Nighthawk wrote:BTW... Dougie was a shady character himself before "good" Cooper essentially took over his body. He was a compulsive gambler, spending money on prostitutes while he had a beautiful wife and a son in need of him at home.
I think the
Mad Men parallels in Dougie's world that I and others have noted (exact same painting in office, Heisman-type trophy behind Bushenell's desk, the MM-ness of the "Bill Shaker of Allied Chemicals" character) are important to the equation in figuring out who Dougie is and what he means. Let me digress a bit before circling back to this.
In the Part 6 review on his blog, Lost in the Movies fascinatingly pointed out a moment in
The Art Life where DKL rather existentially says he doesn't know what would have happened if he hadn't gotten the call to come on board at AFI, and Lost relates this to DougieCoop's existential displacement. The more I think about this, the more fascinating it becomes.
As we learn in MLMT, Coop dreamed of being in the FBI since he was a young boy. I would bet that many of us here on this board had dreams of working some sort of law enforcement jobs (for me, it was a private investigator -- like Mr. Frost, I loved Sherlock Holmes). Kids dream of adventurous lives where they can solve mysteries. (See Sonny Jim reading the Hardy Boys -- also a childhood favorite of mine.) However, most of us grow up and realize we're not cut out for such work, or that the particular job/life we imagined as kids doesn't actually exist except in books/movies.
Coop, in the original show, gets to live the dream most of us wished for. He's a handsome, charming FBI agent, beloved by all, who gets to go interesting places and solve fascinating crimes, K.O.ing the bad guys and saving the day with his intellect and physical finesse in a world of clearly-delineated good and evil. He fulfilled his childhood fantasy.
Most of us don't, however. Most of us drop our childhood dreams and take a job that we may find some satisfaction in, but probably wouldn't even be our second or third pick if we truly had our druthers. We settle down, and attempt to find purpose in starting a family, raising children, passing the torch. For many people, that's enough, and the childhood dreams of adventure and excitement sleep dormant as happy memories occasionally revisited. Others aren't so lucky, and they become unsettled, disenchanted, desperate for escape. Cue the "displaced male with existential malaise" trope that has become the focus of much of the most acclaimed prestige drama from the Sopranos on. I think Dougie (the original Dougie) is implied to be very much a Don Draper-type character: someone who never grew past his childish self-centered dreams, who was dissatisfied with his family and mid-level corporate job and was probably depressed (I assumed that Dr. Ben is some sort of psychiatrist/psychologist Dougie sees), and who was desperate for escape. In other words, an alternate version of Cooper, one who didn't get to live the proverbial dream.
Now the real Coop has been stripped of everything and slotted into this man's life: essentially, forced to live like the rest of us, or like an alternate-reality DKL whose film career didn't take off. He's a child, obsessed with badges and guns, but living in an adult world working a desk job and raising a kid. Give this guy a dwarf coming at him with a gun and everything makes sense: he knows EXACTLY what to do! Throw in a talking braintree? All the better -- finally, something logical! But the rest of the time, he's a child, completely unable to comprehend this dull reality of fluorescent lights, elevators, minor office intrigue, and terrible cars. I think he's going to have to learn to come to terms with living in this reality, with living the life most of us have, before earning the right to go back to his old life of purpose and adventure.
Most of us assumed this season would be about Coop confronting the evil side of himself via DoppelCoop. But what we've gotten is a far more complex deconstruction of identity at a core level, before we can even begin to approach the more straightforward question of "good vs. evil." I'm sure I'm not close to fully comprehending it, but I'm so intrigued to see where it goes.
