Because, if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together.
The Smiths “Ask”
When the bad guy gets shot and dies, everything is set right in the storytelling genre of the crime procedural. For most of the history of serial drama, death has been the metric of narrative justice and the culmination of many plot outlines. However, in this dangerous dream layer of Twin Peaks The Return, the whole world blows up to reset itself when the bad guy gets shot. Cooper’s struggle for his soul intensifies while nearly everything in this demented dream layer-killing floor aligns against him.
Cooper’s dark half (Mr. C) has escaped from prison with a man who has valuable knowledge. Ray Monroe is a double agent and a hero, and he has committed to memory the location of coordinates that potentially serve as the exit of this dream. Mr. C very much needs (not wants) this information despite his earlier posturing before underlings.
The Palmer home is the last place Laura Palmer was safe during her life and the first place she was violated by the person she trusted most, while the person she trusted next most turned her head away from the horror. Sarah Palmer is guilty of a moral crime. Her character is put on trial in this dream and found guilty, sentenced to the consumption of misery that would ground most characters to ash, even in this dream. In the fiction of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer suffered tremendous trauma, and she died. There is no saving Laura Palmer or bringing her back in any timeline of this drama; save one. This one.
From the perspective of a murder investigation, it doesn’t matter if the victim had an angel watching over her in her dream. The case is solved. And yet... Dale Cooper cannot let it go. This obsession with understanding the evil that killed Laura Palmer and wondering how much she was complicit in her demise has mixed up victim and predator. Being unable to save a dead girl who suffered (and probably chose not to pass it on to the world) has driven the mind of Dale Cooper into madness.
Under the corrupting psychic invasion of a demonic force of evil that only knows power and suffering, Dale Cooper undergoes a psychotic breakdown, like Leland and Windom Earle before him. Twin Peaks The Return is a story about the corruption of a good soul and whether what is good inside us can only overcome what is worse when we let go of the controls and let Natural Law unfold before us in our life and through the love we briefly share.
There is hope in Twin Peaks The Return. Something that a strange lady did to the Purple Power station reversed a polarity unmeasured by the instruments on the roof as they floated in the void between layers of a dream. Leonard Cohen sang that a crack in everything is how the light gets in. That sewn-face lady made a small crack in this dream prison, rapidly becoming a pit of danger and death for our hero. Through that crack, we are the light that breaks into the narrative. The viewer’s passion, attention, and compassion will pour into this dream and help to guide Cooper through this dark maze of his soul’s underbelly.
As we enter Part 8, Cooper remains simple, pure, and lost in his dream, with almost no allies.
His new wife tolerates him with slow-growing affection.
His new boss is bewildered by how this simple man uncovered a crime ring involving his insurance agents, third-party inspectors, and the police.
Cooper has the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department convinced he was compromised after interacting with the forces of darkness in the Ghostwood Forest.
Cooper has the Blue Rose Task Force, who think they’ve found him but are still chasing a shadow in a maze Mr. C has concocted.
Philip Gerard works overtime from the Red Room, trying to wake Cooper from one layer of dreaming that’s a death sentence to return to another that’s an endless trap.
The Fireman waits in his mansion of Cooper’s Frontal Cortex for the signal, prepared to do what must be done to save his Dreamer’s soul.
But in the Amygdala of a dark motel, incredible malfeasance gathers into clouds of storm. Something dark is coming.
When all these investigations converge, will a truth be revealed that solves this mystery? Probably not. Simple answers aren’t the ones we carry like the stone in our shoe that has become comfortable pain over time, duller and more digestible.
We viewers are the expression and experience of Cooper’s frustration. Why can’t he wake up and invoke his agency to control this madness and escape all this damn dreaming? Cooper’s final weapon is we, the viewers. We are part of this story. The affection we’ve built for these characters over all these years is a powerful psychic energy. We pour these warm feelings into our viewing of The Return, and the narrative is impacted strangely by our attention. When you feel it and then see it, you’ll know.
Cooper, as Laura’s angel, fit too perfectly. It was a sappy, romantic ending, like classic Hollywood. It meant too much to be authentic. Romantic endings will never be enough to explain away incest and murder in fiction or life. Can we ever fully understand a situation that we watch with our eyes and hear with our ears but is not aligned with what we feel in our hearts?
Something is wrong in the town of Twin Peaks, manifested through this dream lens. Overall, this experience doesn’t feel good. But there are moments of potential here, launch pads towards transcendence, which, in its most basic definition, means to rise above. If your mind had to create a dream metaphor to explain that a parasite of evil has invaded your psyche, what form would it choose? Giant marshmallow man? A big guy in a black mask and cape with a laser sword and wires everywhere? No, those metaphors belong to other mythologies. In Twin Peaks The Return, a nuclear bomb is a perfect image to convey this painful truth of moral and spiritual corruption. When the bad guy gets shot in The Return, this dream resets, and a truth is revealed through a fevered rush of metaphors that begin with a mushroom cloud explosion and end with a repeated poem we can never un-hear.
It will take small miracles to free Dale Cooper from the prison of his mind. So far, he has dodged each killing blow with the grace of a man walking an inch above a minefield while blinded by sunlight. Yet, damaged and lost inside his dream, he is constantly threatened by ejection and non-existence. Like Cooper in this weird nightmare, corruption is the most significant threat we face as human beings, far greater than the death we are each promised at birth. Soul corruption is measured by the tics of those we hurt when our behaviors are powered by greed, fear, and stupidity. Yet, when we let go and allow natural impulses to guide us to that which brings joy and warmth into our lives, it’s a magic trick we pull on ourselves. Tada! This is happiness in motion!
Watching Twin Peaks The Return with deep scrutiny is like sitting in a pew and listening to a father’s story about taking his son to the killing stone on the mountaintop. Some moral crimes cannot be atoned. Over seven hours of drama, we’ve experienced a man enmeshed in his shortcomings become an outcast from his higher reasoning and the better angels of his nature. Yet, as the love pours from each viewer into Dale Cooper’s Dream, we call on him to wake with love and hope, to stand for justice, loyalty, and friendship. Despite his faults, we manifest him to be better, and I believe we’ll get there together with Cooper. But first, we must survive this bomb in Part 8. Pay attention. Be here now. Here we go...
Share this post