When the homecoming queen, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), is murdered in Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), a boyishly chirpy, yet noble FBI agent, who possesses a child-like wonder for the world around him, is sent to investigate the case. Mystically-inclined, Agent Cooper is open to any leads, no matter how metaphysical their origin. In one of the most iconic episodes we enter Dale's dream where Laura Palmer whispers the name of her killer in our hero's ear. This takes place in the Red Room, a Bardo-like realm where our characters meet otherworldly entities and tussle with the dark side of their souls (embodied in a shadow self) before passing through to the next plane of existence. Here they meet their evil doppelgänger, whom they have to face with "perfect courage" or "it will annihilate your soul". Or as Lynch puts it, "the unified field", where he believes all great ideas come from. Frost sensed the fans growing restless, thinking Lynch too absolutist in not solving the mystery. In a 2000 interview with Entertainment Weekly, he reflects on Lynch not wanting to reveal the killer: "I know David was always enamoured of that notion, but I felt we had an obligation to the audience to give them some resolution." It has been suggested that the BOB entity is thought up by Laura as a coping mechanism, and though the Twin Peaks storyline doesn't exactly confirm or deny this idea, BOB is a very much an evil entity that has purchase over the minds of other people too, particularly if they are those supersensitive enough to other realms. Acerbic Agent Albert Rosenfield, played by Miguel Ferrer, postulates that BOB "is just the evil that men do".
Lynch had been right about the primacy of the central mystery. The network was going to cancel Twin Peaks but, with some arm-twisting from Lynch, ABC allowed Frost and Lynch to see the thing through to the end of the second season. And then the unexpected happened: the final episode of season two, "Beyond Life and Death", airing on 10 June 1991, became one of the best episodes of the series. Lynch revived the show with the defibrillator that is his boundless imagination. Having nothing left to lose made him more ingenious than ever.
The season two finalé sees Dale Cooper enter the red room, now known as The Black Lodge, the realm from where BOB descended, to rescue his girlfriend Annie (Heather Graham), only for Cooper's evil doppelgänger to escape, with good Cooper left trapped in the Lodge. And to make matters ten times worse, Bad Cooper ("Mr C") is also possessed by the BOB entity. This is deeply wounding. Laura is able to resist BOB, but she's also in touch with her shadow side. Did this happen to Cooper because he hasn't acknowledged his capacity for darkness? Lynch was still haunted by his creation, in particular the character Laura Palmer. He wanted to make a prequel film, Fire Walk with Me, detailing the last seven days of Laura's life.
Fire Walk with Me is an extraordinary piece of work. However, it is ruthlessly uncompromising. We see the last seven days of Laura's life, and there is a great empathy to the story. Here Laura is revealed to be a powerful messianic figure, whose light balances the darkness of BOB, who wants to possess her -- Laura's messianic status is confirmed in episode eight of season 3 when we see the Giant (Carel Struycken) making her and sending her to Earth as a reaction to the birth of BOB. At first glance, Laura doesn't appear to be much of a messiah. A contradictory figure, she helps the elderly by day and prostitutes herself by night in a coke-addled frenzy. There are times when her behavior is downright demonic. There's plenty of darkness in her, but (and here is the crucial difference) it's on a conscious level. She is actively engaging with her dark side, a necessary exigency for her to eventually counteract the darkness in the world.
This is the difference between Dale and Laura: Laura knows you have to concede that evil stirs within her/our own soul in order to conquer it, whereas Dale just wants to conquer it. Rather than be ensnared by evil she puts on a ring that weds her to the Red Room and then she dies. Understanding evil, in her mind, is the best defence against it. How often do you hear that a man who has killed his family was the friendliest neighbour on the street? Obliviousness to darkness means it can possess you more easily. Fire Walk With Me was not fully embraced by fans. Very little light was shed on Dale Cooper's fate, and the film was a commercial bellyflop and received no fanfare, probably due to how unflinching it is, the quirky tone of the show no longer present. In an article for Premiere magazine, David Foster Wallace wrote that he thought it was due to Laura's twofold nature, claiming multiplex audiences want escape, and not this kind of moral ambiguity, as they feel implicated by it.
