What's the source on Lynch not liking BOB's possession?

[laughingpinecone]

I've read over and over that he reportedly didn't like the final twist, but do we have a quote on that? Specific wording?

If it's a general distaste, it baffles me because there's plenty of foreshadowing right from the get-go that something Bad was gonna happen to Coop. I think it goes as far back as the character's creation (you don't just name someone D B Cooper for nothing!), but a vague bad end is already very well present in the international pilot and it's specifically BOB-related from ep16 onward so...?

On the other hand, I can see a few specific reasons why he wouldn't have liked it as it was meant to happen in ep29's script. Maybe he didn't think it had been seeded enough in the previous episodes - gotta show the character be open to that kind of possession, it would've taken a descending arc which simply hadn't happened on screen so he felt it was way too soon for something that major to happen? Maybe he didn't like the straight-up possession like Leland's but was eventually happy with his doppelganger solution?

[frahm9]

Didn't he even add "How's Annie?" in the end? Thought it was kind of a seal of approval. That's news to me, would like to know more about it too.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I've read over and over that he reportedly didn't like the final twist, but do we have a quote on that? Specific wording?

I imagine that if he didn't like the twist he would have changed it, just like he changed almost everything else in Coop's story in Episode 29. Unlike some of the other storylines that more or less had to be adhered to (Ben and Donna, the Norma/Ed/Nadine/Mike quadrangle), Coop's ending could have gone anywhere.

From Lynch on Lynch, I get the sense that he liked it as a story point and a chance to explore duality ("He's really up against himself") - he just hated it as the ending for the series. ("That's not the ending. That's the ending that people were stuck with.")

I happen to disagree with him - I've always thought it was a deliciously cruel way for the show to go out. But I can certainly understand a creator (or audience member) who loves a character NOT liking such an ending. Despite being a seemingly cruel god to his characters and subjecting them to all sorts of torments, Lynch is typically EXTREMELY kind to them when it comes to endings (with the exceptions of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway). It seems that for the most part he likes to see his characters find peace (even it requires committing infanticide to get there!).

[laughingpinecone]

I've read over and over that he reportedly didn't like the final twist, but do we have a quote on that? Specific wording?

I imagine that if he didn't like the twist he would have changed it, just like he changed almost everything else in Coop's story in Episode 29. Unlike some of the other storylines that more or less had to be adhered to (Ben and Donna, the Norma/Ed/Nadine/Mike quadrangle), Coop's ending could have gone anywhere.

From Lynch on Lynch, I get the sense that he liked it as a story point and a chance to explore duality ("He's really up against himself") - he just hated it as the ending for the series. ("That's not the ending. That's the the ending people were stuck with.")

I happen to disagree with him - I've always thought it was a deliciously cruel way for the show to go out. But I can certainly understand a creator (or audience member) who loves a character NOT liking such an ending. Despite being a seemingly cruel god to his characters and subjecting them to all sorts of torments, Lynch is typically EXTREMELY kind to them when it comes to endings (with the exceptions of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway). It seems that for the most part he likes to see his characters find peace (even it requires committing infanticide to get there!).

Oh, this clears a lot of things up, thank you!
Agreed he could've changed it! One could, at most, imagine a situation where the other three were like "David please please PLEASE we need the biggest cliffhanger we can muster and honestly, this is it", and hey, they wouldn't have been wrong...

And yeah, haha, he sure is, with Wild at Heart as the extreme example... truly an inspiration to everyone who's ever felt like going up to a writer to tell them to their face that they got their own characters wrong I think there's a lot of 'you reap what you sow' in his endings? With 'were the protagonists largely victims of circumstances' VS 'did they actively dig their own grave' as a sort of general watershed... his protagonists are all walking disasters who make plenty of mistakes but there's Jeffrey-level walking disaster and there's Fred-level walking disaster and they deserve two different endings. And I could see this feed into his dislike for the TP finale as an ending. I love it too, it's deliciously heartbreaking and I was perfectly happy to deduce all the missing links. But I can see how he might think that Coop's arc either needed a lot more groundwork before getting to that point or... to continue.

I get the sense that he liked it as a story point and a chance to explore duality ("He's really up against himself")

HA! I've been saying that it's the lynchiest plot ever, nice to have confirmation from the man himself!

