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GLIMPSES OF THE MYSTERY
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Big things are happening in Buckhorn, South Dakota! Part Nine saw major breaks in the Buckhorn case concerning the murder of Ruth Davenport--the woman who was discovered dead in her apartment beheaded with her body missing and the corpse of a beheaded Major Garland Briggs (whose head is still missing) positioned in bed just below her severed head. The prime suspect, Bill Hastings, is a local school principal whose fingerprints were found all over the crime scene, but who maintains his innocence, claiming (back in Part Two) that a bizarre dream about the Davenport murder is his only connection to the case. Yes, he and Davenport were having an affair, he admits, but he loved her and is not guilty of her murder. Hastings and Davenport were up to more than dancing in the sheets, however. As Detective Mackley reveals in Part Nine (27:26), "It turns out that William Hastings along with the help of Ruth [Davenport] the librarian was researching and publishing some strange little blog about some alternate dimension." The plot thickens when Agent Rosenfield reveals the bizarre contents of Hastings' recent posts: "About one week ago, Hastings ended his blog entry with this cryptic sentence: 'Today we finally entered what we call 'the zone' and we met the Major.'" (28:00) And when Special Agent Preston interviews Hastings in person (40:45), we get to hear it straight from the horse's mouth: Preston: "Mr. Hastings, are you the author of an online journal or blog entitled The Search for the Zone?" Hastings: "Uh huh, yes." Preston: "What sort of things to you write about?" Hastings: "Different things." Preston: "Approximately two weeks ago, did you write an entry about what you described as an alternate reality?" Hastings: "A different dimension. Yes! But it's real! It's all real!" When Preston confronts him with his claim about "meeting the Major," Hastings tells a fascinating story. Ruth Davenport, a librarian, is "very good at uncovering hidden records and she had indications that if we went to a certain place at a certain time we would enter the dimension and make contact with a certain person. And so we went there...and the major was hiding there, or "hibernating" as he said, and other people were maybe going to find him and he wanted to go to a different place and so he asked us to get him numbers--important numbers--coordinates. And we found them in the place he told us go, a secure military database. Ruth wrote them on her hand so that she wouldn't forget." (41:45) (Looks like I might have been on to something in "Flipping Terrifying: Does Davenport Mirror Palmer?".) There's more to the story, which I'll cover in detail in the episode guide, but the big news for this post is that Bill Hastings wasn't just whistling dixie when he said "It's real! It's all real." As it turns out, his website, The Search for the Zone, is indeed live online at http://www.thesearchforthezone.com. Suffice it to say that web design isn't exactly his forte, but it's still a terrific little easter egg with a significant collection of things to peruse and read. How much of it will be plot-relevant is anybody's guess, but what we have here seems to be a sanctioned supplement to the series, and so perhaps information within these documents will end up functioning in a way similar to The Secret History of Twin Peaks as a trove of inputs that provide perspective on various characters, plot-lines, and mythology arcs that don't receive sustained treatment in the series itself. Here are some things to check out while you're nosing around on the site: 1. "My older journal entires"--After a paragraph on how "forces from deep dimensional space" might have "splintered time" or effected "the assassination of President Kennedy" in some way, Hastings offers us an opportunity to "Click here to read my older journal entries." When we do, however, it takes us to an "Http Error" message which then kicks us over to an 11:00 minute static-filled video (mostly a black screen with flickering lights and some fuzz) with music from the third season of Twin Peaks--Badalamenti's "Falling," Chromatics' "Shadow," "I'm a Good Man Old Skool Hip-Hop Mix," "I Love How You Love Me," NIN's "She's Gone Away," and a few others. It's really just viral marketing in the end, but an intriguing form of it, at least. 2. Reading Links--These go surprisingly deep and look and feel a lot like some of the real conspiracy sites out there that offer a pastiche of half-baked theories and genuine insight into various scientific and historical phenomena. The aesthetics are definitely a time-warp. 3. .Wav Files of Electrical Interference--Looks like good ol' Wild Bill Hastings has been tracking the woodsmen around and making recordings of their signature sounds. 4. A Chance to Sign Up for The Search for the Zone Mailing List...which is actually, disappointingly, just a ploy by Rhino to get email addresses to shill the Twin Peaks soundtrack. They have to pay the rent, I guess, but I'd rather get stuff in my inbox under subject headings like "The Science of Parallel Universes" and "The Horizon Project" on a regular basis than just opportunities to buy music. Not that I won't buy the music. I'll probably buy the music. Ok. I'm buying it. But I still want the crazy articles! 5. Invisible Coordinates Leading to the Convenience Store--Located just underneath Bill Hastings' incredibly prestigious list of web accolades is a set of coordinates that remain hidden until you scroll over them. Once they appear, you may click on them to be taken to mysterious video of the convenience store where the woodsmen hang out.
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THE PAIN AND SORROW OF CONVENIENCE: OIL AND CORN AS AVATARS OF ATOMIC-AGE SUFFERING IN TWIN PEAKS7/6/2017 While everybody's dazzled by the mushroom cloud, a more insidious form of evil is going unnoticed. Ever wonder why the people from another place live above a convenience store? Or why they eat creamed corn? Or smell like engine oil? Or vomit a mixture of corn and oil when they're about to give up the ghost? If so, this one's going to blow your mind. The critical fallout of Part Eight has been largely about the evils unleashed by the atomic bomb. On a surface reading, the bomb itself perpetrated terrible evils against humanity. On an esoteric reading (think The Secret History of Twin Peaks), the bomb was engineered by Aleister Crowley and his cabal of evil sex-magicians with the hope of literally opening a portal to hell. On a figurative reading, nuclear fission is a terrific metaphor for "the evil that people do"--those myriad social, psychological, and spiritual ills that are driven by the mechanics of bombardment: something unified gets hit hard by an outside force it cannot withstand and splinters into parts, generating exponentially multiplying destructive energy in the process. What happens to Leland, Laura, and Cooper when they collide with BOB is a kind of fission--a microcosm of what happened at White Sands. But if the literal and metaphorical horrors of nuclear fission are the most obvious forms of evil under scrutiny in Part Eight, they are not the only ones, nor are they the ones that are explored most extensively in the mythology of Twin Peaks to date. Part Eight is also, if much less obviously so, an exploration of another atomic-age evil, namely the incessant drive for convenience that set loose the behemoths of the petroleum industry and industrial animal agriculture, leading to our collective dependence on two of the most destructive commodities in the history of humankind: oil and corn. The first step in illuminating this insight is to highlight the pride of place given to the symbols of convenience, oil, and corn in the existing Twin Peaks mythology of evil. Though the recurrence of these three symbols as harbingers of evil may not leap to mind as readily as more glamorous baddies like BOB, the white horse of death, and now "Mother" or "Experiment," most Twin Peaks fans will have an implicit grasp of their importance to the narrative. Have you ever wondered, for instance, why the people from another place live above a convenience store? Or why they smell like engine oil? Or why the pain and sorrow they consume to survive are symbolized by creamed corn? Or why they vomit a mixture of creamed corn and engine oil when they're about to give up the ghost? Or why some of them--especially this new crop of "woodsmen"--appear as if they have just bathed in fossil fuels? If these questions have occurred to you, you're probably already at least implicitly familiar with convenience, corn, and oil functioning together as symbols in a broader mythology of evil in Twin Peaks. But notice, too, that these three elements are not only individually present as symbols of evil, but they are recurrently bundled together as a package of elements that characterize the most basic existential necessities of evil characters: these characters live above a convenience store, they eat creamed corn, they look and smell like engine oil (as if, terrifyingly, their bodily exertions exude petroleum--a substance that is quite literally eons of death exposed to extreme pressure and released through destruction of the Earth). In the Twin Peaks mythology of evil, then, convenience, corn, and oil aren't just incidental instruments of evil-doing (like weapons, hard drugs, malevolent plans, or even cursed rings), but are rather essential existential elements of evil-being: convenience shelters evil, corn nourishes it, and oil is its lifeblood and bio-power. These are the things that give evil place, feed it, and keep it going. The central roles of convenience, corn, and oil in the Twin Peaks mythology of evil predate The Return, but they are all back with a vengeance in the new series. We get early glimpses of their continuing importance in the oily woodsman haunting Buckhorn Jail (Part Two) and Dougie's and Mr. C.'s corn-and-oil-ridden vomit (Part Three), but the latest two episodes have put these elements and their essential connectedness at center stage. At a pivotal moment in Part Seven (17:26), for instance, just before we see Gordon Cole in repose whistling to himself in front of a giant poster of a mushroom cloud foreshadowing what is to come in Part Eight, the camera lingers on a bizarre framed print on the side wall of Cole's office that depicts an ear of corn superimposed over what appears to be the shaft of a mushroom cloud (see below). I can practically hear Cole's inimitable shrill tenor instructing us to keep our eyes on the prize: "NOW WHEN YOU SEE THAT MUSHROOM CLOUD, YOU'RE GOING TO BE DAZZLED! YOU'LL BE TEMPTED TO LOSE SIGHT OF THE CORN. DON'T LOSE SIGHT OF THE CORN! THE CORN COMES FIRST!" Less cryptically, the message might be to recognize that gigantic, glaring, world-historical forces of evil like atomic bombs (and the cabals of elite scientists or would-be sex-magicians who conjure them) don't just come into being without more pedestrian, less obvious forms of evil hidden the woodwork, laying the groundwork, feeding the hunger for ever more spectacular forms of domination, exploitation, and destruction. Without scarcity and lack at the mundane level of simple human finitude--without the desperate but too often unquenchable needs that vulnerable beings have for safe shelter, ample food, and the means for securing bodily integrity and healing--there would be no grandiose plans for world domination. In Part Eight, this foreshadowing comes to full fruition in what is surely the most accessible and stylized presentation of the underlying significance of convenience, oil, and corn for the Twin Peaks' mythology of evil that we have yet seen in any