Childe MMorse To The DARK TOWER Came

 

 

A pattern has emerged. Why, I wonder, does this keep happening?

I'm not consciously bucking convention for your clicks. I'm not playing the role of self-styled trash iconoclast. I may, however, be a man with questionable taste as regards a certain strain of Hollywood filmmaking. That, and/or I have a pronounced tendency to enjoy weird, messy movies which few others seem to enjoy, at least at first blush. Or both! Probably I'm both! Either way, I am happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to The Dark Tower even though seemingly no one else did*. Also, I have no idea whether I will enjoy it a second time or if you will enjoy it at all. Judging by the reviews, you probably will not? Aren’t you glad you clicked this review?

*Technically me, plus four RT-approved critics: Owen Gleiberman, Victoria McNally, Dan Mecca, and Mike Reyes.

I've been a fan of King's epic magnum opus since the publication of the second book in the series in paperback, waaaaay back in the ancient era of 1989. I've read the series, the novella, the Concordances, the graphic novels, and every King book that connects to the Tower saga. But I never believed that The Dark Tower would actually be a movie. Moreover, I’ve never really believed that The Dark Tower would be a decent movie. The lead up to the film’s release, with its multiple date changes, lack of a strong marketing push and, for that matter, any trailers until two months before the film's release, not to mention the absence of buzz and the reports of disastrous early screenings, all but confirmed that I was right. The reviews, which were unleashed last night on hopeful fans of the books like plague rats on unwary babies, made things definitive: The Dark Tower is a bad movie. A flat balloon. A total disappointment. A banal wreck of the Hesperus that has managed to score more poorly than Batman v. Superman, formerly the poster child for Movies That No One In Their Right Mind Would Defend.  

So of course I enjoyed it.

 

 

Mind you, the movie on screen isn't actually The Dark Tower - not as King wrote it. It's a weirdo amalgamation of Dark Tower elements that's remarkably out of step with current adaptation trends, far more reminiscent of past decades of film adaptations in how cavalierly it plunders the source material in order to craft a "Hollywood version." On a first viewing The Dark Tower is an appealing throwback to the kind of mid-budget, overly serious, semi-to-genuinely ambitious fantasy films made in the 1980s; the sort of films I tended to stumble over as a child via friends or cable and that I very much enjoyed for their feeling tactile and a bit dog-eared; as much because of as in spite of their flaws and absurdities. The ragged edges and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach are part of the appeal. So too the flirtations or outright dalliances with camp. I want to rewatch The Dark Tower on slightly degraded VHS. I want to do a double feature with, say, Highlander or Willow or something. THAT'S the vibe this movie gives off, and for some reason I'm okay with that on first viewing despite this movie in no real way resembling the books that made me fall in love with these stories.

As a book series The Dark Tower is very weird and messily constructed and sometimes very silly and embarrassing (This is a saga containing a bizarre and totally unneeded reconstruction of the Emerald City, as well as Doctor Doom robots which throw Harry Potter snitches at people, to name just two examples). Those qualities were and are part of the appeal. The Dark Tower as a movie feels similarly messy and silly and weird, and if it isn't 100% clear, I like messy and silly and weird. These things unironically appeal to me. I want Matthew McConaughey's Evil Villain to be in charge of a giant death-ray that's powered by unwilling psychic children who live in a totally unexplained compound on top of a mesa in another world. I want to see him use this death-ray right away, with as little explanation as possible. Yes, please. I want homeless people living in NYC who are secretly refugees from that unexplained compound, and I want inexplicable sci-fi portals leading into the kitchens of Chinese restaurants, and I want Dennis Haysbert intoning the Gunslinger's Creed very seriously, and I want battles with Todash monsters samidst rusting theme park equipment, and I want demons made of floorboards and an overweight guy from the Sombra organization leaping like a monkey over NYC rooftops and and and and and….

A lot of very smart, very cool people saw something crushingly mediocre and/or unforgivable when they watched The Dark Tower. They're not wrong. If you're a Tower junkie - a longtime Constant Reader - you're probably going to hate the movie. However, here is what I saw as a longtime fan of King's series: a purposefully stripped-down (far too stripped down), leanly propulsive introduction to Jake Chambers, Roland Deschain, Walter Padick (aka The Man in Black), as well as the concept of the Tower as the hub of the multiverse. It's not a good adaptation of the books, but it's an approach that functions as a quasi-sequel to the books I've dearly loved while also coming across as its own bizarre and wounded beast. A number of reviews have complained that the plot is incomprehensible. Very possibly my love for and knowledge of the source material has made it impossible for me to see that incomprehensibility, but it seemed fairly straightforward to me, collapsing an absurdly overstuffed mythology into a story that fits a single film: The Tower stands at the center of all worlds, keeping them safe. The Man in Black wants to bring the Tower down. Doing so will let a bunch of demons and darkness into the universe. He wants to use Jake to do it, since Jake’s strong in The Shine, a powerful psychic ability that can be harnessed to break the Tower. Roland, formerly a protector of the Tower, doesn’t care about any of that now, doesn’t see the point in battling a darkness he can’t individually conquer, and only wants vengeance for the life of his father. Jake meets him and helps him broaden his mind and open his heart a little.

