LOST & FOUND: TWIN PEAKS – SEASON 2, EPISODES 20 & 21

The Path To The Black Lodge & Miss Twin Peaks (Twin Peaks S2, eps. 20 & 21)

Windom Earle: “Garland, what do you fear most in the world?”
Major Garland Briggs: “The possibility that love is not enough.”

I’m the worst. We’re right at the end of this thing and I decide to take a week off? What kind of columnist am I?

Just thought I’d get that out of the way right up front. Sorry for the delay, folks.

Thoughts on The Path To The Black Lodge:

Now we’re talkin’.

The Path To The Black Lodge is not a great episode of television, but it is a nice example of how Twin Peaks ought to have proceeded in the wake of Leland Palmer’s death. I’m not sure why the show decided that it would be totally, like, super-amazing to follow James Hurley around as he shtupped some over-quaffed lady who had no bearing on the show whatsoever. Seems like a less-than-stellar decision to me. Following the death of Leland Palmer the show proceeded to dazedly wander, tossing inconsequential stories out like a sadistic Santa Claus intent on boring all the world’s children to death.

Was it that the show’s writers didn’t have a plan?

I dunno. What I do know is that Twin Peaks got boring and hard to sit through for a while there. It was difficult to write about the show when so little worth paying attention to was happening (and yet I managed to generate far too many words on these episodes regardless). But last week things picked up considerably, and this week things pick up even more. Shame then, that the whole enchilada will come to a screeching halt next week with the show’s second season/series finale, Beyond Life And Death.

But before David Lynch returns to the show we’ve got these two episodes to discuss. A lot of really nifty mythological details are sprinkled liberally throughout the running times of The Path To The Black Lodge and Miss Twin Peaks. It’s clear from these sprinklings that Mark Frost had some specific plans in mind for the further exploration of Peaks’ mythos. No other episodes of the show offer up this much substantive detail on the blue collar mysticism that underlies the narrative (with the possible exception of Zen, Or The Skill To Catch A Killer which, having been directed by Lynch, offers up details that don’t offer us much in the way of analytical opportunity). It struck me in watching these episodes that while David Lynch was off directing Wild At Heart (an oft-cited reason for the sudden and precipitous fall from grace that Peaks suffers in its second season), Mark Frost was beginning to put a necessary frame around the dreamy landscape that Frost and Lynch had created together. I don’t envy him that responsibility.

Let’s face it: it’s arguably “easier” to create dream-imagery than it is to explain that imagery in a way that’s compelling in the same way that its arguably easier to create a mystery than it is to solve that mystery in a compelling fashion (see: fan reaction to Lost). In this sense, Frost had an unenviable job: How to take all of the visions and Tibetan talk and body-hopping parasitical spirits and Owls and other dreamy detritus that had piled up over a season-and-change and create a compelling, (partially) believable overarching mythology from them without (a) going too deeply into Goofyville, or (b) betraying/lessening the power of those past visions/owls/whatnot.

Because totally unexplained phenomena can only take a television audience so far. This was doubly the case during the time in which Twin Peaks aired. Nowadays there is a legitimate niche market for television shows with expansive, seasons’-long mysteries and unresolved questions. The internet has created an environment – a home, more or less – in which folks like you and I can congregate and collate all of the information that a show like Twin Peaks (or, again, Lost) offers up. It allows us to theorize and (much more importantly) to keep the fires of fandom alive and hot in ways that, less than 20 years ago, were simply impossible on a large scale. It offers us an ease of communication and connection, of information collation and storage, which is essential in order to sustain the “mass appeal” of a show that demands active and/or intuitive participation with itself. I submit that one large and significant reason for the audience’s patience with Lost as an ongoing, unsolved series of mysteries boils down to that audience’s ability to have a sprawling, ongoing conversation about those mysteries that kept said mysteries intriguing, not overwhelmingly frustrating. Twin Peaks never had that particular advantage. Then again, Lost never had a fallow period as overwhelmingly, skull-thuddingly mundane as Twin Peaks’.

