Chapter 7: Second Hour "The Stars Turn And A Time Presents Itself"
007 - A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks, 2nd Edition
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Acronyms & Common Terms
TP = Twin Peaks (1989-1991)
TPTR = Twin Peaks The Return (2017)
FWWM = Fire Walk With Me (1992)
RRL = The Red Room Dream Layer
TVL = The Version Layer
MPL = Missing Page Layer
TFM = The Fireman’s Mansion
Twin Peaks = The entire franchise
INTRO2
Part 2: Scene 1
(0:00–0:01:37) Local (1:00:35-1:02:12) Global Time
1m37s
PN: Intro Credits
E4
Part 2: Scene 2: The Version Layer: Buckhorn, SD
(0:01:37--0:06:15) Local (1:02:12--1:06:50) Global Time
4m38s
PN: Blue Rose Investigation
SN: Black Lodge Plan
The scene starts with Bill Hastings in jail.
His wife Phyllis comes in, and they stare each other down as he confesses that he had a dream that he was in Ruth Davenport’s apartment.
Phyllis tells Bill he was there, but it wasn’t a dream. She’s known about his affair all along.
Bill considers this and snaps to say he knew about her affairs also with George, his friend and lawyer, and someone else.
Phyllis tells Bill he’s going to spend his life in prison. When she says goodbye to Bill, she gets up to leave, and his expression of pure dread reveals that he understands he’s truly alone now. This revelation breaks him. We hear Bill repeating his break-down, “Oh, my God…”.
Cut to the lobby of the Police Station, where Phyllis tells her lover (and Bill’s lawyer), George, that Bill knows they have been having an affair and not to walk her out, that she’ll see him later at her house. George’s face betrays puzzlement and what seems to be a bit of joy.
Detective Macklay confirms to George that Bill Hastings is not holding up well, and they both agree that Phyllis has had a hard day.
Cut back to Bill Hastings worrying fingers through his hair in the jail cell. He seems lost in the depths of a spreading madness and misery.
The camera pans across cells, and we see a Woodsman looking catatonic, almost ecstatic, his skin like black oil. Then, there is the faintest little percussion drum roll, and the Woodsman’s body disappears down to his face floating upwards to the right of the screen and then off. It looks as if he mutters something before he evaporates from the screen.
Cut to the Hastings’ house, where Mr. C is waiting in the dark for Phyllis to return. She greets him with a warm and flirtatious recognition, which rapidly transitions to fear as he tells her she behaves precisely like human nature dictates.
Mr. C pulls a gun, shows it to Phyllis, and tells her it’s George’s gun. He shoots her, and she curiously splits when she’s shot.
Poor Bill Hastings is one of the most tortured characters in TPTR. In this scene, we witness a man broken down to dust. All that remains at the end of this scene is the oppressive weight of horror and failure. Hastings realizes he is a man without power, friends, options, or defense.
Bill Hastings has confirmed that this world contains monsters that will eat everything and everyone. And his wife just told him to fuck off and die. There is much misery dealt to these characters in TVL, but poor Bill Hastings may have it the worst of them all.
As we will discover, the Woodsmen are BOB’s loyal and dark henchmen. They corrupt characters in the dream, which we witness in Part 8. Like the Garmonbozia-consuming characters who walk the borderline between light and dark in RRL, I believe these Woodsmen draw towards and feed on suffering in TVL of this dream.
The Woodsmen consume suffering in TVL just by being near characters in great pain, like poor Bill Hastings in the final part of this scene. The Woodsmen are unlike any other nefarious agency in Twin Peaks, and we have to give these oily fellows both our fear and respect.
In TVL, Cooper and Mr. C are dream weavers, creating the dream’s narrative by engaging with these shadows, some of whom deceptively look and feel like Cooper’s memories. But they are damaged, some beyond repair here in TVL.
Cooper has lost his rational agency within the dream, which is the ability to understand that this is a dream and that it will have an exit with an ending. BOB understands this. Mr. C understands this. And they are desperately searching for a way to exit this dream while they are in control of the dreamer’s mind. Suffering is the rocket fuel they need to break the gravity barrier of all these dream layers.
On the other hand, Cooper will need a different fuel to break out of this dream. He will have to play a game named Call For Help and hope someone or something will come to his aid.
C3
Part 2: Scene 3: The Version Layer: Las Vegas, Nevada | Twin Peaks, WA
(0:06:15--0:12:06) Local (1:06:50--1:12:41) Global Time
5m51s
PN: Black Lodge Plan
SN: Blue Rose Investigation
We see a high-rise office building at night. Inside, a man named Mr. Todd sits at a desk among other desks. He calls a young man named Roger over, hands him a stack of money, and says, “Tell her she has the job.”
