What is the Story?
A man wakes up to a new reality, with challenges that will test his soul, ordeals that will weigh his heart against a feather, and a final test that will determine his worthiness to pass to the next level of consciousness.
Dale Cooper
Special Agent Dale Cooper rolls into Twin Peaks with the full force of his faculties of observation and deduction, along with his strong power of intuition. First, Cooper becomes enamored with the people, town, and spirits that inhabit the woods around Twin Peaks. Next, he engages in an investigation that begins to mingle with his dreams. Eventually, his dreams invade his reality, and he becomes locked in place, struggling against impossible odds to retain his humanity while his soul is under assault by a force of extreme negative energy without mercy.
Thomas Anderson
Thomas Anderson wakes up with the help of a few new friends, looking for a living idol to worship and build a revolution around. Is Anderson the chosen one? He might be, but he still has to act regardless of prophecy. Thomas Anderson eventually falls in love and sacrifices that love for the greater good of humanity. That is where things get interesting.
The Trap Of The Next Reality
Dale Cooper From the Basement to The Main Floor
With Twin Peaks, we get to visit the Basement, the Main Floor, and very briefly, the Top Floor of different layers of narrative reality.
When Dale Cooper willingly enters the Red Room in the finale of Season 2 of Twin Peaks, his soul is tested and fails the test. He is forced to choose between saving three women (Caroline, Annie, and Laura) or saving himself. Still, he freezes in place, unable to determine, and becomes possessed by a force of pure evil that feeds on human pain and suffering (I’d like you right now to picture the image in your head of a close-up of a mouth slowly chewing creamed corn with rotten, oily teeth). And now Cooper is stuck in place for 25 years, moving slowly inside his damaged mind. While captured in the amber of the Red Room, Cooper cycles through his investigation of the death of Laura Palmer, based on his once precious case files and all that he dares to dream.
When the film Fire Walk With Me begins, the doors to Cooper’s imagination have been kicked wide open, and there is no distinction between what happened (memories and investigations) and what could have happened (dreams and psychic influences).
In Fire Walk With Me, I posit that we are narratively experiencing a retrogressive movement forward from the finale of Season 2 of Twin Peaks, my fancy way of saying I think that Fire Walk With Me is a sequel, not a prequel, to what happens at the finale of Season 2 of Twin Peaks.
While we move through a dubious history of Laura Palmer’s death that feels like a prequel, much more is happening under the surface in that film. Cooper is lured into the dark woods of a nightmare that will very likely end with his soul possessed by a force of extreme negative energy that has been preying on human suffering since time itself began in the human mind.
What is authentic in the film Fire Walk With Me is an experience of the most profound trauma. In the end, it doesn’t matter what event happened in which timeline. What matters is that suffering is successfully transferred from the screen to the viewer. This immense suffering is what Cooper (and each of us hitching a ride over his shoulder) must process and work through during all of Twin Peaks The Return.
But we are rooted in the narrative and, as such, must return to Dale Cooper sitting in a chair like poured glue in a cold room. Lost in the dream, Cooper becomes obsessed with saving Laura Palmer, being her angel. Eventually, he will even try to undo time itself in his memory, to sacrifice everything in an attempt to save her life, the act of a desperate madman, willing to cut the last cord holding him to any semblance of sanity. It’s a massive gamble with what may be the ultimate cost of his soul. Cooper has unknowingly broken with the basement layer of reality and is lost in a world of fantasy and danger.
Thomas Anderson From The Basement To The Top Floor
For The Matrix Resurrections, we don’t get off at the Main Floor; that’s where backstory lives. We get off at the Top Floor and periodically get to peek down through holes in the ground to see what’s happening on the Main Floor.
In the original Matrix Trilogy, Thomas Anderson starts in the basement of this diagram, where he wakes from an imprisoning dream to learn that humanity is now a fuel source powering a planet ruled by machines that harvest energy from biological hosts. There was a war between humans and their machines, and the machines won.
