[Twin Peaks] Chapter 15: Hour Eight "Gotta Light?"
015 - A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks, 2nd Edition
This chapter is provided free to read for everyone. Chapters 1-9 are also free to read. To read the entire book and all the content in the back catalog of this newsletter, consider subscribing
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
Chapter 15, Part Eight
INTRO8
Part 8: Scene 1
(0:00:00–0:1:40) Local (6:44:52-6:46:32) Global Time
1m40s
C16
Part 8: Scene 2
The Version Layer: Somewhere in SD
(0:1:40-0:11:21) Local (6:46:32-6:56:13) Global Time
9m41s PN: Black Lodge Plan
Mr. C and Ray drive in the dark of South Dakota.
Mr. C pulls his phone out. An app with three black boxes, one of them with a capital C. The second box says “FIRE,” and the third has a small capital D with a large tan circle, a small black circle inset, and a capital “X” next to it. There is a slider arrow at the bottom of the app.
Mr. C says, “There are three tracking devices on this car.” He taps each of the boxes and tells Ray to get up close behind the semi-truck.
Mr. C types “DEGWW8” into the phone, rolls down the window, and says, “That should do it.” He throws the phone out of the car.
Ray says, “I hope you’re not sore at me for running off. It sure was stupid of me to get caught up like I did. Thanks for getting me out of there.”
Mr. C says nothing.
Ray asks, “How’d you do this?”
Mr. C says, “Darya told me what happened. You needed to get out, Ray.”
Ray asks where Darya is.
Mr. C says, “She’s waiting for a phone call when we get someplace safe.”
Ray asks, “Where are we going?”
Mr. C says, “You’d probably like to go to that place they call The Farm.”
Ray says that’s what he was thinking, and they are heading in the right direction, but they aren’t going to let them just walk.
“Aren’t they?” Mr. C says, “You have something I want, Ray.”
Ray pauses, then says, “Yes, I do. I got it memorized. All the numbers, memorized perfectly. But honestly, Mr. Cooper, I think it might be worth some money.”
Mr. C looks at him menacingly.
Ray says, “Maybe, quite a lot of money.”
Mr. C says, “You think so, do you?”
Ray says, “Yes sir, I do.”
Mr. C doesn’t respond. A moment later, he sees something up the road and says, “There it is. Take that little road up there on the right. Let’s get off this highway, Ray.”
They pull off onto a side road, and after a short distance, Ray stops the car in a secluded field.
Ray asks Mr. C, “You mind if I pull over a sec? I gotta take a leak.”
Mr. C says, “Go for it,” and looks at Ray again.
Ray gets out of the car, and the headlights shine into the darkness. He walks away from the vehicle to relieve himself.
In the car, Mr. C opens the glove compartment and pulls a revolver, checking that it’s loaded. Then, he gets out of the car and approaches Ray.
Mr. C says, “Ray, I want that information.”
Ray, still urinating, says, “Yes?”
Mr. C raises the gun and says, “Looks like you’re out half a million.”
Ray pulls his gun out, his back still to Mr. C, and says, “Well, I think you’re wrong about that.”
He turns around, and Mr. C squeezes the trigger three times, but the gun doesn’t fire. He looks down at it with surprise.
Ray says, “Tricked ya, fucker,” and shoots Mr. C twice. The bullets ricochet off Mr. C’s revolver into his stomach. Mr. C falls down, gut shot. The camera rushes to Mr. C’s body as Ray walks up to shoot him in the head, which doesn’t happen.
Flashing lights descend, and strange music starts playing.
Six Woodsmen phase in and out towards the murder scene.
Ray is shocked and terrified.
The Woodsmen are translucent. They dance around Mr. C’s body.
Ray looks around at them all; his gun is limp and useless in his hand.
The Woodsmen are on their knees, patting the dirt softly. They work on Mr. C’s body which is also now translucent as it flashes in and out of phase.
The ominous music builds while one of the Woodsmen works on Mr. C’s bloody stomach. There is so much blood smeared all around.
The other Woodsmen dance in circles around Mr. C’s body.
They smear blood all over his face.
They start digging inside his gut, mixing dirt and blood to smear all over.
The dark ritual is complete, and Mr. C’s body lies still. The Woodsmen wait.