Roger asks Mr. Todd why “He” makes him do these things.
Mr. Todd responds, “Roger, you better hope you never get involved with someone like him. Never have someone like him in your life.” Mr. Todd is visibly disturbed as Roger leaves the office.
Cut to a railroad crossing, and a train is coming. The gates come down. The train passes.
Cut to the inside of a motor lodge diner.
Mr. C, Ray, Darya, and Jack are eating. Ray teases Jack about the amount of food he’s eaten.
Ray says that Darya told him Mr. C was worried about tomorrow.
Mr. C looks at Darya and grows annoyed that anyone here thinks he would be worried about anything.
Mr. C tells Ray that he doesn’t need anything, that he WANTS, and he WANTS a set of coordinates to which Bill Hastings’s secretary has access.
Ray is smarmy and coy in his confirmation that he will get those coordinates for Mr. C.
The “He,” referred to here by Mr. Todd, is Mr. C, who has contracted with Todd to do terrible things in TVL. We can assume these things helped Mr. C amass power and gerrymander influence over the character behavior unfolding in TVL. These measures are the first three of the ten deadly trials that were placed to destroy Cooper.
The money Mr. Todd just handed Roger will pay assassins to murder a man in an abandoned Las Vegas tract home.
During this diner scene, Mr. C reveals a weakness, which is, of course, hubris. Mr. C does not have complete authoritarian control here in TVL, despite the threat of his domination in its affairs.
Uncorrupted characters and elements of this layer remain pure—Gordon Cole, Major Briggs, Hawk, Lucy, Andy, Ed, Norma, Jacoby, etc. There are also sacred elements like coffee and cherry pie that remain uncorrupted. Each of these memories contains strong positive emotional attachments that Mr. C and BOB cannot drain warm emotions away from nor change the reference of their meanings.
And yet other memories have been manipulated and damaged in TVL. These are Bobby and Shelley Briggs, Sherriff Harry Truman, Audrey Horne, and Diane. These characters suffer, and some of them break.
The uncorrupted memories magnify the power of Cooper’s Golden Seed. The seed bleeds simplicity and gentility into the dream to change the behavior of even the most corrupted characters.
Understanding the metaphysical relationship between Dale Cooper and the things and people he loves is critical to gaining the most profound meaning possible from repeated viewings of TPTR.
So what are these coordinates, and what do they represent? I believe they are the exit to this entire dream, and I have learned not to apply much logic to this metaphor over time beyond naming its purpose. As shown in the analysis of the sound playing from The Fireman’s phonograph, the town of Twin Peaks hosts these coordinates. We can assume they take the sojourner to the Palmer House, where in TVL, a monster lives inside a sad and lonely old lady who lost everything for many reasons, each equally painful.
Because some aspects of TVL operate beyond his capacity to corrupt, Mr. C must use Ray’s charms to get the coordinates from Betty (Bill Hastings’s secretary). Unfortunately, we later learn that Betty’s car gets blown up (we assume after Ray has extracted the coordinates from her).
Smuggling information or outright secrets inside characters unaware of possessing them is a very Wizard Of Oz-like mechanism in TPTR.
At this point in the narrative, we don’t understand why Bill Hastings is involved with these coordinates or their ultimate purpose. But if BOB/Mr. C. wants them, then we can assume that he will not employ these coordinates for kindness but rather towards the event horizon of his inexhaustible corruptive ends.
F3
Part 2: Scene 4: The Version Layer: Twin Peaks, WA
(0:12:06-0:15:09) Local (1:12:41-1:15:44) Global Time
3m3s
PN: Hawk’s Investigation
SN: Mystery | Something Is Wrong In Twin Peaks
The treetops are creaking, and the wind blows strong.
We are following a flashlight beam as it ambles through dark woods.
We see Margaret Lanterman in her cabin with her Log, on the phone again, calling Hawk.
Hawk answers from his cell phone, and we understand that he is the one moving outside, in the forest, in the dark. He moves with an intensity of purpose, looking for something, anything.
Margaret asks him where he’s walking tonight, and Hawk responds that he is on the same page with her Log. She tells him, “The stars turn, and the time presents itself. Hawk, watch carefully.”
He says he will.
Margaret says, “I’m too weak to go with you. But stop by. I have coffee and pie for you.”
Hawk says it will need to be after, that he’s almost there now.
Margaret’s last words of this call are, “Please, let me know what happens.”
