Stewart Gardiner joins Agent Cooper on a wild ride as David Lynch pushes Twin Peaks beyond space, time, and the boundaries of television.
By Stewart Gardiner // Agent Cooper is falling through space. He was in the Lodge, then he was in New York. Now he is falling through the interstices between the two worlds once more. Cooper drops out of the sky onto the balcony of an industrial structure. It sits amidst a vast ocean. Purple light bathes all. Lynch’s beloved reds and blues together constitute purple. Doctor Jacoby says that his red and blue lenses “tend to give ‘reality’ a slightly purple tint” (The Secret History of Twin Peaks). That would be putting it mildly here.
I consider the Red Room to be part of the Lodge. Whether that means it is the Black Lodge is open to further discussion. Sarah Palmer channels an unknown individual during the season 2 finale. They talk to Major Briggs in reverse speech. “I’m in the Black Lodge with Agent Cooper.” Mr C says that he must return to the Black Lodge. What of the White Lodge however? Perhaps the Black and White are one and the same; a person entering the Lodge determines its condition based on what they bring with them.
The Color Purple
Glastonbury Grove is the gateway to the Lodge. Passing through the curtains is therefore passing over the threshold and into the Lodge itself. The Red Room is many rooms, a series of shifting realities. The infinite portrayed in forms (barely) understandable to the human mind. All of that is to say that the Lodge is a vast world rather than a single series of rooms. Which brings me back to the beginning of part 3.
The Purple Room is unlike anything else yet seen in Twin Peaks. It goes by different rules, which initially leads one to believe that Agent Cooper is somewhere else entirely. The first woman does not speak in recognizable language. The second woman talks in reverse speech. This at least suggests the Purple Room is yet another part of the Lodge. Cooper is going on a journey and this manifestation of the Lodge reflects his transition from one world to the next.
Time Interrupted
It is a transitional space. Electricity represents the intercourse between worlds in Fire Walk With Me. So too here. There is a constant hum of electricity in the Purple Room. This is the way out for Agent Cooper and it is as if he is already within the electrical current.
Agent Cooper finds himself in a room lit with a fireplace. An eyeless woman is there with him. The passage of time stutters backwards and forwards as Cooper tries to reach the woman. “Where is this? Where are we?” he asks. He no longer has the understanding that he had in the opening scene of the premiere; that black and white scene may very well take place later. Cooper is currently on his journey towards enlightenment. The eyeless woman replies to him in breathy bursts, sounds that defy the conventions of language as we know it. The POV also shifts – Cooper looks over and is apparently looking at himself from a distance. This recalls the late scenes of 2001, although Kubrick’s cuts have a permanence in that they serve the forward passage of time while distorting it.
There is a terrifying banging from outside. Something is trying to get in and it’s the primal stuff of dreams. The eyeless woman gestures Agent Cooper to be quiet – she cannot see but she certainly hears the danger. A machine on the wall draws Cooper’s attention. Its design might be described as weird industrial, like something out of Lynch’s Dune. An alternative reality Victorian future device. The number “15” is displayed on the front of the machine. Cooper tries to get near it but something pushes him back. Is it the machine that is interrupting time in the room? Cooper cannot get close enough. Not yet. Something needs to happen first.
Time and Relative Dimension in Lodge Space
The eyeless woman takes Cooper outside via a door and a ladder. They climb out of a metal box with a misshapen protuberance. It all has a purple glow to it. The Purple Room is apparently bigger on the inside. Although the outside is vast too. Recalling the Man in the Planet from Eraserhead, the eyeless woman pulls a lever. The protuberance electrocutes her then throws her off into space. The metal box goes dark.
Did she switch the room off? Not quite. She altered its state by pulling the lever. Cooper will discover this is the case when he climbs back inside. But before that…. The giant head of Major Briggs floats on by saying: “Blue Rose”. Wow.
Where is My Mind?
Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks explains that Mr C visited Major Briggs before leaving town. In part 4, Bobby Briggs states that: “Cooper was the last person to see my father alive.” Major Briggs is now in Lodge space cosmic-speaking Gordon Cole’s case designation for the unexplainable. The fact that it is only his head is significant. After all, headlessness would seem to be a running theme this season.
Tracey and Sam have their heads mutilated to the point of absence by the manifestation in the glass box. The dark man two cells down from Hastings vanishes – except his head, which floats off. A librarian has her head removed; the crime scene includes the body of a man. Forensics pull prints from the body but the man’s identity is a military secret. We’ve seen Major Briggs’s disembodied head. Is that his body? And if so, has Mr C got a walk-in freezer where he has been storing it for 25 years? More likely, perhaps, that the Major was alive until recently.
Final thought on headlessness for the moment: losing one’s head is a common enough description of the effects of Lynch’s work.
My Mother’s Coming
Cooper climbs back inside the metal box and finds that the Purple Room has changed. The quality of the light is different. There is notably a blue rose on a table behind Cooper.
