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GLIMPSES OF THE MYSTERY
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Beauty is often a harbinger of goodness and truth, as I've observed in a previous post. And there is certainly no shortage of beauty in Twin Peaks-The Return. For a time, Cooper's journey through the non-exist-ent to the violet world in Part Three was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen on television. Then, the journey through atomic fire in Part Eight came to occupy the top spot. And now Mr. C.'s journey into the dark heart of The Dutchman's has become a serious contender for the most beautiful of them all. For me, being enveloped in beautiful images and sounds lifts the veil of the ordinary, enabling me to transcend the natural skepticism and atomistic thinking of "practical" day-to-day life where we are constantly assaulted by the need to predict, control, and consume discrete objects, as if the world were just the sum total of the individual things rattling around in our narrowly construed field of vision--the objects that allow us to get a foothold in a world of near to overwhelming experiential possibilities. When beauty lifts the veil, there is a vulnerability--a naked exposure--to the all in which in which particular things have their individual being and meaning as collective participants in a great mystery. This is why--after a particularly intense experience of beauty--we often find that our vision is transformed upon our return to the ordinary world. Where once we saw merely disjointed objects arrayed for our conspicuous consumption, we now see things enveloped by a breathtaking mystery. This truth and the feeling of deep, world-transforming goodness that follows in the wake of an experience of revelatory beauty came home to me in an astonishing way during Mr. C.'s journey to confront Phillip Jeffries. As Mr. C. crosses the threshold of door 8, he enters a room facing a wood paneled wall with an old steam radiator in the right corner. In the middle of the wall is a prominent amber stain that--in my heightened state of awareness of the whole--immediately but atmospherically illuminated the present experience in the light of the atomic blast from Part Eight. As Mr. C. gazes at the wall--a perfect symbol of the ordinariness of everyday experience--it begins to peel away like a veil obscuring a great abyss, and Mr. C. finds himself in the presence of something extraordinary. The straightforward importance of this scene is Mr. C.'s confrontation with the Judy mystery: Who is Judy and what does s/he want of him? We get the sense that Mr. C. is staring into the abyss of his own origins, vulnerable for the first time (we've witnessed so far) to the existential need of knowing who he is rather than the pedestrian wanting for things and objects to dominate, which he has thus far understood as his destiny. But I am less interested here in the straightforward importance of this scene as a moment on Mr. C.'s journey than I am in its holistic importance for the unfolding of the mystery we are experiencing both in this episode in particular and in the series as a whole. And what we are shown as the veil rolls back over the abyss and the room returns to the ordinary wall and the radiator behind door number 8 is astonishingly illuminating of both the individual episode and the entire series. What we find in the combined image of the veil and the abyss is nothing short of breathtaking: in my heightened state of consciousness, something deep within me chose to experience it as the sacred alchemy of Laura Palmer hovering above an atomic blast, enveloped in the Fireman's protective spirit, converting the devastation into a radiant log that is turning gold. There is fear in letting go, to be sure, but there is infinite, radiant, transformational beauty there too.
Here are twenty of my favorite still images from this exquisite painting come to life, including the startling tableau above of this sacred alchemy. What do you see in these images? How do they illuminate for you what lies behind the veil? And how do they bring that glory back into renewed vision of the everyday?
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AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY OIL CAN: TRACING THE PHILLIP JEFFRIES NARRATIVE THROUGHOUT THE RETURN8/21/2017 If Laura Palmer is Twin Peaks' leading "woman in trouble," and Dale Cooper is its occidental-Tibetan-monk-investigator in shining armor, Special Agent Phillip Jefferies has emerged as the series' Ur-villain--the enigmatic mastermind-gone-mad at the origin of the Blue Rose task force and at the center of one of its most opaque mysteries: "Who is Judy and why can't we talk about her?". After Part Fifteen, there is little doubt that the Jeffries narrative will figure centrally in the remaining three parts of The Return. But on a close inspection, the search for Phillip Jeffries and the mystery at the heart of his disappearance has been one of the most persistent, important, and thoroughly explored narrative arcs of the new series. Jeffries himself or his guiding importance to the central mystery of The Return receives coverage in parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Some of the most insightful people currently writing about Twin Peaks, including John Thorne (Wrapped in Plastic and Blue Rose Magazine) and Eden Roquelaire (Garmonblogzia and Twin Peaks Freaks), have offered fascinating treatments of Jeffries and his connection to the Judy mystery in Fire Walk With Me. I won't revisit the important ground they've covered in this post. My modest aim here is to try to pull together some of the most prominent threads of the Jeffries narrative woven through the arc of The Return through Part Fifteen in hopes of setting the stage for seeing as deeply as possible into the significance of the Jeffries narrative in the final three episodes. Some of the references to Jeffries I'll cover here are obvious and direct and others a bit more oblique, but my goal is to spotlight only those instances for which there is evidence that is approaching compelling based on what the series itself shows to us about Jeffries or, in the more oblique cases, what the promising interpretations put forward by Thorne, Roquelaire, and others have already revealed about him and the mystery he has come to represent. In addition to consulting the work linked above, readers may wish to refresh their memories on Jeffries' exploits in FWWM by revisiting the famed Philadelphia Bureau incident scene and the extended cut of this scene from The Missing Pieces that includes footage of Jeffries in Buenos Aires. My approach is direct and unambitious. I simply move through the episodes in order, offering photos and brief commentaries on occurrences in the show that relate directly to Jeffries or can be plausibly interpreted as being important to the Jeffries narrative. I'd be most grateful to have any such occurrences that I have overlooked reported in the comments so I get get them integrated into the narrative. Part Two-Retrieving a communications briefcase from the motel bathroom, Mr. C attempts to contact Phillip Jeffries. A threatening voice mentions a meeting with Major Briggs and declares that Mr. C. is "going back in tomorrow". Mr. C. suspects it isn't Jeffries after all, and when the voice goes silent, he logs into the FBI network to download information about Yankton prison where Ray is allegedly being held on weapons charges. After securing the plans for Yankton on a handheld device, he leaves. (Part Two, 36:16-39:48) Part Three--Naido's interactions with Cooper in the violet world and the non-exist-ent may not initially seem directly relevant to the Phillip Jeffries narrative. But several clues--both in Part Three and in more recent episodes--suggest an important connection. For one thing, her plunge into the non-exist-ent after leading Cooper away from portal 15 is immediately followed by the appearance of Major Briggs' head exclaiming "Blue Rose," which we learn in Part Twelve in an elite task force originally headed by Jeffries. Also, her timely reemergence in Twin Peaks in Part Fourteen in a context that explicitly presages the Mr. C./Jeffries meeting in Part Fifteen coupled with the revelation that she produces verbalizations similar to monkey chatter (see below) are important clues that suggest a connection to the "Judy" and "monkey" threads of the Jeffries narrative, expertly discussed by Twin Peaks scholar and Wrapped in Plastic creator John Thorne in "Judy, Judy, Judy". I won't rehash those connections here, but will take them for granted as support for conjecture that Naido's steering Cooper away from portal 15 and toward portal 3 in the violet world (which takes him to Rancho Rosa in Las Vegas where he assumes the life of Dougie Jones) is important in some way to the dealings that have Jeffries and Mr. C. at cross purposes. Whether Naido is seeking to thwart or serve Jeffries' agenda isn't clear to me at this point, but that she is an person who is connected to him in some significant way seems highly probable. Part Four-Outside the Yankton Federal Prison after the meeting with Mr. C., Albert confesses to Cole that Philip Jeffries had requested information on the identity of “their man in Columbia”—information which Jeffries alleged that Cooper desperately needed—and Albert complied and gave Jeffries the information. A week later, their agent in Columbia was killed. Cole, in disbelief, looking deep into Albert’s eyes and plaintively repeating his name, seems to come to a resolution: “This business that we witnessed today with Cooper—I don’t like it; something is wrong. Could be the accident but I don’t think so.” Their conversation is interrupted by feedback as Albert’s foot scrapes a pebble which causes Cole’s hearing aids to go haywire, causing a sensation like “a knife in my brain.” “I don’t think he greeted me properly, if you take my meaning,” Cole continues, “something is very wrong. Albert, I hate to admit this, but I don’t understand this situation at all. Do you understand this situation, Albert?” “Blue Rose,” Albert replies. “It doesn’t get any bluer—Albert, before we do anything else, we need one certain person to take a look at Cooper—do you know where she lives?” Says Albert in reply, “I know where she drinks.” (Part Four, 50:52-55:22) Part Five-Obviously in fear for her life and unsure of what to do next, Lorraine--a woman hired by Duncan Todd on behalf of Mr. C. to murder Douglas Jones--hesitantly takes out a blackberry and nervously types something, looking as though she’d much rather be sliding down a razor and landing in a manure lagoon than engaging whatever horrors lie at the other end of her electronic communication. We see a single decrepit lightbulb jutting outward from a makeshift electrical box that dangles from exposed conduit. A windowsill is visible just beneath the filth-ridden fixture, which hangs thick with the remnants of a spider web full of hollow exoskeletons and other detritus. Presumably inside the building (which we later learn is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina--the place Philip Jeffries is known to have been stationed before his disappearance), a small black box with two red pinprick lights sits centered on an earthen plate atop what appears to be an ancient copper trunk; we hear the phone ring followed by an electronic beep. Lorraine types the number “2” into the Blackberry, above which we see the abbreviation “ARGENT” (Argentina) followed by the number “159” at the far-right margin. Both pinprick lights on the black box flash twice, accompanied by beeping. Is she communicating with Jeffries somehow, or does Mr. C. also have a base in Buenos Aires? If she's communicating with Jeffries, but Duncan Todd hired her to kill Dougie Jones at Mr. C.'s behest, does that mean she is double-crossing Mr. C. and providing information to his rival? (Part Five, 3:01-4:02) Part Five, continued--We see an aeriel shot of Buenos Aires, Argentina followed by an abrupt cut back to the decrepit lightbulb and a pan down to a long look the enigmatic black box on the earthen plate. The two red lights on the box blink twice, and the box suddenly folds in on itself, rapidly collapsing into what appears to be a small pebble of pyrite. This sort of odd technology is just what one might expect to see from a man who uses contraptions (in Part Fifteen, for instance) shaped like old-timey oil cans in order to take meetings with vengeful Doppelgängers. (Part Five, 56:01-56:33) Part Eight-Speeding through the dark after just having witnessed Cooper's exorcism by woodsmen, a deeply shaken Ray Monroe leaves a telephone message for “Phillip” (who we must assume to be Phillip Jeffries, especially after the revelation in Part Thirteen that Ray was working for Jeffries): “It’s Ray. I think he’s dead but he’s found some kind of help so I’m not 100% and…um…I saw something in Cooper that may be the key to what this is all about. I told him where I’m going ["The Farm"--the site of the epic arm-wrestling match in Part Thirteen], so if he comes after me, I’ll get him there." Ray's claim that the "something in Cooper" is the "key to what this is all about" makes a lot more sense now that we've learned from Ray's testimony to Mr. C. in Part Thirteen that Jeffries wants "something that is inside" Mr. C. (see below). (Part Eight, 11:25-11:54) Part Eleven-Just before Bill Hastings is savagely murdered by a woodsman, Gordon Cole enters the vortex and catches a split-second glimpse of the woodsmen atop the stairs at a mystery location that we soon learn is "The Dutchman's"--the place where Phillip Jeffries is rumored to be staying according to Ray Monroe's testimony to Cooper in Part Thirteen (see below). Part Twelve--After sweeping the room for bugs, Cole and Rosenfield fill in Agent Preston on the history of the ultra-top-secret Blue Rose task force. Rosenfield explains that the Blue Rose was convened by Gordon Cole to explore unresolved aspects of Project Bluebook, the government's two-decade investigation into UFOs which was shuttered in 1970 in what Albert suggests was a "massive cover-up." Rosenfield informs Preston that Cole appointed Special Agent Phillip Jeffries to lead the Blue Rose and then recruited Agents Rosenfield, Chet Desmond (who went missing in the Fat Trout