With bonus Illuminatum!
And season one with “cast” commentary:
RIP Krzysztof Penderecki, 1933-2020
I enjoyed Season 3 of True Detective, and thought the season finale, which aired last night on HBO, was especially good. Like the season as a whole, this eighth episode, “Now Am Found,” was rich, sad, ironic, often menacingly sinister, and ultimately ambiguous. “Now Am Found” showed that, like the two seasons that preceded it, True Detective’s third season was ultimately not about the criminal investigation purportedly at its center. Rather, True Detective is about the people who investigate the crimes, and how the investigations impact their relationships.
Three relationships drive the third season of True Detective: the relationship between Detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) and his partner Detective Roland West (Stephen Dorff); the relationship between Hays and his girlfriend and then wife Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo); and the strange relationship between iterations of Hays himself, primarily versions of himself from 1980, 1990, and 2015. Like Season 1 of True Detective, Season 3 employs multiple timelines, often to a purposefully confounding effect.
Looping timelines are part of True Detective’s DNA. In Season 1, Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) proclaims that “time is a flat circle,” paraphrasing Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. Our souls will infinitely repeat everything we have ever done or will do. Season 3 dramatizes Cohle’s proclamation via its viewpoint character, Wayne Hays, who is, to borrow a phrase of Kurt Vonnegut’s “unstuck in time.” Hays is in the early stages of a creeping dementia in the 2015 timeline, and throughout the series his consciousness veers between the years.
In 1980, Hays and West begin investigating the murder of Will Purcell and the kidnapping of his sister, Julie Purcell. Hays also meets his future wife Amelia in this investigation. In 1990, a second investigation into the Purcell case is under way; Hays and West attempt to right some of the wrongs that went down in the 1980 case. In 2015, Hays and West initiate a third Purcell investigation (not letting the fact that they are no longer police officers stand in their way). True Detective Season 3 unspools, tangles, and ties these threads into a bewildering and often thrilling tapestry, ultimately depicting a man whose mind is falling apart.
Like the episodes before it, “Now Am Found” dips freely from timeline to timeline. However, this final episode is bookended by two scenes that deviate from the main 1980-1990-2015 plotlines. The opening scene seems to be set a few years after 1990—perhaps in ’94 or ’95. Amelia is teaching English at the University of Arkansas, where Hays is now the head of campus security. In an idyllic moment that restages their initial meeting in 1980, Hays sticks his head into Amelia’s classroom to hear her read a bit of Delmore Schwartz’s poem “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day.” This moment is the only glimpse we get of this timeline, a timeline that Amelia and Hays promise to create for themselves roughly half way through “Now Am Found.” In a scene that caps the end, or an end (there are no tidy ends in True Detective) to the 1990 timeline, Amelia and Hays agree that their relationship has been inextricably bound up in the Purcell case; their partnership’s genesis was rooted in murder and mystery. They elect to start anew, to write their own conclusion. The episode’s beginning delivers this conclusion, an ironic inversion that represents the season’s approach to linear time.
The second scene that deviates from the 1980-1990-2015 plotlines is the very last shot, which I will come to momentarily. First though, let me address the third-to-last and second-to-last scenes (which, after all, is what this blog’s title promised).
The season’s third-to-last scene comes after Hays follows one last lead as to where Julie Purcell might be. The lead comes from a vision of Amelia (prompted by reading a snippet of the true crime book she wrote about the case, which Hays has never fully read). The vision is a phantom, a ghost emanating from his own consciousness, and it directs him to write another conclusion in the Purcell case—a happy ending with a family restored. However, when Hays finally makes it to the woman whom he believes is Julie Purcell, his dementia undoes him. He calls his son, who arrives along with Hays’ daughter, to bring the old man home. Hays hands over the last clue to the Purcell case—the address he drove to—to his son, who is also a detective. The loop remains open.
Hays and his grown children return to Hays’ son’s house. This third-to-last scene plays out as a glowing, bright fantasy of familial reconciliation, extending that reconciliation to Hays’ once-estranged partner West. The family (including West) gaze on their children from the porch, iced teas in hand, rocking softly, their hands touching. It’s almost too godddamn corny for words.
