A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 23
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
How someone deals with failure can tell you a lot about them as a person. To break it down into a flimsy binary, there are those who successfully process their failure or loss and are then able to move on with their lives and past whatever setback the universe may have thrown at them, and there are those who don’t. The ones who dig in, drag it out, refuse to accept it and will die on that hill to turn a capital L into the big W.
Benjamin Horne falls so squarely into the latter camp that it is as if he’s always lived there and has chosen to define his life through a constant series of battles against his friends, neighbors, and society should any or all of the above have the gall to stand in the way of his righteous crusade for wealth and the power it confers upon whomever has the most of it. His failed coup of a deal for the eternally ephemeral Ghostwood Estates, where he lost to his former partner and lover Catherine Martell, his brief imprisonment for the suspicion of the murder of Laura Palmer, and the loss of control over One-Eyed Jacks all within the span of a week or two sent him into a fugue state of fighting for a state that never was in a revision of one of history’s lamest lost causes. The switch back to reality has given his tilt against the very windmill he helped set in motion at Ghostwood an entirely different slant.
Should the sad man let the seemingly impossible to grasp victory over this metaphorically named phantom project go, and move on to another one instead of spending his energy and dwindling resources on the same old one that’s already escaped him several times over by now? Obviously. Will he? Goodness, no, he is a man and a winner and will never know defeat.
He adopts one of the more recognizably cynical postures that we’d still recognize today; the vocal defender of [INSERT CAUSE], whose only real concern about the issue they’ve taken up is how it can buy them something they want. Admittedly, it’s usually a massive, globally-based company doing the virtue signaling to distract from how their plastic bottles are ruining the environment, how poorly treated their female employees are, or sweeping something their CEO said, did, or allowed to happen under the rug, but you get the idea. Someone in power is taking up a cause as a means of cynical, showy activism when it’s really about them.
The worst part is that he’s roping in his teenage daughter, who was already kinda onboard because his fugue state got her worried enough to care about him when it seemed like her inheritance was on the line (good work, Ben). Her teenage friend and eternally career-hungry opportunist Bobby Briggs joins in because who even goes to high school in this show anymore? Ben’s brother Jerry is along for the ride, which is surprising as it seems like this is an extremely local fight that won’t allow for much, if any, of the international travel he seems so fond of. Also enlisted is a doe-eyed former protege that he helped get a leg up in the business world and who may understandably now have a blind spot for the mentor that’s dragging him into a petty, acrimonious local mud fight instead of trying to talk him into doing anything else that might benefit Twin Peaks more than a single residential housing development.
All of them are so caught up in their own version of the American Dream that they don’t realize how much it will cost them or those around them to achieve it. They only have to look at their adversaries to see what damage the failure of that cause can cause. Josie Packard has been tossed around from one controlling overlord to another for the entire run of the show, from the newly arrived on the scene Thomas Eckhardt’s manipulations as a man-behind-the-curtains, to stupid Hank Jennings, and finally Catherine and Andrew Packard. Throughout the show, she’s been an immigrant trying to navigate the fleeting whims of all those who’ve controlled her in some form or another and as she’s become increasingly desperate, she has been forced into situations where violence has been the answer most readily at hand for her. It becomes a solution that’s easier to excuse oneself from when a third party like Catherine is manipulating Josie into the act of murder, but the latter’s desperation gives the former’s machinations a more welcome purchase.
The only times she’s been able to act on her own have also led to violence. Her attempted murder of Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a means to try and further cover up her involvement in her husband’s apparent death only ended up drawing more suspicion to herself. Then she succeeded in killing her not-brother Jonathan who was an extension of Eckhardt’s influence on her. Desperation is a ripe breeding ground for violence and she ends up paying with her own life after her final murder of Thomas Eckhardt himself.
That act brings the supernatural flooding back as Coop gets a vision of a crowing, victorious BOB and the mysterious Man From Another Place in the aftermath of the attack. It’s a rare instance of that sort of event appearing in an episode that’s not directed by Daivd Lynch, but is handled in an appropriately elusive manner utilizing the language that’s been previously established in the show for when that Other World crosses over into ours. A curious twist leaves us with Josie seemingly trapped one last time. No longer bound by mortal men, her face instead appears writing in the wood grain of a bedside table near where she seemingly died of unspecified heartbreak after revealing her final secrets in front of Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Her mute scream stops, frozen and unnoticed by anyone who could notice, and would be powerless to help her even if they did.