The Matrix is a fully immersive computer program that convinces humans to live real emotional and physical lives inside an intelligent simulation. At the same time, they generate electricity for their silicon-based captors. While their biological energy is harvested to feed these machines, it’s just enough not to kill the human hosts. In Twin Peaks, the One-Armed Man called out to warn the demon BOB, who was disobeying the rules of the Black Lodge by overharvesting Laura Palmer’s sorrow. In The Matrix, these machines pushed humanity a little too fa,r and what comes out of both film narratives is the clarion call for a savior. It’s bad form for a parasite to kill its host, whether it’s machines feeding on human electrical energy or inter-dimensional demons converting human pain and suffering into creamed corn sustenance.
We do have a term for parasites that kill their hosts: Cancer. When the entire human species has become enslaved by its own creation, the idea of salvation always invents a hero of necessity to battle on behalf of human liberty and to end human sorrow. This is how our best stories have always worked because the only way to end suffering is to move through it and let it pass away in the distance of time. The only revolution that matters is letting go of sorrow completely once it has had its way with us.
Neo falls in love with Trinity and, through that love, agrees to help wake as many human beings as possible so they can join in a final battle against the machines. But Neo’s revolution fails, or at least it doesn’t go down the way they plan, and he and Trinity lose their lives in a glorious sacrifice at the end of the original Matrix Trilogy.
When Matrix Resurrections begins, we don’t know that Thomas Anderson didn’t die at the end of The Matrix Trilogy. We don’t understand that his enemy saved him and Trinity from biological death. Like Darth Vader, they are put back together by mechanical entities without mercy or judgment. Once their physical bodies are restored, Anderson and Trinity are plugged into a new version of The Matrix. Anderson has unknowingly broken with the basement layer of reality and is lost in a world of fantasy and danger.
Each of these characters is lost in his dream, enslaved in a construct of fear and ignorance. In Cooper’s case, an evil intelligence actively manipulates this new layer of his dream to destroy all the Good left within him, symbolized by a glowing golden orb. If this orb is smuggled to the edge of Cooper’s vast imaginative reality, it can be activated to scream its song and end this merciless dream.
In Anderson’s case, The Matrix has been explicitly designed to bring a rational context around Neo’s quest. Matrix 2.0 is a delicate puzzle intended to fit around one stubborn piece: Thomas Anderson. He goes by Neo sometimes, and he’s usually got this girl with him…
The New Enemy He Didn’t Even Know He Had
Dale Cooper In The Basement of Twin Peaks
In the basement of this image above, during Cooper’s investigation, he reveals that Laura Palmer was a young girl harvested for sexual purposes by powerful and corrupted men in the town of Twin Peaks. And, horrifically, the man who abused her most often and most terribly was her father. Regardless of Leland Palmer possibly being possessed by a demon, he still raped and abused his only daughter for years. He eventually murdered her in a dirty train car, wrapped her dead body in plastic, and dumped it in the river, where it washed up on Martell’s property shoreline. That is the story in Twin Peaks until a dreamy and talented young FBI agent rolls into town to solve the mystery of her murder.
Dale Cooper solves the case, but something happens afterward when his dreams intermingle with his memories and eventually become his reality. He becomes entangled in a battle to the death with his old boss. Cooper slept with the man’s wife, and it drove him mad —or maybe Windom Earle never really existed at all, and Cooper invented him as a foil so he could remain good in a world rapidly unraveling before him. It doesn’t matter because Cooper eventually descends into madness, a complete soul possession. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave the town of Twin Peaks fast enough to avoid corruption. Ultimately, it seems to happen to almost everyone in this town, except the few powered by a light that comes from beyond the dreamer’s will.
Cooper becomes possessed in a slow dream that repeatedly cycles, time and time again. Someday, he might save the girl, but then he’s back at the beginning all over again, wondering where he even started.
Dale Cooper On The Main Floor of Twin Peaks
Dale Cooper has a double in this dream (we all do). His shadow’s name is Mr. C. While dreaming, Cooper has doodled all over his memories. He's dribbled thick coffee from spout to cup over and over. At the same time, his moral shadow has been busy consolidating and filibustering reality like a Republican fears poor people finally having all their votes count in a Democracy.
In Part 2 of Twin Peaks: The Return, the first trap springs, and Cooper falls into a literal hole in the floor.