The scene swells with menace though. The sun promises to set, and we pan to a shot of Hays’ grandchildren, boy and girl on bikes. The shot echoes the first episode’s shots of Will and Julie Purcell riding their bikes into the night, into peril. Hays will never get outside of the circle in which his consciousness is circumscribed.
Through Hays’ consciousness we depart the scene entirely. In a fantastic shot, we see Hays’ face submerge into time. Mahershala Ali is excellent in True Detective Season 3, and his eyes are especially expressive, signalling shifts in consciousness, in realization and unrealization.
The third-to-last scene transitions to the second-to-last scene through Hays’ eyeball. We end up at the VFW bar, all the way back in 1980, to reconcile with the person missing from the family reunion depicted in 2015: Amelia.
Amelia, like West, was both partner and rival to Hays. Their partnership seemed doomed after the fallout of the 1980 investigation. Amelia, also a true detective, authors an article that damns Hays’ career. This point of resentment boils throughout the season, particularly during the 1990 strands; resentment and competition are seeded into their partnership. And yet when Amelia arrives at the VFW bar, searching for a resolution, a conclusion if not a reconciliation, she opens something new in Hays, who cries before her and then asks her to marry him. The two exit into a glowing light, off to repeat their parts in a circle to which the viewers have already borne witness. This scene too is coded in subtle irony. Their new beginning will not set them free from the arc of their circle.
The light resolves into darkness, and we find ourselves some place utterly new yet wholly recognizable. Amelia is gone; the family is gone. This scene is Hays alone, somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam. It’s likely some time around 1965. Hays turns and looks directly toward the camera, but also, perhaps, directly at some version of himself, some version from 1980, 1990, 2015. He seems to gaze forward at the eye that gazed backward at him from half a century in the future.
Wayne Hays then turns and walks into the enveloping jungle. He disappears. Season 3 of True Detective is over.
The moment that Hays disappears into a Vietnamese jungle is ambiguous, sure. But given True Detective’s formal thesis that “time is a flat circle,” we can also read this ending as a suggestion that Hays is bound to repeat his arc. The Vietnam War is in many ways the founding unaddressed trauma of Hays’ life, and the series in a bleakly ironic gesture puts him right back there at the ending.
The title of “Now Am Found” clearly alludes to “Amazing Grace,” but the episode’s events ironically show that Hays can never be found. True, there are momentary gestures of reconciliation, of “being found” — by his son and daughter, by Amelia, by his partner West — but Hays is a consciousness in fragments, a kind of damned loop of a person suffering through a purgatory he doesn’t fully have the language to describe, let alone communicate to another person.
Some viewers may have found the final shot of “Now Am Found” bewildering, inexplicable, or unnecessary. I thought it was a sad, rich image that provided a vital coda for a sad, rich television show. The final image serves to reinforce the series’ trope of eternal recurrence, undoing (or, more charitably simply complicating) the episode’s opening scene, in which we saw a peaceful, happy Hays and Amelia. But if the final scene in Vietnam undoes the domestic bliss that Hays and Amelia authored for themselves, it also points to the promise of futurity, of a future that goes on and on and on.
RIP Anthony Bourdain, 1956-2018
Anthony Bourdain, who died today of an apparent suicide, embodied a visceral curiosity far too absent in much of American culture. Bourdain took his readers and viewers into strange places and showed them that those places weren’t really that strange because, after all, the people there turned out to be human too. This strand of humanism sometimes evinced with bitter notes in Bourdain’s presentation, but ultimately there was a deep love for the human potential throbbing underneath everything the man did. His resolutely-cool persona never seemed like a put-on or an act. Even though he performed that persona with a ready naturalism in his shows, there was always a wonderful nervous edge there too, as if Bourdain was winkingly aware of the artificiality of show bizness but was confident that if he was just himself enough he could transcend that artificiality and make something real.
