LOST & FOUND: TWIN PEAKS – SEASON 2, EPISODES 2 & 3

Coma & The Man Behind Glass (S2, eps. 2 & 3)

“Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.” – Blaise Pascal
Grandson Tremond: “J’ai une ame solitaire.”

I’m well aware that there’s a stretch of this season that’s infamous for being terrible, but between the two hour premiere (covered last week right here) and the episode Coma, the season is off to one hell of a good start. It helps that Lynch unleashes his dark side here in a major way. The imagery presented over the course of May the Giant Be With You and Coma is impressionistic, striking and frankly, nightmare-inducing. I’ve never been one to feel frightened by gore. Slasher films don’t scare me except in the most rudimentary, cat-jumping-out-at-you way. But this? This unfixed, free-floating mélange of id-imagery freaks me the f*ck out.

Here’s a completely unsubstantiated theory: the initial demand (real or perceived) to know the identity of Laura’s killer was fueled, in part, by the endings of the first two episodes of the second season. If the general audience’s reaction to those endings was anything like mine, David Lynch freaked them right the f*ck out too. There is, I think, a discernable difference between the sort of surrealism Lynch offered in Zen, and the sort he’s offered up over the past two weeks. I’ll argue that where Zen‘s imagery largely evoked dread, Giant and Coma’s imagery largely evokes fear. These words are sometimes used interchangeably, but they aren’t interchangeable. Dread is the feeling of something waiting to pounce on you. Fear is seeing it pounce.

Dread is something a majority of people enjoy experiencing on TV and in film. It’s what makes thrillers so popular. People want to be afraid of the dark on that level – spooked by shadows. What’s less popular, overall, is when something truly frightening comes out of those shadows. Twice in a row, David Lynch leaves us in a place of nightmares, and I can’t help suspecting that some folks were turned off by that – and by the seemingly-nonsensical imagery – wanting to get away from the “arty” stuff (read: the stuff that made me poop myself/that I didn’t understand) and back to the other stuff. Namely, Laura Palmer.

Thoughts on Coma:

“[O]ne day Lha Thothori Nyantsen was in the tower praying and his castle was then totally covered with lights, rainbows and clouds, and a miraculous thing happened. In the midst of this mysterious display he ended up with a box in his hands. He was on top of the castle praying, and suddenly a box appeared in his hands, just like that, out of thin air. When the box was opened, inside there was a sutra known as Samatok Köpa, Samatok Köpeto (Sutra Designed like a Jewel Chest), and one called Pangon Chag-gyapa (Sutra of a Hundred Invocations and Prostrations), and then Cittamani (wish fulfilling jewel), that is the mantra OM MANI PEME HUNG, and a little golden stupa. So these were all found in the box in his hands. So Lha Thothori Nyantsen, on top of Yumpu Lhakar, found these. That is considered, historically, the first time Buddhism came to Tibet, miraculously. Then in a dream he saw that in the future, five generations from him, they would know the meaning of the content of these objects: the stupa, the texts and the mantra. – Tibetan Buddhist History: An Introduction

Cooper: “Amazing isn’t it? The Happy Generations.”

• Cooper gives Albert an impromptu history lesson on Tibet as we join them in The Great Northern for a brisk breakfast, and in case you were wondering – yes, what Cooper says here is firmly rooted in the real-world beliefs of the Buddhist people. The man Cooper refers to as King Hathatha Rignamputsan can be linked to Lha Thothori Nyantsen, the 28th King of Tibet. I’m a fan of the way that Tibet’s history is tangentially woven into the show, and the ways in which Buddhist/Eastern thought and legend seep into the narrative.

• Oh, and incidentally? Take a look at the quoted passage just above. Note that among the items the King found in his mysterious box was “a little golden stupa.” By-and-large, a stupa refers to structures like these – places of prayer that contain holy relics, comparable to Catholic Churches in a sense. Now considered to be places of veneration, stupas were originally much, much smaller and served as funerary monuments. In form and appearance, they resembled mounds of earth. Seen any mounds of earth hanging around Twin Peaks? I know I have. And what’s interesting to me – if we make an irrational, intuitive, Cooper-esque leap in logic to consider the mounds of earth in Twin Peaks to be rudimentary stupas – is that these typically-holy creations have been subverted and corrupted in the context of the show. By appearing in places where death has been present (the train car) they fulfill their essential, original function as funerary monuments, but they operate to mark out places and moments of extreme violence and, dare I say (dare! dare!) the presence of Evil.