[Mr. Reindeer]

Btw...

(you don't just name someone D B Cooper for nothing!)

Has it ever been stated where Coop's middle name/initial came from? The only places I recall seeing it were in MLMT and the Access Guide, and on the trading cards, all of which came out in late season 2 with presumably minimal participation from either Lynch or Frost.

Did Scott Frost come up with the "D. B. Cooper" thing? Or Peyton/Engels? Or was it something Lynch/Frost always had in the writers' bible, but wasn't referenced until those materials?

[laughingpinecone]

Btw...

(you don't just name someone D B Cooper for nothing!)

Has it ever been stated where Coop's middle name/initial came from? The only places I recall seeing it were in MLMT and the Access Guide, and on the trading cards, all of which came out in late season 2 with presumably minimal participation from either Lynch or Frost.

Did Scott Frost come up with the "D. B. Cooper" thing? Or Peyton/Engels? Or was it something Lynch/Frost always had in the writers' bible, but wasn't referenced until those materials?

Frost says in Reflections that 'they' personally reviewed every bit of expanded material and merchandising. Meaning him and who I don't know, but that at least puts a Mark Frost Stamp of Approval on everything. The cards are also further canonized by their inclusion in the blu ray set!

[Mr. Reindeer]

Btw...

(you don't just name someone D B Cooper for nothing!)

Has it ever been stated where Coop's middle name/initial came from? The only places I recall seeing it were in MLMT and the Access Guide, and on the trading cards, all of which came out in late season 2 with presumably minimal participation from either Lynch or Frost.

Did Scott Frost come up with the "D. B. Cooper" thing? Or Peyton/Engels? Or was it something Lynch/Frost always had in the writers' bible, but wasn't referenced until those materials?

Frost says in Reflections that 'they' personally reviewed every bit of expanded material and merchandising. Meaning him and who I don't know, but that at least puts a Mark Frost Stamp of Approval on everything. The cards are also further canonized by their inclusion in the blu ray set!

True, but there's some stuff on the cards that is explicitly contradicted by the series (for instance, the cards say that the Great Northern broke ground in 1927, whereas Episode 18 shows footage of Ben & Jerry at the groundbreaking circa the mid-'50s; although whoever edited the cards was astute enough to correct the Access Guide's erroneous assertion that Margaret's husband was a firefighter). I tend to take all that stuff with a grain of salt until it's incorporated into the show. That said, I do expect a few things here and there to end up being canonized, like Deer Meadow from MLMT ending up in FWWM. And the D. B. Cooper reference definitely seems like a Lynch/Frost thing to do in that era.

It's also interesting to note that Cooper's birthday from MLMT/the trading cards is mentioned in the script for Episode 29 (although Lynch ended up cutting that dialogue). So someone on the writing staff was definitely taking that material seriously.

[LostInTheMovies]

The primary source I've seen for Lynch not liking Coop's cliffhanger (at least as initially presented) is Martha Nochimson in The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (1996). It is unfortunately unclear if this is based on her own deductions or direct confirmation from Lynch, or suggestion from someone else (Catherine Coulson appears in her footnotes highlighting other divisions between Lynch and Frost; at another point she directly attributes Lynch for the claim that he was surprised and disappointed by where Frost took Invitation to Love). Here is a sample of what Nochimson writes:

"Worse, Cooper's boundary crossing terminates in his possession by BOB, Laura's murderer and the demon he has been longing to see/understand. ... Lynch had little interest in Windom Earle and was firmly opposed to depicting any possession of Cooper by demonic forces. That the series ends with such an event is ironically attributable to Lynch's loss of control over the series - the control that he habitually exercises in order to lose control. ... Worst for Lynch was Frost's plotting of Cooper's fall into division at the end of the series, a narrative direction that can best be understood in the context of Frost's identification of Cooper with Sherlock Holmes, an identification not shared by Lynch. ... When Lynch came back to Twin Peaks, a project for which he had initially had great relish, the return was not a happy one for him. The momentum of the show had turned against his initial creative impulse, a tide he could not stem until the final episode. Taking his last chance, he put Frost's written script aside and improvised with the cast to create a series finale that recaptured the initial faith in the human roots of vision and creativity in the energies beyond language, logic, and reason. But there were only so many changes possible. Lynch had to make what he could of the demonic division of Dale Cooper, which contravenes all he believes about life (and narrative)."