When I graduated college in 2001 I thought I would be a travel writer. I moved to Japan and did the English teacher thing and then I did the backpack around Thailand thing. Then I ran out of money. At some point in there, I read Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 behind-the-scenes look at the New York restaurant scene; I’d later listen to the audiobook a few times, read by Bourdain himself. Bourdain’s first show A Cook’s Tour became a favorite—particularly the episodes in Japan and Vietnam—and I watched his second show No Reservations when I could. By the time the oughties were over and Bourdain was doing The Layover and Parts Unknown, I’d settled into a nice domestic professorial life fitted out with occasional (comfortable) trips. Bourdain, meanwhile, lived the life that I had imagined for myself when I was 17, 18, 19, before I even knew who he was. I’m envious of him for that, but moreover I’m ultimately thankful that he shared what he did with all of us, and that he shared it in such a bullshit-free way. His spirit of visceral curiosity will live on.
This is the first part of the behind-the-scenes features for Twin Peaks: The Return. The other nine parts are up on YouTube as well (for now anyway).
RIP the great Harry Dean Stanton, 1926-2017
…Kelly’s Heroes, Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Cockfighter, Renaldo and Clara, Alien, Wise Blood, Escape from New York, Christine, Repo Man, Paris, Texas, Red Dawn, Pretty in Pink, The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Fire Walk with Me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Straight Story, The Green Mile, Big Love, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return, and so many, many more.
Harry Dean Stanton elevated any film he was in, adding strange depth and soul to characters who may have otherwise been flat. Stanton was what people who write about film call a character actor, a subtly bizarre term, really, if you think about it, one that we use to easily distinguish between leading actors—“stars”—and the folks around them who are far more interesting. The greatest character actors are true artists, and Harry Dean Stanton was the greatest character actor. He did play the lead, occasionally though, as in Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders), a cult film that look let me stop here and say, See Paris, Texas already if you haven’t, it’s amazing. And while he’s not exactly the lead in Repo Man (dir. Alex Cox), he’s certainly the weird bouncing gravity that both anchors the film and propels it forward. (I assume that Repo Man is still required cult film viewing for young folks?). It was a joy to see Stanton one last time this year in Twin Peaks: The Return, where his performance of “Red River Valley” was a standout scene in a show full of standout scenes. While I’ll miss seeing him in new films, Stanton’s long list of roles insures that we’ll still be able to wonder into a film or show and excitedly declare, Oh shit! Harry Dean Stanton is in this!
As David Lynch and Mark Frost’s excellent series Twin Peaks: The Return approaches its conclusion this weekend, I have set myself the deeply important task of ranking all (okay, not nearly all) of the new characters we’ve been introduced to this season. They’re ranked from worst to best. The rubric I’m using is my own damn aesthetic intuition.
53. Steven Burnett
Damn. Steven is the worst. Just hated the guy. By the way, Gersten Hayward is not the worst, but obviously she can’t be on this list (even though she’s in that picture above) because she was in the original Twin Peaks, accompanying Leland Palmer on piano for “Come on Get Happy.”
52. Deputy Chad Broxford
Deputy Chad is a total piece of shit. Watching him get booted from the conference room with his sad ass lunch–two TV dinners and some soup!–was a highlight though.
51. Warden Dwight Murphy
Warden Murphy tried to get slick with Dark Cooper, but, nope. I’m almost certain we will get the whole Mr. Strawberry story by the last ep…right?
50-48. The Fusco Detectives
I loved the Las Vegas plot and I wanted to like these guys but they were so annoying. I mean, I guess that’s the joke, but the joke was vexing.
47. Freddie Sykes
Freddie Sykes telling that story to James is probably the most bored I got during The Return. However, he redeemed himself by punching those dudes who attacked James “James Has Always Been Cool” Hurley. I’m guessing his pugilist skills will come into play in the finale.
46. Darya
We hardly knew ya.
45. Jade
Jade was the first to be kind to Dougie, I realize, so I probably should put her higher on this list.
44-43. Sam and Tracey
Look, these two didn’t get much screen time, but the two-part opener is a classic, and their characters quickly showed that The Return was not going to traffic in nostalgic fan service but instead do something new—something somehow darker and weirder than the original series.
42. Mickey
Mickey is obviously a very minor character, his presence inarguably enhanced by sharing the screen with Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl Rodd. I liked the dude.
41. Ray Monroe
I think we were supposed to hate Ray and I hated Ray. Typing out his name I realize that maybe he’s named after Ray Wise, who played Leland (?).
