SOURCE: Nochimson, Martha. “Desire under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body of Reality in Twin Peaks.” Film Quarterly 46, no. 2 (winter 1992-1993): 22-34.

[In the following essay, Nochimson discusses the character of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, asserting that Cooper represents a new kind of movie and television detective.]

The dazzled affection that Dale Cooper, hero of Twin Peaks, inspired in a large television spectatorship can only partly be explained by the appeal of actor Kyle MacLachlan. Nor can it be ascribed merely to the time-tested popularity of the detective figure; on the contrary, Cooper lays waste to a multitude of film and television detective clichés. Since his creators came to the series with distinguished careers in each of the major media, David Lynch and MacLachlan himself in film and Mark Frost in television, some inventive synthesis between the traditions was expected, but Dale Cooper is more than a little juggling of two formulas. “Coop” wears the regulation suit and trench coat but sets a fresh and compelling standard for media detectives and opens a new chapter in the relationship between mystery and desire.

Cooper's eager desire to enter the labyrinths of mystery ties knots in the venerable Hollywood Mystery Tradition (HMT), although the overall narrative line of the series initially suggests that Lynch has brought that tradition with him in his first foray into television. In the HMT, the life of a male protagonist is disrupted by an encounter with his darker side when desire meets the body of a deadly (or dead) woman. In Twin Peaks, FBI Agent Cooper solves the mystery of who murdered the desirable Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), and ends up staring into a mirror at an image of himself so monstrous that none can doubt that his stint on the case has plunged him into darkness. But when I asked David Lynch why Cooper's bridge to self-knowledge is a dead woman, I was greeted with silence. Then: “It isn't her.”¹

Lynch asserts that Laura, Twin Peaks' femme fatale, is not the point of initiation. As Lynch goes on to point out, his detective's fascination with mystery precedes the particularity of the case. Dale Cooper comes to Twin Peaks already filled with a passion for mystery, and Laura's death offers him a major occasion to indulge it. Readiness by itself, however, does not go to the heart of Twin Peaks' innovation. What kind of readiness is the question.

There is a kind of readiness that is standard in the Television Mystery Tradition (TMT). The basic model for the TMT is not the erotically stunned investigator but ever-ready Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, the standard television detective is not seduced into his narratives; he enters them with a passion to dispel any illegibility represented by any body of crime—which is not a disruption in his life but rather its raison d'être. For the Holmesian television detective, lack of clarity is the desirable aspect of mystery, an intellectually aphrodisiac opportunity for orgasmic restoration of clarity. If this seems a contradiction in terms, let doubters observe the quivering of Jeremy Brett as Holmes contemplates a jumble of clues. But again the fit is incomplete. Cooper is Holmesian only in his predisposition for mystery; he is far too sensually stimulated by Douglas firs, among other Twin Peaks delights, to qualify as a man of cerebral lust.

Ironically, Cooper's striking originality is best understood in contrast to what his seemingly different filmic and home-box colleagues share: the disavowal of vulnerability or illegibility in the body of the detective (the fear of castration?).² In the movies, the disavowal is accomplished through a displacement of anxiety about the body onto a woman. When the detective's body is brought into play, all frailty is transferred to the body of a femme fatale. For example, the obligatory assaults all Hollywood detectives endure are inevitably contextualized as either directly or indirectly brought about through the unreliability or treachery of a desirable woman's body—not theirs. Once attacked, the detective's body demonstrates an eerie dependability under pressure—the cinema sleuth is second only to Bugs Bunny in ignoring torn limbs or bullet holes as he struggles to solve the mystery. The shifts and changes associated with the body, so risky in the world of the film detective, are totally feminized. Television's asexual, cerebral Holmesian is even more drastically disembodied. Here, the detective's otherness to body is created by displacing all the vagaries of physicality onto the miasmic body of the world. Involvement causes contamination (crime); by contrast, the detective postures as a detached, virtually fleshless site of cleansing. Accustomed as we are to this contempt for the body in the detective genre, we are slow to question it or its effectiveness. Familiarity makes it seem right.

However, it isn't truly right for television, a medium that by nature deflates the dualism of the orthodox detective through its unorthodox normalization of shifts and slippage—and thus its normalization of the vicissitudes of the flesh.³ The popularity of Dale Cooper is a tacit admission that on a visceral level the television audience knows how wrong the traditional detective is in that medium. As we shall see, Cooper made us gasp with delight precisely because he identifies with the vulnerability of his body. Uniting precision of mind with flow of body in his pursuit of mystery, Cooper emerges as the first detective truly appropriate to the medium of television.

