on my way into The Return. the black+white symbolism from the original runs even stronger through this one, and Part 8 in particular seems to be pushing the idea that the two are one and the same. not only in being set in the 40s and 50s and being filmed in black and white, but also in the Woodsman character’s mysterious poem:
This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.
the container and the contained, the water and the well, the white and the black of the eye, are being conflated with each other. another character in this episode who doesn’t seem to hold any other significance mentions a zebra on the loose; a horse that is both white and black.
we’re also reminded of the black and white horse costume near the original series’ climax, and of the white horse symbolising death which has appeared in both the original series and The Return but is thus far yet to be contrasted with a black counterpart.
in episode 27 of Twin Peaks, a strange phenomenon begins to take hold of the town. residents begin to experience seemingly random trembling in their right hands; and there seems to be no logical pattern among the people afflicted by it.
the first we see experience the tremors is an unnamed woman enjoying a slice of the double R diner’s famous cherry pie.
two named characters are next; cooper’s hand begins to shake as he laments that his personal attraction to annie is impacting his professional life, while pete’s appendage acts up while he looks onward as audrey loses her virginity to her sweetheart jack.
at the very end of the episode the reason behind this epidemic seems to rear its head; the killer BOB is reemerging into the physical world right hand first. as bob has done in the past, he is presumably exerting his influence through the possession of human beings; and as the personification of the evil that men do, he is allowed access to people only during through moments of violence.
what allows bob to take control of cooper’s hand is obvious. the special agent’s worldly attraction to annie is beginning to supersede his ascetic attitude toward his work. he is thinking of the flesh when he needs to be thinking of the spirit.
the woman with the pie is stranger. not only is she a one note background figure, seen in this shot and never again, but she’s seen doing nothing more than the completely innocuous act of eating.
but the next time the episode shows us the double R diner, annie is in the middle of cleaning up a visceral red stain, no doubt left behind by some kind of bright red food, but evoking the image of a scene of violence nonetheless. and then immediately afterward cooper and annie share an embrace, knocking a set of plates onto the floor, dirtying the diner with even more red sauce.
several seconds pass as we watch crimson drip to the ground. a dramatic beat usually afforded to a shot of a corpse. the destruction and consumption of the diner’s food is explicitly being linked with “violent” acts of the flesh.
certainly the most concerning are the unfortunate implications this has for pete’s character, though. what it might mean that he is taken by the demon of violence as he watches the younger woman with her boyfriend is obvious.
and how could I forget to mention that The Return all but explicitly confirms that the beings of the white lodge (white house) exist on the layer above the story, with the giant in Part 8 acknowledging the viewer directly through the fourth wall and viewing the events of the episode on a project screen. I wonder what this says about the tv show within a tv show so omnipresent within the first two seasons… layers upon layers.
internet was out for a few days while i finished The Return, so i had some time to mull things over. i’ll try to churn out some of my thoughts on it over the next while.
obviously a lot of the thoughts buzzing around my head after the finale were about “Judy”. naturally, one of the first things i did when i got access to the wide web again was to surf around and see what other people’s thoughts were. maybe a mistake. i quickly found that most people had picked up on the same thing that i had, but that i was really hoping wasn’t true.
it seems pretty airtight that the ‘mother’ cooper needs to be wary of, banging on the walls of the strange zonespace room, is the same ‘experiment’ being watched for in new york, banging on the walls of the glass cube. this ‘experiment’ would appear to be the same creature that birthed BOB following the white sands nuclear test in 1945 (i.e. a mother). it makes perfect sense that this thing would be the thing depicted as a huge dark “owl” on hawk’s living map, and mr. c’s ace of spades card.
what bothers me is this idea that judy, presumably as the ultimate evil and therefore overarching villain of twin peaks’ cosmology, would also be laura’s mother sarah palmer.
i won’t pretend i don’t see any hints at all. if seasons 1 and 2 climaxed with the reveal that laura’s father killed her, it follows that season 3′s villainous ‘mother’ character would literally also be laura’s mother. sarah’s psychic nature does seem to reveal a dark source in The Return, and there is, of course, the scene wherein she turns to attacking laura’s image to consider.
