Thoughts on Lonely Souls:

• The measure of a good mystery, I think, is whether arriving at an answer ends up being worth the trip to get there. Lost split its audience in two with its final season, and one of the most commonly-heard complaints about the ending of that show was that the answer(s) we got weren’t worth the trip.

Well, here we are, at the center of the show’s first-and-primary mystery: Who killed Laura Palmer? Does it pass my informal “good mystery” test? As horrific as the answer to this question is – and it is genuinely horrific in the original, un-diluted sense – it makes perfect, terrible sense and, as far as I’m concerned, arriving at this answer is very much worth the trip we’ve taken to get there. I’ve talked a bit in these columns about Evil-as-ecstatic-state, and how Twin Peaks’ greatest arguable strength is the way in which it peels back its weird/idyllic surfaces in order to give us an unblinking look at that Evil and the ways in which the Appetites of these characters feed or fight that Evil. Throughout the show, Lynch, Frost and company have managed to give us glances of glimpses of the free-floating metaphysical malevolence that festers within their fictional town, but Lonely Souls dispenses with the glimpses entirely and forces us to stare headlong into hell.

• Cooper and Truman set Mike up as a kind of Bob-detector at The Great Northern, having him scan the hotel’s guests in some indefinable way for Bob’s presence. Thanks to some fancy editing on the part of Lynch (who directs this episode), Mike seems to implicate Ben Horne by freakingthef*ckout as we’re shown Horne barreling down a hallway in the hotel. As we’ll discover very shortly Ben Horne is a red herring but I still find Gerard’s reaction to him very interesting. After all – Ben Horne is arguably evil (though not conclusively capital-E Evil). Is it possible that Bob had inhabited Horne at some point in the past? As far as I’m aware, it’s not impossible.

Leland: “Just know that we love you very much.”
Maddie: “I love you too.”

• We reenter the Palmer household to the sounds of Louis Armstrong, who reminds us all that it’s a Wonderful World. Maddie’s finally made the decision to head back home, and while Sarah is still a fragile creature, and seems saddened by the news, Leland deals with this announcement in a warm, paternal way and frames Maddie’s decision in terms of what’s best for her. There’s a sense here that a storm has passed – that Laura’s parents are starting to put the pieces of their lives back together, and the tableau that the three of them form at the end of this scene seems to promise them all a brighter tomorrow. Which, given the events that will shortly occur, is decidedly cruel in its way. We’re left here with the image of the three of them nestled on the couch as a family, an image that will be irrevocably destroyed by episode’s end.

Cooper: “Je suis une âme solitaire.”

• Hawk enters Harold’s house on a search warrant and find that the agoraphobic, orchid-obsessed Martin Short impersonator has hung himself. When Cooper and Truman join him to investigate they find a note on Harold’s body which reads “I am a lonely soul” in French – the same phrase and language employed by the Tux-wearing Grandson Tremond that we met a few episodes back. This is eerie in all the best ways, and it raises two potential scenarios: (a) The grandson, or someone affiliated with him, has killed Harold and staged it as a suicide, ala Ben Linus’ dispatching of John Locke; or (b) Grandson Tremond knew that Donna would meet Harold and perhaps knew that this event would occur. For a few reasons, I think option (b) is correct, and we’ll talk more about why that is later on in the series.

• We’re getting closer now – closer to the secret that destroyed Laura’s life long before it was taken from her. Harold destroyed almost half of the diary’s contents before he took his life, but the forces of law and order are making headway regardless. Thanks to Deputy Hawk and the evidence the department preserved from the abandoned train car, Cooper connects the scraps of paper found in that damnable place with the last pages of Laura’s diary, torn from the book.

• We return to Bobby and Shelly, who’ve quickly realized that their supposed ticket to the good life (i.e.: Leo’s comatose state) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After paying the bills, Shelly’s left with forty-two dollars to live on for the month – a realization that immediately sends cracks through the foundation of their previously-giddy relationship. And to make matters worse, Leo’s starting to speak, muttering “new shoes” randomly but not senselessly. You might remember Leo snarling “You punks owe me ten grand! Leo needs a new pair of shoes!” to Bobby and his buddy Mike.

