A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 6
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
Special Agent Dale Cooper is a responsible adult in a show filled with irresponsible adults, sometimes criminally so. Yes, the latter makes for good, easy drama and stake-raising circumstances, but if everyone were going haywire, the show would spin as out of control as the residents of its titular town after the murder of one of their own. Also, it’s a very dramatic scene for the two of them! The culmination of Audrey’s crush and Cooper’s measured responses is a meaningful conversation where an adult listens to a confused kid and treats them with a respect and dignity the rest of the so-called adults around are dubiously capable of, even if they managed to notice.
Their interaction is especially notable given how readily young, inexperienced women are sexualized in media; Cooper never touches, or makes a move to touch, Audrey during their conversation. He doesn’t give her bedroom eyes, despite being in one, and there’s no longing glance back at her in his bed as he leaves to get them french fries and malts so they can talk about her life (but probably not about witnessing her dad make out with another woman while they plot to commit arson). It’s one of the highlights of him as a character - the ability to see people and read what they’re not saying while also listening closely to what they are. It’s the kind of treatment we have been learning more and more that Laura was lacking from, like, literally everyone in Twin Peaks?
Constantly sexualized and pursued by those around her, she seems to have turned that into a means of accruing power and control over her life and those who used her for whatever part she played in theirs. The vague ring of sex (and drug) traffickers involving Leo Johnson, Jacques Renault, and the perfume counter at Horne’s department store that leads to One-Eyed Jacks. Corrupting her boyfriend Bobby after humiliating him with sex by making him deal drugs for her. And her therapist Jacoby possibly compromising his professional standing for an affair with his patient, or at least walking an uncomfortably fine line along the borders of propriety.
The auditory glimpse we get of her last night from the recording the myna bird left before it was gunned down in cold blood provides one of the darkest glimpses yet into the depths where she dwelled. The tape plays and all we get is the squawking voice repeating cries of, “Leo, no!” and the reactions of everyone in the room. There’s no cutaway to a lurid dramatic reenactment - you have to listen, and listen closely, to hear it, while translating the bird voice to the Laura we’ve already heard on tape elsewhere in the episode. But by holding the visuals to the reactions of those assembled, every viewer is forced to picture what’s happening in their own heads, likely in ways that television wouldn’t be able to portray for another ten or twenty years, if even then. It’s a strong filmmaking choice that involves and incriminates the viewer, making them both accomplice to the crime while bringing them that much closer to where Laura lived.