There's much more, but that's the most directly pertinent. Additionally, we know that Coop seeing Bob in the mirror was definitely not Lynch's idea, but - as described in Reflections - was conceived (apparently in synchronicity) by Peyton & Frost. Considering as well how differently Lynch and Frost emphasize Cooper's flaws and strengths in the episodes in which one or the other takes the lead in characterization, I think it's fair to believe Nochimson's assertion is grounded in evidence provided by Lynch and others. (Though she does get some things wrong - like Lynch directing WAH in s2 - these tend to be things Lynch himself misrepresents, further suggesting that he is the source of her claims about not liking Cooper's fate.)

[laughingpinecone]

Ah, thank you very much! An extremely interesting paragraph.
One thing that strikes me as odd is that the author keeps referring to Coop's fate as a 'division', and as we all know, there was no 'division' in Frost+Peyton's concept, that's all Lynch... oh it's all so confusing. For one, there's still no details on why he was reportedly so against having Coop be possessed... Lynch did in fact bend over backwards to avoid Coop's possession on a technicality. But it's the reasoning behind that's what really matters, I think, and of course he doesn't spill the beans.

...out of the many things to be grateful for in s3, attribution is going to be a hell of a lot easier... and less relevant, in a way. Having been conceived as an almost monolithic work, there won't be, presumably, any lost trajectories to be divined between the lines of scripts and interviews...

[Soolsma]

Btw...

(you don't just name someone D B Cooper for nothing!)

Has it ever been stated where Coop's middle name/initial came from? The only places I recall seeing it were in MLMT and the Access Guide, and on the trading cards, all of which came out in late season 2 with presumably minimal participation from either Lynch or Frost.

Did Scott Frost come up with the "D. B. Cooper" thing? Or Peyton/Engels? Or was it something Lynch/Frost always had in the writers' bible, but wasn't referenced until those materials?

Frost says in Reflections that 'they' personally reviewed every bit of expanded material and merchandising. Meaning him and who I don't know, but that at least puts a Mark Frost Stamp of Approval on everything. The cards are also further canonized by their inclusion in the blu ray set!

From Dale Cooper's wikipedia page

Lynch named Cooper in reference to D. B. Cooper, an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft on November 24, 1971.[1]

[Mr. Reindeer]

The primary source I've seen for Lynch not liking Coop's cliffhanger (at least as initially presented) is Martha Nochimson in The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (1996).

[....]

"Worst for Lynch was Frost's plotting of Cooper's fall into division at the end of the series, a narrative direction that can best be understood in the context of Frost's identification of Cooper with Sherlock Holmes, an identification not shared by Lynch. ..."

Uh...what? I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and I fail to see ANY correlation. Holmes's defining characteristic was his single-mindedness - he was far less "divided" than almost any other character in literature. This paragraph seems to be a lot of thrown-together, poorly-reasoned conjecture.

But there were only so many changes possible. Lynch had to make what he could of the demonic division of Dale Cooper, which contravenes all he believes about life (and narrative)."

Not sure why the author feels that changing the ending wasn't "possible" after Lynch had changed 40% of the script. Why not?

From Dale Cooper's wikipedia page

Lynch named Cooper in reference to D. B. Cooper, an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft on November 24, 1971.[1]

Eh, I'd take that with a grain of salt. The only support cited is a 2008 travel guide called 'Weird Washington' - I'd assume that the editors of that book probably didn't have much insight into the making of TP, and were just printing "facts" heard from a friend of a friend. It's certainly possible that Lynch was responsible for the name, but an unsupported Wikipedia entry doesn't prove anything. (Notably, Dale doesn't have a middle name - or even a middle initial - in the pilot script.)

[LostInTheMovies]

Uh...what? I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and I fail to see ANY correlation. Holmes's defining characteristic was his single-mindedness - he was far less "divided" than almost any other character in literature. This paragraph seems to be a lot of thrown-together, poorly-reasoned conjecture.