Trailer Park in FWWM while investigated Theresa Banks' murder), and Dale Cooper into the fold. After noting Cole's reluctance to bring new blood into the group in the wake of the mysterious disappearances of Jeffries, Desmond, and Cooper, Rosenfield invites Preston to become a member of the elite task force, she accepts, and he pledges to brief her in detail in the morning. (Part Twelve, 2:40-4:50) Part Thirteen--After permanently retiring Ray's "Boss" Renzo in an epic arm-wrestling battle for the ages, Mr. C. shakes down Ray Monroe for information on who put the hit out on Mr. C. and Ray spills the dirt: "It came through a man named Phillip Jeffries--at least that's the name he gives. I never met him. I don't talk to him on the phone. He set the whole prison thing up with Warden Murphy. Jeffries says you were going to kill me. He said I could get out and stay out if I killed you first." Mr. C. asks him "Why?", and Ray replies that Jeffries said that Mr. C. "has something inside that they want." Mr. C. asks whether Jeffries ever mentioned Major Briggs and Ray says "No." Then Ray reaches into his pocket and produces the Owl Cave ring: "Jeffries said I was supposed to put this on you after I killed you." "Where did you get that?", Mr. C. demands to know. Ray claims that an unfamiliar guard gave it to him just before their prison break. Mr. C. orders Ray to put it on his left hand and then demands the coordinates that Ray got from Bill Hastings' secretary. After Ray hands them over, Mr. C. inquires as to Phillip Jeffries whereabouts. "Last I heard," Ray replies, "he was at a place called "The Dutchman's", but it's not a real place--". His final sentence is interrupted by a bullet to the brain followed by an unscheduled trip to the Lodge. We see that Richard Horne has witnessed this entire episode via closed circuit television (all but the Lodge part, anyway), and wonder whether he might tail Mr. C. to "The Dutchman's". (Part Thirteen, 18:52-22:44) Part Fourteen-Rosenfield is giving Preston the promised briefing on the origins of the Blue Rose, explaining that the whole thing started with a case concerning a murder investigation in Olympia, Washington in 1975 worked by two young field agents, Gordon Cole and Phillip Jeffries. Albert explains: "They arrived at a motel to arrest the suspect named Lois Duffy. They hear a gunshot outside her room and kick the door in. They find two women inside. One on the floor dying from a bullet wound to the abdomen. The other holds a gun which she drops as she backs away when they enter. They recognize the wounded woman as Lois Duffy. She speaks her last words to them: "I'm like the blue rose." She smiles, then dies, then disappears before their eyes. The other woman screaming in the corner, they now notice, is also Lois Duffy. By the way, Lois Duffy did not have a twin sister. Then while awaiting trial for a murder she swore she didn't commit, this Lois hangs herself." Tammy goes on to infer that the significance of Lois' last words ("I am like the blue rose.") is that the dying lois "does not occur in nature--is not a natural being," but is rather "conjured...what's the word...a tulpa." Albert affirms her inference: "Good." (Part Fourteen, 4:52-6:45) Part Fourteen, continued--Just then, Cole busts into the briefing announcing "coffee time!" and Diane joins the group too ("Deputy Diane reporting for duty."). Echoing Mr. C.'s final interrogation of Ray in Part Thirteen in which Mr. C. wants to know if Jeffries mentioned Major Briggs to Ray, Cole asks Diane whether Cooper mentioned Major Briggs on that fateful night of their last visit. She confirms that he did. [If Ray was being truthful that Jeffries did *not* mention Briggs to him, and Diane was being truthful that Cooper (who was presumably already Mr. C. at the time) *did* mention Briggs to her, perhaps this means that Jeffries' lack of knowledge and Mr. C.'s knowledge of how Briggs fits into the equation will turn out to be an important plot point that gives Mr. C. an edge over Jeffries in some way.] Albert then briefs Diane on Briggs' recent death and the ring found inside his stomach, which triggers Diane's testimony that Janey-E is her half-sister. After this revelation she leaves, allowing Cole, Rosenfield, and Preston to continue with more sensitive matters. (Part Fourteen, 6:46-11:00) Part Fourteen, continued--Gordon informs them of his conversation with Frank Truman, in which he learned that the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department is investigating the found pages of Laura Palmer's diary "indicating two Coopers." He then moves on to discussing the details of "another Monica Belucci dream," in which Cooper and Jeffries figure heavily. Cole explains that Belucci invited him to Creperie Plougastel, that Cooper was there (but his face was obscured), and that after exchanging pleasantries and enjoying coffee, Belucci said to him "the ancient phrase:" "We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside a dream." She follows up, forebodingly: "But who is the dreamer?" She gestures to Cole to look behind him, and he turns to see his younger self in the old Philadelphia office (in footage from FWWM), talking to an alarmed Cooper who oddly informs him with a now uncannily familiar expressionless visage that "It's 10:10 am on February 16th; I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about." Cole continues: "And that was the day Phillip Jeffries appeared and didn't appear...and while Jeffries was apparently there, he raised his arm and pointed at Cooper and asked me "Who do you think that is there?". Damn! I hadn't remembered that! Now this is really something interesting to think about." Looking confused, Albert chimes in, "Yes...I'm beginning to remember that too." The interesting to think about, terrifyingly, is that of whether the Cooper in the Philadelphia office with the specter of Phillip Jeffries in 1989--before "the Good Cooper" went to Twin Peaks to investigate Laura Palmer's murder--was somehow actually, if we may borrow a line from Hawk, "not the Good Cooper." Was it Mr. C. at whom Phillip Jeffries was pointing? Or is Jeffries simply confused, having seen Mr. C. in non-linear time in his dimensional travels? (Part Fourteen, 11:00-15:10) Part Fourteen, continued--While Andy's happening in the White Lodge and his interactions with Naido before and after do not make explicit reference to Phillip Jeffries, there are several important clues that these events belong squarely within the Phillip Jeffries narrative. As discussed above in reference to Part Three, Naido appears to be connected to the Jeffries narrative via her association with Briggs' "Blue Rose" declaration following her fall into the non-exist-ent, as well as her veiled connections to the "Judy" and "monkey" threads. As for Andy himself, among the visions shown to him by the Fireman during his time in the White Lodge is a hazy photo of the electrical wires that we see later on in Part Fifteen as Mr. C. drives toward his meeting with Phillip Jeffries (or at least his surrogate smoking oil can transmitter). Given that this image is the first in the series passing before him to depict a future event (something that has yet to happen, rather than a recap of happenings past), the Jeffries meeting and its aftermath will likely figure importantly into Andy's mission to keep Naido safe. That Naido is now on the same cell-block as the formidable "Garden Glove Sykes" (who occupies cell 8--we'll consider the possible significance of this below) seems to presage a coming attraction at the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department in which Jeffries, Mr. C., and agents aligned with the Fireman (Frank, Bobby, Hawk, Andy, Sykes) will come into conflict over Naido and what she knows or represents. That brings us to Part Fifteen, the final installment so far, where the Jeffries narrative drops into sixth gear as Mr. C. journeys to "The Dutchman's" to confront Phillip Jeffries himself (or at least the steaming old-timey oil-can avatar who speaks for him these days, perhaps in order to avoid being physically (or spiritually) close enough to Mr. C. to be susceptible to his mind-reading powers). I'll devote a bit more photographic attention to the step-by-step of this event captioning the pictures as we go (with sincere advance apologies for the fact that I'm on vacation and lack access to my 4K television, so my signature hand-taken-in-a-dark-room-with-an-ancient-iPhone stills are even grainier than usual). Mr. C.'s earthly journey to the "The Dutchman's" terminates, satisfyingly, at the fabled convenience store from Part Eight, where a woodsman is waiting to escort Mr. C. through the convenient portal to his otherworldly destination even deeper in the dimensional stew than the convenience store itself. Intriguingly, this is the first time we see the convenience store in color, though the tones are decidedly muted (especially in my shitty iPhone photos taken from a grainy stream). We know that this place is even stranger than the average portal to other places because the store itself--which isn't really there--is just stage one, as Mr. C. and the woodsman disappear while traversing the stairs of the already non-existent store, indicating their passage into a dimension even beyond the plane occupied by the store. Mr. C. and his woodsy guide traverse a hall (adorned with the wallpaper from the framed print in Laura Palmer's bedroom) where they come upon a seated gatekeeper sitting next to a large electrical switch that comprises, among other things, a host of tubes and wires and an old turn-table platter. Mr. C. announces his intentions: "I'm looking for Phillip Jeffries." Upon Mr. C.'s request to speak to Jeffries, the woodsman throws the switch and a burst of electricity illuminates the room, revealing the guts of his bizarre switching station. One imagines oneself to have caught a glimpse of a radio-station broadcasting microphone in the foreground in front of the turn-table. As the sparks fly from the switch box, we briefly glimpse the masked jumping man from the convenience store scene in FWWM. As he jumps, the mask intermingles with visions of faces that are hard to discern, but that include, according to some with better means for photographing this brief scene, Sarah Palmer and Major Briggs. Mr. C. follows his lumbering escort into a long passage leading to another staircase--presumably the one that Gordon Cole glimpsed in his split-second vision of the woodsmen in Part Eleven. As they walk, the woods that occupy the space on the earthly plane intermingle with the hall, suggesting that we are also moving through earthly space as we traverse the hall at The Dutchman's. The wall rolls back like a curtain to reveal Jeffries' proxy: a smoking contraption that appears to be a modified diving-bell (like the ones from the non-exist-ent and the White Lodge) strongly and aptly suggestive of an old-timey oil can. Mr. C. and Jeffries engage in a stilted, confusing conversation the upshot of which is that Mr. C. (or perhaps Cooper or perhaps both?) has already met Jeffries in the Philadelphia FBI office in 1989, as depicted in the famed scene in FWWM that was reprised in Cole's dream in Part Fourteen. But whereas Cole's dream focused on Jeffries' accusatory identification of Cooper (exclaiming "Do you know who that is there?") and omits mention of Jeffries' infamous, incoherent, and much-discussed ramblings about "Judy", the conversation here in Part Fifteen is focused squarely on Judy. Since the conversation between Mr. C. and Phillip Jeffries' oily avatar is likely to be extremely important to the events that unfold in the remaining three parts of The Return, let's take a minute to reprise it here: Phillip Jeffries: “Oh, it’s you.” Mr. C.: “Jeffries!” Jeffries: “By God.” (or maybe “My God!”) Mr. C.: “Why did you send Ray to kill me?” Jeffries: “What? I called Ray!” Mr. C.: “So you did send him! Did you call me five days ago?” Jeffries: “I don’t have your number.” Mr. C.: “So it was someone else who called me?” Jeffries: “We used to talk.” Mr. C.: “Yes, we did.” [Flashback to FBI Headquarters in Philadelphia in 1989. Jeffries: "Well now: I’m not going to talk about Judy. We’re not going to talk about Judy at all."] Mr. C.: “1989. You showed up at FBI headquarters in Philadelphia and said you’d met Judy.” Jeffries: “So. You are Cooper.” Mr. C.: “Phillip, why didn’t you want to talk about Judy? Who is Judy? Does Judy want something from me?” Jeffries: “Why don’t you ask Judy yourself. Let me write it down for you.” [Mr. C. dutifully takes out a pen and pad and writes down the numbers, which appear to emerge out of the steaming oil can spout in the following order: 4-8-0-5-5-1-1-4.] Mr. C.: “Who is Judy?” Jeffries: “You’ve already met Judy.” Mr. C.: “What do you mean I’ve met Judy?” [Ed: Might Jeffries be referring to Cooper's interactions with Naido in the violet world and non-exist-ent in Part Three?] [Jeffries falls silent and a phone starts ringing. It rings six times total. After the fourth ring, Mr. C. interrupts, yelling at increasingly elevated volume at Jeffries.] Mr. C.: “Who is Judy? WHO IS JUDY?!” [After the sixth ring we hear a loud switching sound and a burst of electricity and Mr. C. answers the phone just before the seventh ring. The feed flickers as Mr. C. is transported out of Jeffries’ oil-canny presence to the phone booth in front of the convenience store. As he listens into the receiver, the sound of electricity accompanies the staticky feed and his head is briefly drawn toward the receiver in a flickering stutter identical to the way that Cooper’s head was drawn toward the electrical portal in the violet world.] Outside the convenience store, Mr. C. is accosted by Richard Horne, who witnessed Mr. C. murdering Ray at the Farm and presumably trailed him to the portal to "The Dutchman's" from that location. Horne announces that recognizes Mr. C. as an FBI agent from a photo in his mother Audrey Horne's possession. Mr. C. gives Horne a knowing look, spits at the ground to distract him, and incapacities him, commanding him never to threaten Mr. C. again and to get in the truck: "We'll talk on the way." Where will Phillip Jeffries, the mystery at his dark heart, and Mr. C.'s insatiable search for Judy take us in the final three episodes of The Return? Goodness knows.
