Drive With A Dead Girl (S2, ep. 8)

“Life is neither a good nor an evil: it is a field for good and evil” – Seneca
Leland: “May I show you my new clubs?”

Welcome back to Lost & Found. For those of you who might be joining us for the first time, we’re currently making our way through television’s strangest-ever show, Twin Peaks. If you’d like to catch up to us you can do so by visiting my author archive or by using the handy-dandy listing of columns that’s located at the end of this long, meandering string of nouns and verbs.

Back to the Island: The Book, a compilation of my thoughts on Lost’s themes, references, allusions and pop culture influences, is currently in progress and this week’s release of the series box set, along with my continued drive to finish the darn thing, left me with less time for Twin Peaks. As a result we’re tackling one episode, not two. I know that we just took a break last week, but as I’m not paid for these I’m afraid that the paying stuff needs to take priority. On the plus side: the more of you who opt to purchase the book, the more time I’ll arguably have to devote to these columns. So, if you’re interested in pre-ordering Back to the Island: The Book and/or joining the soon-to-publish mailing list for the book you can shoot me an email at WhatIsWater@gmail.com. You can also shoot me an email if you have any insights on Twin Peaks that you’d like to share, or if you’d care to tell me how lame it is that my little book project has resulted in less Peaks this week. Rest assured that this column isn’t going anywhere and that next week’s column will be business as usual.

Starting this week I’m shaking things up a bit – the bullet-point format joins the rest of Freddy Mercury’s enemies in biting the dust as I shift to a more conventional format. The bullet-points worked exquisitely well for Lost, which offered regular opportunities to break down and discuss a variety of things in crippling detail but Twin Peaks has proven itself to be another sort of animal – one that demands a more intuitive approach – and I’ve begun to feel like the bullet-point aesthetic is hindering me more than it’s helping me at this point in time. Things will still look pretty much the same to you (or so I hope) but this’ll allow me to mix and mingle my thoughts a bit more. We’ll try it and see how it works. Your comments, observations, criticisms and BBQ recipes are, as always, encouraged and appreciated.

Thoughts on Drive with A Dead Girl:

Things I don’t care about, and won’t be discussing in this column:

• Hank and Norma’s marital troubles
• Bobby and Shelly’s misguided attempts to find “The Good Life” through blackmail
• Josie’s disappearance
• Lucy and Andy’s baby-drama,

Apologies to you if you’ve been waiting for an epic dissertation on how Josie’s disappearance metaphorically makes a comment on the cultural mores of East and West, or how Hank and Norma’s marital troubles reflect the legacy of the Cold War or whatever. I don’t have much to say about these plotlines other than “this was good,” and (more often) “this was NOT good.” If you have something to offer regarding these characters or their storylines in this episode I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

This episode was directed by Caleb Deschanel, father of Zoe and Emily Deschanel (no nepotism here! Move along!) and an accomplished cinematographer and director of photography on films like Being There, The Right Stuff, The Natural, and The Passion of the Christ. He handles the material admirably well. Drive With A Dead Girl begins in the midst of darkness. A long static shot of the Palmer household at night mingles with the memory of last episode’s events and it becomes clear that we’re watching from without as the horrific murder of Maddie occurs within. It’s a haunting choice and there’s a sense of malevolent sentience to this exterior that’s like something out of a Shirley Jackson novel (“whatever walked there, walked alone.”). There’s also, again, the whole voyeurism thing going on here and then there’s the Russian-doll quality that I see, but that definitely counts as “stretching” on my part: Bob’s spirit inhabits Leland’s body just as Leland’s body inhabits the “body” of the house just as the house inhabits the “body” of the town and this sudden, impressionistic sense of worlds within worlds and sins within sins is a strong one to me. Peaks’ typically-ookyspooky soundtrack does the heavy lifting here and evokes all the outright terror of Lonely Souls’ final moments through a low, ominous drone.

