Diane, 1:00 pm, June seventh. The town of Twin Peaks defies easy description. In the first and second episodes, we met eclectic characters, mourned the loss of a town golden child Laura Palmer, and then learned that Laura wasn’t quite as pure as she seemed. Many of the characters seemed like oddballs, but they all matched recognizable archetypes. This week took several steps towards the unrecognizable, however, and the evil at the heart of this town has begun making itself known.
Here’s five thoughts on episodes 3 and 4 of Twin Peaks, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” and “Rest in Rain.” Spoilers below.
1. All Work and No Play Makes One-Eyed Jack a Dull Boy
Benjamin Horne and his family – including his daughter Audrey, one of Laura’s classmates – clearly don’t get along. Four episodes in and Audrey has already gone to great lengths to mess with her fathers as-yet murky plans, and Ben seems to feel nothing but disdain for his family. It’s not a surprise that when we open the episode on them around the dinner table, the family sits in complete silence.
Enter Ben’s brother, Jerry – yes, they are named Ben and Jerry, a cheeky bit of humor that goes uncommented on during the episode – fresh off the plane from Paris to bring a cascade of chaos to the evening. He loudly interrupts the dinner (much to Mrs. Horne’s disdain), pulls Ben away from the table, and then spirits his brother off to a seedy underbelly of the region: the brothel One-Eyed Jacks.
We get a hint that the brothel might be one of Laura’s many jobs around the town (a stark counter to volunteering for Meals on Wheels and teaching English to Josie Packard). Audrey, for her part, quickly reveals that she’s as resourceful and crafty as her father, slipping a clue revealing the relevance of One-Eyed Jacks to Agent Cooper and sneaking into the walls of the Great Northern to snoop. Time will tell which side she’s ultimately on, but she seems to have the town’s – and Laura’s – best interests at heart.
2. A Lesson in Tibetan Politics
Kooky Agent Cooper (more like Agent Kook-er amirite aha) has some strange tricks up his sleeve, and “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer” explains some of them. According to Cooper, he once had a dream about the plight of Tibet, which led him to incorporating Tibetan Buddhist beliefs into his investigation process. His nearly supernatural methods of deduction, then, are a function of his mental openness and embrace of spiritual philosophy.
Cooper brings Sheriff Truman, receptionist Lucy, and deputies Andy and Hawk to the woods, where he walks them through an experiment that channels his beliefs. Going off a note in Laura’s journal that stated she was excited to meet “J” the night before she died, Truman reads down a list of “J” names as Cooper chucks a rock at a bottle several yards away – if the bottle breaks, there’s your suspect. He knocks over the bottle when the Sheriff reaches Dr. Jacoby, Laura’s therapist (more on him below), but the true culprit is revealed when Cooper shatters the bottle: Leo Johnson, town scumbag, abuser, and drug runner.
What’s remarkable isn’t just that Cooper’s allies go along with his plan, it’s that his methods are a source of zero conflict whatsoever. The Sheriff and friends are happy to join Cooper on his journey, barely questioning him about his unorthodox technique. In exchange, when FBI forensics expert Albert Rosenfield (played by the excellent Miguel Ferrer) comes to town to aid the investigation and immediately called the locals “primitive” and “amateur,” Cooper takes the side of the townsfolk, referring to a kindness and naturalness that he thought had vanished from the world. This vision of the town synchronizes with Cooper’s idealism, making him uniquely suited to notice and uproot the rot at the town’s core.
3. The Red Room
Speaking of that rot, Twin Peaks quickly takes a turn for the supernatural at the close of episode 3, finishing the episode on a bizarre dream of Agent Cooper’s. He sees a glimpse of two men, one who calls himself Mike and another named Bob. The nature of the men is unclear, and their speeches are vague and full of riddles. Bob, notably, appears to be the invisible man lurking in the Palmer household, drawing Mrs. Palmer’s screams at the end of episode 2.
Continued belowThen the dream moves on, as a small man (credited as “The Man from the Other Place”) sits in a red room with Cooper and a woman he refers to as his cousin. The Man asks “doesn’t she look exactly like Laura Palmer?” Both the man and his cousin speak in an off-putting, robotically distorted dialect. As the small man dances, Faux-Laura says, “Sometimes my arms bend back,” before walking to Cooper, kissing him, and whispering the name of her killer in his ear.
When Cooper wakes, he can’t remember the name of her killer, but over the course of the next episode the dream’s predictions start to become true. Laura’s cousin Madeleine, a dead ringer for Laura (who is also played by Sheryl Lee), arrives in Twin Peaks for Laura’s funeral. Then, when the results of the autopsy come back, we learn that Laura was tied up with her arms bent back.
4. To Laura, Godspeed
“Right as Rain” brings the town together for Laura’s funeral. This is the show at its soapiest, but it also exposes the impact of the darkness Truman speaks about. The lead-up to the funeral offers glimpses at the tension bubbling around town, as Shelly Johnson hides a gun with Leo’s bloodied shirt and Laura’s boyfriend Bobby has a frightening confrontation with Leo.
The funeral itself is chaotic, exploding into a brawl when Bobby promises to kill James, her secret lover. Bobby is a child playing at being a man, and his inability to process his own feelings allows him to be a truth teller for the town: he excoriates the other attendees, saying they all knew that Laura was in trouble, but no one did anything because it would mean admitting the town’s flaws. The violence is capped off by Laura’s father, Leland, diving onto the casket and causing the lowering mechanism to break.
The funeral drama is immediately undermined by cutting to Shelly working at the diner as she mocks Leland and the broken casket. The moment earns a quick, dark laugh, but it’s indicative of a larger callousness that plagues the town. Bobby, dumb and impulsive as he is, has the town pegged.
5. What Is Going On In This House?
Leland Palmer is having a mental breakdown. Toward the end of episode 3, he dances manically around the living room while sobbing and holding a picture of Laura, only stopping when his wife’s attempts to stop him cause the picture to shatter. The disturbing moment is matched at the close of episode 4 at Laura’s memorial, as Leland begs to dance with people near him and eventually must be restrained. His wife yells for him not to “ruin this too” ¬– is she referring only to Leland shattering Laura’s picture, or is there something more sinister about his mental decline?
The evil Cooper witnessed in his dream seems related to Leland’s mental state. After the funeral, Sheriff Truman lets Agent Cooper into a “secret society” of sorts called the Bookhouse Boys which fights the darkness around Twin Peaks. Truman sums up the thematic weight of this evil in the face of the town’s supposed purity, saying, “Maybe that’s the price we pay for all the good things.” That duality seems like the key to understanding the murky abstractions of Twin Peaks, and maybe it’s also the key to solving Laura’s murder.
