Drink full: The TWIN PEAKS 2017 spoiler thread, part 2

how did it put it, about Jeffries not really being a person?

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 10:50 AM (twenty-nine seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in a traditional sense (i'm paraphrasing)

also the reverse shot, in the theater/lodge room, where you could see an entire room of what looked like power transformers or something in the background -- were they actually machines like Jeffries? was it a bunch of people who had become some sort of spirit battery things?

I'm thinking no, because Jeffries was more of a percolator

also, I said this upthread, but I take solace in the unambiguous happy ending for Dougie, Janey-E, and Sonny Jim. Cooper not only saved their lives, he improved them.

the flipside of this is that maybe cooper BROUGHT evil to the nu-palmer household in the final scene

angels flank the golden Laura orb in part 8. xp

I just rewatched the scene and this is not true.

It's a sad story - it's twin peaks - and Dale Cooper's tragedy is that he doesn't understand that he doesn't to make it anything else. The ending of fire walk with me is always in play, though: that rapturous, radical ending that could only be achieved by ignoring dolt coop's "don't take the ring, Laura". His stunt in part 17, trying yet again to prevent her death (but notably not the years of trauma that preceded it), is a whole other level of "you don't fucking get it, do you?" The ending is a kind of "happy" one for Laura because it's a return to the status quo of fwwm, i.e. Laura owns her story (which, yes, involves screaming). Remember that Laura, the whisperer, is the one who holds all the knowledge that coop can't grasp, and she kisses him and smiles before whispering into his ear.

Obviously it isn't a happy ending for Dale but I don't think it's necessarily that bleak; Dale is lost but lynch has only given him, oh I dunno INFINITY chances to get it right. How long was Philip Jeffries bumbling between dimensions/times/stories/dreams, screaming and babbling like an idiot, before he stopped existing and learned to chill the fuck out? I think Cooper will eventually make his way home to join Laura and the angels.

xxp karl - good point. ha, actually Cooper & Laura fucked up the reality of that family & that Twin Peaks. but the lack of the electricity sound over the final "FROST/LYNCH" card is important - it overloaded, it was too much, and now it's gone.

He doesn't *get* to xp to me

The strongest argument for a non-teleological reading of The Return btw is that the open-endedness means I can never end my Showtime subscription.

So to circle back to the glass box, was it made more or less clear that Mr. C was the funder of that whole thing? At this point I don't even remember.

how fucking cool was it to hear "fire, walk with me" from MIKE

god, I need to rewatch

"the open-endedness means I can never end my Showtime subscription"

oh, I did this yesterday. torrenting the series for rewatches for now.

Through the darkness of future's past,
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds...
"Fire... walk with me."

how fucking cool was it to hear "fire, walk with me" from MIKE

I'm glad al strobel got to speak forward in this

New revelations for me: Jack Nance is the star of Eraserhead! Mark Frost written Hill Street Blues and two Fantastic Four films!

he should get an award for his delivery of the fwwm lines imo

for a variety of reasons, I found the finale, especially the final sequence in the alternate reality (or whatever we're calling it) to be almost unbearably sad. Poor Cooper (and Laura).

This is where I'm still at two days later. Still weighed down by that abyssal sadness.

The first thing that happened at work this morning was me and the two other major twin peaks fans in the office had breakfast and talked about the finale. When I started talking about that slow motion end credits sequence I felt myself almost tearing up.

He's a fucking great actor, such presence xp

I don't want to do the thing where every beautiful, magical piece of this series is a literal reference

but the little voice in the back of my head is mumbling "Cooper... is the magician"

he should get an award for his delivery of the fwwm lines imo

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 11:07 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

total chills

the future's past!

or is it "futures past"

wins is suuuuuper-OTM re: Coop's cluelessness in attempting to 'save' Laura at the very point in time where she's been ground all the way down and is ready and willing to sacrifice herself in order to resist BOB's influence. Thwarting that moment of self-sacrifice seems not only beside the point but almost thoughtlessly cruel. It robs her of her most powerful expression of agency through the course of that horror, and it probably wouldn't have done much more than hinder BOB's activities. There's always another Teresa/Laura/Ronette/Maddy around the corner.

Yeah bad coop has this absurdly complicated master plan spanning years and involving umpteen failsafes, umpteen accomplices, and early in part 17 it's shown once and for all how futile and point-missing his whole quest was.

Also early in part 17 we find out that good coop has had this absurdly complicated master plan all along, involving &c &c!

Should be obvious how that's gonna go and the story of Richard (a kind of synthesis of the two coops) confirms it

The narrow somewhat solipsistic drive to "save" the victim by solving their crime is very true to cop psychology in true crime and crime fiction, maybe in real life too.

the saddest thing to me is that Cooper explicitly chooses his fate (Diane asking him "are you sure you want to go through with this?")

Great posts wins

Sorry if this is obvious to everybody else, but what was Dark Cooper after? I never really had a clear sense of what his end game was supposed to be, beyond chasing coordinates

annihilating everyone and everything that good Cooper loved?

Main takeaway from today's breakfast discussion that I wanted to post here: the part of the giant-coop conversation at the very beginning of The Return where he tells him (warns him) to 'remember' Richard and Linda, 430, 2 birds with one stone -- that exchange could be the last thing chronologically in the whole show. Cooper patently does not remember Richard and Linda when he reads the motel note - they take care to have him mutter 'Richard and Linda?' - but the giant could be cautioning him, 'afterward', against repeating the folly we see him commit throughout episode 18.