That ominous tone goes away in the literal sense, but in the figurative sense that uneasy drone stays with us for the rest of this episode in the feeling of total uncertainty that surrounds every one of Leland’s words and actions. Leland is the first person we see in this episode and his weirdo-chipper demeanor, previously the source of both amusement and pity, is now flecked through with a dark, monstrous satisfaction. The imagery of what looks like a hundred golf balls strewn in the corner of his living room is rendered somehow disquieting – a kind of literalization of his mental state – because we’re now privy to Leland’s terrible secret and we recognize now not pitiable instability but dangerous instability. Bob is driving Leland now, and it begs the questions of how often Bob takes control and whether we’ve seen Leland in a similarly “possessed” state prior to Lonely Souls without realizing it.

This Leland has a brio and a confidence that’s queasy-making, and when Donna and James come over to say goodbye to Maddie his lies come so smoothly and so effortlessly that it’s almost breathtaking. He has spent the previous night murdering his niece and disposing of the body and here he is, cucumber-cool, laying down a reasonable alibi/cover story like the cat who swallowed the canary (after torturously freaking the f*ck out of the canary first). In this, the pre-internet, pre-cell phone era (OMG! We wuz such primitives lolz) there’s a plausibility to Leland’s words about having “just missed” Maddie and how Donna and James can “write her.” D&J would have no means of contacting Maddie once she’d boarded her bus and Leland really only needs for Maddie to never arrive at her destination. Granted, this places even more suspicion on Leland (who’s still scheduled to stand trial for Jacques’ murder) but I don’t suppose Bob cares overmuch about that.

And speaking of Bob, he does his magic mirror trick again and pops up as Leland looks at his reflection. This kind of imagery becomes less spooky as the show goes on and it’s less spooky here than it was in the previous episode. Basically, the less abstracted Bob becomes the less frightening he is but I don’t see that as problematic because (a) the show has already handily and amply established Bob’s inexplicable creepiness through its free-associative dream sequences and whatnot, and (b) because Bob-as-mirror serves (uncomfortably) well to highlight the non-supernatural aspects of this horror show. In a very real sense, Bob is Leland’s reflection. You don’t have to read Bob as a literal apparition/boogeyman to see in Bob a manifestation of Leland’s darkest, most awful possibilities. Whether he’s doing his best Ben Gazzara-in-Roadhouse impression, swerving back and forth across the road and merrily singing with a body in the trunk, or masking his chortling laughter as grief with his back turned to the forces of justice, Leland’s psychosis comes across as his own, despite the parasite that’s attached to him.

Young victims of incestual molestation often report that they disassociate the identity of the family member who violates them by mentally replacing them with another person who does the foul deed to them. As they age, this kind of disassociation becomes more and more difficult to maintain, and the inability/refusal on the part of the victim to reconcile the person they’ve invented and the family member that’s violated them can lead adolescents and young adults into horribly self-destructive behavior – drug use (check), prostitution (check), suicidal impulses (check)…. All of which is to say that Twin Peaks may be playing an overtly-supernatural game with its inhabiting spirits and Giants and Little Men From Other Places and so on and so forth, but this game is a deadly-serious one – one designed to hold real and terrible truths about this most-heinous of crimes within its heightened, obfuscated mystical mythology. This simple fact is highlighted by Bob’s image in the mirror – an image that is ostensibly supernatural according to the dictates of the show, but which is also primarily, more importantly, a metaphor for something “real,” yet no less horrific for being real. Does that make sense? It makes total sense to me but I’m the one huffing paint, not you.

And speaking of horrific, we learn that Leland has jammed Maddie’s corpse into a golf bag, which he hauls from his house and drops into the trunk of his car with a sickening thud.

Jerry: “The last thing a good defense attorney needs to know is the truth.”

