A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 13
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
It makes you wonder what sort of cases Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has worked in his past that he can say it’s hard to imagine a cruelty the likes of which befell the teenage Audrey Horne when she was kidnapped and drugged nearly to the point of overdose. It can be easy to look back on the past, even one as recent as the late-80’s to early-90’s during which Twin Peaks takes place, as being of a softer and more naïve era, and for a lot of Americans it was, being only a handful of years after Morning in America. Of course, to hundreds of thousands of other Americans, it was only two years after the band played on. But to a member of law enforcement in the United States at the dawn of the nineties, especially at the federal level, it would have been hard to ignore that you were working in a time of unprecedented activity for serial murder.
Audrey’s experience is undoubtedly not an easy thing to see and have to process for anyone capable of empathy, but it does point to a naifish blind spot on our dear Special Agent’s radar about the very real evils that live and work in places closer to home than the ones we’re warned about lurking on the edge of town. Jerrfey Dahmer was still at large, Ted Bundy had just been put to death in Florida and The Silence of the Lambs was on bestseller lists; it would not take much work to imagine a worse fate befalling Audrey. Or perhaps that’s the point.
What sets Agent Cooper apart from the rest of the officers in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s office is his distinct lack of jadedness. He’s the antithesis of the burnt out cop-husks and crypto-fascists that are TV’s de rigueur; the gravelly-voiced detectives who’ve seen it all and are barely capable of empathizing with the victims and survivors of a crime beyond the most perfunctory requirements of their investigation, or the stern authoritarians who see themselves as the only line between law and order and everything else. The normal to our Special Agent is not unlike the norm for a lot of people (or David Lynch); it’s not bleached human bones or heads in fridges, so when he does encounter such evils, his reaction is ultimately closer to ours.
How will he handle the evil that is starting to become increasingly prevalent around and within Twin Peaks? The arrival of his supervisor, Regional Bureau Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Gordon Cole brings the first real evidence of a threat that’s been hinted at periodically throughout the season so far in the form of a note from Agent Cooper’s former partner, Windom Earle. The level of danger is unclear, though, as no further details are provided about their history.
A more immediate threat surfaces when Deputy Hawk brings back the one-armed shoe salesman named Philip Michael Gerard, whose medication is suggested to be partially used for treating schizophrenia. Gerard experiences a brief seizure when this medicine is withheld while he’s in police custody but comes out on the other side as MIKE, an inhabiting spirit and one of the apparitions that spoke to Agent Cooper in his dream about a week ago. MIKE reveals something of his nature and purpose - to stop BOB, his malevolent double whose true face is the one seen in the composite sketch but who also hides within a body he inhabits like a parasite who feeds on fear and pleasure. When asked if BOB is near, MIKE answers simply, chillingly, “for nearly forty years.”
It’s a deeply unnerving revelation that evil can live undetected for so long in plain sight, but also the truest echo of the time in which the show was made. While less than supernatural in nature, serial killers such as Ted Bundy were able to operate with relative ease for alarming periods of time. We still have yet to learn about what sort of cases Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled before he took this one, and we’ll see what confronting whatever lies at the end of this one does to him, but asking yourself how you would deal with this may provide the best window into what the future holds for him.