Part 6 certainly gives the audience a lot to think about. Stewart Gardiner continues to delight in both the questions and answers of Twin Peaks.
By Stewart Gardiner // My notes for Twin Peaks: The Return part 6 contain more than words. I have roughly sketched out ladders and steps, drawn lines and scribbles. There are numbers in a sequence (3, 2, 4, 8, 10). A larger 6 sits next to them. Then there’s a rectangle with a single dot near the top of it. This is not something I usually indulge in. Words normally suffice for me. But I have not succumbed to madness. Nope. How do I know this? Well, I didn’t write any of it on the walls. Is that a good enough answer? I’m not sure.
The FBI Story
I’ve suggested these past couple of weeks that the Cooper-as-Dougie storyline is a sort of back to front version of Cooper’s origin story. It’s like an alt-reality take on The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, except it exists out of time and yet within the core Twin Peaks narrative. I wasn’t the only one to notice the description of a dead man in Cooper’s Autobiography that exactly matched that of Dougie. I had an enlightening conversation about it with Lindsay Stamhuis, one of the solid gold folks behind the Bickering Peaks podcast. We exchanged mutual assurances of sanity. Lindsay was going to go off and investigate the Autobiography for further connections. I look forward to her findings.
David Lynch pulls the audience further down the rabbit hole with part 6. He’s not dragging the audience against its will. He’s letting the audience linger, really see what’s down here. Like the opening sequence of Blue Velvet or his Fish Kit and Chicken Kit artworks, Lynch is cutting into what lies beyond the surface. Part 6 is beautifully and disturbingly done.
Not Columbo’s Wife
With a certain reveal in part 6 in mind, it is entirely appropriate to once again quote from the Autobiography:
“Diane, I’ve never asked you this before, and as a general rule I try never to mix my private and public life, but I would consider it a great honor if you would consider having dinner with me. If this in any way crosses over a line that we have long ago set for our relationship, I will understand. If not, how does eight o’clock sound?”
Now, I could get into questions of canonicity between the television show and Fire Walk With Me on one hand, and the books on the other. You could quite accurately say Mark Frost’s Secret History of Twin Peaks is more canonical than The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which in turn is more so than the Autobiography. But to be honest, I think it would be a reductive exercise. There exist connections to these works and they are worthy of study in their own right.
Duck and Cover
Cooper not only asks Diane out for dinner, but there is a quote from Diane herself. She describes the food rather than offer insights into Cooper’s character:
“We had wonton soup, egg rolls, and Peking duck. That’s the one where they inflate the bird with air, swelling it to over double its original size. Without a doubt the most delicious skin I’ve ever eaten, firm and at the same time delicate.”
You can see why Diane and Cooper would get on like a house on fire!
Some have questioned over the years whether Diane was a real person or simply a means for Cooper to frame his own musings by personalizing them. But it always seemed genuine and one of the cut scenes from Fire Walk With Me has Cooper talking to Diane from outside her office. The audience does not, of course, see her. But with part 6 of The Return that has all changed.
Cursing in the Rain
Gordon Cole previously told Albert that they needed “one certain person to take a look at Cooper.” The story picks up with Albert out on a night that it is chucking down cats and dogs. “Fuck Gene Kelly, you motherfucker!” he shouts to the heavens. Albert is nothing if not colorful in his use of language.
FBI forensics genius walks into a bar called Max Von’s. There is a woman sitting at the bar, with her back to us. Albert says one word – a name – and it is the most glorious thing! “Diane,” he says. And like that she is alive on screen! Diane turns around, cigarette in hand and simply says “Hello Albert.” As played by the magnificent Laura Dern, Diane is already the coolest.
I wrote an article on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks that in part suggested that Blue Velvet was Cooper’s dream of what led him to become a detective. In which case, Laura Dern’s Sandy is his dream of Diane. Or the whole thing is Diane’s dream…
Back to Cooper and his Autobiography for a moment:
“It occurred to me last night while in the middle of a very fine duck that I do not know Diane’s last name.”
Thanks to the end credit titles of part 6 the audience now knows the answer: Evans. Hello Diane Evans, it’s wonderful to finally meet you.
Tough Dame
Naomi Watts is another incredible actress who has worked with David Lynch before. Her star-making turn(s) in Mulholland Drive is endlessly fascinating. She embodies that picture’s multi-faceted tones, surfaces and depths. Watts’s Janey-E in Twin Peaks: The Return really comes into her own in part 6. Dougie’s condition obviously frustrates her. But it doesn’t prevent her from taking action.
