A Pilgrim's Peaks - Part 8

This episode has a reputation. It’s the one that the few people I’ve talked to about Twin Peaks over the years who knew that I hadn’t watched The Return yet have mentioned explicitly while also making sure to tell me nothing beyond oblique warnings and wanting to know what I thought of it afterwards. I can see why it would turn some people off - on the surface it has almost nothing to do with the immediate plot that it interrupts. It feels like the familiar stuff gets left behind after the first 15 minutes in favor of a long series of leisurely paced scenes that are unrelated to the story, like an art-house version of the season 6 episode of Lost that’s just Richard Alpert’s backstory.

That’s just on the surface, though, because in reality there’s no mistaking this as something that’s detached from Twin Peaks in any way, shape or form. If anything, what we witness here is the connective tissue that explicitly tells us what the root of all the evil that we’ve been seeing is and that it's entirely human-made. This is the biggest canvas yet that Lynch has had to dissect the darkness that’s at the heart of his midcentury Main Street Americana obsessions and he doesn’t disappoint. What was once represented by something as small as an ear found in the grass under the shade of a tree is now depicted as the first test of the atomic bomb on July 16th, 1945. It’s a spectacle of awesome beauty that we cannot look away from and are eventually consumed by as the camera enters the mushroom cloud and we’re transported. 

First, to a void occupied by the creature that appeared in the glass box at the top of the mysterious building in New York City and slaughtered two people. The creature expels a gritty, stringy ectoplasm that contains a number of eggs, one of which hatches into a black orb where we catch a brief glimpse of BOB’s grinning face. After plunging through more nuclear plasma we are back in the building amongst the purple sea where an alarm sends the giant into action. He views what we’ve just seen, enters a levitating trance and soon expels glowing golden dust which forms into a similar orb that contains the homecoming queen photo of Laura Palmer, which is sent away to Earth. By creating the atomic bomb we ushered an instaible force into the world that hungers for suffering, destruction and death. That force is not without an opposite, but it’s one that’s as amorphous as you would expect from the concept of, “good,” from someone who has shown little to no inclination for traditional representations of good and evil in his work. If all we can do is interpret from the example Laura Palmer lived, then maybe it’s just the will to endure the unbearable without giving in. 

I’ve been sort of passively interested in the history of the atomic bomb and nuclear war for a while now. I’d like to be able to say that it started while reading Richard Rhodes’The Making of the Atomic Bomb in college back in 2006, but I never finished the book back then and in fact if the bookmark in the copy I still have is any indication, I didn’t even make it to Oppenheimer (but still got a x.x in the class according to my transcript). My best guess is that this low key obsession has something to do with the regular anniversaries of the 9/11 terrorist attacks feeling more intense as time goes on and trying to figure out some way of using historical comparisions to help make sense of what is probably the defining historical moment of my generation. There are some strong similarities - both are attacks on overwhelmingly civilian targets by militarized aggressors who were pursuing a novel form of warfare on a scale the world had never witnessed before. And while one claimed to be trying to end a war as the other claimed to be (at least in part) inciting a war, both are examples of the abject failure of either side to engage in meaningful diplomacy. 

I don’t think that I ever had a feeling about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki growing up. I knew about them in a generalized sense; I remember mushroom clouds as a common doodle in the margins of notebooks throughout grade school and had stuff like Terminator 2 and Akira to feed the nuclear family of my imagination. It wasn’t until the more recent, post-9/11 years that I started thinking about those events on my own. Reading up on what history thought of them brought me to the point where any ambivalence that I may have had about the justification of those bombings evaporated when combined with the view through the lens of what I saw happen on TV the morning my dad woke me up to tell me someone had flown a jet into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. 

What was unleashed on the July morning during the Trinity test was a more holistic evil upon American soil. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two horrible ends of a path that continues to lead away from that event and into an unknown future made more grim by the potential it unlocked. The radiation that lingers behind from that schism and all our subsequent domestic tests can be seen in the presence of the lumberjack figures that occupy much of the second half of the episode. They’re a kind of wandering malevolence that can disturb the people they encounter and occasionally prove fatal for those unlucky or unprotected. After killing the occupants of a radio station, one of these men takes over the broadcast in order to repeat an ominous phrase whose mention of a, “horse as the white of the eyes,” has connections as far back as the original series. Sarah Palmer saw a white horse on two occasions while in a state of semi-consciousness and the lumberjack’s message makes all of his listeners pass out, with one in particular defenseless as a strange insectoid creature crawls into her mouth. 

Another curious sonic cue follows the lumberjacks through their first appearance over the wounded Mr. C, their reappearance at the abandoned gas station and the rest of the episode. It’s a strange shuffling noise that sounds most like someone scrubbing quickly through footage in a digital nonlinear editing software and it’s a noise that’s been heard before. When Agent Cooper first arrived in the building on the purple sea, that was the sound made by the building’s eyeless occupant. Connections that continue to pop up in the chaos of the world, tying together good and evil and further indication that the two are closer to each other than we’d like to think.