Ray is sitting on the ground in shock and moaning, watching this grisly scene unfold.
Other Woodsmen are still dancing around Mr. C’s body.
One Woodsman holds Mr. C’s head up by the neck to look at Ray.1
Ray scoots backward on the ground, still seated, in terror.
A BOB bubble is extracted from Mr. C’s open chest and belly, like an amniotic sac surrounding BOB’s maniacal face.
This is Ray’s breaking point; he gets up and runs for the car while the Woodsmen continue their dancing ritual.
Ray slips and falls, quickly getting back up and bolting into the car.
He backs up and floors it in drive, getting out of there as fast as possible. The license plate on the car is UTD 643.
Ray pulls away.
The Woodsmen phase in and out, dancing, while dust lifts and hangs in the air. Then, finally, they disappear to light flashes, and droll music plays on while dust floats in the supernatural light.
The light dims, and the screen fades to black.
Dark shadows obscure a quarter Moon.
Ray is driving away, talking to someone he believes is Phillip Jeffries.
Ray says, “I think he’s dead. But he’s found some kind of help, so I’m not 100 percent. And I...I saw something in Cooper. It may be the key to what this is all about. And I told him where I’m going, so if he comes after me, I’ll get him there.”
Ray hangs up the phone.
Everything changes in the narrative of TPTR right here.
In a typical crime show, this would be game over. The bad guy is shot, and justice is served. But there are no episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos where etheric beings appear from nowhere to resurrect the bad guy. But that’s what happens in this scene.
And this isn’t the strangest thing in this episode of transcendent, cinematic storytelling.
The most consequential truth revealed here is that Mr. C will be tough to eliminate in the world we are presented with on-screen.
Mr. C’s video game respawn is the ultimate form of gerrymandering in narrative fiction. It’s a great cheat, but not the only one in this scene.
The use of technology in TPTR is worth its own essay.
In this scene, Mr. C defuses all attempts to track him with a few taps into an app that visually makes no sense. He then throws the device out the window and declares himself untraceable.2
This mind-bending mastery over technology, secret information, and the functionality of respawning are all potent clues that we are witnessing a compartmentalized simulation contained within the larger context of Twin Peaks.
It’s telling that Ray calls him “Mr. Cooper,” not “Mr. C,” like Otis did, even though they were all in the same house at the time. I take this at face value that Ray believes Mr. C is Dale Cooper.
This is a fantastic scene of dishonor amongst criminals where Ray and Mr. C exchange lies but still reveal truths.
Mr. C lies about Darya.
Ray lies about the Farm being a welcoming place.
This is a dangerous game of misinformation. It escalates to the point where both men pull their firearms, and only one of them is loaded.
When Ray asks for more money, Mr. C understands that Warden Murphy has betrayed him. But this isn’t the first time things have gone pants for Mr. C in TVL. Both unplanned diversions involved Ray Monroe, who reveals himself to be a double agent in this scene, aligned with Phillip Jeffries.
Mr. C is not directly shot here. Instead, he is hit with a ricochet off his gun.3
The Woodsmen are corrupted Praetorian guards of BOB’s victims of possession. They come to BOB’s aid when Mr. C is threatened, ensuring he stays alive in TVL, even if it means breaking the laws of the dream to bring him back.
Ray’s testimony confirms that other characters can see BOB in TVL. Ray bears witness to this on the phone with the Jeffries he’s working with to take Mr. C down.
G4
Part 8: Scene 3
The Version Layer: Twin Peaks, WA
(0:11:21-0:16:00) Local (6:56:13-7:00:52) Global Time
4m39s
PN: Road House Band On Stage
Lights flash. A guitar knob is turned. It sounds like thunder but the electronic kind. Trent Reznor is on stage with “The” Nine Inch Nails. An MC stands in front of a microphone with a large pine cone.
He says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Roadhouse is proud to welcome The Nine Inch Nails.”
NIN starts playing “She’s Gone Away.” It’s a song about a moment of clarity, where the absence of someone and something collides with time, all of it being pulled into a very dark void.
We must ask ourselves why this performance is presented at this particular point in the narrative.
Witnessing a Roadhouse band scene so early in an episode is a deviation from the norm of our expectations after seven hours of intense viewing and study. We must probe to determine the meaning of this scene ourselves.