but i’ll get my less academic misgivings out of the way first. the idea of a “female” spirit being twin peaks’ ultimate evil is bad enough on its own - BOB is “the evil that men do” above all else, and his hosts who make up the primary antagonistic forces of all three seasons are emblematic of anti-woman violence. to have this female evil be none other than thegrieving mother of the victim and the wife of the killer would be beyond out of line with twin peaks’ established moral thread.
more practically; sarah palmer as judy as twin peaks’ ultimate villain just doesn’t track within the logic of the series. one instance of grief stricken mania directed at a long dead daughter does not suddenly rewrite every other aspect of a character’s personality or history. the “white (horse) of the eyes” is demonstrably not sarah judith palmer “looking away” from the abuse of her daughter. within Fire, Walk With Me we see with our own eyes not only that sarah opposes her husband’s sometimes cruel treatment of their daughter, but that leland / BOB takes the active precaution of drugging her so that he can commit his evils without her interference. within The Return, too, the one instance in which sarah uses her powers for violent purposes, she’s defending herself from a man. if the entity that lives behind sarah’s face were judy, then it would be abundantly clear that judy is strongly against sexual violence.
without any of the added implications of frost’s books, my interpretation of the “frog moth” from part 8 was that it represented essentially a flesh world counterpart to BOB.
to me part 8′s extended atomic explosion sequence immediately evoked 2001: A Space Oddysey’s famous stargate sequence, and I think frost and lynch were turning kubrick on its head with BOB’s origins in this episode. while in the universe of 2001, it’s interdimensional alien benefactors who are responsible for human violence and ultimately the creation of the atom bomb, the monolith somehow providing the early ape with the idea to commit murder with a bone. but in part 8, the opposite seems to be true of the world of twin peaks; in finalising the creation of its ultimate weapon in 1945, humanity also allows the creation of the interdimensional spirit of human violence, and from the spawn of judy, BOB is born.
the vomiting child in part 11 i think is another, smaller-scale example of this. a child accidentally comes into possession of a gun through parental negligence, fires it, and chaos ensues. this vomiting child is another spirit of evil born from this chaos; a representation of violence born by the use of manmade weapons.
and if BOB is the “spiritual” consequence of the white sands nuclear test who “enters” people through possession, the frog moth is then the “physical” consequence of the explosion. crawling from an egg in the irradiated sands with a multitude of mismatched limbs which barely seem able to function the way they should, we are given the impression of something mutated; literally created by the radiation resulting from the blast. and an animal that literally, physically enters the bodies of humans by crawling in through their open mouths.
another big thing that i feel is really hurdling the idea that judy is somehow twin peaks’ big ultimate bad is the fact that she’s an owl. if we accept that the negative spirit depicted on hawk’s living map is judy, this is the logical conclusion; judy’s symbol seems to be a form of the owl cave petroglyph, which itself seems to represent an owl in flight.
wikia user Special Agent Dale Cooper’s opinion - as documented on the twin peaks wiki’s owl article - is that the owls act as ‘vessels’ for spirits like BOB; but my interpretation of episode 16′s finale scene was almost the opposite. as some unknown entity scurries around the forest floor, screen flush with violent red, an owl suddenly flies into frame from a bright white light; the owl is a spirit of the white lodge sent to retrieve a rogue spirit. that’s the role of the owl; a watcher.
The Secret History seems to agree more with the former interpretation. the owl is said to be the psychic representation of a large-eyed race of “grey aliens” with malevolent intentions and hailing from the black lodge, in opposition to the benevolent “nordic” race from the white lodge. my reason for dismissing this supposed discrepancy was at first to try to accept that lynch and frost’s versions of twin peaks would always fundamentally differ. majorly, Secret History and The Final Dossier seem content with the assumption that the white and black lodges are indeed simply two different “locations”, contrary to the series’ own implication that black and white are the same. but i think the books themselves hold clues that this so-called “black and white” interpretation of the world of twin peaks may be misleading. frost uses the twin earthly lodges of the masons and the bavarian illuminati as worldly analogues to the two spiritual lodges. but real-world masonic lodges contain a particular design element that surely inspired lynch’s depiction of the lodge; a black-and-white mosaic floor,
“emblematic of human life, checkered with good and evil.”