“Good night, Margaret,” Hawk tells her as he approaches Glastonbury Grove. Energy sounds whistle while the music turns moody and dark.
We can assume that Hawk is following Margaret’s direction that something is wrong in Twin Peaks, and it has to do with Agent Cooper’s disappearance. Hawk is scouring through Cooper’s final days in Twin Peaks. He likely understands that this area of the woods was the site of some metaphysical battle. Hawk will come to learn that Cooper lost that battle. Gaining this insight is the purpose of the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department’s investigation in TVL. It will result in Lucy turning a gun on an old friend and firing.
The Log has always been an agent of supernatural wisdom within almost all of Twin Peaks’s narration layers. In TVL, the Log brings a coalition of the willing and the good together inside Dale Cooper’s mind and soul.
The Log speaks through Margaret. She translates to Hawk and the viewers. The Log has always spoken directly to the viewer, which is why it has always seemed quirky and weird, but at the same time, serves a critical role hovering on the borderline between the third and fourth wall.
Hawk's investigation will lead him to conclude that Cooper did not exit Glastonbury Grove as the same person who went in.
Because this is Cooper’s dream, Hawk, like all other characters here, is a manifestation projected through Cooper’s memory and imagination. Through these images, Cooper is applying his innate analytical skills through the observations of his dreaming mind in kinetic motion.1
A3
Part 2: Scene 5: Red Room Layer
(0:15:09-0:25:17) Local (1:15:44-1:25:52) Global Time
10m8s
PN: White Lodge Plan
SN: Mystery
We are in the Red Room, and the familiar chairs are here with the white statue looking left, one arm covering the right breast and the other the genitals.
No one is sitting in the chairs.
There is an astrolabe on the table.
Cooper manifests into the Red Room like his application was booted up after the program restarted. He is sitting in one of the chairs with his black suit and a circle pin on his lapel.
Phillip Gerard sits next to him and asks, “Is it future or is it past?”
Cooper doesn’t answer.
Phillip says, “Someone is here…” and then disappears suddenly.
Laura Palmer walks into the room, making a strange backward energy sound with every step.
She sits in the chair next to Phillip. Laura is wearing a black dress with an ornate brooch. She says and then blinks strangely, “Hello, Agent Cooper. You can go out now.”
Cooper doesn’t respond.
She asks, “Do you recognize me?”
Cooper asks her, “Are you, Laura Palmer?”
She says, “I feel like I know her…but sometimes my arms bend back.”
Cooper asks, “Who are you?”
She says, “I am Laura Palmer.”
Cooper says, “But Laura Palmer is dead.”
She says, “I am dead...yet I live.”
Laura then puts her hand up and opens her face to reveal a strobing white light beneath the skin.
Cooper reacts as if a secret was revealed. He asks, “When can I go?”
Laura rises, touches the side of her face, walks to Agent Cooper, bends down, kisses him full on the lips, and then smiles. She whispers something in his ear. He groans softly. She stands back, looks up, and suffers a kind of seizure.
Cooper is looking up in shock as well.
The Red Room curtains are agitating upwards.
Laura screams and rises upwards, flying up and away off-screen. Her scream abruptly ends.
Cooper is still in shock.
There is a loud rustling, and the curtains of the Red Room blow and rise. A white horse is off in the distance, and the camera travels past the horse into the black.
RESTART PROGRAM
Philip Gerard is back now, sitting next to Cooper. He asks again, “Is it future or is it past?”
Now Philip is across the room, motioning for Cooper to come to the curtain and go beyond.
They are now walking down a carpeted hallway.
They are now in a room with a bare tree. The tree has a pulsing globe in the upper middle of its bare branches.
Philip points at it and says, “The Evolution Of The Arm.”
The tree says, “I am The Arm and I sound like this.” There is an electronic sputtering (similar in cadence to the “whooo-hooo-hooo” that the Man From Another Place once gave).
The Evolution Of The Arm asks Cooper, “Do you remember your Doppelganger?”
The camera zooms in on his face, and we see Cooper under the spell of BOB, both laughing maniacally in the Red Room, and we see the chase scene again.
The Evolution of The Arm says, “He must come back in before you can go out.”
This scene above is one of the most critical scenes in TPTR. Designed as subterfuge and built to be misinterpreted on first viewing, this scene is worth watching, thinking about, rewatching, and thinking about again.
Inserting an analogy to hardware, operating system, software, and application is helpful. Consider these definitions to be employed:
Hardware: tools, machinery, and other durable equipment.
Operating System: the software that supports a computer's basic functions, such as scheduling tasks, executing applications, and controlling peripherals.
Software: the programs and other operating information used by a computer.
