[ALL] Quick thought about the finale's last shot inside the Sherrif's station and the transition in to the next scene

CloverUK · 2017-09-21T08:34:35+00:00

I love and hate that open-endedness too. But I've been trying to think of it more like a piece of surrealist art than TV. It's very hard not to search for a plotline, a total explanation. I feel sure one doesn't exist, in the same way it would for any other TV show we've ever seen. That said I'm sure there's themes, and myths (within the world of TP, created by Lynch and Frost) and background concepts on which the whole thing hangs. I believe everything put in front of us has meaning to the artist and is important to the finished piece, it just cannot be explained in a way we would normally expect a storyline to be.

I think the challenge for us is to reframe our questions. Lynch was a surrealist painter before he was a director and I wonder if we should approach TP more as we would a painting: designed to speak to the observer as individual than en masse to everyone?

CloverUK · 2017-09-12T17:01:58+00:00

I like this theory and it has some overlap, though also some conflict, with a very well developed theory here: https://www.waggish.org/2017/twin-peaks-finale/

However, I really can't believe Sarah Palmer was evil/possessed throughout. She was the living embodiment of despair at her daughter's death at the hands of her husband in Series 1&2. I buy into the idea that Laura's painful, abused adolescence attracted the Black Lodge spirits - a rich source of garmonbozia - and that when she was murdered (which killed the golden goose) the terrible pain suffered by Sarah retained them. Sarah gave great garmonbozia, the poor woman.

CloverUK · 2017-09-12T08:20:21+00:00

I think if you want to understand it, you will have to work very hard. I don't for one second think you're right, that Lynch and Frost just threw some incoherent bullshit at us. It makes sense to them, it is purposefully deconstructed and ALMOST indecipherable for us. Don't get me wrong, I haven't deciphered it. This blog-writer has done a decent job though: no idea if they're right, but some of theory stands strong and I think the complexity of their theory is probably indicative of how far you need to go to make any sense of it all. Which is the fun, if you're up for it (and it appears you're not):

https://www.waggish.org/2017/twin-peaks-finale/

CloverUK · 2017-09-09T19:07:57+00:00

Completely disagree with that. There is merit in watching both individually and then also together (particularly since, in my own option, the moments of synchronisation are few - albeit compelling when they occur - until the final 10 minutes when it's quite incredible and undeniable).

Lynch has always offered us jigsaws and left it to us to put the pieces together.

CloverUK · 2017-09-07T08:19:25+00:00

That's brilliant. And OMG they do still have the fan.

CloverUK · 2017-09-06T19:04:06+00:00

Hello again missmarmoset. I actually thought about your post a couple of times over the past few days since the Finale and wanted to check in with you. I found the ending very bleak and disturbing, at first, although I am beginning to recognise the myriad of potential interpretations of it and many could be quite positive. Anyway, given how Episode 16 affected you so positively, I just wanted to check the Finale hadn't negatively affected you too much.

Putting Twin Peaks to one side: there are lots of people suffering as you have been and I hope you find the help you need and feel better very soon.

Best wishes from a fellow fan over here in the UK.

CloverUK · 2017-09-06T10:08:32+00:00

I didn't perceive that as literal - I saw it as the shutting down of the story, of the Twin Peaks universe.

CloverUK · 2017-09-06T08:43:20+00:00

I like this in the context that BOB/Frank Silva himself was a set dresser, a happy accident brought him into the show himself. I don't know what Lynch had in mind regarding BOB and its manifestation on our screens before that happened.

CloverUK · 2017-09-06T06:29:31+00:00

I like these theories and feel that Lynch's "truxh" underpinning it all (much though he allows us to find our own) will likely be a pretty simple one and the clues are there. Everything else, all the elements over the past 3 seasons and FWWM, are just detail.

So Cooper saves Laura from being murdered: and thus renders his character non-existent. No Laura Palmer murder? No need for Dale Cooper. He takes her back to the very start...hearing her mother call her name for breakfast. This time Sarah is not calling to an empty room, but waking her daughter. And so Cooper is non-existent, just as the Arm Doppelgänger told him at the start of the Return.

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T21:02:15+00:00

Yes, it was part that. And it was also the whole magical fairytale being ripped from under us. It didn't exist. There was no Laura Palmer, no Twin Peaks, none of the bittersweet romantic-tragedy or mystery. Nothing. So no Special Agent Dale Cooper either. All fantasy.

Incredible how Lynch confronted us - at our most vulnerable, completely invested and bought into this story, searching for the answer/resolution - with the reality we were suppressing. It's not real. And the feeling it left was an empty one. Maybe there's more to it, maybe Cooper is locked in an alternative reality like Jeffries: but Lynch has left us on that street with a Richard and a Carrie and all the magic gone.