• Speaking of Evil: Bob is discussed, and while Albert is clearly bemused by the fact of Cooper’s dreams and anti-logical deductive techniques, it’s interesting to me that Cooper never receives the kind of tongue-lashing that Albert so clearly enjoys handing out to the “hayseeds” in Twin Peaks. There’s a professional respect between these men that creates an interesting dynamic.  I truly enjoy the rapport between Miguel Ferrer and Kyle McLachlan on this show. Watching their worldviews clash and compliment one another makes for surprisingly-rich exchanges between them, both in the words themselves and in the underlying battle between positivism (one might say “naïve idealism”) and cynicism (one might say “realism”).

• Also touched on during their morning coffee-n’-conversation: Ronette Pulaski has awoken from her coma, as we saw in the final minutes of the previous episode (were all of you as terrified as I was during the final minutes of May the Giant be With You?), Jacques Renault is dead courtesy of an inconvenient pillow, the mill has been burnt and Leo Johnson identified as the primary suspect. Whew.

• On top of all of this, Albert’s also conducting an investigation into who shot Cooper. We learn that he’s interviewed the bizarre old man who brought a shot-and-bleeding Coop some warm milk, and that the old man (“Senor Droolcup,” as Albert calls him) is deeply senile – something we’d pretty much figured out for ourselves by looking at him.

• And, on top of that, Cooper’s ring is still missing, remember? The Giant removed it from his finger during their interactions, and promised to return it once the Giant’s “clues” became clear. In the last column I recommended that you read The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life. My Tapes. I’ll do that again now. There’s some intriguingly vague stuff in there to do with Cooper’s ring. And there’s some VERY intriguing stuff about the final bit of information that Albert drops in Cooper’s lap during this alarmingly-overstuffed casual debriefing – namely, regarding Cooper’s “former partner,” Windom Earle.

Who is Windom Earle? Why does Cooper look so troubled at the mention of his name? Read the Autobiography.

• The Mysterious Japanese Businessman appears again, apparently keeping an eye on Cooper.

Mrs. Tremond: “Creamed corn!? Do you see creamed corn on that plate?”
Donna: “Yes..”
Mrs. Tremond: “I requested no creamed corn. Do you see creamed corn on that plate?”
Donna: “No.”

• It seems entirely appropriate, now that we as an audience have travelled this far into Twin Peaks’ figurative and literal woods, for us to come across what amounts to a strange recreation of Little Red Riding Hood. Donna, as you may or may not recall, has taken over Laura’s Meals on Wheels route (I’d forgotten this entirely, because Donna is hella-boring), and her route apparently includes the Tremond household. Inside, Donna delivers a meal to an elderly Mrs. Tremond in bed and meets the woman’s tux-wearing grandson (again with the tuxedos – what’s up with that?). It’s immediately apparent that Donna’s wandered into something bigger and stranger than she or we were expecting. Because of the creamed corn, you see.

In a sequence that is genuinely surreal Donna watches as the creamed corn on Mrs. Tremond’s plate appears to vanish, then reappears in the hands of Tremond’s grandson, and then vanishes again completely. It’s clear that there’s something going on here – but what that something is isn’t clear at all. Again, there’s the feeling of having been dropped into a dream, of not quite having our footing. That feeling is underlined, not just by the fact of the food’s inexplicable migration, but also by the indefinable discomfort that creamed corn seems to cause Mrs. Tremond. I can’t say as I blame her. Creamed corn is disgusting. And, if I can venture into vaguely-spoilery territory for a moment, I think that’s highly appropriate. If cherry pie sums up all that’s Good and Right about this town, creamed corn arguably sums up all that’s Evil and Wrong with it.

• Oh, and that last thing the grandson says before Donna leaves? It’s French: “J’ai une ame solitaire,” or “I am a lonely/solitary soul.” I’ll stop there but leave you with this: Notice again the ambiguity of these characters. It won’t be the last time we see them.

• For the most part I genuinely adore David Lynch’s skewed view of the world. I like the ways in which Twin Peaks juxtaposes comedy and tragedy, satire and sincerity, all in the same scene or even in the same moment. And yet, there’s something about the business with the stools in Ronette’s hospital room that feels tone deaf to me. The two halves of this scene don’t match up at all, and the attempt to juxtapose the humor of Coop and Truman’s prolonged chair-adjustments with the stark brutality of Ronette’s condition doesn’t work at all for me. It’s the first time that Lynch-being-Lynch feels “off,” feels misguided and even distasteful. Your mileage may vary, as it should, but I’d be dishonest if I said that the goofiness of the behavior here doesn’t overshadow what is, and should be, a serious moment.

That said, I like the business with the chairs. It’s just unfortunate that Lynch chose to combine it with this scene.

Jerry: “Brother Ben, we’ve got two ledgers and one smoked cheese pig. Which one do we burn? And it ain’t gonna be my pig.”