of the three seasons. At 21:54, exactly five full minutes after the Trinity explosion at 16:53, and after a harrowing journey into the mushroom cloud and through the sublime rip in the fabric of space-time opened thereby, where do we find that this long-sought portal into hell leads? Where do we end up after all this world-historical Sturm und Drang? At a f*cking convenience store. And what are the two (and only two) things visibly available for consumption at this place beyond the atomic portal? You guessed it. Oil conveniently refined into gasoline for automobiles and corn conveniently canned for stacking in suburban bomb-shelters. And who is all this for? A bunch of aimless, slovenly, desperate busy-body men milling around trying to keep their sad, waning fires lit. The anti-climax of it all actually had me tempted to laugh at the absurdity of this destination-nowhere. All this work to open up the hell-gate and control the world, and all we manage to do is invite some other pitiable group of lost, lonely souls to act out their version of our frenetic, fragile, graspy melodrama in service of preserving the illusion of material satisfaction and fulfillment. I'm glad I didn't laugh, though, because less than a minute after the above close-up of a convenience store and its two key commodities, the store itself opens up into a yawning black abyss (24:35) and just a few seconds after that, we're treated to the horror of Experiment disgorging a plague of frog-locusts and the voracious hunger to instrumentalize and destroy life that is BOB (24:43). Here's the upshot: a convenience store stocking oil and corn is essentially the go-between or the connective tissue between the Trinity Explosion and the primordial opening of the hell mouth. How's that for impressive product placement? It's one thing to realize that convenience, corn, and oil are at center stage in Twin Peaks' mythology of evil, and another thing entirely to understand why they belong there. Upon reflection, it's pretty clear that any perceptive account of the unique forms of pain, sorrow, and self-inflicted alienation that we face in the wake of the atomic age will need to take convenience, corn, and oil into account. Let's start with convenience. As print advertisements and television from the 1950s suggest, life in the atomic age is synonymous with easier life through technology. Housework is barely work anymore, what with vacuums, dishwashers, and washing machines. Reading and museums and the arts for entertainment? Who needs them, with the exciting advent of radio and television entertainment in your very own home? And who needs weeks or months on a boat when travel on a jet aeroplane is such a snap! And no need for multiple visits to the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (much less to labor on those things yourself), when one-stop shopping at a supermarket with shelves upon shelves full of meaty chicken breasts under cellophane and eggs in pristine cartons is just a fifteen minute drive from your shiny new subdivision away from the noise and crime of the inner city! Can you guess which commodities we have to thank for all these wonderful new conveniences? We are grateful to unfathomable amounts of oil to make gas to drive our cars and to make electricity to run our appliances and to make fertilizer and pesticide to grow our corn. Thanks to oil, we no longer need to grow corn the old fashioned way like the indigenous people from whom we stole it did, taking the time and effort to husband the soil and let the land be fertile for the many other things it nourishes. No, we can let the soil burn and feed the plant with fertilizer, and we can patent the fertilizer so that no one else can use our seeds without paying, and we can talk the government into subsidizing our growing of vast amounts of corn on practically every field in existence at a financial loss so that we can drive subsistence farmers across the world into famine or suicide and produce artificially cheap meat, eggs, and dairy by moving all the animals off of pasture into cages where we feed them corn and produce them by the tens of billions in conditions that it is kind to call a living hell and then flush their oceans of blood and excrement into our water tables, lakes, rivers, streams and oceans. Our reward for all of this will be ever increasing convenience with maybe a few unintended consequences like the hollowing out of rural America, infertile soil, water shortages, dying oceans, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, global warming, severe weather, cancer, strokes, diabetes, and maybe a pandemic of bird flu. Oh, and perhaps a few wars to keep the oil flowing so we can keep the corn growing and our stomachs full of the artificially cheap pain and sorrow of others--oil converted to corn, corn converted through suffering into dead flesh, and dead flesh into energy for the pursuit and acquisition of still more power and comfort. Garmonbozia, anyone? David Lynch has never shied away from showing us the evil, bleeding underbelly of the voracious need to consume and instrumentalize that lies beneath the illusion of suburban convenience and comfort. Not in Blue Velvet, not in "Eat My Fear," and certainly not in Twin Peaks, where--for those with the eyes to see--the terrifying people from another place, the dark magicians seeking total power, those living on the pain, suffering, and humiliation of others--turn out to be us. Convenience has a way of sheltering evil in plain sight, of turning the degradation of people, animals, and the Earth into instruments of perverse power and pleasure. Convenience has a way of robbing us of meaningful labors and difficult but important relationships to people and places from which we are estranged because of the safe distance we put between our attitudes and actions and their consequences for others. And convenience has a way of putting us to sleep, of deflating us, of duping us into living lives that are filled to the brim with that gaudy emptiness that always digests into despair. Let us not allow the mushroom cloud to divert our gaze from the corn and the oil.
"Gnosticism," roughly speaking, is a collective term for the generalized teachings of a variety of ancient heretical Christian sects that denied Jesus was fully human in addition to being fully divine (as orthodox Christianity claims), believing instead that Jesus was a divine, spiritual being who merely inhabited a human form without actually becoming incarnate--i.e., materialized into human "flesh". Rather than coming to save the entire world, the gnostic Jesus was believed to have come in order to impart transformational esoteric knowledge ("gnosis") to a select few adherents who, through the possession of this secret knowledge, could escape annihilation at the end of their material lives and become fully spiritual entities like Jesus. Some scholars of gnosticism suggest that these basic teachings long predate Christianity, having precursor forms in ancient Asiatic religions. Contemporary proponents of pre-Christian gnostic ideas (e.g., John Lash) often describe the gist in psychological terms as "intuitive knowing of the heart that liberates us from social conditioning and ego-fixation." One of the key teachings of Christian forms of gnosticism was that Christian sacred texts--especially the New Testament gospels--had a double-meaning throughout: on the surface were stories and lessons and bits of wisdom that average people could take at face value, more or less literally, and get a basic sense of the world and its features and how to live a decent life therein; under the surface, however, were alleged to be deep secrets that gnostic adherents could use on their journey toward spiritual transformation and eventually complete freedom from the constraints and corruptions of material life. Select initiates detected by masters of the chosen few could be brought into the fold if and when they passed certain tests and initiation rituals, but generally the secrets of gnostic Christianity were to be closely guarded, and were thought, in addition, to be impenetrable to non-adherents in any case, given that the condition of understanding was having the secret knowledge. Without gnosis, one would not be able to access the hidden secrets of the gospel messages. Why think that Part Seven has anything whatever to do with gnosticism? There are several intriguing clues that take place in rapid fire from 21:40-29:56. 1. Diane's change of heart on going to Yankton--The first is Diane's strange change of heart about the trip to Yankton Federal Prison upon having Gordon Cole tell her (at 21:40 ff) that "this is extremely important, Diane, and it's about something you know about, and that's enough said about that." Up until Cole's raising of the prospect that some secret knowledge of Diane's is the key to the case, she's as cold as stone to the prospect of helping them out. But the minute the issue at hand becomes one of using her secret knowledge to leverage an outcome that is otherwise unobtainable, she seems immediately resolved: "Federal prison. South Dakota." Just seconds later, we see them on a plane to South Dakota. 2. The esoteric plane--And speaking of the plane to South Dakota, there's no way to deny that this situation offers us a straightforward example of something like gnostic double meaning. On the surface reading, we've got a relatively banal establishing shot of a jet in flight (an establishing shot that is in fact so banal that redditors were able to dig up the stock footage from which it was drawn--an online advertisement for a used Gulfstream G450, no less). But the deep reading gives us something else entirely: a coded message blinking out to us from the six cabin windows that alternate white and dark in rapid succession. And because the stock footage of the used G450 didn't include the whited-out windows, we have no choice but to conclude that there is a special message being conveyed here meant only for those with the eyes to see it. 3. Albert's coded message to Diane from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7--It struck me as deeply odd when, immediately following the bizarre establishing shot of the plane, Albert stops to offer a pearl of biblical wisdom from Matthew, Chapter 7 to Diane while handing off two 50ml bottles of vodka. He says "Judge not lest ye be judged." and hands her the bottles (notice that he has two in his hands in the photo above, and then two again in the photo below, even though Diane is shown holding just one when it cuts to her with the bottle). Once again, there is a double meaning. At face value, Albert is just being kind: he knows Diane likes to drink, he knows she's under extreme stress, and he's providing her with the means of self-medication, judgement-free--no strings attached! Immediately following this kind gesture, he says "Just the fact that you're here speaks louder than words.", and of course he gets the typical Diane response. On the surface, this is a throwaway act of kindness that supports the surface narrative that Albert and Diane have both got hearts of gold under those rough exteriors. But there's an esoteric meaning, too, as it turns out that Matthew Chapter 7, Verses 1-6 is a passage that is taken in the gnostic tradition to be a crucial reminder that the deepest truths of the gospel are not for everyone and that adherents of the narrow path should know better than to assume that the deep and transformative things they are gleaning from holy scripture are things that can or should be understood by everyone. F. Aster Barnwell comments on the significance of Matthew Chapter 7 in this regard his esoteric work, Hidden Treasure: Jesus Work of Transformation in the following screen capture of pages 168-169 (accessed free via Google