Audrey: “Did you sleep with her? …Did you?”
Ben Horne: “Yes.”

• And the hits just keep on coming. Bad enough that Audrey now understands the full extent of her father’s corruption; we also learn that Horne slept with Laura during the brief time she worked at One Eyed Jack’s. But what’s somehow worse than this revelation is Horne’s admission that he loved Laura (the fact that he keeps her picture on his desk is creepy, but it also backs his claim up). As far as I’m concerned, when you love someone you don’t take sexual advantage of them in a creepy, drug-festooned brothel that you own. Love – the sort of capital-L Love that seems to exist quietly in Twin Peaks as a polar-opposite force to the darkness in its woods – has no part in what Ben Horne and Laura Palmer did together. Both Fenn and Richard Beymer do excellent work in this scene.

• There’s some other stuff here with Big Ed and Mad Pirate Teenager Nadine and Shelly and Norma, but I’ll be honest – it’s not holding my interest here due to a desire to talk about what’s coming. To sum up: Shelly’s story is becoming a remarkably sad one, and Nadine continues behaving like a Grade-A Whackadoo. All of this is worth it for the increasingly-hilarious silent faces that Everett McGill makes, confronted by his already-loony wife’s new psychoses.

• Bobby’s buddy Mike pops up in this episode after disappearing completely for what feels like forever, and together the two of them discover a micro-cassette hidden in the sole of the boots that Leo bought from Philip Gerard.

Cooper: “Much of what I’ve been able to decipher supports the contention of the one-armed man; there are repeated references to “Bob”. He was a threatening presence in her life from early adolescence. There are intimations of abuse, molestation. On a regular basis. He is referred to, on more than one occasion, as a friend of her father’s.”

• We’re almost there…hovering disquietingly-close to the darkest parts of the woods. Ben Horne is certainly a friend of Laura’s father, someone she’d have trusted from an early age, and someone who, as we’ve just learned, had slept with Laura before. All of this certainly adds up to a damning amount of circumstantial evidence – enough to arrest Horne on suspicion at the least. But Cooper, Truman and company have the wrong man. Ben Horne didn’t kill Laura Palmer.

Log Lady: “We don’t know what will happen, or when – but there are owls in the Roadhouse.”

• A mounting sense of unease, of slow-built dread, begins here. Something is happening, as Cooper says – something that will change this show, these characters, and our experience as an audience forever. Something is coming, and we will bear witness to it, in all its hellish detail.

Tojamura: “Since the moment we met I have been strangely attracted to you.”

• But before we get to this show’s heart of darkness, let’s talk about Mr. Tojamura – the Japanese businessman who is actually Catherine Martell in disguise (!!!!!!), without a doubt the single strangest non-metaphysical plot development on the show so far. Catherine’s been missing all season, presumed dead, but it turns out that she decided to go into hiding, don a full-body Japanese-Man-Suit, and skulk around Twin Peaks in a knottily-veiled attempt to gain the upper hand on Ben Horne. Her machinations make little sense to me at this point, but that’s not important really. What is important: Catherine Martel has been walking around Twin Peaks in a completely life-like Japanese Man-Suit. According to reports, Lynch and his compatriots went to some lengths in order to hide Tojamura’s actual identity, inventing a fake actor (Fumio Yamaguchi), giving him a fake resume which included participation in some of Kurasawa’s films, and releasing this information to USA Today in advance of the episode’s airing. This is very, very, very bizarre, and given the mounting sense of dread that fills the back-end of this episode, it’s also bizarrely out of place upon revisiting it. On the other hand, I appreciate the brief respite, because this is the point at which Twin Peaks stops being eerie/oddball/melodramatic and becomes something altogether horrifying – more horrifying than Demonic Laura, or Bob’s couch crawl – more horrifying than anything I’ve ever seen on television. The transformation won’t last long (thank God), and we’ll soon be back to relative-normalcy, but for an agonizingly-long stretch of minutes, Lynch and Co. channel a vision so perverse and clinical and agonizing and frightening and utterly brutal that it leaves us feeling drained and flattened.