David Lynch and Mark Frost point the way toward a televisual aesthetic through the incorporation of the detective genre into the serial format. Within the serial context, with its mini-closures which suggest partial distinctions rather than absolute divisions, Cooper invites us to see how desire for mystery can produce in the detective an interpenetration of mind and body in an ever widening gyre of wonder. Can. The erotically anxious, shadow-haunted milieu of the Hollywood detective is not absent from Twin Peaks. Nor is the antiseptic Holmesian stance. But Cooper's mystery involves a heretofore unthinkable freedom from the masculine fear of the body that obsessive disavowals traditional to the detective genre suggest.

FREEDOM FROM FEAR

In Twin Peaks, Cooper detects through immersion—physical indeterminacy, obliqueness, and ambiguity are his primary modes of discovery. Once Cooper has used standard FBI procedures to assemble his suspects, he turns to his preferred means of inquiry, a modus operandi that initiates the town and the television spectator into the sleuthing approach of a mind-body detective. In the third episode, he introduces his unorthodox procedures to the audience and the Twin Peaks constabulary as he sets himself up in a local forest, incongruously situated in front of a blackboard, to expound upon the Tibetan Method.

This Method is not grounded in the pragmatic “realities” of most police dramas: police academy, laboratory, or mean streets. Instead it issues from the most powerful plane of reality in Twin Peaks: the dream. Cooper narrates a dream about a longing to end the political repression of Tibet that is identified with what amounts to a longing to free the body from the repressiveness of logic. “I awoke from the same dream realizing that I had subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique involving mind-body coordination operating hand in hand with the deepest level of intuition.” The mixed, seriocomic tone of Cooper's presentation under the Douglas firs itself challenges us to use Cooper's method, an exercise that pointedly avoids the routine detective apparati of logic, clues, or muscle. Instead, Cooper designs a unique heuristic process which calls for him to throw rocks at a bottle situated on a tree stump—at a precisely measured distance—as the name of each suspect is read from the blackboard.

As we accustom ourselves to meditating on crime through the sensory experience of natural textures and sounds, the illegibility of the body loses its accustomed code as a site of fear; instead it emerges as the locus of knowledge through play as it was when we were young. However, the result is not a regressive infantilism but a renewal of human desire for a miraculous world.

Lynch/Frost's choice of an FBI agent as the hero of Twin Peaks draws attention to the transformation of normal coding. A mass-media FBI agent character ordinarily depends on our understanding of the literal job of the FBI: to intervene in criminal investigations when state or national boundaries are crossed. Television government agents are the sine qua non of television's endless and obsessive restoration of limits, barriers that authorize only the most domesticated form of desire. In Twin Peaks, the traditions are honored in that, literally, a state boundary is crossed during the murder of Laura Palmer, and that is the conventional reason why Special Agent Cooper is the man for the job. However, as a boundary specialist, Cooper is not the disavower of the body, the purger of bodily fluctuation through the rigid limits of convention, but a specialist in crossing boundaries, a quester capable of moving confidently and productively between the mental clarity of law and the intelligent fluidity of the body.

Such talents are immediately in demand when Laura Palmer is found brutally murdered—naked, pallid, blue-lipped, and wrapped in plastic—within the first three minutes of the series. This crime is a form of reality testing for Twin Peaks (and television tradition), revealing a town layered into slick, flat planes of cliché (mental limits) and rivers of wild energies (body). Solving the murder means going beyond cliché through a mind capable of negotiating many layers. Local law (and television tradition) is by nature merely part of the plane of cliché, and thus only capable of partial vision. Local law—read common sense—is affectionately personified by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), but his traditional search for “just the facts” has limited application because Twin Peaks challenges the constitution of a “fact.”

The traditional fact loses its hard edge when the crucial clues are discovered in dreams and visions. Cooper's dreams reveal what pragmatic detection will never find: BOB (Frank Silva) and MIKE (Al Strobel), two male energies from another dimension who have crossed the limits of the natural world to inhabit it as parasites of human hosts, as they term their local habitations. BOB, a male Medusa complete with snaky locks and bone-chilling smile, is the young male energy that has used smiling Leland Palmer, Laura's father (Ray Wise), as his host and that impels him to horrifying atrocities against his daughter (and others). MIKE is BOB's former companion in crime, one-armed from ripping off the offending, guilty arm, who now hunts BOB to terminate his reign of terror. The absurdly banal names adopted by these devastating powers once they have crossed into the plane of “ordinary” reality are, according to Frost and Robert Engels, a writer-producer on the series, a primary example of the Twin Peaks tone: here, banalities tragicomically mask strange forces.⁴

Cooper first meets BOB and MIKE in a dream at the end of the third episode of the series. The meeting between detective and crime within the dream context expands the conventional role of the detective's eye (which traditionally is restricted to controlling through looking), emphasizing the otherness of body. Cooper's eye within the dream is, by contrast, enraptured.

The heart of MIKE's message to Cooper is couched in five rhymed lines:

Through the darkness
The future past
The magician longs to see.
One chance out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.