Someone has left a blank envelope on their doorstep (shades of the videotape in Lost Highway). It contains a photo of Dougie and the prostitute Jade.
“Do you have an explanation for this?” asks Janey-E.
“Jade,” replies Cooper/Dougie.
“Jade? So that’s her name is it?”
“Jade give two rides.”
“I’ll bet she did.”
It’s the voice of never giving up, even when things turn to shit. “What a mess you’ve made of our lives Dougie,” she tells him, not without some compassion.
Dougie owes $52K in gambling debts, but Janey-E decides to pay off what he borrowed ($20K) plus a very generous 25% interest. She sets up a meeting with two goons (one of which is Jeremy Davies, who played fan favorite Daniel Faraday on LOST) and basically shows them who’s boss. Hint: it is most definitely her. “We are living in a dark, dark age and you [gesturing at the two goons] are part of the problem.” They just take it. “Tough dame,” says Davies. “Tough,” agrees his colleague.
Don’t Die
Security guards from outside his office building bring Cooper home. “He’s got this thing for my badge,” says one of them, not unkindly. Cooper traces over the number 7 on the cover of one of his files. His company is called Lucky 7 Insurance. The actions cuts to one of the most iconic images of Twin Peaks: suspended traffic lights. A red light and a harsh crackle of electricity. The electric crackle recalls when Cooper traveled from the Purple Room through spark plugs back into this world. The “Blue Frank” track from the Pink Room sequence of Fire Walk With Me also employs a similar crackle just underneath the skin of the music.
Lynch discusses the suspended traffic lights of Twin Peaks in Lynch on Lynch:
“So when you see this red light, or a light turning to red, and it’s moving, it gives you a feeling. And then it becomes like the fan in the hall outside Laura’s room. It makes you wonder. And it gives you the willies!”
The red light here brings on Mike in the Red Room, who appears to Cooper rather like Eraserhead’s Lady in the Radiator appears to Henry. That is, in his room. Space and scale no longer have meaning.
Mike reaches out, as if attempting to pierce the membrane between two worlds, so that he can communicate with Cooper:
“You have… to… wake up. Wake up. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.”
He reaches out, but as reversed it could almost be pushing Cooper away, willing him to come to his senses. Mike can warn him, but cannot help. He can chant out without being able to do anything definitive for Cooper.
You’ve Certainly Given Me a Lot to Think About
Mike and the Red Room fade away, but Cooper then sees spots of light on the case files he has to assess. I wonder whether this is Mike’s doing or Cooper’s own. He was always the most intuitive of detectives and perhaps his inner self is generating these manifestations. 25 years in the Lodge may well have honed the intuitive parts of Cooper.
Cooper takes a pencil and begins to awkwardly mark the documents. He makes scrawls and scribbles. There are ladders and steps – things that lead one way and another. From the top of a flight of steps he curves a line down to a black mass.
Dougie’s boss Bushnell Mullins goes through the case files and is at first dismayed:
“What the hell are all these childish scribbles? How – how am I going to make any sense out of this?”
“Make sense of it,” replies Cooper.
Cooper’s words may seem parroted again, but it’s as if he’s exerting his will upon Mullins. The man quietly concentrates on the pages, really studies them. He seems to arrive at some enlightenment:
“Dougie. Thank you. I want you to keep this information to yourself. This is disturbing. To say the least. I’ll take it from here, but I may need your help again. You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about.”
The world needs Cooper. There are bad people out there.
This Magic Moment
Speaking of bad people, the dangerously misogynist creep Richard Horne makes an even more hateful impression in part 6. He’s going to be dealing drugs for Red (Lost Highway’s Balthazar Getty, last seen pointing a hand like a gun at Shelly in the Roadhouse in the premiere). Red has some weird stuff going on. He tosses a coin in the air and it stays up there, turning and turning. Richard Horne then removes the coin from his mouth, gripping it incredulously between thumb and forefinger. Red reaches out and the coin drops into his hand. Richard no longer has it. “Magic motherfucker”, he exclaims later in his truck, barrelling along the road.
Richard mocks this small town he lives in. Red likes it. Memories of Cooper, another outsider who fell for the town of Twin Peaks, although one may presume for different reasons. Red calls Richard “kid” which doesn’t go down well at all. Richard’s subsequent “Don’t call me kid” is like a hateful version of Marty McFly’s “Nobody calls me chicken.”