I believe this song is perfectly placed and executed.
Mr. C is briefly out of commission. The schemes and mechanisms of his deception are on pause, and the truth may be revealed here. She’s gone away. And we’ll find out later that she’s The One. What happens when The One has gone away?
I consider this a moment of reset in TVL.
Mr. C is briefly no longer manipulating this simulation to his advantage. And in his moment of resurrection, like the hard reboot of a computer, where the Operating System hasn’t yet taken over the functions of programming the experience, a higher reality floods Cooper’s dreaming mind.
The intellectual truth will be revealed metaphorically because that is the traffic of dreams. But the emotional truth of his captivity is revealed on stage in this scene through the hardline of Music, which has never lied to the viewer in any of Twin Peaks.
I do not view what is about to happen as a literal reveal of how evil came into the world with a nuclear explosion. On the contrary, there has been evil in this world since the spark of human cognition. So instead of viewing what will unfold from this scene as a mythological origin story of evil on Earth, let us consider this an intimate exploration of a fictional character’s moral corruption told through audiovisual metaphors.
Twin Peaks is the story of Dale Cooper's soul corruption and possibly his redemption. I view nearly everything we are about to witness in the remainder of this episode as Cooper’s dreaming mind revealing the depth and extent of the corruption that has invaded his psyche, threatening what is pure within him.
By the end of this episode, the dreamer will know the truth, even though he may not understand it yet. It’s the same for the viewer because we experience this in real-time with Cooper as he dreams.
C17
Part 8: Scene 4
The Version Layer: Somewhere in SD
(0:16:00-0:16:20) Local (7:00:52-7:01:12) Global Time
20s
PN: Black Lodge Plan
The ring of the Nine Inch Nails song “She’s Gone” reverberates in the field as Mr. C’s corpse lays peacefully with arms outstretched. He sits up, eyes closed, and the ringing stops.
He opens his black eyes, bloody-faced and filthy.
Fade to black.
The system is rebooting, and the plan is back in action, but at what cost? What happened in TVL during that gap while Nine Inch Nails sang about how she’s gone away?4
I interpret what follows as metaphoric of BOB’s invasion of Cooper’s psyche and the process of corruption that ensued in the mechanics of Cooper’s dreams, memories, and emotions.
A demonic force invaded Cooper’s psyche and has taken control of the broadcast of “reality” in his dream. This dreamer is just becoming aware of this dire situation.
H2
Part 8: Scene 5
???
(0:16:20-0:56:43) Local (7:01:12-7:41:35) Global Time
40m35s
PN: Mystery
New Mexico July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m.
The atmospheric wind swirls. We are at the top of a mountain, looking down into a distant valley. We can see for miles; there is so much to look at but little life.
A mechanical voice starts counting down from ten, and there is a click after one.
There is a brilliant flash of light from the valley below.
Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima plays.
We zoom in toward the mushroom cloud in the center of the valley. Lightning strikes all around the periphery of this explosion.
The devastation rises.
Small clouds gather beneath the more immense mushroom cloud.
There is an intense atmospheric whooshing.
Inside the cloud now.
Explosions of color.
Erratic movements of speckles and spots.
A black field with hundreds of tittering white dots moving in swarming patterns.
Opaque colors with flashes of yellows and reds.
A negative image. An X-ray with sperm-like objects moving in sync.
An explosion of white flashes against a black background, like an electric dandelion, blown, or like bubbles underwater moving at high velocity.
A pattern of back-and-forth rowing emerges and morphs into a violent digging of light into darkness.
A fiery explosion comes towards the screen.
Blue, white, and yellow stars are born in a nebula of fireworks exploding on screen.
A dusty tunnel with a bright light in the middle.
Multiple explosions of light and thunder.
Yellow explodes into red, each explosion producing a rippling effect on the gas and dust around it.
A yellow explosion consumes the screen, growing more significant and more violent.
The nuclear furnace burns and swells to the music.
There is a shift to black and white.
Explosions rip across the screen from every direction.
A dark dust cloud rolls across our view.
The story being told here is not a documentarian’s account of the historical nuclear testing of an atomic weapon.5
The story being told here is one of moral corruption. So far, in this scene, we have invoked the ultimate depth of physical destruction.
