A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 9
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
There’s an uncanniness to watching something unfold in real time when watching film and television; mediums where its passage is typically suborned to the invisible editorial staccato of screen time. There’s a scene in this episode set in the room where Ronette Pulaski is recovering after waking from her coma that opens with a minute and a half long static shot of Ronette in the foreground as Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S Truman enter, then move, attempt to sit on, figure out how to adjust, and finally seat themselves on a pair of chairs. Unlike the previous episode, there really isn’t anything else that lingers in this fashion, and especially not over such a banal action as entering a room and sitting on a chair. In that sense, it actually comes off as a better fit within the context of its episode than other, similar scenes from the last one.
The one with the waiter delivering Agent Cooper’s room service order of warm milk had edits, but were such that they emphasized the painfully real time nature of the suffering that Coop was in after being shot three times at point blank range. Taken on its own, it is a fabulous scene; perfectly emblematic of the unique tonal balance that exists in Twin Peaks of the danger and suffering that daily life simultaneously hides and highlights. Unfortunately for it, the rest of the episode has several other scenes or sequences that, while not bad, are similarly paced, robbing that first one of its impact and trying the viewer’s patience with an uneven pacing. The sprawling nature of that feature-length episode revealed a weakness in the show’s formula for the first time, where a follow up of the traditional episodic drama length righted the course by naturally keeping things moving, until they didn’t, and then allowing them to start back up again.
It’s good to be back to the world we know.
But the world behind that one has started bleeding into the one our characters live in during their waking lives. Audrey Horne is experiencing the least fantastic but most immediately dire one, as she remains stranded in another country, unable to leave the brothel she quickly became over her head at after getting into, and where she now lives as a prisoner at the hands of people she’s crossed, or who have been crossed by her family. Donna Hayward has taken up Laura’s meals-on-wheels route and has an interaction during one delivery that highlights how supernatural simple filmmaking tricks can be when we experience them through an effective performance of the eyes of her character. Practicing magic, indeed. The Log Lady and Major Briggs have a conversation at the diner where she relays a message from her log telling him to deliver a message of his own. He accomplishes that later on in the episode, telling Agent Cooper of a message surfaced through the logs of top-secret deep space monitoring that matches what he was told by his phantom giant in both content and time of delivery. Leland Palmer recognizes a police sketch of BOB, a man whose existence in a physical plane we occupy has been strongly implied as tenuous were it not for the ending of the previous episode where we see him murder Leland’s daughter, Laura.
And finally, we have Maddie, who has mentioned having strange dreams, then sees blood staining the carpet of the Palmer living room and in this episode has a vision of BOB stalking through the Hayward household directly towards her.
The universe that Twin Peaks has built already provides ample malleable material which allows it to be shaped in interesting and formally experimental ways. That same flexibility has also granted it license to utilize the supernatural as stand in for the writer’s hand in shaping the plot in ways that we still don’t see very much today. These aren’t ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Nor are they the vampires, werewolves, demons or zombies that we think of when we hear the word supernatural. These are people trying to get through their lives as best they can with what wits they have, whether that comes in the form of a small log, a belief in Tibetan philosophy, or something else that’s only been hinted at thus far, it will not be what you expect, but it might be your friend or your neighbor or your family.