Bitches be like “This film radiates comfort” and this is the film

Twin Peaks: The Return Ends

The ending of Twin Peaks: The Return was undeniably divisive, for the world and for me. Reading about it, I find myself in the strange position of disagreeing with people criticizing it and people praising it. It's not the “perfect ending,” it's not “radically innovative,” but nor is it a middle finger to the fans or a terrible conclusion.

#1. What Happened in the Finale

The finale is simultaneously by far my favorite episode of the series, and frustrating because I think it reveals how ultimately hollow everything that came before is. The show ended up being about not much of anything beyond its own existence.

But, that fact was conveyed in an episode that was amazing, and while narratively looping, felt stylistically different. This wasn't the same jumbled aesthetic we'd seen before, it was a bit more classical, and haunting.

The Sopranos was famously influenced by Twin Peaks, and here it felt like Lynch walking down the same path as The Sopranos' Kevin Finnerty dream episodes, or Mad Men's California episodes. It's a reality slightly askew, where identity shifts subtly and we're not quite sure what it all means, but it feels right.

From a mythology point of view, my read of what happened is this. Cooper came out of the Lodge knowing he had to be at a certain place at a certain time to defeat BOB. He fulfilled this, but he also knew that he was involved in a higher battle with JUDY, the force of evil, and planned to defeat “two birds with one stone” by taking her out and rescuing Laura.

He traveled back in time to do this, and succeeded, altering reality such that Laura never died. However, JUDY, who had possessed Sarah Palmer, didn't like this, and did some dark magic that prevented Cooper from saving Laura.

He decided he had to go further, and pass through some kind of risky dimension jump to go save her. He crossed through with Diane, and during a (conscious or not) sex magic ritual that echoes Lost Highway's dimension hopping sex in the desert, crosses to another realm.

My read on this, which may be slightly suited to giving an ending I find satisfying, is that in the moment before Agent Cooper was to take her, Laura built an alternate world in which she was a different person living in Odessa, Texas, and working as a waitress. Much like Deer Meadow functions like a cold, evil version of Twin Peaks in FWWM, Odessa's diner is filled with hooligans and danger, rather than the warm comfort of the Double R. It's a shadow world built out of what she knew in her old life.

Cooper finds her and brings her back to Twin Peaks, where she drives past the real Double R, which is dark and goes to her house, which owned by the Tremonds/Chalfonts, the same name of the people who owned a trailer in the trailer park with Teresa Banks in FWWM. They are connected to the Black Lodge in some way, and their presence indicates Laura's house as a site for something evil.

Throughout the entire sequence, Cooper seems different, acting in the halting manner of Bad Coop, but not evil in the way he is. He just seems like a different person. But, when he says “What year is this,” it would indicate that perhaps this is the first we're seeing of the true Cooper, one not masquerading as his old self after stopping being Dougie, or lost in the haze of Dougie. It struck me as odd that Cooper comes out of the Lodge without any damage, so perhaps you could read it as Cooper playing different parts required by the Fireman.

He stays as Dougie to help do good in Vegas, gets awakened when the time is right to go to Twin Peaks, then goes through the Lodge to help Laura. He never seems in control of his own actions, which is frustrating from a narrative point of view, but makes sense in this context as Cooper never actually being aware of what happened to him until the last shot. He asks what year it is because he's been in the Lodge so long, he doesn't know.

Meanwhile, Laura is waking up to the falseness of her reality. It's a holding world not unlike where Naomi Watts spends the first section of Mulholland Dr. While Naomi Watts and Bill Pullman in Lost Highway, built a more idealized escape from their own death, it seems like for Laura Palmer, the only escape is to totally disassociate from her old identity.

In the end, she can't. The harrowing scream of her mother returns, Laura herself screams, the house blinks out of existence, and presumably Laura returns to the path to her own death.

My optimistic read of this scenario is that this whole sequence happens during Fire Walk With Me, and after she sees what could be, she still chooses death, and after death Cooper is there to usher her into the White Lodge or emotional peace in the last shot of Fire Walk With Me.

In that sense, all of this is still leading up to that final image of Fire Walk With Me, and it just took a long while to get there. Cooper consciously never escapes the Black Lodge, and only awakens at the end before the world collapses around him and Laura.