All of this nuclear activity is metaphoric of the moment when the evil of BOB impacts and starts corrupting the flawed but innocent psyche of Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks.
This nuclear bomb in Part 8 is an organizing incident of our hero’s corruption and current dire situation.6
We see an empty convenience store with two gas pumps outside. Each pump has one light bulb at the top.
There are two hanging lights above the front windows.
There is a door and what looks like a phone booth.
There are stacks of cans visible through the largest front window.
There is a staircase leading up on the right side of the building.
Lights begin flashing as the door opens and closes like it’s phasing through time.
A dust cloud rolls out the front door, phasing in light.
Bright flashes of light inside the store.
More dust rolls out.
Bright flashes inside occur more rapidly.
The dust cloud grows to cover the entire store and then dissipates.
Human-looking figures walk around, phasing in and out.
They look like Woodsmen but are not oily and burned (yet).
The figures move around the inside and outside the convenience store. They phase in and out, walking all around the pumps.
They do not walk up the stairs but walk everywhere else on the screen.
Their fists seem to be out in front of them quite often.
Close shot of the far right gas pump. The figures continue walking around with their fists held out, closer to the screen.
Figures stand behind stacked cans inside the convenience store.
Flashing lights.
The figures disappear.
A wide-angle view of the convenience store is followed by the scene going in and out of focus. This repeats several times.
Lights flash in static sputters like a 35 mm film rolling in a movie theater.
The figures are back.
Close shot of the large front window of the convenience store.
The figures move around inside the store.
Side shot of the store again. The lens goes in and out of focus, sputtering as a needle stuck on a vinyl record.
The sputtering stops.
The perspective shifts rapidly between close shots and wide shots.
Flashes of light highlight figures moving in the shadows.
Fade to black.
The figures in this scene can be viewed as proto-Woodsmen. We witness their corruption. In this reading, what is their function?
I view the Woodsmen as dream shepherds, protecting the integrity of the dream’s narrative.
The Woodsmen’s purpose seems to maintain the existing logic of the dream for as long as possible before the narrative collapses. This goal remains consistent even after corruption when they begin to serve an “Extreme Negative Force.”7
This scene begins with an atmosphere that is calm and serene and will pass through chaos to conclude in new frenetic and malevolent order.
For the Woodsmen, the oily substance on their skins marks their corruption.8
A strange creature floats on a screen filled with black.
The creature is androgynous, pale like an alien, and monstrous.
The creature vomits into the black. This viscous, plastic-looking substance becomes closer as the screen presentation zooms toward the vomit.
The creature has horns, resembling the image on Mr. C’s playing card from Part Two.
We zoom up close to the vomit and see hundreds of small egg shapes floating in this putrid stream of awful.
Then, finally, there is one dark globe with BOB’s maniacal face floating in this stream. This is the bubble we saw earlier during the Woodsman’s resurrection of Mr. C.
Inside the vomit, eggs are floating all around with bubbles.
One egg breaks from the fluid and floats away.
There is a burst of music and flame. Multiple explosions jet across the screen.
A large pool of fire morphs into the shape of a heart. Finally, a golden orb emerges from the heart of fire and moves towards the screen (towards the viewer), eventually consuming the focus while reflecting all the explosions.
The golden orb comes close, and the music speeds up rapidly.
Red blobs move very fast, like blood cells in a vein. Thousands of these red orbs move at blinding speed against the flow of this environment.
The movement on the screen slows and shifts into a view of a massive dark ocean.
The causality here reveals the nature of nested evil within the mythology of TPTR. In this scene, BOB is a by-product of this creature, therefore inheriting his evil spirit from whatever this creature represents here. Logically, this implied order must be respected in any analysis of the relationship between these images and concepts portrayed on screen.
In other words, logic dictates that the bubble in the puke is not more potent than the creature that does the puking.
BOB is a powerful agency of corruption and malevolence in Twin Peaks, but BOB has been revealed as only a facet of the darkness and evil that this floating creature represents. Total and complete moral corruption in the form of these eggs and BOB, along with the frightening possibility that there are other elements of evil that we don’t see in this viscous plastic substance.
