Twin Peaks Rewatch 39: The Return, Part 5

[Persistence of 3]

>>I saw this theory being passed around last night which has now made me think he won't become Cooper until he retrieves what he lost in transitioning back into the real world, that being his shoes. The scene in this episode where he stares longingly at the statue's shoes kinda reinforces that, in my interpretation. Where would he get his shoes back you might ask?<<

 

I considered this as well but my answer to the question is Audrey. The 'missing' room key to The Great Northern is enroute back to Twin Peaks. I'm guessing that we'll discover that Agent Cooper's possessions (the ones left in his room) are still being held somewhere semi-forgotten, in storage because young Audrey Horne sentimentally refused to have them disposed of when Cooper failed to return to claim them. Or something like that.

[fellintooblivion]

14 hours ago, pyide said:

So the corpse with the missing head and the military classification on the prints was Major Briggs, as most assumed.

 

Did you watch the rest of the episode?

 

The Air Force said they have had people entering his prints into a search 16 times in the past 25 years.

 

I don't understand how you can take that as confirmation the body was Briggs' without some real willful ignoring of facts.

[pdotjpg]

RE: Lynch and female characters

 

I sort of put him in the same camp as Hitchcock and von Trier in the sense that there seems to be a great empathy for and fascination with women (in a pervy and detached way), and attempts to humanize these characters is often absolutely tone deaf. The guy's probably a lecher with an ego that lets him put whatever he wants on the screen without consideration for how it might be perceived - very typical of great, contentious directors. Also ties into his mean streak of exploiting physically deformed and odd-looking people, etc. He's not excused, but I've learned to take the good with the bad in his work.

[Gregalor]

1 hour ago, pdotjpg said:

Also want real Coop back, though the feeling isn't as strong after this episode as it was after the last. Does no one at work give a shit about this totally catatonic man? It's kinda implied by Naomi Watts that Dougie has experienced bouts of depression or something like that (he's also established to be an alchoholic?), but this is still stretching it.

 

It's becoming extremely distracting that he's made it this far. How has no one thought by this point that maybe he's had a stroke?

[LostInTheMovies]

19 minutes ago, pdotjpg said:

RE: Lynch and female characters

 

I sort of put him in the same camp as Hitchcock and von Trier in the sense that there seems to be a great empathy for and fascination with women (in a pervy and detached way), and attempts to humanize these characters is often absolutely tone deaf. The guy's probably a lecher with an ego that lets him put whatever he wants on the screen without consideration for how it might be perceived - very typical of great, contentious directors. Also ties into his mean streak of exploiting physically deformed and odd-looking people, etc. He's not excused, but I've learned to take the good with the bad in his work.

 

I think this is probably a fair enough description of the first half of his filmography (and, unfortunately, much of The Return so far). However, from Fire Walk With Me through Inland Empire the female characters tend to be centered and explored much more than the male ones. I'll be interested to see if The Return eventually works its way up to that or if that was only indicative of a certain phase in his career (having something to do, maybe, with his creative and personal partner for 15 years, editor/writer Mary Sweeney - EDIT: to clarify that timeline, they divorced in 2006).

[marblize]

13 minutes ago, fellintooblivion said:

 

Did you watch the rest of the episode?

 

The Air Force said they have had people entering his prints into a search 16 times in the past 25 years.

 

I don't understand how you can take that as confirmation the body was Briggs' without some real willful ignoring of facts.

 

Major Briggs's head floats around space while his torso walks the earth, leaving fingerprints, planting macabre clues - this time in the form of another torso: Dougie's.

 

As most assumed.

 

(I had actually considered last week that the corpse might be Dougie's by some weird timefuck - I edited it out of my reply in the e4 thread because I was embarrassed by the thought, lol. it's still probably not Dougie's but the ring inscription made my eyes widen slightly)

 

[SuperBiasedMan]

This is a fairly baseless thought, but I wonder if Dougy was a real person that DoppelCoop basically reformed into CloneCoop. Dougy seems to have a life that lasts quite a while, but if the murder is involved in creating DougyCoop, maybe that means that Dougy was just transformed/replaced relatively recently?

[LostInTheMovies]

I loved this episode. I've been dazzled so far but in a more cerebral way, this was the one where the emotions started kicking in more. Interestingly enough, I also feel that way about the course of the original Twin Peaks and about Lynch's body of work as a whole - the early parts are impressive, polished, and brilliant but it's the later stuff that really hits me on a gut level.

 

I wrote up my response here (I've also covered 1/2, 3, and 4), and have slowly begun making my way through the recent forum posts, hopefully to catch up soon. My very own "Twin Peaks Rewatch: The Return"

[Gamebeast23456]

1 hour ago, LostInTheMovies said:

 

I think this is probably a fair enough description of the first half of his filmography (and, unfortunately, much of The Return so far). However, from Fire Walk With Me through Inland Empire the female characters tend to be centered and explored much more than the male ones. I'll be interested to see if The Return eventually works its way up to that or if that was only indicative of a certain phase in his career (having something to do, maybe, with his creative and personal partner for 15 years, editor/writer Mary Sweeney).

