Monday, September 04, 2017

‘Twin Peaks’ Season 3 Finale: The Curtain Call

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Kyle MacLachlan in the finale of “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Credit Suzanne Tenner/Showtime

Episodes 17 & 18

In May of 1990, ABC aired the “Twin Peaks” Season 1 finale, and frustrated viewers who’d expected the show’s creators David Lynch and Mark Frost to resolve the “Who killed Laura Palmer?” mystery. In June of 1991, “Twin Peaks” Season 2 also ended with more questions than answers, and stuck fans with a cruel twist, revealing that heroic FBI Agent Dale Cooper had been replaced by an evil twin. So if you were confounded by the way the third (and perhaps last-ever) “Twin Peaks” season wrapped up last night ... well, call it tradition. Whether by circumstance or intent, this has always been a TV drama that eschews tidy resolutions.

What makes Season 3’s sucker-punch especially powerful though is that it comes as something of a surprise. For the better part of an hour, the first half of the two-part finale seems poised to put a festive bow on nearly everything that’s come before, pleasing everyone who cheered last week when the ready-to-rock Agent Cooper emerged from a summer-long fog. But everything sours quickly at the end of the episode, and in the following one.

All in all, these were two mesmerizing hours of television, but because they follow Lynch’s usual dream-logic, they’re not always plain about their meaning. Here’s a nutshell interpretation of what they literally depict:

In the first hour, Cooper’s dark doppelgänger Mr. C is finally forced back to the Lodge that spawned him, thanks a combination of Lucy’s deadly marksmanship and Freddie Sykes’s supercharged punching power. Cooper then uses knowledge he’s apparently acquired during decades in limbo to seek a more lasting justice, by jumping back in time to prevent Laura Palmer from being killed. But while he does steer her away from the scene of her murder, the effort ends with Laura disappearing into the darkness, screaming in terror.

In the second hour, Cooper takes off after Laura, journeying with his former colleague Diane Evans (also now back to her real self) through one of the nebulous portals that dot the American landscape. They stop for the night at a motel, and in morning he wakes up to a goodbye note written from “Linda” to “Richard” — suggesting that both he and Diane slipped into new identities after passing through the wormhole. Cooper eventually finds someone in Odessa, Texas who looks like Laura but goes by the name Carrie Page. He tries to bring this woman “home,” but when they get to Twin Peaks they discover the Palmers’ old house is occupied by other people. Carrie becomes as panicked and soul-sick as Laura used to be when she was at that address. She screams again. And so “The Return” ends.

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I can only guess at what this all means, based on clues dropped throughout “Twin Peaks,” as well as in the prequel film “Fire Walk with Me.” Bear with me while I repeat some of what I think we know.

Gordon Cole explains that the mysterious “Judy” his old partner Phillip Jeffries talked about is an ancient entity, whose name is pronounced “joo-day.” This might be the same malevolence we’ve seen as “Bob,” inhabiting Leland Palmer and Mr. C. If so, he/she/it would be one of an array of otherworldly beings who’ve been exerting a crude influence over humanity, largely via dreams, portents, and doppelgängers. Other shadowy figures have included the Fireman, the Arm and the old lady sometimes called “Mrs. Tremond” or “Mrs. Chalfont”

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Frances Bay as Mrs. Tremond/Chalfont and Jonathan J. Leppell in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” Credit New Line Cinema

Which brings us to the show’s final minutes, where we find out that the Palmer home’s new owner (played by Mary Reber, who actually owns the real property) is named Alice Tremond, and that she bought the house from a Mrs. Chalfont. It’s possible the Palmer house itself is one of these “soft places” around the world, where humans and immortals pass back and forth, leaving scenes of violence and misery in their wake. This would explain why both Laura and Sarah Palmer were frequently plagued with terrifying visions while walking up and down their stairs.
When Cooper and Diane drove past the power line tower, he said things could be different. He pulled into one hotel with an older car, and...

It would also maybe explain why Cooper can’t fix everything by changing the past. We see a repeat of a few key scenes from the “Twin Peaks” pilot, altered so that Laura’s body is no longer “wrapped in plastic” by the lake. But despite these alterations, Laura’s old house still seems possessed by evil spirits, and her parallel universe life as Carrie Page isn’t much better than one she left behind. (In fact, when Cooper/Richard drops by Laura/Carrie’s apartment, there’s a freshly killed man on a chair in her living room.) “What year is it?” Cooper asks at the end, as if that’s going to make a difference — as if some miseries aren’t just threaded into the fabric of whatever universe he lands in.