The magician is Cooper. The heart of detection is the magic of boundary crossing. Cooper's “chance out” will enable him to cross the limits of the ordinary world into the darkness where future and past conflate.

The set design, the refrain elements in the series, as well as the visual and narrative texture of Twin Peaks, implicate the spectator in both kinds of perception: the more conventional use of the controlling camera eye is disrupted by visual elements compatible with Cooper's Tibetan Method, by an alternate camera eye enraptured by indeterminate visual distinctions. Richard Hoover, the production designer of all the series episodes except the pilot, created a look for the show in which, he says, the concepts of inside and outside were conflated. A massive use of wood gives an outside feeling to the interiors. The interiors burgeon with dead animals and their parts—horns, shells—and nature drawings that are often photographed as if they were theatrical backdrops for the action.⁵

The opening signature montage (my terminology) of Twin Peaks, designed by David Lynch, prepares us for both visual styles. Its lap dissolves among sharp images to the strains of the slow, mournful, but somewhat romantic theme music (composed by Angelo Badalamenti) suggest, according to Lynch, an enigmatic interpenetration of opposites as robins and cascading waterfalls dissolve into the artifacts of an industrialized logging industry which spews thick smoke from its smokestacks and generates spearlike golden sparks with its gears. The series is coded to create a rich “cultural compost heap,” as Mark Frost calls the unorthodox yoking of elements in Twin Peaks. With its suggestion of the blending of once discrete entities until they fuse with each other, this phrase suggests the organic reality that calls forth Cooper's mind-body approach.

In this context, the purely Holmesian sleuth seems alarmingly invasive. A synecdoche of the reductive aggressiveness of the Holmesian mind is provided by the redoubtable Albert Rosenfeld (Miguel Ferrar), Cooper's favorite FBI forensics specialist, who can virtually reconstruct in his laboratory the molecules of Laura's last minutes. Called into the investigation by Cooper to perform an autopsy, Rosenfeld positions himself over Laura's corpse, sounding a prefatory whir with the handheld drill with which, in the name of science, he intends to bore a hole in her head. He is surprised (and furious) when his state-of-the-art methods are opposed by the Twin Peaks doctor, Doc Hayward (Warren Frost), and Sheriff Harry S. Truman, both of whom knew and loved Laura. Truman is so infuriated by Albert's unfeeling detachment that he punches him, indeed so hard that Rosenfeld lands grotesquely on top of Laura in a position that suggests the perverse necrophilia inherent in the Holmesian passion. Cooper underlines the negative image by supporting Hayward and Truman against Albert's scientific enthusiasm. The body of the crime, the body of flesh, is not to be erased or commodified by logic. Cooper's expression of a belief in mind-body connection is not just theory. In his compassion for body, he is mind-body connection.

Twin Peaks redefines the detective sensibility as being as much of the body as is the corpse, not to frighten the spectator but instead to encourage him/her to play with the instability of Cooper's physicality during intensely dramatic moments. For example, when Cooper wakes up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight, he presents a ludicrous figure, with his slicked-back hair still neatly plastered together but standing straight up, at a 90-degree angle to his head. Frequently, while sifting evidence, Cooper takes time out to breathe in the aroma of the ubiquitous local Douglas firs, or to savor black coffee (see photos, p. 22), sugar doughnuts, or pie in a way that has the effect of a police car chase coming to a screeching halt to make way for a family of ducks. In Twin Peaks, the illegibility and orneriness of the body is everywhere “in our face,” minus the anxiety with which Hollywood detective films code such occurrences. Cooper's persistent sidetrips into sensuality are comic, but not frivolous. They forge a new sensibility, one in which the sensuous loses its conventional coding as a distraction to be scrupulously avoided by the hero.

In Twin Peaks, mystery conventions that depend on the suspect nature of the sensuous world—inevitably tied up in gender issues—are transformed. For example, in suspense films the tracking shot down a corridor paralyzes us with anxiety as it suggests an awful crisis of illegibility in the physical world, which is inevitably bound up with a fear of the feminine.⁶ The long corridor is conventionally shot as if its depths, secrets, and illegibility were completely other to a masculine seeker, stimulating a positivist need for definitive control of a physicality which now seems female, fearful, and illegible. By contrast, on Twin Peaks, the prevalence of an alternate treatment of this shot weakens both its usual gender implications and its usual definition of the relationship between the detective and the body. Sometimes a stationary camera may look down a long corridor while figures appearing in the distance come toward us as a form of energizing discovery. When Cooper and Truman meet for the first time, they are tiny figures shaking hands at the end of a very long hospital corridor. As they move toward the spectator, the long hallway is no longer claustrophobic but rather a place from which good things emerge. The friendliness of the corridor is a part of a text in which the ideal subject position is Cooper's Tibetan Method.