 

That’s the film, easily understood to my mind, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong in concept with limiting the story's initial scope and making clear the stakes involved in order to welcome the 90% of people who have never read King’s Dark Tower books. Nor, for some reason, do I have any issue with their taking extensive liberties here despite my longstanding love of this series. I never felt like I couldn't understand what I was seeing. I didn’t feel like the film as a whole was hopelessly disjointed and broken. I didn’t feel as though the leads were sleepwalking through the film or betraying the source material.

 

 

McConaughey brings a grimly purposeful emptiness to the role of Walter, the Man in Black, Roland's ageless nemesis and the more he strutted around like a Nihilist Peacock who just does not give a fuck about anything, the more I bought into that emptiness. Walter’s casual sadism isn't showily Evil, it's bored. He’s bored, and he wants out; out of the universe, out of life, eager for an end to all things, and McConaughey’s emptiness sells that eagerness. Also, hearing an actor of McConaughey's caliber intone very seriously about his magic powers (or rather, his “magicks”) is deeply weird and dopey but also really satisfying? This is where the camp elements of the film – mostly centered around McConaughey and his band of sycophants – simply clicked for me. McConaughey casually cooking up some chicken while wearing an apron, right before he murders two people is just goofy as fuck, and (to my twisted mind) a total hoot. McConaughey rolling around multiple worlds, telling people in a Very Serious Voice to “stop breathing,” which they then promptly do, is blackly hilarious and campy as all get out. I can’t be the only one who enjoys that sort of thing, can I?

 

 

As for Roland himself Idris Elba goes minimalist, as he should, while bringing interesting flickers of emotion to the surface over the course of the film – like flecks of mica in granite. I particularly liked the flash of quiet madness across his face at the thought that Jake might be one of Walter’s tricks. As someone who has held Roland Deschain in my head for over a quarter of a century I thought Elba did solid work in introducing King’s most complicated creation. The movie's script lets him down by eliding entirely over the flashbacks that gave the character depth in the first Dark Tower book, but that's not Elba's fault. He's got charisma to burn, and he fits the role like a well-worn glove. There were outcries when Elba was cast, since Roland is very clearly a white man in the books (and that fact is an actual plot point for a good part of the second novel). I don't care. Elba embodies Roland's laconic stoicism and his wounded heart quite well, say thankee.

 

 

The big surprise is Tom Taylor, playing young Jake Chambers. He’s saddled with the most thankless and the most precarious role, and he does shockingly good work with what's on the page and more importantly with what is not on the page (which is, I presume, a lot). He’s gratifyingly authentic as Jake, and he elevates the film around him simply by feeling like a real kid from New York City, absorbing everything the film throws at him. Taylor and Elba have solid chemistry, and while I would be very surprised at this point if there’s ever a sequel I would genuinely enjoy seeing them play off of one another again.

 

Sure, yes, there are lots of problems. For one, the scenes with Fran Kranz fiddling around with portal technology and McConaughey’s death-ray feel like the most pedestrian scenes in the film. Then again, I sat through multiple, duller (and seemingly lengthier), scenes of The Red Skull and Arnim Zola standing around talking about developing death-ray technology without condemning Captain America: The First Avenger in the entirety. It wasn’t any harder to do that here. For another, the script is as mentioned a throwback to the way Hollywood USED to adapt genre properties - namely, however the hell they wanted, and damn the fans - and while I enjoyed the film for what it was (again, a throwback to 80s fantasy films ala Highlander or Krull) the script isn't great. More importantly, the elimination of the flashbacks contained in the first Dark Tower novel means that Roland himself isn't as complicated or as interesting as he would be if we saw more of his harsh and unforgiving, melancholy upbringing. The film's leanness lets Roland down in this respect and that's a bummer. Thirdly, the script as it appears on the screen leans too heavily on educating the audience via exposition as opposed to letting us puzzle things out. That's a shame, but there is - to my genuine surprise - ZERO prolonged voiceover explaining things to us. That's a plus.

 

Finally and relatedly, to those of us who may or may not have scrutinized every inch of trailer footage and who've noticed the film's running time, it’s fairly obvious that great big hunks of the film were excised. Despite feeling like I got a fast-paced, full story from the film and despite really liking the experience of a genre film that clocks in at under two hours (we could all do with more movies that last an hour and a half), I still wanted more. My biggest issue with The Dark Tower on first watch is that it simply isn't long enough. It isn't that I wanted more action. It's that I wanted the film to relax more, to breathe despite McConaughey’s commands to the contrary, to luxuriate in some longer conversations and some wordlessness and more weirdness. It is highly doubtful that we will ever see any sort of Deluxe Director’s Cut Edition of the film and that feels like a shame, because another 20 minutes of Jake and Roland making their way through Mid-World together would definitely enrich my experience.

 

Where was this?

That looks like a door from Drawing of the Three! Where was this?

Oh, hey, a depiction of the Tower's beams! Where was this?

Say hey, where was this?

Where dis?

 

The Dark Tower is not the movie I had in my head, at all, but then I honestly wonder whether it really could be. Not theoretically, in a Best of All Possible Worlds game, as a prestige HBO series (Lord, how I wish...) or a three-hour Lord of the Rings-style epic that's faithful to the first novel (Which would also be wonderful..), but as a film that is actually financed and filmed and put into theaters by the same companies currently trying to build out a hundred different cinematic universes. Maybe that makes me a cynic, but hey, I’m the one pointing to the positives in a movie currently sitting at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes*, so clearly I’ve got SOME optimism in me.