In Twin Peaks, good and evil aren't black and white. To Foster Wallace, Fire Walk With Me is a movie that requires that these troubling "features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away, but acknowledged." In 2014, the most wonderful thing for Twin Peaks fans occurred: Lynch announced on Twitter that the show was coming back with a third season. Having matured and cast aside their grudges, Frost and Lynch got back to work, with Frost admitting that it was Twin Peaks' fervent fandom that kept the show alive in his mind. The Return: The new season's pacing was glacial but in a hypnotic way, unfurling like smoke before our eyes. This slowness is entrancing. Our culture has sped up to a distressing degree, so to enter into a world with such a creeping pace at first feels peculiar, and then radical. Pretty soon, it becomes clear that Lynch is rewriting the rules of television all over again, giving us not what we want but what we need. For consciousness to be expanded, one has to ditch one's formulas. Something deeper is happening here.
Italian psychologist, Roberto Assagioli believed that within us there are "subpersonalities", multiple modes in our psyches that are triggered without us giving the green-light. These "subpersonalities" are autonomous and need to be integrated or else they have the capacity to subsume our whole identity, particularly if they are disowned or unacknowledged. They are our way of dealing with challenges throughout the course of our lives, and at one point they did prove useful -- that's why they've remained -- but they can thwart situations in which they are no longer appropriate. Assagioli was heavily influenced by Carl Jung, who coined the term Individuation, which is the process whereby someone integrates all their unconscious parts (or "subpersonalties"), bringing them to the level of consciousness. He also came up with the idea of The Shadow, all those elements of our psyche that we reject, which can be negative characteristics.
Twin Peaks: The Return refuses to be itself, and thus becomes even more itself, growing into something better and stranger. Even though the show knows how to age, that doesn't mean its protagonist does. A lot of growing up is accepting the unattainability of heroism to the level of purity that Cooper aspires. To be a real hero in the real the world requires one to embrace darkness, which is impossible without embracing your own (à la Laura). So, in Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper's identity is atomised into three separate individuals. We long to see the Cooper we know and love, but for him to achieve the wholeness the maturation process dictates, he has to move on from being that former Cooper and become something different. Even while practically lobotomised, there's a kindness, a purity to Dougie, that is redolent of Agent Cooper's essence. In episode 16, Cooper finally wakes up. And it's him, it's really him, the coffee loving Agent with a heart of gold. And when Cooper returns to Twin Peaks, he defeats evil with a little help from his lovable old pals.
"We live inside a dream," it appears part of Cooper's identity is still in the Black Lodge, having gone so far beyond the human realm that time's linearity has been revealed as an illusion. Or, this timeline could be collapsing on account of Cooper meddling with the past. Or it could be a meta-commentary on the artifice of the show, and Cooper is now aware he's a character on a television show. Either way, in Twin Peaks dreams have just as much heft as reality, with which they are inextricably woven, and the same goes for our own lives. Dreams can point us where to go, or reveal to us something we've been overlooking. The invalidating of dreams is an unfortunate side effect of our more atheistic age. If you fall in love in a dream, you are really falling in love. This is why compensatory "subpersonalities" often show up in dreams. So it is in the last episode of season 3, with evil vanquished, that Cooper, now equipped with supernatural, lodge-like capabilities, can't resist going further, and sets out to reverse the past, specifically the death of Laura Palmer. He is incorrigibly upstanding in his purpose, his valiance giving him no sense of self-preservation.
Cooper is heroic, accepting harsh realities for himself, but not for others. While more admirable than being in denial about himself, it still counts as not accepting reality. He's so virtuous that he goes to monumentally self-sacrificing lengths to save Laura from her fate. It takes considerable hubris to bend the laws of nature, and this is exactly what Cooper does by going back to the night of Laura's murder and altering events. Another act of hubris so great that it tries to bend the very nature of reality occurs in episode eight - possibly the most groundbreaking hour of television that's ever aired. We go back in time to 16 July 1945. We see a long sequence in which the first ever atomic bomb is detonated in New Mexico. The Trinity Test as part of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico was the single most destructive technology ever commissioned, therefore it is the most evil act of technological advancement ever committed. Splitting the atom is an act of scientific hubris on par -- in storytelling terms -- with going back in time and changing the course of history. To assume the power of a god seems to be where the human race is inexorably heading, the unremitting progress leaving no space for self-reflection.
