Part 18 - What is your name? (SPOILERS)

[claaa7]

on the name Carrie Page.. i was intrigued by the fact that we were presented with the 3 missing pages from Laura's diary, the way we was informed that there were still one missing made it sure that that last page would be revealed somewhere down the line (although this series surely throws ut Chekov's old writing rule of "if a gun is introduced in a story, then it has to be fired" LOL). it seems Cooper found the missing Page!

[Cipher]

Connection I just saw in a comment section: Phillip Jeffries also asks what year it is during his visit to the FBI in Fire Walk With Me.

If we're meant to read into the parallel, what world did Jeffries come from? What had he tried to do?

[N. Needleman]

Connection I just saw in a comment section: Phillip Jeffries also asks what year it is during his visit to the FBI in Fire Walk With Me.

Oh fuck. You're right.

[rocketsan22]

Did I not see the camper thing that Mike was driving in FWWM in one scene?

[Soolsma]

Anyone else expected more Mother (was it implied she's Judy?), Jumping man, Sarah?

I did, which is one of a number of things that still makes me suspect Season 4. OTOH, maybe the foolish Cooper walking into Judy's Odessa lair indicates she's won the game, due to his pride.

If that's the case, are you also counting the Arm and Gerard to be accomplices in a sort of master plan by her?

[N. Needleman]

Anyone else expected more Mother (was it implied she's Judy?), Jumping man, Sarah?

I did, which is one of a number of things that still makes me suspect Season 4. OTOH, maybe the foolish Cooper walking into Judy's Odessa lair indicates she's won the game, due to his pride.

If that's the case, are you also counting the Arm and Gerard to be accomplices in a sort of master plan by her?

At this point I have no clue. MIKE sure did seem eager though (and the Arm seemed sinister). Or maybe they thought Cooper had something less stupid in mind.

[Cappy]

I wonder if Naido is a kind of blank slate character, one that other characters are free to project their own wishes and desires upon. She just becomes Diane for Dale, who needs a witness to validate his own life experiences. Which is not too far off from some of the old theories about Diane, namely that she wasn't a real person, and just a conceit by an FBI Agent who needed to address his meticulous case notes to somebody, anybody. He named his tape recorder Diane for this reason, according to the theory.

And when we finally get to meet Diane (not her improper tulpa copy) she is very much an embodied abstraction, a personified waiting room (red hair, black-and-white nails, etc.) That scene from TMP where Cooper talks to her offscreen only adds to the ambiguity.

FWIW I do think Diane's a real person. I think her story has gone far enough down certain roads (the trauma of rape at the doing of Cooper's doppelganger, some kind of deep connection with the good Cooper being very heavily implied in this part and the previous one, even her alt-life as Linda leaving Richard being an action based on feelings which she bothered to write for him in a note) for it to be tasteless to now rubbish all of them. Perhaps the strongest argument against Diane being in-universe fictional though might be that it just wouldn't be something Lynch would do to Dern. He sure might be seen to have done this to others though.

That's a good point. I do think her story has been fleshed out sufficiently enough that it would be odd to reveal her as some sentient thought projection (tulpa?). The one moment that made me suspicious of Diane (or Naido as Diane) was after when Naido became Diane, and kissed Dale and said she remembered everything. It is possible that her time spent out in spirit dimensions has made her forgiving or capable of recognizing the "real" Cooper, but she just felt a little "idealized male fantasy" here. Maybe not for viewers so much but for Dale Cooper's sake; Diane existing as a perpetual cool girl that never complains about the actions of her male associates. It absolves Cooper of any guilt for Diane's pain (not to mention the Audrey situation).

I feel like most of the events depicted after Coop's face is superimposed over the screen have an air of surreality and dream logic to them. It's like it's either Cooper waking up from a dream, or Cooper realizing he is in a dream and going full lucid.

[The Gazebo]

The top comment there is also a great reflection on how the 25-year gap between the old show and this season may be reflected in some ways in its ending. (I don't think that's one of its primary goals, but it tracks -- "What year is it?", merger of humor and horror in Cooper, a yearning to undo events and return to a town that isn't. At the very least, I think it's interesting to speculate on elements that would lose at least one layer of meaning were this same season to somehow have emerged in '92. There are more satisfying ways to look at the ending, for sure, but that's worth noting.)

Lots of good discussion there. I think, as one of the disappointed, that to maximize my enjoyment, I just have to ignore the mythological ramifications (which is far too 'out there' for me), and maybe even the various interpretations, and just take in the visuals or the ambience of each scene. Once I try to think too hard about time travel and other dimensions, etc, the magic disappears. 17 and 18 were pretty good visually, while storywise I'm left cold.

[sylviecerise]

Was singing it abstent-mindedly & realized that Chromatic's Shadow was definitely written with the last episode in mind:

At night I'm driving in your car
Pretending that we'll leave this town
We're watching all the street lights fade
And now you're just a stranger's dream
I took your picture from the frame
And now you're nothing like you seem
Your shadow fell like last night's rain

A mixed perspective of Carrie/Laura, Richard/Cooper, and Sarah

[N. Needleman]

It is possible that her time spent out in spirit dimensions has made her forgiving or capable of recognizing the "real" Cooper, but she just felt a little "idealized male fantasy" here. Maybe not for viewers so much but for Dale Cooper's sake; Diane existing as a perpetual cool girl that never complains about the actions of her male associates. It absolves Cooper of any guilt for Diane's pain (not to mention the Audrey situation).