Anywho, the point is this: Mark Frost and his group of writers were creating a backwoods mythos from what amount to scraps of illogical dreams and poetic-but-largely-context-free dialogue snippets. Barring the possibility that Lynch and Frost had already decided on the larger mythology surrounding their fictional town (a possibility that I’ve discounted based on the articles I’ve read), Frost & Co. were building this framework from the ground up, while navigating around the narrative they’d created and were continuing to create.

Good job, Mark Frost. We’ll likely never know where much of this stuff was ultimately headed, but it’s a testament to how well the show’s mythic seeds are planted and how evocative the writers were in crafting those seeds that I find Peaks’ open-ended mythos to be a fitting expansion of/amendment to the initial near-Dadaist visions offered up by the show – one that’s worth discussing and examining for how it draws from different traditions and belief systems while remaining (as far as I can tell) its own uniquely shambling entity.

…That was a lot of words.

Cooper: “He’s taken another pawn Harry but he didn’t tell us his move. Windom Earle’s playing off the board.”

The episode picks up directly following the discovery of Ted Raimi’s dead body stuffed into a giant papier-mâché chess piece. A pre-Sex In The City Willie Garson, playing Raimi’s roadie buddy, explains that Ted Raimi decided to just wander off and follow a strange, grubby looking man into the woods in the middle of the night ‘cause they were totally thirsty for some brewskis, dawg. Why this was necessary/advisable/logical in the slightest remains unclear to me. Then again, the people on this show have a habit of wandering unadvisedly into the woods as we’ll see a little later in this episode. Last week’s two installments brought us a return to some of the bedrock details that made the show so enjoyable to begin with – the recordings to Diane, Cooper-as-G-man, Lynch-as-Gordon-Cole, hot coffee and cherry pie and measured quirk. This week brings us the return of Andy’s sad-yet-hilarious habit of crying at the scene of any homicide. Have we seen him do that since the Sherriff’s Department investigated the train car waaay back in season 1?

Hawk: “Audrey, Agent Cooper would like to see you at the Sheriff’s station.”
Audrey: “Oh, well I have a lot of work to do. Maybe this afternoon?”

That exchange sums up so much of what’s changed/gone wrong with the Audrey-and-Cooper chemistry this season, and with the characterizations as a whole. It’s as if we’ve watched two different shows – the “Who Killed Laura Palmer Show” and the meandering, occasionally-interesting “What’s Everyone Up To Twinkle Time Variety Hour.” The Audrey we’ve known over a season-and-change wouldn’t dismiss Hawk this way. Cooper, after all, saved Audrey from a fate worse than Layne Staley’s. He’s been her “knight” for jeebus’ sake. Now she’s got a lot of work to do?

Earle: “These uh, these evil sorcerers – Dugpas they’re called – they cultivate evil for the sake of evil, nothing else. They express themselves in darkness for darkness without leveling motive. Now this…this ardent purity allows them to access a secret place where the cultivation of evil precedes in exponential fashion and with it the furtherance of evil’s resulting power. This – this place of power is tangible and as such it can be found, entered and perhaps utilized in some fashion. The  Dugpas have many names for it but chief among them is the Black Lodge.”

Mmmmm….more mythology. And while, yes, the name “Dugpa” sounds like something George Lucas might’ve invented while on a bender involving an inflatable Jar Jar filled with Nitrus, it’s also the name of a historically-existent group of people – a group that held special interest for Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, aka Madame Blavatsky, a founder of the belief system known as Theosophy:

“[T]he word ‘Dugpa’ has two senses. Literally, it refers to an inhabitant of Bhutan, and using that meaning his interpreter could not make sense of what I was saying. There is another meaning to the word, meaning an evil being, or even a sorcerer, and to my surprise this seemed to be unfamiliar to the interpreter. But the Dalai Lama showed that he understood exactly what I had in mind.” – Raghavan Iyer, “My Talk with the Dalai Lama”

“Dugpa: Adherents of the Buddhist religion of Tibet who, previous to the reform by Tsong-kha-pa in the 14th century, followed sorcery and other more or less tantric practices, which are entirely foreign to the pure teachings of Buddhism. In theosophical literature dugpa has been used as a synonym for Brother of the Shadow” – Global Coexistence