The Saddest Music
Part 6 reintroduces Carl Rodd from Fire Walk With Me. He was the manager of the Fat Trout Trailer Park, which was where Agent Chet Desmond vanished during the Teresa Banks murder investigation. He now runs the New Fat Trout Trailer Park, presumably outside Twin Peaks rather than Deer Meadow.
Carl makes his daily trip into town and sits on a bench smoking, coffee in hand, watching the trees in the sky. A mother and child go by, the mum repeatedly chasing and catching up with her boy. Lynch cuts back and forth between this and Richard Horne rage driving in his truck. In a truly horrific scene, the kid runs out onto the quiet road and Richard speeds over him in his truck. A hit and run rendered unflinchingly.
The saddest Angelo Badalamenti music infuses the scene. People stand in shock and horror as the mother cradles her boy in her arms. The shared emotion of it all is very Twin Peaks. Carl looks on, true sadness in his eyes. (Harry Dean Stanton does sadness behind the eyes like no other.) He sees yellow flames leave the boy and rise up into the air, which recalls the phenomena that Cooper-as-Dougie is seeing. The Secret History of Twin Peaks tells the audience that Carl went missing in the woods as a child, along with Margaret Lanterman (later the Log Lady). Lodge denizens more than likely took him. Did he already have a visionary grasp on the world? If so, the Lodge perhaps amplified such tendencies.
A Man Comes Out of the Blue Like That
This disturbing scene lies at the heart of part 6. Its roadside horror recalls not only the car crash aftermath at night with Sherilyn Fenn in Wild At Heart, but also a sequence in Fire Walk With Me. There Mike pulls up alongside Leland and Laura and starts yelling and gesturing at the former. The noise of the car horns blaring and the threat of horrible secrets divulged make for an intensely affecting experience.
Carl goes to the mother and places a hand on her shoulder. A simple yet profound gesture. He looks at her intently and she at him. It’s as if he’s trying to take some of her pain and sorrow (Garmonbozia) into himself.
The camera cuts to an electricity pylon with the same numbers as that of the pylon in the Fat Trout Trailer Park in Fire Walk With Me. The camera moves up to the top of the pylon and there is that electrical crackle once again. Chris Rodley asked Lynch about the electricity in his films and how it seemed “to announce imminent danger or revelation” (Lynch on Lynch). “Right, exactly right. Exactly,” said Lynch. “And what it means I don’t know.”
Dwarfland
There’s further disturbing material in part 6, yet it teeters on the edge of humor. Mr Todd in Vegas sees a red square appear on his computer. He clicks it away then goes into a safe and removes an envelope with a single black dot on it. Ike “The Spike” Stadtler receives the envelope. He is an assassin dwarf rather than a dancing and backwards talking one. The envelope contains photos of Lorraine (from part 5) and Dougie. Ike runs the picks over their faces, then stabs the spike into Dougie’s photo and leaves it there, surely a twisted nod to Sherlock Holmes.
The assassination itself begins ludicrously and ends up as brutal as anything, the competing tones perfectly judged by Lynch. Last week one of the goons working for Lorraine said that she was a worrier. Part 6 shows that she was right to worry.
Something Manufactured
Hawk has been looking for something that is missing. It has to do with his heritage, according to the Log Lady. At the end of part 6 he drops a coin in the bathroom and it rolls under a cubicle. He notices the words ‘Nez Perce Manufacturing’ on the cubicle door. This refers to the Indian tribe who lived in the Twin Peaks area. Hawk notices the metal sheet is starting to come away from the rest of the door. He pulls at it some and notices something shoved down inside. The space between contains yellowed handwritten pages. A good guess would be that these are missing pages from Laura’s diary. Who could’ve hidden them there? Well, Mike was familiar with the Sheriff’s Department bathroom.
What could the pages say? In the key future past scene of Fire Walk With Me, Annie appears to Laura in her bed and tells her that, “The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave. Write it in your diary.” Lynch addresses whether Laura did or not do so in Lynch on Lynch:
“I know that Laura wrote that down, in a little side space in her diary. Now, if Twin Peaks, the series, had continued, someone may’ve found that. It’s like somebody in 1920 saying, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’, or something, and then later you sort of see it all. I had hopes of something coming out of that, and I liked the idea of the story going back and forth in time.”
You know, I’ve just realized something else. This could be very, very important. If you look closely at
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