40. Special Agent Tammy Preston
Maybe when I go back and watch The Return again in full Tammy will do more for me. But I tended to agree with Diane…
39. Colonel Davis
Look, I know—very minor character. But it’s great to see a Ghostbuster on Twin Peaks…and the name echoes the actor who played Major Briggs, one of my favorite Twin Peaks characters.
38. Miriam
I do so hope she survives.
37. Principal William Hastings
Not a particularly interesting character until his utter breakdown and eventual death. Loved seeing Shaggy bawl.
36. Hank
Like so many of the minor characters in Twin Peaks: The Return who show up for a brief monologuish-dialogue, Hank shows us a character drenched in his own paranoid concerns, ready to spin off into his own madness, or his own sitcom. Like, make that sitcom. I’d watch it.
35. Ike the Spike
Ike’s look when he realized that he’d bent his murder-spike was heartbreaking and hilarious.
34-33. The Evolution of the Arm and Philip Jeffries’ reincarnation.
Are these two a cheat? I’m not sure. I mean…I guess in a way they aren’t “new”…and in a way they aren’t really “characters…except they are and they are.
32. Gordon Cole’s date
I would watch this sitcom.
31. Becky Burnett
Becky at times seemed like an easy shorthand to show that not much has changed in the sweet dark little town of Twin Peaks. The “I Love How You Love Me” scene is one of the best in the series though.
30. Charlie
Is Charlie ranked so high on this list simply because his introduction also brings the return of Audrey?
29. Beverly Paige
I was really hoping that Lynch would do more with Beverly.
28. Sonny Jim
Sonny Jim rules.
27. Wally Brando
So I accidentally watched episode 4 of Twin Peaks: The Return instead of episode 2 (like, I watched ep 1, then watched ep 4 the next night, thinking it was ep 2—I could probably write a whole essay on that). Anyway, Wally Brando’s monologue is the most ridiculous moment in a kinda ridiculous episode, an episode that contains maybe my favorite moment in The Return—Bobby Briggs breaking down when he sees Laura Palmer’s picture. Brando’s monologue, delivered to a Sheriff Truman who endures it with weary and forced goodwill, seems like a send-up of everything quirky in the original Twin Peaks run.
26-25. Wilson and Randall
Goddamnit, Wilson, get it together!
24+. The Farm Gang
Dark Cooper arm wrestling Renzo is a great scene in a series larded with great scenes—a dark and violent satire on Hollywood machismo, but one that helps subtly propel one of the major plots of The Return: “The starting position is much more comfortable.” It’s the out-of-place-looking guy at the end who asks Dark Coop if he needs any money who really cracks me up.
23. Anthony Sinclair
Tom Sizemore’s Anthony Sinclair freaking out to the conga line is pretty great. The moment when Dougie gives him an accidental, dandruff-inspired back rub that leads to his break down is transcendent.
22. Duncan Todd
Patrick Fischler was great but underused as Duncan Todd. I liked to pretend that he was the same character who got so scared behind Winkie’s in Mulholland Drive.
21. Constance Talbot
Jane Adams is a really underrated actor and every scene with Constance Talbot was a treat (especially her interactions with Albert).
20. Red
No matter what you (or David Foster Wallace) thinks about Balthazar Getty, Red’s coin trick with Richard Horne was one magic moment.
19. Naido
As a character, the Eyeless Woman is obviously a cipher, but her introduction in the third episode is one of the most arresting moments of the series.
18. The Experiment
Again, maybe a bit of a stretch of what a “character” might be—but my affinity for the characters I’ve liked best in The Return is very much bound in the aesthetics of their scenes—and I don’t know if I’ll ever see a television show as aesthetically compelling and confounding as the eighth episode of The Return. (And I watched it for the first and second times that I saw it on a fucking iPhone on an airplane).
17-16. Chantal and Hutch
These two wandered in from a Tarantino movie. Again, a spin-off sitcom, please.
15+. All the minor characters in those end scenes at The Roadhouse
One of my favorite things about The Return is its rough pattern of ending up at The Roadhouse (or The Bang Bang Bar, if you like) to witness some tender grotesquerie.