I have two major issues with the conclusion, even though on the whole I liked it, at least my interpretation of it. The issues are...

#2. It Doesn't Match The Show We Just Saw

People are writing articles saying how the show was always about Laura, and this conclusion elegantly brings it back. But we just watched 18 hours of content, of which maybe one hour at most was about Laura. The last episode and a half doesn't really do much with the previous sixteen hours. And in fact, you could probably hop straight from Fire Walk With Me to the scene of Cooper in the Red room mid Episode 17 and watch through to the end and get the same experience/themes conveyed.

The bulk of The Return was concerned with characters flitting in and out of the story, seemingly at random. There were great scenes, there were boring scenes. There was wonderful atmosphere, and there was a distance from the emotions happening. The original show, and FWWM, are very heated, full of outsize emotion that is almost uncomfortable to watch.

The new show keeps the viewer at arm's distance. We don't know most of the characters, and particularly with the new ones, don't care much about them. What emotion there is comes from our understanding of the characters relative to the original series. Bobby being a police officer who cries when seeing Laura's picture is effective only because of our knowledge of the character's past.

So, to people who say that the show is radically innovative or a rebuke to people looking for nostalgia, I'd argue the show depends entirely on nostalgia to be palatable to a mainstream audience. Dougie's antics are powerful because of the gap between our memory of Cooper and who we see, or our residual affection for cherry pie and coffee. The show, while on the surface quite radical, leans heavily on memory and nostalgia to fuel what emotion there is.

But, the bulk of the content is new characters or the search for Cooper. Laura is alluded to in Episode 8, and mentioned from time to time, but if this was supposed to be all about Laura, why was the vast majority of the show about the Bad Coop/Good Coop struggle, which amounted to not much of anything, or about random characters popping in and out of the story?

#3. The Conclusion Undermines Laura's Humanity

Lynch famously said that he chose to make Fire Walk With Me because he wanted to see Laura Palmer alive. In the original series, Laura Palmer is a mirror who reflects the darkness and beauty of the town in which she died. We first meet all the characters through their relationships with Laura and she provides our entry point to the town. But, she is not a character, she's the object of investigation for Cooper and the others.

In Fire Walk With Me, she becomes a vivid, ferociously alive character, and we spend most of the film immersed deeply in her crumbling world. It's a film that is so emotionally raw, a lot of people find it hard to engage with. They have to distance themselves from her.

For me, doing work that distances the audiences from the characters, as The Return does most of the time, is the safest form of filmmaking. A scene like Laura telling James she's “gone, like a turkey in the corn,” is very bold and potentially laugh worthy. But, if it works, it's incredibly powerful. But, forsaking conventional character arcs and keeping the viewers at a distance from what's going on is an easy way to make a movie. There's no risk. It forces the audience to do the work of finding the connections, rather than making them feel it. It's head rather than heart filmmaking.

Now, obviously most Lynch has a lot of intellectual stuff to ponder, but what most of The Return lacked was the raw emotion that powers his best works. The emotion that was there was due to nostalgia, and the oblique storytelling served to make the entire thing an enigmatic mystery, but also a challenge to engage with.

You were always quite aware of being a viewer watching the show because we knew more than the characters. We knew that Dougie was Cooper, and we spent most of the show waiting for Coop to wake up, or Gordon Cole's group or the Twin Peaks' sheriff group to finally figure it out so the story could move forward. It wasn't a great mystery since the mystery was not what is going on, it was more, when are the characters going to learn what we already know?

Again, none of this would be a problem if the show was doing stuff on an emotional level. There were scenes that were incredibly powerful: even just James walking into the Road House as the Chromatics played in Episode 2 was phenomenal. Cooper as Dougie eating pie with the Mitchum Brothers was as great a scene as I've seen all year. But, it was based on nostalgia, and our longing to feel that old Twin Peaks feeling.

In that sense, perhaps the show's greatest achievement was in making us long for the old Twin Peaks even as we frustratingly realized we'd never get there. Audrey can dance like she used to, but then we find out she's in a coma or mental hospital or something and will never know. The past remains just out of reach, and even if Cooper can return, he'll go away just as soon. He will live years in the Black Lodge between shows, just like Audrey will wait somewhere in our minds while we long to see her on screen again.