Application: the special use or purpose to which something is put.
Hardware is the physical parts of a machine that takes instructions from software and applies energy to logic to execute functions.
Systems of functions synthesized together become programs.
Programs working together become software.
Software that runs the user experience is an Operating System. Applications run at all levels within the operating system.
The human mind is an operating system.
Memory and Imagination are two pieces of hardware the operating system of the mind uses to create the user experience.
Memories are applications, little software programs that run on demand and randomly askew inside the imagination as it functions in our dreams.
Dreams are software running applications we didn’t develop intentionally.
In Twin Peaks, dreams can be hacked.
In Twin Peaks, the hardware of memory can be sabotaged.
And in Twin Peaks, the windswept soul can be ripped away and cast into a void of non-existence.
There are so many points of interest in this scene that I will offer my views with an extra dosage of humility, reminding the reader that this is only my current opinion and that I respect yours, whatever it may be.
We begin this scene at the starting position of what I have come to refer to as The Cooper Loop.
Dale Cooper is caught up in the Red Room dream cycle, where he applies his investigative skills and instinctual insights to the already solved murder of Laura Palmer. In other words, Cooper is obsessing over a solved case while he is stuck in the muck of this dream. He simply cannot let the death of Laura Palmer go, and it is about to cost him everything.
Cooper’s purpose is not to disprove what he already knows to be accurate. The reality of the narrative so far constructed is that Leland Palmer molested and murdered his daughter Laura. Cooper keeps tumbling the facts together in this dreamscape until those facts are rubbed raw and start to falter; this can only lead to madness over the possibility of how to save a girl who is already dead.
Cooper’s dilemma is to bring justice to a crime of mortal injustice already committed and documented as “solved.”
Moral crimes of murder are also spiritual crimes, and there is no justice for spiritual crimes except relying on supplication, superstition, or outright madness. Cooper is well down the path of madness here.
Laura Palmer has always been dead in the Twin Peaks we’ve all watched. Assigning agency to Laura Palmer after her death in Twin Peaks is a religious ritual no different than drinking wine on our knees and imagining it turning to blood inside our throats.2
If BOB were not a corruptive presence in this dream, I believe Cooper would be allowed to leave RRL unaccosted to awaken. However, by the nature of the Red Room’s hinted metaphysical mechanics, Mr. C would automatically be pulled back into the Red Room when Cooper stepped one foot outside the red curtains. Indeed, in Part 3, we will see this process begin happening, only to be subverted by Mr. C/BOB’s chicanery.
BOB is a corrupting and devilishly creative presence here, so much so that he and Mr. C have combined resources and efforts to create a trap out of an entire layer of dream (TVL). But how to get Cooper out of this Red Room layer and into the trap layer?
There is an old saying about not getting in your enemy’s way when making a mistake. Because the shadow always knows, Mr. C. understands Cooper’s tendency to act irrationally when servicing a beautiful woman in whatever capacity she requires (except Audrey’s needs in Season 1). It’s a flaw in his character that his logic never catches him in these situations. And his Double is going to use that flaw against him perfectly here.
Cooper’s memory function is corrupted. In TPTR, memory is metaphorically presented as a machine that looks like a tea kettle, speaks with a human-sounding voice, and calls itself Phillip Jeffries (who may or may not have ever existed).
This machine of memory represents the function of the familiar inside this dream. But Cooper’s memory hardware has been corrupted, abducted, and relocated to a dark motel that is itself a metaphor for the deep corruption of one’s soul. If my life decisions are being made from a place in my mind where this dingy motel becomes an apt metaphor, there very likely isn’t much joy in my life or value that I bring to the world.3
If a demon invaded our psyche and allied with our shadow self to seize the machinery of our memory, using it to corrupt how we perceive reality, the game is pretty much over from that point. Unfortunately, this is what has happened to countless victims of cults, and so it stands here with Dale Cooper walking on the razor’s edge of the fault line of his sanity.
In Part 17, Cooper alters his memory of Laura Palmer’s death for a fantasy where he intervenes before her murder. When Cooper falls into this fantasy, he loses touch with reality and becomes windswept. This break in The Cooper Loop opens a window for the corruption of truth in this dream. Like a cavity in a tooth, rot moves in to grow.
Laura’s scream here in Part 2 is the same scream in Part 17 when her murder is ripped out of the fact column of this investigation and placed into the might have been column.
When the fact of her murder is altered in memory, Laura’s image in this dream becomes something different than before this in the RRL. Laura was never a memory of Cooper’s. He never met or knew Laura Palmer in her life. Still, he has formed a strong image of her through his investigation into her murder, along with a completely irrational mission he’s concocted to save her before she dies. That irrational daydream is about to become weaponized against him in this dream.
