Chapter 5: Welcome Back To A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks
005 - A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks, 2nd Edition
After 17 years of work, James Joyce published his final novel, Finnegan’s Wake, in 1939. The famed mythologist Joseph Campbell fell under the spell of this book. In 1944, he wrote the essential guide to understanding the deep complexities and nuances of Joyce’s nearly impenetrable masterpiece.
A Skeleton Key To Finnegan’s Wake helped many serious readers navigate Joyce’s intricate prose, which was intended to recreate the experience of sleep and dream.
Campbell’s book inspired the one you are now reading. I wrote the First Edition of A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks to frame my experience of watching Twin Peaks The Return with the hope that my book will help serious viewers navigate the intricacies of this powerful, long, segmented film that likewise recreates the experience of sleep and dream.
I will explore with you, scene by scene, how Twin Peaks: The Return tells the story of Dale Cooper's return from a dream within a dream.
Everything that follows is my opinion, and I respect yours.
The Dale Cooper we know and love is being attacked through a coordinated, deadly plan put together by his shadow self, now in league with a demonic force of extreme negativity that invaded Cooper’s soul at the very end of Season 2 of Twin Peaks. Cooper is caught in a triple-layer mind melt, trapped in a seemingly endless nightmare maze about to turn vicious.
For twenty-five years of dream time, Laura Palmer has been begging Dale Cooper to save her as they repeat the beginning of a Hero’s Journey that never quite starts. Cooper believes he is a modern-day chivalrous knight who will fight every dragon to save the nearest princess in peril. Unfortunately, this sense of noble duty is a honeypot of deception, a test that draws Cooper in and presents him with a challenge to save himself or save the dead girl. Unfortunately, he failed this test and has been stuck inside the Red Room dream layer while his doppelgänger partnered with the demonic entity known only as BOB. Cooper’s dark side (Mr. C) and BOB work on gerrymandering the dreamer’s reality by damaging memories and suppressing Cooper’s moral frame of reference in order to distance Coop from the friendships that made him strong in the main story narrative of Seasons 1 and 2 of Twin Peaks. I don’t think we ever see the narrative world of Seasons 1 and 2 in Twin Peaks The Return. Instead, we begin where we last left Cooper, inside the primary layer of his dream, the Red Room.
From the primary “Red Room Dream Layer,” a slow, looping process cycles over and over until a trap that Cooper springs on himself from the future (or is it past) of a sub-narrative in this multi-layered dream that I will refer to here as “The Version Layer.” For Cooper’s doppelgänger to take over the waking reality after the dream ends, these dark creatures who have invaded Cooper’s psyche must suppress the presence and influence of Cooper’s moral center, represented in this tale by a golden sphere representing that which makes a person capable of doing good in the world. In order for Cooper’s shadow self (like Leland, aligned with the creature BOB) must exit the dream and that location and process is a mystery to everyone involved. In order for the dark plan to work, the golden seed of Cooper’s core of moral goodness must be cast into non-existence.
In The Version Layer of this dream-turned-nightmare, Cooper will face ten deadly trials and have the slimmest hope to exit this dream with his soul intact. Everything is set against Dale Cooper succeeding, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Will Cooper’s fading but still warm memories of friendships invoke the better angels of his nature to come to his aid when he needs it most inside this dream and its game of “Call For Help?” And what are these angels. The answer may surprise you. Let’s find out. Put this key in the lock, and let’s walk between worlds together at least once more.