There’s a lot more to deconstruct here, including multiple moments where characters seem to be waking up to the possibility that they’re actually fictional constructs. Cooper says goodbye to his FBI colleagues with a resolute, “See you at the curtain call,” like they’re all actors, preparing for their final scene. And at one point, he gets jarred out of his gung-ho persona for a second and a still shot of his stunned face remains faintly superimposed over the screen — as though Coop were standing back and watching himself play out a made-up TV story.

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All of this though raises a big question: Was this a satisfying way to end three months of television, with a sprinkling of metafiction and a hefty dollop of existential despair?

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Kyle MacLachlan in “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Credit Showtime

Personally, I loved it. There are plenty of moments in these last two episodes aimed at fans of the show: like Cooper calling the Twin Peaks police station to ask if the coffee’s on, or Lucy shooting Mr. C (then saying, adorably, “I understand cellular phones now!”), or the return of Julee Cruise to the roadhouse stage or the reprise/reimagining of scenes from the pilot and from “Fire Walk with Me.”

The best moments throughout “Twin Peaks: The Return” though could be enjoyed as pure televisual poetry, regardless of their larger meaning. Watching these two hours felt at times like falling into a trance. Lynch employs a lot of his best techniques and motifs: such as making his actors’ movements look unnatural by running the film backward, and “cracking” the image on the screen to reveal something beneath the surface. The branching reality recalls Lynch’s films “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Dr.,” where characters’ personalities, circumstances, and even names change from scene to scene.

Mostly though, this finale felt like a recalibration. In the recent documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life,” the director tells the story of how he started smoking, drinking and sneaking out at night after his family moved to Virginia when he was a teenager, and admits, “It was almost like I couldn’t control it.”

I thought about that during these last two episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” and especially when the Arm repeated a question that Audrey asked a few weeks back: “Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane?” For Lynch, that’s never really been the story. He’s spent much of his life and career preoccupied by the mysteries of compulsion, and fascinated by how there’s only a few degrees of difference between a good person and a bad one.

Like so many longtime “Twin Peaks” fans, Agent Cooper approaches the end of his adventure with the dogged belief that his mission has always been about avenging Laura Palmer, and preventing young women like her from being hurt in the future. But if “The Return” has made anything plain about Lynch and Frost’s vision for “Twin Peaks,” it’s that they see corruption and tragedy as inevitable, regardless of the time, place or generation. They do see the glow within people too, and the bonds we forge. But in a way that just makes the ends we all come to more heartbreaking.

So “satisfying” would be the wrong word to describe any “Twin Peaks” ending. But it’s not all bleak, either. Anyone looking for comfort should just know that at least there’ll always be another Cooper, in another one of his guises, working to see if this time he can make everything turn out all right. He just can’t help himself.

Extra Doughnuts:

• The finale clarifies that the One-Armed Man recreated a version of Dougie to reunite with Sonny Jim and Janey-E. We’re also reassured that Ben Horne has been informed about the whereabouts of his brother Jerry. But what was the deal with Audrey’s freakout at the roadhouse last week? Did Steven Burnett actually shoot himself in the woods? Will Becky be O.K.? We may never know the answers to any of these questions. For those annoyed by the elliptical nature of the finale, I’ll say that while I didn’t share your disgruntlement, I do think you’re probably justified in wondering whether every scene of the past eighteen hours has been “necessary,” per se.

• “David Lynch: The Art Life” will be available on a Criterion Collection Blu-ray on September 26th, and I highly recommended it. There’s a lot there that’ll resonate with “Twin Peaks” fans — including scenes of Lynch swilling wine just like Gordon Cole, and some home movie footage of his mother carrying a log. I’d also suggest that Lynch devotees track down the recent “Blue Velvet Revisted,” which compiles behind-the-scenes footage and interviews from the set of his 1986 movie masterpiece. Both docs are notable for how they reveal Lynch not as some alien weirdo but as a hard-working craftsman, always at his happiest when he’s making something.
NYT

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