Even in the afterlife, these men manipulate Laura Palmer for their ends.
After the scream, a glitch in the Cooper Loop spreads like a virus, uploaded to the RRL. We can identify this shift after Philip Gerard asks his eternal question (“is It future...”), then is suddenly on the other side of the room, gesturing for Cooper to come with him.
This is the first diversion with many following in this scene, like scrambling the Rubik’s Cube to reset the game. The RRL plays differently now, outside the programming of The Cooper Loop. The trap waits, and Cooper is blindly walking right into it.
The Evolution Of The Arm here resembles a cell body with branching dendrites. Nerve cells deliver electricity to fuel proper cellular function. In a mind operating under normal and safe conditions, uncorrupted energy would be distributed equally to the Frontal Cortex and the Amygdala. This tree can easily be viewed as metaphoric of cells in the brain delivering electrical impulses that power both Lodges of the Frontal Cortex and the Amygdala. These Lodges compete normally in the dream under a system of relative homeostasis, a wave that travels between the darkness and the light.
As we will discover, Cooper’s memory function isn’t the only area of biological infestation and corruption. The Doppelgänger of the Evolution of The Arm will corrupt the energy delivered to the Lodges of the dream, infecting the energy flowing into Cooper’s Frontal Cortex with darkness and malice that likewise overpowers the Amygdala to further corrupt the dream and dislodge the Golden Seed into a void of darkness with no stars.
This massive wave of dark energy coming into the Frontal Cortex is likely what the Fireman’s machines detect in Part 8. His response to the alarm is to protect Cooper’s Golden Seed by placing it inside the image of Laura Palmer and then sending her image into an entirely new layer of this dream, away from the nightmares that haunt and hunt Cooper here in TVL.
The Fireman will then give Cooper instructions on how to hack into the next smaller dream layer while setting up Lucy, Andy, Freddy (and probably others) for the final game in the set with BOB and Mr. C in TVL.
Strange narrative tributaries flow into this scene from the past, the future, and what will never happen in Twin Peaks, except in this dream.4
C4
Part 2: Scene 6: The Version Layer: Buckhorn, SD
(0:25:17-0:40:32) Local (1:25:52-1:41:07) Global Time
15m15s
PN: Black Lodge Plan
Mr. C is storing his Mercedes, and Jack is lowering the storage garage door.
As he’s preparing to leave, Mr. C calls Jack over, grabs his face, and awkwardly massages his jaw while Jack looks down subjugated, as if he’s being milked of all his suffering.
Mr. C arrives in a different car at a motel, and Darya is in a room, lying in bed in her underwear, talking on the phone. She hangs up as Mr. C enters.
He asks her who was on the phone.
She says, “Jack, who says it’s all good to go.”
Ray was supposed to meet Mr. C this afternoon but never showed.
Mr. C. asks Darya where her .45 is, and she says it’s by the bed.
He checks outside the room and then grabs her gun, getting on the bed and pulling her close. He calmly sets the gun down on the bed. He tells her Jack is dead, that he killed him two hours ago, after he wired the car, catching her in the lie.
Darya tries to get away, but Mr. C is more powerful. He holds her down, draws a device from his pocket, and plays something for her on his little voice recorder. It’s a recording of Darya talking to Ray on the phone when Mr. C pulled up.
Ray told her he got arrested in South Dakota for carrying weapons over the state line. He also told her he got a call from Jeffries, who told him that Darya has to kill Cooper if he is still around tomorrow night.
Darya said she will but has to go because Mr. C just pulled up.
Darya tries to get away, but Mr. C slams her hard three times into the hardwood of the bed. She stops struggling and starts crying.
Darya asks if he will kill her, and he says he will.
She tries to escape again, and he punches her hard. She is bleeding from the mouth and nose, crying with blood, tears, and snot mixing into a stream of muck on her face.
Mr. C asks Darya, who hired her and Ray to kill him?
She says she doesn’t know because Ray never told her.
Pensive about this betrayal, Mr. C says, “This is quite an interesting thing to think about. The game begins.”
He asks her why they want him dead and how much they want him dead. Half a million split two ways.
Darya said they wouldn’t have done it, but Mr. C has no mercy on her for the lie.
Desperately, Darya reminds him that tomorrow he’s supposed to go away.
He says, “Tomorrow, I’m supposed to get pulled back into what they call the Black Lodge. But I’m not going back there. I’ve got a plan for that one. But this prison thing with that fucker Ray...”
