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GLIMPSES OF THE MYSTERY
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In the final, undated entry of her Secret Diary, just after confessing that she knows "exactly who and what BOB is" and that she feels an urgent need to "tell someone and make them believe," Laura Palmer gut-wrenchingly admits to a nearly universal human fear: "I'm so afraid of death. I'm so afraid that no one will believe me until after I have taken the seat that I fear has been saved for me in the darkness. Please don't hate me." (184) In the first entry of his book on Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, just after noting in the introduction that "everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level" and that "the more your consciousness is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source," (1) David Lynch draws an epigraph from the Bhagavad-Gita to locate the origin of everything that will follow in the pages to come: "He whose happiness is within, whose contentment is within, whose light is all within, that yogi, being one with Brahman, attains eternal freedom in divine consciousness." (3) Laura's fears were tragically realized: her story would not be told and believed until, in death, she claimed the seat saved for her in darkness. And yet, here in Part Two of Twin Peaks-The Return, we hear a welcome epilogue to her story: "I am dead, yet I live." And lest we doubt it, in a literal opening of the windows to her soul, Laura removes her face to display a dazzling light within coming up from the deepest level, bathing Cooper in a blinding light that effaces his own facial features as if all individuality has been reclaimed by the unified source from which it emanates. But this enlightenment is fleeting. For no sooner than we are warmed by it, and we witness Cooper asking Laura for permission to begin his own quest back to the light ("When can I go?"), Laura is borne away from him screaming in terror, indicating that the illumination she revealed to him is as yet deeply buried--her happiness is not yet within her, and there is much farther to travel before the attainment of eternal freedom in divine consciousness is realized. Cooper is on this journey too. At this point, in fact, he is not only decidedly NOT unified with divine consciousness--he is not even one with himself. After losing a race with his shadow self to exit the lodge, he has been trapped for a quarter century there, as Evil Dale (we now know him as "Mr. C.") has been running amok in the land of the living, fracturing Cooper into yet a third shard of being in the golem "Dougie Jones." It's comforting to interpret all of this as though it's a story unfolding in a fictional world. And it is, after all, such a story. But there is an unsettling subtext here for those who have the eyes to see it, and its unwelcome lesson is that this war of three selves has battlefields in every human life. Who among us, after all, has not at some point ceded control to our darker selves, allowing them to lock away what is best and deepest within us--even for decades at a time--and to construct facades that mask their evildoing in banalities and vain pursuits that all but assure that our best selves will remain imprisoned within, perhaps even until we have taken the seats we fear have been saved for us in darkness. This is Laura's story. And Cooper's. And ours. We are all on this quest. Thankfully, we are not alone on this quest. There are those to whom we are responsible, whose desperate pleas for help elicit our empathy, compassion, and resolve. And there are fellow travelers, too--those who bear the inner light on our behalf when we cannot, and those who help us to see the light at those pivotal moments when everything hangs in the balance. Twin Peaks is full of desperate people, and of light-bearers and seers, too. Cooper's journey back to himself begins, to wit, with a desperate plea from Leland to "find Laura." Cooper's own quest to become whole, then, is inextricably linked to a responsibility to Leland to follow the glimmers of Laura's light and thereby enable her to tell her story and reclaim herself--to help her, as she pleads in her diary, "explain to everyone that I did not want what I have become. I only did what any of us can do, in any situation...my very best." (184) The light-bearers--those who help to light Cooper's path back to righteousness--are many in Twin Peaks and will no doubt continue to multiply as the series unfolds. To this point, however, three stand out, each one symbolizing an important conduit to the good within us. Tommy "Hawk" Hill, Deputy Chief of the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department, symbolizes intuition. For Hawk, the boundaries between self and all are porous and permeable, and this attunement to the world around him and his intimate connections to it often reveals deep significance in the most minute details. Where swaying sycamore trees give way to red velvet curtains and where a coin rolling across the bathroom floor is the key to revealing Laura Palmer's deepest secrets and Cooper's only hope, there Hawk will be at the whetted-edge of attention. Dr. Jacoby--the quirky pyschologist reborn as the insurgent Dr. Amp--symbolizes insurrection. Recognizing that eternal freedom in divine consciousness requires, first, the reclamation of finite freedom from the forces of institutional corruption and the materialism that sedates us into suborning it, Dr. Amp goads us into digging ourselves "out of the shit"--throwing off the shackles of servitude to our military-industrial overlords--so that we can take our "cosmic flashlights" out from under the bushel and reclaim autonomy. Sonny Jim, Dougie and Janey-E Jones's son, symbolizes innocence. Sonny Jim seems to be so in touch with Cooper's inner-child that one wonders at times whether he is in fact merely a manifestation thereof. With his goofy smiles, his earnest thumbs-ups, and the resolute comfort he takes in the trappings of an America long ago lost (if it ever existed at all), Sonny Jim lights the way (via cowboy lamp) to some of the deepest of the unsullied places in Cooper's heart. Cooper has seen some great wonders by these inner lights of intuition, insurrection, and innocence, among them 30 consecutive jackpots at the Silver Mustang Casino, the deceit in a corrupt insurance agent's lying heart, and the dots across a pile of case files that need to be connected in order to bring that agent, Anthony Sinclair, to justice. Carl Rodd, proprietor of the New Fat Trout Trailer Park (and the old one, too), is the only person other than Cooper, so far, to "see the light" and be moved to action by it, first when he gazes into the majestic tree canopy above him, and then again when he witnesses the spirit of the boy tragically hit by Richard Horne's truck ascending to the sky ("Oh God!") and rushes to his shattered mother's aid as a crowd of bystanders looks on in shock.