A silent meditation on the wonder, beauty, and deep meaning of the happening that enveloped Andy (with a foreword by Lao Tzu):
Dao 道 What we look for beyond seeing And call the unseen, Listen for beyond hearing And call the unheard, Grasp for beyond reaching And call the withheld, Merge beyond understanding In a oneness Which does not merely rise and give light, Does not merely set and leave darkness, But forever sends forth a succession of living things as mysterious As the unbegotten existence to which they return. That is why men have called them empty phenomena, Meaningless images, In a mirage With no face to meet, No back to follow. Yet one who is anciently aware of existence Is master of every moment, Feels no break since time beyond time In the way life flows. --Lao Tzu (The Way of Life, Perigee, 14) You might be wondering, "Hey sicko, did you set out to compile this gory cavalcade of crushed melons?". The answer is an emphatic "No!". I was actually in the process of writing up a decidedly happier piece called "The Treasure of Thwarted Expectations," in which I catalog my delight in some of the wondrous surprises that came to us in Part Fourteen, among them the Conference Room Sting on the Deplorable Deputy Dickweed, the Mysterious Return of Naido, Vegetarian Andy and The Fireman's Documentary, Super Sykes of the Garden Glove, and of course Sarah Palmer's (Somewhat Darker) Reprise of Her Daughter's Face-Removal Trick (runs in the family, I guess). As I was collecting a grisly still of Sarah's throatless jilted suitor for the post, I was seized by a chilling sense of how often I've had the unpleasant task of taking these photos of destroyed (or at least very badly damaged) human heads. As I searched back through THE GLASS BOX photo archive, I could hardly believe how much devastating head trauma we've seen--in almost every episode, excluding Part Seven, we see a badly conked noggin or at least a serious pain in the neck. So, though I'm hesitant temporarily to table my essay on the treasure of thwarted expectations, I suppose it is only fitting to adjust my expectations of the evening's labor to bring you the following grisly assemblage of head trauma in The Return, starting with the big fella who got me thinking along these lines. I would say, "Enjoy!" but that seems like the wrong sentiment. How about "Be edified!"? As difficult as these images are to look at, they are profound reminders of our finitude. Inured as most of us are to images of violence and brutality in films, it can be powerful occasionally to slow things down to a still shot and seek edification from images of death and mortality that show us how fragile we are--we beautiful, ugly, perfect, flawed, simple, endlessly complex spiritual unities of intellectual, emotional, moral, and physical being that can be broken so easily, suffering head trauma of so many varieties, physical and otherwise. Let's end on a positive note, though, shall we? Some of the most compelling heads we've seen so far are nothing short of cosmic fountains of healing light, right? So let's take a gander at those before we go to sleep, hmmm? Ahhhhh. Much better!
I'm a man, and I love my fellow men. But--am I wrong, fellas? (perhaps some women can chime in here, too)--before we get to work on discerning our flaws and honing our talents, some of us can sometimes be a little over-confident, under-reflective, aggressive, emotionally stunted, and fragile. At our best, we're capable of great things. But at our worst, as history has well shown, we are very bad indeed. Brutal, in fact. We've all but cornered the markets on domestic violence, assault, rape, murder, terrorism, war, and genocide. Our privilege has not always led to greatness, alas. Fortunately for us, lucky number thirteen is a master course in the follies of toxic masculinity, and thus a terrific resource for learning from our mistakes. The centerpiece of Part Thirteen is an arm-wrestling odyssey that culminates in the death of Ray Monroe at the hands of Mr. C. in a scene that will join Part Eight's journey into atomic fire as one of the greatest both in Twin Peaks-The Return and in television history. But the entire episode is shot through with men doing badly, or at least, very, very sadly. One can hardly blame a woman with ring-side seats to this eternally recurring cycle of self- and other-destruction for seeking a little something to take the edge off as she watches these chowderheads bashing away, incessantly and forever, with no relief in sight. The main event of this post is a photo essay of the arm-wrestling odyssey and Ray's trip to the ol' Lodge; we'll get there soon enough. Suffice it to say that if a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll have about 80,000 words before we're done. But before we proceed to a still-by-still of that testosterone-fueled travesty, let's meet the major players and see if we can discern a little of our darker selves (or our friends and partners' darker selves, maybe) in these characters'...frailties, shall we call them? Opportunities for honest critical reflection and self-improvement abound! Invulnerable and evil to the core, Mr. C. likes to play a little cat and mouse before he brings the full-on malevolence home. He tried dancing with the devil, but in the end good ol' Ray just didn't have the steps. Nice ring, tho. Big, bad, bald, and king of the sucker punch, this guy was boss at The Farm for fourteen years. Why? Because he's the best arm-wrestler, of course. Toxic masculinity isn't really into visionary leadership or good administrative skills, I guess. It's more about forcibly pushing another guy's arm into the table. Insecure leaders are well-known to hire weak-willed boors as their right-hand men. Behold, exhibit A. The accountant isn't always there for the bloodbath like he was today, but ain't no bloodbaths going down unless somebody's trying to stack up a dollar or two. These guys are here to look menacing until it's their turn to become a corpse for the brotherhood. Prospects for promotion are looking dim, gentlemen. The devil knows there's no greater tool for evil than a man hollowed out by rage. And Richard Horne--shall we call him Dick?--is definitely a serious tool. These men behaving badly may be the stars of the show, but they've got a supporting company of all-too-familiarly fragile fellas appearing on stage both before and after them throughout Part Thirteen. Let's meet this ship of fools, shall we? Vegas, casinos, showgirls, cocktails, millions, conga lines. The brothers Mitchum have full garages and empty lives. It's not his fault. Duncan Todd is just following orders. He's a manchild and a crashing bore, but he's got a square jaw, a stable job, and powerful friends. You know you want to settle for him! There's a big break in the case, but to see it requires a bit of creativity and resolve. Let's just crumple it up and throw that shit away, though, because we know what comes next. You know the drill: he's the sort of guy who's crestfallen when his wife won't rape and torture the man he is about to murder in front of his own child. Why does the crooked cop always, ALWAYS look like Harvey Keitel? He thought he could make a little money chumming up to the mob and now it's time for the crying game. Poor, poor Anthony! So, so sad! He used to be really good at sports and now he owns the place, so naturally he walks on water and can do no wrong. This megalomaniacal narcissist never met a vulnerable woman he wouldn't offer Kool Aid--or in this case, Huckleberry extract with pure water. He's got a heart of gold and he's totally turned things around, but he used to be a philandering, drug-running killer. He's got TPS reports and a hot date with your name on it, but his spray tan will stain the sofa. Exercise caution! Confused? Need a listening ear? A shoulder to cry on? Professor Existentialism 101 will explain everything you need to know in just a few short, scintillating lifetimes. Now you too can pull yourself together thanks to his expert help! Not recommended for the comatose or catatonic! He had a hard childhood and a difficult life, which makes it okay that he's emotionally unavailable and his background singers are half his age. He never learned to access or express his feelings adequately and now he's alone eating takeout with a carved wooden bear head. Ding! Ding! Ding! And now for the main event! You know there's toxic masculinity coming because the jacked truck it drives just pulled into the abandoned warehouse full of violent, overgrown children with guns galore and no impulse control. What could go wrong? Part Twelve was...well...a little odd. From the glacial pacing of many key scenes, to some glaring discontinuities, to the inclusion of scenes that collectively mention up to ten new characters we've never seen nor heard from to date, to apparent reruns of Roadhouse bands and Dr. Amp's vlog, to bizarre manicures, Part Twelve offered us plenty of head-scratching opportunities. Just what we should expect, I guess, from an episode that has the same "red light" (upper left corner) establishing shot of the Hotel Mayfair at the beginning and right near the end. Here are a baker's dozen of the things I found puzzling over the course of this oddball episode--twelve proper plus a bonus! What oddities did you notice? 1. Discontinuous wine consumption--To toast Special Agent Tammy Preston's joining the elite ranks of the Blue Rose Task Force, Albert pours Gordon a tiny little glass of wine which proceeds to morph into a full glass just seconds later. It's right out of the gate and pretty glaring, but not obviously meaningful in any way. Just sloppy editing, or something more? 2. Diane's weird "Let's Rock!" hand gesture--The chilling Lodge soundtrack and Diane's hardened expression were creepy enough without the addition of this inscrutable hand gesture. Have we seen it before? Not exactly, to my knowledge, but it reminds me of Red's preoccupation with hand "guns". 3. Discontinuity at the convenience store--Sarah Palmer's terrifying trip to the convenience store witnesses a chilling change of scenery behind the clerk shortly after Sarah says "The room seems different." and "Men are coming." At first, there seems to be another checkout line behind the young woman at the counter, but after Sarah's warning, just seconds later, there appears to be another wall of wine and liquor on the opposite side of the store from where Sarah picked up her Smirnoff. It could just be that the camera angles are different, but I worked pretty hard to try to find a way for that huge wine section to be behind the woman, and I couldn't imagine how it would work. 4. Two incidental turkey references in two weeks?!--Sarah Palmer freaks out about the addition of turkey jerky to the options at the checkout and asks "Is it smoked?". Just last week in Part Eleven, we saw a symbol of a turkey entering diseased corn, calling to mind Laura Palmer's bizarre claim to James Hurley that she's "Long gone, like a turkey in the corn" in Fire Walk With Me. 5. Time out-of-joint in Vegas?--In an episodes with so many early discontinuities, I had my eyes peeled for other temporal strangeness and was surprised to see Sonny Jim Jones wearing exactly the same outfit in Part Twelve (top photo) as he was wearing in Part Five (bottom photo): notice that the shirt, jeans, and shoes are the same. 6. Something in the kitchen?--What on earth was that menacing ruckus in the kitchen that prompted Hawk's concern that someone else might be in the house? As if the preternaturally loud ceiling fans weren't terrifying enough! 7. Kriscol's plasma?--Who is Kriscol and why is a scene devoted to telling him to keep his blood? I loved the scene, because I'll watch anything and everything I can get with Carl Rodd in it, but we already know from any number of amazing scenes (consoling the dead hit-and-run boy's mother, helping Shelly in the clutch, etc.) that he is a supremely good guy (so there's no need to reestablish that), and we know nothing whatsoever about Kriscol, so it just seemed a bit gratuitous somehow unless something important is going to come of it. But what? 8. Ben Horne's reticence--Why does Ben Horne neglect to tell Sheriff Truman that Richard beat up his own grandmother before going on the lam? What does he stand to gain from withholding information on Richard from the Sheriff's department? Or is he just too disoriented to keep his wits about him? He seems to recall that two-tone lime and forest green bike with the fat tires well enough. 9. Gordon Cole's French connection--Far be it from me to criticize Director Cole's late night company, but the strangeness of this scene was on a par with the "Lil" scene in Fire Walk With Me where Cole and Desmond communicate about the Teresa Banks case with the unorthodox aid of a dancer in a red dress with a blue rose on her lapel. I was thinking of Lil the entire time, but after this woman finally succeeded in making her dramatic exit to the bar, the uncanny interchange between Cole and Albert, with all the talk of mothers and daughters and turnip farms and all the blinking and intense eye communication sealed the deal: this entire scene was in code, right? 10. Pretty much everything about Audrey and Charlie but especially all the new characters!--Aside from the fact that this was not the triumphal return for Audrey that many had envisioned (though I still think Sherilyn Fenn killed it), and that her "lawfully wedded husband" Charlie is probably not the guy you'd pick to win a contest of suiters involving a head-to-head with the likes of Special Agent Dale Cooper or John Justice Wheeler, who the bloody blue blazes are "Tina," "Paul," and "Chuck?" and what is going on in this storyline that seems to be arriving just a little too late in the game? When you add these three who's-its from Audrey and Charlie's bizarre love pentagon to "Abbie," "Natalie," the less-than-fully-flourishing-but-at-least-now-free-from-house-arrest "Trick," and their pals absentee "Angela," the double-timing philanderer "Clark," and his side project "Mary," you've got a soap-opera full of brand new characters with just a third of the series to go. Not sure who all these folks are, but they're probably all super tight with Kriscol. Or maybe they're the people stiffing Kriscol for his work around the New Fat Trout. WHO KNOWS?! 11. Dr. Amp reruns already?!--There must have been a writer's strike at the ol' "Where's Your Freedom?" vlog, because virtually all of the footage from Dr. Amp's lengthy appearance was either recycled or just very modestly tweaked from previous appearances. The still below of the good Doc at his broadcast bench is from Part Twelve, but the same sequence appears more or less verbatim in Part Five. Initially, I thought that the Nadine footage was from the same take as well, but double checked to find that she's wearing a different outfit and drinking a different flavor dinner shake in Part Five. 12. Diane's left thumbnail--We've borne witness to a fair number of odd things happening on the left lately, but what in the world is going on with Diane's left thumbnail? Is that a covert camera lens? Or some sort of gem-implant? Brrrrrrr. Chilly. BONUS: Chromatics (again) playing instrumental covers? I can't get enough of Chromatics ("Shadow" is basically still the soundtrack of my life two months later) so I ain't exactly complaining, but it is a little weird that in this particular outing, the band is not even playing one of their own songs, but rather an instrumental cover of one of Chromatics' bassist and producer Johnny Jewel's other bands' songs, namely "Saturday" by Desire. The lyrics of the song they aren't singing, though, certainly would have added to the chill if they had sung them. Among the more ominous lines are "Baby, someone is stealing you at night." and "I've got a bad feeling about Saturday."
"Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights." --David Lynch (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, 127, 2006) "Twin Peaks is still out there. Haunted, full of shivers and delights, a candle glimpsed in a log cabin window, while passing through a deep and darkening wood. Some dreams survive. --Mark Frost (Foreword to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, iii, 2011) Hawk's discussion with Sheriff Truman of his "very old but always current" map in Part Eleven (25:10-30:08) is a crucial and most illuminating addition to the guiding Twin Peaks mythology surrounding fire. This scene thus offers the perfect prompting to revisit some other prominent pieces of the fire puzzle in Twin Peaks, illuminate them in view of the new information that Hawk presents to Sheriff Truman, and finally set them into the broader context of the rich mythological and evolutionary history of fire in human experience. Along the way, I hope to shed some light on a handful of puzzling questions about Twin Peaks, including those of (1) how the need for fire betrays a fundamental lack at the heart of the human experience, (2) how fire transforms the human relation to time (specifically, how fire illuminates "the darkness of future past"), (3) how this transformed relation to time expands human freedom (and thus feeds the "magician's longing to see"), (4) how the desire to "walk with fire" is indicative of humanity's ambiguous placement "between two worlds", and (5) how fire (and its kinetic analogues, such as electricity) are functioning in the valuation of good and evil and the conflict between them in Twin Peaks. The symbol of fire is ubiquitous throughout the narrative of Twin Peaks, showing up in prominent ways in each of its filmic iterations, including both seasons of the original run (1990-1991), the feature film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and now abundantly in Twin Peaks-The Return (2017), as well as in its textual supplements, including Jennifer Lynch's The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) and Mark Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016). (Though some might reject the idea that The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer deserves inclusion among primary sources overseen by the series creators, I take it that Lynch and Frost view the diary as of a piece with their work (in spirit, at least, if not always in literal detail) given that each grants the diary his imprimatur in a dedicated foreword to the new edition issued in 2011. Frost calls the book "another bright pane in [Twin Peaks'] hall of mirrors" (iii) and Lynch goes even further, claiming that "Jennifer Lynch found The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer in the heart and mind of Laura herself." (iv)) Though the symbol of fire is handled in nuanced ways throughout these respective treatments, it seems fair to observe a trajectory across the works from earliest to latest in which fire is initially most often associated with evil (or at least antisocial transgression of established norms) but comes to be portrayed increasingly in a more ambiguous light as an instrument of great power that, while very dangerous and susceptible to corruption, can be used for good or ill. More concretely, where early works such as the original series, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and Fire Walk With Me explore fire primarily as a symbol of evil, contemporary incarnations of the world of Twin Peaks such as The Secret History and The Return give us a more complicated picture in which fire, though often a corrupting force, is potentially also a force for good, and even perhaps a primordial source of goodness. It is fitting, somehow, that things have gotten a little more complicated in the twenty-five-plus years since Twin Peaks shattered the innocence of television and ushered in an era of experimentation now fully into middle age and at the height of its powers. Perhaps the quintessential reference to fire in the original series takes place during Cooper's dream in the third episode of season one, where Mike--the one-armed-man--performs his infamous soliloquy over a slumbering Cooper, introducing BOB and acquainting us with the incendiary yearnings of the people from another place ("inhabiting spirits"), the dwelling where they live, and Mike's divine conversion away from a life chasing fire with his devilish former partner: 'Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chants out between two worlds: 'Fire, walk with me.' We lived among the people, I think you say "convenience store." We lived above it. I mean it like it is, like it sounds. I too have been touched by the devilish one, tattoo on the left shoulder. Ohhh, but when I saw the face of God, I was changed. Took the entire arm off. My name is Mike. His name is Bob." (S1S03, 40:17-42:00) Seconds later, BOB announces his nefarious intent to "catch you with my death bag" and promises "to kill again," as the flames on a ring of twelve candles surrounding a mysterious mound of dirt flicker and suddenly extinguish into thin columns of smoke. When Cooper, Harry, Hawk and Cole finally apprehend Mike's host, Philip Gerard, and deprive Gerard of his antipsychotic Haloperidol prescription (following the Giant's clue that "without chemicals he points"), Mike emerges and spills the beans on his former partner, describing BOB as a parasitic inhabiting spirit who feeds on "fear and the pleasures", consuming and dissipating the life-force of his host like a raging fire turns wood to ash and smoke. (42:04-46:30) We get a much more intimate and terrifying picture of BOB as a consuming fire in The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which rocketed onto the New York Times Bestsellers List in 1990 propelled by unanticipated public obsession with the question "Who killed Laura Palmer?" in the wake of the scintillating first season. What readers found in the diary, however, was not the coffee, quirk, and teen angst many sought, but the harrowing consumption unto death of a brilliant and mercilessly abused young woman who fueled BOB's fire by cleaving herself in two, living a double life of school and volunteerism by day and drug-trafficking and sex work by night to escape (and explore) the inferno within her. Described in her own words in a series of journal entries logged from her twelfth birthday to just before her death at age eighteen, Laura's exposure to fire comes in many forms, from the kindling of her desire to be touched at age thirteen while standing naked before three older men in the flickering shadows of a campfire (34), to the sparks of a psychic bond forged in shared dreams with Margaret Lanterman who mysteriously carries a log since her husband--a fireman--was tragically killed fighting a blaze (45), to the wildfire of insanity-inducing conversations with BOB himself (or at least the consumptive self-loathing he burned into her), whose words she records exclusively in capital letters: Laura: "When you first came to me, I was not doing bad things! I was a baby girl! I was nothing...I was all goodness...I was happy!" BOB: "INCORRECT." Laura: "I could talk to you forever and never learn a thing." BOB: "SOMEONE OF WISDOM IS ALWAYS MORE DIFFICULT TO COMMUNICATE WITH. THIS IS THE FIRE YOU MUST WALK THROUGH." Laura: "I don't want to hear about fire." BOB: "THEN YOU DON'T WANT THE ANSWER." Laura: "Who are you...really?" BOB: "I AM WHAT YOU FEAR I COULD BE." (156) The vision of fire that emerges in these early works is one of a consumptive, destructive, even evil force, one that lures us in with bright, promising sparks of illumination, discovery, and exhilarating self-transcendence only then to catch flame and blaze into a blinding inferno of forbidden knowledge, derangement, and annihilating self-transgression. This vision of fire comes into heart-rendingly sharp relief at the decisive moment in Fire Walk With Me when Margaret Lanterman intercepts Laura on her way into the Roadhouse just hours before her death in an abandoned train car in the woods. In a scene that is all the more poignant for those who have learned from the Secret Diary of the special psychic bond the two share, Margaret puts her hand lovingly to Laura's forehead like a vigilant mother checking for a fever, and offers a terrible beauty of a lament: "When this kind of fire starts, it is very difficult to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy." Twelve hours later, Pete Martell finds her ashen corpse wrapped in plastic. Jeopardy, indeed. If Lanterman's vision of Laura's imminent immolation is bleak, however, it is fascinating to observe that she seems to acknowledge the possibility of a different species of fire ("When this type of fire starts..."), or at least the potential for a more genuine relationship to fire reserved for the wise and mindful--those who have already pruned the tender boughs of innocence through experience and taken adequate precautions against the flames rising too fast, against becoming fuel for a blaze they naively or rapaciously tried to use as a tool. To make matters still more intriguing, in addition to her special connection with Laura, Lanterman essentially functions as an oracle for the two characters in the series who most convincingly lend themselves to being interpreted as exemplars of this different, wiser, more mindful relationship to fire: Major Garland Briggs and Deputy Chief Tommy "Hawk" Hill. Though Briggs and Hill will get considerably more attention in this essay, it is worth mentioning as well that Lanterman shares a less oracular though no less profound connection with a third potential exemplar of this relation, Carl Rodd--owner of the New Fat Trout Trailer Park--who was abducted as a child with Lanterman and another classmate (since deceased) in the woods outside Owl Cave in 1947. (The Secret History of Twin Peaks, 142-151) Serendipitously, the two primary sources of Twin Peaks that remain to be discussed--The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks-The Return--map nicely onto Briggs and Hawk respectively: Briggs turns out to be "the Archivist" who compiled the dossier that constitutes the former; and Hawk has emerged in the latter as the primary investigator and interpreter--with regular guidance from Lanterman--of the BOB-fire connection between Leland and Laura Palmer and Special Agent Dale Cooper. What's more, while Briggs and Hawk are similar in their expressions of a wiser relationship to fire--one that recognizes the value of its utility under proper care but respects its destructive power and even wisely fears its employment beyond its proper limits--Briggs and Hawk take decidedly different approaches to modeling this relationship--approaches that are well-calibrated to their unique personalities, vocations, talents, and gifts. Where Briggs is an analytically-minded scientist, strategist, documentarian, and moralist, Hawk is an intuitively-minded artist, spiritualist, seer, and storyteller. On paper, they couldn't look more different from one another. What they share in common resonates on a deeper plane, not attributes of being but a fundamental way of being: each has rigorously come to know himself through the careful discernment of his gifts and limits, thus enabling him genuinely to be open to what the world and others have to teach, and vigilantly to make ready for opportunities that the cosmos puts in front of him to gear his unique perspective and talents into the flourishing of the whole. That Briggs knows himself intimately and has transcended the facade of toxic, grasping masculinity that consigns many men of his station to a life of aggressive one-dimensional fragility couldn't be more obvious. From his freely shared vision of light for his embattled son Bobby to his rejection of vainglorious careerism (both of which are back at center stage in Part Nine of The Return), Briggs is a man who is both intellectually and emotionally clear about what matters to him, why it matters, and what in particular he is called to do about it. These qualities are on open display in his fascinating interchange with Lanterman over coffee at the R&R in Episode Nine of Season One. In what appears to be a test of character designed to discern whether Briggs is worthy of receiving prophecy from the log, she observes his medals and says "You wear shiny objects on your chest. Are you proud?". His reply is classic Briggs--"Achievement is its own reward. Pride obscures it."