A different woman (credited as American Girl) is sitting in front of the fire. Phoebe Augustine played Ronette Pulaski in the original and fascinatingly also appears here. The American Girl talks in reverse speech, strengthening the idea that we are still in the Lodge. She looks at her watch. It is 2:52. Something is about to happen.
Cooper instinctively moves towards the machine. It now has the number “3” on it. He pushes against the invisible barrier and his head comes away smoking.
“When you get there… you will… already be there,” the American Girl tells him.
The banging from outside starts up again.
“You’d better hurry… my mother’s coming.”
Cooper pushes his head through the barrier and it is stretched out and smokes black smoke. He floats through into the machine, face down. His shoes do not go with him.
For a Purpose
It is 2:53. At the same time (253, time and time again, Laura told Cooper in the premiere), Mr C is fighting the call back to the Lodge. He is doing everything in his power to hold back from vomiting. (When he later does vomit, it is Garmonbozia he throws up – and there is a lot of it – that “pain and sorrow” which takes the form of creamed corn in Twin Peaks).
Cut to Rancho Rosa. A sad sack version of Cooper is sitting in a house with a prostitute called Jade. “Dougie, what is wrong with your arm?” she asks him. “I think it fell asleep,” he says. He is wearing the Owl Cave ring on the hand of the numb arm. Teresa Banks’s arm went numb. She too was in possession of the Owl Cave ring. The ring is jade. Jade is Dougie’s companion. Surely no coincidence.
Jade takes a shower and Dougie vomits painfully onto the floor. There is a snap! and Dougie vanishes. “What the fuck was that?” shouts Jade.
Dougie briefly appears against red drapes in front of Mr C’s car. Then Dougie is sitting in a chair in the Red Room. Mike is standing by him.
“I feel funny. What’s happening to me?”
“Someone… manufactured… you.”
“What?”
“For a purpose… but… I think now… that’s been fulfilled.”
“It has?”
Dougie’s hand starts shrinking, as if melting away. The Owl Cave ring falls to the floor and bang! his head is but flames of black smoke. He burns away to a tiny golden ball.
Spark Plugs
Flames and black smoke pour out of the electrical sockets in the house where Dougie was. Cooper manifests from the black smoke. Not only isn’t he wearing his shoes, but the pin from his suit jacket is missing. (Thanks to Rob Perrin for bringing this significant detail to my attention.) He was wearing it in the Red Room but wasn’t wearing it in the black and white scene – bringing the when of that sequence into question once again.
Cooper has returned to the world, but has also lost his faculties. Despite the humor in these scenes it is really upsetting to witness Cooper the great and intuitive detective stripped of his selfhood. He is utterly childlike, mimicking words and snippets of phrases – “Call for help”, “Far from here”, “Or night”. His repetition of phrases and mannerisms recall the old bellhop. Cooper leans over awkwardly to point and it reminded me of the old bellhop’s movements. The bellhop was definitely childlike. Could he have spent so much time the Lodge that he could no longer function adequately in the real world?
Alt-Cooper
The Cooper-as-Dougie scenario is like North By Northwest twisted back to front and turned inside out. Cooper urinates for the first time in probably 25 years. It is at first bewildering and appalling to him. Then it is absolute relief and a kind of joy. “There’s nothing quite like urinating in the open air,” Cooper once said on a camping trip with Major Briggs. There’s nothing quite like urinating full-stop it would seem.
Cooper always took such delight in the world around him. In part 4 we see him start to take delight again. His childlike wonder comes to the surface. It’s as if we’re getting to see how Agent Cooper became Agent Cooper. This is his future past origin story.
Kafkaesque
Gordon Cole has a portrait of Franz Kafka on his wall! How appropriate is that? And not just because David Lynch long wanted to film The Metamorphosis. Kafka is surely the patron saint of blue rose, Cole’s investigative specialty. The temptation to write more about Kafka and Lynch is strong, but I shall resist.
Gordon and Albert’s scene at the end of part 4 sums up the experience of new Twin Peaks so far. Cole has his hearing aid turned up to the max and he momentarily speaks for the audience:
“Albert, that sound you just made with your feet is like a knife in my brain.”
The good sort of knife in the brain feeling of course.
“Albert, I hate to admit this, but I don’t understand this situation at all.”
“No.”
“Do you understand this situation, Albert?”
“Blue rose.”
“It doesn’t get any bluer.”
That gets right to the heart of the beautiful and mysterious nature of Twin Peaks: The Return. We’re only four hours in and things can only get stranger.
Dictaphone Blues
Cooper has reappeared. But the Cooper that Agents Tamara Preston, Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield see is the wrong one. Mr C isn’t even acting like himself. There is something very wrong going on.
“Albert, before we do anything else we need one certain person to take a look at Cooper.”
“I’m right with you.”
“Do you still know where she lives?”
“I know where she drinks.”
My second viewing of part 4 was with my wife. She turned to me after this exchange and spoke a single name, which was Badalamenti music to my ears: “Diane,” she said. Diane. My brain lit up (with knives!) and I responded with a name of my own: “Laura Dern.” The name of the blue rose.