*This score positions The Dark Tower as “worse” than Baywatch in the eyes of those poor souls who think of RT’s aggregated “scores” as some kind of critical Final Word. It similarly positions The Dark Tower as more reviled than The Oogieloves and the Great Balloon Adventure, and that is fucking insane.

The Dark Tower is not the second coming of The Fellowship of the Ring. We're all bummed about that. It is, however, a perfectly serviceable and surprisingly enjoyable if unfortunately truncated and bizarrely loose introduction to a very weird, very complicated, very goofy, very niche property that I have loved unabashedly for over a quarter of a century. Much like the first book of King’s series it is functional, but not extraordinary.

 

It took King writing The Drawing of the Three for the world of the Dark Tower to come to full, satisfying, exciting life. That’s the book that made me and many others fall fully in love with Roland and Jake (and Eddie and Susannah, whom we will now likely never see). It’d be nice if the film made enough money to justify their at least attempting to make a second film incorporating the elements of that book, introducing the two characters who truly make the story whole, and giving the filmmakers an honest opportunity to learn from the choices and the mistakes made in their initial film. Whether they do or don’t learn would be up to them, but it’d be nice.

Sigh.

That’s how I feel today at any rate. I liked it, warts and all, despite the reservations and the problems that are very self-evident. I left the theater legitimately smiling even if I'm not especially clear on why. The thing of it is, I don’t know if I'm blind. I can't tell whether, as a longtime fan, being swept up in the excitement of seeing ANY Dark Tower movie led me to fall for a bad Dark Tower movie. All these poor reviews seem to say that's exactly what’s happened. By their measure I’m sufficiently intoxicated by the pure lizard-brained satisfaction of seeing a bunch of stuff I never thought I'd see on screen brought to life that I cannot distinguish between a fun, liberal mash-up of a series I love and drab mediocrity. That’s disturbing to me. I don’t want to be viewed as someone who defends “bad” movies. Nevertheless, a fun, liberal mash-up is what I saw last night.

I'm seeing the movie again this weekend, with all of this negative criticism now firmly in mind, and part of me kind of hopes that some kind of scales will fall from my eyes and I'll join the ranks of the 84% who just really, really do not like the film. That would be easier, yeah? I could laugh off my initial enjoyment as a product of my wishful thinking and my longstanding fandom, and pitch in on bashing this particular piñata. Better that outcome surely than to feel like some kind of bizarro Armond White, enthusiastically endorsing films that other smarter, better writers want to kill with fire. Once I see it again I’ll report back and let you know whether my opinion’s changed.

 

But, much as I think I'd like to be in the majority on this film, I don't think that'll happen. I might temper my opinion some, but I don't think I'll suddenly decide that the film is as mediocre or as irredeemably bad as many have stated. I had fun. Fun is fun. I will watch the bejeezus out of the prequel TV series that is, at least as of today, still moving forward, and I will hope for a second film that learns from the first, and that casts its Eddie and Susannah very well indeed.

 

Ultimately I'm a guy who likes and sometimes loves a lot of films that are divisive and wounded and strange. Films that may or may not ever gain a cult following, and which I seem predisposed to want to take in and cuddle from the outset. Today I add The Dark Tower to that list.

Long days and pleasant nights, all.

 

 

Enter of Your Own Free Will

 

Welcome, visitors. I invite you to poke around and see what there is to see. Not sure where to start? Me either - but here are some suggestions:

I Heart I Heart Huckabees

Stealing Fire: In Praise of Prometheus

Do No Harm: The Quiet Marvel of Doctor Strange

The Good Place (S1, eps 1 & 2)

MMorse v Batman v Superman: Dawn of Too Many Words

Twin Peaks: The Return (S3, eps 1 & 2)

The Giant: "You are far away."

Several years ago, when it seemed as clear as daylight that Twin Peaks was finished and done with forever and ever amen, I re-watched the show for Chud.com, one episode at a time. I was in the process of rewriting that material for publication as an e-book when something truly extraordinary happened – it was announced that Twin Peaks would return.

You could have knocked me over with an owl feather.

Twin Peaks is largely remembered by most people as an amalgamation of quirk and surrealism (coffee and cherry pie! Little dancing man! Curtains! Weird jazz music!), but those beloved elements, central as they were and are, were laid atop something much darker and more dangerous. As I wrote way back in the Ancient Year of 2010(!):

“much of Twin Peaks’ cumulative power lies in its unblinking look at Evil. In its best moments this show offers a startlingly-clear view through grimy, warping glass at what feels and sounds and seems to be pretty much Evil Incarnate. …allow me to let someone smarter than I step in to start things off:

“Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed….they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person….Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are – at least potentially – everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time – not ‘lurking below’ or ‘lying in wait’ or ‘hovering on the horizon’: evil is here, right now.”

 – excerpted from ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head,” by David Foster Wallace

Wallace submits in his (great, great) essay that all of Lynch’s films focus on Evil, and that this focus comes without the comforting narrative fiction that is clear “moral victory.” As in Lynch’s films overall, so also in Twin Peaks. When people do terrible things on this show there are sometimes consequences. But there are sometimes no consequences at all. Lynch doesn’t introduce Evil into Twin Peaks so that Good can vanquish it. Lynch introduces Evil as fact, as uncaring force of nature – a storm to (maybe) survive but not vanquish; not really, not ever.”