14. MC
MC proudly presents THE Nine Inch Nails. MC proudly presents James “James Was Always Cool” Hurley. MC proudly presents “Audrey’s Dance.” And best of all…MC proudly dances to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” in one of the most sublimely silly sequences of the season.
13+. All the bands who played at The Roadhouse
The first performance of one of these bands in The Return, the Chromatics playing “Shadow,” provides a wonderfully cathartic rush from the dark tension that builds up in the two-part opener.
12. ….but especially Rebekah del Rio
My dream is to go to that place.
11. Bushnell Mullins
Bushnell Mullins ended up being one of the characters in The Return who I found genuinely moving. I hope we get to see him again.
10. Sheriff Frank Truman
Look. I know we’re all holding out for Harry Truman to show up somehow at the end. But Robert Forster is a ringer, and he’s done a great job this season. It’s also fun to pretend that he’s a doppelganger of his Mulholland Drive character.
9-8. The Mitchum Brothers
Like Bushnell, I ended up surprised by just how endearing these two turned out. Their devotion and loyalty to Dougie and his family (and Candie) seem absolutely genuine. And like Bushnell, I hope we’ll see them again.
7. Candie
God bless Candie.
6. Richard Horne
Richard Horne is the worst. Okay, I started this stupid list by declaring that Steven Burnett was the worst…but Richard is, like, awful. Menacing, horrific, a little bit goofy—Lynchian. You sort of want to save him a little, which you also know is a stupid mistake.
5. The Woodsman
“Gotta light?”
4. Janey-E Jones
Janie-E not being in the top three on my list is proof that this list is stupid. Naomi Watts is amazing in The Return. I hope (a version of Dougie) finds his way back to her and Sonny Jim, just as Agent Dale Cooper promised.
3. Dark Cooper
Dark Cooper, or Evil Cooper, or the doppelganger, or whatever you want to call him might not technically belong on a list of “new” Twin Peaks characters, because we know he was there at the very end of the final series. But c’mon. He can’t not be included. Dark Cooper was a cipher with depth, violent, but also radiating a strange sexiness as well as an ironic sense of humor. I’ll miss his black glowing energy.
2. Diane
I didn’t read any of the press stuff for Twin Peaks—I didn’t know that Michael Ontkean wouldn’t be back as Sheriff Truman, for example, or that Robert Forster would be in as another Sheriff Truman—which made watching The Return even more of a thrill. Probably the biggest little casting thrill though was Laura Dern showing up as Diane. (I gasped). Laura Dern is one of my favorite actresses, and she only seems to get better from role to role. (I’m still surprised how many Lynch fans haven’t seen Inland Empire, a film in which she is absolutely amazing). It would be difficult for me to overstate how perfectly Dern’s Diane fits into the visual logic of The Return—I have pretty much avoided all coverage of the new series, so I don’t know if anyone’s written an essay on all of her costumes yet, but I’d love to read one eventually. My hope is that we’ll see some kind of resolution with Diane (even if it’s a bizarre and unsettling resolution) in the finale—is there a non-tulpa Diane out there? Please.
1. Dougie Jones
Agent Dale Cooper’s return in episode 16 is a supremely satisfying moment, but I’ll miss Dougie dearly. I have often used the word “Lynchian” to convey ideas like sinister, paranoid, dark, and weird—and I think the word fits. But a glowing optimism underwrites all that’s dark in the Lynchverse, and this light finds its avatar in Dougie, a kind of holy fool who’s protected and guided by the kindness of others. Thumbs up.
It’s Twin Peaks: The Return Finale Week over at 3 A.M. Magazine. They’re running a series of essays about the new season for the rest of the week. Yesterday, we got to read Jeff Woods’s “Hurricane Bob: Part 1,” which deftly connects the many frequencies of current energy flows in politics, culture, and visual art in a discussion about The Return. Today, they posted my essay on mediacy & electricity (“Algorithmic Weather: Mediacy in Twin Peaks: The Return“) something that’s fascinated me this new season, and a long-term preoccupation of Lynch’s that perhaps reaches its zenith in The Return. Below is an excerpt:
Drone cameras hover over darkened Douglas (Dougie) firs, panoramic views of Las Vegas and Manhattan. The same point-of-view takes in the apocalyptic mushroom cloud. We are to believe that modern electricity, introduced to our world through innovations in military technology, expressed through wall sockets, telephone lines, Skype calls, and cellular data, has its roots in the creation of both the evil and good forces in the universe of Twin Peaks. The Mother, as she is known, spews out the evil force of BOB; the Fireman counters with the innocence known as “Laura”. A frog-like insect crawls into the mouth of a girl hypnotized into sleep by a Woodsman reciting a poem over compromised radio waves. Media determine the situation.