Who will see the light next, and where will it lead them?
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The inimitable Dr. Lawrence Jacoby's hilarity-charged transformation into the unhinged, vlog-casting, gold-shit-shoveling Dr. Amp has certainly been among the comic highlights in the always challenging, often bleak return of Twin Peaks. It is tempting, perhaps, to think that generating this current of comic relief is Dr. Amp's raison d'être in the series. But I suspect, with a little help from his cosmic flashlight, that nothing could be further from the truth. From a structuralist standpoint, narrative-wise, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he'll end up being a kind of interpretive key to the convergence of the three main mysteries we're exploring so far (through Part Five) into one central problem. I say this because when you storyboard these episodes, Jacoby's appearances are dead-on-the-money where you'd put them if your narrative intent were to have him play this sort of role. Jacoby has appeared in three scenes so far for a total of almost 9 minutes of airtime. To put this into perspective, that's roughly 1/6th of a full episode, and a staggering 1/30th of the entire series so far. When you consider the fact that this is an ensemble cast of over 150 people, it would be very surprising for a character like Jacoby’s to get so much solo-time on screen for no good reason. When we bear in mind, too, that Jacoby was the vehicle into the deepening of the main mystery in Twin Peaks’ original run as the bearer of the half-heart locket and the tapes containing evidence of Laura’s lurid double life, we shouldn’t be too surprised to find him standing sentry at the thresholds of the mysteries that await in Twin Peaks 2017. Jacoby’s central importance to the narrative machinery of these new episodes becomes undeniable, however, when we take a closer look at the strategic placement of his scenes, all three of which (through Part Five) could not be more deliberately executed. Bear in mind, first off, that he is the first person we see in real-space and his mountain trailer retreat is our first exposure to the Twin Peaks of 2017. Before the first Jacoby scene, we see only Lodge footage of Cooper and Laura and the black/dream room footage of Cooper and the Giant. So Jacoby's first scene--our first glimpse of life in Twin Peaks in over 25 years--is immediately preceded by the introduction of the main "dream code"--the Giant's description to Cooper of the dream clues that must be cracked in order to "solve the crime". To bring Jacoby’s importance into sharper relief, let’s recall what transpires between the Giant and Cooper in the immediate lead-up to Jacoby’s first appearance: Giant: “Listen to the sounds. It is in our house now.” Cooper: “It is?” Giant: “It all cannot be said aloud now. Remember 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone.” Cooper: “I understand.” Giant: “You are far away.” Cooper flickers and disappears. (Part One, 4:46-7:14) The Giant thus utters six sentences that are clues to Cooper's quest. Cooper receives these six clues and then says "I understand,” as if to indicate to the Giant (and to us) “Message received.” The Giant follows up with an observation--"You are far away now."--that calls attention to the steep challenge that awaits Cooper before he can investigate these clues—Cooper must find a way to draw near to himself again and regain sapience and agency in real-space in order to make headway in the investigation. Cooper--like each of us--must dig himself out of the proverbial shit, throw off the yoke of the evil forces that aim to separate him from his authentic self, and ultimately dispel these forces of darkness with the light of cosmic truth. Given Lynch and Frost's love of doubling, and given that at this stage (through episode 5) there are three main mysteries afoot each in its own main theater of action (the glass box in New York