--and serves as intuitive confirmation to Lanterman that her log has found its proper audience. Its message to Briggs? "Deliver the message." Briggs understands, as open to taking counsel from a log as he was to welcoming its wonderful and strange bearer to coffee. As the overseer of Project Bluebook--a top-secret government investigation of paranormal activity around Twin Peaks and far beyond--Briggs is well versed in compiling and delivering messages. One such message is the 350-page dossier published in The Secret History of Twin Peaks--an archive that traces the mysteries of Owl Cave across time from Meriwether Lewis's journey through the fire and into the cave on October 1, 1805 to Briggs' prognostication in 1989 of a present-day journey there that Hawk, Bobby, and Frank Truman (as well as, we anticipate, Gordon, Albert, Tammy, and Diane and the guests of honor, Cooper and Mr. C.) will make on October 1 in The Return. The realization that dawns on Briggs in his final entry in the dossier on March 28, 1989, just minutes after meeting with Cooper (we now know it was Mr. C.) and just a day before he allegedly died in a fire at Bluebook's Listening Point Alpha (we now know he escaped the fire into "hibernation" in "The Zone"), is this: though he had believed that the transmission he received "from somewhere in the surrounding woods of Ghostwood Forest" (353) just before his abduction--those strings of numbers intermittently interrupted by the words "Cooper/Cooper/Cooper"--was an indication that Cooper would replace the recently deceased Douglas Milford as his partner in Project Bluebook, the meeting with Cooper (Mr. C.) made it clear to him that "the message holds the answer, just as I thought, but I've misinterpreted it. Protocols are in place. I must act quickly." Among those quickly taken actions, surely, was the sending of a message to the future that only Betty Briggs could deliver, only Bobby Briggs could retrieve and decipher, and only Hawk could properly receive as a dire warning that a malevolent double of Cooper would be confronting them there with intent to take possession of black fire. (358-359) Major Briggs, you see, is wise enough to know that no one can harness the fire alone, that the very best one can do is to open the way for those in one's circle of influence to discover their unique paths to it and through it in challenging and often mysterious concert and community with others--an approach precisely the opposite of BOB's workings in Laura: selfish, secretive, isolating, rapacious, degrading, and exhaustively consumptive. When one considers that Laura had the steam, barely beyond girlhood, even with BOB hellbent on consuming her, to feed the hungry (Meals on Wheels), heal the sick (Johnny Horne), comfort the imprisoned (Harold Smith), and even love her enemies (the Secret Diary contains some shocking passages in which Laura, apparently clear-headedly, describes degradations visited on her as opportunities to bring mothering love to dark places and broken people--"sleazy men who are actually crying babies," 38, 112), it is not particularly surprising that she (or someone very like her) should be chosen by the oldest of the old for redemptive work of cosmic significance. It's enough to make one wonder whether there was more to BOB's targeting of her than the just the happenstance that she is Leland's daughter, whether perhaps Leland was targeted because he would be Laura's father, whether the largely secret, mostly isolated, but nonetheless fiercely resolute and relentless fire-fighting unto death of Laura's childhood is preparation for an enigmatic chapter yet to unfold, a resurrection into a community of fellow fire-fighters, all now converging--as Lanterman says to Hawk, "there is fire where you are going!". Perhaps we should try to imagine our way to a radical transformation of vision--a shift in our gestalt from a lost girl full of dirty secrets to a young woman learning to preserve and unfold a great mystery; from a charred husk of a man enabling BOB to consume his daughter to a father so determined and loving that he finds a way to break through forty years of deep dissociation at the moment on which everything hinges and knowingly end the earthly life of the person he loves most in the world ("Don't make me do this!") in order to save her from a fate far worse than death (possession by BOB, the end game from the beginning) and preserve the possibility for her to finish her appointed task in another place and time. What if these temporal tragedies that we have received always and only as unspeakable secrets shelter deeper, other-worldly mysteries with redemptive possibilities we have scarcely imagined? And what would it be like to learn to experience the world at large in this way? The significance of this crucial difference between secrets and mysteries is powerfully conjured by Garland Briggs at the decisive moment in the dossier when he turns away from discussions of Lewis and Clark and the Nez Percé to cataloging the events in and around Twin Peaks traceable to BOB (whose first known host seems to have been a grifter and failed gold miner known as "Denver Bob Hobbes," 58-65). Says Briggs on the outset of this new section of the dossier: "Moving forward in time, it is important that we learn to distinguish between mysteries and secrets. Mysteries precede humankind, envelop us and draw us forward into exploration and wonder. Secrets are the work of humankind, a covert and often insidious way to gather, withhold or impose power. Do not confuse the pursuit of one with the manipulation of the other." (Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, 58.) There is no more perfect segue into illuminating the pivotal discussion of fire between Hawk and Truman that begins with the displacement of a computer at center screen by the unfurling of an ancient map. Staring into his screen, Truman gazes at the secret location, the coordinates for which (as we know even if he doesn't) Mr. C. is killing people with impunity in order to discover--targeting anyone with even minimal utility (Darya, Phyllis Hastings, Ray, Warden Murphy, Duncan Todd, eventually Hutch and Chantal, and who knows who else), objectifying them into pure instruments of his will, exploiting them until their utility is exhausted, and then annihilating them. Of this secret location harboring an occult power for the sake of which many lives are being desecrated, Truman says: "By my reckoning, this is where we're headed. But there's no road. The road is gone." Low and behold, in the age of information, we have arrived at a location that Google maps can't countenance and that civil engineers can't help us traverse. But where the power of technology to lay secrets bare ends, there mythology can elevate and focus our vision on the deeper mysteries. Says Hawk, "The information that Major Briggs gave got me thinking. We'll understand a lot more when I explain my map. This map is very old but it is always current. It's a living thing." If there's a better brief description of mythology than "a very old but always current living thing," I'm not aware of it, and Hawk proceeds to deliver a master course in illuminating figurative seeing: Truman: "Looks like a campfire. What is this?" Hawk: "It's not a campfire. It's a fire symbol." Truman: "What's that mean?" Hawk: "It's a type of fire. More like modern day electricity." Truman: "Good?" Hawk: "It depends upon the intention. The intention behind the fire. The Major also gave us a date. The day after tomorrow. If you read these stars, you find that same date. It refers you to here [*points to corrupted corn*]." Truman: "What is that?" Hawk: "It's corn, it's fertility, but it's black, diseased or unnatural. Death. If you put these two symbols together [*points to fire and black corn*], you get this [*points to black fire*]. Truman: "Black fire." Hawk: "Correct." Truman: "We saw this [*points to the symbol that is similar to Mr. C.'s modified ace of spades*] on that little slip of paper we took out of Major Briggs' tube. What is that?" Hawk: "Frank, you don't ever want to know about that." Truman: "Really?" Hawk: "Really." Several of Hawk's insights here invite our rapt attention. First, fire is not to be understood literally, but rather as a symbol for a constellation of different phenomena (including "modern day electricity") that grant to human beings the transformative power to convert one form of energy into another, and thus the life-changing freedom to concentrate, store, and deploy that energy as a resource on demand. Second, this transformative power (in whatever form it takes: fire, electricity, oil, fission, etc.) is in itself neither good nor evil; it is--at least at first--an instrument of the intentions of those who wield it, and can thus serve good, evil, or indifferent purposes in keeping with the goals for which it is mobilized. Third, this transformative power is inherently dangerous and potentially transgressive--whatever intentions may lie behind its use, its deployment has the potential to range beyond and thwart those intentions, corrupting and even annihilating the the people and things it was mobilized to sustain and enhance (often even without our realizing it until we're choking on the smoke of its unintended consequences). Fourth, there are uses of this power and mysteries at its origin that the wise should never even contemplate much less attempt to appropriate or control on peril of unleashing oblivion--not just annihilation of the ones suffering or wielding the power, but the total effacement and forgetting of the world as such and everything good, true, and beautiful within it. (That Hawk explicates these insights by recourse to the symbols of corn and "black fire"--a metaphor resonant with engine oil, among many other things including dark magic and the left-hand path--may call to mind our previous discussion of "The Pain and Sorrow of Convenience: Oil and Corn as Avatars of Atomic-Age Suffering in Twin Peaks.") Having now blazed a trail through some highlights of fire's employment in the narrative of Twin Peaks, we may gain some concluding insight into the mysteries of fire therein by situating this narrative in view of some older stories about its transformative power. Fire, as it happens, is one of humanity's most ancient and abiding symbols of the essential lack at the heart of human existence, the ambiguity of human longing that arises from that lack, and the destructive potential of inordinate human desire--desperate wanting that obsessively yearns to possess what cannot wisely or rightly be owned in hopes of filling the insatiable lack at the heart of human being. To bring these features of fire into view, we'll consult two very different ancient stories that are nonetheless remarkably similar in their implications: the Greek myth of Prometheus (as told by Ingrid and Edgar Parin D'Allaire) and a rendering of fire's role in the history of human evolution (as told by Yuval Noah Harari). I'll let them speak in their own voices in the following two long quotations and then follow up to tease out a few final insights. Prometheus Brings Fire to Humankind (D'Allaire's Book of Greek Myths, 71-72) "Man's creator and his best friend was the Titan Prometheus. Zeus had given Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus, the task of repopulating the earth after all living creatures had perished in the early battles of the gods. He gave the two brothers great measures of gifts to bestow upon their creations, and they went down to earth and began to make men and beasts out of river clay. Wise Prometheus modeled men with great care in the shape of the gods. Epimetheus rapidly made all kinds of animals and without any foresight he lavished the good gifts upon them. When Prometheus had finished shaping man, he found that there were few of the good gifts left. Animals could run faster, see, smell, and hear better, and had much more endurance. Besides, they were kept snug in their warm coats of fur, while men shivered in the cold nights. Prometheus was sorry for mankind and he went to Zeus and asked him if he might have some of the sacred fire for his poor creations. But Zeus said no, fire belonged to the gods alone. Prometheus could not bear to see his people suffer and he decided to steal fire, though he knew that Zeus would punish him severely. He went up to Olympus, took a glowing ember from the sacred hearth, and hid it in a hollow stalk of fennel. He carried it down to earth, gave it to mankind, and told them never to let the light from Olympus die out. No longer did men shiver in the cold of night, and the beasts feared the light of the fire and did not dare to attack them. A strange thing happened: as men lifted their eyes from the ground and watched the smoke from their fires spiraling upward, their thoughts rose with it up to the heavens. They began to wonder and think, and were no longer earth-bound clods." Fire and Evolution (Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 12-13) "Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens, by contrast, is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. [...] A significant step on the way to the top was the domestication of fire, [which gave humans] a dependable source of light and warmth, and a deadly weapon against prowling lions. [...] A carefully managed fire could turn impassable barren thickets into prime grasslands teeming with game. [...] But the best thing fire did was cook. The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens. Fire also opened the first significant gulf between man the other animals. [...] When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force. Unlike [other animals], humans could choose when and where to ignite a flame, and they were able to exploit fire for any number of tasks. Most importantly, the power of fire was not limited by the form, structure or strength of the human body. A single woman with a flint or fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours. The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come." For two stories so different in their orientations to the human experience (one mythological, one scientific), the parallels here are astonishing. Both accounts portray human beings in their most primordial state not as lords of creation but as originally deficient creatures among other superior animals. Both accounts position the transformative power of fire in terms of both the leverage it gives humanity over other animals (elevating them to a position somewhere between animality and divinity-"between two worlds") and the possibilities it opens for abstract thought (promoting the growth of "jumbo brains" for higher forms of "wondering and thinking"). And both accounts intimate the potentially destructive power of fire--that fire is destined to be both a blessing and curse, and a curse precisely because the blessing unfolds as the quintessential temptation to want too much of a (potentially) good thing. The insight I'm most interested in here is the import of fire for the dawning of abstract thought. What fire offers humanity in raising its gaze to the heavens is, both literally and figuratively, a fundamentally changed relationship to time that vastly expands human freedom. Whereas creatures of instinct and habit must live in the small, familiar orbit of subsistence--doing little more perhaps than meeting their most basic needs for food, water, companionship, and reproduction (if they're lucky!)--creatures who have big brains and the time, convenience, and leisure purchased from cooking by fire, extending their productive and waking hours by torch-light, and sleeping soundly under cover of fire without worry of a hungry lion attack may begin to imagine their lives as otherwise than merely subsistent. Whereas once there were only pasts, the urgent inheritances of biology, vaguely understood but not explicitly known, pushing one inexorably into first order desires to meet the most pressing present need, there is suddenly now the opening of future-past: the ability to project oneself in the present into a time that has not yet obtained, hypothetically survey the possibilities, risks, and rewards for being in that time, and then orient oneself by way of that hypothetical projection into the state of being that imagines. No longer enslaved to the endless repetition of mere subsistence, one has the means at one's disposal to transcend through imagination, to accrue action-guiding experience not by actually undergoing it (and thus assuming all the real risks before one can anticipate the outcome) but by imagining it, eliminating those prospects that fail to withstand hypothetical scrutiny, and then acting in anticipation of the desired outcome.
