PURE EXPRESSION
DOUGIE LAYS BARE THE GENIUS OF DAVID LYNCH
Alittle over hour an hour into Twi n Peaks: Fire Walk wi t h Me, Davi d Lynch’s widely loathed and frequently misunderstood feature- length prequel to the cult television series he co- created in 1990 with Mark Frost, Special Agent Chester Desmond, the hard-headed G-man played by Chris Isaak and the ostensible hero of the film, inspects the grounds at the mysterious Trout Farm Trailer Park in Deer Meadow, Washington, where he is investigating the grisly murder of a young woman named Teresa Banks. Agent Desmond spots a clue beneath a trailer, crouches down to pick it up — and vanishes.
He — as well as every other character newly introduced over the course of these first thirty minutes — does not appear throughout the remainder of the film. Agent Desmond is sucked into a hole in the middle of the movie, never to be seen again.
This sort of brazen misdirection — introducing a cast of characters totally unlike the beloved small- town weirdos of the original series and then unceremoniously abandoning them — is of course entirely typical of Lynch. It was also, before Twin Peaks: The Return premiered on Showtime four weeks ago, the clearest indication we had that the longawaited revival would not be a conventional duplicate of the cherished original.
The Return was never destined to target nostalgic pleasure centres with second servings of coffee and pie: Lynch seems fundamentally incapable of administering “fan service,” nor indeed of doing anything to indulge, pacify or pander to an audience. He’s an artist, not a network executive. He has no interest in what Twin Peaks fans want and little regard for what they might think. And who would want reiteration, when you can have something radically new?
So far, so good: the first third of Twin Peaks: The Return has proven more wildly, profoundly unusual than even the most hopeful estimations could have predicted. A galaxy of unfamiliar characters and locales have materialized with the verve of fresh invention. Old faces have been rendered unfamiliar by time or tweaking, or else have reappeared for moments only, absent their usual eccentric appeal. Ghastly killings — the mutilation by supernatural force of a pair of good- looking twenty- somethings, the stabbing of a defenceless secretary by ice pick, the slaughter of a child in a cocaine- fuelled hit- and- run, among others — range from arbitrary to unexplained, and with no charming FBI agents around to solve them. Dale Cooper’s forays through the Black Lodge, once the domain of backwards-talking little people and light jazz, are now portrayed with the galvanic terror of the hardcore avant-garde.
It’s nothing l i ke anyone could have imagined. It’s better than anyone could have dreamed.
There is also Dougie Jones. Dougie is an insurance underwriter with a prestigious firm in Las Vegas. He has a wife, Janey- E, and a young boy, Sonny Jim, with whom he lives a pleasant, mediocre life of morning lattes, after- work trysts and lime- green sport coats. But Dougie isn’t real: he was created — and this is where it gets complicated, in Twin Peaks fashion — by the evil doppelgänger of Agent Cooper, cooked up as a decoy that would act as a conduit for the Good Coop’s escape from the Black Lodge and prevent the Evil Coop from having to return. The effect of which is that Good Coop is now trapped in t he body of t his goofy dunderhead, dimly aware of what’s going on around him and i ncapable, for now, of snapping out of his post-Lodge daze. For the last several weeks we have had to watch with increasingly strained patience as Dougie potters through his days unawares.
Dougie’s simple- minded antics play at first as comic relief. After he winds up on the floor of a high- rolling Vegas casino, Dougie inadvertently summons the powers of the Lodge to spot slot- machines poised to cash out jackpots — and in a delightful montage winds up winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in showers of coins. When he’s shuffled by his wife to the office for a meeting, he wrenches a coffee from a co- worker and sucks at its plastic lid like a child with a sippy cup — which Kyle MacLachlan plays hilariously. But four hours in the slow company of Dougie is apparently too much for some people.
The consensus emerging online is that whatever charm the bit had has long-since been exhausted: what once seemed amusing now just seems abrasive, and for many the joke just isn’t funny anymore. As a friend declared to me at the end of last week’s episode, “Good Coop needs to wake up pronto.”
But I contend that the sad saga of Dougie Jones is indispensable. That such an act could run so long — so much longer than is strictly necessary to establish the crisis, so much l onger than is required to make the most of the gag — is precisely what makes the new Twin Peaks special.
Governed by the powers that be of any other network, in thrall to the demands of an audience or of focus- groups and f eedback- t ests, Lynch would be obliged to wrap the Dougie arc nearly as soon as it began. Had Lynch been afforded even the slightest bit less creative latitude by Showtime — had some suits concerned about ratings needed to sign off on every shooting script — this storyline would never have been permitted to unfold at its glacial pace.
What we’re getting is Lynch’s unadulterated vision. And in this pop- cultural epoch of tailored content and gratification by algorithm, that fact is a miracle. We need to cherish every minute of Dougie Jones.
Where else on network television are you going to find so pure an expression of one artist’s singular whims?
IT’S BETTER THAN ANYONE COULD HAVE DREAMED.