The coffee and the cherry pie of Twin Peaks are admittedly swell, but the show’s primary focus was always Evil, in all its many forms; not simply the evil that men do, but Evil as “environment, possibility, force.” That focus on Evil is as strong and as disquieting as ever in the two-hour premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return – a piece of television that is a direct and largely unambiguous thematic continuation of what came before (while still being wonderfully indirect and ambiguous in a whole bunch of different ways). When Twin Peaks returned on Sunday it spent precious little time amidst the Douglas Firs, or lingering over hot black coffee, or indulging in gentle quirk, but if you’re a longtime “Peaks Freak” then what you saw in The Return was both largely comprehensible and pretty darned exciting. Given how Lynch’s films increasingly abandoned straightforward narrative for abstraction, this was something of a surprise and a relief. Much as I can admire it from a distance, 18 hours of Inland Empire isn’t a trip I was particularly excited to take.

Don’t mistake what follows as an attempt to authoritatively “decode” The Return. That’s futile. Instead, in my patented roundabout manner, I want to continue to talk about the themes and ideas that Lynch and Frost have explored and continue to explore in the world of Twin Peaks, and to continue constructing my own meaning from the story Lynch and Frost are telling.

What happens in the first two hours of The Return? First and foremost, we are reintroduced to Special Agent Dale Cooper, confirmed to have spent the last 25 years trapped in the waiting room of the Black Lodge while his doppleganger (Coopleganger?), who may also be possessed by Bob (Booper?) (…….Booper Coopleganger!), roams free in the “real" world.

On top of that, David Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost spend their time crafting an expanded universe around the two Coopers – a universe that’s spread far beyond the borders of their titular town to explicitly encompass New York City, South Dakota, and Las Vegas. We get glimpses of good ol’ Twin Peaks, Washington itself but those glimpses are either brief, appropriately bizarre vignettes or are largely in the service of establishing and detailing the main Cooper storyline.

Let’s tackle the two-hour premiere by splitting it into locations.

***

THE ADVENTURES OF BOOPER COOPLEGANGER IN SOUTH DAKOTA

Dale Cooper is the primary focus of these first two hours, and so it makes sense to begin with his doppleganger, introduced after a wonderfully Lynchian POV-shot of a nighttime drive set to a twisted version of “American Woman,” Cooper’s doppleganger is a stoically chilly SOB who evidently takes his fashion cues from Jamie Sheridan’s portrayal of Randall Flagg in 1991’s The Stand.

 

I’ve written at length before about Twin Peaks’s preoccupation with twins and mirrors, and the Coopleganger serves as a dark mirror of Cooper himself – right down to the preference for handheld recording devices. He’s also a twinned reflection of BOB, that greasy, longhaired embodiment of primal Evil.

 

Exactly what Booper Coopleganger has been up to for 24 years is unclear, but it ain’t good (and from now on let’s call him “Mister C,” as he’s dubbed in the show itself, so that I don’t run a goofy joke straight into the ground). There’s every indication that Mister C’s spent that time wallowing in sin and darkness. We watch as he recruits two associates, Ray and Daria (whose name, uttered by Mister C, sounds remarkably like “Diane”), for some sort of nefarious purpose involving the secretary of one Mr. Bill Hastings, whom we meet in this episode, and some numbers. Whatever that purpose is, it has to do with what he WANTS, and not what he NEEDS.

Mister C: "WANT. Not NEED. I don't need anything, Ray. If there's one thing you should know about me it's that I don't NEED anything. I WANT."

That is one very interesting philosophy, and it ties back directly into the original series and one of its primary themes. First, recall Dale Cooper’s words to Audrey in Season One, Episode 6, “Realization Time”:

Agent Cooper: “What I want and what I need are two different things Audrey.”

The two Coopers both draw a clear distinction between “want” and “need,” and operate on opposite sides of that distinction. For Agent Dale Cooper, “wants” are to be shunned in favor of “need’ – with the implication being that mere want is a lesser thing, the call of the body at the expense of the soul. For Mister C, “needs” are to be shunned in favor of “wants” – with the implication being that “needs” are weaknesses and that “wants” are strengths.

All of this evokes and buttresses the original series' fascination with animal appetite and with evil for the sake of evil; evil consciously chosen. Mister C appears to be asserting that he is not controlled by his appetites, he chooses them. This aligns perfectly with Lynch's unnerving philosophy of evil as a force - a free-floating malign energy that has frightening agency and takes uneasy pleasure in acts of darkness - not compelled to do them but freely choosing them, descending into a primal animal state to revel in its own malevolence.

Twin Peaks has always been deeply interested in Appetites. The original series and its characters were obsessed with food (recall Ben Horne tearing into a brie and butter sandwich like a man starving in the desert).On a larger scale, the kind of raw hunger and deep appreciation for food shown throughout Twin Peaks is echoed on a lot of levels within the narrative; hunger for sex, for drugs, for violence, for sin, for abandon, basically – an abandonment of what one “needs” in favor of what one “wants,” consequences be damned. That current of want over need – of consuming animal appetites – is re-embodied in Cooper’s transformation from one who needs to one who wants. 