 

As a director and a visual artist before that, it makes sense that Lynch is fixated on the specifics of an image, and a particular image that has gotten him into trouble with SJWs like me is that of beautiful (almost always white) young women. However, I do tend to agree that his ideas on representing women have evolved, at least depending on how important to his story it is. I mean, it's hard for me to watch Mulholland Drive and not think that this writer is not being thoughtless about the images he constructs and knows we are also going to think about them. He's certainly not above sexism in any way, and his tendencies never disappeared, but his relationship to female characters (really most social issues) is, perhaps, fittingly confusing. 

[PinkCrayon]

Cooper's longing look at the statue's shoes was strangely sad.

[Filmigirl]

Hello all,

 

I binge listened to the podcast at the beginning of 2016 and loved it and now that I finally gave in and signed up for a Showtime trial yesterday to get the new episodes, I look forward to rapping with ya in real time.

 

The Alex Jones Jacoby Rant Show as a replacement for Invitation to love is GENIUS. Politics has become our national soap opera so it makes sense.

 

With the music, it will be interesting to see if the shuffle begins to come back more as Cooper returns to "himself". It would be interesting to see some of the comedic ("comedic"?) scenes at the station house with the music added to see if our reaction is different. One of the things I always really disagreed with the hosts with was on Badalamenti's score. I love the score. I used to have the cassette tape (real OG here) and played it until it wore out. That said, the sparse use of music in the new series is quite effective, with the possible exception of the station house comedy scenes.

 

[LostInTheMovies]

A great comment on Reddit points out the social/class critique of Dougie/Coop's situation:

 

There's something that feels very "fifties" about the form this critique takes (I also think it's probably heavily due to Frost as well as Lynch) - right down to the contrast between the suited salesman and the cowboy statue. I love the ambivalence of that image and how many layers it contains. Not simply the contrast of a mundane present with a mythic past (that probably never quite existed like that) but also an implicit recognition, with the consistent focus on the gun, that both past and present were formed through and linked by an unspoken violence. And then there's the poignant mirroring between this frozen, incommunicative statue and Dougie's own state, but also its heroic status and his own humble standing: it's both an embodiment of his condition and an aspirational ideal. And, just on the story level, the shoes!

[pyide]

57 minutes ago, fellintooblivion said:

 

Did you watch the rest of the episode?

 

The Air Force said they have had people entering his prints into a search 16 times in the past 25 years.

 

I don't understand how you can take that as confirmation the body was Briggs' without some real willful ignoring of facts.

 

Well the prints that were blocked were from the headless body, so I guess it was more confirmation that the military block was related to Briggs, than the body actually being Briggs.
And I must have been distracted during that scene inititally because I thought they said it was the second hit on the prints in years, definitely not the case on a rewatch. Woops! Not even close!

 

The Colonel also said it's possibly another wild goose chase, but if it is real this time, they have to alert the FBI. Seems like obvious foreshadowing to me but nothing is that simple in this show.

[pdotjpg]

25 minutes ago, LostInTheMovies said:

 

I think this is probably a fair enough description of the first half of his filmography (and, unfortunately, much of The Return so far). However, from Fire Walk With Me through Inland Empire the female characters tend to be centered and explored much more than the male ones. I'll be interested to see if The Return eventually works its way up to that or if that was only indicative of a certain phase in his career (having something to do, maybe, with his creative and personal partner for 15 years, editor/writer Mary Sweeney - EDIT: to clarify that timeline, they divorced in 2006).

 

The female characters in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire certainly were centered, and it was clear that Lynch's allegiance was with them, but don't they feel more like a conduit for the guy's ideas about women, rather than honest, realistic representations? In this sense I think the von Trier comparison is particularly apt - I get the same vibe from, like, Dogville or Breaking the Waves.

 

I do agree about FWWM, though. Maybe that was handled with more tact due to the fact it touches on an actual, real life issue? Whereas the stuff that came after were these ethereal, heady movies about movies with basically no grounded characters (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in particular being weird remixes of noir tropes and of each other).

 

Idunno, probably don't have anything else to add to the topic. It's always equal parts fascinating and disheartening to look at this side of Lynch's works.

[marblize]

18 minutes ago, LostInTheMovies said:

There's something that feels very "fifties" about the form this critique takes (I also think it's probably heavily due to Frost as well as Lynch) - right down to the contrast between the suited salesman and the cowboy statue. I love the ambivalence of that image and how many layers it contains. Not simply the contrast of a mundane present with a mythic past (that probably never quite existed like that) but also an implicit recognition, with the consistent focus on the gun, that both past and present were formed through and linked by an unspoken violence. And then there's the poignant mirroring between this frozen, incommunicative statue and Dougie's own state, but also its heroic status and his own humble standing: it's both an embodiment of his condition and an aspirational ideal. And, just on the story level, the shoes!