Books). [NOTE: I have not read this text and know nothing whatever about the author, but rather found it through a targeted Google search of "Matthew 7 + esoteric meaning" on a hunch that Albert's comment went deeper that it may have at first seemed. As such, I do not seek to recommend or criticize the work here, but use it merely as an example of links to gnosticism.] "To 'give that which is holy unto the dogs' or to 'cast pearls to swine' portrays the one doing so as ignorant of the true value of the knowledge he has gained. It is not the fault of the swine that pearls have no aesthetic appeal, but it is certainly the fault of the one casting them not to know this." It's not entirely clear to me what Albert intends to convey to Diane (or to us) on a deeper level, but there are some intriguing possibilities to consider. Given the fact that Lynch keeps taking us back to Diane throughout the jet plane scene to show us her jaded/dismissive reactions to various gaffes or expressions of naivety committed by Special Agent Tammy Preston (her failure to get Albert's "Girl from Ipanema" joke, for instance), perhaps Albert is offering her a gentle reminder that Preston is not yet among the initiated and so Diane should neither judge her harshly for her failure to be in the loop nor let slip any information for which Tammy isn't yet ready (I'll say more about this in 4. below). A second possibility is that Albert knows that Diane will face a true test of her mettle in meeting Mr. C. and that she must thus ready herself to guard her secret knowledge from Mr. C. at all costs. I'll have more to say about this second possibility in 5. below. A third possibility is that Albert is attempting to convey something to us--the audience--about how advocates of "secret readings" of Twin Peaks ought to conduct themselves. This is an especially fascinating prospect given that just one week later, the airing of Part Eight opened up a chasm in the show's viewership between "gnostic" viewers in-the-know (who claimed to be gleaning all manner of deep meaning from the episode) and befuddled viewers (who claimed to have no idea what was going on). Befuddled viewers, in many cases, were treated very badly indeed by "gnostic" viewers, being told repeatedly that maybe "Twin Peaks wasn't for them" and the like when they expressed any sort of reservation about the genius of the episode. Perhaps one meaning of the esoteric subtext of Albert's comment is a rebuke of arrogant viewers: he is reminding us that people who are really, genuinely in possession of deep insight into Twin Peaks--that is, folks who enjoy something like what John Lash describes above as "intuitive knowing of the heart that liberates us from social conditioning" and the conventions of "accessible television"--are not likely to be judging others for their lack of knowledge; the true possessor of wisdom, after all, knows better either than to lord that wisdom over others who lack it (judge them for their ignorance) or share it with them before the time is right (throw pearls to swine). 4. Agent Tammy Preston's initiation into gnosis--Throughout the series, one gets the impression that Cole believes that Preston is special and is thus putting her through a series of challenges in order to give her the opportunity to prove her mettle and enter more elite ranks of knowing and understanding. But it is also clear that Cole is pacing her through this process--he is neither judging Tammy for not being fully up to speed nor is he "throwing pearls to swine" by introducing her to things for which she is not yet ready. Recall that in Part Four, for instance, Cole actually sends Preston away before discussing Mr. C's disturbing "Yrev very good to see you" line alone with Albert. But here we witness him take her through what seems like an initiation or right of passage into deeper, more esoteric wisdom. She comes on the scene to present a discrepancy between Cooper's finger prints 25 years ago and Mr. C.'s prints two days ago, and this time Cole decides she's ready for a different plane of reasoning about what is going on with that reversed finger print. Cole points to the reversed print, looking knowingly at Rosenfield, and cryptically says “Yrev…the backwards word,” this time explicitly choosing to include Preston in the conversation. A puzzled Preston is lost: “What does this all mean?”, she wonders aloud. Cole congratulates her for doing excellent work—“passing one test after another!”—and bids her to put out her hands. She offers them palms up and he tells her to flip them over. Starting with her left pinky finger, he takes each of her fingers between his right pointer finger and thumb, lightly pinching each while saying one word per finger: “I’m very, very happy to see you again old friend.” When he’s pinched each finger, he returns to her left ring finger—the same one whose print was reversed on Cooper’s recent prison prints—and touches the fleshy lobe just above her knuckle: “This is the spiritual mound, the spiritual finger…you think about that Tammy.” What Cole seems to be inviting her to realize is that Mr. C. is not the real Cooper. Those with the eyes to see know that Mr. C. is not the real Cooper because his "spiritual mound"--the fleshy part of his left ring finger just above the knuckle--betrays him as a forgery, insofar as that spiritual mound conveys an unforgeable spiritual blueprint of the bearer. Only the real Cooper will leave a proper print of that particular part of that particular finger; the doppelgänger, who is a material look-a-like but ultimately a spiritual imposter, will not leave the proper spiritual resonances (which in this case has the effect of reversing the print, leaving a mirror image). Here we find two key features of gnosticism in the same instance: the belief in esoteric insight that only a select few can see and the belief that the true essence of being is spiritual rather than material. 5. Diane shields her gnosis from Mr. C. and detects his emptiness of it--Key to this insight is to recall that, from the very beginning, Diane's urgent importance to the story derives from special knowledge of Cooper which she and only she possesses. Back at the end of Part Four when Cole and Rosenfield get hip to the fact that they might be dealing with a doppelgänger, Cole's first thought is to find "that one certain person"--namely, Diane--who can verify whether Cooper is the real article. Then when it comes to the brass tacks of talking Diane into helping, it's his reminder to her--as noted above--that her secret knowledge is key to unlocking the mystery that convinces her to do it: "it's about something you know about. And that's enough said about that." When Diane finally faces the fire and rises to meet the bottomless emptiness of Mr. C.'s gaze, one gets the impression that she is at great pains to guard this secret knowledge from him and that Mr. C. is concentrating all his dark powers on attempting to draw it out of her. The question of where they last saw each other is pivotal to this exchange, and Mr. C.'s failure to provide an answer in the proper spiritual register--his terrifying, labored, contentless reply of "At your house."--is what convinces Diane beyond a shadow of a doubt that he lacks true understanding of what transpired the last time she saw the real Cooper. Diane's successful defense of her secret knowledge and her clear intuition that Mr. C. lacks the indelible spiritual mark that she and Cooper once left on one another proves her authenticity as a votary of esoteric knowing. Her success in thwarting Mr. C.'s dark powers of spiritual invasion stands in stark contrast to the pathetic failure of Warden Murphy, whose mind is a sieve leaking all kinds of information that Mr. C. can use to exploit him. The juxtaposition between Diane and Warden Murphy's encounters with Mr. C. is at it's most instructive in the difference between Mr. C.'s answers to their respective litmus test questions--the questions whose answers will tell their inquirers whether Mr. C. is the real article or a fraud. Diane asks "When did we see each other last?". Mr. C.'s got nothing, so he tries to deflect and get inside her head by asking her "Are you upset with me?". She turns the tables, responding with a question, "What do you think?", refusing to engage him at all on his own terms. When she forces this issue yet again, all Mr. C. can manage is the hollow, labored "At your house." She knows he's got nothing. Warden Murphy, by contrast, asks him "How do I know you know anything about...THIS." After an agonizing but relatively brief pause, Mr. C. says, almost with alacrity, "Joe McCloskey." Where Diane stonewalled Mr. C.'s dark powers of intuition, Warden Murphy betrayed himself almost instantly. 6. Diane's assessment of what is missing from Mr. C.--After Diane bolts from the visiting room and Cole rejoins her in the parking lot, she regales him with a viscerally moving description of how she knew that Mr. C. is not the real Dale Cooper:
Diane (in agony): “Listen to me! That is not the Dale Cooper that I knew.” Cole (turning up his hearing aid): “Please tell me exactly what you mean.” Diane (beside herself): “It isn’t time passing. Or how he’s changed. Or the way he looks. It’s something here (points to heart) or something that definitely isn’t here (crying).” Cole: “That’s good enough for me Diane, that’s good enough for me.” If we loop back to the beginning and recall John Lash's psychological definition of gnosticism as a form of "intuitive knowing of the heart that liberates us from social conditioning and ego-fixation," we can see that what Diane found wanting in Mr. C. that Special Agent Dale Cooper has in spades is gnosis (if not any particular gnosticism)--that liberating, intuitive knowing of the heart that he must have once upon a time lavished on Diane in a way that left an indelible spiritual mark on both of them. In the wake of Part Eight, it's no longer a stretch to say that Twin Peaks demands more of its viewers than any show in television history. Doubtless, there are occasional patches of smooth, beautiful sailing: with David Lynch skippering, you're going to see lovely things. But the truth is that the show is frequently very, very hard: hard to watch, hard to follow, hard to understand, hard to explain, and increasingly hard to defend to the burgeoning number of viewers who want more coffee and donuts and less primordial egg-ridden spooge hurtling through the tohu wa-bohu. To be sure, there are plenty of folks who love the show despite (or even because of) its difficulty. But there's no denying that the heat is rising in Twin Peaks discussion groups, with members bickering--occasionally even at each others' virtual throats--over whether Part Eight went too far off the rails to deserve to keep its audience. Some participants even confessed to the advent of significant unrest in their households and relationships over personal disagreements with partners and friends who have had their fill of hanging out in mushroom clouds and watching soot specters shamble around under strobe lights. Critics are increasingly impatient too, with some going so far as declaring their "loathing" for the show and questioning the artistic integrity of Frost and Lynch's motives in making it. Says Scott D. Pierce of the Salt Lake Tribune, "[a]t some point, I half expect that Frost and Lynch will laugh, tell us it was an elaborate joke and mock all who took it seriously." Pierce's view is extreme, but he isn't alone. I think Pierce and his ilk are dead wrong that Twin Peaks' difficulty disrespects its viewers. On the contrary, I think that Twin Peaks is demanding of its viewers precisely because it respects them. But for the sake of promoting healthy dialogue across differences of opinion, I won't just baldly