He asks her if Ray got that information from Hastings’ secretary. She doesn’t know.
He asks if Ray ever mentioned coordinates to Darya. She says no.
He reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a playing card, then asks Darya if anyone ever showed this to her before. It’s an ace of spades with a circle with ears (or horns) in the middle. There are scratches above the circle. He tells Darya that this is what he wants while smiling with cruelty and malice.
Darya asks again if he will kill her, and he tells her, “Yes, Darya.”
She screams and struggles, but he punches her unconscious, puts a pillow over her head, and shoots her dead. He lifts the pillow, and we see the dreadful results from the futility of her resistance against this inhuman monster now lying in bed with her smoking corpse.
Mr. C walks to the bathroom, washes his hands, picks up a suitcase from the bathroom floor, and brings it back into the bedroom.
He activates some kind of device from the suitcase.
There is static, and he asks if it is Phillip.
The voice responds, “I missed you in New York, but I see you’re still in Buckhorn.” The voice says that Mr. C met with Major Garland Briggs.
Mr. C asks how he knew that.
The voice says, “Actually I just called to say goodbye.”
Mr. C asks if this is Phillip Jeffries.
The voice responds, “You are going back in, and I will be with BOB again.”
Mr. C asks who this is, and the line goes dead. He looks more intrigued than unnerved.
He opens and starts typing into his FBI laptop, entering an agent ID of “kdhgw….”
The screen shows a blinking red light in Buckhorn with a pin on Yankton Federal Prison.
He searches for “sdl04pcseprot,” and the search results yield “Yankton Federal Prison, South Dakota - Level 4 Security System.”
He then enters Yankton Federal Prison credentials as follows: “Organization: mkeuoucq / Name: eeuoubp3x / ID Number: 398715015787412”
He downloads many scrolling schematics and then shuts off the devices.
Mr. C. walks outside and knocks on the door of the room next to the one he just murdered a young girl inside. He says, “It’s me,” to the voice behind the door.
Chantal opens the door in a high-cut kimono, drinking a Fresca through a bendy straw. She greets him warmly, running fast to hot.
Mr. C enters and tells her that she will need to clean up the mess in 6.
She says, “Darya? Good. I was getting so jealous of that bitch.”
Mr. C tells her, “Then go get your husband. I will need you and Hutch in a few days. I’ll get word to you.”
She says, “Okay boss.”
He says, “Chantal, come here.”
She walks over, and he runs a hand up her thigh, then says, “Oh, you’re nice and wet.”
She chuckles, knowing what comes next.
This scene of Jack’s milking prompts the uncomfortable question, What remains inside someone milked of all their suffering if suffering is all they’ve ever known?5
Mr. C seems to be milking Jack’s suffering here, perhaps creating the same garmonbozia he is about vomit up all over his car in Part 3.
Darya’s murder is a brutal scene of misogynistic violence, entirely in line with what we will discover Mr. C is capable of inside Cooper’s dreaming, damaged mind.
Shooting victims through the eye in TVL is Mr. C’s calling card. We’ve seen three women murdered this way, two we know of by his hand, which allows us to infer the third.
In this scene, Mr. C reveals almost magical technology in TVL, demonstrating that he hacked into the operating system of his own environment, like NEO in the finale of The Matrix.
Who is impersonating Phillip Jeffries in this conversation? In FWWM, Jeffries is a corrupted character presented as a memory. In TPTR, Jeffries corruption has spread from a single memory to the entire memory mechanism of the Dreamer’s mind.
This reading makes the Jeffries scene in FWWM critical, a warning bell to the dreamer that a dangerous, corrupting influence threatens the sanity and sanctity of the entire psyche of The Dreamer.
My money is on Phillip Gerard being the voice claiming to come back together with BOB.6
This scene in the diner occurs between The Cooper Loop’s reboot and the TVL trap about to be sprung on an unsuspecting Cooper. Cooper’s Golden Seed remains intact within his character, and he is preparing to exit RRL while his Double gets pulled back to the RRL. These things are not going to happen according to plan or design.
A4
Part 2: Scene 7: Red Room Layer | The Version Layer: New York City | The Void
(0:40:32-0:47:56) Local (1:41:07-1:48:31) Global Time
7m24s
PN: White Lodge Plan
SN: Black Lodge Plan | Mystery
Back in RRL, Cooper is still looking at The Evolution Of The Arm, who says, “253 Time and time again. BOB...BOB...BOB...Go now! Go now!”
We are in a moment of unexplained crisis.
