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

o-t-motherfucking-m

when lucy said "we haven't seen agent cooper since before wally was born!"

said to myself, "this is the key that unlocks the mystery"

Laura’s subsequent life appears to have been better than her childhood, judging by what little we learn of her, but there is still a dead body in her living room when Cooper shows up.

hmmmm

the dead body is the average Twin Peaks viewer imo

seems about right, he did have his mind blown.

According to the Twin Peaks wiki, the Double R is at the corner of Main and Falls in Twin Peaks.

In Ep 18, as Cooper turns the corner at the Double R, you very clearly see a street sign for Bendigo Boulevard, the street the real Twede's Cafe is on in North Bend, WA.

maybe he has that all inside out. I like the ideas that the final part of 18 isn't some invented world, but the real world, as discussed many times in this thread.

I think our real world is a fake creation of Judy

Ok I bailed on the waggish piece at the point where it refused to acknowledge that the rape actually happened. Even before that it was weaving a convoluted thread that was barely skimming some of the more disturbing moral implications of the show.

tbf the show skimmed some of the more disturbing moral implications of the show (by making leland (and now sarah)) less responsible for their actions)

xp?

is there a second piece, because the one I read implicitly acknowledges the rape

Love that waggish take on the finale

I wouldn't read too much into the North Bend thing - when they had that scene with Mike and the creep, there was an establishing shot of his office that was the main street in North Bend.

Yeah I think it's enough to note that the RR diner looked different.

Also Ike the Spike's motel was obviously in LA, so it's not like there weren't simple continuity errors.

On the other hand one defining characteristic of this show is that everything is up for grabs...

remember that weird flash of the diner at the end of one of the early episodes, where it had a completely different set of people?

I keep seeing this strange idea about that part 17 offers the "happy", "closed" version of the season ending whereas part 18 undoes all that/starts a new story with a bleaker open ending. But the two episodes basically have the same ending! Bad vibes at the palmer house, Laura screams, Cooper is lost and confused, the world spins.

Diane and Cooper now reenact this summoning ritual in order to draw Judy into the Cage. They both know this is the plan; while they both care for and love each other, this act of sex is anything but an act of love. Both are joyless. Cooper is dispassionate throughout, but remains focused on Diane with an expression of restrained concern. Diane tries to be affectionate but collapses into terror and tears, covering Cooper’s face and staring up at the ceiling.

This is where I got off. I suppose that could be read as an implicit acknowledgment, if that's the part you mean. But it's too schematic for me, and tone deaf to what the actors are portraying.

Lynch is a fucking brilliant director of actors. The further an interpretation of his work gets from talking about what's hidden, diverted, revealed in their performances, the more it falls flat for me. That said there were some concepts I liked, like Laura being a kind of capacitator. But trying to tie it all together just on a plot or thematic level like that is more appropriate for a Christopher Nolan movie, where the performances basically don't matter.

this is the very next line...

None of this is unexpected to them. This was the plan all along. The suffering that Diane (and to a lesser extent Cooper) endures is a product of her having sex with the man who raped her. She knows it is going to be a traumatic experience: she sees her double outside of the motel because she is already dissociating at the prospect of having to sleep with Cooper, even though he’s not that Cooper. Cooper tells her to turn out the light in the hopes of sparing her some of the trauma, but it’s an empty gesture. He is guilt-ridden with the sins of his doppelganger.

lol ok thanks, my bad

That's such an incredible piece and that part is particularly affecting. I don't understand your objection, Sciatica.

oops

My general objection to the piece still applies but I don't feel like picking it apart.

after rewatching the last two episodes, 18 felt like the epilogue and something that would've read really well as part of a book.

Yeah it's totally an epilogue to me - it basically starts at the "curtain call"!

Despite all of the obvious caveats and my belief that nothing substantive is really going to be further resolved or explained, I can't help but be intensely curious about Frost's next book.

Simon, if you're still bouncing around itt, I've finally started listening to your podcast this week. You and your fellow contributors are great and are giving me a lot of new angles to chew over.

thanks!! we're taking a week off to mull over it all before we record the finale/wrap-up with our guest. if we can secure (redacted) and/or (redacted) to come on we might do another post-series retrospective thing.

xp It'll be as illuminating of the return's many mysteries as its predecessor was

(Also, I believe the intent is for it to cover the missing 25 years)

I'm curious about the Frost books because I'm feeling the withdrawal pains but I don't know... I tried one of his novels and it was kinda bad. And the comments on the Secret History upthread (and Lynch's distancing himself from it) make it sound like it won't really be what I want from Twin Peaks.

