A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 5
Sitting through the opening credits of every episode of Twin Peaks’ original run, especially in the second season, I would sometimes think to myself that the show really started to sprawl out as it went on. The number of names in the opening credits alone seemed to require more time than they had footage to run names over. You can see evidence of this in at least two places; the main title card itself is a freeze frame, and there’s an awkward cut that extends the footage of the waterfall behind the Great Northern hotel by slowing it down. That carries over in spades to The Return, which seems to have at least doubled the cast and quadrupled the number of locations its story encompasses. With all those plates spinning at once, it can sometimes feel like nothing happens in an episode because we’re just taking a single step forward in four or five different stories instead of five steps forward in one.
What we see come up in the first standalone episode of the series (the first four were originally released in pairs, and on the disc version can be viewed as a feature-length presentation) are examples of themes that have recurred throughout the show; violent men, idiot boys, corrupt authority figures and the same old mistakes being made in a new day.
The most obviously violent man is the owner of the casino where Dougie won nearly half a million dollars the day before. He lashes out at a subordinate because he’s incapable of comprehending a world in which the extremely likely can occur. To him, the only possible cause is the one he understands; cheating, and that with the help of an insider. The only possible response is to then beat the innocent suspected insider without warning to a degree that he has to be carried out of the casino after being fired. Gangsters! So romantic!
Equally charming is the Roadhouse patron smoking in front of a No Smoking sign who’s a dick to the staff that politely asks him to stop, responding with an implicit threat of violence. He goes on to bribe the bouncer, an off-duty cop, and then assault a woman who’d asked him for a light for her cigarette while insulting her friends for not also being vile. He’s listed in the credits as having the last name Horne, so it seems like your classic son of a local rich, powerful family who’s surfed in that wake his whole life and never had to experience consequences for his actions-type behavior. Curious to see how the rest of the Hornes deal with this sadist. Or don’t, as the case seems to be.
Turning the other eye to take advantage of the wealth being spread around is the off-duty cop who was a dick to the veterans of Twin Peaks investigating Margaret Lanterman’s lead in a previous episode. Unsurprisingly, it seems like when this bastard isn’t getting paid to seemingly give his coworkers a hard time, he likes to get paid to ignore people who like to give other people hard times. Hashtag, all cops. Cooper’s doppelgänger, Mr. C, is also still carrying around BOB’s corruption after all these years, while also trying to pass himself off as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with varying degrees of success. And on a smaller scale, we have Dougie’s coworker Anthony. Dougie calls him out on a lie after seeing a green light flash across his face during a meeting, but he’s unable to follow up when pressed for details because he is still neither Dougie nor Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI. We see more hints of the one lurking beneath the other, but for now they’re both mostly just echoes in a shell, looking for a voice.
I’m not sure who this Steve Burnett guy is, but he seems like the latest in a lineage of residential Twin Peaks idiot boys of which Bobby Briggs and, to a lesser extent, James Hurley were probably the most notable predecessors. He fails a job interview (with Bobby’s old friend Mike (Hi, Mike!)) spectacularly, seemingly too dumb to know that resume templates exist on the internet. Or maybe he was too high on cocaine to be able to think about looking that up - since Becky, his girlfriend? wife? seems so surprised at how low their supply is. On top of all that, he’s sponging off the money Shelly gave her, saying that he’s going to treat her to dinner. With the money she just gave him. To Becky’s credit, she appears to see through him at least a little bit, until he gets her to do coke with him before they drive off to that final meal of the day. The look on her face as The Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me,” goes non-diegetic reminded me of Laura Palmer at her most escapist in a way that did not at all feel alarmingly foreboding or make me worried about her.
Which brings us to the same old mistakes being made on a different day. The above blonde repeating blonde notwithstanding, we get a healthy dose of this as Norma Jennings holds Shelly while they both look out a window of the Double R at all youth being misspent in Steve’s car that afternoon. Norma with Hank who chewed up so many of her dreams and Shelly with Leo Johnson and the unreliable Bobby Briggs. Or, as we learned in Fire Walk With Me and its extras; Laura and Bobby and their toxic, escapist relationship.
For all those separate single steps forward, I think this is also the longest The Return has lingered in Twin Peaks. We check in or see just about everyone, even if it only feels like small vignettes of the characters we spent so much time with. While those are nice, it will be interesting to see how long it takes, or if it’s even possible, to fully return to Twin Peaks after all this time.