DIFFERENCE AND THE DETECTIVE

Unlike most detective screen fiction, Twin Peaks does not represent the hidden, the fearful, the illegible, the body, and the feminine as interchangeable concepts. Certainly the discovery of Laura's body seems to signal the otherness of woman as a terrifying disturbance for men, one familiar from Hollywood narratives and even from television, since the concept of Body is so super-saturated with feminine associations that femininity permeates even the seemingly neutral television presentation of an unreliable physical world. Yet, on Twin Peaks, otherness rather quickly loses its gendered aspects. Physical disruption may alert us to difference, but here the difference is not predicated on a binary opposition between male and female, and when a female expresses difference, it is not always either frightening or unfortunate. Similarly, masculinity pointedly does not guarantee reliability, as the murderer turns out to be Laura's father, Leland Palmer. Possessed by BOB, Leland's body is unreliable, veiled, and secretive; at moments he is murderous, at other times compulsively racked by dancing and singing. His ominous difference defies ordinary gender construction. Conversely, Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), daughter of Ben Horne (Richard Beymer), the richest man in town, who also dances compulsively, is defined as Special Agent Dale Cooper's special agent.

A young girl struggling with inner longings, Audrey is, like Cooper, a seeker who has her own very special mind-body connection. Audrey's off-beat, disruptive presence as body cannot be identified in terms of the conventional distrust of the female body in a text in which Leland Palmer also exists. Moreover, it is worked into the narrative as part of her legitimate desire to participate in a world from which her father's ruthless domination of the town threatens to exclude her. When Audrey uses her body to compel a group of Norwegian businessmen to interrupt their work, she disrupts a fraud her father is perpetrating on them. When she surprises the madam of a brothel owned by her father with her ability to twist a cherry stem into a three-ring pretzel shape using only her tongue, she wins a job and the opportunity to find out more about both Laura's death and what Ben Horne has hidden from her.

Nowhere is difference more fully demystified than in Cooper's heuristic dreams. Indeed, Cooper's dream at the end of the third episode suggests that in order to deal with mystery the detective must move between masculinity and femininity in a way that obviates the whole issue of castration fears. Cooper's dream shows him “a place between two worlds”: the Red Room. It is a large enclosure surrounded on all sides by billowing red drapes. Aside from these, it contains only three black art deco upholstered chairs, a torch lamp, and a Grecian white marble statue of a female nude, the floor beneath tiled in an Escher-like geometric pattern. In the dream, an aging Cooper is seated in one of the chairs. Another is occupied by a Little Man (Michael Anderson)—about three feet in height—wearing a red suit. The other chair is soon filled by Laura, as she was in life, but dressed strangely in an evening gown much like a costume from a 1940s B Picture: low-cut, black velvet, deeply slit. Laura and the Little Man speak as though a 78-rpm record were playing at 33 1/3 rpm. Their gestures are enigmatic. This is particularly true of the Little Man, who undulates as he talks, “speaking” a body language at least as meaning-laden as his dialogue, and equally hard to decipher.

Cooper looks attentive during the dream, never rises from the chair, and barely speaks. He watches the Little Man dance to repetitive, rhythmic music with a cool blues melodic line played on a saxophone. Cooper is fascinated (and ultimately tutored) by the Little Man, even though there is a lack of logic to what he says or what he does: dancing, rubbing his hands, or simply turning his back to Cooper and shaking. Similarly, Cooper's eye (and ear) is overwhelmed by a Laura who is barely understandable because of the manipulation of the sound track. She too makes illegible gestures.

At the end of the dream, Laura kisses the aged Cooper sensually and whispers in his ear, unheard by the audience. When Cooper wakes—his hair standing on end—he can only remember that Laura has solved the mystery for him. Until the middle of the second season, Cooper seeks to retrieve what he now knows. The important moment when Cooper “hears” Laura with his conscious mind will be fully discussed below. Here, we must ponder the significance of Cooper's dream for his coding as a man, and as a detective hero.

The Red Room is a place where everything that has always been true of onscreen murder mysteries—whether in the movies or on television—is inverted. Cooper's site of discovery resembles the site of crime in ordinary detective stories: a place where no action can be identified in terms of pragmatic or logical purpose. Unlike other detectives, however, Cooper discovers more from body than from mind. Rational language and action barely exist in the Red Room. Here body speaks, as it were; Laura, nothing but inert body in the “real world” of Twin Peaks, possesses the solution to her own murder and is willing and able to share it with Cooper in his dream. Unlike the femme fatale, Laura is neither sexualized nor desexualized object. She is another subject. There is pleasure when Cooper gains knowledge through merging with her—she tells him the name of her murderer when she kisses him—but the desire satisfied in this kiss is a compound of his desire to understand and her desire to communicate. Similarly, the merging of two subjects is suggested later, when we learn through a diary entry that Laura and Cooper have had identical dreams of the Red Room. As Laura is not object, she is not the detective's impediment. Cooper is hampered by his own limits. Her illegibility is not the displacement of his own, but the corollary of his need to understand his body.