Bodies are made metaphors for data. In Episode 2, Sam explains to Tracy that all he has to do watch what happens in the glass box. Here, the show winks at us—the glass box of television, but also a metaphor for technologies that mediate and express electricity. Recall that they miss Cooper’s appearance, but are privy to what opens up between worlds: the Mother enters through the glass box and eviscerates them. Additionally, new faces are introduced in almost every episode, many of which rarely return. They are given names and ample screen time. They are there solely to deliver information, they are mere voice recorders.
I’LL SEE YOU AGAIN IN 25 YEARS
Chevron tiles swirl into swaying lush red curtains, into an impressionistic recap, into the framed and cabineted picture of Our Girl, into the opening bars of Angelo Badalamenti’s “Falling,” and we are back in Twin Peaks.
THE OPENING TITLES
Well, I shivered. I wish the opening titles had gone on longer.
The twin waterfalls cascade into silk fire curtains, and then we’re back on the dizzying floor, chevrons swirling into black. The red room.
THE GIANT
The Giant speaks to Special Agent Dale Cooper. He tells him to “Listen to the sounds,” strange scrapings emanating from an old phonograph.” Is this the Black Lodge? “It is in our house now,” we learn. (But what is the “It”?). The Giant seems to send Cooper on a mission: “Remember 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds…with one stone.”
SHOVELS
Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, still sporting spectacles of varying hues, obtains shovels in a remote mountain forest location. The scene is slow, the sound of the wind in the tall trees seems just as important as the few lines of dialogue here. We’re not really in Twin Peaks yet, but we’re not far.
NEW YORK CITY
Oh, we’re in New York City.
THE GLASS BOX
We’re out of Twin Peaks. The lighting, staging, colors, the low rumbling hum in the background—Lynch paints something here closer to his films after Fire Walk With Me—something sharper, blacker, browner than the soft edges of the original Twin Peaks run.
COFFEE
Tracey brings coffee. Tracy’s curious about what’s behind all those locked doors. Pandora. “You’re a bad girl Tracey.” There’s no pie in the scene, and the coffee is not in the wholesome mugs we might find at, say, the Double R Diner.
THE GREAT NORTHERN HOTEL
The Horne Brothers are back. Ben survived the last episode of Season 2, apparently (But what about Audrey Horne?!). Ashley Judd is in Twin Peaks now. Jerry Horne has a weed business. There’s a zaniness to the scene, notes of preciousness even—we are back in Twin Peaks, in Twin Peaks.
THE TWO SHERIFF TRUMANS
There are two Sheriff Trumans. “One is sick and the other is fishing,” Lucy—still the receptionist of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office a quarter of a century later–informs us. The quirky vibes of The Great Northern Hotel carry over. But really, Where is Sheriff Truman? Could “sick” and “fishing” be taken as metaphors? Are there literally two Trumans, somehow both Sheriffs?
INTO THE NIGHT
Twin Peaks’s zany daymode could be read as a parodic inversion of television tropes; a quarter century later, it’s harder to see these inversions, simply because television as a medium (in storytelling, but more importantly, in aesthetics) has caught up to Twin Peaks. The zaniness has a twin—the sinister night, often equally manic, often casually brutal.
DARK COOPER
Hooboy.
David Foster Wallace once described Kyle MacLachlan as “potato faced,” and I’ll admit that I have a hard time seeing him as a sinister figure. He’s no Leland Palmer (or Bob), but he wears his weight well in a scene that tip toes the line between grotesquerie and cartoonish parody. Distortion is necessary.
Dark Cooper—“Mr. C,” as moonshine-swilling addresses him—comes to collect two teens–Ray and Darya—for what? Are these doppelgängers of Richard and Linda? They go into the night, and we are in Twin Peaks.