the phrase so central to twin peaks’ mystery is not “the owls are a force of good”, but it also isn’t “the owls are spirits of evil”. the owls are not what they seem. andso this needs to be followed through to its ultimate conclusion. judy is not what she seems.
malo’s comments on the conspiratorial tone of homestuck’s skaianet systems documentation give me pause on the very nature of the whole Secret History of Twin Peaks. the two texts are in essence the same concept; an attempt to draw all of human history into one web, connecting seemingly disparate dots across hundreds of years until they all spiral together into one central point. but The Secret History’s connection to conspiracy theory is perhaps even more explicit. frost spares no thread from the fabric he weaves; aliens, government coverups, the masons, the illuminati and crowley’s thelema are all among the supernatural phenomena apparently connected to the story of twin peaks.
a favourite theory among The Return’s audience is that the directors write certain scenes to poke fun at them; that certain characters act as audience surrogates, desperate for answers but receiving none. and now I have to wonder if this is the core of The Secret History. the whole book is a corkboard of red strings tied up with red strings, and indeed the introduction is framed in such a way to make the reader feel like they are the one doing the investigation; tammy is the audience surrogate, and the corkboard is a cautionary tale. this is how not to understand twin peaks. getting caught up in connecting all the tiny dots will just obscure the bigger picture from you. even if we can assume all the events detailed by the book really did happen, how are we to trust the conclusions that the authors reach? tammy’s attitude toward the unexplainable is always to try to ‘rationalise’ it; but the fact is that rationalising the things we already know will not always provide us with the answer. again, the central phrase to twin peaks’ mystery: things are not what they seem.
and on the topic of getting caught up in other people’s theorycrafting, i’ve been doing some more surfing around other people’s theories. it’s a filthy habit, i know, but the other day i came across something really simple that has me rethinking the whole way i’ve been approaching twin peaks. dale cooper and his FBI colleagues are part of the blue rose task force; they investigate cases similar to that of lois duffy, who was charged with the murder of her own tulpa.
leland palmer was a blue rose case. it was his doppelganger that killed laura palmer. which isn’t to say that leland is innocent of any crime; the fact is that we already know from hawk’s black lodge stories that a doppelganger is just another part of someone. their ‘shadow self’, representing the darkest parts of their soul, with which they are meant to come to terms on their way to the white lodge. The Return’s mr. c isn’t just a case of BOB ‘possessing’ cooper’s doppelganger. in truth BOB and the doppelgangers are intrinsically linked. BOB is the evil that men do, and our doppelgangers are the evil sides of our selves. BOB is inherently inside every single doppelganger. this has always been the question posed by BOB’s existence; were leland’s crimes really the result of possession by some spirit, or is BOB just representative of something that was truly evil about him? the doppelgangers merely universalise this conundrum.
it’s also easy to get caught up in the technicalities of what the ‘difference’ between a doppelganger and a tulpa is. i think things become a lot clearer when we accept that a doppelganger is just a kind of tulpa. doppelgangers, and as an extension the black lodge as a whole, are just psychic emanations of people; and that’s just what a tulpa is. the three coopers feint was in reality a double double cross. dougie jones was “created for a purpose”, but so was mr. c. both of them are tulpas of cooper, merely representing different components of his psyche.
i think this streamlines one of the first thought processes i kicked off when i started my most recent viewing of twin peaks - what’s up with the ongoing tv show within a tv show narrative? as i later pointed out, twin peaks itself is also a tv show within a tv show. and just as lodge spirits are ‘reflected’ as tulpas in the flesh world, so too can the Invitation to Love characters be considered tulpas of the main twin peaks cast. so by better understanding these characters as psychic reflections of each other, we might be able to build a better understanding of what role all these characters serve.
it’s taken me however long it’s been between reading homestuck and now to realise that a “stem” (as in what sollux lives on) is also a part of a “brain”
