TV Rewind: Twin Peaks
By Eric Hughes
July 6, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
So with that said, I’ll propose that Sarah Palmer’s mind enables her to see nightmarish “visions,” and that Agent Cooper, well, might be an alien.
Of course, I could be blowing small observations of mine totally out of proportion, and assuming Twin Peaks’ scope a whole lot bigger than it actually is (and will be). Is Twin Peaks mere drama or an animal more like Lost? It’s hard to tell.
The more practical of my two examples, I think, is in the nightmarish “visions” of Sarah Palmer. At the end of “Pilot,” she wakes with a bang and does her best Sidney Prescott in distress. Prior, we’d seen a gloved hand, somewhere across town, reach into the earth to excavate the half of the heart locket that Donna and James buried only hours before. It wasn’t until watching “Episode 1,” however, that I realized the two scenes were related to one another. That is, Sarah had “seen” it.
In “Episode 1,” Donna visits the Palmer house in support of Sarah and Leland, and ends up on the couch next to Sarah, who tells her, repeatedly, how much she misses her daughter. Soon enough, Sarah sees Laura’s face float on top of Donna’s body, and Sarah embraces her. Even stranger, mid hug, Sarah catches out of the corner of her eye a longhaired man crouching in the couch’s shadow. She, like at the end of “Pilot,” screams like a mad woman, which apparently is all you need to do to get unknown mystery men out of the home.
So, if Sarah sees/hallucinates/whatever her dead daughter’s face on Donna’s body, then spots some man we haven’t seen before with her naked eye, then I don’t think it too far a stretch to assume that what freaked Sarah the eff out in “Pilot” was, yep, that hand grasping the heart locket.
And if that is true, then what’s really at work here? Can Sarah control what she sees? My guess is she can’t as it would be pretty senseless to scare yourself stupid on your own accord. Instead, Sarah just has visions. But are they something she quietly developed after Laura died, or has she been grappling with them for a long time? And, how is it that the excavator knew the locket would be in the place he dug? Lucky guess, or did Sarah have something to do with that, too?
My other a-ha is related to Agent Cooper, who is so unlike everyone else in Twin Peaks. And I don’t know that we can totally blame it on the fact that he’s from the feds and not the town.
Our first clue is in his reaction to food. Now, I get excited about pie just as much as the next guy, but certainly not diner pie. He’s told a handful of people already about that local slice of cherry he just had as if it was the first piece of food he’s ever tasted. I didn’t even know that diners were capable of “write home about it” food.
Second is the totally bizarre way he sometimes makes phone calls. We catch him at the top of “Episode 1” handing upside for reasons I can’t understand. He rotates around to stand on solid ground again and has his feet secured in strange metal booties. No explanation for these nor what they do. Did they help him with his hang time, or are they much more important than that?
Third is his incessant taped dictations to some unknown individual named Donna. He’s documenting everything for her – his case notes, character profiles, that pie he had at the diner. He’s creating, I guess, a full survey of his experiences in Twin Peaks. I don’t know how useful such personal detail would be in a police investigation. It’s as if he’s doing it for some other reason.
Finally, he reads people and situations extremely well, like he’s a few beats faster than even the smartest Twin Peakians. Even Harry Truman, the town’s chief law enforcer, was impressed when Cooper figured out that Harry and Josie have a thing. Is he naturally gifted or, as I’ve suggested, a more intelligent being shape shifted into human form? We’ll see!
Anyway, “Episode 1” was a good hour of television. A ton of characters have already been introduced, and the episode did a good job in giving each of them some voice. Even more, many of them helped shed light on what they know about Laura Palmer, but well before the incident and the night of the attack.
We learn that:
Laura died between midnight and 4 a.m.
James last saw her at 12:30. She jumped off his motorcycle and, before running off into the night, told him that she couldn’t see him anymore
She died through loss of blood
She had numerous, shallows wounds, and bite marks on her shoulders and tongue that were probably self-inflicted
She had lesions on her upper arms and wrists – where she was bound
And, within the last 12 hours of her life, she had sex with at least three men
More items:
Something spooked her a few days prior and she never recovered from it. James said she started using cocaine again
Laura tutored Audrey’s 27-year-old brother, who has the mind of a third grader
Josie had hired Laura to come over twice a week to teach her English
Meanwhile, like Audrey in “Pilot,” Shelly’s gruff and cruel stepdad, Leo, gets painted in “Episode 1” like such a baddie that I don’t know it’d make sense to assign him any responsibility in Laura’s death. It’d be too obvious.
In the episode, Shelly is home and is told to do laundry, so she rounds up the clothes – including a stack from Leo – and heads over to the washer. As she’s breaking apart the pile, she notices that one of Leo’s shirts has an embarrassing amount of blood on it. She stares at it blankly and decides hiding it in a drawer makes the most sense. I guess she didn’t want Leo to know she saw it when she hands him back
his wash.
Leo, in another part of the house, appears moments later and starts punching things when he realizes that Shelly must have found his shirt – he can’t find it anywhere. He corners Shelly and asks her what she knows about it. We’re to only assume what he does to her as the screen fades to black.
As we close here, a major Twin Peaks theme – almost like a custom within town limits – is infidelity. I didn’t think so much of it last week, because it happens, but we’re introduced to many more cases of it here to think it bears some sort of significance.
We’re got Laura cheating on Bobby with James, Bobby cheating on Laura with Shelly, Ed cheating on his wife with Norma, Harry seeing Josie in secret and – from “Episode 1” – James cheating on Laura with Donna, Catherine cheating on Pete with Leland’s business partner and Dr. Jacoby as the keeper of the other half of Laura Palmer’s locket, a reveal that cliffhangs the episode’s end. I wouldn’t think Laura cheated on Bobby (or her lover, James!) with Jacoby; I figure Jacoby is just a creepy old psychiatrist with a thing for young blondes.
Anyway, as he clutches the locket, he listens to a recording of Laura’s voice, which tells him – before cutting to silence – about a man she met. And it isn’t just James, because she mentions him by name in the recording, too. Jacoby, apparently, will get more play on Twin Peaks than I gave him credit for in “Pilot.”
So Twin Peaks is turning out to be a healthy investment for the summer. So much has been introduced here so far – and I feel like I’ve only covered half of it – to suggest that we’re only scrapping the surface.