This isn't a paragraph, it's a series of fragments I had to excerpt somewhat laboriously because I was transcribing from a book to my phone. I highlighted what was relevant, at the cost of losing some context. That's why I added the ellipses but perhaps I should have added brackets as well to further highlight what I was doing. I'm on a computer now and can type faster, so I'll provide the whole context in a moment.

But are you questioning whether Frost sees a correlation between Cooper and Holmes? Or whether there's a correlation between Cooper's division and Holmes'? If the former, this is definitely the case - it's something he's said on numerous occasions, including directly to Martha Nochimson during her interview with him before she met Lynch. (This conversation was part of what spurred her analysis.) If the latter, I think you're misundersanding what she means by "division", which is my fault for not providing more of the text. She is speaking to the idea of a division between rationalism and intuition, with the subordination of the latter to the former (rather than a more organic trust in the subconscious, which she attributes to Lynch). Seen as such, Holmes' singlemindedness, as you describe it, would be seen as a division of a more fundamental unity. I have some disagreements with Nochimson's analysis, but she is not claiming that Holmes was a confused or distractible character.

Here is the full paragraph:

"Worst for Lynch was Frost's plotting of Cooper's fall into division at the end of the series, a narrative direction that can best be understood in the context of Frost's identification of Cooper with Sherlock Holmes, an identification not shared by Lynch. This identification is illuminated in Frost's novel, The List of Seven, a fantasy about the adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle with a strangely heroic man who became the model for Sherlock Holmes. Plainly, Frost's selection and characterization of Doyle as his hero in the novel reveals how intensely Frost identifies the longing to see as a form of piercing logic empowered to keep irrationality under necessary control. The novel depicts Doyle as a man committed to the difficult feat of 'walking the line' between the irrational and the rational: 'He [Doyle] knew that the path of human perfectibility - the path he aspired to walk - lay exactly on the midpoint between them' (p. 5). Frost's interface with Lynch in his focus on the border is clear here, but even more clear is the vast difference between the two men in their understanding of it. Crossing is not an option for Frost. In The List of Seven, crossing the line puts a human being in the kingdom of evil, in the grip of what Frost understands as the Dweller on the Threshold, a cosmic satanic force that appears to be what Frost sees as the irrational side of 'the line.' It is from this un-Lynchian construction of the border that Frost arrived at the necessity for Cooper, who repeatedly crossed what Frost identifies as 'the line,' to fall into the power of evil. Lynch's and Frost's separate visions of the aftermath of the possession is pertinent to our understanding of the chasm between their narrative instincts. Both intended to deliver Cooper; however, Frost would have restored him to rationality, while Lynch, as is clear from the final episode that he rewrote (to be discussed in detail below) intended to restore his access to the subconscious."

Not sure why the author feels that changing the ending wasn't "possible" after Lynch had changed 40% of the script. Why not?

Because if the show was to continue, this was to be a central hook for a new season. Plus, Harley Peyton has said in Wrapped in Plastic that Lynch didn't have "veto power" over "larger storytelling decisions." I'm sure this power balance between him and Frost was further compounded by the fact that Lynch chose to disengage from much of the writing process, effectively ceding the momentum and development of the show to other parties. That 40% of the script (I'd argue maybe more) that Lynch changes doesn't alter the destination, but it greatly modifies how we get there and what it means. I think Lynch found his peace with an idea that may have troubled him at the outset: obviously he not only made the idea of Coop's "possession" his own, but further explored variations on it in almost all of his subsequent works.

[Mr. Reindeer]

LostintheMovies - Ah, thanks for going through the work of typing all that out to give the context! That makes more sense. I'm very aware that Frost viewed Cooper as a Holmesian character (Scott Frost made this more overt in MLMT, where I believe Cooper talks about admiring Holmes); I was questioning how being Holmesian has any relationship to his division/possession by Bob at the end. The full paragraph makes the author's point much more clearly. I would still argue that the "division" has no relationship to Holmes as a character; however, I see the author's point that it may be related to Frost's interest in Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (who spent the last few years of his life trying to communicate with the dead), and the push-and-pull between Holmes's extreme devotion to logic and his creator's interest in spiritualism and the mystical. I'm going to have give Frost's novels a read one a' these days. It sounds like they provide some fascinating insight into his perceptions of the White/Black Lodge mythology. Maybe I'll include them in my pre-season 3 rewatch/reread.