In Fire Walk With Me, Cooper entered Laura's dream and tries to dissuade her from taking a ring that would wed her to The Lodge. He can't surmise why her taking the ring is so necessary, as he's too hell-bent on saving the damsel from her fate. White Knights always think they know what's best for their seemingly helpless damsels. In one of the most moving scenes Lynch has ever directed, set in The Roadhouse, further examples of his intuitive ingenuity are demonstrated. Unaccountably, those congregated in the Roadhouse seem to just pick up on the sadness of this event in the air, and start crying. Foster Wallace marveled: "David Lynch seems to truly possess the capacity for detachment from response that most artists only pay lip-service to." Lynch's receptiveness to ideas, no matter their source, means he's open to some very troubling ones. People often puzzle over how dark Lynch's work is. They can't reconcile how terrifying his vision can be with his guileless, boy-scout demeanor. That said, when Lynch directs beauty he eclipses everyone else, too. The more you open yourself to darkness, the more you open yourself to the light. This is the healing effect of accepting one's own darkness.
Twin Peaks The Return - The Ending: Eventually, Laura remembers some of what happened to her in the other timeline. Some trauma persists through time and space and there's nothing anyone can do about it, no matter how heroic their efforts, except provide the victim a safe space. This is something Laura had already excelled at -- intentionally sealing her own fate, and Christ-like, accepting it. In the last moments, Laura remembers her life in the previous timeline. She lets out her blood-curdling scream. The lights in the Palmer residence go out, and the screen goes black. So what the hell was that ending all about? Some fans were ruffled by this inscrutable conclusion. Here are some possible explanations we can posit:
1. Cooper managed to lure Judy into the Carrie Page timeline, because Judy feeds on pain and suffering, so Laura's scream summoned Judy, and thereupon the timeline was collapsed essentially trapping the Judy entity, but also killing Cooper and Laura along with it.
2. Now that Cooper seems to have Bad Cooper in him, it could be that Bad Cooper took the reigns and brought Laura back to Twin Peaks to offer her up to Judy.
3. The Carrie Page timeline is a dream, and when Carrie realises she is dreaming she wakes up back in the Palmer residence as Laura Palmer.
However, unless Lynch decides to make a fourth season, we'll probably never know what the ending truly mean. The ending might be insoluble by design. This means Lynch has the last laugh, for there is only one thing he hates more than meddling executives: narrative closure. By being unresolved the mystery of Twin Peaks prevails once more. So, just like in life, we have to surrender to the mystery of it all. Is this an ending where good or evil prevailed? Source: www.popmatters.com
This destination of the "bright midnight" involves "bliss" and "light," unmistakable symbols of joy and euphoria. "Sweet delight" is involved, set against the contrasting "endless night." The darkness has come to an end. One of the themes of The End is internal travel. Morrison sings “there’s danger on the edge of town.” Danger here refers to one of the core elements of the hero’s journey: overcoming the obstacles. Morrison tells the listener to "ride the king's highway" and to "ride the highway West." In between is the line "Weird scenes inside the gold mine." The placement suggests that "the gold mine" is somehow associated with going West. This passage is an invitation to encounter what Morrison called the “dark forces,” symbolic of obstacles that must be defeated on the journey to liberation. We next encounter the image of "the blue bus," which is said to be "calling us." When he says “the West is the best,” he’s not talking about California, he’s talking about the mythological West, a landmark within that whole hero’s journey, to reach his Shangrila. Bernard Wolfe wrote, "What an ingenious formula: Morrison did resurrect something in the paved-over human potential, something at least assumed to be there, fantasy freedom, fantasy sex, fantasy departure, through the trick of escaping from the human realm or going through the motions of escape.” Despite the occasional darkness, from the haunting eeriness of End of the Night to the chilling visions in The End, Morrison’s overriding images are beautiful and positive. He ultimately emphasized light over darkness, but light cannot be achieved without first conquering dark and dangerous obstacles. Morrison was ultimately a “light-bringer and emissary of the light.” And Morrison, when you look at a song like When the Music’s Over, right after he screams out, “We want the world and we want it now,” he says, “See the light. Save us, Jesus, Save us.” And the light, meaning love, the sun and the dawn, are the prevailing themes in The Doors, not the dark, the night, the chaos and the abyss. —Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine (2017) by David Shiang
Jim Morrison: “People have the feeling that what’s going on outside isn’t real, just a bunch of staged events, all I did was to record this feeling. Out in the social world people mostly live as if they are perpetually acting in conformity with what others believe about them. That's a way of living a lie. It’s a lie even if everyone else is right and you’re wrong.”