In Hollywood, the secrets of femininity are conventionally distinguished from the clarity of masculinity. But, in Twin Peaks, Laura's secrets identify her with Cooper. Her secrets are presented in tandem with those of the Little Man, whose illegibility creates intimations of masculine murkiness. This small, wiggling, dancing, rosy figure has clear phallic associations, even in being called “the Little Man.” To make the association clearer, the Little Man of Cooper's dream frequently undulates in front of a Greek marble female nude such that he is often framed with the statue's crotch behind his head. (Her genital identity is emphasized by her hand, which both covers and points to it.) The existence of such a Little Man as Cooper's guide suggests that readiness to seek Laura's killer is identified with Cooper's receptivity both to her (and her ambiguity) and to the complexities of an almost illegible phallic reality.

In the Holmesian detective, the scrutinizing eye and the phallus become one, suggesting that the detective's potency transcends the unreliability of the body. In Twin Peaks, the phallic energy of Cooper's body is readily distinguished from the logical scrutiny of his detective's eye. As in the Dream of the Red Room, insight is a product of a magic partnership between the eye and the oblique meaning of the phallic image. Cooper's logic must be put on hold in order for him to explore phallic magic. Cooper's magic phallic helpers take two forms which reflect the anatomical changeability of the male member. After the Little Man, a second phallic helper appears, a Giant (Carel Struycken).

The Giant, identified as a phallic presence in an angle-up shot foregrounding his crotch, appears to Cooper in a vision as the FBI agent lies on the floor of his hotel room, apparently bleeding to death. At the end of the first season, Cooper is shot by an unknown assassin when he opens the door to what he thinks is room service. As the second season begins, the open doorway becomes a frame highly charged with expectation while we wait for someone to enter it and come to the aid of our hero. When at last someone arrives, it is the senile Old Waiter (Hank Worden). For an agonizing but comic eternity, the doddering old man makes irrelevant small talk while Cooper asks him to get a doctor. Surprisingly, the badly wounded Cooper is not annoyed by the old man's senility and politely indulges his caprices. Cooper even returns the old fellow “a thumbs-up” as he leaves and what looks like Cooper's last chance goes out the door. Cooper lies there for a long screen minute, after which a brilliant light floods him and the Giant pays his first call. The Giant's speech is distorted in a way reminiscent of the Red Room. Giving Cooper several oblique clues to the mystery, he takes Cooper's ring, saying that it will be returned when Cooper finds the “things the Giant has told him to be true.” We do not understand the significance of the ring until much later.

The phallic incapacity of the waiter in the “real world” plays against the stereotypes in the detective genre. A hiatus in the ordinary male potency—and logic—seems to be necessary in order for Cooper to cross a boundary and gain access to a part of himself that is impeded by the limitations of the G-Man's organizational code. Being shot, says Cooper to himself as he lies on the floor, is not as bad as people think, as long as “you can keep the fear from your mind.” Indeed, he muses, “that's pretty much what life is like. O.K., as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.” The vulnerability of the body is here portrayed as an advantage for Coop—not one that we would care to see pressed beyond the point of no return, but an opportunity to look at reality from an altered perspective.

Cooper's productive vacations from logic are a significant departure from the oppressive literality of American television (and films) that obsessively emphasizes phallic power to foreclose any such “lapses in virility.”⁷ The two forms of phallic power in conventional screen fiction are the thrusting mind/eye and the thrusting fist or gun. The idiosyncrasy of Twin Peaks in this respect is the deferral of that forward thrust, visually emphasized by the literal emptiness of frame left by the open door to Cooper's room. We wait and wait for it to be filled by that male strike force we have been trained to expect. Only after a long hiatus do Harry and his deputies burst in, guns drawn, filling the empty door frame with the usual rescuers. In comparison with the phallic power of the Giant there is something diminished, foolish, and loveable in this conventional rescue.

But phallic onslaught is not always so benign. Indeed, on Twin Peaks, unlimited by a commitment to law, it is the source of evil. Just before Cooper's path leads him to correctly identify Leland as Laura's murderer, MIKE tells Cooper about the rejected but not forgotten joys of his days as BOB's partner, speaks in a kind of frenzy of his experience with BOB of the Golden Circle of Appetite and Satisfaction. BOB devours life as he closes the Golden Circle to satisfy his boundless appetites. The cannibalistic aspect of this energy is all too clear to us—not from Laura's murder, which we never see, but from the death of her cousin, Maddy, which recreates the original atrocity. When we see Leland kill his niece, BOB and Leland dissolve in and out of one another during the act; the bright light common to both BOB's appearances and Cooper's waking visions reveals BOB/Leland both kissing and killing the girl, kissing her as if he were devouring her face. Phallic energy is a continuum with BOB on one end and Cooper on the other.