This is an elegant and powerful thing from a thematic point of view, but it's not as satisfying emotionally as Lynch at his best. I don't love meta stuff because I think it's safe, and it feels like the safest statement you can make with the new Twin Peaks is to say you'll never have the old Twin Peaks again. With that as the parameter, the show can't fail.

But, this is all a long road to saying that I find it frustrating to return to Laura Palmer at the end because it's not about Laura Palmer, the character, it's about Laura Palmer the object. Her story is over, it was told. But, Cooper finds himself unable to let go, and in this case, you get the sense that Lynch does as well. He is pulled to revisit the past, to save Laura, so pulled that we literally go back into a movie that already told its story well.

In FWWM, we see Laura accept death because she knows that it's the only way to resist BOB. Her death is sad, but it's also a triumph over the force of evil. And it's her choice. Here, we see Cooper trying to save her, and succeeding, in the process creating a forked reality where she never dies.

This all gains greater significance thanks to our knowledge that Laura “is the one,” the golden ball anti-BOB who will battle the forces of evil. I don't love this interpretation because I think it takes away from her humanity. Perhaps the intention is that all our lives are really battles between forces of good and evil, and that Laura's individual struggle is just as powerful as a cosmic battle between good and evil.

But in practice, it winds up making you feel like she is less important as a person than as a celestial force, and I find that inconsistent with what I saw in Fire Walk With Me.

And in general, I didn't want to watch Twin Peaks to rehash the same conflict we already saw dramatized. I loved the idea of Good Coop vs. Bad Coop because there's so many potential layers and emotions there. Coop would have to reckon with the fact that a dark version of him raped Audrey and birthed a terrible son, or raped his best friend/ally Diane. That might be more rape than I want to see, but it would be fascinating to see the character we loved deal with that, particularly since the series finale sets up a scenario where his failings let Bad Coop into the world.

There's a lot to reckon with, but we never do. We never see Coop have to deal with any of this, in fact he's not much of a character at all, perhaps never appearing as himself until the final shot. When he's Dougie, he's braindead and seemingly haunted, but Good Coop seems as chipper and jolly as he ever was. He never has to reckon with the changed world he enters, and I think that's more exciting territory than revisiting Laura Palmer's death through a Mulholland Dr./Lost Highway/INLAND EMPIRE framework again.

If anything is frustrating to me about The Return, it's that so much of it feels like Lynch doing his greatest hits. It's the same unhinged id driven maniac (Richard Horne via Mr. Eddy, Frank Booth, Leo Johnson), the notion of shifting realities and identities in the last episode, or literally choosing to go back into a movie we already saw rather than engage with something new and uncertain. INLAND EMPIRE already made me feel like Lynch was saying the same thing one too many times, but this felt the same.

While Dougie was at times frustrating, by the end I was enjoying his antics because they felt fresh. Too much of the show was just hitting the same beats we've already seen from Lynch again and again and again. The hints at something new ultimately didn't really lead anywhere, and in the end we returned right were we began.

In the future, I might choose to ignore most of The Return's tangled journey and focus on this last episode and a half, which the more I think about it, the more I love. Whereas the rest of the series, the more I think about it, the more I find ultimately hollow.

In the end, I might be harsh on The Return, but only because I know how strong and powerful Lynch's work can be. For me, the emotion of a story is the most important thing, and I don't like being distanced. So, this wasn't necessarily the ideal show for me.

That said, it was still an incredible ride and so much fun to discuss and watch over the summer. I'd love to see more, even if I don't expect it to match the heights of Lynch's best work.

And in the end, I hope it's more the haunting great moments that stick with me than the often bumpy journey to get there.

Thoughts Roundup - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 13

“What Story is That, Charlie?”

Last week, when we were given an episode that was slow, withholding with its information, and for many, very frustrating, I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried, because I knew it was just a strange, brief detour and that we should focus on the journey rather than the destination. I also didn’t worry because I thought the next episode would be better, and thankfully I was right. I’m no Angelo Badalamenti, so I won’t toot my own horn too much but I think now, hours after watching it, I’m realising that I was very right, because this isn’t just a better episode, but is one of the all time best Twin Peaks episodes. It keeps that steady pace, but there’s an alchemy of all the ingredients that’ve made this season so great, which tonight forms a cohesive, exciting and deeply involving hour of television. 

