How did Lynch and Frost end the original run of Twin Peaks? They ended their insanely popular art TV show with a Body Swap trope (a subtrope of Body Snatcher not too dissimilar to the Puppeteer Parasite). A total nightmare induced lucid dream (NILD). We see Dale Cooper turn into BOB, essentially. Or rather, our beloved protagonist switches places with our despised antagonist, now walking around in a Dale suit. If this were the Bible, we’d see Jesus and Satan switching places without anyone but the reader knowing it! Situational irony at its worst! I’m reminded of an early Christian Gnostic belief that Yahweh is actually Satan, or a demonic ‘demiurge’ pretending to be God. This demiurge selfishly created the universe and enslaved our souls in space and time. A bit of this Gnostic worldview survives in the popular Christian dictum: “The body is a prison for the soul.”
The end of season two took the cliffhanger format to an entirely new level. For some, this was the greatest thing they couldn’t have imagined—a sharp right turn into a new darkness, a new metaphor. Cooper’s potential physical death as the cliffhanger ending of season one was nothing compared to the potential death of his reputation at the end of season two. And the ending of season two is nothing compared to what was delivered at the end of season three: the potential death of the dream of Twin Peaks altogether, and the meta-death of Laura Palmer.
All lights go out. We return to starting positions, to a slow-motion reenactment of Cooper’s original dream in season one, and to the inverse of the composition at the end of Fire Walk With Me.
Oh FWWM. The nail in the coffin at the end of season two was Fire Walk With Me, released as a gift to all those fans left helpless in dark, in despair. Yet, in his grand finale film, Lynch did not at all address the end of Season Two but instead went back to the darkness, a prequel to season one. If Lynch and Frost make another Twin Peaks movie, it will probably be a prequel, never returning to what happened in Episode 18.
Therefore, to better appreciate the cliffhanger/annihilation gifted to us at the end of season three, we should compare it to the end of season one, season two, and FWWM.
Regular cliffhangers always get resolved, while Lynchian cliffhangers are somehow always already resolved, or dissolved. And they lead to wider possibilities, darker stories. We get placed into a larger self that must embrace the good and the evil, the open and the closed, all at once. As Shunryu Suzuki says, “If you want to tame a bull, give it a large pasture.”
Submitted December 06, 2018 at 12:23AM by dftitterington https://ift.tt/2QefO53
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