scene", Diane does all the work
while Cooper just kind of watches her do it.
Of course. He's us, and we're watching TV.
Just watching. Diane covers Cooper's face
and begins to cry. Now, there is the valid
interpretation that she can't bear to look
at him because he's the man who forced himself
on her, and he did. We did... and we're kind
of doing it again... But there is another
reason, and that is that Cooper is becoming
who he is in real reality - the viewer in
the real world. Agent Cooper is just us watching
the show through the power of the camera,
and Diane, being a TV character, is unable
to see the real-life face of Agent Cooper,
just like Gordon Cole couldn't in his dream
of reality.
Cooper was there, but I couldn't see his face.
We're there in the dream through the power
of watching, but they can't see that. TV characters
can't see the audience watching them. Yes,
Diane can't bear to see the face of her attacker,
and also she is compelled not to see it because
TV characters literally can't even.
Once crossed over to the real world, we're
still aware of the irony that we're watching
the real world on TV and we still need a representative
in the show, so Cooper gets to remember and
keep his identity as Cooper, even though Cooper
doesn't exist in the real world and we're
now watching a Twin Peaks that doesn't exist.
This is the show we put on the air - a non-existent
Twin Peaks. That old vehicle we drove in with
is gone. This Cooper is less of who we remember
him to be because he's not a TV caricature
of a person anymore. Coffee isn't investigative
fuel, it's just coffee. Nothing to get jazzed
about. He does harm in the name of good - he's
somewhat balanced, because in real life we
can't split ourselves into good and bad. We
all have the capacity for both within us.
Throughout the finale, we do what we've been
doing the whole time Season 3 was happening,
both as our representative in the show and
as viewers outside the show watching - we
try to make Twin Peaks exist in a world where
it doesn't exist. Twin Peaks memes! "Judy's
coffee shop, just like the Judy in the show!
A white horse, just like the one Sarah Palmer
saw! Ooh, that guy kinda looks like Bob, doesn't
he? Carrie Paige says she isn't Laura Palmer,
but she has to be! Her mother's name is Sarah!"
Sa- Sarah...?
"There was a missing diary page - Carrie Paige
must be the "missing Paige", right? Get it?
Chalfont and Tremond!"
Chalfont. A Mrs. Chalfont.
Alice. Alice Tremond.
"I remember those names from watching the
show!"
But Twin Peaks memes do not Twin Peaks make.
The context isn't there for any of this. We
both cannot see and outright refuse to accept
that Twin Peaks is gone. We brought it back
to the house and tried to force it to be what
it once was just so we could beat the closure
out of the dead horse, and it killed the show
all over again.
What year is this?
"What year is this?" Is it 1990 again when
the Twin Peaks mystery was still alive? "Is
it future or is it past?" It's neither. Twin
Peaks died in the past, and this isn't Twin
Peaks' future. Laura Palmer is Twin Peaks,
but this isn't Twin Peaks and that isn't Laura
Palmer... except we're still watching TV,
it is Twin Peaks, and that is Laura Palmer...
or at least what's left of either of them
in our memories. When she screams, what we're
seeing is an echo of what happened in the
premiere: not just the character, the very
concept and memory of Laura Palmer screams
in agony, forcefully removed from television
even as we look the other way trying to prolong
the mystery. And then, the show dies. White
of the eyes, darkness within our TV sets.
The power is cut off. We end on the image
of us continuing to refuse that the show is
gone because of what we did to it twenty five
years ago. This time, the Lynch/Frost bumper
is silent. No electricity flows anymore.
We killed two birds with one season, and now
there's nothing left to explain because there's
nothing left to explain.
Shadow, take me down with you for the last
time.
There is a depression after an answer is given.
It was almost fun not knowing. But there is
still the question, "Why?" And this question
will go on and on until the final answer comes.
Then the knowing is so full there is no room
for questions.
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Goodbye.