• The terror lurches back to life in the place where all of this began: the home of Leland and Sarah and dear, deceased Laura Palmer. Sarah, who’d seemed to be at least slightly “better” earlier this episode, appears to have backslid into a drugged-up haze. She slides, hands-and-face-first, down the stairs – a mirror of the imagery in the show’s pilot. Sarah crawls/slides her way along the carpeted floor in a fairly pathetic spectacle and before she passes out she witnesses another vision: a white horse that suddenly appears, seems almost to wink at her, then disappears again into the ether. I suppose you can argue over whether the pale horse (“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”) is “real,” but I’d argue that its objective reality is beside the point. The horse is a symbol, and the “right” question to ask here is what this symbolism means.

Most cultures view the white horse as symbolic of spiritual purity/power/honor/redemption/resurrection/the Sun/victory over darkness. In other words, it’s generally and widely considered as a symbol with positive associations. So what’s it doing here, in a place with no positive associations at all, moments before the unleashing of hell on earth? The answer is that there’s simply no way to know. Lynch traffics in symbolism without concrete “meaning,” and to reduce the horse to any one interpretation is again (or so I’d argue) very much beside the point. Yes, it’s true that The Diary of Laura Palmer spends no small amount of time describing the horse that Laura’s father pretended to have bought her for her birthday (but which was actually purchased by Ben Horne, letting us know that Horne’s creepy fixation on Laura was in place at age 13). And yes, it’s true that what we’re about to learn literalizes the concept of “Trojan Horse,” in which Bob hides himself within the least-suspicious person and wreaks the most damage. Personally, I see the image as a warning of danger – a warning sent from an unseen source that’s potentially tied to the figure of The Giant. We’ll talk more about this as the mythology continues to unspool. But regardless, for now, the horse serves simply as a strange line of demarcation signaling the arrival of the supernatural into the “real” world of Twin Peaks.

The Giant: “It is happening again. It is happening again.”

• Whatever’s happening here, it’s occurring in two places simultaneously: The Palmer house and the Roadhouse, where Cooper, Truman and the Log Lady have gone to await….well, they don’t know what they’re waiting for. As they sit in anticipation of the ineffable, Julee Cruise, David Lynch’s at-the-moment favorite chanteuse, returns to the stage of the Roadhouse for another performance of acid-tinged 50’s style love songs (“I want you to rocket back inside my heart”). As she sings, something shifts subtly in the atmosphere – a heightening of illumination both literal and figurative. Cruise and her band vanish just as the white horse did. In their place stands the figure of The Giant, spot-lit and solitary.

The Roadhouse seems to freeze as The Giant appears and what is “real” and what is a “vision” start to blur together indistinguishably. It’s entirely unclear to me how much of what follows here is witnessed by Cooper, or his companions, or the other known characters in the bar but it seems as though what they experience is a kind of mass emotional psychic event. They appear to somehow “feel” what is happening without bearing actual witness to it. Dread builds, and then…

Sarah Palmer lies unconscious on the floor of her home. The record player, which had previously insisted that this is “a Wonderful World,” is now skipping endlessly in a silent groove. Leland Palmer stands before the mirror, adjusting his tie and carrying himself with calm and a confidence that is new and somehow disquieting. This is not the show-tunes-singing, antler-dancing grieving father we know. His wife lies nearby, an obvious wreck, and he seems to take no notice of her whatsoever. For the first time, the darkest of thoughts enters our minds: has Leland drugged his wife? That line of thinking makes some sense, since Sarah is still suffering from her loss – and yet it doesn’t feel right. The Leland we know wouldn’t leave her there like that. And that’s because this isn’t the Leland we know.

This is Bob, revealed at last.