These eggs represent corruption on the tactical scale. But, as we will see, one of these eggs has a journey that will carry them to the end of this layer of the dream, where it will wait for a union that will never come.9
Mr. C’s goal is to find the coordinates that host this creature’s nest in TVL.
The Black Lodge’s plan is to bring BOB home to this creature, not Laura.
The White Lodge's plan is to bring Cooper home (meaning waking up the dreamer) without BOB. The ruse is convincing Cooper, within these nested layers of dream, that he is bringing Laura back home to rest safely. He will save himself by saving Laura and breaking dream laws over time and death.
In this ocean, great waves roll in wide swaths of open, dark water. The pervasive sound of wind consumes our audible focus.
A dark tower appears in the distance, a large protrusion jetting up from this immense ocean.
Massive waves break against the rocks. Spraying water violently explodes against the jagged cliffside.
The wind whistles. Our view travels up the cliffside to a vast, smooth, modern structure, focusing on a dark rectangular window high up the structure.
Inside, ambient vintage music plays from a gramophone in a room that looks like grandparents once sat and talked without radio or television. In this room, a pretty woman (Lady Dido) in an elaborate sparkly dress sits on a couch.
The floor has a swirly appearance.
There is an iron screen in front of Lady Dido. A standing lamp with a teardrop shade and tassels is rooted to a circular mat on the ground.
There is a large gramophone piece of furniture next to the couch she sits on and two recessed circular structures on the ceiling.
Covered windows hide the ocean view. A rectangular tapestry hangs on the wall to the right of Lady Dido.
A sizeable bell-shaped object with two transistors on top and two dials on the front sits on a large circular rug. A large beam runs down the center of the ceiling.
Lady Dido sways to the music. Her hands are folded in her lap.
A clanking alarm begins.
The Fireman appears from behind the bell machine. He looks at Lady Dido and then turns to look at us.
The Fireman seems concerned with what he sees and hears. Eventually, he turns to the bell machine and pushes a button. The alarm stops ringing after 64 times.
The Fireman looks at Lady Dido again and turns to walk behind the machine.
We witness the moment of alert that follows the recognition of an “Extreme Negative Force” invading the psyche of this organism, Dale Cooper, now lost in his dream.
This place is the frontal cortex of the Dreamer. This is where the brain’s executive functions bring memory together with emotion and the golden orb that represents the best inside us, the source of mercy, compassion, and pure creativity. The golden orb is a metaphor for the force of love, which is much more than a simple emotion. Love is a force of nature to be called on during moments of moral emergency.
This scene is a moment of revelation, where the dangerous scope of imminent holistic moral corruption is made clear to the Frontal Cortex of the fictional dreamer and the actively engaged viewer.
The function of the Fireman here is to safeguard the overall moral health of the organism while it dreams. But, unfortunately, Dale Cooper’s health is in grave danger. From this revelation, we witness emergency countermeasures that the Fireman and Lady Dido execute to resolve this drastic situation.
The music stops.
The Fireman ascends an ornate staircase with a railing that begins halfway up.
The Fireman’s steps produce scratching sounds.
He enters a large vestibule outside the Theater of Imagination.10
Another bell machine is situated on a more prominent circular rug.
There are two illuminated light sconces on each side of this room.
The wavy carpet mesmerizes the viewer.
There are distant floating lights in the background with covered windows lining the sides of the room.
The Fireman walks through this room into the theater.
The theater has a large screen, a balcony, and another bell machine.
The Fireman approaches the theater stage, climbs a few stairs, and stands on it as atmospheric music swells.
He gestures to the screen, and the images we saw earlier of the bomb exploding play out again. He seems disturbed by what he sees.
The fire grows large again.
The convenience store is on the theater screen. Lights flash, and the figures walk in phase.
The theater screen features the creature vomiting again. The theater screen image freezes on BOB’s bubble.
The Fireman walks forward a few steps and turns to face the bigger screen (pointing at us, the viewers).
An organ plays as it ascends and hangs in the air over the theater stage.
A light shines into the theater, and Lady Dido walks in; this spotlight lights her way forward to the stage.
Flashes of light illuminate the room from the front.
Lady Dido approaches the event happening before her reverently.
BOB’s bubble appears on the screen again, and she seems very worried as she surveys it.