I don't know about that. I thought Diane seemed very hesitant at first when Cooper went to kiss her, exultant over his great victory. Then she threw herself into it, but initially she seemed way uncertain to me. Later, at the crossroads, she seems equally unwilling - and then of course there's the most terrifying sex scene since Zulawski's Possession. Cooper is complicit, but he doesn't get it anymore than he gets what he's done with Laura.

I feel like most of the events depicted after Coop's face is superimposed over the screen have an air of surreality and dream logic to them. It's like it's either Cooper waking up from a dream, or Cooper realizing he is in a dream and going full lucid.

Or sinking into heroic delusion. Remember, it ends with him echoing Jeffries, whose fate he ends up sharing: "We live inside a dream."

[Hester Prynne]

it seems Cooper found the missing Page!

Nice!!!

[Novalis]

The top comment there is also a great reflection on how the 25-year gap between the old show and this season may be reflected in some ways in its ending. (I don't think that's one of its primary goals, but it tracks -- "What year is it?", merger of humor and horror in Cooper, a yearning to undo events and return to a town that isn't. At the very least, I think it's interesting to speculate on elements that would lose at least one layer of meaning were this same season to somehow have emerged in '92. There are more satisfying ways to look at the ending, for sure, but that's worth noting.)

Lots of good discussion there. I think, as one of the disappointed, that to maximize my enjoyment, I just have to ignore the mythological ramifications (which is far too 'out there' for me), and maybe even the various interpretations, and just take in the visuals or the ambience of each scene. Once I try to think too hard about time travel and other dimensions, etc, the magic disappears. 17 and 18 were pretty good visually, while storywise I'm left cold.

The strange thing is, your proposal of cold-reading the show, empty of ideas, is probably a lot closer to what Lynch seems to be asking -- at least in most interviews I've seen.

Lynch's basic position, insofar as it can be gleaned from his more candid moments during documentaries and interviews, is that a film is something other or more than a text. Sure, there is a screenplay, and this is translated to film, but the film-maker is not primarily involved in mere translation but in something much more visceral, affective and primal: world-building.

I've read quite a lot about this dynamic as part of my art history masters. In so far as texts are meaningful texts, they are transparent, allowing words to vanish and be replaced with meanings. But the whole point of visual art, images and film is not to vanish and be replaced with meaning, but to appear: to resist the hermenuetical impulse of the audience, to stubbornly be there opposite your face looking back at you in all their visuality (and for film, audiality). The pre-occupations of Lynch as film-maker coincide somewhat with what has been called in art history 'the visual turn', 'the pictoral turn' or 'the new visuality'; i.e. a serious re-evaluation of the image as image, not as a text. In this kind of methodology, audiences do not approach images in order to 'decode' them or extract meanings from them, but as a source of experience and sensations. The emphasis is not on producing discourse about the image, still less interpreting it, but about engaging with it perceptually and experientually.

I'm not very good at this. My mind is primed to 'read' images, to 'read off' what they are purportedly telling us, rather than feeling its way around, bodily, kinaesthetically, experientially. YMMV

[SamGGD]

WHAT THE FUCK DID LAURA WHISPER IN TO COOPS EAR??????

[Hester Prynne]

What does it mean when Jeffries says, "This is where you'll find Judy. There may be someone. Did you ask me this?" Who is the someone and who asked Jeffries this?

[Tailsun]

Laura's death, imbued with some higher truth. That she didn’t die for nothing. It’s either nihilistic or poignant. Maybe it’s both. The moment Laura disappeared, everything kind of made sense to me; it's about pain, going in circles. These things never really go away. You can't erase or re-write the kind of wound Laura left behind. The futility of trying to change history, to make things OK again. I had a Laura in my life, and these scenes hurt and I can't deny that. All the exposition, all the nonsense plotting, fell away. Just like Lynch did with Bob disposing of Windom Earle. Laura and Cooper. This is all Twin Peaks has ever been about, at least for me. When Cooper was listening to Laura's whispering in the Lodge, under the sad music in the credits, it hit me hard; Cooper the detective, the righter of wrongs. Laura the victim, the lost girl. Both not really knowing each other, and seemingly separated by time, but inextricably connected. Yet, neither of them could solve anything that happened. No-one could. It makes the coffee and pie and goofy lounge jazz look fucking stupid, and it's one of the most heartbreaking, staring-down-the-barrel, sincere ideas Twin Peaks has ever executed.

I'm catching up with the posts since last night so apologies for pulling out a quote pages later (that bothers some people more than others), but I just wanted to say that I came away with the same feeling and you managed to put it into words in a way that I couldn't.

Something that occurred to me as I was finally falling sleep last night is that with all the fixation on the future and the past, the present moment becomes secondary. Perhaps this is the ultimate mistake of our Cooper; returning to or revising the past in an attempt to create a "better" future and dooming himself to a purgatorial un-reality in the process. It leads me to yet another reading of the "Fire Walk" poem (add it to the pile): Cooper as the magician, cast away to the darkness, unable to tame the fire that both illuminates and destroys.