“In the East, they are known as the “Brothers of the Shadow,” living men possessed by the earth-bound elementaries; at times—their masters, but ever in the long run falling victims to these terrible beings. In Sikkim and Tibet they are called Dug-pas (red-caps)…” – Madame Blavatsky, Collected Writings Vol. 6

“These individuals don’t show up and advertise they are Dugpas or Shammars. They always work through their unsuspecting victims. You may to see their hidden hand when you see disunity and trouble in any progressive movement working for the welfare of the people. Look at the results to see their hand. You will also see a clear demonstration of cunning, deception, and all tactics geared to the principle – end justifies the means.” – Looking For Dugpas

“I may be allowed, however, just to mention two things, which must convince every unprejudiced person of the wicked lives and false doctrines of the Red Caps. In the first place, many of the clergy marry; and in the next, they persist, in opposition to religion and common sense, in wearing Red Caps.” – George Bogle, mounting the least-convincing case possible for the “wickedness” of the Dugpas

“In the early Theosophical writings, H. P. Blavatsky used the term “dugpa” for the various non-Gelugpa orders of Tibetan Buddhism, namely, for the Kagyupa, Nyingmapa, and Sakyapa orders. In doing this, she followed the usage of Western writers of the time. These writers indiscriminately termed all of these orders as “Red Caps,” “Shammars,” and “Dugpas,” or “Dukpas.” Blavatsky additionally used the term “dugpa” for followers of the non-Buddhist Bon religion of Tibet.”– David Reigle, Who Are The Dugpas In Theosophical Writings?

What’s clear in doing a little background reading on the notion of Dugpas: There is nothing clear about the notion of Dugpas. Madame Blavatsky and her followers/fellow explorers used the term Dugpa in a pejorative, evil sense, conjuring imagery of dark magicians involved in pagan bloodrites and rituals designed to cast off morality and live animally. David Reigle’s writing suggests that Blavatsy was being insanely general/reductive in applying that term. Whether or not Balvatsky’s claims about the historical sect are true is sort of beside the point; they fit admirably well within the mythology of a television show that’s overwhelmingly interested in the clash between civilization and savagery, between the moral sense and animal instinct.

Major Briggs: “I could use a good stretch. Perhaps a walk in the woods to clear my mind.”
Truman: “Good idea. Don’t forget the bread crumbs.”

Good idea? This is a TERRIBLE IDEA. Sherriff Truman and Co. have just taken the statement of now-dead-Ted-Raimi’s roaide buddie, who explicitly informed them that Ted Raimi disappeared into the woods with Windom Earle. It’s been revealed that Earle is after the “ardent purity” (that’s a great phrase) of power that resides inside the Black Lodge, and we know now that Earle and Briggs both worked on the mysterious Project Blue Book. So why in the name of all that is Good and Holy and filled with Cherry Pie would you let this man walk off alone into the VERY SAME WOODS where Ted Raimi just met his baroquely over-the-top death, courtesy of Earle?

For my money, the neatest, creepiest moments in this episode involve the bizarre onset of trembling that afflicts the right hands of Cooper and some random woman in the diner. All of a sudden, and for no good reason, their right hands begin to shake uncontrollably. I assume that it’s connected to what we see at the end of the episode, and with what we’ve already seen of “Mike,” who removed one of his arms in order to (supposedly) sever himself from the path of evil. Note that both the woman and the diner and Cooper experience a trembling in their right hands, and that the arm that Mike removed was his left arm. Here’s one of my follow-me-down-the-rabbit-hole moments:

Practitioners of “white” magic – the sort of benign/beneficent sorcery that’s been so-far associated with the White Lodge, sometimes refer to themselves as adherents of the “Right Hand Path.” Those people who practice “black” magic – the sort of selfish/savage sorcery that’s  been so-far associated with the Black Lodge, sometimes refer to themselves as adherents of the “Left Hand Path.” Dugpas – those feared Red Capped Buddhists – are, from what I’ve read, considered to be practitioners of the Left Hand Path. The Wikipedia article I’ve linked to suggests that some people don’t like it when one path is labeled “good” and the other, “evil,” and that both paths are simply different means of practicing magic. But those sorts of distinctions – like the distinction between historical/actual Dugpas and the sort of Boogeymanish entities written about by Madame Blavatsky – don’t matter for our purposes here. What matters, are the ways in which Twin Peaks is deploying these ideas in the service of its own story. Had the show continued I think we’d have gotten some idea what this little detail was supposed to have meant.