It's interesting that Lynch didn't have veto power over larger story points. I'd never heard that before, although it certainly makes sense.

It is very telling that twinning/doubling has become so pronounced in every subsequent Lynch work. However, it seems that even after TP, he didn't entirely embrace the theme right away. In the "Tricks" episode of Hotel Room, Barry GIfford's screenplay creates deliberate identity confusion between Moe Boca (Harry Dean Stanton) and Lou Holchak (Freddie Jones). The men talk about a woman, Felicia, who apparently was Moe's ex-wife. At the end, after Jones's character has left, the police come in and arrest Harry Dean for murdering Felicia - and call him Lou Holchak. Harry Dean screams, "I don't understand!" Lynch, over Gifford's protestat, decided to downplay the identity confusion by including an insert shot of Jones slipping his wallet and ID into Harry Dean's coat pocket, which the police find later - making it a simple frame-up rather than the doubling/twinning theme that pervades so much of Lynch's subsequent work. Gifford said (I think in Beautiful Dark) that he doesn't understand why Lynch felt it was necessary to make this change, and Gifford fought it because it killed the ambiguity and mystery. Seems very uncharacteristic for Lynch.

[LostInTheMovies]

It's interesting that Lynch didn't have veto power over larger story points. I'd never heard that before, although it certainly makes sense.

I'm always thirsting to know how this actually worked in practice - although we have a bit of a sense of it from Reflections & Harley Peyton's other interviews (w/ Peyton basically vetoing Lynch and getting it back in the end when he was not invited to be in On the Air). But I was recently leafing through Greg Olson's bio Beautiful Dark and Peyton and/or Frost also talk in there about how Lynch just wasn't very involved in the actual writing process - would just check things over later. It seems like in a lot of ways it was less an official set-up than just the way things developed. It's also interesting how, even if he had that power, Lynch seemed to prefer integrating what already existed to just overturning it. Hence, no director's cuts, no leaving out episodes he doesn't like, not even (for the most part, with some possible exceptions) retconning stuff he doesn't like out of existence. Instead he seems to build on things he wasn't fond of and make them into something that works for him. It's a very organic, kinda Andy Goldsworthy way of working if that analogy makes sense!

It is very telling that twinning/doubling has become so pronounced in every subsequent Lynch work. However, it seems that even after TP, he didn't entirely embrace the theme right away. In the "Tricks" episode of Hotel Room, Barry GIfford's screenplay creates deliberate identity confusion between Moe Boca (Harry Dean Stanton) and Lou Holchak (Freddie Jones). The men talk about a woman, Felicia, who apparently was Moe's ex-wife. At the end, after Jones's character has left, the police come in and arrest Harry Dean for murdering Felicia - and call him Lou Holchak. Harry Dean screams, "I don't understand!" Lynch, over Gifford's protestat, decided to downplay the identity confusion by including an insert shot of Jones slipping his wallet and ID into Harry Dean's coat pocket, which the police find later - making it a simple frame-up rather than the doubling/twinning theme that pervades so much of Lynch's subsequent work. Gifford said (I think in Beautiful Dark) that he doesn't understand why Lynch felt it was necessary to make this change, and Gifford fought it because it killed the ambiguity and mystery. Seems very uncharacteristic for Lynch.

Wow, that is FASCINATING. I had no idea! I really do see Lynch as an artist who was (and probably still is) constantly evolving, and who may have been more cautious at certain points than people realize (that first/second-stage division especially). Also, this anecdote really makes me think that Lynch does - or did - like to ground his surrealism in a psychological explanation. You see it in FWWM, you see it in Lost Highway (which I think Lynch & Gifford agreed was inside the character's head, and then Lynch got pissed at Gifford for stating this publicly), and you see it perhaps most of all in Mulholland Dr which everyone and their grandmother (at this point) sees as a pretty straightforward disguised-dream. I've tried to see ways around that, to be open-minded and get fresh perspectives on it, but the film just hammers home the "dream" interpretation at so many angles that I find it hard to escape.