MORE COFFEE
We’re back in New York.
Tracey returns with coffee and sneaks her way into the locked room with the glass box and young man. We get something resembling exposition—a billionaire pays the young man to watch the glass box. “We’re not supposed to say anything about this place or that glass box.”
SEX & VIOLENCE
Tracey and the young man imbibe a bit of coffee, make out, and then she disrobes. Sex ensues. We are clearly in the realms of premium pay cable, and not the American Broadcasting Company.
The glass box fills with a black atmosphere, and a ghostly humanoid appears. The wraith descends on the couple and attacks them. Was Tracey allowed in to the locked room as a kind of bait?
This is perhaps the goriest thing I can recall in a scene directed by Lynch.
BUCKHORN, SOUTH DAKOTA
We are not in Twin Peaks, but parts of Buckhorn definitely feel like Twin Peaks—there’s a quirkiness here, an at-times belabored zaniness, and even a slowness to the South Dakota scenes. At this point in “My log has a message for you,” we perhaps realize that Mark Frost and David Lynch have no intention of milking nostalgia; they’re going to tell a new story, one with strange new strands. There’s a lot of material on the table by now, here in the episode’s second half. Jane Adams, who I think is a fantastic actress, is the detective who shows up to investigate a murder scene—a woman’s head, missing an eye, paired with a headless male body. Somehow Buckhorn and New York City will connect back to Twin Peaks.
MY LOG HAS A MESSAGE FOR YOU
“Something is missing and you have to find it. It has to do with Special Agent Dale Cooper,” the Log Lady tells Deputy Hawk. She tells him that he will find it by way of “something to do with your heritage.” A reference to the Black and White Lodge? The Giant sends Cooper on a mission; the Log Lady sends Hawk on a mission.
BACK IN BUCKHORN
Jane Adams is really underutilized here. She turns up Principal Hastings as a murder suspect. Hastings is played by Matthew Lillard (who seems so much older here than my memory has preserved him).
SOMETHING IS MISSING
“But Agent Cooper is missing,” Lucy informs Hawk. She helpfully reminds him, in what I take to be a piece of jokey exposition that falls in line with the original series’ jabs at television tropes, that Agent Cooper has been missing for 24 years, since before the birth of her son Wally. (Recall that the second season ended with Lucy very, very pregnant). Hawk, who appears to be in charge of the Sheriff’s Office, tells Andy to pull out all the old files on Cooper. Hawk promises to bring coffee and donuts the next morning.
BACK IN BUCKHORN
Principal Hastings is interrogated and he comes across guilty as hell. The cops get a search warrant. Detectives, one with an oh-so-Lynchian broken flashlight, search Hastings’s Volvo. In the truck, under a cooler, they discover a scrap of flesh. (I can’t help but see here an echo of MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont finding a severed ear in Blue Velvet.
DID I WATCH THE NEXT EPISODE RIGHT AWAY?
I wanted to but no, my wife had to go to sleep, but I’ll watch it tonight.
FEELINGS
Lynch’s great strength is his evocation of color, light, and sound to create mood. The estrangement this mood often produces can threaten to overwhelm the narrative, and can also create the impression of tonal disjunctions—between characters, characterization, dialogue, motivation, and all of the other things we expect a television show should do. My primary interest in Lynch’s work is the feeling it produces in me, and the finest moments in “My log has a message for you” produced those feelings—feelings that words don’t refer to so easily.
From Margaret Atwood’s essay of 10 March 2017 in The New York Times:
In this series I have a small cameo. The scene is the one in which the newly conscripted Handmaids are being brainwashed in a sort of Red Guard re-education facility known as the Red Center. They must learn to renounce their previous identities, to know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.
The Handmaids sit in a circle, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them to join in what is now called (but was not, in 1984) the “slut-shaming” of one of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she was gang-raped as a teenager. Her fault, she led them on — that is the chant of the other Handmaids.
Although it was “only a television show” and these were actresses who would be giggling at coffee break, and I myself was “just pretending,” I found this scene horribly upsetting. It was way too much like way too much history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven’t been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won’t get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life.
Which brings me to three questions I am often asked.
First, is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.”
Biblioklept 