assert this claim. I'll argue for it in hopes of bridging the gap between those who sympathize with Pierce's view (or something like it) and those who could spend years watching giants and jubilant otherworldly flappers fine-tune their Rube-Goldbergesque time-travel machines unto infinity while Audrey Horne and Big Eg Hurley go hang. The first step is to challenge the claim that Frost and Lynch's artistic motives are inauthentic--that their aim is not in fact to make a compelling show, but is, at best, to ride their aesthetic hobby horses with no real intention of rewarding the viewer or, at worst, to revel in obscurity for the express purpose of confounding or mocking the viewer. This outlook seems wildly implausible in light of what we've learned about Frost and Lynch over the course of their storied four-decade careers. Indeed, it is difficult to find two people in the industry who have been more consistently earnest in their efforts to be true to their artistic visions and generous to their audiences. To anyone who has spent even five minutes with Mark Frost's recent novel, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, the suggestion will seem lunatic that Frost is somehow cynical in his approach to Twin Peaks or anything but fully earnest in his love for the characters and subject matter. Whatever one thinks of the book, the care and delight that went into producing its fastidiously curated content are veritably beaming from every page; whatever flaws one can ferret out, there is simply nothing cynical about the effort. As for David Lynch, the consistency of his artistic vision is nothing short of legendary and direct expressions of deep respect for his viewership are easy to find. If anything, he gives his viewers too much credit. Consider, for instance, the following long quotation from the "Interpretation" essay in his book Catching the Big Fish, in which he credits viewers with knowing much more than they may realize about difficult films and texts, enjoining them to dive deep into their own intuitive depths with the help of good friends. Says Lynch, "Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words. And when they can't do that, it feels frustrating. But they can come up with an explanation from within, if they just allow it. If they started talking to their friends, soon they would see things--what something is and what something isn't. And they might agree with their friends or argue with their friends--but how could they agree or argue if they don't already know? The interesting thing is, they really do know more than they think. And by voicing what they know, it becomes clearer. And when they see something, they could try to clarify that a little more, and again, go back and forth with a friend. And they would come to some conclusion. And that would be valid." (Catching the Big Fish, 20) The book concludes with this blessing to readers: "May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease. May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one. Peace." (Catching the Big Fish, 177) And Lynch is not just whistling dixie here. He puts his money where his mouth is, having founded a a non-profit organization--The David Lynch Foundation--the express mission of which is to teach transcendental meditation for the purpose of "healing traumatic stress and raising performance in at-risk populations" (including inmates in prison and students in embattled schools). In short, these simply are not the words and actions of an indulgent elitist who disrespects his viewers, satisfied to waste their time with self-centered, masturbatory obscurantism. It seems plausible, then, to think that Frost and Lynch respect their viewership and have every intention of delivering them an authentic, edifying experience. Their efforts to do so might still fail, of course, but if they do fail, it's not for lack of genuine effort to succeed. The demanding nature of Twin Peaks, then, is not plausibly explained as a one gun (five gun?) salute to its viewership, Dr. Amp's antics notwithstanding. From this point forward, I assume that Frost and Lynch see the difficulty of Twin Peaks as fully compatible with genuine respect for their audience. My aim in the remainder of this essay is to illuminate the questions of (1) how and why Twin Peaks is so demanding of viewers and (2) why one has good reason to consider the difficulty of Twin Peaks an asset to the show and a potentially edifying gift to its viewership. I'll handle the questions of how and why Twin Peaks is so demanding in two steps: I'll start with some examples drawn from my own personal experience of the difficulty of watching and interpreting Twin Peaks, and then look to the work of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer for some help in explaining what's going on behind those difficult experiences. As the subtitle of this essay suggests, the guiding problem is that Twin Peaks complicates and even transgresses our dominant language norms, saddling us with the additional burdens of constructing context and even inventing new language before we can begin to interpret and understand what the show puts in front of us. Whereas most television shows unfold within a familiar context (i.e., realistic police drama, heroic fantasy, psychological thriller, etc.) and abide by well-established conventions of plot development, dialogue, and character type, Twin Peaks resolutely does not and thus shifts the difficult labors of contextual construction and establishing nomenclature (a system of naming and reference for making meaning in a particular narrative or context) onto the viewership. A couple of personal examples might help to bring these problems into sharper relief. I'm trying to write an episode guide for Twin Peaks and it feels like translating a foreign language. Before I can say anything meaningful about "what's going on" in plain English, I have to have a holistic, insightful grasp on what's going on in the show. The problem is that Twin Peaks keeps showing me things that, first, are incredibly difficult to understand, and second--even once I have (tenuously) understood them--are near to impossible to capture in sensible, accessible descriptive language. Reflecting on these two interpretive problems, it is easy to see that they are intimately connected: of course it's going to be really hard to capture in language something that I don't really intuitively understand from experience. It's hard enough to bridge the gap between having an experience I do intuitively understand and then describing it to someone else in a way that captures that experience. With the added wrinkle that the original experience of the show is often so foreign to my everyday stock experiences as to be initially unintelligible, it's hardly surprising that it ain't easy to capture "what's going on" in words. To make matters more concrete, think about the scene in Part Three where Dougie is called back into the Lodge and must confront the news that he is merely a spent golem. What happens to Dougie in the wake of receiving this terrible news is so bizarre that one can barely even grasp the basic mechanics of it on a first viewing, much less the significance of it. In attempting to write about this scene, I found myself rewinding the footage five, six, seven, eight times before it was even clear to me exactly what had taken place and even then--still!--I had no idea how to try to convey what I finally understood. Here's what I came up with: "Without warning, Dougie’s head implodes into a menacing black vapor and a gold pearl materializes from out of the vapor. In a flicker, an entity that appears similar to the Arm's disfigured head snaps into the frame and ingests the gold pearl, only then to disgorge it onto the seat before disappearing." To say the least, this sentence was not an easy one to compose even after it was clear to me what had actually transpired. What's more, though the sentence is rendered in clear English, the meaning of the happening it expresses is hardly illuminated thereby. If it were just the surreal moments that presented this challenge, Twin Peaks might not be so hard; after all, for every Lodge visit, temporal rift odyssey, and gravity-defying dime, there are five scenes depicting regular folks doing mostly mundane, if sometimes odd, things. But those scenes too are often incredibly demanding of the viewer, given the care that is taken with how the scenes are constructed and situated in the series as a whole. Scenes that appear on their face to be relatively straightforward instances of comic relief, or action, or much-needed rest from the action in a clean, well-lighted space often turn out, upon further reflection, to be more complicated or mysterious than they initially seemed (think of Dr. Amp's Gold Shit-Digging Shovel or Ike the Spike's failed assassination attempt on Cooper or Bing's curious behavior at the R&R). These challenging oddities and mini-mysteries strewn throughout even the most seemingly banal scenes are incredibly difficult to capture and convey, assuming one notices them at all. The upshot is that Twin Peaks is demanding of its audience not just as a task for reflective interpretation after the fact, but also at the most basic level of the viewing experience itself; much of the time, what we experience on screen is not enough to provide the usual assurances that we fully, or even partially, understand what we are seeing, much less the significance of what we are seeing. And this is simply not an experience we're televisually well-accustomed to, even from watching other demanding, well-wrought series like True Detective or The Leftovers where there are interpretive mysteries o'plenty (to be sure) but many fewer disruptions and transgressions of the foundational assumptions that viewers are used to being able to take for granted in watching television concerning, for instance, what and where and when things are, what basic laws (if any) of perception, persistence, and interaction govern these entities, what to expect in terms of pacing and plot and character development, and how to discern the big tops from the sideshows when it comes to interpretive significance for the narrative as a whole. In Twin Peaks, however, viewers can't take any of these things for granted, but must take on the burdens of contextual construction and meaning-making themselves, wrestling their understanding of the narrative (and the more conventional mysteries within it) from regular bouts with--among other things--extreme abstraction, surrealism, spatial and temporal discontinuity, magic, absurdity, caricature, bizarre characters and their perpetual doubling, unconventional pacing, and exaggerated sonic signification. Even for the most experienced Twin Peaks freaks, the result is inarguably a demanding, disorienting ride. That these unorthodox features of Twin Peaks complicate things for the viewer is certainly clear enough, but it remains to elucidate why they make it so demanding, and, moreover, why rising to the challenge of these demands (rather than simply deeming Twin Peaks a failed experiment and throwing in the towel) is an edifying prospect. Here, some insights from Hans-Georg Gadamer into the norms of human language and understanding (and how Twin Peaks complicates and transgresses them) can help us to glimpse what is going on behind the scenes as we struggle to make sense of Twin Peaks. [Spoiler warning: Things are about to take a turn for the slow and abstract for the next handful of paragraphs, but only for the purpose of returning to our beloved Twin Peaks with some handy new interpretive tools; besides, if you're reading this, you probably voluntarily watched Cooper standing listlessly under a statue for ten minutes and willingly journeyed to the center of