As this ability to "see in the darkness of future-past" grows ever more capacious and efficient, and one's imagined goals and hopes become ever more ambitious, and the means at one's disposal to convert, store, and deploy energy continue to increase apace, it is only a matter of time until the "longing to see" outstrips anything resembling an authentic or legitimate need. I'll have more to say about that problem (and how it illuminates the lives of any number of characters in The Return) in a future post on "Mindfulness in Twin Peaks." Stay tuned! Clocking in at a robust thirty-three minutes of airtime out of the roughly ten hours we've been back in Twin Peaks so far, the Roadhouse is a major presence in The Return. Its outsized role in the new series, however, is far from universally appreciated, both in the sense of being liked, on the one hand, and--as I shall argue here--in the sense of being understood, on the other. Along with the slow pace of the "Cooper in Vegas" narrative and the demanding abstractions of Parts Three (Cooper's journey back to Earth) and Eight (the atomic blast at White Sands), the prominence of the Roadhouse and the precious time allotted to the songs performed therein is one of the most carped-about aspects of the new series. The carping reached a crescendo this week after Part Ten ended with a Roadhouse juggernaut--Rebekah Del Rio's seven-minute performance of "No Stars"--in a comparatively short episode (just over 54 minutes) that many hoped would grace us with Special Agent Dale Cooper's long-awaited awakening from somnambulance in Vegas or at least a first appearance of the much-beloved Audrey Horne. The three most common complaints one hears about the Roadhouse are that (1) it's too commercial ("What is Lynch doing carrying water for hipster bands?!"), (2) it's not my kind of music ("I don't really like these songs and it's a pain to sit through them!"), and--one suspects, most importantly--(3) it's a waste of precious time ("Why are we languishing away with Rebekah Del Rio for seven minutes when we haven't seen the old Coop or Audrey yet?!"). I sympathize with folks who have lodged these complaints. The Roadhouse does seem a bit like a band showcase at times. I don't personally love all the songs (though I do confess to loving some of them). And knowing from recent experience how much action Lynch and Frost can pack into thirty-three minutes, it's hard to resist weighing the opportunity cost of Roadhouse performances in lost nostalgia for Coop and Audrey and Big Ed's Gas Farm and pie. Notwithstanding my sympathy for these complaints, however, I think they all misfire. In what follows, I'll explain why I think these complaints are misguided, briefly sketch what I take to be a more productive way to engage the Roadhouse scenes, and set up a therapeutic exercise that might help viewers--Roadhouse lovers and haters alike--to make the most of what these scenes have to offer. The complaint that the Roadhouse scenes are a glorified form of hipster-friendly product placement, while tempting at a time when twee-loving culture vultures are the new yuppies, is fundamentally out of step with Lynch's aesthetic. Heineken and Pabst wars in Blue Velvet notwithstanding, Lynch famously abhors the trend toward using films as promotional instruments of any kind (see above: "total fucking bullshit!") and cares notoriously little for "what's hot" in terms of broader cultural trends. He admits to working on the occasional commercial to make money, but is adamant that the commercialization of film "putrifies the environment." Given that what attracted Lynch to Showtime in the first place was having total creative control and a budget that precluded the need for any kind of commercial pandering, those who wish to frame the Roadhouse as some sort of sell-out to hipsterism face the uphill battle of explaining why in blue blazes Lynch would choose to engage in a practice he openly despises--"to putrify the environment," as he so scornfully puts it, of a work of art decades in the making with no commercial pressure to do so. The Roadhouse just ain't about showcasing hipster bands on any reasonable interpretation. The complaint that the Roadhouse scenes confront us with songs we don't particularly like, while perhaps perfectly true for some of us and perfectly fair for those approaching Twin Peaks as mere entertainment, is not a legitimate reason for those approaching Twin Peaks as a work of art to eschew the duty of interpreting these scenes in the context of the work as a whole. Obviously, if you're watching just for fun and the show feels like being stuck in a carpool with a Smashmouth fanatic, then get out the car. But if you think of yourself as aesthetically bent or critically astute or even open to a little interpretive challenge, expressing frustration with the Roadhouse because you don't like the songs is a little like hating on Guernica because grey's not your favorite color or because "it's not very realistic." The challenge of the Roadhouse scenes is to see beyond the particular songs and bands to their resonance within the work of art as a whole: how are the Roadhouse scenes inviting us to see, hear, feel, and imagine the world of Twin Peaks differently than we might without them, and how do those modes of seeing, hearing, feeling, and imagining illuminate that world (or fail to illuminate it)? That a work of art fails in some way is inevitable, and you might well conclude, after a serious engagement with these scenes, that they are an artistic flop. Be that as it may, the Roadhouse ain't ultimately about you and your fave bands. The complaint that the Roadhouse is a waste of precious time is a bit more complicated, since it is conceivable that one could engage the Roadhouse scenes on their own terms in view of their place in the work as a whole and come to the conclusion, as noted above, that they fail to do anything beautiful or interpretively important, or at least that the opportunity costs of indulging the beautiful, significant things they accomplish outweigh the time devoted to them; one could perhaps make a cogent case that Twin Peaks would have been a more beautiful or compelling work of art without the Roadhouse scenes, or with some other aesthetic strategy in place for accomplishing the intended effects. It seems fair to suggest, though, that if one is aiming at a charitable interpretation of the work--if one is attempting to remain genuinely open to seeing, hearing, feeling, and imaging the world that the artist has painstakingly created for the viewer and invited her to explore and to wonder at and to relish--the conclusion that the Roadhouse scenes are a waste of precious time is one that should not be reached summarily, on a whim, at the merest whiff of indifference to the particular songs, or aesthetic taste offended, or narrative expectations thwarted. So suppose one is genuinely open to idea that the Roadhouse matters to the work of art--that it's not ultimately just a showcase for "hipster" music, or a video jukebox featuring records you love or don't, or a sonic filler that displaces potentially more important narrative "content". What reasons do we have for thinking that the Roadhouse is important--that careful aesthetic attention to it will repay our time and effort? Here we can point to reasons that are both external and internal to Twin Peaks itself. Externally, we have Lynch's four-decade commitment to marrying film, music, and sound in revelatory, revolutionary ways that have transformed the medium--ways about which entire books have been written. In the foreword to Beyond the Beyond: Music from the Films of David Lynch, Kristine McKenna describes Lynch's uncanny ability to intuit just the right song for illuminating an image or narrative: "Who can explain the alchemy of a song, or what causes it to combust in the human heart? Lynch doesn't question it or try to explain why; he just knew that no other song could be playing when Pete got his first glimpse of the smoldering beauty, Alice, in Lost Highway. [...] From the grinding of a rusty gear to a symphony, Lynch is tuned in to the sounds of life on earth. His receptors are acutely sensitive and unfiltered, and he makes no value judgment of the sounds or the songs he hears; they simply fascinate him, and he knows how to pair them with images that transform them into something new. I can see him, one ear pressed to the ground, listening to the distant groan of shifting tectonic plates, the other ear pointed heavenward, hearing strains of a popular song he loved as a teenager. He listens, marvels at what he hears, then brings it all back home to the rest of us." (Beyond the Beyond, 8, 11) McKenna refers above to the use of Lou Reed's "This Magic Moment" in Lost Highway, but we could just as easily cite the use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren" in the same film, or Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet, or Rebekah Del Rio's "Llorando" ("Crying") in Mulholland Drive (more on that in a minute), or a dozen others. Music always matters--and matters a lot, too--in the films of David Lynch. Borrowing the words of the one-armed man, Philip Gerard, we might say that Lynch "means it like it is, like it sounds," insofar as the meaning of being in Lynch's films--the significance of what is appearing before us--is so inextricably tied to how it sounds that it sometimes feels like things come into existence through and as music. Internally, we find a preponderance of evidence that music--and in particular, music in the Roadhouse--matters a great deal in Twin Peaks. In first run of the series, Julee Cruise's "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" and "The World Spins" (see above) are the gateway into the unforgettable scene in which the Giant appears to inform Cooper and the rest of us that "it is happening again" as Maddie is murdered. And now that it is happening yet again here in 2017, what are the Giant's (or at least his close relative, ???????'s) very first words to Cooper and to us in the very first scene featuring new footage? "Listen to the sounds." Among those sounds, so far, are thirty-three minutes of Roadhouse performances, the culminating seven minutes of which--just this past Sunday--are a performance by none other than Rebekah Del Rio, the very diva whose heart-rending performance of the aforementioned "Llorando" at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive (embedded below) delivered a life-shattering epiphany to Betty/Diane, the film's tragic protagonist: your nostalgia over the past and your expectations of the future will rob you of the unfathomable richness of the world present before you right now. Those who have seen the film will know that Betty's thwarted expectations of life in Hollywood enslaved her--or rather her alter-ego Diane--to a feedback loop between regrets over the past and anxiety over the future that turns deadly both for her and for the woman she loves. And here in the Roadhouse, we find Rebekah Del Rio saying the same differently, singing of unrequited hopes ("No stars!") for a return to the starry night on which it all began, perhaps alerting us to our own thwarted expectations of life in Twin Peaks--those regrets over the past (Cooper's trapped! Audrey's dead!) and anxieties about the future (No Coop? No Audrey?) that threaten to rob us of the mystery, wonder, and beauty that the film gifts to us right now, with each and every passing week. Assuming there are good reasons to pay close attention to what's going on in the Roadhouse, then, how might the presence of these scenes enhance or even transform our seeing, hearing, feeling, and imagining the world of Twin Peaks? How can these performances aid us in being fully present to what is unfolding before us? I suspect there are many answers to this question and that individual viewers paying close attention are finding their way to all sorts of edifying vistas on the series by way of these performances. My approach has been to see these scenes as functioning somewhat like a chorus in Greek drama--a company of players tangential to the main action that appears on stage at regular intervals for various purposes that are crucial to the advancement of the story and the viewer's orientation within it. In a brief but illuminating post on this topic, Kris Haamer describes the Greek chorus as serving a wide variety of functions, meeting everything from the practical need to pace and space major events in the narrative, to the literary needs of providing commentary on actions and events and guiding the atmosphere and expectations of the audience, to the emotional need of distilling the very essence of the story into an affective experience that the viewer can feel even and especially when the drama cannot adequately convey it through didactic dialogue. In my experience, the Roadhouse has served all of these functions at various times, from Rebekah Del Rio's sage warning above, to the Cactus Blossoms providing transportation back down into the Mississippi mud after a surreal journey into the beyond in Part Three, to Nine Inch Nails anesthetizing me into believing that an edgy if conventional journey into an aging industrial icon's rage would be the highlight of the evening only to propel me moments later into the abstract core of atomic evil in Part Eight, to Chromatics' whispering the unspeakable heart of The Return directly into my spirit at the