Philip Gerard and Cooper run from the Evolution Of The Arm’s room, but Cooper is now walking down the hallway alone and cannot walk through the Red Room curtains. He looks perplexed and instead walks back down the hallway, entering what seems to be the room where he last spoke to Laura.
Cooper looks around the room and walks to the far side, exiting into another hallway that appears to mirror the previous one. Now, he can walk through the curtains (the phish).
Cooper is now in a room with Leland Palmer, sitting in a chair, looking forlorn. Leland is in a nice suit and tie. He pleads with Cooper, “Find Laura.” Leland looks down and away in misery.
Cooper walks across the room towards an ominous scratching noise with a strobing light.
In this next room, the Red Room floor starts shifting and stretching.
Phillip is back with The Evolution of The Arm, and we see another white statue without a right arm looking downwards.
Philip says, “Something’s wrong.”
The Evolution of The Arm says, “My doppelganger!”
Cooper exits the room into another hallway, where we see the armless statue. He walks towards the white marble display and opens the curtain that the statue is looking at.
The scene is a desert highway, and a car is rapidly approaching. It’s Mr. C, and he is driving very fast.
The statue changes into what looks like the doppelganger of The Evolution Of The Arm. It seems to be threatening Cooper, roaring at him.
The Red Room floor is shifting, erupting up and down.
The doppelganger of the Evolution Of The Arm screams, “Non-exist-ent!” at Cooper, and he falls into what seems to be outer space because it is dark but filled with stars.
Cooper lands with a thud against the glass box from Part 1.
He dissolves into and floats inside the box’s chamber, coming through the hole in the wall. He hovers in stasis inside the glass box, waiting for whatever comes next.
No one is sitting on the couch (because Sam and Tracey are in the lobby, wondering about the security guard). The locked door is open, and no guard is sitting at the desk outside.
Sam comes out of the bathroom, and the scene unfolds, as we’ve seen. We are moments away from the creature appearing in the same box and murdering Sam and Tracey.
A rumbling starts up in the box with creaks and groans. Then, the box replicates within itself (frames within frames), and it sounds like metallic lock tumblers fall into place. Some cosmic key has been inserted, and a portal opens to suck Cooper into another level of reality.
The box fades into darkness, and Cooper drifts outwards again. Then, finally, the screen flashes white, and the box is empty.
The camera is jostling and shuddering. Cooper floats in space.
Here we learn about the importance of 2:53 as the striking time when the RRL performs its reset and purge. But in this scene, we see a subversion of this reclamation process.
What we witness here is an act of supernatural psycho terrorism. A new layer of the dream, with different controls and alternative tectonic plates of influence, forces itself upon the narrative perspective of the dreamer.7
The very awareness of perception gets hacked here in the middle of a dream, and I cannot think of a better metaphor to explain how a human being falls into madness.
Poor Leland here reveals the loss of Laura’s presence from RRL, and he provides Cooper with his only clue to getting out of the dream altogether when he begs him to “Find Laura.” The unspoken part of this request should read, “...and take her home.” 8
The interesting question is whether this instruction to find Laura is another virus, leading Cooper to a trap or a helpful instruction for what to do when the mission isn’t clear in the final layer of the dream. I think it could be read either way and defended.
Gerard and The Evolution Of The Arm are the middle managers of RRL, standing around lamenting all the changes the bosses are making. It’s a bit humorous when viewed from this perspective.
Cooper is ejected and captured in TVL inside the glass box we are familiar with, bringing some pattern into focus for the viewer. In TVL, Mr. C has been preparing a cosmic slaughterhouse channel trap, and this glass box is both a net and a killing chute.
We can confirm from this scene that TPTR is not a linear narrative. Indeed, this is the third time in two episodes that we’ve witnessed parts of this Tracey and Sam scene play out from different angles and under different circumstances.
In less than two hours of screen time, the entire landscape of FWWM has come undone, and we finally have a new story unfolding in Twin Peaks.
D2
Part 2: Scene 8: The Version Layer: Twin Peaks, WA
(0:47:56-0:52:52) Local (1:48:31-1:53:27) Global Time
4m56s
PN: Something Is Wrong In Twin Peaks
SN: Road House Band Onstage
Sarah Palmer is drinking, smoking, and watching television in the dark at the Palmer residence. She’s watching a nature program, and a pack of hungry lions is murdering and devouring a substantial hooved animal. The light goes out in the animal’s eyes, and Sarah Palmer has a reaction that looks similar to the ecstasy of the Woodsman at the beginning of this episode.
The Chromatics are playing “Shadow” on stage at the Road House.
Shelly and her friends are at a table laughing, talking and drinking.