a mushroom cloud aided only by images of white flak and rain falling upwards, so we already know you're adept at negotiating slow and abstract.] Following his teacher Martin Heidegger who famously described language as "the house of being," Gadamer maintains that language is not just a communication tool that we pick up and use when we need it and then shelve when we don't (e.g., "verbal" communication), but is rather the primary mode of being through which humans meaningfully experience and understand the world in the first place. Because we human beings are always already using language (in this broad, interpretive sense of recognizing and understanding meaningful differences in the world) by the time there is a meaningful world in front of us to speak of, we can never get a fully impartial perspective on meaning-making. Insofar as our understanding of the world is always already taking place within language by the time it's possible to ask critical questions about it, there's no way for human meaning-making to leave language behind. In "Man and Language" (pp. 69 ff.), Gadamer characterizes this linguistic mode of human understanding in terms of three essential features: self-forgetfulness, I-lessness, and universality. According to Gadamer, when "language is a living operation"--that is, when we are experiencing it in the way we ordinarily do as an open window into the world--language is unaware of itself (self-forgetful), always already absorbed in a community of understanding (I-less), and all-encompassing of our understanding given that every particular linguistic point of reference (ideas, words, sentences, etc.) that is meaningful to us assumes our background understanding of how that particular idea or word fits within the linguistic system as whole (universal). We can make these abstractions more concrete by attending to how they feel in our experience on the ground. The self-forgetfulness of language feels like breathing or seeing through your favorite pair of glasses: it's influence is simultaneously pervasive and almost completely hidden from you--everything depends on its occurrence behind the scenes, but like a good operating system on a phone or a computer, when things are going well, you'll never even know it's there. Imagine calling to tell your best friend about an amazing night on the town with a new flame: here's what you're not doing--"Now let's see, I want to express my excitement, so I'll choose emphatic verbs, limit my use of dependent clauses, and make sure that my word order is entirely unambiguous, leaving no room for question about the sincerity of my attraction to this fascinating new person." Nope. You simply gush forth your enthusiasm for the person and your excitement about the evening, without any care or knowledge of grammar or syntax, or even basic awareness that you are speaking words at all. The same is true for your friend. Unless she is pissed at you or jealous, she won't even apprehend that you are speaking or that she is listening--you will simply be together in a world of shared meaning, as the words and sentences vanish into their understood significance for the two of you in that experience. And this is the way it goes most of the time in our day to day dealings. Self-forgetfulness is thus a beautiful thing--it means that, most of the time, anyway, we can live and experience and communicate in a meaningful world without the vaguest sense that we are doing so, without any conscious effort to "construct" what we are seeing or saying or feeling. To appreciate what a blessing it is that language usually functions in this way, consider those terrible moments, hopefully much fewer and farther between, where language is not a living operation and you become acutely and awkwardly aware that you must now "produce" something to say and everything depends on your "finding the words:" the professor calls on you when you're unprepared for class; the person you'd most like to impress in the world turns up next to you at the grocery when you're in your giving-up-on-life pants; you're suddenly on the spot to make an impromptu wedding toast half in the bag, but not far enough in to be oblivious to how badly this is about to go; you're on deadline, but you have writer's block. For most of us, these experiences and others like them make us feel anywhere from uncomfortable to seriously incapacitated: the usual luxury of blissful self-forgetfulness is snatched away and we're suddenly on the interpretive hot-seat, scrambling to discharge a burden of meaning-making that usually happens effortlessly. The I-lessness of language feels like a fascinating conversation in which you lose yourself in the back-and-forth of the dialogue and emerge a different person, or like a game in which you subordinate your individual performance to becoming one with your teammates and rivals in the scintillating, unpredictable play of the competition. When linguistic understanding is taking place as usual, we are always already enmeshed in a world of shared meaning with others, going about our business in implicit awareness of how the communal norms of meaning-making and -sharing generally function and of how to make our way within them. Even when we aren't actually with other people, the ways in which we understand ourselves and the world are always already deeply inflected by the ways we've been shaped in our language communities. Understanding, as Gadamer elegantly puts it, always takes place "in the sphere of the 'we'". The universality of language, finally, shows up in our ability implicitly to infer and express all sorts of unstated information from prior understanding of the background context of what is explicitly seen or said or felt. When someone says, for instance, "I'd like two scoops of vegan butter brickle, in a cone, to go.", no one needs to tell us not to prepare six scoops of cow's-milk Superman in a dish for dine-in, much less not to offer a massage or a cab ride or a trip to see the Rothko Chapel in Houston. We already understand all those things implicitly and immediately without having to be told because we already possess a background understanding of the language as a whole and of how the various parts work meaningfully together therein. Thanks to the universality of language, every meaningful sentence we speak brings the entire unsaid background context of the language along with it. We are now in a position to make it much clearer why Twin Peaks is so demanding of the viewer, in light of these three essential features of language. Most television shows do not challenge these basic conventions of linguistic understanding but rather work intentionally and comfortably within them: they allow us to suspend our disbelief and become blissfully absorbed in the narrative (self-forgetfulness), safely ensconced in a set of shared communal interpretive conventions of meaning (I-lessness) and armed with significant background knowledge from our previous experience of similar shows that enables us effortlessly and implicitly to grasp and infer innumerable meaningful connections between what we see and what we don't see (universality). Twin Peaks, on the contrary, not only resists easy accommodation to all three essential features of language, but often makes a point of calling our attention very explicitly to the fact that breaking out of these usual rhythms of made-to-order meaning is essential to our ability to wake up to what is really going on, both in the drama of Twin Peaks and in our own daily lives in the world at large. As wonderful a blessing as it is, most of the time, to live in a world that is effortlessly understood (self-forgetfulness), shared meaningfully with others like oneself (I-less), and grasped in advance as a whole (universality), it is nothing short of dangerous to allow oneself to be lulled into believing that there is nothing more to the world than what one has dreamt of in her inherited, accessible, expressible philosophy. To embark on a genuine search for truth, one must wake up from the ingrained tendency simply to accept what has been handed down to one and take responsibility for actively making meaning rather than just always passively receiving it. Waking up isn't easy, though. It typically requires exposure to some person or place or experience that calls forth a radical rupture from the everyday--a cleavage from our average selves and modes of apprehension that affords us enough critical distance from who and how we typically are to see the crucial difference between who we have been up to now and who we might yet be in a future past. Most of the time, we live from out of the past toward the future, allowing the conventions and inheritances of our heritage to dictate what we see, feel, understand and know--what we will be. But in these rare moments of wakefulness, in these experiences of rupture with the everyday, we live from out of the future toward the past, holding open the possibility of being and understanding something new, something as-yet-underway, something not completely determined by who one has been and what one has understood up to now. Twin Peaks awakens us from our self-forgetfulness by making it impossible to fall asleep at the wheel. How, after all, can one become anesthetized by inherited understanding when inherited understanding often provides exactly ZERO traction on what is transpiring in front of one at any given moment? When we are sure that we understand, we can coast along and sink into comfort; when we are unclear about what is going on, and yet desire to understand, we must cling to wakefulness, stay alert, remain poised at the edge of our attention. Twin Peaks forces us into expanded consciousness of our I-lessness by necessitating interaction with different others. When we're confident that the people in our usual orbit have a stranglehold on the truth, there's no reason to go outside the bubble. But when a visceral experience is so confounding that everyone we usually trust is as confused as we are, we have no choice but to broaden our horizons and look for input from elsewhere if we care about truth-seeking. To achieve the understanding we hope for, we must build bridges to communities of interpretation beyond the one in which we began the search. Twin Peaks pushes outward on the boundaries of the universality of language, finally, by reminding us that our present conception of "the whole" is always too small and that there are beings and experiences and epiphanies out there in the world that our inherited conception of things, at least as we currently apprehend it, cannot sufficiently comprehend. It is hardly a mystery, then, that most viewers find Twin Peaks exasperating at some point or other. What the series is doing, after all, at least if I'm on the right track in this essay, is nothing short of challenging and even transgressing some of the most elemental ways that human beings go about their business in the world. Self-forgetfulness, I-lessness, and universality are who we are and where we live and what we know. To expose those essential features of our identity to dismantling, expansion, and evolution is deeply unnerving. In the same way that most of us find it uncomfortable (at the least!) to be called on when we don't know the answer, or to be put upon to articulate and defend what we believe when we haven't really thought it through, most of us--if we're honest--will find ourselves put on the spot in various ways by this show that simply refuses to cooperate with our expectations, forces us to hone our perspectives against the whetstone of diverse opinion, and demands that we perpetually find the courage to dismantle and reconstruct the frames of reference we were tempted to think could bring everything together even before all has been revealed.