The Golden Circle of Appetite and Satisfaction described by MIKE to Cooper is an unusual address (possibly unheard-of on American prime-time television) to the phallocentrism that is the unacknowledged motivator of Hollywood fictions. The Golden Circle is an energy that, in returning to itself, seeks the obliteration of the feminine, whose existence threatens the closing of the masculine self-referential circle. When the Giant returns the ring to Cooper as he finally hears Laura's dream voice, the gesture celebrates Cooper's major achievement in solving the murder. Securely on his finger, the small ring indicates that the Golden Circle of Appetite is under control. In solving the mystery, Cooper restrains the energy of phallic onslaught. His reward for doing so is to hear and see once again his dream of Laura, the desirable woman whom phallocentrism has suppressed from the narrative, and to bring back her voice and her body, even though this means crossing the boundary between life and death.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF COOPER'S NEW MANHOOD

Cooper is at his zenith when he regains the ring, identifies Leland as the murderer, and effects his capture. Working far beyond the shallows of the conscious mind, Cooper has no knowledge, in the ordinary sense, of what he is doing. But as Hawk (Michael Horse), Sheriff Truman's American-Indian deputy, tells him, he doesn't need to “know.” Even ultra-scientific Albert is moved by Cooper and defers to the power of Cooper's alogical ways. Cooper gives himself mind, body, and soul to the magic of his process, assembling a group of suspects, though unable to explain to anyone what he is doing. Finally, the Old Waiter speaks, echoing one of the unfathomable pronouncements of the Little Man in the Dream of the Red Room: “That gum you like is going to come back into style.” The words illogically move Coop outside of time and space, Laura kisses him again, and he hears her voice identify Leland as her murderer. The Giant appears to Cooper and returns the ring, a transaction that justifies spectator faith in Cooper, creating the kind of delight that audiences take in the logic of Holmes, but without the attendant diminution of the mystery

Like BOB's Circle of Appetite and Satisfaction, Holmes' method devours mystery. Solution means termination. In contrast, Cooper's Tibetan Method moves through the mystery to open the world for the detective and his cohorts. When Cooper and Truman trick Leland into a jail cell and BOB destroys the tormented Leland in preparation for deserting his host body, the awful wonder of the riddle at the heart of Laura's death is augmented, not diminished, by knowledge. After BOB is clearly gone, Cooper and the other “Peaksers” (my coinage) are sobered by their new knowledge of evil, but the world is not restored to its pre-mystery neatness; it is infinitely larger. This taste of infinity derives from the preceding moment, Cooper's finest, when BOB casts off Leland as his human host.

As BOB dissolves his connection with Leland, nothing remains but the broken body left behind by the crime. In Leland's final moments, as he tells the story of how BOB possessed him as a young boy, Cooper as usual sticks by the body, cradling Leland's head in his lap. The two form a Pietà, as Cooper urges Leland to move “into the light,” helping the distraught man to the afterlife. This scene, created by Mark Frost, is a crystalline visual, emotional, and narrative realization of Cooper's Tibetan Method. If up until now Cooper has been alternately a stereotypical federal agent and a comic subversion of that stock character, against all logic suggesting the possibility of a new hero, at this moment he is that new hero incarnate. Cooper's ability to keep “fear from the mind” (read resistance to castration anxieties) redefines the detective as an adversary of repression and reconfigures his desire as a liberated commitment to the wholeness of life.

This moment of radiance renders excruciatingly painful Cooper's ultimate possession by BOB. In the last episode of Twin Peaks, Cooper becomes the monster he once defeated, inverting the conventional narrative progress in which initial defeat leads to ultimate victory. Why? To explore this mystery, we must speak not only of the incidents in the Twin Peaks narrative, but also of the production context in which the series was created. The production elements most germane to this discussion are the long period during which Lynch neither directed nor wrote for Twin Peaks and the premature cancellation of the series.

After the death of Leland Palmer, the series struggled on with two handicaps: David Lynch took time out to film Wild at Heart and, according to Frost, Kyle MacLachlan, a co-creator of Cooper with a say in the production unusual for an actor, refused to play out the projected story of a relationship with the quirky, illegible Audrey. As a result, Twin Peaks turned toward a love affair for Cooper with a new, more stereotypical character in the series, Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham), and a father-son vendetta between Cooper and Wyndham Earle (Kenneth Welsh), Cooper's former FBI mentor, gone suddenly insane.