How could Lynch and Frost make this thematic point even clearer? Well, they might include a seemingly throwaway scene in which Laura’s mother is shown watching horribly gory footage of lions feeding at night, of literal animals literally indulging their appetites. And how might they tie the scene and that footage back to Mister C and to Bob and to the sort of corrupting, primal, animal “wants” that Bob (and now Mister C) embody? They might choose to end that throwaway scene by focusing in on the mirror behind Mrs. Palmer’s head, where we can glimpse the animals as they continue to feed and Mrs. Palmer adopts a look of horror. That shot is a direct callback to the image in the original TP pilot in which we were oh-so-subtly introduced to Bob for the first time. Not coincidentally, Mrs. Palmer is seated on her couch and looking terrified. Now look in the mirror:

Right there, reflected in the mirror, is the show's primary personification of animal appetites. It’s no accident that Lynch shot Mrs. Palmer’s brief scene as a seemingly intentional reflection of that earlier scene, given the show’s preoccupation with twins/doubles/mirror images.

 

What Mister C “wants” is underlined a final time over the course of these two hours during his tense dialogue/confrontation with Daria, who along with Ray has apparently been hired by someone to double-cross and kill Mister C (as for who that might be? Scroll down to the Vegas section):

Coopleganger: “Anybody ever show this to you before? Do you know what this is? This is what I want.”

Before Mister C murders Daria with a shot to the head – the third woman to be shown as having died in this particular manner over the course of two hours – he shows her a playing card. It’s an ace of spades, which immediately brings to mind One-Eyed Jack’s, the gambling establishment and den of all-around iniquity from the original series. The central spade on the card has been inked over by hand, in favor of a different shape – what might be a distorted version of the owl cave symbol.

 

That symbol is branded onto the mysterious green ring that plays such a prominent and totally-unexplained part in the narrative of Twin Peaks, linking the ring to the cave and both things, ultimately, to the Red Room/Black Lodge. In Fire Walk With Me it's heavily indicated that the ring has the ability to bring people into the Red Room/Black Lodge.

So what are we to make of this? Well, we know that Mister C is “supposed to get pulled back to this thing called the black lodge.” We know that the owl cave ring has some kind of seemingly mystical properties involving transportation/teleportation, and that it has transported people to the Red Room. Is it possible that possessing it might keep a doppleganger from being transported against its will? We’ll see!

There’s a little more plot here, involving Cooper downloading plans for a Yankton South Dakota prison from the FBI database (and can we take a moment here to pause and appreciate the ways in which Lynch and his collaborators have melded modern technology and filmmaking with comparatively archaic effects-work? I genuinely ADORE that Cooper’s Microsoft Surface has a display screen that looks like it was programmed in the 90s), and we’ll see what that amounts to soon enough. Before I move on to other things, let’s take a look at the conversation that Mister C has with “Philip Jeffries.”

Phillip Jeffries was the FBI Agent played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me – another agent of law and order targeted by the Black Lodge for unknown reasons. However, David Bowie is deceased, and the voice on the other end of Mister C’s call doesn’t sound a thing like The Thin White Duke. Is it possible that Jeffries has a doppleganger as well, currently running around the “real” world like Mister C? I’d say that’s a distinct possibility. As I’ve previously noted the Black Lodge seems to have a real mad-on for FBI agents; Bowie, the agent played by Chris Isaak at the start of FWWM, and Dale Cooper have all been seized by the Lodge. Perhaps the reason for the targeting of FBI agents is a conscious effort to replace agents of righteous order with double-agents of chaos and darkness (Twin Peaks loves its doubles/twins!).

Doubly intriguing is “Jeffries’” mention of Major Garland Briggs – one of my very favorite characters from the original series. Briggs has intimate ties to the Black and White Lodges, and more knowledge about the mythology of Twin Peaks than anyone else. The actor who played him, Don S. Davis, passed away several years ago. Unless “Jeffries” was referring to Bobby Briggs during his call with Mister C I’m not sure how Lynch and Frost intend to involve this character – but I can’t wait to find out. As for Jeffries, he seems to know a lot about Mister C, telling him that “you’re going back in tomorrow (to the Lodge), and I’ll be with Bob again.” Whoever this Jeffries is, he seems to be acquainted with Bob and has perhaps been possessed by him before. A strong thread throughout the show is the way in which being possessed by Bob is both something filthy and something ecstasy-inducing for those who experience it – a thread that confirms David Foster Wallace’s notion of evil being something that “transports” the characters in Lynch’s works.

Mister C’s narrative section finishes with him ending his call, leaving the room containing Daria’s dead body, and proceeding to go next door where another version of “Dark Diane” (a double, if you will) is waiting for him – played by a very welcome Jennifer Jason Leigh – and just before Booper Coopleganger initiates sex with her she’s ordered to clean up the murder in the next door.

Multiple women are murdered throughout these two hours – three of them gaining gruesome, gaping holes in their faces. It’s revolting stuff, and this particular thematic constant is the place where Twin Peaks makes me most uncomfortable. Twin Peaks has always featured acts of horrific violence against women, and The Return continues that pattern to genuinely disturbing effect. Speaking for myself I have always viewed that violence as commentary about the ways in which women are victimized, as opposed to Lynch taking pleasure in staging that violence, but I confess to curiosity over how the new wave of socially conscious criticism will react. Criticism has evolved a great deal since the original series aired, and in particular has focused over the past few years on whether television shows and films are properly socially conscious. Whether you very much like or vehemently dislike this trend, it’s a trend, and I’m genuinely curious as to what those critics will make of all this violence against women.