end of Part Two such that I will never again be without it, nor ever forget where I was and how I felt when I first received it at an illicit screening in an anonymous theater in Los Angeles on May 21, 2017 where there was--at least for a fleeting, transcendent, inexplicable, transgressive moment--no discernible difference between everything that is me and everything that is Twin Peaks and everything that is everything else. The Roadhouse, for me, is about attunement, about a weekly coming-into-resonance with Twin Peaks, as if each performance strikes a tuning fork, drawing me inexorably into the orbit, the mood, the interpretive horizon within which its many gifts have appeared, can appear, and are appearing. I have come to rely on the Roadhouse you see, and to depend on its orienting compass. I missed it dearly in the single standalone episode where we got no help from it, Part Seven--an episode that, bereft of the guiding hand of its chorus, as if reminding us how important the Roadhouse really is by its flaunting its conspicuous absence, begins with a man screaming in abject desperation "I don't know where I am!" and ends in somnambulant disorientation with the song "Sleep Walk" piped into the R&R, where people are disappearing and reappearing seemingly willy nilly. How fascinating that Part Ten appears to function as an orienting opposite of sorts to Part Seven: Jerry Horne knows where he is (or at least that "I've been here before!"), we advance in more linear ways than usual on a host of plot lines, and we get double-time in the Roadhouse, as if Rebekah Del Rio senses the vacuum left by Part Seven and decides to let us in on a major secret as a bonus: until your experience of the now alone is adequate, with no past regrets propping it up and no false hopes motivating it, you will never be present enough to the world for it to reveal itself to you in all its grandeur. I promised, in conclusion, a therapeutic exercise for cultivating deeper appreciation of the Roadhouse. You're probably already onto it, as it's nothing particularly complicated: just a cordial, curated invitation to spend some more intentional time with these performances in the spirit of what Kristine McKenna calls "Lynch's capacity for deep listening"--listening "to each song as a universe unto itself." (Beyond the Beyond: Music from the Films of David Lynch, 7) What follows is a collection of all the Roadhouse performances in the order of their appearance, each with accompanying lyrics beneath the embedded video. When you listen to these songs and reflect upon their lyrics, what is stirred in you? How do you feel? Of what are you personally reminded? Are any of these stirrings such that they allow new revelations to appear from out of the narrative flux? I hope this labor of musical apprehension is as evocative and rewarding for you as I have found it to be! Please share any revelations in the comments! Chromatics, “Shadow” (Part Two, 49:46 ff, approx. 5 minutes) Shadow, take me down Shadow, take me down with you For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time You're in the water I'm standing on the shore Still thinking that I hear your voice Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time At night I'm driving in your car Pretending that we'll leave this town We're watching all the street lights fade And now you're just a stranger's dream I took your picture from the frame And now you're nothing like you seem Your shadow fell like last night's rain For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time Cactus Blossoms, "Mississippi" (Part Three, 56:14 ff, approx. 3 minutes) I'm going down to the sea M-l-S-S-l-S-S-l-P-P I watch the sun yellow and brown Sinking suns in every town My angel sings down to me She's somewhere on the shore waiting for me With her wet hair and sandy gown Singing songs waves of sound There's a dive I know on River Street Go on in and take my seat There's a lot of friends I'll never meet Gonna take a dive off River Street You look different from way down here Like a circus mirror I see flashes, of you on the surface I'm coming up from way down here The water's clear, all I want is to see your face I'm going down to the sea M-l-S-S-l-S-S-l-P-P I watch the sun yellow and brown Sinking suns in every town Au Revoir Simone, "Lark" (Part Four, 55:23 ff, approx. 2.5 minutes) So So long So long ago There wasn't anyone out there I thought I needed to know But no more When I find the day leave my mind in the evening just as the day before I saw the window was open The cool air I don't know what you saw there Don't know what you saw in me Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's understood There's not enough of me I saw that something was broken I've crossed the line I'll point you to a better time A safer place to be Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's done no good Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's done no good Trouble, "Snake Eyes" (Part Five, 47:13 ff, approx. 4 minutes) *instrumental* Sharon Van Etten, "Tarifa" (Part Six, 55:28 ff, approx. 3 minutes) Hit the ground The yard, I found something I could taste your mouth Shut the door Now in the sun tanning You were so just Looking across the sky Can't remember Can't recall No I can't remember anything at all We skipped the sunrise Looking across the grass Said he wanted And not that I'm every It's the same, I could mean you were right Everyone else Hasn't a chance, don't Fail me now Open arms, rest Let's run under Cursing myself at night Slow it was 7 I wish it was 7 all night Tell me when Tell me when is this over? Chewed you out Chew me out when I'm stupid I don't wanna Everyone else pales Send in the owl Tell me I'm not a child You summon Forget about everyone else Fall away somehow To figure it out Nine Inch Nails, "She's Gone Away" (Part Eight, 11:55 ff, approx. 4.5 minutes) You dig in places till your fingers bleed Spread the infection where you spill your seed I can't remember what she came here for I can't remember much of anything anymore She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away Away... A little mouth opened up inside Yeah, 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, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away Away... (Are you still here?) Au Revoir Simone, "A Violent Yet Flammable World" (Part Nine, 54:55 ff, approx. 4 minutes) Oceans shape the sides Touching down in the spaces Soaking from a warm goodbye An early rise offers kindly Tonight I sleep to dream Of a place that's calling me It is always just a dream Still I cannot forget what I have seen The crowd's hard to believe At their faces I'm looking But your feet I'm following In soft steps on a path the way you lead I don't want to lose myself It's a whisper It's a funny thing We fold like icicles on paper shelves It's a pity to appear this way You're flying when your foreign eyes Trace the heights of the city Steaming With rocks and clouds we breathe Violent skies A shock to my own body Speech is wild Alive sacred and sounding Wild From across and beyond, oh far beyond I don't want to lose myself It's a whisper It's a funny thing We fold like icicles on paper shelves It's a pity to appear this way Hold, hold, hold on I swear I saw it somewhere Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow Hold, hold, hold on I swear I saw it somewhere Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow I don't want to lose myself Tonight I sleep to dream of a place that's calling me It's a whisper It is always just a dream It's a funny thing Still I cannot forget what I have seen We fold like icicles on paper shelves With rocks and clouds we breathe, a shock to my own body It's a pity Alive sacred and sounding To appear this way From across and beyond, oh far beyond Rebekah Del Rio, "No Stars" (Part Ten, 46:48 ff, approx. 7 minutes)
My dream is to go to that place You know the one Where it all began on a starry night On a starry night where it all began When we danced With the stars in our eyes The night when it all began When it all began You said hold me Hold me hold me Don't be afraid don't be afraid We're with the stars I saw them in your eyes En tus palabras [trans: in your words] Y en tus besos tus besos [trans: and in your kisses...your kisses] Debajo de una noche [trans: under a night] llena llena de estrellas [trans: full...full of stars] Under the starry night Long ago But now it's a dream Yo vi en tus ojos [trans: I saw in your eyes] Yo vi las estrellas [trans: I saw the stars] Pero ya no hay ya no hay estrellas [trans: but there are no stars] Pero ya no hay ya no hay estrellas [trans: but there are no stars] No stars No stars Ya no hay estrellas [trans: there are no stars] No stars For me, the return of Twin Peaks has been nothing short of a jackpot--an embarrassment of riches that I vaguely hoped for in my wildest dreams but never imagined I'd actually win. I suspect I'm not the only one out there pinching myself to make sure I'm awake, as week after week, the show delivers the goods on every imaginable front: a complex, deeply absorbing story, fascinating characters, unfathomable mysteries, abundant beauty, harrowing horrors, astounding set design and photography and effects, gorgeous music, winsome ensemble acting, the best sound work in the history of television and on and on. It's been such a deep personal joy to experience it all that I don't think I could love it more even if David Lynch himself subscribed me to an exclusive "Wonderful and Strange Gift of the Week Club." I've been keeping up an episode guide and trying to eek out a few glimpses into the mystery as occasional inspiration strikes, but tonight I just feel like reveling in some of the wonderful and strange things I really love about the return of Twin Peaks. Here are some of them, in no particular order, and with no attempt to be rigorous, critical, or insightful. This post is just straight up fan love for a show that is making my life extra wonderful and strange here in the summer of 2017. 1. The elevation of the everyday--Twin Peaks routinely makes the likes of ancient toilets, dime-store alarm clocks, telephone poles, and federal prisons look breathtakingly beautiful. It's simply astonishing. 2. The Detectives Fusco--Every minute that these lumbering lugs are on screen is a hoot, not only because I love their hamfisted bumbling and the absurdity of the idea that three brothers or three cousins or (my favorite possibility) three random guys with the surname Fusco ended up employed in the same department, but also because the whole time they're lunking about, I'm relishing the anticipation of Albert's hopefully forthcoming excoriation of these blithering hayseeds. That's got to happen, right? If anything seems written in the stars... 3. The evolution of the Arm--Is it a brain synapse with a rinded watermelon impaled on it or just a garden-variety leafless sycamore tree with a translucent bladder of medical waste perched atop it? I don't need to know to love, love, love it so! (And when it--or it's doppelgänger?--appeared out of the Las Vegas pavement and began screaming "Squeeze his hand off!" to Cooper, the abiding primordial desire not to wake my children and thus have to pause the show for who knows how long is the only thing that kept me from bursting into sustained applause and cheering.) 4. The Cole/Rosenfield synergy--I would seriously consider mortgaging my house for a shot at seeing a buddy cop show with these two cats tooling around on the trail of otherworldly riff-raff. Starsky and Hutch. Cagney and Lacy. Stankle and Cutty. Cole and Rosenfield. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be. But what a swan song for the inimitable Miguel Ferrer! I am so grateful for the opportunity to enjoy this incredible performance. 5. The furniture--The set designer is trying to kill me with this stuff. I Google it. I have dreams about it. I know full well I can't afford it, but no harm in a fella knowing what's what and keeping an eye out for bargains. 6. Bushnell Mullins--Intuitive, empathetic, and unstintingly loyal, Battling Bud is just the cat's pajamas. I was shocked to learn last week that Don Murray, the actor who plays Mullins, is 87 years old and that his return to the screen in Twin Peaks comes after a sixteen year break from acting that began upon the wrapping of his last film, "Elvis is Alive." 7. Harry Dean Motherf*cking Stanton--The Lynch-Stanton thing is one of my favorite things of all time, but my love affair with HDS began before I became a Lynch fan back when he was Andie Walsh's underemployed widower dad in Pretty in Pink. One of the great epiphanies of my years of pouring over the details of films I can't shake is that the book Mr. Walsh is reading when Andie comes in late is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, one of the toughest reads in modern British literature. HDS is just complicated like that, and his dazzling depth and gravity radiate from every scene. 8. This neon sign--The gin joint where we meet the fabled Diane for the first time couldn't just be any old watering hole. And thanks in no small part to this scintillating sign, it wasn't. All I wanted to do was drink a corpse reviver #2 with an aviation chaser somewhere in the vicinity of the blissful buzzing of this sign. That's one hell of a prop! Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. 