It seems to me that hanging in there with Twin Peaks is an edifying prospect notwithstanding the various challenges and discomforts that attend to attempting what it demands of us. Those of us who are disinclined to suffer it any further as entertainment, moreover, might do well to abandon it as a leisure activity and take it up instead as a spiritual or philosophical exercise in self-expansion. What Frost and Lynch are offering us here, I think, is nothing short of the gift of an opportunity for cultivating self-transcendence. None of us can achieve that lofty goal, alas, without putting in some hard work. In today's world, with insular group-think on the rise and tyrants o'plenty anxious to exploit our uncritical provinciality, I think we could do much worse than to spend some of our ample televisual experience hard at work on expanding our interpretive horizons. David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is turning out to be one of my favorite textual companions for the journey through Twin Peaks-The Return. The book comprises more than six dozen very brief essays--some just a page or even a paragraph in length--on various aspects of Lynch's life and work and their elevation through his meditation practice. Many of the essays begin with short excerpts from Hindu sacred texts and in leafing through these epigraphs this afternoon, I was astonished at how illuminating some of them are of recent events in Twin Peaks. Here are five epiphanies to which these epigraphs testify. 1. The woodsmen are slaves to unhappiness and self-inflicted suffering, as are the rest of us who end up greedily asking the world, in one way or another, "Gotta light?": "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." (Upanishads, cited in Catching the Big Fish, 3) 2. Perhaps the creative outpouring of potential life and death from "Mother" is more complicated than just a spilling forth of unmitigated evil, as many seem inclined to think: "Know that all of Nature is but a magic theater, that the great Mother is the master magician, and that this whole world is peopled by her many parts." (Upanishads, cited in Catching the Big Fish, 15) 3. The assumption that the world of Twin Peaks is a dualistic universe animated by a straightforward opposition between good and evil oversimplifies a richer and more complex narrative: "One unbounded ocean of consciousness became light, water, and matter. And the three became many. In this way the whole universe was created as an unbounded ocean of consciousness ever unfolding within itself." (Upanishads, cited in Catching the Big Fish, 47) 4. The wise live from out of the future past: "Avert the danger that has not yet come." (Yoga Sutras, cited in Catching the Big Fish, 175) 5. Inner power has two faces: "Softer than the flower where kindness is concerned, stronger than the thunder where principles are at stake." (Vedic Definition of the Enlightened, cited in Catching the Big Fish, 169)
The usual ways of attempting to make sense of the narrative in Part Eight are helpful, but adult vision in the critical-theoretical attitude has a way of seeing too many things at once, anticipating too much, and leaving the present matters at hand to attend to past or future details. What would a hypothetical child--perhaps the inner child in each of us--make of what we saw on Sunday? What becomes clearer or less clear about the narrative in the present without a past full of suffering and a future full of existential dread? This experiment is an effort to get us onto a different path of looking, because where the parameters of what can be received are adjusted, so are the phenomena presented. I sometimes find it helpful to interpret Lynch films as if I were a child reading a storybook. In doing so, I take it for granted that the fantastical and the real are best of friends, that the enchanted world of the story is an extension of my own world rather than an escape from it, and that "getting it" is more about relinquishing myself wholeheartedly to the story's imagination-expanding ride than about mastering and sorting its details and discrepancies. For me, the exercise of attempting to experience a narrative through the eyes of my inner child can help me to suspend my critical faculties and dial back my skepticism (two essential skills borne of adult experience that are crucial for coping with suffering but that often hinder my full absorption into a good story) so that I can deal more intuitively and joyfully with what's in front of me. Here are some of the things that my inner child told me about the more difficult moments of Part Eight. So this huge fiery bomb goes off on Earth and makes these scary soot people from another planet come. The soot people love fire so much that they'll do anything to get it. They're all burnt up from it and they don't look very nice because all they ever do is try to get more fire. They don't have time to comb their hair and shave their beards and change clothes or hang out with their friends and families because they're so burned out trying to get that fire. The big bomb made a secret passage through this crazy tunnel to their hideout, which is an old burnt-up store. It looks like it used to be a really cool hideout, where you could buy stuff and get gas for your car, but then they didn't take care of it or fix it up and now it's all broken down and smoky. They're just nervous and mean and moving around looking for other people's fire to take. That's why they came to our planet, I think. When they saw the fire, they thought they could get some of ours, maybe. The soot people go away and then I saw this wicked cool dragon lady in outer space who's kinda scary, because it's real dark and she looks super powerful and mysterious and kind of like a person but sort of not and you can't really know if she's bad or good because she's not really doing anything mean or nice. The dragon lady's not like the soot people--she doesn't have any clothes or even hair or a face and she's not burned up--she's just flying in space and everything is dark except her. Then a whole bunch of watery, sticky goop comes out of her head. I thought it was barf or something at first, but then I saw that there's all these eggs in it--tons and tons of little speckled eggs and some medium-sized ones that look sort of like these awesome robin eggs I saw in our yard and lizard eggs I saw at school. Maybe it's more like frog eggs, though, because the goop is like a comforting pillow to them and protects them like I saw in the lagoon at Northside Park on a nature walk. But there's a really big black pod, too, with some mean guy's face in it, kind of off to the side, pushing the eggs around. I liked all the little and medium-sized eggs, but the big black pod was weird and scary. It felt like when my uncle died from cancer cells; my mom said the cancer cells got too big for the other cells and just took over like a bully and wouldn't let the other cells grow. I bet there's some cool creatures in the tiny and medium eggs, like robins or lizards or frogs, that might come out if that bully doesn't get them. Anyway, one of the nice eggs comes out of the watery goop and flies into another fire tunnel--it looks sort of like the big bomb fire tunnel for awhile and the egg gets all heated up and hot and golden and flies through the fire. But then it goes into another tunnel that's got all these red specks and stuff and I'm kind of glad, because if it was white specks again it might go back to the burned-out soot people hideout. But there's another hideout! It's this rad metal fortress that's way up on a mountain in the middle of a purple ocean! It looks like you could never get in, but there are these little holes on the side that are small enough for the egg to fly through it! The egg flies into this thimble machine in this room that looks kind of like my great-grandma's house before she died with one of those super old record players (we sold hers at a garage sale because it took up too much room and can't play CDs or iPods). There's a lady in there who is all dressed up like for an old time costume party, and then this giant old man who looks like Robert Wadlow from the Guinness Book of World Records. They're very weird, but I feel like they could be nice underneath even though they're super serious and kind of mysterious. The thimble machine is blinking and buzzing, I think because the egg flew in and any time something flies in through one of those holes, the giant who's like the caretaker of the hideout needs to know. He turns off the buzzer and goes upstairs to this old theater that seems like his Batcave where he goes to find out his missions because it has a big screen and another thimble machine and bunch of cool chutes and tubes and wires and golden metal pieces like a Rube Goldberg machine I saw on YouTube. So the old giant guy sees the bully pod pushing in on those neat little eggs and he doesn't like it either, and then he does something really cool: he rises up right by one of the tubes that is connected to the thimble machine and he activates his superpower which I think is sort of like this really awesome kind of positive thinking that can actually make bad things happen different and good in the world--I mean, my dad is always talking about this thing called "mindfulness" where you can fight bad things in your life just by being sort of quiet inside and not always so worried about homework or bullies or something embarrassing at recess that you get mad and sad so easy and can't be happy in what you are doing right then because you're always thinking about bad or sad stuff from before or next time. The old giant's superpower is kind of like that, except not just with what he feels about stuff, but with what stuff is really like in the real world, if that makes sense. I'm kind of embarrassed to say the next part, because it's about the birds and the bees and some kids my age don't know about that and their parents get weird about it. But my whole family are feminists and my aunt is an activist and makes knitting stuff and crafts all the time and one time she made these little uteruses out of yarn for a craft fair to sell to people to pay for ladies who have cancer like my uncle did before he died. Uteruses are the things that protect babies while they are growing inside their mamas and my aunt says they are really powerful, and they must be really powerful, because that's just what the old giant makes when he turns his superpower on--a giant gold uterus of mindfulness just comes right out of his face and when the little egg comes out of the tube it goes straight into the golden uterus! The fancy lady in the costume is there too, and she's got a big smile on her face like she knows that egg is going to be safe and like that black bully-face pod doesn't have a chance to get it now! The golden uterus of mindfulness gets bigger and bigger with the egg inside it until the the old giant has put so many layers of good quietness around it that the egg has its own globe of lights around it, kind of like my planetarium turtle nightlight that Mom gave me that puts stars on my ceiling and makes me feel safe because it's not dark and I'm not alone and I can count stars until I calm down and fall asleep. The egg globe floats down to the fancy woman in the costume and she looks into it and smiles and sees a happy girl's face inside the globe of lights around the egg and kisses her. I think the happy girl is like a protector of the little world inside the egg. I'm glad there's a protector to go with the egg globe, because even though the old giant's mindful thoughts and the fancy lady's love seem great and everything, I worry that they'll go away sometimes or maybe they won't last, and so a protector is there just in case. The egg globe floats up into the Rube Goldberg machine and into a golden tube that will launch it to Earth! And it's going to my country, the United States, even though the leaders of my country made that big bomb that made the soot people come. I'm not Catholic, but I go to Catholic school, and the priest there says that there's a lot of power in helping people even though you do bad things and they do bad things and that the kindest people even love their enemies and do good to people who hate them, so I think that means that the old giant and the fancy lady are some of the kindest people. By the time the egg makes it to New Mexico, I can't see the globe or the protector girl anymore. I worry that they burned off on a bumpy trip all the way to Earth, but I still hope that maybe they're inside the egg with the creature somehow, like maybe the creature ate them to stay alive on the trip like one of those weird placenta thingies that my friend Oscar's mom turned into a powder for soups and salads because there's so much nutrients in it. I was right that there is a super cool creature inside the egg! It hatched and it's a frog-fly! It has these neat froggy back legs that and these cool insecty head and wings. I hope it has a lot of awesome powers, too, because in my Greek and Norse mythology books, all the animals that are like a cross between two animals are mythical and magic and can do all the things that both animals can do and sometimes much more. So maybe this creature can swim in deep water and fly to high heights, like a moth to flame! That would be so great! My friend Mable (a know-it-all smarty pants whose mom is a professor who teaches college students about Jonathan Swift) says she's a "realist" and that creatures like this one are probably cursed because they have legs for swimming but no gills for breathing under water and wings for flying but a body too heavy to carry aloft for very long, and so "this poor creature has the worst of both worlds." She got all dramatic and bossy and said that they "must live between the heights and the depths in futile repetitions of ascent and descent," whatever that means. She's a know-it-all, like I said, but I did look up "futile" on Google and it says "hopeless." I'm not hopeless at all, because that little creature seemed to know just what to do and just how to do it--right out of the egg, even, like it didn't really eat the placenta protector and all those stars until they were all gone, but just invited them inside to grow with it and show it where to go. Also, I think Mable's wrong that "ups and downs and all-over-agains," like my brother says, are "futile." I'm kind of like that--going up and feeling good sometimes and going down and feeling bad sometimes, but I've learned some stuff about feeling good from feeling bad and some stuff about feeling bad from feeling good. I was really happy to see the frog-fly walk and super excited when it flew all the way up to that girl's window. Maybe it really can do all kinds of cool stuff! I wasn't expecting the creature to go into that girl's mouth at all, though. That was very weird and gross. I don't eat animals. But I didn't expect that tiny speckled egg to go into the giant's uterus of mindfulness and I didn't expect it to get that smiling girl to protect it and I didn't expect the creature inside to be a frog-fly or to have brought the protector inside of it to guide it, but all those things happened and it seemed to turn out okay. If the frog-fly can take in its protector while sleeping inside an egg, maybe this girl can take in her protector while sleeping in her bed.
I have a book about an old lady who swallowed a bunch of seeds and grew a garden in her belly and then just barfed the whole garden up and it was really nice in her yard then. And a radioactive spider gave Peter Parker super powers in my Spiderman comic. I hope the frog-fly can help the girl keep those soot people from taking her fire and I have a feeling that will happen, because the soot people did some very bad things to other people in her town that didn't happen to her. Maybe it's not so bad to be like the frog-fly, where you can fly okay--high enough to do your special thing--but not so high as the soot people. They can go way up high, all the way into the sky, and zip around in the electrical wires, and come down like lightning, but when they do, they just hurt people and when they don't they just go around in that old, smoky, burned out store. I'd rather be a frog-fly than a soot person, that's for sure. Beauty is one thing. The sublime is something else entirely. Where words fail, pictures partially succeed.