• God, I love the Horne brothers. The more I watch of his performance, the more I realize what an eminently-watchable character actor Richard Beymer is. His portrayal of Ben Horne is a wonder, and the way in which he and David Patrick Kelly play off one another makes for some of the best chemistry on the show. In the wake of the Mill’s burning and Catherine’s disappearance the brothers must decide which ledger to destroy. Thanks to that Mill fire, the decks have been cleared in a major way on this show, and all of the characters I found patience-testing in Season 1 have been changed for the better by this development – Catherine’s missing, and prior to disappearing she became much more interesting as a woman conspired against, as opposed to a woman conspiring; Josie Packard is similarly missing, which I’m thrilled about, since she was pretty boring; Hank Jennings has developed into an intriguingly-connected sideplayer who’s involved in shady doings on levels I hadn’t remembered/contemplated, Leo Johnson’s in a coma…..that Mill fire was a blessing.

• Leaving the Brothers Horne we catch up with Deputy Andy, who is plastering “Have you seen this man” posters around town with Bob’s sketched face on it (have other people in the town dreamed of Bob? Would they recognize him?). And this is the second moment of the episode that feels slightly “off” to me. Andy’s a bit of a simpleton, for sure, but he’s always been a fairly realistic simpleton, despite the surrealistic circumstances and surroundings in this town. I can buy that he’d be messy with his tape. I can’t buy that he’d manage to wrap half a roll around his own fingers, with stray strips on his face. This isn’t the behavior of a sweet, well-meaning simple/stupid guy. This is Lenny from Of Mice and Men territory, and it doesn’t work (for me).

Major Briggs: “Achievement is its own reward. Pride obscures it.”

• On the plus-side, Major Briggs is emerging as one of my favorite characters on the show. Prior to this revisiting of the show I’d never really thought about him twice. I admire and appreciate his calm positivity, and am intrigued by the way in which that quality exists side by side with a detached, almost mechanical way of expressing himself. There’s a quality of “enlightenment” around Major Briggs – a quality highlighted for us in the vision he recounted to Bobby in the previous episode, and again here, when approached by the Log Lady. I mean, how centered and kind of amazing is that line above? It’s the sort of throwaway inspirational line that tends to grab me as a viewer (think also of Lost’s “Jesus Christ is not a weapon”). The Lady o’ the Log delivers Briggs a message from her log which is, appropriately enough, “Deliver the message.” Intriguingly, Briggs seems to understand what she’s talking about. I, on the other hand, do not.

• The roots of Andy and Lucy’s weird animosity are exposed here – she’s pregnant, but Andy’s sterile. So how exactly does that add up? This in no way explains why Lucy’s been cold toward Andy, but it certainly justifies Andy’s frustration in the moment. The scotch tape stuff is no less aggravating the second time around.

Truman: “Hank used to be a Bookhouse Boy. Back then, Hank was one of the best of us.”

• And Hank’s story just got more interesting yet again. We learn that Hank and Truman were friends once, and that he was a Bookhouse Boy like Truman, Hawk, James, and now Cooper. This means, one assumes, that he’s privy to the secret about the dark side of Twin Peaks, and of the Evil that lurks there. It also means, so I assume, that Hank was once dedicated to stopping the flow of drugs into Twin Peaks before reversing course and becoming a supplier of them. I want to know more. How did Hank and Truman fall out? What happened to turn Hank from “one of the best” to one of the worst?

Leland: “I know him…My grandfather’s summer house on Pearl Lakes. He lived right next door. I was just a little boy. But I know him. I have to tell the sheriff about this right away.”

• Creeeeeeeeeeepy. As of this moment, something important and troubling stirs and floats to the surface: Bob was known to two generations of the Palmer family – both Laura and Leland have seen his face. But what does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that Bob may not be entirely human. For Leland to recognize him from his own boyhood means that Bob has stayed the same in his appearance for at least 30 years or so. We’d suspected this, but the timing involved here confirms it for us in a nicely subtle way.

• Leo’s in a coma, which means he’ll be coming out of it at some point. Damn.

Emory: “Why is the vacuum cleaner off?!”

• Emory Battis, the manager of Horne’s department store and the “talent scout” for One Eyed Jack’s, is also, apparently, a customer of the joint – one who enjoys being tied up and having his toes painted while someone runs a vacuum cleaner. Somehow, ice cubes and Frosty the Snowman also play into his weirdo-jumble of fetishes. Yikes.

• Little Red Riding Hood is brought to the forefront as metaphor during this scene, with Audrey describing herself as Red, and Emory as the Wolf. In a show as steeped in animalistic, savage imagery as Twin Peaks, this is no coincidence. Nor is the image of a man (or men, really) as wolves although its not just the men in this town who have Appetites (notice that in the next scene between Bobby and Shelly, Shelly tells him that she’s “Going to eat you up,” which is what the wolf tells Red Riding Hood). Through Audrey’s interrogation we learn that Laura only came to One Eyed Jack’s once – that she was using drugs and was kicked out. We also have it confirmed that Ben Horne owns the place, and that he’s fully aware of how things work.