Pete: “Josie I see your face.”

That’s a nifty line. When we last left Josie Packard she was unsuccessfully attempting to remove herself from the drawer of a bureau, which is to say that when we last saw Josie Packard she mysteriously died and had her spirit LITERALLY TRAPPED IN THE KNOB OF A DRESSER DRAWER. Now, here, we get the implication that Josie’s confinement might not be so confining after all. Is it possible that Josie’s spirit is now free to roam the entirety of the wooden structure of the Great Northern? Spoiler alert: Barring some revelation in the final episode, we’ll never know the answer to this question.

Earle: “Hello Wilbur!”

Remember how ridiculous I found it that Briggs would just wander in the woods while Windom Earle is running around? Well all is forgiven, because this boneheaded decision leads to Windom Earle dressed up as a horse and take the Major captive via tranquilizer gun. Which is, frankly, kind of amazing in that “Hahahaha…no, really…WTF?” kinda way.

For those of you younger than I am, Earle’s seemingly-bizarre decision to call Major Briggs “Wilbur” is a reference to “Mr. Ed,” the 60s-era TV comedy that paired a man named Wilbur with a talking horse named Mr. Ed. Whenever the state of televised entertainment is getting you down, remember that at one point in time, long before you were a glimmer in your parents’ eyes, network executives were greenlighting shows like Mr. Ed (a talking horse!) and My Mother The Car (a benevolently-possessed automobile!). There’s a strange comfort to be found in the undying idiocy of television programming, and I say that as someone who watched (and enjoyed!) reruns of Mr. Ed as a kid. Additional, unnecessary trivia: Alan Young, the gentleman who played Wilbur on the show, has provided the voice for Scrooge McDuck since 1983, and will turn a spry 91 years old this year.

Major Briggs: “There’s a time…If Jupiter and Saturn meet, they will receive you.”

A drugged Major Briggs proceeds to give Windom Earle a key piece of the Owl Cave puzzle, telling him the time at which the “door” to the Black Lodge will open. Jupiter and Saturn – two massively important symbols in the world of Twin Peaks – have been floating in the background of the show from practically the beginning, obscured but visible from time to time. Recall if you will the shadowy shape that “flies” behind the curtains in the Red Room, first seen in Zen, Or The Skill to Catch A Killer. Speculation over the nature of that shape has ranged from “bird” (because of the bird symbolism on the show) to “angel” (because…well, you’ll see). But I submit that the shadow we glimpse in Zen is neither of those things – it is instead the shape of the planet Saturn, the planet’s ring clearly jutting from either side of the spherical shape as it passes behind the curtains. Watch the Red Room scene again and tell me if you agree. Because the astrology/astronomy/kabbalah stuff doesn’t end there. There’s also the curious fact of Laura’s cat being named Jupiter – something we learn about in The Diary of Laura Palmer. Laura’s cat acts, both symbolically and literally, as a protective figure in her life during the early chapters of her Diary. It is, I submit, not coincidence that the figure of Jupiter disappears from the story as Bob gains more prominence.

And lest you think me off my meds, allow me to digress annoyingly for a minute or two.

Note that the age-old symbols representing Jupiter and Saturn are near reverse-images of each other. According to a number of sites that deal with this sort of information (I’m a fan of myth/legend/religion, but I’ve never been much for Astrology) Jupiter and Saturn are essentially polar opposites: “The former expands, the latter contracts.” If one were looking for a way to represent, in shorthand, a clash between the polar opposite forces of “Good” and of “Evil” you could do a lot worse than choosing these two planets to serve as symbolic signifiers. Boiled to their essences, Jupiter seems traditionally to have been a more “positive” symbol, whereas Saturn seems to have been viewed more as “negative.” In terms of these broad categories, that places Jupiter firmly as a symbol of the White Lodge, and Saturn as a symbol of the Black Lodge. To be more specific:

In animal symbolism, Saturn is supposed to historically govern “nocturnal birds of prey,” notably the owl. As a symbol, Saturn is often associated with death. While some of the “modern” astrologers I looked into emphasize that Saturn’s association with death and “negative” imagery has been misconstrued and overly simplified, it certainly serves the purpose of this television show to have Saturn operate as a less nuanced, “ardently pure” (to steal Windom’s words) symbol for the dark forces of the Black Lodge. Here’s a particularly apt quote that aligns nicely with what we’ve seen on this show:

“[A]s every power in the universe is twofold, positive and negative, the Saturn individual can also be the dark adept, masterful in the way of destruction, utterly rigid in his superlative ego, utterly isolated and self-condemned to an eventual spiritual disintegration, to the death of the soul……”

Sound familiar? It should. It describes, more or less, the sort of spiritual disintegration that we’ve watched Laura and her father undergo – an isolation and degradation that ultimately consumed them both.

Twin Peaks is a show about Evil – about the darkness of the human heart and the spiritual and/or existential terror of existence in an imperfect, impure world. But Twin Peaks is also a show about ardent Goodness – about the subtle, wondrous power that Love and community have against the darkness. It’s fitting, then, that Jupiter should be cited as the other force in Major Briggs’ drugged-up speech and that Briggs’ greatest fear would be “the possibility that love is not enough.” Jupiter, or so I’ve been reading, offers mankind the opportunity to channel a divine and righteous power – the unifying force that suffuses the universe and sustains all. A man with access to the power of Jupiter is a kind of king that “leads the collectivity, yet is actually molded by the needs and degree of consciousness of this collectivity…. Jupiter’s symbol represents life coming ‘down’ into the concrete experience, seeking expansion through a multitude of contacts and sensations. This is also the deepest meaning of the number 4, which represents the basic vibration of the earth and of mankind as a species of life.”

All of what I’ve read and absorbed on this topic emphasizes the importance of balance, both within the individual and within the collective whole of humanity. This balance is achieved, ultimately, through the balancing of the forces represented by both Jupiter and Saturn – a balance that’s nicely summed up in the imagery of the White and Black Lodges. One cannot exist without the other. These forces need each other to exist, and require each other to fulfill their assumed function – the refinement of the human soul. Imbalance, as Twin Peaks has been telling us in ways both large and small over the course of two seasons, breeds disaster. We’ll likely never know what Frost and Lynch’s end-game ideas for this show really were, but I’d hazard a guess that it involved the idea that the Black Lodge and its residents were growing overly-powerful (see: Mike and Bob) and that this state of affairs presented a dire threat, not only to the denizens of Twin Peaks, but to the whole of humanity. And as if to subtly reinforce this Cosmic/trippy jibber jabber, the show cuts directly from Earle muttering “Jupiter and Saturn,” directly to a shot of the mysterious box that Andrew Packard received from Thomas Eckhardt – a box that displays the symbols of the zodiac and the phases of the moon on its surface. Andrew and Catherine manage to solve the puzzle and open the box, but we’re left wondering what’s inside the silver container that they find when they succeed in their single-minded mission.

The episode comes to a close with a one-two punch of strange, as Dale’s dance with Annie is interrupted by a vision of the Giant as he seems to warn Cooper not to let Annie enter the competition or, more interestingly to me, may be warning Cooper away from Annie altogether. The way its shot doesn’t do the moment any favors – where previously the Giant has come across benevolent but unsettling, here his appearance veers dangerously close to comical for my tastes. But that’s okay, because what happens next isn’t comical at all.

The camera tracks through empty spaces, evoking for the first time in a long time the sense of existential dread that Lynch nailed so effortlessly early on. And then, suddenly, we’re in a grove, surrounded by trees, with a sinister pool of dark liquid at its center. A spotlight appears, and in it, a solitary, disembodied arm surrounded by darkness. It reaches out, as if clawing itself into existence, and suddenly it’s as if the darkness itself shuts off, revealing the full figure of Bob, free and smiling.

WIN MISS TWIN PEAKS…..AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!