James walks in with his friend Freddy, wearing a green gardening glove on one hand.
Shelly tells her friends that her daughter Becky is with the wrong guy (Steven).
James seems taken aback when he sees Shelly (though we later learn he’s mooning at her friend because he’s in love with her). The other ladies notice James looking over at their table, and one makes a derisive comment about his mental faculty.
Shelly defends James, informing them that he was in a motorcycle accident and is, “Just quiet now. James is still cool. He’s always been cool.”
A man who looks like Jacques Renault is tending the bar.
A man in a leather jacket (Red) catches Shelly’s eye, and they share a moment. Then, he raises a finger gun and fires at her, and she acknowledges him but quickly looks away.
The scene ends on a more melancholy note with Shelly laughing with her friends and James looking at them longingly, smiling.
“Shadow, take me down with you.” Cooper is about to be indeed taken down by his shadow.
The musical performances in TPTR contain the whiff of danger and subtextual emotional comfort in this long film that is primarily devoid of that feeling.
When we come to these emotional codas at the end of most parts of TPTR, I counsel you to check in with your feelings during these musical Roadhouse finales and interludes.
How do you feel?
There is one constant that has stayed true throughout all of Twin Peaks; the music never lies to you. Not once.
Note Red’s influence over Shelly, whose character in TVL is already becoming corrupted. Watching Red manipulate Shelley in this scene is a window to understand how memories become corrupted in TVL. Old friends are not what they once were in this place, even the good ones. Time is truly Ben Johnson’s “Old bald cheater” in TPTR.
Sarah Palmer reacts like a starving beast when she views the suffering and bloody murder of a colossal animal being ripped apart and consumed by lions.
Many viewers struggled with Sarah’s character evolution, but if we continue to view TPTR through the lens of Dale Cooper’s nightmare, this all starts to make more sense (including understanding where Mark Frost’s books fit in).9
In TVL, Sarah is a dangerous character, barely holding back a force of pure malice. What do you imagine would happen if she came into contact with Dale Cooper in TVL? I think she’d eat his face, exposing his golden seed so that it can be cast into the void, and Mr. C exits the dream with BOB integrated and ready to start dark work in the world.
As we close the first two hours of TPTR, Dale Cooper is in serious trouble. He just barely passed the first trial of the glass box, missing being ripped apart by seconds.
I still wonder what happened to that security guard.
CREDITS2
Part 2: Scene 9
(0:52:52-0:54:34) Local (1:53:27-1:55:09) Global Time
1m42s
PN: Exit Credits
Music
1. “Shadow,” performed by Chromatics.
In Memory Of... Frank Silva
Extra Credit
Listen to the In Our House Now Podcast on Phillip Jeffries's character in FWWM and TPTR. John Thorne and I go super deep in this one.
This passive observation of the natural motions of the mind is also the core of a thriving personal meditation practice, and its implications should not go lost on the viewer and reader.
In Transcendental Meditation, this natural motion is conveyed to have an inner and outer stroke, where the thinking process is part of meditation. Thoughts rise from the depth of our consciousness and return to the void. Watching this motion unfold in one’s mind, not trying to change it or exert any will, is the core of good meditation, regardless of the technique.
One of the unfortunate positions I've had to take in my scholarship of Twin Peaks is that Laura Palmer never had an agency that wasn't assigned to her by a man. This doesn't change in TPTR because her entire existence here is defined through the lens of Dale Cooper.
This is like a President authorizing the military to seize voting machines and count all votes for their opponent as a vote for themselves. If a nefarious plot can take the machinery that administers the will of the People, then Democracy becomes Dictatorship. Likewise, in this dream, the mechanics of perception are corrupted to blind and then maul the morality of the dreamer. The concept that we are morally vulnerable to dark forces in our dreams is the most disturbing aftershock of staring at TPTR so closely.
I will be adding an essay about Mark Frost’s two novels, The Secret History Of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier, that will be impacted by this notion of what never happened in Seasons 1 or 2 and what only happens in this wacked-out complex and the dreamy nightmare of TPTR.
What could you do by manipulating someone with that expansive void inside them?
Two Phillips with very different functions in TPTR.
Recall the scene in Clash Of The Titans where Hera simply picks up Perseus and places him on a strange beach, where his adventure begins. This event in Clash Of The Titans is similar to what is about to happen to Dale Cooper in this dream.
How ironic that Leland, with his one line, reveals Cooper’s mission’s purpose in a way that no other character does in any part of TPTR.
As stated above, I will be writing about Mark’s books in a later essay.
Listening to TP playlist I made while reading this, so good.