. It’s party time for the Mitchum brothers, and party time for the soundtrack producers who give us one of the wildest and weirdest cuts yet. I don’t know how to describe it other than it being a demented casino style nonsense song, and I might be wrong, but the percussion pattern sounds a lot like a sped up version of the drumming in The Bookhouse Boys, a track from the Season 1 soundtrack. It’s nice seeing Coop enjoying himself, and it’s funny how happy he has made the Mitchum brothers, Janey-E, and his boss. The fact that he can still manage this despite being a silent, largely unresponsive man who walks into glass doors, speaks to the innate happiness that Cooper has always brought people, only this time it’s accidental. People want him around, and I think it’d be quite a bittersweet ending if he does wake up and leave for Twin Peaks. Yes, it’d be satisfying for us, but Janey-E wouldn’t have her husband anymore, Sonny Jim wouldn’t have a dad, and The Mitchum Brothers wouldn’t have anyone to buy pie for. Before it becomes the Everybody Loves Dougie show, Anthony steps in to put an end to him, but even he can’t bring himself to poison Dougie to death! So Dougie-Coop has his sharp black suit, a black coffee and a piece of cherry pie. Whereas we once would’ve said “THIS will be what wakes him up!”, we’ve stopped expecting it and instead learned to enjoy the pleasure he takes in scoffing the stuff down. While it can feel melancholy when signifiers from his past edge him towards who he used to be, some of these episodes hint at the idea that maybe he’s happy where he is. We want him to get back to his old self, but do we want that for him or for us? He’s had the food and drink that he loves, he’s walking around amazed by everything, and even uncovered a considerable crime. Everything about him is there, really. And I’m beginning to feel like that’s enough for me. Then the Fusco Brothers attain a crucial piece of the puzzle that’d help get Cooper back home, decide to throw it out, and I laugh “FOR FUCK’S SAKE”. Dougie’s prints reveal that he was an FBI Agent and broke out of a maximum security prison, and away this is tossed because of its unlikeliness. It’s funny, really. Because it is unlikely, it is absurd, and that such an important fact has been discovered and thrown out immediately by the police is hilariously frustrating. I loved this moment, Eric Edelstein’s weird and distinctive laugh commenting on how ridiculous this all is.

. I love how adoringly Janey E looks at Cooper when she opens the car door for him. They’ve come a long way since she was angrily cramming him into the car, and it’s nice to see her not suffering the financial burden that the original Dougie left her in. Naomi Watts is really effective when painting Janey E as someone rediscovering feelings for her husband, and it’s actually kind of touching. And Sonny Jim’s Gym is so fucking bizarre. Why does it play music-box versions of Tchaikovsky? Why does it have a prison-style search light? Why anything? I love it.  

Continuing in the lovey-dovey, not-so-bad-after-all vein of things, this season has had a lot of characters turn out to be not quite as awful as you expect them to be. The Mitchum Brothers showed a kind of generosity, Ben Horne is an altruist, and Anthony has a breakdown in front of his boss and Dougie, claiming he wants to be a better man. I mean, you can’t call him a good person just because he didn’t MURDER COOPER, but it’s nice to get a variety of technically bad people who, when it boils down to it, don’t really want to be that bad. It’s not such a bad world after all, hey?

. Actually yes it because fucking Doppelcoop is on the warpath again, and this time he’s getting what he wants via arm wrestling, just like Sylvester Stallone in Over the Top. And just like Sly claims himself to be in Over The Top, Doppelcoop is a machine, and the amount of control he displays in this scene is really quite frightening. “It hurts when you had my arm like this. Let’s go back to starting position. It’s really much more comfortable”, he says, arm-wrestling a boss of a bunch of bastards so that he can get to bad old Ray. He demonstrates that he has the entire arm-wrestle under his control, and can position his arm wherever he wants without exerting force. He can win, and kill, without trying. This is who Doppelcooper is, and why he is such a formidable force. He rarely exerts power, but when he does it is effortless and unstoppable. He will get what he wants, and every piece of his journey has been carefully manipulated and decided by him, and that’s what this scene shows. The gang watching on heavily resemble the spirits above the convenience store in FWWM, and I think this is a purposeful visual metaphor, a way to tie them visually to the evil that lurks upstairs. When Doppelcoop wins, he gets Ray and the scene that follows is an immensely satisfying one. 

