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Contain spoilers

by TWY

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As I was rewatching a particular episode of Twin Peaks, I was reminded of Gilles Deleuze’s word on Vincente Minnelli: “People’s dreams are always devouring, and threaten to engulf us; the other’s dream is very dangerous. Dreams have a terrible will to power, and each one of us is a victim to the other’s dreams. […] Beware of the other’s dreams, because if you are caught in the other’s dreams you are done for!” And in Twin Peaks, Monica Bellucci spoke about the question: “Who is the dreamer?” This is not to say that the series operates entirely with dream logic, nor to subscribe to the theory that the series was “dreamt” up by a character or such. But, the “dream” represents in Twin Peaks a state of disjunction, such that separates the life force of its characters, and ultimately, makes a grand return to clash them back together in the most violent and discordant fashion possible.

The opening of the eleventh part of the Twin Peaks: The Return displays such clash: the children discover a bloody beaten woman in the bush. Not unlike the discovery of the ear by Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, the camera slowly zooms into the ear, entering into its secret, and such is precisely the Devourer, the other’s dream. We, the audience, won’t be seeing these children again, but another group of children shall take their place: Shelly, Becky (Shelly’s daughter), Bobby, etc. They are adults but still children in their parents’ eyes. We can’t help but still looking at them as the dashing youths in the original series. But everything here is happening in the most spectacular fashion, almost unreal. 

The fury of Becky. Lynch pairs the scene with the music of Cooper’s escape in the mauve zone (Part 3), an unlikely choice that connects the cosmic to the domestic. And Shelly holds on to her car, playing like a stuntwoman, yet unable to stop Becky from executing her revenge. Meanwhile, Becky shoots blank fire from her revolver into the empty apartment. The camera then flies into the corridor, and “captures” the lovers in-hiding: Steven, Becky’s drug addict husband, and Gersten, the only returning character of the Hayward sisters, who played the piano in Season 2.

“Even the most gracious of young girls is a terrible devourer.” (Deleuze) And so, the dreams of others begin its spread, memories and images start to invade our minds. Why Gersten? Why is she here? How about Donna? Why is she like this? Why her and Steven? So many unanswered questions.

And then comes a formation of rapid attacks. At the Double R, we are now with the Briggs family: Bobby, Shelly, and Becky, in their sole reunion of the whole series, but despite being physically there, each one is seen as “the other’s dream.” And how else can we explain the sudden appearance of Red, Shelly’s new drug-dealing boyfriend? The sour face of Shelly, worrying for her daughter, suddenly blossoms into a smile, almost surreal, while for the other two at the table, an attack – because this wasn’t our dream. That’s the devouring, and that’s the danger. Twin Peaks had always operated on this – the logic of secrets and revelation. But then, a gunshot. One can never expect such violence in the Double R. Bobby immediately restores his identity as a policeman. As he swiftly apprehends the situation, what he sees can only be described as more dreams of the other. The traffic jam, the sound of the horn, and the girl who vomits, all but a dream to Bobby. We will never know the end to this.

Of course, this is not the first time we see such an attack. The idea that the other’s dream invades, as Deleuze described, was present in Fire Walk With Me, where Dale Cooper “entered” Laura Palmer’s dream. Laura would then took notice, while Cooper did not. Twenty-five years later, when Frank Truman (another character who entered the Twin Peaks mythology as a stranger, as Harry was unavailable) was confused when seeing the remains of Laura’s diary, commenting: “Laura never met Cooper, he came here after she died.” But that is precisely where all our problems and confusion resided: everything is unequal, and only the dead could mark the knight, invite him into her dreams, with clues and fragments scattered, and the experiences that couldn’t be experienced again. “The dream of those who dream concerns those who are not dreaming.” (Deleuze) This disjunction between the living the dead, between reality and dreams, marks the beginning of Cooper’s obsession, although he would only understand this until many years later. 

“Beware of the other’s dream.” Why say that Fire Walk With Me is both a beginning and an end? It’s only because the film finds the invasion of the “dream” at its source. Laura Palmer was no longer a character but a physical form in the fiction, and therefore she owned her dream. David Lynch, then, walked into this dream, and 25 years later, into Dale Cooper’s. The Original Series, Fire Walk With Me and The Return are layers of dreams within each others, and at the end, they each seek to clash into the prior one. Such clashes have devastating effects: at the end of The Return, Cooper willingly lets himself crash into the source of the dream, Laura’s murder. The material of cinema allows him to pull this stunt, as Lynch recycled footage of Fire Walk With Me and the Pilot. Remember how Gordon Cole “saw” Laura at his threshold in Part 10? Was it here that Cooper saw his way out of this game by directly altering the source material? When the dust settled, Laura’s dead body was erased from the Pilot footage, with an effect resembling a Photoshop eraser brush. Lynch had, at the time of its creation, stated his interest in Photoshop, and the idea of easily manipulatable digital images. And in The Return, he uses the digital image’s ability to freely freeze, fade, crop, copy or superimpose his materials, creating a kind of “bad” special effects and a primitive expression, as if they are layered on a flat surface rather than on a three-dimensional space. Lynch found the fragility of digital image, the same way he found the fragility of Cooper, an easily fractured character at his core. As a detective, digital forms made all this too easy, as if there is no work. Remembrance had been made in express: the FBI remembered their encounter with time-traveling Philip Jeffries (David Bowie), after literally being shown a clip of that scene (Fire Walk With Me); Bad Cooper uses his numerous digital device to gather his information. No work? But the fact is that there is, and tremendous work, the work of the morning after. After clashing into the source, what now? There will no longer be a Laura Palmer, but only Carrie Page. In Part 18, after Cooper woke up in the absence of Diane, there were almost zero digital effects, no easy ways of remembering or searching. A detective must go back on the road, in search of that person of his dream.