Is the ending cruel to Laura?
I'm not sure. My initial reaction to the ending was indeed a sense of disappointment that her triumphant moment in
Fire Walk With Me had been ruined by the past/future actions of Cooper. But I don't think her new existence in what reads pretty heavily as a bleak/manufactured reality diminishes her invocation as a totem of acceptance in episode 8, which dovetails entirely with her catharsis in
Fire Walk With Me (and indeed the entire series positing that love is the opposite of fear, rather than good the opposite of evil, all cosmology and philosophy extending outward from her personal trauma and acceptance). Her scream darkens the world. Coop's lost at the end, and only beginning the process of self-acceptance Laura endured long ago (only having just been forced to embody a personality that sees his capacities for failure and appetite as anything less than two separate, cartoonish doppelgangers, who we'd been watching earlier in the season as Dougie and Mr. C). She's awake, still totemic, ever more so with the cosmology expanding (so beautifully and naturally!) to incorporate both of her parents. Hope at the end rests with her, despite cutting off at a moment of horror (and I really don't think it's going too far to piece together a possible sense of hope from the series' mythology there, remystified around Laura as it is in the final episodes and part
.
Returning the story to a tight focus around Laura, revealing some of the more removed and cartoonish elements of its mythology were intentionally pat (false catharsis in episode 17 before the supernatural elements take on a decidedly more strange and personal tone), actually goes a long way toward justifying the patterns of abuse presented this season to me.
When the series seemed to have extended far past the scope of writing a young girl's trauma and uplifting internality onto surreal cosmology, these moments read coldly. Now that it's solidified that it really was that, from start to finish (or at least is that in select moments of the original TV run, in
Fire Walk With Me and, subsequently,
The Return) I can see more purpose there than before.
I still have misgivings, I still think it's less deftly handled than in previous Lynch works, and I'll say any day of the week that the gendered division of nudity is a thoughtless concession to sexist filmic tropes, but -- I'm a lot less down on it than I was before. Lynch is Lynch; it's not perfect; but I can see some sort of resonance now.
(Doesn't mean there shouldn't have been some female characters with agency as an honest counterpoint in the midst of all that, because there really could and should have been, and I think would have at no expense to the series with a little workshopping, but at least with everything still pointedly spiderwebbing out from Laura at the end, the focus on abuse feels less distanced, less unimaginative, less pat.)
Trying not to condone here, but to register that my reaction has been softened by the final two hours as a response to the previous sixteen to an extent I couldn't have expected.
But -- I am also not a woman, so, one million grains of salt.