Major Briggs: “I’m not at liberty to reveal the nature of my work. This secrecy pains me from time to time. Any bureaucracy that functions in secret inevitably lends itself to corruption. But these rules I have pledged to uphold. I believe a pledge is sacred.”
Cooper: “Speaking as a man and a fellow employee of the Federal Government, so do I.”
Major Briggs: “Well, I may reveal this much: among my many tasks is the maintenance of deep space monitors aimed at galaxies beyond our own. We routinely receive various communications, space garbage, to decode and examine. They look something like this … radio waves and gibberish, Agent Cooper. Till Thursday night, Friday morning to be exact.”
Cooper: “Around the time I was shot.”

• Don S. Davis, who plays Major Garland Briggs, is probably recognizable to some of you for his role in The X-Files. It’s somewhat ironic then, that the character of Major Briggs should be revealed here to be involved in what appears to be research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This episode continues to underline Briggs’ growing importance to the show in terms of “the nature of his work,” and the readouts that he presents to Cooper here pull us all deeper still into the woods, making it clear to us that Dale Cooper is intimately involved in what’s happening here, on levels that he and we don’t understand at all. If these readouts are generated by deep space monitors, it stands to reason that the communications received by those monitors would originate from somewhere in deep space. This implies some seriously wonky stuff. It implies that what we may be dealing with here are aliens (!), that the visions Cooper has experienced of The Giant and the Little Man may be visions of literally unearthly creatures. There’s that famous (now arguably-overused) quote from Arthur C. Clarke about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and the inexplicable, quasi-mystical events we’ve witnessed in this town are suddenly, however tenuously, capable of being considered “rational” in that they consist of phenomena that is not metaphysical, but rather, literally alien. That said, were I you, first-time viewer of the show, I’d be very careful not to conclude that you understand what’s happening here on the macro-narrative level based on this exchange.

• The song sequence between James, Donna and Maddie is surprisingly well done. I like the sense of a triangle slowly forming, and the sense that like Laura before her, Maddie finds something exciting and forbidden about the clearly-present attraction between her and James. Donna’s jealousy is nicely played, and it motivates her to leave the room so that James can follow her, leaving Maddie all alone in the Palmers’ living room.

….which is where the nightmares begin.

• It’s been 20 years since I first watched this scene, and its lost none of its strange, horrible power in all that time. There is no explaining the way in which the sight of a man crawling over a couch feels like a violation – but it does. Once again, Lynch has hacked somehow into a free-floating existential dread that frightens me in a way that no amount of grue and splatter can. The image of Bob in the Palmer house is the image of cancer made sentient and malevolent. When you folks picked Twin Peaks as the first show we’d revisit here on Lost & Found, I wrote the following:  

“For me (especially having revisited some of it as an “adult”) much of Twin Peaks’ cumulative power lies in its unblinking look at Evil. In it’s best moments this show offers a startlingly-clear view through grimy, warping glass at what feels and sounds and seems to be pretty much Evil Incarnate. Mark my words – It won’t happen for all of you, but for some of you Twin Peaks is going to burrow under your skin and slither there. It’s going to creep you out, man…

“Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed….they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person….Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are – at least potentially – everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time – not ‘lurking below’ or ‘lying in wait’ or ‘hovering on the horizon’: evil is here, right now.” – excerpted from ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head,” by David Foster Wallace

Wallace submits in his (great, great) essay that all of Lynch’s films focus on Evil, and that this focus comes without the comforting narrative fiction that is clear “moral victory.” As in Lynch’s films overall, so also in Twin Peaks. When people do terrible things on this show there are sometimes consequences. But there are sometimes no consequences at all. Lynch doesn’t introduce Evil into Twin Peaks so that Good can vanquish it. Lynch introduces Evil as fact, as uncaring force of nature – a storm to (maybe) survive but not vanquish; not really, not ever.

When I wrote that, and quoted Wallace, I was thinking specifically of this scene. There’s a malign joy in Bob’s eyes as he creeps his way toward Maddie/the viewer. It’s the sight of someone “ecstatic, transported.” In Maddie’s vision, “evil is here, right now.”

The Giant/Major Briggs: “The owls are not what they seem.”

• We return to Cooper’s dreams, and to another of The Giant’s “signposts,” and the mythology of Twin Peaks expands further.  Now we understand, however irrationally, what is meant by those words. As we watch, Bob’s face becomes the face of an owl. The owls are not what they seem in this town because, somehow and in some way, the owls ARE Bob.

• We end with Audrey still trapped in One Eyed Jack’s, now exposed as the boss’ daughter, and apparently in real danger. Will Cooper rescue her?… Well, as I keep telling you all he IS a kind of knight. What do you think?

GO BEHIND GLASS….AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!