Dido’s shadow appears in the spotlight underneath The Fireman, floating horizontally now, high up in the air above the stage, arms at his side.
Lady Dido climbs the stairs to the stage. The Fireman’s head glows.
The BOB image on the theater screen cuts to a space background.
A beautiful, sparkling, golden gas-like substance starts flowing into the room from The Fireman’s head.
Lady Dido looks up, smiling in reverence at what is happening.
The golden stream of sparkles becomes a flowing river-like structure that looks like a tree with limbs emanating from The Fireman’s head. Tributaries of these sparkles gather and form into glowing golden orbs.
Lights flash in the room as a small galaxy of sparkles swims in the air above The Fireman.
One of these golden orbs grows large and floats out of the stream down to Lady Dido. She holds this golden orb reverently, gazing into its depths. Finally, she brings it close, and we see the face of Laura Palmer inside the orb.
Lady Dido gives the orb a long kiss and then lets it go to float upward. It moves towards a portal that looks like a curving horn with three holes. The horn tube rotates towards the theater screen, which changes to an image of the Earth like one would see in an old 1950s documentary animation.
The orb is transubstantiated from this theater into the image on the smaller screen. In black and white, that screen displays a satellite moving towards the Earth; the orb glows golden as it descends.
Wide angle of the theater. Lady Dido watches the orb descend.
Fade to black.
Laura Palmer is a construct in TVL. She is a figment of Cooper’s imagination. Not even a memory (because they never met). And yet, Laura’s trauma and murder are the central supporting column of this entire assault on Cooper’s psyche. When pulled from RRL in Part Two, she became something different beyond a single layer of this dream. The construct of Laura is unique within this universe of Cooper’s dream.
The Fireman’s dream tree in this scene might contain all the characters that populate Dale Cooper’s mind, and memory, including the image of Laura Palmer built up through his investigation.
Danger threatens to completely corrupt Dale Cooper, and this essence of his goodness, represented by the golden orb, will have to be smuggled to the edge of this simulation of dream where the cosmic battle of this man’s fictional soul is taking place before our eyes as viewers.
What is happening is not distant from the viewer. Instead, we are taking an active part in synthesizing meaning into what we are seeing.11
I do not believe that the viewer needs to rely on outside sources of information (Hinduism, other Lynch films, etc.) to derive inter-textual meaning from the image itself. The golden orb represents what is pure inside Dale Cooper. That goodness has been infused into the constructed image of Laura Palmer, which is then sent into another layer of dreams that we will not encounter until the final hour of TPTR.
The screen overlay reveals that what we are seeing is a New Mexican desert in the year 1945. The numbers tick up to August 5th, 1996.
The wind roars as the screen zooms in flashes, eventually onto an egg hatching in the desert to squishing, liquid sounds.
A creature crawls and slithers out of the egg. It looks like a frog with beetle wings.
The creature crawls on the sand and flutters its wings, leaving a slimy trail. It crawls off-screen.
Dark clouds move fast across the face of the full Moon.
It is nighttime outside another convenience store. Crickets chirp into the still night.
Two people emerge from the shadows, a young boy and a girl.
The boy asks, “Did you like that song?”
The girl says she did. She stops, looks at the ground, and exclaims, “Oh, look! I found a penny! Oh, and it’s heads up. So that means it’s good luck.” She runs her thumb across Lincoln’s face.
The boy says, “I hope it does bring you good luck.”
She smiles at him.
Elsewhere, in the desert, a Woodsman floats from the sky diagonally. Another follows him. Their eyes look crazy, and their skin is blackened and oily.
A middle-aged couple drives near this place. Their car approached another car and stopped in the other lane.
Shadows cross the headlights. The Woodsman stumbles up to their car, accompanied by growing scratching noises.
He leans into the car window, a cigarette in his mouth. He asks the man driving three times, “Got a light?”
Another Woodsman is in front of this car, looking through the windshield.
The man’s wife screams. Her husband stares in catatonic shock at the Woodsman with the cigarette looming in his passenger window.
The woman’s wail is drawn out and distorted as the electricity continues to crackle.
The Woodsman continues asking, “Got a light?”