In screenwriting lingo, when a story begins and ends with a framing treatment of roughly the same theme or insight, it's called "bookending." The idea is that if you sound the same note on the outset and at the conclusion of the story, the viewer will take the interpretive cue that the narrative--however convoluted--has brought one "full circle" and will thus be able retrospectively to reconstruct a certain continuity throughout the drama. Once a fairly common framing tool, bookending has largely fallen out of favor. As screenwriting conventions have evolved over the past several decades, and storytelling on screen and elsewhere has become decidedly less linear, many writers have come to think of bookending as a cheap ploy--something that writers resort to when they haven't done a sound enough job of constructing the narrative to enable readers to put the pieces together themselves. Bookending, or so the critique goes, is lazy writing for lazy viewers. Whereas ideally writers construct a careful, subtle, challenging, but ultimately continuous narrative that repays close attention and active interpretation from the viewer (leaving plenty of underdetermination and ambiguity for the active viewer imaginatively to bask in as she ranges over possible readings of the story before her), bookending fails to challenge writers or viewers to uphold their ends of the bargain--the writers simply tell the reader what the story is "about" (at the beginning to set the stage, and at the end to drive the point home) and readers passively receive the information. Leave it to Lynch and Frost to use an almost imperceptibly subtle form of bookending--a framing tool that is often used as a lazy means of orienting readers in a loose-jointed, poorly-constructed plot--as an ingenious way of disorienting readers in one of the tightest, most fastidiously-constructed plots ever to appear on television. The bookends, in this case, are Jerry Horne and Bing, and the theme that their characters foreground at the beginning and the bitter end of the episode is personal dislocation: "I don't know where I am!". In Jerry's case, the conveyance of the theme couldn't be more straightforward: he veritably screams it into the phone in a scene that seems otherwise to be entirely gratuitous. Bing's role as a bookend is decidedly more subtle--so subtle, in fact, that most viewers will not have experienced him as a bookend at all. To see that his character's appearance is functioning as a bookend here, one must do three things that take her outside the usual parameters of the narrative itself: (1) she must consult the credits for information on who is playing the character "Bing" (Riley Lynch, David Lynch's son); (2) she must turn on closed-captioning to clear up confusion about what Bing actually says in the scene ("Anyone seen Bing?"); and (3) she must watch through to the bitter end of the credits, literally until the last second before the Lynch/Frost Productions frame, in order to appreciate the full significance of the scene. Why must she do these things? She must do (1) to learn who "Bing" is, since that character has not been identified or addressed as such on screen by any other character, appearing only twice so far in very minor roles--once as the guitarist in "Trouble" performing "Snake Eyes" in the Roadhouse in Part Five (the scene in which we first meet Richard Horne) and once as the young man who bursts into the R&R Diner and exclaims, almost unintelligibly, "Anyone seen Bing?" (as depicted in the photo above). The exclamation is so garbled that in early online discussions of this odd scene, people were rendering the line as "Anyone seen Billy?" and wondering about who Billy was and the significance of his having gone missing. With some help from (2) closed captioning, however, we know that what he actually said is "Anyone seen Bing?". And if we watch until the (3) bitter end of the credits, we see that the self-same character--Bing, again--returns to the diner, seemingly in the company of a young woman, standing right in front of the register (as depicted in the photo below) at 57:57--after all the credits have rolled literally one second before the Frost/Lynch Productions frame. The musical cue that leads up to Bing's reemergence--a foreboding drone deeply at odds with "Sleep Walk," the song that has been playing throughout the credits--makes the significance of the moment unmistakable. With these extra-narratival pieces of information in place, we can now juxtapose the experiences of the average viewer (who is not in possession of this extra-narratival information) with that of the viewer who has this information. The average viewer sees a young man she is not likely to recognize in the moment as Bing (the guitarist from Trouble) burst into the R&R looking for Bing. Her assumption will be that Billy (or Bing or whatever that garbled name was) has gone missing and that this man is a friend of his on a frantic search for him--it's weird, given that there is no precedent for it and it doesn't seem to connect to any previous scenes, but it doesn't seem particularly significant (at most, perhaps, it's a signal of a new plot development, as Joanna Robinson indicates in a recent Vanity Fair Article). But for the viewer who is possessed of this extra-narratival information, the scene is well beyond weird into utterly baffling territory: Bing himself enters the R&R, causes a huge commotion looking for himself (?!), leaves in a panic, and then reappears minutes later, calm and collected, perhaps with a significant other, and no one seems to bat an eye. The scene is all the more strange given the odd edits that shuffle customers around (though those could just be depicting the passage of time).
But now consider this bizarre scene in the broader context of Jerry Horne's dislocation in the first scene. "I don't know where I am!", after all, is an apt description of Bing's performance at the R&R too: "Hi, I'm Bing! I'm looking for myself. Has anyone here seen me? I'm in a panic to find myself. Oh, and I'll be right back in a minute acting as though nothing happened." Bing is the second bookend in an episode in which the guiding theme of the series--derangement, dislocation, not knowing where we are--is reaching a fever pitch. As the audience, we are right there with Jerry Horne, Bing, and Cooper, not knowing where we are in a narrative that simply refuses to make us feel at home. What we have here, it would seem, is yet another case of doubling, in which the characters and the viewers are simultaneously experiencing time-out-of-joint. In this particular case, fascinatingly, the viewer's ability to orient herself literally requires her derangement--that is, she must go beyond the range of the narrative that is absorbing her and take stock of extra-narratival information that sheds light on the story unfolding before her. She must rouse herself from the "Sleep Walk" and reemerge awake. There is something deeply disturbing about mirror images. It's tempting to think that this fact might just be a matter of cultural history, given that there are horror films o'plenty that make terrifying use of mirrors (the mirror scenes in The Shining and the Poltergeist series, for instance, surely saw to it that I'd have a troubled relationship with mirrors growing up, and all the unnerving mirror mythology in Twin Peaks certainly hasn't helped in adulthood). It's more likely, though, that mirrors and mirror images have become a favorite go-to trope for unsettling us for the more elemental reason that mirrors remind us of our finitude and our naked vulnerability in a whole host of ways: looking into mirrors, we admire and lament our fleeting youth and beauty; we canvas and catalogue our faults, learning to hate ourselves; we put on masks, fashioning who we are to the demands of voracious and judgmental others; but most of all, we disengage from the world, turn our backs to it, and become consumed by doubles of ourselves--an act that mirrors our original alienation from a world with which we were once one until self-reflection arose and shattered the one into many. This alienating but inevitable act of turning away from unity and giving birth to plurality is precisely what is on the "Log Lady" Margaret Lanterman's mind in her final introductory monologue of the original series. In introducing the fateful episode 29, which infamously ends with Evil Dale seeing Bob gaze back at him through a shattered mirror, Lanterman says: "And now, an ending. Where there was once one, there are now two. What is a reflection? A chance to see two? When there are chances for reflections, there can always be two or more. Only when we are everywhere will there be just one." After 25 years of waiting to find out what's behind the mirror, and now 7 episodes of knowing that the answer is something deeply wicked, it's a tantalizing prospect that our fractured hero Special Agent Dale Cooper can somehow find a way, like the Log Lady says, to eliminate "chances for reflections" and "be everywhere" so that "there can be just one." Ain't no unity to speak of yet, though. Indeed, the mirror images and flipped doubles are multiplying by the episode. There are too many to count, but here are a few of my favorite goodies (a couple of which may well be production errors or mere figments of my imagination--even so, you've got to love a show with a mythology so deep that mere continuity errors can be reasonably thought to have abiding significance for the series). 1. Mr. C.'s flipped greeting to Gordon Cole--In saying, "It's yrev, very good to see you, old friend.", Mr. C. alerts Gordon to the fact that there's a doppelgänger at the wheel of Special Agent Dale Cooper. 2. Mr. C.'s flipped left ring-finger print--Special Agent Tammy Preston discovers this discrepancy between the print of Cooper's left ring finger from his FBI file and the print of Mr. C's left ring finger from his Yankton intake in Part Five and then briefs Cole and Rosenfield on the plane to Yankton for Diane's visit with Mr. C. in Part Seven. In discussing the discrepancy en route to Yankton, Cole points out to Preston that the left ring finger is "the spiritual mound--the spiritual finger," as if to suggest that, though Mr. C. might be able to bear the other nine prints without a problem, he can only display a mirror image of the print for the finger that contains Cooper's unique spiritual blueprint. 3. Ike "The Spike" Stadtler's flipped palm flesh-wound--This one is much more subtle, and I'm still unresolved as to whether it was intended, but given context clues and Lynch's legendary attention to detail, it would surprise me if it turned out to be a mistake. In Part Seven, during the struggle between Cooper and Ike "The Spike," the Arm pays an unexpected visit to a pavement in Las Vegas near you, screaming at Cooper to "Squeeze his hand off! Squeeze his hand off! Squeeze his hand off!". Cooper obliges the Arm, and as is clearly discernible from the above photograph, he is squeezing Ike's right hand against the right-side grip (pointing forward) of the handgun. After a second wicked blow to the trachea, Ike has had more than enough and pulls away from the struggle with a visible wound on his right palm, presumably leaving the flesh on the right-side grip of the gun behind, as is clearly discernible from the photograph below. After dusk has fallen, however, and the forensic team has arrived to sift through the evidence at the crime scene, we see a curious sequence in which one of the officers clearly has to wrench Ike's palm flesh from the left-side grip of the gun (pointing forward) rather than the right-side grip of the gun, to which it would surely have been affixed given the photographic evidence above. Notice too, in the photograph below, that the sequence of the left-side grip of the handgun being stripped for evidence is not just in the background, but is a very intentionally spotlighted close-up. What has happened here? Are we to believe that Lynch (1) showed us a close-up of the Arm telling Cooper to squeeze Ike's hand off when his palm is clearly on the right-side grip; (2) chose to put Ike's departure from the scuffle into slow motion in order to enable us, if briefly, to see the wound on Ike's right hand; and then (3) chose to put a close-up of the gun literally under a spotlight depicting discontinuous placement of Ike's palm flesh? Or is this yet another instance of flipping in which, perhaps, the Arm's intervention or Ike "the Spike's" as-yet-undisclosed dark origins in the Lodge have changed the game? 4. Ruth Davenport's decapitated head's flipped eye wound (?)--Against this backdrop, we're ready for the big reveal...or perhaps just a gaping window into my wild imagination. My first thought upon seeing Ruth Davenport's decapitated head was that "This is no ordinary wound; it looks as though it has been cauterized by some strange molten metal or white hot light--this has got to be significant." Once it was revealed that Major Briggs' body was under the covers, it seemed even more plausible that something extraordinary was responsible for Ruth's death--something, perhaps, that shone through from another world. Perhaps she and Briggs, the thought occurred to me, were occupying parallel, overlapping spaces in different dimensional planes and some overwhelming force of interdimensional power shot through them both, leaving Davenport's head and Briggs' body in our world and Briggs' head and Ruth's body in some other place. But what could this overwhelming force of inter dimensional power be? Given that I've been casting about since Part One for some stranger-than-average way to explain Ruth Davenport's golden cauterized eye, I've been keeping eyes peeled for potential doubles. And given the recent influx in flipped doubles in Part Seven, I've been keeping an eye out (sorry--last intolerably bad eye pun) for a flipped double for Ruth. Then like a bolt of white light from Laura Palmer's face, it hit me! Actually, it was quite literally a bolt of white light from Laura Palmer's face, and in particular it was THIS bolt of white light from Laura Palmer's face from the opening credits: My partner kept telling me that this image had to be some sort of clue, and we always religiously watch the opening credits, quipping that no one in their right mind skips through this sequence. But what if it really is a skeleton key to the whole business? I thought to myself: "This image reminds me of Ruth Davenport's cauterized eye."