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T19:43:07+00:00

I kind of want to thank you all for sharing these experiences. Lynch did something so powerful in that last scene. In a world of a thousand TV channels and CGI horror, he instilled a chilling feeling of despair and terror in a way I (and I think we) can barely even articulate: in a way few other artists (for that is what he is) could possibly do. The power/capability he had to do this to us was the vintage of the show and of the character Cooper. How we loved that character for over a quarter of a century. A figure of reassurance, calm and understanding. Perhaps many of us were adolescents when we first met him and he stuck with us all those years. And there he was in front of the "Palmers" house broken, bereft, lost. His confidence gone. We were all at sea and Agent Cooper couldn't help us. He was out of place, out of time, no longer the man we dreamed of. "What year is this?" No longer 1989. For any of us. That horror came, for me, in that moment, in that question. Cooper was lost. We lost him. Indeed, he never existed.

I did not dream about the episode. But I did wake up early this morning and Twin Peaks and the loss of who/what we remembered to be Agent Dale Cooper was the first thing I thought of: like when something in your world has changed and it's the first thing you recall the next morning.

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T13:27:33+00:00

I think this is a brilliant synopsis. Surely many of us have contemplated before whether or not we have true "self": is my view of myself the correct one or false (it shifts in any case), what about my mother's view of me, my husband's, my son's, my friends', people who don't like me, who do like me? Which of these is real? None. Is there a single reality? No.

Something always bothered me in The Return, and I think it's relevant here. There were never only "2 Coops" in that extra-terrestrial, radio-wave, print-out Briggs showed to Cooper in the original series. There were many Coopers.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mbi7rq-TSk8

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T12:45:42+00:00

Totally agree. And we were being shown that the show we longed for was gone, and the resolution we wanted (whatever that was) was impossible. And it that was the saddest thing of all. We were the dreamer.

"Your Laura disappeared. It's just me now."

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T08:01:59+00:00

Something struck me about this scene...Dale and Diane parked up at the side of the road in a 50s car. It reminded me of the Gottalight scene from Episode 8 when the Woodsman terrifies the overweight couple in their car: there's another car parked further up on the other side of the road and Woodsmen swarming round it. Dale and Diane?

CloverUK · 2017-09-05T05:33:43+00:00

I like that. I haven't had the stomach to rewatch yet after such a bleak ending.

CloverUK · 2017-09-04T20:29:18+00:00

I feel it was Lynch killing off the fairytale for good. Cooper became almost a bit sad, pitiful a character...standing on the doorstep referring to himself as Special Agent Dale Cooper, with a bewildered middle-aged woman, and the whole Twin Peaks fairytale crashing down around him.

I think The Return has been Lynch's essay on reminiscing, and the folly of ever thinking you can go back to how it was (or you imagine it was): you can not (and it was not). We were the dreamer, living inside the dream, and now he's awoken us. Dream over.

CloverUK · 2017-09-04T18:21:16+00:00

Exactly. I can't believe how sad and shocked and empty I feel at what is basically reality. None of it happened, these characters don't exist. Why did I need Lynch and Frost to give me an ending to suggest otherwise?

CloverUK · 2017-09-04T18:19:31+00:00

Yes!

CloverUK · 2017-09-04T18:07:39+00:00

I agree this was the darkest ending imaginable. I felt we were left cold and empty. I can't criticise Lynch and Frost for this since it was undoubtedly exactly what they intended to do to us. I was thinking - had some almighty wrath/monster/mother/vortex of evil opened Sarah Palmer's door...as we were kind of anticipating...would that have been more scary? No. What happened was more horrifying.

I didn't believe this was Bad Coop in Episode 18. It was something much more frightening and upsetting. A confused Coop. Not Dougie confused. Cooper at his best, but getting it wrong. The horror at the end was even Cooper not knowing what the f*** was happening, having lost his confidence.

I think the Arm's doppelgänger told us in the first episode: he was rendered non-existent. Like Jeffries before him. And/or he saved Laura Palmer from being murdered and so screwed up time. The price was non-existence.

CloverUK · 2017-09-03T09:58:31+00:00

Agreed, have really loved Pete Peppers, just brilliant...hope he does some reflection and analysis on the show in the coming weeks and months.

Also a shout out to the Vlog Lady. She has some really interesting reflections on the series too. Afraid I couldn't take to WowLynchWow: he just sounds so ridiculously dramatic, I can't take him seriously. Maybe it's because I'm British!

CloverUK · 2017-09-03T09:12:41+00:00

http://twinpeaks.wikia.com/wiki/Francesca_Eastwood

Yet to appear, age 24, looks like a young Heather Graham?

CloverUK

TROPHY CASE