The husband slams on the gas, and the car takes off, avoiding the other Woodsman, tearing off into the dark night; the terrorized couple hold hands, tearing away from the scene.
The boy and girl walk on a dirt road in a valley with a large hill on their left. Crickets chirp.
The girl asks, “You live in town, don’t you?”
He says yes.
She asks, “You live by the school?”
He asks how she knows that.
She says she just does.
She says, “So, I thought you were going with Mary.”
He says, “No, that’s over.”
She asks if he’s sad about that.
He says no.
She says, “Oh. Okay, that’s good.”
They arrive at her house.
She says, “It was really nice of you to walk me home.”
He says he really wants to and asks if she minds if he gives her a kiss.
She doesn’t know about the kiss.
He begs for just one.
She exhales and closes her eyes.
They kiss sweetly, and she exhales.
They say goodbye and wave at each other before she enters the house.
Boots walk in the desert toward a flat building with a large antenna. The Woodsman with the cigarette is stalking for prey. He sees the antenna and travels toward it.
The Platters “My Prayer” plays.
We see the outside of a radio station KPJK.
The clock on the wall informs that it is 10:16 PM.
A disc jockey flips through pages in a binder with a headset while a 7” record plays next to him.
Elsewhere, a mechanic listens to the radio in a garage, working on a car.
Elsewhere, a waitress cleans tables in a diner, preparing to close up for the night.
The young girl is inside her home now, in pajamas, listening to the radio in bed. There are dark, circular marks on her knees. She is smiling.
The Woodsman approaches the radio station and enters the front door. A woman files papers with her back turned to the door.
She says, “Yes,” her face turns to horror when she understands the danger in front of her.
The Woodsman asks her, “Got a light?”
An electric hum grows. The woman is frozen but also drawn toward him.
He crushes her skull with one hand.
The Woodsman sees the DJ in the booth and enters, asking, “Got a light?”
The man turns around in horror, and the Woodsman grabs his head and squeezes but doesn’t kill him as quickly as the woman did.
There is a horrible squishing sound. The record scratches when the Woodsman pulls the arm and needle off the vinyl record.
Elsewhere, the mechanic, the waitress, and the girl all listen to dead air hiss over the radio.
The Woodsman flips a switch and grabs the microphone, bringing it close to his mouth.
With a cigarette hanging from his mouth, he recites the following verse several times over and over:
This is the water And this is the well Drink full and descend The horse is the white of eyes And dark within.
The waitress, hearing this recitation, collapses to the ground.
The mechanic, hearing this recitation, drops his wrench and collapses to the ground.
The frog beetle crawls outside a home.
The girl lying in her bed looks at the radio with distaste.
She reaches for the dial but doesn’t make it. Instead, she falls asleep on the bed.
The frog beetle crawls outside her house. The Woodman’s voice on the radio carries out into the quiet night.
Her window is open.
The frog beetle jumps and flies to her sill.
The girl sleeps peacefully. The frog beetle crawls to her face, clucking and fluttering its wings.
The girl’s mouth opens wide enough for the frog beetle to crawl inside. She swallows.
The Woodsman ends his repetitious recitation, emphasizing a final “with…IN.” He finally crushes the DJ’s skull, and the man’s eyes turn white as his head is brutally ripped apart, blood pouring onto the floor in chunks.
The Woodsman leaves the radio station and walks into the darkness as lights flash in front of him.
A horse whinnies in the distance several times as the credits roll.
The sleeping girl’s eyes blink rapidly with furrowed brows.
Twilight Time is a song about the departure of light and the coming of night. Birds stop singing. Twilight is a time for affection and other curses to slip carelessly into human hearts. We had already seen the Woodsmen participate in a ceremony of re-corruption when they saved Mr. C.
I believe that what we witness in this scene is another facet of corruption, that of the character who populates this dream layer.12
I have come to consider Part 8 as a reboot of TVL that occurs in the brief moments following Mr. C opening his eyes after his resurrection.
Mr. C was only unconscious for a few minutes of dream time, but it was enough to reveal a truth about the higher cognitive functions of the dreamer’s psyche.
Countermeasures were executed that will guide the dreamer to the conclusion of this dream.
Sarah Palmer of TVL is the primary character hosting this seed of corruption that would greet Mr. C at the door of the Palmer home. She waits for him, or rather, what’s inside her waits for Mr. C and the payload of BOB that he would carry with him to the door.
