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

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

a cobra, rather

lol yeah maybe that's what "a guy" looks like in Texas but

I see what ur saying tho, obv the use of the real undressed locations and actual homeowners is meant to give this impression of it being more "real" than everything else but tbh I think it's a trap in the last half hr of mulholland dr and I think it's a trap here

Kinda feel like there's an argument to be made that any 'real-world' manifestation of a person who's entered a Lodge or Waiting Room is something like a tulpa. Or at least no longer the person they were before entering that liminal space.

Even Andy?

That's the cicada post I was thinking of too wins. I don't know what to make of the whole thing. The kind of specificity I'm looking for is probably irrelevant for extraterrestrial frog-cicada hybrids.

I see what ur saying tho, obv the use of the real undressed locations and actual homeowners is meant to give this impression of it being more "real" than everything else

on the real/dream thing, i'll share something that i mentioned while sitting by a firepit the other day, and which everyone looked at me like i was literally the stupidest person in north america for saying:

sometimes things can look so real that they look fake. in this case, it was the glowing embers in the firepit and the perfectly charred wood. it looked like stock image for "backyard firepit", or a fireplace in a box DVD, and it was freaky looking as a result. after spending enough time in a surreal state, reality is disarming.

anyway, i also felt that the final scenes felt more "real" than just about anything in the series, certainly 100000x more real than the twin peaks sheriff's dept. scene where BOB dies, for example, and as a result it felt dreamlike

And the dot approaching the crossroads of the 8/infinity symbol has to refer to time folding in on itself, or overlapping planes, or opportunities to switch between timelines, or something

cosign this

it was literal map of time.. like the dot went to a place and teapot bowie said "ahh here it is! here's the time you want to go to."

anyway, i also felt that the final scenes felt more "real" than just about anything in the series, certainly 100000x more real than the twin peaks sheriff's dept. scene where BOB dies, for example, and as a result it felt dreamlike

otm

I was halfway hoping the next iteration would be the infinity unfolding into a loop

imo the ending should have been Bill Pullman driving by in a semi truck while playing the sax

are there any scenes in lynch's output where they're driving at night, there's a shot of the headlights illuminating the road, and then something good or even neutral happens? all i can remember after driving at night are nightmares

actual homeowners

? aren't the Chalfonts and Tremonds actual people that have been referred to/shown in the TP "universe" before?

if you're referring to the woman who answers the door being the irl owner of that actual irl house, idk how we're supposed to know that from just watching the episode. seems a lil too extra-textual to me.

there's this from inland empire:

http://i.imgur.com/GtxhJh0.gif

xp

thanks above for the judy/naido input -- I'd read that, and it didn't seem right to me.

Haven't really taken time to unravel the finale in my head yet, tho I have a few intuitive takes (don't we all?) The map, taken from that weird joker symbol, seems pretty important -- I do think of it as some kind of map, as mentioned above, and if it does refer to an infinite loop through multiple dimensions/realities, it washes away most of the frustration I might have felt at the end. And I did, admittedly.

However, while I'm not picketing for a 4th season, it's hard to say I wouldn't love to see it now. With Cooper and the gang traversing an infinite loop, why would this story ever need to end?

similarly, why would it ever need to begin again

xp yeah I was responding to chaki's post about the real north bend being foregrounded. It obv won't be picked up by everyone but you can def view it alongside the other choices made to present this part in a more naturalistic style

Like I said tho it kinda has the opposite effect

xpost In order for Lynch to deliver an even more brutal dose of reality which completely undermines the viewer's desire for pat nostalgia?

Like the final episode of season 4 is just an extended montage of various characters' dying moments. Kinda like Six Feet Under but more focused on the visceral brutality of dying.

the last section, after Cooper and Diane drove through to the other side, felt a lot like the second section of Lost Highway