That said I can get into esoteric history stuff so I'm curious if anyone would recommend it just on that level.

I'm curious about it specifically because it's coming after the Return, and theoretically might explain...something?

tbh getting a bit weary from explanations (couldn't make it thru the piece above). Need probably a good 2 weeks to a month, and then just rewatch the thing and see what I think.

My hunch is that The Final Dossier will be something like Cole's recollection of the 'unofficial version' that Jeffries alluded to.

Simon you indicated way up thread you had some production dirt that you'd hold onto until the finale aired; what was it?

I have a feeling Leland/BOB was drugging Sarah all those years not to keep her in the dark about what was going on in the house but to keep Judy, the more powerful being, at bay, so that he could follow his own urges. Once he died Judy totally consumed her. Judy might have been both a "mother" and partner to BOB, which would add another disturbing layer of incest to things.

I watched fwwm just before the finale and it's pretty clear that Sarah knew something was going on. If not the depth of it, she knew and she didn't stop it.

Simon you indicated way up thread you had some production dirt that you'd hold onto until the finale aired; what was it?

lmao he's never gonna reveal this, well played Simon

YOU"RE NOT GOING TO TELL ME WHAT SHE FUCKING SAID?

Haha I saw a tweetpic that juxtaposed Audrey shouting "you're not gonna tell me what she said?!" with Laura whispering in dale's ear

I was gonna until wins gave me the idea not to just now xps

Simon has put that dirt in his pocket

lol

simon will you make the final podcast a long, detail-oriented discussion of mountaintop ecosystems?

Or replicate Jay Leno's post-Cheers finale show and just get a bunch of TP cast members hammered on-mic?

I went back to the waggish piece to try to give it a better read. I'm just not into longform pieces like that, there are too many unsupported interpretive leaps you have to just sit with while following along. Like when the author says

Cooper tells her to turn out the light in the hopes of sparing her some of the trauma, but it’s an empty gesture. He is guilt-ridden with the sins of his doppelganger.

Sure, that's a possible interpretation of that action. But it's not how I read MacLachlan's performance, which (as posters have pointed out above) is graded into Mr. C in an ambiguous way. And I find the implications of that a lot more interesting and conflicted and truer to how Dern plays in response. But then it just keeps going from there. Like the line I quoted above about Carrie Page being a less traumatized version of Laura, except for the dead body in the room. Slow down there buddy, maybe we should unpack that a little?

I like the message board format better for trying to work all this out, where we can argue with each other in real time.

That said, I think this is really good:

Why would the Fireman, portrayed as a positive figure, create (or at least target) such a martyr figure? Without knowing the exact mechanics, I suggest that Laura Palmer was meant to function as a capacitor: storing a huge accumulated charge of suffering which could then be discharged at the precise moment. Laura’s immense suffering does not make her superhuman, but it makes her uniquely capable of serving a purpose in the Trap. In the right setting, this discharge could overload the circuits of a Lodge entity and destroy it altogether. To use another apt analogy, it would be like an atomic bomb reaching critical mass. But with fissionable material as substantial as Judy, you would not want to detonate it in our universe, or else it would take most of our world with it.

It pushes against that blurring of roles through circumstance (Carrie sharing some with Shelly eg) and gets you thinking about why the distinctions that remain might be important.

So that aerial shot of the avenida 9 de Julio, was that stock footage or (what I prefer to believe) did they go to Buenos Aires to shoot a single establishing shot for that one scene of a black box in a plain room turning into a whatever

I disagree with about 1/3 of that piece but it's food for thought

That piece looks tldr but sciatica's post gets at my problem with a lot of readings, inc Adam's above which is a strong interpretation in many ways, which is that they seem to wilfully ignore the actual emotional texture of what we're shown

I don't think we'd get a sex scene where Dale Cooper seems like himself because Dale Cooper does not fuck

wilfully ignore the actual emotional texture of what we're shown

yeah I hate this mode of interpretation tbh. I generally work backward from what we're shown on-screen, and a big part of that is how the actors are handling a scene

like, what is emotionally going on between everyone involved, how is it being portrayed, what is the effect/mood being conveyed

I don't think we'd get a sex scene where Dale Cooper seems like himself because Dale Cooper does not fuck

otm, he's too pure