Ben Horne is still being held by the Sherriff’s Department and Jerry reappears (it’s always good to see David Patrick Kelly show up on this show – his energy plays so well off of Richard Beymer) in order to personally represent and defend his brother. Their bond is weird and twisted but it’s also genuine and deep – they genuinely love each other and would, one presumes, do anything for each other. It’s interesting to me how this fidelity contrasts with their rapacious greed and disregard for everyone else around them. It’s during this scene that we get a flashback to their lives as boys, when they apparently watched an older woman (babysitter?) dance provocatively in the half-darkness, shining a flashlight as she sways. There’s an overt sexuality to it, and when held up against the now-verified fact of Laura’s abuse at a young age we begin to see a pattern of innocence and youth despoiled, of children who encounter sexuality both raw and fairly benign and seem to emerge from the other end of those experiences as corrupted figures.

Hawk: “Some of my best friends are white people.”

Lucy returns to the Sherriff’s Department and brings her sister Gwen along with her, who promptly rattles off addled and uncomfortable comments to Deputy Hawk – first calling him “Eagle Eye,” then saying that he must “hate white people” after all they’ve done to his people. Hawk, being the reasonable, bad-ass, turquoise-earring-wearing man he is, shrugs off the awkward offering of White Guilt and walks away. On a show like Twin Peaks you can never be sure if a thing is intentional or unintended. This little scene-let might have been intended as a riff on clueless white people who’d rather generalize an ethnicity’s past suffering and assume unwarranted blame than commune with an individual openly, or it might just have been a goofy lark. Your guess is as good as mine.

Cooper: “In another time, another culture, he might have been a Seer, a Shaman Priest. In our world he’s a shoe salesman and lives among the shadows.”

Meanwhile, Cooper and Truman continue to work Laura’s case and it’s distressing to see them on the wrong track, still pursuing Ben Horne when the real killer is literally right in front of them. More distressing is Leland’s behavior, which flips like a switch from manic energy to shocked grief and disbelief, to anger and then, worst of all, to barely-suppressed glee. We’re still not clear on where the line between Leland and Bob exists, or if that line exists at all. His behavior in this scene is psychotic, and Ray Wise sells the holy hell out of it.

Still, unclear as the line is, one has the sense during Drive With A Dead Girl that Bob is firmly behind the wheel throughout (haha! Pun!) and the way in which Leland switches back and forth, on and off, between normalcy and psychosis suggests that Bob could have been driving him all along, that all of Leland’s grief over Laura’s death could well have been an act; perhaps everything we’ve ever seen of Leland has been the equivalent of a Halloween mask, with Bob leering out from the eyeholes. That thought is deeply, deeply disturbing to me. But watching Leland seemingly ready to kill Agent Cooper with a golf club while Sherriff Truman waits just feet away, one gets the sense that the Leland-mask is slipping, and that Bob’s personality is asserting itself more and more forcefully. Then again, perhaps we’ve simply never been privy to moments like this one before. Maybe we’ve been selectively shown the moments in which Leland’s mask is more firmly affixed. That’s the thing – there’s just no way to know at this point.

Le One Armed Man is under house arrest and continues to act as a pretty fascinating figure to me. The actor playing him continues to paint the character as a kind of half-man, half-animal as he scents his way around seeking out his old familiar/partner. It’s a fun performance – as much goofy now as creepy – and Mike’s seeming noble purpose clashes nicely with his overall ambiguity. How much do we really know about Mike? What are his motivations for tracking Bob? It’s a mark of the show’s overall strong writing, direction and acting work that I’m more interested the less I know. Mike inexplicably attempts to escape from the police by bashing an officer over the head, making his true motives even murkier (I like that he apologizes to the unconscious officer after the fact and that his apology seems genuine).

Whereas Bob’s first mirror-appearance in this episode is less scary than discomfiting, his second appearance in the rear view mirror of Leland’s car managed to send a shiver down my spine. There’s something unconscionably dirty about the smile that’s reflected back to us here – a smile that seems to say “Just LOOK at what I’m getting away with here! Just…..LOOK. Just LOOK. Just LOOK.” It’s unsettling, but it wouldn’t be nearly as unsettling without the undeniably great work being done here by Ray Wise.