In Part 17 of Twin Peaks: The Return, Dale Cooper alters time in his memory of the investigation of Laura Palmer’s death, removing her from this dream just before he fell into the hole in Part 2. The abduction of Laura Palmer from Cooper's Fire Walk With Me dream layer creates what I call (along with Candy in the Mitchum Casino) “The Version Layer.” As with version 2.0 of The Matrix, this is a new layer of narrative reality that Cooper is unaware he has entered, a trap sprung by his irresponsible choice to abandon what he knows to be true and to change time in his memory in order to finally “save” Laura Palmer and take her “safely” home to her Mother.
There is a wormhole of narrative reality between Parts 17 and Part 2 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which opens a void in this dream trap that Cooper falls into. The passage through the void in this narrative wormhole should kill the character of Dale Cooper, but he is rescued just in time, whisked away to the Purple Power Station, where his greatest love has been hidden as a beautiful yet hideous creature named Naido. She is kind and yet cold in her instructions to him. Naido ends up placing her hands on the machine, injecting the Version Layer with the total protection of her love, like Lilly Potter when she stepped between the killing curse and her innocent infant son.
Just in case Cooper was saved (counting on it, actually), Mr. C and the force of extreme negativity invading Cooper’s soul have set up Ten Deadly Trials that Cooper must pass through in the Version Layer to break the spell on this evil layer of his dream. And even if Cooper manages to escape this dream layer, he will still be lost in a void, with no story to be a character inside. So he has to find the best of what’s inside him (the Golden Orb) and smuggle it to the edge of his reality. The orb is placed inside the image of Laura Palmer that haunts his dreams. See, Cooper never knew Laura. She is not a memory to Dale Cooper, but a projected image laden with baggage. All he knows is that he has to save her. And he does. When he’s rejected from crossing the threshold of her house, in Part 18, the scream she emits ends the entire dream, and we cut to black. This is the end of Twin Peaks. What happens after this is equally anyone’s guess. How wonderful is that?
Thomas Anderson From The Basement To The Main Floor
In the basement of The Matrix, Thomas Anderson’s big enemy is Agent Smith, who is the agent that enforces order in the simulation. Throughout the trilogy, Smith changes significantly through interacting with Thomas Anderson as Neo. Agent Smith realizes after the first film that Neo cannot be controlled by threats of force or the fear of death. Instead, he is superhuman in The Matrix because his emotions fuel his power through his imagination, which the machines cannot understand or counteract. Neo loves.
By the trilogy’s end, Smith is broken, defeated, but an unyielding enemy. Like Mr. C to Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return, Agent Smith is an extension, a part of Thomas Anderson. But it’s when the part struggles with not being the whole that conflict arises in all spiritual quests.
The threat of force and the fear of death do not maintain a proper social order. Freedom does not bend for any emotion except humility and gratitude.
In Matrix Resurrections, Agent Smith is no longer the primary adversary. Instead, this new Matrix 2.0 casts Thomas Anderson as a game designer who made a sweet online community game called The Matrix. Everything Anderson feels like he remembers from the trilogy is all creative output from when he made one of the great video games of all time. Imagine George Lucas was Luke Skywalker through the first three films, only to wake up to find himself as one of the most creative and successful film directors of all time, and he dreamt the whole thing. Same scenario.
In the Matrix 2.0, Agent Smith is relegated to being Anderson’s milquetoast boss in a video games tech company. Nevertheless, Smith still keeps a close eye on his quarry. Still, even his superhuman strength and immortality within The Matrix are not enough to contain Thomas Anderson when he wakes up to his full power inside the simulation. As powerful as he is, though, Anderson seems to have no ability to end the simulation once and for all. The machines have identified that the Matrix’s greatest risk of narrative collapse occurs when Anderson comes into contact with Trinity, and these machines are committed to keeping those two apart for every being’s sake. Their behavior in love explodes the simulation every time, so they must be kept biologically close together but emotionally distant from one another. It reminds me of that old Keith Whitley song Love From Ten Feet Away.