When Lynch returned, he was surprised by and unhappy with the introduction of Earle into the series—and with justice. Unlike the conflict with BOB, Cooper's struggle with his post-Leland adversary draws the emphasis of the central story into a binary context in which outdated Holmesian logic marginalizes Cooper's unique Tibetan Method. At the same time, in these later episodes Coop is also afflicted by a kind of femme fatale, as Earle wages war on Cooper in retribution for Cooper's brief, tender love affair with Earle's wife, Caroline. Earle uses Annie, a look-alike of Caroline, as the bait in the traps he sets for Cooper to lure him onto another plane of reality where he believes he has the power to finish Cooper off. Thus, Annie Blackburne is also a step backward, a conventional female other with a body through which Cooper can be made vulnerable.

However, Lynch's return meant the reestablishment of the centrality of the mind-body connection. Lynch directed (and rewrote) the last episode, rejecting most of the script that was written for the Twin Peaks finale.⁸ Understanding these changes may help to focus the prevalent sense that Twin Peaks went wrong after the death of Leland Palmer, and to focus the painful impact of the last episode.

In both the rejected script and the taped episode, the large narrative outlines are the same: Earle dies at BOB's hands on an alternate plane of reality, and Cooper and Annie return to Twin Peaks. Cooper, though no one knows it, is possessed by BOB. However, in the unused written script, the place into which Cooper is lured by Earle is less the Red Room and more a binary landscape in which Cooper is tested in a series of surreal divisions between mind and body. With the changes made by Lynch, the taped episode returns to the early emphasis in the series on productive disruptiveness of the body. To bring the series back on track, Lynch returned Cooper, Earle, and Annie to the Red Room. However, unlike Cooper's dream of the Red Room, which was an interlude of meetings that produced power and justice in the best sense, Cooper's visit to the Red Room is an interlude of failed and disastrous meetings. The problem is a “power failure” in Dale Cooper, as we immediately see.

When Cooper enters the Red Room looking for Earle and Annie, the dancing Little Man indicates the presence of a blues singer (Jimmy Scott). He sings to Cooper about this place as a place of vision. But the power failure in Cooper is evident as the lights flicker on and off, deepest black alternating with brilliant light that cannot illuminate anything. Dale Cooper strains his eyes in the blinking dark.

The Old Waiter appears and serves Cooper a cup of coffee that turns rock hard, back to liquid, and then to oil sludge. The Giant appears and informs Cooper that he and the Little Man are “one and the same.” Laura appears, telling him that she will see him in 25 years, a reference to his original dream in which he was an older man—in this final Red Room encounter he is younger than he was in the dram—and she was the source of his knowledge. The apparitions still speak to Cooper, but he is not receptive.

Is it because the visit is initiated by Earle, bringing Cooper into the Red Room as other to Annie's body, that Cooper is more vulnerable to the devouring circle and less unified and ready to move across boundaries in an integrated way? Is this why Mark Frost says Cooper is not ready for the final confrontation in the Red Room and so fails?⁹ Properly, neither Lynch nor Frost answers interpretive questions. If it is not on the screen, then … And what we see on the screen in the final episode is that long hallways have taken on the stock anxiety of the suspense film. As Cooper walks through the convoluted corridors of the Red Room, the Little Man says, “Wrong way.” Cooper takes this literally and walks in another direction. But Cooper is approaching the Red Room in the wrong way. The apparitions become correspondingly negative: eyeless, they suggest castration. Laura appears to him now as violent, hostile, and dangerous—her eyes, lacking an iris, are ominously all white. She attacks him. When Cooper runs from her, he discovers he is bleeding. Even the Little Man appears as a snarling figure. The iconography of vacant eyes and growling phallus suggests an experience of emptiness where once there was fullness. The benign meeting of subjects has turned into the hostile encounter of subject and object. The bleeding contrasts with Cooper's previous wound, when there was no fear and there was vision.

Appropriately, when Cooper finally finds Earle, he suffers almost nothing at this opponent's hands. Earle is almost immediately dispatched by a laughing BOB in a puff of flame and smoke. Earle's stereotypical scenarios are properly subordinate problems in the world of Twin Peaks; the real problem is that Earle has brought forth in Cooper a part of himself that is literal rather than visionary, divorced from rather than in league with the body. Thus Cooper's real nemesis in the Red Room is a demented white-eyed double of himself, who, in collaboration with BOB and a white-eyed Leland, forces Cooper into a Sartrean game of tag through the red-curtained corridors. Cooper is losing his power to cross boundaries; his mind has succumbed to fear. As we discover in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the “good Dale” remains trapped in the Red Room, unable to leave. The man who returns to Twin Peaks is the lesser aspect of Dale Cooper.

