A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 2
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
It’s easy to be cynical about the esoteric or apparently nonsensical. Something that doesn’t align with our generally agreed upon understanding of how the world should work and its population behave by taking it less seriously than we do can feel like a threat to the choices we’ve made and make every day just to get by. It takes a healthy and open mind to be patient and wait for results before judging the process that gets you there. Reading or hearing David Lynch talk about catching the big fish, in his own words, in that voice, can feel like several industrial-era Great Britiains’ worth of factories blowing smoke up your ass - his whole persona can come off like such a put on, but by all accounts he’s always been and always will be that way, has never harmed anyone in his practice, and has produced some of the most landmark popular art in film and television the medium has ever known.
Knowing even a little bit about him and his philosophy makes it extremely hard not to see Special Agent Dale Cooper as a cypher for Lynch, especially in this episode when he lays out an elaborate holistic philosophical practice that informs his traditional investigative method and which produces meaningful work. To the credit of everyone around him, he is as trusted in this as in the rest of his deductive methods (if with a little more skepticism than usual). It’s another way the show highlights his difference; a Federal representative among locals, a man of passionate enthusiasm among the blithely accepting, and man of the world among the people who populate it. And yet, he never places himself on anything but an equal level. If he’s ever portrayed as unequal to his partners in law enforcement in this show, it’s only when they comment on a perceived lack when comparing themselves to him.
Cooper’s inquiry aligns him with what we as an audience suspect from our observations of the goings on in the town that are outside his purview. That the trucker Leo Johnson’s violence towards his wife Shelley has likely extended to others, especially given how readily he escalates threats of violence towards others as means to exert or reinforce control over situations where it’s in short supply for him. That the psychiatrist Lawrence Jacoby, who has closed out the last two episodes with revelatory glimpses of him as a repository of relevant, secret knowledge, is more a subject of interest than initially suspected. That everyone in Twin Peaks has secrets they’re hiding, often from some of the people who are closest to them.
Fittingly, it’s when they’re expressing love that the characters are the most open with each other. Whether it’s for music and dance, already a recurring theme for Audrey Horne, who also confesses her crush on Cooper to Donna between solo dances at the double R. Or later on, when Donna and James restate their affection for each other, finally alone after a chaste night among Donna’s parents. These moments of connection provide a warm contrast to the fraying among the other residents of the town, painfully illustrated by Leland Palmer’s breakdown as he dances with a framed photo of his dead daughter. An echo of his wife Sarah’s more melodramatic meltdown in the previous episode (which introduced a villainous looking mystery man), they are experiencing on a personal level what few, if any, in the town can imagine and are each being driven into their own separate forms of inchoate mania. Leland uncontrollably sobbing, breaking the framed photo and smearing blood on the photograph while his wife can only beg him to stop.
And then Cooper dreams. And in dreaming, pulls the very disparate threads of his investigative method, Audrey’s dancing, and Sarah Palmer’s vision into a hallucinatory visionary experience that, probably more than anything in the original run of the show, burned a very specific idea of Twin Peaks into the public consciousness. Set in a room of red velvet curtains with angular black and white zig-zag flooring, performed backwards and then disconcertingly played forward, with speech delivered in a matching mode that seems to allude and connect to events we’ve seen in a way that’s not dissimilar to how a rorschach reveals its form, all intercut with mysterious figures talking of good and evil. The shockingly bold, distracting beauty of it belies a narrative effect that lends a substantive hand to the style on display. If you’ve been paying attention to details, valid information is disseminated, and even more foreshadowed.
The process works.