Mr. C works desperately to find the coordinates of her nest. Finally, he is coming, and she is ready to receive him.
As in our lives, often, our planning is followed by laughter from beyond the void.
CREDITS8
Part 8: Scene 6
(0:56:43-0:58:18) Local (7:41:35-7:43:10) Global Time
1m35s
Do you have a friend or loved one who is hard to buy for and is a massive Twin Peaks fan? Consider gifting them a subscription to this newsletter. They, too, will be delivered 52 weeks of deep thinking about art and our place as human beings trying to do the right thing in a world that feels like it’s running off the rails.
Music
1. “She’s Gone Away”: Written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: Performed by Nine Inch Nails
2. “My Prayer”: Written by Georges Boulanger and Jimmy Kennedy: Performed by The Platters
3. “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”: Written by Krzysztof Penderecki: Performed by Warsaw National Philharmonic
4. “Slow 30’s Room”: Written and Performed by David Lynch and Dean Hurley
What would have happened if Ray had stayed, staring at Mr. C’s corpse being held up to face him by the Woodsmen? Would BOB have transferred to Ray?
This makes me laugh every time.
This is significant and worth a more profound exchange of ideas and perspectives. Lynch’s direction in the Behind The Parts for Part 8 on the Z to A set is that the bullets ricochet off Mr. C’s gun, which saves his life. It’s also interesting to note that after Mr. C falls to the ground, the camera zigzags up to him like it follows a pattern on the Red Room floor.
Consider what Mark Frost said in a podcast conversation with Sam Esmail:
“The idea [for Part 8] came out of the feeling that the larger issues of what was going on in this world that we’d created needed something like an origin story. It needed, not explanation, but illumination. We had to go back to the scene of the crime, the original scene of the crime, that had, perhaps, engendered all that followed.” Talk house Podcast, “Episode 16,” Air Date: 11/16/2017
Note that final “Perhaps,” because it’s essential.
I consider the on-screen graphics denoting the time and place of this bomb to be the most deceptive element of TPTR.
Consider Mark Frost’s words from the Talkhouse Podcast interview with Sam Esmail:
“There are a lot of original sins if you look at American history, but the most modern and the most devastating is obviously the Atomic Bomb and the fact that we developed it and, knock wood, that we’re the only country that’s ever dropped one on other human beings and it felt like that might have been an entry point for something. And we’d been playing all along with this mythological notion of other dimensions and other realms, and our version of a realm of the gods or the demi-gods or a play of good and evil on another plane, that this felt like the organizing incident and so it was very carefully scripted.” Talk house Podcast, “Episode 16,” Air Date: 11/16/2017
The collapse of this dream narrative happens in the last seconds of Part 18 of TPTR until only the echo of a scream remains.
For historical reference, consider the corruption of the civil service that took place early during World War II in Poland. These “Ordinary Men” rounded up and murdered 2 million of their own citizens, men, women, and children.
Those civil servants became detrimental to the state’s security and its citizens. The Woodsmen in TPTR represent this corruption but apply to dream a reality.
The corruption of the Woodsmen, along with the deterioration of the function of memory (represented by the Phillip Jeffries machine), empowers Mr. C to run TVL like the warden of a prison.
There were many eggs in that viscous fluid. How many of these hatched to crawl inside the projections in Cooper’s dream and his memories? Infecting and then corrupting these images outright (perhaps even imposing false memories of events like being raped inside Cooper’s memory of Audrey and the tulpa of Diane in TVL).
This is my own term for the Fireman’s Theater. It’s where images are constructed and projected onto a canvas of experience.
I highly recommend engaging with John Thorne’s work here around Laura as an avatar. He has rolled this out, dissected it, and processed the complexities into a simple experience that is emotionally rewarding. In addition, his arguments have impacted my thinking toward a more satisfying understanding of what is happening here with Laura in Part 8.
CLICK HERE to purchase John’s book Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns To Twin Peaks.
Is there a frog moth for each of these characters we’ve met? Is that what the little girl will vomit up in the car when Bobby Briggs encounters the strange woman honking her horn behind the vehicle that fired a gun into the diner?