In the Matrix 2.0, Thomas Anderson understands even his love for Trinity as a geeky longing for a woman he could never bring himself to approach and talk to within the narrative reality of this layer of the simulation. Anderson is emotionally fragile and overwhelmed for the film's first half, as intended by his captor. But his new enemy is one he doesn’t see right in front of him, the Psychiatrist, a more formidable enemy than Agent Smith ever hoped to be. Even Agent Smith seems to understand that you can’t mess with the program that tells you what your feelings mean and how to interpret reality. An algorithm controlling our emotional realities is one of the most frightening viruses ever to attack the human race, a family of mind viruses. Long before Cambridge Analytica passed data over to the forces of global disorganized crime so that they could micro-target individuals with a new version of reality fueled by weaponized anger and apathy, The Matrix was talking about this stuff more than twenty years ago.
The Roof, Where These Narratives Pass On Without Us
The Matrix Top Floor
Thomas Anderson eventually wakes up from this version of the Matrix 2.0 to discover that humanity survived without him, despite his sacrifice. He learns that Trinity is still alive but captured. And once again, he and a small group of trusted friends risk their lives, but this time for one woman, the love of his life, his only reason for living. They successfully rescue Trinity, wake her up, and reunite in the Matrix 2.0, baptized through a flood of bullets that miss them completely. Finally, they master this new version of The Matrix and rocket off into the sky together without firing a shot at their simulated enemies.
And so begins The Matrix 3.0, where humanity might find a way to master a new world in symbiosis with these machines.
Thomas Anderson steadily moves towards mastery of the simulation, and the narrative ends for us, the viewers.
Twin Peaks Top Floor
The ridiculous comic book ending, where Freddy the Green Glove Superpuncher knocks a BOB bubble through a dimensional portal in the floor of Sheriff Truman’s office, serves a purpose beyond comedy. This absurd scene brings an end to a simulation that should have never happened inside Dale Cooper’s dreaming mind. His dreams were corrupted, and now he must invent a way to hack into his dreaming mind and pass a golden orb to the active entity of himself in this dream, a metaphorical container for the most sacred center of his being. If I were religious, I might call it the pure light of God. But I’m not, so I’ll say that it’s the best thing about every one of us, the something which imbues us with dignity from birth, the source of those certain unalienable rights that the American Founding Fathers seemed so concerned with all those years ago.
Unlike Thomas Anderson, who runs towards love while seeking salvation, Dale Cooper must sacrifice his love and even his identity to move beyond the dark veil where, as Dylan sings, “…Lies nothing.” Cooper sacrifices everything for this cosmic rescue mission to bring the girl safely home. The absurdity of this moronically simple quest lies in the refutation that her house is where she was emotionally and sexually abused, then tortured to murder. The mission should have morally failed at conception, but alas, Dale Cooper is on the threshold of reality with a damaged concept of time, memory, and identity. He abandoned everything but his goodness in order to get here, and he delivers the girl to the doorstep only to find the mission dissolves in front of his eyes.
He doesn’t know that inside this construct of Laura Palmer in his damaged, dreaming mind is the key to ending this entire nightmare. Like in The Matrix, every object and character dreams in a simulation, and everything bends to the dreamer's will, except the few things beyond the veil that the dreamer can never see, though their presence is often felt.
Dale Cooper stumbles into ending the simulation, which is where the narrative currently ends for us viewers.
Unlike Thomas Anderson, Dale Cooper never fully woke up inside his dream during the time we spent with him. He didn’t understand the reality beyond the dream, and neither do we. Maybe he does now. Perhaps that’s what comes after the cruel fade to black, when the echoing scream that ended the dream dies away, dopplering out into the long night of the void, far away from us viewers now, far out there in the intergalactic space between narratives.
As viewers, you and I get to stand outside these narratives and consider all their aspects from every angle. We know how these stories began. We’ve discussed what happened after that. And we know how they ended (so far). The most important question for any analysis and appreciation of narrative art is, “What does it mean to me as a human being with my experiences, my hopes, and my anxieties?”
Twin Peaks and The Matrix are epics of moral crisis. They both deal with processing trauma. Both feature heroes who find the wisdom and strength to skip across the laser beams running between the forces of cruelty and love in every story, even our own personal ones. For the best of us, we run towards love, even sacrificing it when necessary for survival.