Then I thought: "Why shouldn't there be some sort of cosmic connection between Laura Palmer and Ruth Davenport. After all, they occupy the very same narrative space across twenty-five years as the women whose deaths kick off the action in some sleepy little town, exposing an underbelly of corruption in the least likely places and leading to...LODGE INTERVENTIONS." Moreover, the recent revelation that Briggs' body was aged at "late forties" even though he would have been in his seventies (and we know that aging occurs in the Lodges, thanks to Cooper's aged appearance in Las Vegas) made me wonder whether whatever overwhelming force thrust Davenport and Briggs together might have flipped or fused their attributes in some way, such that Briggs' body reflected Ruth's age. If that's the case, Ruth and Laura would be roughly the same age--in the neighborhood, anyway. Finally, the weird way in which Ike the Spike's wound ended up flipped made me wonder whether maybe Ruth's was flipped too. Grasping at straws, I decided to see what would happen if I flipped the image of Ruth's cauterized wound and then superimposed it over the image of Laura's beaming eye. The result took my breath away. Just before Cooper's encounter with a luminescent Laura Palmer in Part Two, Philip Gerard--the one-armed man--asks Cooper, "Is it future or is it past?". Imagine for a moment the circumstances under which you might encounter this question in full earnest. Under what circumstances, in other words, might you find yourself in the existential quandary of genuinely wondering whether your perceived present actually has yet to happen in the future or has already happened in the past?
Any such circumstances will be profoundly disorienting. Anyone who has experienced déjà vu, for instance, has lived through the gooseflesh-inducing dislocation that this question provokes--that uncanny feeling that arrives in the coincidence of breathtaking excitement at getting a special kind of leverage over the usual flow of time (on the one hand) and bloodcurdling horror at existing, somehow, outside this usual flow as a stranger to oneself (on the other). In addition to instances of déjà vu, we might experience different but similar shades of this vertiginous feeling in dreams, visions, religious experiences, meditation, bouts of mental illness, experiments with mind-altering substances (think Jerry Horne's recent revelation: "I don't know who I am!"), or--to a lesser degree--in philosophical thought experiments that invite us to consider whether we're brains in a vat or drones in a matrix, beings whose experiential lives are not staked to the ground of fundamental reality at all, but are rather ever-flowing spatio-temporal projections that can be sped up, slowed down, rewound, replayed, remixed, back-masked, beamed into other worlds, and put to ends that are not our own. The world of Twin Peaks pays lavish attention to this disorientation of being in time (let's call it "time-out-of-joint") and, crucially for my purpose here, to the prospect of achieving liberation from the incessant, limiting flow of time by learning how to abide in time-out-of-joint--that is, how to seek out and experience these uncanny departures from the usual spatio-temporal flow as opportunities to return to the flux of everyday life with renewed vision, sharpened attention, decreased dependence on material and spiritual superfluities, and increased attunement to one's essential resonance within the mystery that lies beyond and ultimately envelopes one's fleeting historical moment. Twin Peaks attends to the liberating prospects of "abiding in time-out-of-joint" on two distinct levels: (1) At the narrative level, the unfolding of the story offers ample opportunities to observe characters struggling to abide in time-out-of-joint with varying degrees of success and failure. Moreover, because the story unfolds across two (or more) worlds, we have an opportunity to witness these characters contending with departures from their usual states-of-being both in the "real" world (i.e., in a fictional version of the world we viewers live in here on Earth) and in a spiritual/dream world that is somehow both in and beyond "reality." To make this distinction more concrete, think, for instance, of the difference (in the original series) between Cooper's efforts to depart from the usual spatio-temporal flow of a criminal investigation by, say, throwing rocks at milk bottles as a means of inviting the cosmos to participate in identifying key suspects, and Cooper's efforts to decipher what is going on while in dreams or in the Black Lodge. Because Cooper's (and other characters') stories take place between two worlds, our opportunities to witness their grapplings with time-out-of-joint are doubled. (2) At the meta level, the way the narrative of Twin Peaks is constructed offers viewers themselves ample opportunities to experience time-out-of-joint by forcing them to contend with unconventional visuals, sound, pacing, and plot devices that violate established norms of narrative flow in serial drama, thereby disrupting viewers' experience, thwarting expectations in ways both thrilling and infuriating, and demanding that viewers seek alternate means of being edified by the narrative when the typical goal of straightforwardly "understanding what is going on" is simply not an option. Woe to the unsuspecting viewer, more concretely, who comes to Twin Peaks reluctant to watch "three pointless minutes of some guy sweeping out the Roadhouse" or hesitant to accept the intervention of "a blob of medical waste perched atop a sycamore sapling" as a fitting explanation of how our beloved protagonist escapes an assassination attempt unscathed. In summary, we viewers get to join the characters of Twin Peaks in the struggle to make meaning of worlds teeming with interpretive possibilities that far exceed our present powers of understanding and that strenuously resist any singular interpretation of "what actually happened" even at narrative's end. The case of Cooper in Las Vegas furnishes a particularly fascinating opportunity to experience both of these levels simultaneously--that is, we can learn from the experience of a character who is himself "abiding in 'time-out-of-joint'" as the story unfolds, and we can experience a version of this abiding for ourselves by resolutely hanging in there with a story that simply refuses to observe the usual rules of narrative flow in serial drama, finding ways to take up Vegas Cooper's invitation to "make sense of it" even when the meaning isn't immediately or straightforwardly accessible. Before attending to the case of Cooper in Las Vegas, however, it is important to say a bit more about what I mean by "the usual flow of time"; after all, if the purpose here is to illuminate what it means to abide in time-out-of-joint (and thus to achieve a certain liberating visionary leverage on garden variety time), we must begin with a clear sense of how the world looks when time is, as it were, "in joint"--that is, when experience is flowing in the usual way. Here, a little insight from the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger can help us. As Heidegger saw it, typical human experience flows from out of the past toward the future, as human beings naturally draw on the prior understanding of the world they have achieved through previous experience ("the past") in order to illuminate and understand new, as-yet-unrealized possibilities for thinking about and acting in the world ("the future"). The good news about this arrangement is that experience begins not in alienation from a hostile world unknown, but in the comfort and familiarity of a world that is always already "home:" by the time there is a meaningful world in front of us--family and friends to engage and things to use in various ways--we are always already experienced with this world, always already construing it (and the people and things in it, including our very selves) in terms of the familiar patterns of identification and transmission we have inherited from the past. The bad news about this arrangement is that always starting with the familiar has a way of flattening the world, reducing a magical place where there is much more to behold than most of us have dreamed of in our inherited philosophies to a series of banal repetitions of the same. This bad news gets considerably worse when we countenance the fact that these banal repetitions of inherited ways of thinking and being inevitably transmit forms of injustice, exclusion, and suffering that become nearly impossible to escape. Let's call this default form of human experience "living from out of the past toward the future" or "past future," for short. In part two of this post, I'll address the question of how this default mode of experience--"past future"--can be disrupted by a different way of being in the world "from out of the future toward the past," or "future past" for short. The challenge, as we shall see, is that while the way of the "past future" is comfortable and familiar, the way of the "future past" is dark and difficult, at least at first. Here is the epiphany toward which we are progressing: "In the darkness of a future past, the magician longs to see..." Can the world once again become a magical place of infinite possibilities when we short-circuit our default approach to construing the world in terms of familiar, predictable patterns of thought and being and open ourselves to seeing and being something more? How can attending to the details of Cooper's experience in Las Vegas help us to open these doors of perception? More to come... |
Mr. RoqueMonitoring the situation from a well-designed chair somewhere in Grand Rapids, MI Archives
August 2021
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