Great point about the surge, Karl

I've never read Pope, much less quote him, but came across this today and it stuck out:

Like following life through creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect

He was looking for "Judy" I think - he said to darya "this is what I want before showing her the symbol xps

one loose end that I keep turning over - Audrey + her husband/the Arm and "the story of the little girl that lived down the lane". That phrase appearing in both scenarios seemed very deliberate, but I'm not really sure what it means. Is Audrey in some sort of reality loop of her own? who knows

xpost
that's a good point, the double meaning of "remember". it could also be an indication that he has been richard before, in one of the earlier loops, depending on how seriously you take the idea of the infinity/8 symbol.

Ok cicada fans here's what I've got: the most-studied NM genus is Okanagana, though the lifecycle is still unknown. The most-studied is Magicada, which is in the northeastern US, and varying species have 13 or 17 year cycles. There are other genera with 2 to 9 year cycles but I can't find one with an 11 year cycle specifically.

Considering Lynch's love of biology I don't think this is *entirely* pointless.

I'm more and more convinced Lynch and Frost's idea behind The Return, the one that compelled Lynch to revisit Twin Peaks after publicly declaring it dead for so long, was to present an allegory about the danger and sadness of ruining a beautiful mystery, with Laura Palmer being the personification of that mystery ("The One"). Mr. C represents the meddling network execs who turned Lynch against his own creation in season 2. He says he cares about only one thing: information, represented by Judy. He is enraged when Jeffries, who like Lynch doesn't want to talk about Judy, won't directly give him that information.

David Lynch is the dreamer, Laura is the mystery he created, and "Judy" is the answer to the mystery that destroys the dream. Cooper and Jeffries want to overcome Judy and protect the mystery, but once Judy has entered the world, their efforts are futile, and they are driven gradually torn apart.

It also reflects on Lynch's role as an artist attempting to overcome not only these meddling forces trying to stifle his creativity, but the threat of nuclear annihilation and other horrors he grew up under. The Fireman witnesses humanity create the atomic bomb and sow the seeds of its own destruction. What else is there for him to do but try to create something beautiful like the mystery of Laura Palmer, send it out into the world, and hope for the best.

the other possible meaning is "Remember: 'Richard and Linda'" which was a cue for Cooper to not lose himself in the simulacrum world -- it's a key phrase so that he knows when he hears those names, not to fall for it. he's still Cooper, not Richard

I guess the thing that frustrates me is that I never got the sense from Cooper in the original series that he felt a need to prevent Laura's death. He certainly wanted to understand her, but he talked to plenty of people who had at least some understanding of Laura's decision to accept death. His decision to enter the Lodge in the S2 finale was in order to save Annie/defeat Earle/confront evil (though I'm aware that Lynch never wanted the Laura mystery solved). And now he's either somehow become obsessed with saving a girl who already saved herself in some way, or he's attempting to follow the instructions of the Lodge denizens, which are so vague that it's unclear whether he's misinterpreting them or they don't really know what they're doing either.

After watching it I was thinking about the Fireman as a barely more effectual Angel of History, watching the calamities pile up as his attempts to fix things inevitably go wrong.

Well he has a dual aim, to "kill two birds with one stone", so it isn't just Laura but Judy he's interested in/obsessed with. That tracks with the "confront evil" portion of his original entry to the lodge, more or less.

Solving a crime is in fictional (maybe real) cop psychology a kind of frustrated or deferred form of prevention.

Sorry I checked back and it wasn't mh who said the cicada thing

It feels difficult atm to talk about what Cooper's aim might've been re: Laura, given that we only got to see an hour or so of old school Cooper in action. Was he doing it at Leland's behest? By preventing the murder, was he trying to eliminate the inherent ambiguity in being unable to definitively identify her killer or bring that killer to justice?

I said something about cicadas! I swear.

xpost He just seemed to be on a prescribed track at that point, as if he were being pulled by magnets into an inevitable and inescapable loop.

It's not a bug-frog or a locust-frog or a moth-frog. Those are cicada wings. And the calendar ticked off 11 years to tell you it waited 11 years to emerge, just like ... a cicada.
I thought this episode was great, then exceptional, then it ripped my head off.

― attention vampire (MatthewK), Monday, 26 June 2017 13:49 (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the post i was thinking of

I think

In hindsight, there's something about Cooper's oft-demonstrated intuition/precognition that seems less like the high-level work of a savant and more like someone trapped on a fatalistic continuum and identifying signposts he's already passed. The leap of logic in discovering that Laura was the second waitress at Judy's Diner was so relatively muted and joyless compared to similar demonstrations in the original series. Less 'eureka!' and more rotely checking off a to-do list.

The leap of logic in discovering that Laura was the second waitress at Judy's Diner was so relatively muted and joyless compared to similar demonstrations in the original series. Less 'eureka!' and more rotely checking off a to-do list.

it's implied that jerfferies uploaded him some info when he said "here is where you'll find judy"

some stream of consciousness stuff going on in my head:

usually characters breaking into the "real" world is handled in such a cheesy way, but i'm convinced that's what happened at the end of 18 (even if the "real" world is laura's dream). this is cemented by the facts that:
- coop is no longer a cartoonish bad guy or superman all american hero good guy. he's just "a guy."
- when they drive into twin peaks.... it's not twin peaks. it's north bend, wa. the double r is twede's cafe on north bend road. the palmer house is owned by the actual irl owner, etc.
- of course none of this is black and white. it's laura's dream. we live in a dream. we are the dreamers. it's all a recursion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

I don't think he saw what he was experiencing as real! He's on this quest in a bizarre world that looks like ours, but seems to have different rules. His disarming of the men at the diner seemed very un-Cooper-like, but think about how you react to things and act in a dream.

chaki otm

well, he did move like a python