Leland’s face literally changes, becoming Bob’s, then flickering back and becoming his own again. Leland Palmer is possessed by Bob’s inhabiting spirit.

And with that, Twin Peaks’ central mystery opens wide for us, offering up a darkness that, if you’re like me, is blacker and more terrible than anything we could have expected: Leland Palmer killed his daughter. And with that revelation, in a way that would have seemed impossible only seconds beforehand, an even darker truth rears up from the abyss: Leland Palmer destroyed his daughter long before her life was extinguished. We remember Cooper’s voice: “He was a threatening presence in her life from early adolescence. There are intimations of abuse, molestation. On a regular basis. He is referred to, on more than one occasion, as a friend of her father’s.” We remember Sarah’s words to Leland as he leapt onto his daughter’s coffin: “Don’t you ruin this too.” We remember Laura’s inner anguish, poured out into the pages of her secret diary – a soul in utter despair, made far older than her years when she was far too young. And in remembering, we experience unwanted revelation: Twin Peaks’ secret dark heart is incest – a transgression beyond all boundaries, a corruption total and irrevocable. Murder destroys the body, but Leland Palmer did more than destroy his daughter’s body; he arguably destroyed her soul. This, in and of itself, would be more than enough to make “Lonely Souls” into the most disturbing episode of the show to date. But Lynch is not content to leave us in quiet, disgusted revelation. He desires sacrifice. He wants us to see – no, to viscerally feel – what this really means.

We hear Maddie’s voice calling out before we see her: “Uncle Leland? Aunt Sarah? It smells like something’s burning!” Leland smiles, pulls surgical gloves from his coat pocket, and slips them on. Maddie steps into frame in two senses of the phrase: into the camera’s frame, and into the frame of the door leading to Leland/Bob. A harsh white spotlight illuminates her face – a light much like the one that has settled over Cooper in the Roadhouse. We share her sight as she takes in the room – the body of her unconscious Aunt, and the spooky calm of her now-gloved Uncle. As we watch with her, Leland vanishes, leaving Bob standing there in his place. This unholy transubstantiation occurs again, and it’s again Leland standing there. Maddie screams in fright, runs, and Leland pursues her with a look of ecstatic malevolence upon his face. David Foster Wallace’s words about Lynch’s conception of Evil have never felt so apt and on-point as they do here. Leland Palmer is, literally, possessed, and that possession seems to bring with it a near-sensual ecstasy that is utterly frightening to behold. But Lynch is not content to leave us here on a cliff-hanger, the image of Leland’s outstretched arms as he lunges forward and gives chase, hunting his Niece – the very image of his dead daughter.

Leland pursues Maddie into the Palmer living room, his image shifting to Bob’s, then back, then back again; a kind of living strobe light.  The spotlight remains, tracking this screaming girl as she attempts to find some semblance of safety in a place that should already be the very definition of safety. The home, the family, symbols of small town virtuousness, have been violated utterly. Bob crouches like an animal, hands outstretched, beckoning Maddie into his embrace. And then he’s Leland again, and he’s hitting her – hitting her in the face as the blood sprays and we rear back from our televisions as though WE’VE been struck, astonished by the intensity and unsparing brutality on display. Maddie falls back on the couch, her mouth bloody, mirroring the images of the demonic Laura we witnessed earlier in the season. But Lynch is not content to leave us here with that awful image, the image of Maddie bleeding and deadly afraid, assaulted by her very blood. He desires sacrifice.

Leland hauls Maddie to her feet in an obscene parody of an embrace – half-paternal, half-sexual – and proceeds to finally have the dance with his daughter that he’s been pining for since the show began. He swings Maddie in a circle, crying and holding her so tightly that she can barely breathe, and then becomes Bob again – a parasite in full feeding frenzy, kissing and sucking at her skin like a gleeful tick about to swell with its meal of fear. We flash back and forth, from Leland to Bob to Leland to Bob, as what seem to be the slowed-down sounds of roaring Lions fills the soundtrack and we witness truly animal behavior unleashed. This is perhaps the single most disturbing portion of the scene for me – the seeming dramatization of the incest that’s been implied, Leland/Bob kissing and holding his “daughter” (because, really, that’s who Maddie has become over the course of the show, a fact she admits herself to James) just before he takes her and smashes her head through glass, killing her. She falls to the carpet, bloodied and silent and still.