9. Bizarre electronics--Of all the disorienting, decentering aspects of Twin Peaks--the journeys through space and time, the abstract core of the atomic explosion, the Lodges, you name it--I find exposure to the bizarre electronics to be among the most uncanny experiences in the series because they are at one and the same time almost perfectly familiar and utterly alien, like being in a dream in a house that you are certain is yours even though you know it isn't. It doesn't help when these items occasionally crumple in on themselves, collapsing their considerable mass into a tiny pebble of pyrite or whatever. 10. Superb smalltime crooks and their ruthless masters--These guys really sold it. Never before have the words "he borrowed it" or "nevertheless" been delivered with such sleazy panache. Poor fellas didn't even see that Janey-E train coming, though. 11. Dr. Amp's pedal-powered gold-plated shit-shovel painting station--This ludicrous contraption is such a thing of beauty. Can you imagine being the set-designer furiously taking notes while David Lynch describes this monstrosity to you in assiduous detail? 12. Hawk's vision quest (across a bathroom)--Hawk's breathtaking discovery in a bathroom stall door of three of the four missing pages from Laura's secret diary is one of my favorite scenes of the entire series. Heritage, intuition, investigation, insight, the inherence of the transcendent in the prosaic, the vanquishing of dastardly foes ("You do that, Chad."), and the thrill of a world-changing discovery--this scene had it all! 13. The woodsman in Buckhorn Jail--Hats off to Lynch and Frost for dishing up one of the most terrifying and intriguing moments I've ever witnessed on television. I could not get this image and its possible consequences out of my mind, and the unscratchable itch it generated in me to attempt to exorcise the experience through writing about it is what led to my very first NON-EXIST-ENT post on THE GLASS BOX: "A Spectral Meriwether Lewis in Buckhorn Jail?". 14. Full blown sublimity on the small screen--The deranging, category-busting experiences in Lynch's work are like torrential rivers flooding the parched desert floor of my spirit. What an oasis of inexhaustible richness these sequences are in an age of television as techne without poiesis or phronesis. 15. Mr. C's appearance as a guest villain on Miami Vice--This "last known photo" of Mr. C. that was taken at his home in Rio just before "a girl from Ipanema" bought it furnished one of my favorite moments of comic relief in the series so far. 16. Roadhouse performances--I wasn't sure how I felt about this new convention initially, but now I absolutely love it and look forward to it and even miss it in the episodes in which it doesn't happen. It has become a sort of affective grounding, orienting feature of the series for me, like a chorus in Greek drama, helping me to figure out how I should be disposed and attuned to the events unfolding before me. [Ed: I discuss the significance of the Roadhouse in a lot more detail in "'Listen to the Sounds': Why the Roadhouse Matters Whether We Like It Or Not". ] 17. Ike "The Spike" Stadtler's pitiable 'sad voice'--One of the most abrupt mood shifts of the show to date is the one that takes us from feeling terrorized by Ike's murderous blood-soaked rampage through Lorraine's office building to feeling equal parts amused and sad about the demise of Ike's titular spike when he emits a despondent high-pitched whelp upon noticing its ruin. 18. The astounding Kyle MacLachlan--What can one say about the burden he has been asked to carry in The Return and the precision, grace, and beauty of his carrying it?
The left side of the body--and in particular, left arms--have enjoyed a significant place in the Twin Peaks narrative and Lodge mythology from the very beginning. In the original series, think of Philip Gerard, the one-armed man, who tattooed his allegiance to Killer BOB on his left arm and then removed the arm when he was "changed" and saw the light, forsaking the life of killing. Another central character from the first two seasons, The Little Man from Another Place, was essentially the Lodge embodiment of Gerard's amputated left arm. And outside the Lodge, victims of possession or exploitation by Lodge dwellers who bear the Owl Cave Ring, such as Teresa Banks and Laura Palmer, experienced their left arms going numb at pivotal times, a theme that has been carried over into The Return in the character of Dougie Jones (whose arm goes numb during extracurriculars with Jade just before he is summoned back to the Lodge in Part Three in order to become--you guessed it--a gold pearl in the pocket of a man missing his left arm). This emphasis on wounds and abnormalities to left arms--and to the left side of the body in general--has only ramped up in The Return. Ruth Davenport--the woman whose murder kicks off the new story--suffered a bizarre mutilation of her left eye. Phyllis Hastings--the bitter, cheating wife to unfaithful husband Bill Hastings--was shot through the left eye by Mr. C. in Part Two. In one of the most baffling cases so far, Ike "The Spike" Stadtler seems to experience a traumatic injury to his right hand when Cooper follows The Arm's instructions to "Squeeze his hand off!" and we see Ike pull his hand away from the right grip-module of the gun to reveal that the heel of his right palm is missing; but then when the forensics team is collecting evidence in the next scene, it appears that it is in fact the palm of his left hand that is affixed to the left grip-module of the gun. As if Ike's swapped right and left hands weren't confounding enough, Part Eight piles on to this strange event by serving up what is surely one of the most inscrutable cases of completely unpredictable character doubling in the series so far. And who are these unlikely twins? None other than Ike "The Spike" Stadtler and Experiment, the mother of all evil conjured by the Babylon Working ritual that began with the atomic blast at White Sands, cut an ungodly path through an other-worldly convenience store, and finally culminated in the vomiting forth of a cradle of filth that looses into our world the soul-eviscerating Bob and a frog-locust that has god-knows-what carnal designs on some poor teenage girl in New Mexico. You're probably thinking: "Ike the Spike and Experiment?! What the *%$#? I thought THE GLASS BOX was committed to sober analysis! C'mon, man! Take us back to that on-point stuff about why Dr. Amp matters or how Cooper's journey to find Laura is our journey too. Anything but some far-fetched comparison between Ike and Experiment!". Fair enough. It is pretty weird, I guess. I'll just leave you to your own devices to explain why Experiment HAS A RIGHT HAND ON HER LEFT ARM and vice versa, you know, the sort of condition that calls to mind the predicament of a certain smaller-than-average assassin whose left palm shows up where his right palm should be. With all this negative attention paid to the left in previous episodes, I admittedly went into Part Nine looking for another healthy helping of port-side puzzlement. And heavens to Mergatroid did I find it, but predictably for Twin Peaks, I didn't find it in quite the places I was expecting. No more left-sided murders or mutilations. No more left extremities where the right ones ought to be. What I found instead was instance after instance after instance--far too many of them to be mere coincidence--of characters intentionally touching the left shoulders and arms of other characters, often in ways that (when you're looking for it, anyway) seem blatantly obvious and unnatural. There's Chantal touching Mr. C's left shoulder before she goes to get "the kit." (5:11) There's Cole giving Diane the next thing to a left shoulder massage upon asking her to accompany their crew to Buckhorn. (5:20) There's Bushnell Mullins' effort to comfort Janey-E by patting her left shoulder on his way out of the Las Vegas Police Department after giving the Detectives Fusco a piece of his mind (and a few FWWM-ish clenches of his (right) fist). (13:16) There's one of the Detectives Fusco reaching out to touch the left shoulder of another officer just before the Ike "the Spike" arrest. (20:10) There's Andy offering Lucy a love-pat on the left shoulder after she purchases the chair he likes. (23:05). There's Mrs. Horne laying her hand on Johnny's left shoulder to check his condition after his run-in with the waterfall picture. (24:30) There's Mrs. Briggs reaching out to touch Sheriff Truman's left upper arm after the moving hand-over of the doohickey in the chair. (28:07). There's Albert Rosenfield's gentle restraint of Detective Mackley's left forearm on the way into the morgue. (30:15). And there's Cole's laying the arm of collegial solidarity on Albert as they discuss the Cooper/Briggs connection in the hall outside the morgue. (31:58). In the first half hour of Part Nine (not including two minutes of opening credits), then, there are no fewer than nine obvious cases of characters interacting (in odd and in some cases gratuitous ways) with the left arms of other characters. At 32:00 minutes in, I thought sure there'd be escalating left-arm-contact o'plenty throughout the remainder of the episode. But after Gordon put the ol' paw on Albert's shoulder outside the morgue, these instances completely dropped off. Despite paying close attention to every scene from that point forward (after believing myself to have lighted onto a pattern I thought might give way to something deeply significant by episode's end), I couldn't find any further instances. At least, that is, until the last scene in the Roadhouse where Ella reveals to Chloe that nasty unexplained rash under her left arm. And just in case we've been lulled to sleep by twenty-one minutes of left-arm free drama by this point, Lynch goes in for a second pass--this time a nauseating close-up--to make sure that this new instance doesn't slip by unnoticed. In puzzling over all this chaos on the left, it is well worth remembering that Lynch and Frost are not alone in associating the nigh side of the human body with mystery, evil, and non-conformity to the usual norms and rules of this-worldly human behavior and interaction. The English word "sinister"--defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "giving the impression that something harmful or evil is happening or will happen"--is derived from the Latin word for "left" (sinister). And religious and spiritual visions in both Eastern and Western traditions have strong associations between the left side of the body and evil (or at least extreme non-conformity to social convention that is likely to be interpreted by more conventional people as evil). In a previous post, I briefly discuss Lynch's interest in Hindu wisdom literature and meditation practice. Given the influence of this tradition over his creative process, it isn't terribly surprising to find Lynch paying attention to the left side of the body in just these ways. A passage from Kirti Trivedi's "The Asymmetry of Symmetry: The Left and The Right in Hindu Philosophy, Art, and Life" brings the basic ideas here into sharp relief: Mark Frost, for his part, taps into a similar mythology via Western occultism. The imagination-capturing linkage for Frost, at least the one that comes through clearest in The Secret History of Twin Peaks (239 ff.), is that of Aleister Crowley's identification with "The Left-Hand Path" and the veneration of Baphomet, a goat-headed idol or deity claimed by a variety of occult and mystical traditions (most famously, the Knights Templar) and divergently associated by those groups with everything from "a baptism in wisdom," to Satan worship, to the constellation Aries, the ram. I found this last alleged connection to the constellation Aries especially interesting in the light of the fact that I'd been trying to place why a particular light pattern from the convenience store scene in Part Eight looked familiar to me. In the lead up to the opening of the portal behind which Experiment awaits, there are these odd blurry shots where Lynch turns the convenience store into an abstract pattern of lights that call to mind starlight. Here's the image I have in mind: What you're seeing here is a an out-of-focus shot of the convenience store in which that illuminated top edge of the overhang, the two lightbulbs on top of the gas pumps, and the light at the top right of the store--when taken far enough out of focus--resemble a chain of stars, like a constellation. Given this alleged connection between "the left-hand path" and Aries, I thought to myself: well, does this set of stars look anything like Aries? I don't know much about astrology, so I Googled "Aries" and this image of a potential design for an "Aries Tattoo" popped up: Here's what happens when you lay the tattoo design onto the out-of-focus convenience store. It all seemed pretty far-fetched and not worth writing up until an icon of Aries showed up in Part Nine, just before Ben Horne and Beverly continue their search for the singing bowl noise (50:16): Whatever's happening here, it certainly seems wise to keep looking left as the symbols and secrets and mysteries pile up in the second half of the new series. Seems to me that something sinister is afoot.
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Mr. RoqueMonitoring the situation from a well-designed chair somewhere in Grand Rapids, MI Archives
August 2021
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