…Which brings us to the other half of the South Dakota narrative – the murder of librarian Ruth Davenport, apparently at the hands of local businessman Bill Hastings, played by a shockingly effective Matthew Lillard. The lead up to the discovery of Davenport’s severed head is the only portion of The Return that doesn’t really work for me – Mrs. Green, her verbal tics, and Max Perlich’s rando neighbor character just aren’t all that interesting or amusing or even oddball, they’re just sort of there – but everything else about this part of the narrative works like gangbusters because so much of it encapsulates the show’s strengths, from the overwrought-but-effective soapy elements (“Life in prison, Bill!”) to the investigative elements (the scene between Lillard and the cop he’s known since school is wonderfully done), to the dashes of quirk (“But the Morgans are coming to dinner!”) to the ominous intrusions of the supernatural. The Mister C/Bill Hastings threads are clearly intertwined on a number of levels: (1) Mister C mentions getting “information from Hastings’s secretary,” (2) Mister C appears in the Hastings’s home and shoots Hastings’s wife in a manner identical to how Davenport was killed – via a gunshot to the face, and (3) Bill Hastings may be possessed by Bob, or by another Lodge spirit.

The spirits of the Lodge make themselves known throughout this part of the narrative – first, when detectives search Bill Hastings’s car. As they do so one of their flashlights flickers on and off, on and off. Electrical abnormalities have popped up in multiple places throughout the life of Twin Peaks – first during the Season One pilot, during the examination of Laura Palmer’s body, when the morgue lights flicker on and off like a strobe. Electricity also features heavily in Fire Walk With Me. As I wrote in my overview of that film: “Whether electricity is a means of transportation/manifestation for Lodge spirits, or whether electrical abnormalities simply signal their presence is not clear. But it is clear that the two things are connected.”

Longtime viewers will also be reminded of Bob when Matthew Lillard claims, with seeming sincerity, that he “had a dream that night…that I was in [Ruth Davenport’s] apartment.” In the world of Twin Peaks the un/subconscious is a place of grave danger and great grace, and Hastings’s “dream” could very well be evidence that he is responsible for Davenport’s death, either because he has been/is possessed by Bob, or is being ridden by another Lodge “parasite” similar to Bob. And what do we see directly after the camera pans away from Lillard, disconsolate in his jail cell? Why, it’s a damnfreaky spirit!

Finally, there is the question of whether Hastings’s wife was similarly possessed by a Lodge spirit. There’s certainly evidence to that effect. For one, she clearly knows Mister C and he clearly knows her (and George). Recall what Lillard says to her from behind bars: “I know about you and George! ..And maybe somebody else, too!” That “somebody else” is almost certainly Mister C. Now recall what Mister C says to Hastings’s wife just before he shoots her: “You did good. You follow human nature perfectly.”

That’s a verrrrry intriguing line of dialogue. It could mean simply that she has acted in the sort of way Mister C expects human beings to act, and that he approves of that. It could also mean that she’s a Lodge spirit inhabiting a human body, impressing Mister C by how well that spirit knows human nature. I’m fascinated by that idea since it suggests that there are multiple Lodge apparitions operating out in the real world, sometimes in concert and sometimes in opposition to each other.

***

TWIN PEAKS, WASHINGTON

Lynch and Frost stop by their titular town only intermittently, but it’s a welcome pit stop along a darkened highway. We’re reintroduced to the Horne brothers, Ben and Jerry (named, as longtime fans of the show are aware, after the ice cream makers), and through them to a new character played by Ashley Judd. What any of them have to do with the larger being told is totally unclear, but it’s great to see the Hornes once more. David Patrick Kelly’s Jerry, introduced crooning “Saltyyyyyy…crunchyyyy” like the frequent Richard Foreman collaborator that he is, remains freakishly food-obsessed, and that fetish can only have gotten more acute now that he’s involved in the legal weed industry. For longtime fans their cockeyed banter is like sativa-laced manna from heaven.

Also popping up, even more briefly, is Doctor Lawrence Jacoby – formerly Laura Palmer’s skeevy psychiatrist and now, apparently, resident of the Ghostwood forest that borders the town of Twin Peaks. We’re treated to an extended scene of Jacoby receiving a shipment of shovels, which for now amounts to an amusingly Lynchian non sequitur. Is Jacoby digging something up? Burying something? Recall that in the original series he was the one who unearthed Laura’s half of the locket.

The show also takes us back to the Roadhouse’s “Bang Bang Bar,” where we’re reintroduced to Shelly and James (and a Renault brother tending bar!) and it’s here, oddly, where nostalgia packed the biggest punch for me as a viewer. Shelly may be dead wrong about James (James was never cool, Shelly – and initially that lack of coolness was a real asset to the character…at least until Evelyn Marsh showed up), but it’s great to see them both. I remain firmly on the fence about Balthazar Getty.

Finally, we have the portion of the show devoted to Twin Peaks’ Sherriff’s Department. It’s in these sections that co-writers Lynch and Mark Frost tether their town to the larger unfolding narrative. These segments are also where we learn that there are two Trumans. “One is sick, and one is fishing.” We can assume, since Michael Ontkean did not return for Season three, that Harry Truman is “sick,” and that Robert Forster, who auditioned for the role of Harry Truman back in the day and is cast in Season Three, is the Truman who is “fishing.” And, incidentally, Lucy and Andy have a kid! His name is Wally! Looking forward to meeting you, Wally!