The revelation is complete.

Has there ever been a sequence of network television like this? A sequence that makes the viewer feel both physically and somehow spiritually filthy for having witnessed it? How was this allowed? How did it get past the Standards and Practices people? I have no idea. What I do know is that I have never seen anything like it. What I know is that watching this again leaves me feeling deeply unclean, yet not without admiration for what Lynch has accomplished. He has left us drained and frightened on a level that I’d argue is profound. He has lead us, unsuspectingly, to a place where metaphysical terror and moral revulsion meet. By answering the question of “who killed Laura Palmer,” Lynch and Frost have left us without any meaningful answers. Is Leland complicit in Bob’s actions? Did Leland “invite Bob in”? Did Bob simply barge in one day and set up shop in Leland’s soul? Was there a moral choice made? Or does this parasite, like its “real world” analogues, simply attach itself freely? Is there any protection against real Evil – not simply the literalized manifestation that Bob represents, but the very real Evil perpetrated by Leland against his own flesh and blood? Lynch’s unspoken answer is as merciless as this scene: No.

• And with that, we return to the Roadhouse, where Cooper, Truman, Log Lady, Bobby, and Donna all appear to experience the same engulfing sadness. They may not have witnessed a vision in the visual sense, but they have felt a great shadow pass across their very souls, and it has left its mark upon them. The senile old man (“Senor Droolcup”) who discovered Cooper’s wounded body at the beginning of the season makes a second appearance here, and his typically-addled state seems replaced by quiet compassion and a strange comprehension of what has occurred. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers to Cooper as, separately, Donna weeps, Bobby casts his eyes about as if seeking some small salvation, and Cooper stares up in troubled silence as the red curtains merge with his image and then subsume it completely.

This Week’s Twin Peaks Ephemera

Well, wasn’t that a cheery note to go out on. Let’s lighten the mood a bit before I leave you for the week. 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.

Last week I told you all about Fernando Reza (aka Fro), a graphic designer who creates compellingly-stark art prints. He kindly agreed to produce a Twin Peaks print in conjunction with Lost & Found, and that print is now available for your viewing and consuming pleasure. I’m a big fan of the imagery that Fro chose – the backdrop may look like a simple wash of reds and oranges, but at higher resolution you’ll notice that those are spotlighted red curtains hanging behind the silhouetted shapes of the Mill, the Great Northern and Ronette Pulaski’s terrible bridge. It’s a wonderfully quiet-yet-striking choice. Also terrific: the network of underlying “roots” that spread beneath the imagery, abstractly evoking the town’s secretive, knottily-convoluted nature and underlying darkness. The whole thing has a specificity that’s fun, but there’s an overall-abstractness that makes it visually-beautiful as far as I’m concerned.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a reproduction of the image:

I’ve already placed an order for mine, and you can do the same by visiting Fro Design Store. Support your fellow fans and the artistic impulse! This was a blast to shepherd, and it’s my hope that Fro will return for another print when Lost & Found moves on to our next cancelled television show. Once again: my sincere thanks to Fro for agreeing to design the print, and for being a very nice guy. I hope it’s enjoyed!

Best,

MMorse

Catch up on Lost & Found!

• Lost & Found: An Introduction, A Proposition, A Preponderance of Purpled Prose
• Lost & Found: And The Winner Is…
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S1, Pilot)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 1 & 2)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 3 & 4)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (Eps. 5 & 6)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S1, Ep. 7 & S2, Ep. 1)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S2, Ep. 2 & 3)
• Lost & Found: Twin Peaks (S2, Ep. 4 & 5)