The ring that we’ve seen numerous times gets a visual explanation, sort of. Ray wears it when he is killed by Doppelcoop. It then disappears to the black lodge, where his soul shows up shortly after. It seems to say quite clearly that wear the ring when you die, and you end up on that famous zig zag floor, with fucking Mike. What a bummer he’d be to spend eternity with. Before Ray snuffs it, he talks about Phillip Jeffries, who sent Ray to kill Doppelcoop because he has something he wants, which is Bob, who is in hot demand this season. I’m glad to hear Jeffries mentioned again, and part of me still holds out hope that David Bowie filmed a super duper secret cameo before he passed away, but i’m not counting on it. Maybe the closest we’ll get to seeing him is that mysterious blinking box all those episodes ago. But, Ray claims that he was last seen at a place called The Dutchman’s, and this is all Doppelcoop needs to hear. Ray’s death feels big, not necessarily because he was an important character, but because they discuss Jeffries, the ring and Major Briggs, which all ties into the mythology of the show, a mythology which was also discussed last week with Albert. Now listen, i’m easily pleased when it comes to the Twin Peaks lore - say the words ‘lodge’, ‘blue book’ or even ‘Owl’ to me and i’ll begin jittering in excitement. I may even sick up. But this is more important and integral to the storyline that simply chucking out bits of lore, and that makes it so much fucking cooler. Doppelcoop is working towards it, the Bookhouse Boys are heading towards it and the FBI are heading towards it. The idea of them converging is too fucking exciting to process. So. Ray is dead (Nobody Loved Raymond), and Doppelcoop is on his way to either Twin Peaks via the coordinates that Ray gave him, or The Dutchman’s, wherever the hell that is. 

. Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh are still driving around and i’m guessing, will hook back up with Doppelcoop soon. Their scenes are usually very short, but they’re both such great actors that i’m fine to just hear them shoot the shit for a couple of minutes. 

. Back in Twin Peaks, Becky is still having domestic issues, and Shelly is still being a warm and kind Mum, telling Becky to get to the Double R and have some pie. It’s strange seeing her serving there all these years on, and strange seeing Bobby at the counter, especially because all the camera angles that used to capture the diner are absent, and we’re seeing the place in a completely different visual manner. It feels much more like a legitimate restaurant now, and this is developed with Norma discussing business options with who seems to be her boyfriend. So, no. She didn’t end up with Big Ed, and like Bobby watching Shelly and wondering what might’ve been, Ed watches Norma from a booth further down. He can see her clearly, but she’s a world away. There’s a deep melancholy in seeing Big Ed alone, things clearly not having worked out with either Norma or Nadine. The past, when things looked hopeful, feel like a million years ago, and everything has changed since then. Except for him. Bobby has grown up and become someone his father would’ve been proud of, Norma is franchising, Nadine has perfected the silent drapes. But Big Ed is still pining across the shiny tables for Norma like it’s 1990. 

And Norma is trying to keep things as they are, too. She’s encouraged to change the name of the restaurant, but she wants to keep it as it is, the way people know it. It’s an argument that summarises the attitude of The Return: do you give in and listen to what you’re being told people want, or do you follow your gut and make choices you are passionate about, in the way that you decide? Thank god Lynch and Frost didn’t listen to anyone. Norma knows what the Double R means to the people of the town, and she knows how much people need it, as a source of comfort and of solace. And she can franchise, and have restaurants popping up that try to be the real deal, but there’s really only one Double R, and there’s only one Twin Peaks. And in these scenes, that feeling of solace and comfort feels close yet a million miles away: unmistakably warm, but shot through with that heartrending, small town melancholy. There’s nothing quite like it.

(A little thing I noticed about Bobby - he says he found his dad’s old stuff “today” - but they found his stuff several episode ago, and since then Bobby has been seen at night. So is this Double R scene not chronological, and is actually set a few days back?)