Truman: “I’ve backed you every step of the way but I’ve had enough of the mumbo-jumbo. I’ve had enough of the dreams, the visions, the dwarfs, the giants, Tibet and the rest of the hocus-pocus.”

It’s interesting to see Truman finally step up and confront Cooper’s unorthodox (to put it kindly/as understatement) methods – here at last is the skeptic/believer relationship that shows like the X-Files would take and build off of in the years following Peaks’ airing. I don’t really believe that Truman would pull an about-face on Cooper this suddenly, and given that Truman’s the one who initially told Cooper about the “back end” of Twin Peaks and the darkness that the Bookhouse Boys fight, I don’t believe that Truman thinks of Cooper’s ideas as “hocus pocus.” But what makes this work is the way in which Michael Ontkean sells this shift – firmly and with much conviction. Truman is obviously smarting from Josie’s sudden departure (did I mention that she’s still absent? I know I mentioned that I didn’t care) and that’s the motivation for Truman’s arguably-uncharacteristic snappishness here, or so I’d argue. Ontkean is this show’s secret weapon – granite-solid, always grounded, and always interesting to watch even when the events surrounding him aren’t interesting at all. It’s a shame that Ontkean hasn’t gotten more work of this caliber in the years since the show aired. If you’re a Paul Newman fan like I am you might remember that he appeared in Slap Shot. Having those two credits on your resume is more than most people get, but I’d enjoy seeing Ontkean more often.

It’s an interesting twist to have Norma’s mother’s new husband Ernie turn out to be an ex-con and an ex-buddy of Hank’s who hung in the yard and hit the prison library with him. There’s a sense that “the Professor” is genuinely trying to take a straight and narrow path here, and Hank’s willingness to use his “friend’s” secret past makes me want to reach through the screen and facepunch him, over and over again. I see that as a good thing, and while Hank isn’t the greatest character ever, I appreciate the way that the show continues to swing him back and forth from seemingly-sincere and penitent to grossly manipulative and greedy at the drop of a hat.

But let’s be honest: we’re not hear to see how Hank is going to try and screw the Professor over, nor to see how he’ll probably end up screwing himself for the effort. We’re here for the Main Event – and this episode ends by pulling us firmly back to look in on that Event. Maddie’s body is found, wrapped in plastic, in a mirror-image moment reflecting the show’s pilot. The repetition of this imagery is, to me, potent stuff. Maddie isn’t Laura, and the discovery of her body tells the forces of law and order that law and order have not been restored to this “quiet” little place. The violence continues unabated and once again the Knights have arrived too late to save the Maiden.

More than that, though, Maddie IS Laura in the symbolic, metaphorical sense. The show has gone out of its way to draw this symbolism out for us – casting the same actress in both roles (Sheryl Lee, who is excellent in a small role in Winter’s Bone, a film championed here on Chud and well worth your time when it hits home video – support small, interesting films!), having Laura’s mother confuse Maddie with Laura in her grief, having James fall for her because of her resemblance to Laura, and eventually having Maddie flat-out state that she “became” Laura for a while. Laura keeps surfacing over and over in this show, in memories and half-revealed secrets and diaries and videos and audiotapes and on and on anon, and now she’s resurfaced again. Laura’s death (and life) haunts this town, and the discovery of Maddie’s body might as well be the rediscovery of Laura’s – a testament to the power of darkness and to the way that violence and sin, if not exposed to the light, will simply recur, over and again, without end.

This Week’s Twin Peaks Ephemera

With each column I’ve been linking to a bit of pop culture ephemera that was created around the time of Twin Peaks’ airing, or that was created due to the show’s influence/inspiration.

This week’s selection comes to us courtesy of Hero Complex, the LA Times’ fanboy-friendly section. Michael Giltz has penned a look back at the show which includes reminiscences from Kyle McLachlan, Lynch and Frost. It’s nothing that you hardcore Peaks Freaks haven’t heard before but it’s very well written and it’s an entertaining read.

Also fun: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost discuss Twin Peaks, and Nick reveals that he’s utterly clueless about the show.

Enjoy!