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

I am going back and forth between whether or not Sarah is Judy or the bug-spawn of Judy, or if Judy somehow transmitted its essence into the world through that bug-hatching egg, which found its way to Sarah.

I'm pretty sure Leland drugging Sarah all those years was keeping whatever was in her at bay so that he could follow his urges freely. After his death it eventually consumed her and yearned to be reunited with BOB and Laura, the "family" unit.

great, v otm post Οὖτις

I was frustrated by the ending, but I recognized even in the moment that it was a frustration born of certain expectations which weren't necessarily realistic or even hinted at. It was the frustration of a Twin Peaks fan. But knowing now which elements of the original series are addressed and which are left unresolved, I look forward to rewatching it more as a Lynch fan.

The other thing that's bugging me is the Laura orb from midseason. So Mr. C accesses the theater room via the vortex in the woods, and he appears as an orb in the room with Briggs, and the machinery spits him out where he's supposed to be: in front of the sheriff's station.

It looked like Laura's orb wasn't her being transported through, but created. So was this actually the future/past where Cooper took her away the night she was supposed to be murdered? She didn't get sucked through a vortex, but disappeared, then was recreated to be put into the alternate world?

I mean, I don't think that any of this is completely clear or meant to be, but it's sure fun to spitball

Superimposed Cooper face --> Cooper is the new Laura Palmer

I agree with NA about Sarah btw, I feel like as soon as Sarah committed that act of supernatural violence a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that the experiment was her/in her (I feel like the main reason for this is everyone assuming the experiment is the "mother" the American girl refers to and making an easy leap to Sarah from there) but it doesn't feel right with what we know about that entity.

The experiment/Judy/that one under the moon that you don't ever want to know about (who both coopers are haplessly looking for, it turns out), although she *appears* to disappear from the narrative altogether, seems to me to be going through various developmental stages over the course of the narrative: from basic monster in 1, to atomic mother of abominations in 8, to... a bad bad vibe by the end. I don't think she's Laura's mom.

Re: my interpretation above, it's entirely possible that 'Dale Cooper' and 'Laura Palmer' are simply White Lodge entities that manifest over and over in our world in order to counter mundane Black Lodge forces.

Judy is the most powerful force because it awakens the dreamer. "Judy" is the Answer to all mysteries (the "A" on Mr. C's playing card). The thing that consumes the characters who seek it. The most harmful force in the world David Lynch dreams.

The thing that Hawk knows "you don't ever want to know about."

Mr. C not knowing who Judy is was some serious "this guy doesn't even understand the game he's playing" shit

'Well, maybe if you'd pronounced my mom's name correctly I'd have known who you were talking about, Phillip.'

Mr. C not knowing who Judy is was some serious "this guy doesn't even understand the game he's playing" shit

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 9:51 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i think that's the whole point of booper. he's so scary and determined in the first few episodes but he's as clueless as anyone

I've been pondering what would happen if someone who wasn't a black lodge doppleganger (or the son of a doppleganger) would have stepped on to that rock where Richard died. Maybe the same thing? Maybe nothing at all?

still guilty lols at "goodbye, my son"

Superimposed Cooper face --> Cooper is the new Laura Palmer

― mh, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 12:44 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

holy shit, yes. fuck

Was it mentioned in the original series that Leland and Sarah were high school sweethearts or am I making that up? It's mentioned by Harry Truman that the Palmers have been in TP for generations so if it were true that couldn't be Sarah in NM, though the age of the young girl squares with Grace Z's age and presumably with Sarah Palmer's as well. I agree Judy isn't literally inside Sarah Palmer, I'm just trying to work through the connection between my favorite sequence in The Return and the story as a whole.

We see the Mother vomit a bunch of eggs so at least right now I don't think we're meant to connect the characters in NM directly to TP, I think it's supposed to be illustrative of something that's now happening all over the globe in the wake of the nuclear detonation, that's also somehow connected to sex (the young girl's first kiss etc). But then I don't understand why the scene is set up with such a specific reference to the year.