City, Dougie’s troubles in Las Vegas, and the Davenport/Briggs murder in Buckhorn), it is not unreasonable to infer that the six clues we get are distributed across the three mysteries in a way that will bring them all together. Since our beloved TP creators adore symmetry and twins, I wouldn't be surprised if the first three clues are hints about the mysteries and the second three clues are hints that point to the solutions to the mysteries or keys to the ways in which they will be drawn together into one. So, for instance, purely hypothetically and, for the most part, just thrashing about wildly in the dark, one might venture provisionally to organize these hints into couples as follows: Couple 1: Mystery Hint #1: "Listen to the sounds" (New York Box--knife sounds of alien figure (“mother?”) killing the two lovers/knife sounds of Naido's hands warning Cooper away from socket #15)/Solution Hint #1: Remember 430 (???); Couple 2: Mystery Hint #2:"It is in our house now" (Las Vegas--Casino is called "the house", Cooper follows visions of the lodge to winning slots and similar greenish light patterns to lying Lucky 7 Insurance agents)/Solution Hint #2 "Richard and Linda" (???); Couple 3: Mystery Hint #3: "It all cannot be said aloud now." (Buckhorn, by process of elimination, but I have no idea what it might mean)/Solution Hint #3 "Two birds with one stone" (Ruth Davenport and Major Briggs are killed at the same time across two worlds?). The beauty of these clues is that they are wonderfully underdetermined--that is, we don’t have enough specific information from any of them to know for sure yet which clues go with which mysteries; each could pertain to any of the 3 mysteries and they could be mixed and matched in a variety of ways (e.g., "Listen to the sounds." might be about the slot machines paying out in the Las Vegas Mystery; “It’s in our house now.” might be about the “mother” entering real-space via the box in New York). We’ll just have to wait to see exactly how the clues interact with the three main mysteries in the three main theaters of action. But what I'm getting to here is that the three Jacoby scenes all take place between sets of scenes (couples, if you will) in which characters struggle to discern important clues in the scenes that precede Jacoby's appearances and then one of the three main mystery plot-lines is advanced in the scenes immediately following Jacoby’s appearances. Jacoby appearance #1 (Part 1, 7:15-9:30) happens right after Cooper gets the main clues from the Giant and right before the New York glass box mystery is first introduced. He emerges from his trailer, receives a shipment of shovels, and rebuffs an offer of further help from the delivery man, declaring his preference to work alone. Jacoby appearance #2 (episode 3, at 39:45-42:02) happens just after Andy, Lucy, and Hawk discuss the Log Lady's clue about something missing and just before Jade drops Cooper off at the Silver Mustang in Las Vegas. Jacoby sits, fully gas-masked, at a bizarre homemade contraption contrived to help him spray paint shovels gold. And Jacoby appearance #3 (episode 5, 41:20-45:55) happens just after Andy and Hawk are sifting through old case files looking for "Indians" (i.e., pointers to the way that Hawk's heritage will figure into his finding something missing) and just before the Pentagon dispatches an agent to Buckhorn to investigate the Briggs fingerprints hit there. In this third scene, which runs double the length of the first two, we witness Dr. Amp in full effect, vlog-casting an inspirational message of freedom from the toxic bullshit of consumer drone life in the military-industrial complex: "You must see, hear, understand, and act--act now!" So we’ve got three scenes, two that run almost precisely 2:15 each and a third that runs almost precisely double that at roughly 4:30, and they are spaced mindfully throughout the first five episodes at predictable intervals in parts 1, 3, and 5.