. The reason that the comfort of the Double R feels somehow distant, unattainable and kind of false is because of scenes like Audrey’s in this episode. We can’t sit in the diner and pretend everything is okay in the town, when we know a storm is brewing outside. The argument has moved on between her and Charlie, from being about what has happened to how Audrey feels. And how she feels is heartbreaking. Like she’s not herself and that she doesn’t know who she is, and Charlie’s reaction? Scorn. Condescension. Treating her like the teenager she was when we last saw her. The scene has moved away from feeling frustrating and into nightmarish territory, the wood panelling of the walls making the room feel like a cabin in purgatory, or a real life black lodge. And Charlie’s words become more vague, and more frightening. He speaks of ‘ending her story’, and the discomfort of this scene really brings into the question the dynamics between the two, who he really is, and where they really are. The scene develops an emotional core to the storyline, and we begin to desperately want Audrey to get out from between these two worlds that she’s stuck in, and to leave that horrible room. Like Big Ed, like Cooper and like so many others, she is trying to return, but is stuck. 

. How they’ve managed to make the Palmer living room look more frightening than it did before is beyond me. Sarah drinks and smokes in the sickly darkness, watching a 15 second loop of an ancient boxing match which repeats ad nauseum, like the electric bear that spoke the words “Hello Johnny, how are you today?” endlessly a few episodes back. It feels nightmarish, and you want it to end. But it is stuck. Are we sensing the theme in play here again? The room feels angry and oppressive, and it’s reasonable to expect something evil and awful to materialise in it at any moment. But the horror is not Bob, or the ceiling fan, but the situation of Sarah: a woman who has lost everything, and whose life is full of dread and solitude. 

. Nadine and Dr Jacoby’s interaction is lovely, and feels like a genuine moment between two old friends who haven’t seen each other for many years. Except one has an eyepatch and a silent drape running shop and the other sells golden shit shovels via his angry livestreams. The point is, it feels real, and Wendy Robie still beautifully imbues Nadine with that almost schoolgirlish nervousness and innocence. She is pure in her exuberance towards Jacoby and her drapes, and she seems star struck by her former doctor. I’m so fond of Nadine, and there is a moment that hints at a sadness or darkness in her past, when Jacoby remembers seeing her on her hands and knees in a supermarket trying to pick up a potato. “There was a storm that night”, he says, and she looks afraid, and sad. What happened to her? What happened to all these people in this town? What has time done to them, and why do they all have to live with such pain? 

. And before we know it, we’re back at the Roadhouse, and this week we have probably the most divisive (read: unpopular) performer yet. Yes, it’s James Forehead Hurley, singing Just You and I. I can’t pretend to feel how i’m supposed to feel as a Twin Peaks fan and hate on this, because truly, I loved this moment. I loved it more than any roadhouse scene yet, and I have a big soft spot for James. The poor bastard had a rough time of it, and yes, he was a moody mope, but I feel for him. I was moved by seeing him received so well by the audience, and seeing him perform that song (which I will now have in my head for the next fortnight) made him look young and happy again, and I found it massively touching. It was a bittersweet moment of nostalgic melancholy, elevated by the image of Big Ed back at the Gas Farm, eating his Double R soup all alone. 

There Ed sits, thinking about how things were, and how they are now. Or maybe it’s us that’s thinking about it. Because we can listen to old songs, and sit in the Double R eating cherry pie, but we know evil forces are on their way to town, and already exist there. There is a goodness too, in the log lady, the bookhouse boys, in Ed, Norma, and Nadine. But they’ve been through too much to have that innocence, and the questions that The Return brings us is how can we ever go back to the way things were? And how much power do we have to prevent the bad things from happening again? I’ve been thinking of the song Ohm by Yo La Tengo, where they sing:

“Sometimes the bad days maintain their grip Sometimes the good days fade...

But nothing ever stays the same Nothing's explained”

That feeling, that we might never get back the good days, and that it doesn’t always happen for a clear reason, is prevalent in tonight’s episode, which explores how the characters that populate the show feel. It might not be explained exactly what has happened, but as well as starting to piece together the mystery, Part 13 interrogates the deepest emotional wells of the show, and it results in a moving and beautiful episode that deftly blends darkly satisfying plot progression and emotional complexity (I know it’s weird to call an episode where someone is punched in the face to death “beautiful”, but i’m sticking with it). 

“I’m not sure who I am, but I’m not me”