Useful thread from a film programmer & TP superfan. They screened the finale as it aired in a big theater here, and I'm so glad I didn't go. Shakey, I had the same reaction- it is a darker & more nihilistic ending than I could have ever imagined. Cooper is stuck in a loop ( 8 = infinity) trying to save Laura Palmer forever. He failed. 'Poor Coop & Laura' was what I felt. I knew as soon as Cooper & Diane got to the motel that this finale was going to piss off a lot of people. When the final credits rolled, I was laughing to myself, & felt a vicarious anxiety, just imagining the reaction in that huge theater.

Reminder that back in 2001 many saw Mullholland Dr.'s ending as gibberish. Mix of cheers, jeers, claps, derisive laughs at my TIFF screening

— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) September 5, 2017

I think it was mh who pointed out that the date is just an illustration of the gestation period, which is that of a cicada xp

I thought cicadas bred in 13 and 17 year cycles? (a very quick google seems to confirm this)

Yeah shakey's reaction is almost exactly mine but without the "were people really pissed off?" q at the start

xp take it up with whoever said that

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6y5dpt/s3e18_cooper_saves_the_day_once_and_for_all/

Someone on reddit has a happy ending theory.

When someone is possessed by Satan, nobody takes that to mean that Satan is entirely contained and represented by that person. Satan's still in hell, sitting on his throne, and also in the person, possessing them.

xp aldo - i like that analysis. i think there's definitely something to the lack of electricity sounds over the final "FROST/LYNCH" title card - Judy has been defeated. but we don't know if Cooper & Laura will ever escape from the 4th layer of alternate reality hell that they've sunk into. Things can't just pop nicely back into place.

At least one 'happy' aspect of the ending is that Coop was able to undo the actions of his doppelganger. In a way, wrapping the narrative in a tidy bow would've resulted in a much darker ending for him inasmuch as he'd be forced to reckon with the awful things done by some shadow aspect of himself over the course of twenty-five years.

I wonder if Lynch regrets the angel imagery in FWWM, since it doesn't reappear at all in TR iirc and maybe encourages a conventional quasi-Christian teleological interpretation that seems pretty far removed from his late work.

I was almost worried that it'd be literally him trying to put the genie back in the bottle when he checked into the motel, that he'd somehow traveled back to the time before the atomic bomb explosion, to try to keep Judy from gaining access to our world.

I thought he'd gone to the 1950s to keep the locust frog from getting into Sarah.

angels flank the golden Laura orb in part 8. xp

Until the morning-after goodbye note, anyway. xp to self

The same angel is in Andy's vision when he meets the Fireman.

I was similarly worried that that was where it was going (another futile attempt to undo the past, just as he'd just done in the forest in TP with Laura) but then it became clear they'd gone into some alternate reality with the hotel/doppelDiane, inexplicable bummer sex scene, "Richard and Linda" etc.

xp

the electricity finally goes out in the Palmer house.

yeah i think i said upthread that this seems fundamentally..."good," if not happy exactly

like how can you be possessed by an evil ceiling fan if your electricity's kaputt

yes. if nothing else, Cooper sacrificed himself in a noble effort to prevent the evil that killed Laura from ever manifesting again. "Electricity" - it's all gone at the end. but the credits roll over that terrifying closeup of Laura whispering into Cooper's ear - he looks horrified, and I imagine she's telling him about being stuck in a loop, trapped forever in an infinity of madness - this mitigates the very clear imagery & sound of the ending where we see all Electricity eliminated.

haha, i don't know, the electricity shorting out and laura palmer screaming her guts out doesn't seem like a happy ending to me

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.

haha, i don't know, the electricity shorting out and laura palmer screaming her guts out doesn't seem like a happy ending to me

― Karl Malone, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 1:47 PM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the electricity going out surely indicates a defeat of Judy though right? yes, Cooper & Laura are trapped, probably forever - but that elimination of electricity indicates they succeeded, if not for themselves, for others.

pleasantly surprised by Gordon providing a little exposition, finally dropping that he knows what Judy is, and that he somehow knows about Jeffries' fate

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

xposts

also, remember that the electricity "going out" can also mean a surge of electricity, too much electricity. my first reaction when i saw it was to think that evil had come to this hitherto normal household.

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