Notice the pattern: in all three cases, Jacoby is the bridge between scenes in which we are pondering clues and scenes in which we are witness to main mystery advancements in one of the three principal theaters of action. The plot thickens when you consider that Jacoby's schtick in all of these scenes is preparing tools for digging out of the shit (gold shit digging shovel) and coming to clarity about what is actually going on in the world (cosmic flashlight): evil forces are at work deluding us into believing that we are free, when in fact we are but pawns in a rigged game where almost everything we willingly surround ourselves with, from creature comforts to meaningless day jobs, are toxic to human health and autonomy. The upshot is that the electrifying Dr. Amp is offering us a whole lot more than comic relief. He is, for want of better metaphors, our gold shit-digging shovel for unearthing the big clues and our cosmic flashlight for illuminating how it all hangs together. Let’s watch closely to see whether these obviously deliberate patterns continue to light the path in future episodes. Twin Peaks, Washington, USA The establishment of a strong sense of place is one of the hallmarks of Lynch and Frost's storytelling in Twin Peaks. In the first two seasons, there was one primary theater of action--Twin Peaks, Washington--with characters occasionally crossing the border into Canada for various reasons, all of which emanated pretty straightforwardly from the main stage. But in the new episodes, Lynch and Frost tackle the much more daunting task of scripting the action across seven locations (so far!) that take us coast to coast in the good ol' US of A, deep into the Southern Hemisphere to another continent, and even beyond the stars to another world. In this new set of stories within a story, we traverse a variety of odd boundaries. We move from fictional places situated in a fictionalized version of the actual world (like Twin Peaks and Buckhorn), to fictionalized versions of actual places in a fictionalized version of the actual world (like New York, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Buenos Aires), to surrealist visualizations of other worlds entirely--whether they are worlds outside, extended somewhere in or beyond spacetime, or merely worlds within the space of psychological projection. In living through the first set of stories (many, many times!), I grew to love the iconic establishing shots of favorite familiar places: the mill, the sheriff's station, the Palmer residence, the R&R, One Eyed Jack's, and of course the Great Northern. As the world of Twin Peaks has now vastly expanded, there are many more places to explore. Here are seven of the most memorable establishing shots we've seen so far (through episode five). New York, New York, USA Buckhorn, South Dakota, USA Las Vegas, Nevada, USA Another Place Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Buenos Aires, Argentina
Don't miss this fascinating analysis from Welcome to Twin Peaks of Mr. C.'s unorthodox greeting to Gordon Cole! Conventional English gets a bit harder, apparently, when you're running short a few quarts of garmonbozia!
In traditions as diverse as Hinduism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity, truth, goodness, and beauty have been taken to represent the deepest desires of humankind--desires so deep that their objects are said to transcend--to rise above or swing beyond-- everything else that exists and to hold all existing things in their places. To pursue truth, humankind has logic. To pursue goodness, humankind has ethics. And to pursue beauty, humankind has aesthetics--the arts. In a serendipitous twist of fate for those of us beauty addicts who struggle with logic and ethics, these traditions have also maintained that truth, goodness, and beauty are "ontologically one," as the philosophers say--that is, these "transcendentals" have their being in and through one another such that when even one is present, so are they all.
In this spirit, I've always thought of beauty as a trapdoor into truth and goodness. And for me, the artistic work of David Lynch has been a place to dwell in deep beauty and so to receive strong doses of truth and goodness by osmosis, without the exertions associated with the hard thinking of logic and hard striving of ethics (not that these aren't also directly accessible in his work, but that's another post). My aim in this post is to observe, appreciate, and share with all of you the deep beauty on offer in the first fifteen minutes of Part Three of Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch has always been a painterly film-maker. In fact, he describes his very first film--Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)--as a "moving painting" and discusses the process by which the work came to him as one of imagining paintings coming to life. In reviewing Part Three of the new Twin Peaks in preparation to write an entry for my Episode Guide, I was near to overwhelmed by how much beauty Lynch managed to pack into just fifteen minutes of television. As the filmic flux rushed past and I paused it so as to mark the time-indices, I began to feel as if I had entered an exhibition of paintings--an effect amplified by the fact that my 4K HDTV does not show atomizing pixels, but rather blurs, smears, and layers lines and colors that cannot be sharply rendered. All progress on the episode guide ceased as I tunneled into these astonishingly beautiful still images, realizing that each and every one of them--and many, many more I couldn't capture--is a world of beauty unto itself. As you peruse these nineteen images, which collectively tell the story of the first 15 minutes of Part Three in order of the their appearance in the show, consider the composition, the color palate, the saturation of each still, as well as the astonishing juxtapositions that they create between and among one another. Consider, too, that they were taken from a paused cable feed on a pitiable iPhone camera in the otherwise pitch dark of my basement--in other words, they are poor copies of a poor copy reproduced in aesthetically deplorable conditions on crap equipment. When a simulacrum of a simulacrum can still be the conduit of a beauty that makes one weep, that is really, really something. These fifteen minutes are by far the most beautiful television I have ever seen, and thus some of the most truthful and good television, too. This compelling video from Bruno Enrique Batista Teixeira might make you a believer! The video expertly juxtaposes outtakes from the new series with voiceover passages from Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks to create a tantalizing if all too brief portrait of the horrors that await inside the glass box. As ever, the Twin Peaks universe richly rewards those with the vision and the gumption to read across the narrative's filmic and textual boundaries toward a fusion of its visual and intellectual interpretive horizons. In any case, this video is a harbinger of great things to come for those of us who enjoy the hermeneutic balancing act of moving back and forth between film and text, discovering, for instance, the hidden riches in Fire Walk With Me revealed by The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, or relishing the much more intimate relationship with the inimitable Special Agent Dale Cooper that emerges from having digested "Diane...": The Twin Peaks Tapes of Dale Cooper. To be sure, Twin Peaks is wonderful and strange all by its damn self, but if you're ready for the deep end of this fathomless pool, put on your reading glasses. And if you're ready for a ludicrously absurd mixed metaphor, re-read that last sentence.