Abruptly expelled from the Red Room, the Cooper double, at first unconscious and bleeding, seems himself again as, reviving in his own room, he voices concern for the similarly wounded Annie. But then, assured by Truman that she is going to be fine, Cooper incongruously announces that he wants to brush his teeth. This comic dislocation of a tense moment seems to herald Cooper's return to mind-body connection. But nothing could be further from the truth. Once behind the closed bathroom door, Cooper squeezes the toothpaste tube into the sink until it is empty, and, at the very moment of this image—an image suggesting castration in a moment of impotence—the spectator sees Cooper look into the mirror and discover not his own heroic face but the monstrous, leering image of BOB. Bloodying his forehead against the mirror image (see photo, p. 23), the Cooper double burlesques his earlier concern: “How's Annie? How's Annie? How's Annie?” Each rendition is more a parody of human connection than the one before.

When Cooper loses his former grasp of connection, chaos ensues. “Things get kind of slippery” in the Red Room, as Lynch says.¹⁰ The continuum of phallic energy folds over easily, and phallocentric perversion is an ever-present danger for even the best and brightest of detectives. Cooper's readiness for mystery is finally about avoiding phallocentrism, which is here identified with alienation from the world's body and with castration. When Cooper loses that readiness, no femme fatale is responsible. Neither too much closeness with women nor too much involvement in the world is the primary threat to masculinity. Instead, the image of castration attends both the division of the hero from his body and his fall into masculine contempt for the feminine. In Cooper's triumphs and defeat, Lynch and Frost dramatically re-vision the classical case for the difficulties of human encounter with reality.¹¹ Oh, the pity and fear of that final glance in the mirror!

Notes

1. Interview with David Lynch, January 31, 1992. All subsequent references to Lynch in this article are drawn from this interview.

2. Mary Ann Doane gives an excellent overview of the castration anxiety with which Hollywood saturates the body of the femme fatale: “an articulation of the fears surrounding the loss of stability and centrality of the self, the ‘I,’ the ego. …” Mary Ann Doane, Femme Fatales (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 2.

3. Jim Collins has made a brief and useful foray into applying the concept of televisual flow to Twin Peaks in his essay “Postmodernism and Television,” in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 341-49. For an extended consideration of the concept see E. Ann Kaplan, “Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV,” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 30-44.

4. Interview with Robert Engels, October 18, 1991; interview with Mark Frost, November 22, 1991. All subsequent references to Engels and Frost in this article are drawn from these interviews.

5. Interview with Richard Hoover, September 3, 1991.

6. See Pascal Bonitzer for a treatment of the psychological implications of the tracking shot in “Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth,” translated by Fabrice Siolkowski, Wide Angle, vol. 4, no. 4 (1981), pp. 58-59.

7. Tania Modleski is especially helpful on the subject of the repressive construction of male identity through literality in “Lethal Bodies: Thoughts on Sex, Gender, and Representation from the Mainstream to the Margins,” in Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 135-64.

8. David Lynch graciously granted me a copy of the projected last script of the series, Twin Peaks #29. According to Lynch, there is no written version of the last episode as taped.

9. Frost's suggestion that Cooper is “not ready” for his forced entrance into the Red Room at the end of the series is even more interesting in light of Linda Williams' classification of body genres in film. With reference to one of these body genres, the horror film, Williams explores its address to a male adolescent castration anxiety: “body too early!,” as she says. Williams comments on how typically the physical terror of horror films is coded onto feminine bodies in “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991), pp. 5-9. Twin Peaks' unconventionality is demonstrated by the way the horror of “body too early!” is Cooper's perceptual, not sexual failure, and it is directly coded onto his body. The issue of “body too early!” is reexamined from Laura's perspective in the film Fire Walk with Me, where, once again, it is made clear that she is not the horror but her father's displacement of his self-loathing onto her. In the movie, the “good” Cooper who remains in the Red Room is presented in terms of the relation to body I explore here as a cosmic consoling presence for her.

10. Lynch is willing to say that the Red Room has its own rules. But he did not say much more to me than that bodies are not the same there as they are in the “real” world. He did, however, respond to my question, “Are those who appear in the Red Room sequence projections?” saying, “I think they're real.” Enlarging on this, he added that those places in the Red Room segment where split-second images of various characters appear to emerge from one another should be construed as lots of people running around the same room as the lights are blinking on and off. To me, this suggests that, in the Red Room, more than one body may occupy the same space at the same time and supports my reading of Lynch's detective as one who can only function if he is not fearful of physical indeterminacy.

11. Frost is eloquent on the subject of the equation between the self-referential and evil, an equation clearly evident in Twin Peaks. The villainy of BOB and Wyndham Earle are both rooted in self-reference. So too the disastrous fall of Dale Cooper. Images of sinister, sterile, circular self-reference, which seem to be metaphors for the “Golden Circle of Appetite and Satisfaction,” include a whirring ceiling fan that dominates scenes in which Laura's mother remembers learning of Laura's death and a record player revolving meaninglessly after the record has finished, just before Maddy is killed by Leland/BOB.