laughingpinecone wrote:Rainwater wrote:Pöllö wrote:Although, where is good Coop then if it is just a mere illusion? How can he be saved?
His mind/soul/consciousness/whatever is in the Lodge, while his possessed body is prancing around our world, controlled by BOB. I'm not sure it's that simple, though. I don't fully subscribe to the "split personality" interpretation either, mostly as it seems to remove all personal agency and identity from the victim. Following that line of thought, there is no "Coop", there's just his good side and his bad side, now as separate entities.. which, to me, seems like it takes away all that is interesting about these concepts and dives head-first into "it's all in their head"/mental illness territory. Let's not begin on "there is nothing supernatural going on" theories, which, baffling as it may be, have found their way into this fan-base as well. Eh, to each their own, I guess. I don't mind there being no definitive interpretation, and Lynch certainly seems to like it that way.
How can he be saved? Only through his own willpower, I'd wager. I don't think a backwards-driving truck(whoever came up with that - Peyton or Engels, I assume - in any case, I doubt it was Lynch) would suffice, which has always sounded like bad fan-fiction to me.
I wholeheartedly support any interpretation that emphasizes the characters' agency (and an absolute lack of backwards-driving trucks
), but Lynch himself said that there are two Coopers and one got out...
Yeah, he did say that.. if that means Coop being split in two, I definitely don't understand it, but - I don't think "another Cooper" necessarily indicates a split personality, as the concept of a doppelgänger is quite different. It's an "evil twin", not one person divided in half.
laughingpinecone wrote:I want to believe that, however this will play out on a literal level, it will still boil down to an internal conflict that Coop will have to overcome to effectively save himself, like Laura before him - and more recently the Lost Girl, according to my favored brand of Inland Empire analysis.
The one where she's in some sort of purgatory, dealing with the demons(literal or not) of her past? Or was it a shadow self? I think it's an interesting interpretation and I remember thinking it made the most sense out of the ones I've read - which there aren't that many of. Now that is a movie that is just as mind-boggling as some first-time Lynch viewers have accused Mulholland Drive of being, which is really incredibly straight-forward, compared with the delicious clusterfuck that is Inland Empire.
Pöllö wrote:I like that explanation the most. Some were suggesting that BOB inhabited Coop's doppleganger, but that explanation doesn't make any sense. If that's the case, why couldn't he do that in the first place and just go and do his thing. I think his takeover of Coops body in the Lodge implies that there is only one physical Coop and the one stuck in the Lodge is Coopers good side or call it whatever you want.
Well, I'm not sure if you understood my post. Cooper only has one physical body in any case, regardless of whether it's his doppelgänger using it or just BOB. I don't really agree with the interpretation that BOB has possessed Coop, as I said - I'm not sure it's that simple, and, come to think of it, makes less sense than a doppelgänger possessed by BOB. If you want a meta explanation, if I remember correctly, Lynch introduced the idea of two Coopers because of his intense dislike for the ending in the script where Cooper is indeed possessed by BOB - mostly out of love for the character. The fact that this doesn't seem to be the case and that Cooper's soul no longer inhabits his body and the doppelgänger assumes responsibility in his stead, in some strange relationship with BOB, is what makes Cooper's situation very different from that of Leland and creates the possibility of redemption(then again, he did, by proxy, give his soul to BOB..). I know someone, somewhere on this forum, maybe it was LostintheMovies, already made a post explaining it better than I could, but I can't be bothered to find it.
Besides, I feel we don't have enough to go on to really understand what the doppelgängers in the Lodge are exactly, to what extent they're connected to BOB and whether they're separate entities at all.
Pöllö wrote:I still like to think that Leland was responsible on some level tho, that it wasn't just BOB.
Oh, definitely. Concepts of demonic possession often deal with the guilt of the victim. I think FWWM made it clear that Leland holds some amount of responsibility, in contrast with the episode in Season 2 where Leland dies. I think Lynch had already made up his mind in the finale, with the doppelgänger's "I did not kill anybody" mocking Leland's denial. As for his death scene, it can now be interpreted as him still being in denial even as he breathes his last, but it's probably contrary to the writers' intentions at the time.
Pöllö wrote:Twin Peaks is all about mystery after all.
I do agree, mystery is the heart and soul of Twin Peaks.
(Sorry for the rambling post, I hope at least some of it makes sense.)