Well, this DIY ace of spades is terrifying! Poor Darya! If I had my druthers, this black hole into unimaginable horrors would not be my first choice image to ponder just before drawing my last breath. Truth be told, it wouldn't be my first choice image to ponder before pouring myself another All Day IPA. It is evocative of absolutely nothing good. I feel the need to declaw it a bit. I therefore propose two strategies: STRATEGY #1: NEUTRALIZE THROUGH COMPARISON TO STILL MORE TERRIFYING PROSPECTS When David Lynch gets to thinking about scary faces, this business is actually pretty tame. For instance, consider the following soul-eviscerating prospects from shows such as The Air Is On Fire and The Unified Field. How'd you like to turn up "Smiling Jack" in a friendly game of five card stud?: Or maybe face one of the dreaded "Distorted Nudes" as the queen of diamonds: "Head Talking About Billy" looks like a good candidate for the #2 of clubs [Ed: And is ESPECIALLY TERRIFYING in the wake of Part Eight. "Experimental", to say the least.] And Jokers are WILD with good ol' "Person On TV": The point is that it could always be worse. Sure, the "Alien Ace" (as I like to think of it) is quarter-to-sinister, but at least it isn't rapid-descent-into-madness-forty-five, as some of these others clearly are. If strategy #1 feels like cold comfort, though, never fear... STRATEGY #2: RENDER INNOCUOUS VIA JUXTAPOSITION TO LESS THREATENING FARE Make that shit into a bulldog. Plunk it atop some mediocre fantasy art. Children's book that ass. Or use it to shill some execrable pizza. Join me in refusing to lose sleep over this!
One of my favorite moments in the series so far is the spine-tingling shot of the shocked, coal-faced man in black occupying the third cell of Buckhorn Jail two doors down from poor Bill Hastings. The camera lingers on him just long enough to terrify us before the figure dissipates into nothing--nothing, that is, but the figure's spectral head, which then floats off into the ether, assuring that none of us will ever get a good night's rest again. This image has puzzled me more than just about any other (with the notable exception of the "Alien Ace" that Mr. C. shows to Daria just before he kills her, but I'll get to that later), because I couldn't locate a precedent for it anywhere in the series. As I pondered who this could be, the hat suddenly stood out; I thought to myself, "He looks vaguely like he's wearing a mountain man get-up, sort of a Daniel Boonish sort of thing." No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than I remembered all the Lewis and Clark stuff at the beginning of Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks. That led to an excited Startpage search of "Lewis and Clark", which brought up a bunch of photos of clean-shaven 19th-century-ish men, necessitating a much dicier search of "Bearded Lewis and Clark", which brought up--among many other treats--the following shot of some guy who played Lewis (maybe Clark?) in Manifest Destiny: The Lewis and Clark Musical Adventure. "Bingo!," I thought, reaching for my trusty Photoshop Mix app in order to create the following piece of compelling forensic evidence... Hot on the heels of this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, it occurred to me that there must be some connection between South Dakota and Lewis and Clark, so back to Startpage. In nanoseconds, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a hit for the Lewis and Clark Recreation Area in...where's that you say?...NONE OTHER THAN YANKTON, SOUTH DAKOTA where our man Ray is allegedly doing time in the big house for weapon smuggling. Coincidence? I doubt it! Something tells me headless specter Lewis has some unfinished business in Yankton. What do you think?
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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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