In reintroducing well-loved characters Andy, Lucy, Hawk, and Margaret (aka The Log Lady, played by Catherine Coulson, who died in 2015) the show also conveys for us the basic information we need to connect the dots between the ending of Season Two and the beginning of Season Three. It’s in this section that we learn Cooper “disappeared” 24 years ago, and has not been seen since. It’s here that The Log Lady communicates urgently with Deputy Chief Hawk about Cooper, telling him that “Something is missing, and you have to find it.” She informs him that “The way you will find it has something to do with your heritage” – a comment that fits perfectly with what we know of the show’s mythology so far (recall the “Owl Cave,” a remnant of the area’s Native American tribes). It also fits with what Cooper told Hawk in Season Two of the original series: “Hawk, if I ever get lost, I hope you’re the man they send to find me.” Cooper’s instincts were right on, because Hawk immediately returns to Glastonbury Grove, the gateway between our “real” world and the Black Lodge/Red Room. There he catches a glimpse of the show’s iconic curtains, before we’re suddenly whisked away from Twin Peaks and back to the Red Room.

 ***

THE RED ROOM

From cryptic black and white conversation between Cooper and The Giant to a sentient, malevolent statue, this Red Room has it all: Arms. Curtains. NONEXISTENCE.

It’s also a reflection of itself, with an older Cooper and an older Laura occupying the same positions and space that they occupied 25 years ago – in footage that we see at the very start of the episode. We were first introduced to the idea of an aged Cooper inhabiting the Red Room way back in Season 1 episode 3, which aired on April 19, 1990. Twin Peaks is radically obsessed with Twins and twinning, right up to and including its titular mountains. People and events mirror one another. In the Red Room/Black Lodge this is made literal, with older and younger versions of the characters occupying the same space/time and recreating scenes from the original run (with Laura repeating the famously bizarro line “I feel like I know her…but sometimes my arms bend back”). Past scenes from the show are replayed, blending the narrative’s past and present. Then there are, of course, the evil/crazy/savage “dopplegangers” that inhabit this strange space; just as the Black Lodge exists as the “shadow” of the White Lodge, so these dopplegangers exist as the “shadow-selves” of these characters, reflecting the primal subconscious.

Finally, there’s the way in which the first portion of Cooper’s Red Room experience appears to loop back on itself – to double up, if you will – ending where it began: with Cooper and the man that longtime viewers know as Mike, seated together in the Red Room. That sense of the narrative doubling back on itself lends further credence to the notion that in the Red Room, and in the universe of Twin Peaks generally, time is capable of doubling back on itself. “Is it future? Or is it past?” asks Mike, and that’s not a rhetorical question. In Twin Peaks it’s well established that the past repeats itself, that cycles run in circles like literal and figurative rings.

And then…well…a bunch of stuff happens. Much of that stuff is so loaded with symbolism and surrealism that it’s impossible to say with certainty what it “means,” which is part of the point of the show, frankly, and always has been. Like, say, Cooper informing Laura that she’s dead. She tells him that “I’m dead…and yet I live” and then proceeds to TAKE HER FACE OFF. What’s behind that face is pure light, and that light could “mean” a bunch of things.

The ambiguity of the show’s symbolism is a strength, allowing us to project meaning onto those symbols in a way that’s more powerful than having concrete meaning assigned. To give one more example: during the Red Room sequences we are shown a white horse – a horse that we have seen once before on the original series, and have read about in The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer – a tie-in novel which covers the same ground as Fire Walk With Me (and does so, in no small part, as effectively as FWWM). That novel 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). There are cultures that 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 in the Red Room? Well, it’s very possible that Lynch means it to symbolize Laura’s lost innocence, but the answer is that there’s simply no way to know. Lynch traffics in symbolism without concrete “meaning,” and I’ve argued pretty forcefully in the past that to reduce the horse to any one interpretation is very much beside the point.

If you were a reader of my Twin Peaks columns, back in the day, then you know already that I have very specific ideas about that space and the things within it, and I’ll reiterate those ideas as we go along. However, they’re my ideas, not some key to unlocking the “true” meaning of Twin Peaks, and that’s a distinction well worth reiterating. Trying to parse the show that way is, I think, mostly a fruitless exercise. It’s not WHOLLY fruitless, because Twin Peaks is a collaborative effort between a man who has little use for narrative coherency and a man who takes great pleasure in constructing mythology. It is possible, to give one example, that when a talking tree informs Cooper to remember “253,” it is perhaps referring to a Washington state area code to pick one possible meaning – after all, Twin Peaks is located in Washington. It is much, much more likely that the tree is referring to something else entirely, which will only become clear once the meaning of that number is fully revealed to us (recall, as example, the clue of a “smiling bag” in the original series and you’ll remember just how amusingly unhelpful most of the show’s “clues” really are).

All that said, here are a few more thoughts on what we see in the Red Room:

 “The Arm,” formerly played by Michael J. Anderson and previously known as “the little man from another place”, is now, apparently, a tree with something fleshy and faceless pulsing atop it. Twin Peaks set up this bizarre transformation over TWENTY YEARS AGO, when the Little Man made his final appearance in the original series:

 

WHOA.