 

This is cool.

 

I also read Cooper's second trip to the statue as him feeling a little bit of recognition with the gun-pointing gesture - his past as an Agent obviously.

[LostInTheMovies]

9 minutes ago, pdotjpg said:

 

The female characters in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire certainly were centered, and it was clear that Lynch's allegiance was with them, but don't they feel more like a conduit for the guy's ideas about women, rather than honest, realistic representations?

 

First half of MD, probably so; second half has more of a nuanced, naturalistic FWWM vibe I think. By the time Camilla is taking Betty up the hill, it feels much more about two individual characters whose womanhood informs but doesn't exclusively define their identity vs. the archetypes they seem to be playing earlier in the film. In a similar vein, Lost Highway very much revels in the dynamic you point out but from a much more critical/conscious viewpoint that makes it clear just how much of a construct it is. Inland Empire also relies heavily on a heroine's subjectivity (EDIT: and I think I've heard that Laura Dern was very involved in the evolution of some of that material, though I'm not so sure, she certainly was on the record as saying she had no idea what any of it was about so there's that!) - considering it was his last feature and also stars Laura Dern (who may just end up being the first fully-fleshed-out female character of The Return) I think it may end up being a key comparison piece.

 

With all this in mind, Lynch's approach thus far is rather baffling. I wonder if it's by design or just reflective of where he's at.

 

 

[LostInTheMovies]

35 minutes ago, Filmigirl said:

The Alex Jones Jacoby Rant Show as a replacement for Invitation to love is GENIUS. Politics has become our national soap opera so it makes sense.

 

 

Great point.

[LostInTheMovies]

7 hours ago, Tirranek said:

- Lastly, it's interesting to have this meet or defy expectations over a longer period of time. It's different from his films where those questions are contained in a couple of hours, and everyone discusses the whole thing afterwards.

 

 

 

This is key to me, as somebody who missed Twin Peaks the first time round and watched it all in a short period, without discussing it with anyone, the first time.

[Gamebeast23456]

It feels like there two to three axes of discussion in these forums and it's great! Personally, I prefer talking themes and the more interprative side, but it's also interesting to hear from people who are interested in talking about the plot/lore. To be honest, I wish I had that kind d of focus, it seems like there's some fun detective work going on.

 

Also, because these threads are my Lynch discussion platform of choice, I really need to shamelessly plug my summer project, Fox Vs. Lynch, where I watch (or re-watch) every DL feature chronologically and explore ways that they are about real human emotions and stuff: https://foxvslynch.tumblr.com/

[LostInTheMovies]

14 minutes ago, Gamebeast23456 said:

It feels like there two to three axes of discussion in these forums and it's great! Personally, I prefer talking themes and the more interprative side, but it's also interesting to hear from people who are interested in talking about the plot/lore. To be honest, I wish I had that kind d of focus, it seems like there's some fun detective work going on.

 

Also, because these threads are my Lynch discussion platform of choice, I really need to shamelessly plug my summer project, Fox Vs. Lynch, where I watch (or re-watch) every DL feature chronologically and explore ways that they are about real human emotions and stuff: https://foxvslynch.tumblr.com/

 

Awesome! When I got back into Twin Peaks a few years ago, I watched Lynch's work chronologically for the first time and it felt so revelatory. The evolution of his work often gets overlooked in favor of the consistency of motifs, so this approach is highly recommended.

[purps]

Speaking of Alex Jones, Lynch was on his show back around when Inland Empire came out.

 

 

 

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup

[Frohike]

Anyone notice that Sonny Jim blinked backwards?

[Nappi]

2 hours ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

This scene in the bar was so distressing because of how the women were shocked and taken aback, but they neither called for help nor tried to fully break out of the dude's grip. It seemed like they were resigned to the idea that he can get away with this so they just let it happen.

 

2 hours ago, marblize said:

And the way it just ended without resolution, with his hand around her throat. His threats felt a bit "Do you wanna play with fire, little boy?" (I'm not actually making the connection beyond vibes though)

 

Yeah, that scene was super uncomfortable for these reasons. Very well put together, but I cannot take much more in one episode.

 

I wonder many keywords (owl, coffee, gun, agent...) Cooper still needs to find before he is able to return to normal.

[Vegas]

1 hour ago, purps said:

Speaking of Alex Jones, Lynch was on his show back around when Inland Empire came out.

 

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup

 

LYNCH: "there are questions, and I don't have the answers"

JONES: "Is it your instinct?"

LYNCH: "Instinct means I'm hungry and I want to eat. Intuition is the thing."

JONES: "ahh, yes."

 

God damn it.

[Jackpeep]

14 hours ago, Gattman said:

Did anyone else catch the Mulholland Dr. and Wild at Heart references?

No, what were they?