I wonder if to an extent Inland Empire (and possibly the upcoming season of Twin Peaks) aren't rejections of this impulse, attempts to say "Yes, there is a psychological basis for all this but it's ALSO unequivocally a bending of physical reality." And, by implication, to reflect back on those films Lynch might have been cautious about and cast light on the ways they too challenge a purely psychological reading (this is probably easiest to do with FWWM, which contains some blatantly supernatural elements, and hardest to do with MD except for perhaps the conclusion).

Out of curiosity, do you have a Gifford interview handy where he discusses all of this? I've always been fascinating by Lynch's collaborations, and this one is no exception. There seems to have been a falling-out at some point too, from what I've read of the davidlynch.com chat records...

[LostInTheMovies]

It's interesting that Lynch didn't have veto power over larger story points. I'd never heard that before, although it certainly makes sense.

I'm always thirsting to know how this actually worked in practice - although we have a bit of a sense of it from Reflections & Harley Peyton's other interviews (w/ Peyton basically vetoing Lynch and getting it back in the end when he was not invited to be in On the Air). But I was recently leafing through Greg Olson's bio Beautiful Dark and Peyton and/or Frost also talk in there about how Lynch just wasn't very involved in the actual writing process - would just check things over later. It seems like in a lot of ways it was less an official set-up than just the way things developed. It's also interesting how, even if he had that power, Lynch seemed to prefer integrating what already existed to just overturning it. Hence, no director's cuts, no leaving out episodes he doesn't like, not even (for the most part, with some possible exceptions) retconning stuff he doesn't like out of existence. Instead he seems to build on things he wasn't fond of and make them into something that works for him. It's a very organic, kinda Andy Goldsworthy way of working if that analogy makes sense!

It is very telling that twinning/doubling has become so pronounced in every subsequent Lynch work. However, it seems that even after TP, he didn't entirely embrace the theme right away. In the "Tricks" episode of Hotel Room, Barry GIfford's screenplay creates deliberate identity confusion between Moe Boca (Harry Dean Stanton) and Lou Holchak (Freddie Jones). The men talk about a woman, Felicia, who apparently was Moe's ex-wife. At the end, after Jones's character has left, the police come in and arrest Harry Dean for murdering Felicia - and call him Lou Holchak. Harry Dean screams, "I don't understand!" Lynch, over Gifford's protestat, decided to downplay the identity confusion by including an insert shot of Jones slipping his wallet and ID into Harry Dean's coat pocket, which the police find later - making it a simple frame-up rather than the doubling/twinning theme that pervades so much of Lynch's subsequent work. Gifford said (I think in Beautiful Dark) that he doesn't understand why Lynch felt it was necessary to make this change, and Gifford fought it because it killed the ambiguity and mystery. Seems very uncharacteristic for Lynch.

Wow, that is FASCINATING. I had no idea! I really do see Lynch as an artist who was (and probably still is) constantly evolving, and who may have been more cautious at certain points than people realize (that first/second-stage division especially). Also, this anecdote really makes me think that Lynch does - or did - like to ground his surrealism in a psychological explanation. You see it in FWWM, you see it in Lost Highway (which I think Lynch & Gifford agreed was inside the character's head, and then Lynch got pissed at Gifford for stating this publicly), and you see it perhaps most of all in Mulholland Dr which everyone and their grandmother (at this point) sees as a pretty straightforward disguised-dream. I've tried to see ways around that, to be open-minded and get fresh perspectives on it, but the film just hammers home the "dream" interpretation at so many angles that I find it hard to escape.

I wonder if to an extent Inland Empire (and possibly the upcoming season of Twin Peaks) aren't rejections of this impulse, attempts to say "Yes, there is a psychological basis for all this but it's ALSO unequivocally a bending of physical reality." And, by implication, to reflect back on those films Lynch might have been cautious about and cast light on the ways they too challenge a purely psychological reading (this is probably easiest to do with FWWM, which contains some blatantly supernatural elements, and hardest to do with MD except for perhaps the conclusion).

Out of curiosity, do you have a Gifford interview handy where he discusses all of this? I've always been fascinating by Lynch's collaborations, and this one is no exception. There seems to have been a falling-out at some point too, from what I've read of the davidlynch.com chat records...