The Arm’s purpose within the overarching mythology of Twin Peaks remains incredibly unclear. The Little Man projected a kind of quirky malevolence, and in FWWM Lynch appeared to suggest that the Little Man, Mike, and Bob were all united in the goal of collecting and feeding on “garmonbozia” (otherwise known as “fear, and the pleasures”). We know that at some point, Mike cut off his arm (or his Arm) in order to repent and escape the influence of Evil. Given the way that time and space circle and loop back on themselves in this universe, is it possible that both Mike and The Arm have now repented, and that both are attempting to help Cooper?

 

The episode kicks it up another notch when it introduces an evil tree-doppleganger (Lord I love this weirdo show) which seemingly boots Cooper out of the Lodge entirely through the floor, where he lands on top of a giant glass box that’s sticking out of the side of a building.

In order for Dale to truly leave the Red Room/Black Lodge we are told that his doppleganger must return. Since we know that Mister C has a plan to prevent himself from being drawn back to the Lodge, and since we know that time runs very differently within the Red Room, can we presume that when Mike says “something’s wrong,” he’s referring to the failure of the doppleganger to return? That when Cooper is ejected from the Red Room in apparent spiritual form it is so that he can, like a reverse-Bob, possess someone with the goal of finding Booper Coopleganger and forcing him to return?  That the glass box that Dale Cooper enters, and in which he is seemingly “processed,” is designed to help transport Cooper into a new body?

***

NEW YORK CITY

And speaking of that large, weird, glass box, the New York City portion of The Return is somehow its most obtuse. A mysterious, for-now-anonymous billionaire benefactor has sponsored a bizarre art project/science experiment (I would imagine that “Audrey Horne” is a good possible answer to the question of that billionaire’s identity, but given the ways in which time and space are already being played with it’s possible that Mister C or Cooper himself are responsible for the box – possibly via a connection in Las Vegas (and more on that directly below). The giant glass box that they’ve paid to construct and surround with cameras underlines another of Twin Peaks’s consistent themes: voyeurism. From Blue Velvet to Lost Highway to, of course, Twin Peaks, glimpsing things we shouldn’t, of peering in on things uninvited; of being made aware as a viewer of your own gaze and how you, as a viewer, are a voyeur yourself. One of my favorite instances of this theme comes in Season One, when James and Donna dress Maddie her cousin Laura in order to investigate Dr. Jacoby. Unbeknownst to them, Bobby watches them from the bushes. Unbeknownst to any of them, someone else is watching all of them. And unbeknownst to any of the characters, we’re watching them.

Here, in the first two hours of The Return, Lynch returns to his obsession with the voyeuristic impulse, capturing the cameras that surround the mysterious box with the same dispassionately fetishistic eye with which he captures the naked body of Tracey, the unfortunate young woman who is doomed to die simply because she couldn’t wait for the object of her obsession to finish his shift.

Both Tracey and Sam are charming blanks who speak in the soap clichés of vintage Peaks (“You’re a bad girl, Tracey.” “Try me.”), and their blankness feels intentional, as though these New York City scenes are intended to be dreamlike in a different but no less purposeful sense than the surrealist scenes in the Red Room. Both characters speak as if in a dream, and the essential set-up of this NYC world is dreamlike; a young girl bearing coffee cups marked with “Zs” (Zzzzzz) nevertheless gets granted access to a waiting area with a posted guard (who suddenly, inexplicably disappears) and high tech door, the giant glass box, the strangely formal arrangement of couch, side table, bonsai, and the ring of cameras.

And then things get really strange.

What is the negative image that appears in the box? How’s it connected to Cooper, if at all? Is it possible that the image is Laura, erupting out of the Red Room in a fit of rage? Sure. That's possible. It’s also possible that it’s a Garmonbozia-ghost from Planet Zerp. Your guess is as good as mine! Either way, SOMETHING erupts from that glass box and tears those two charming blanks apart. Was that entity drawn to Sam and Tracey’s primal animal passions? That seems possible, given Peaks’ themes. It also seems possible that it’s there as a direct result of what Sam and Tracey didn’t see: the arrival of Dale Cooper’s spirit. I’d conjecture that the spirit who erupts from the box and kills the unlucky couple may just be pursuing Cooper, but at this point it’s impossible to tell.

Either way, the way in which the New York City narrative and the Red Room narrative overlap and encircle one another reinforce again the notion of time as something cyclical and circular, folding over onto itself in a ring.

Which brings us, finally, to…

 

***

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Just a single scene, starring Patrick “DON’T LOOK BEHIND THE DINER” Fischler as Mister Todd, a frightened-eyed business type ordering some kind of payment to somebody or other. "Why do you let him make you do these things?" asks Mister Todd’s associate, Roger. "Roger... you better hope that you never get involved with someone like him. Never have someone like him...in your life."

And that’s it. It’s a wisp of a scene, but in the context of these two hours it leaves me wondering: Is Todd responsible for hiring Ray and Daria to kill Mister C? He seems to have the motive, assuming that the “him” Todd refers to is Mister C. Is Mister Todd connected to the mysterious billionaire funding techno-occult research in New York City? I have no idea. You have no idea. And yet here we are, puzzling it out and savoring the act.

 ***

...Whew. That's all I've got for now. I'm a little out of practice at this, but boy did I enjoy assembling these thoughts. I can feel the ol' muscles limbering up, and I hope you'll come on back and geek out along with me as The Return continues. Next week I'll take a look at Season 3, eps 3 and 4.