Pamela Courson was the muse who inspired many of Jim Morrison's songs and poems like "Love Street," "Queen of the Highway," or "Twentieth Century Fox." Pam was briefly enrolled studying art at L.A. City College and she liked to explore in particular the Sunset Strip zone. Jim first met Pamela Courson shortly after his break-up with Mary Werbelow in the summer of 1965. Although some versions of their first encounter date the spring of 1966, they had previously met in 1965 at a college campus party and they were living together in the Venice area, probably rent-free at a communal house with other friends. Pam had already run out of her parents' funds and danced occasionally in the Sunset Strip. Jim still received an intermitent allowance from his grandparents. Possibly he supplemented the couple's meagre incomes by dealing acid to students. January Jensen confirmed they'd met in 1965 at an UCLA campus party, prior to The Doors formation.
Pam was a rebellious spirit who looked after new adventures far away from her suffocating middle class family (although Pam felt close to her maternal grandmother, from who she had received her middle name Susan). “What are you wasting your time with this guy for? Get yourself someone with money!” Pamela’s older sister Judy advised Pamela in the fall of 1965, noting Jim didn't have any prospects by then. January Jensen recalls Jim's fixation with Pam: “Jim always carried a notebook with him. And every time we’d come to a restaurant, a general store, or a gas station, he’d have to stop and call Pam.” In November 1971, four months after Jim died, Pam filed a ‘declaration in support of widow’s allowance,’ claiming: ‘Since September 30, 1967, I have considered that I was married to James Douglas Morrison, and that I was in fact his wife at the time of his death and am now his widow’. In her court statement, Pam said, ‘Jim reported to me that he learned from Max Fink that to create a marriage in the state of Colorado it was sufficient if two people stayed together, had relations and agreed to conduct themselves as husband and wife. We spent the night at a hotel, had sexual relations and agreed that we would forever be husband and wife. We honeymooned in Colorado and then continued our the Doors tour.’ Pam’s statement went on to say that during their relationship, all her living expenses were paid from Jim’s earnings, and she and Jim were given $2,500 in cash each month.
Rich Linnell was an early member of The Doors entourage initially through his friendship with Robby Krieger’s brother Ronnie. Early on Rich was helping lug around the band’s equipment at concerts and he ultimately brought his good friend, Bill Siddons, into the fold. Siddons would soon become the manager of The Doors, and Linnell would carve out his own successful career as a concert promoter. -Rich Linnell: I knew nothing about the band at the time, I’d heard a song on the radio, but I didn’t know much about them or their reputation. The Doors were playing at Ciro’s that night [April, 1967], which is now The Comedy Store [8433 Sunset Blvd.], and we went up to Jim and Pam’s place in Laurel Canyon. We walk in and introductions were made, “Hi, this is Rich, this is Jim, this is Pam.” “Hello, how do you do?” And those were the only words spoken for about twenty minutes, while Pam and Jim got ready to go on down to the show, which we were taking them to. And they got in the car, we drove on down the hill, and again nothing was being said. So we dropped them off at Ciro’s, they went in the back door, and we sat on the floor in the front part of the stage and about twenty minutes later the band comes out. And here’s Jim who was previously just quiet—and that’s an understatement—who suddenly just lurches into incredible histrionics onstage, and screaming and rolling around, and I was just going, “What the…?” It was very hard for me to believe at that point that the same guy that I had spent the twenty or thirty minutes in his apartment was the same guy onstage.
-Frank Lisciandro: So what was Jim really like?
-Rich Linnell: What was he really like? Well he was like a lot of things. Well, I think the initial description that I gave, the silence. Which, at the time, and even in retrospect, he was having moment of quiet contemplation. It was perhaps the way Jim centered himself before he went onstage. He was witty, he was charming. He was a challenging conversationalist. And we could talk about anything, and he was well versed with any number of subjects. I’m sure he drank a lot more than I did, but I never witnessed him throwing drinks or glasses around or becoming an obnoxious drunk.
-Frank Lisciandro: What about Pamela and their relationship?
-Rich Linnell: I never knew Pam very well. She was more of a mystery to me; probably because I didn’t know her very well, but she was around a lot on the road. From time to time I’d ask somebody, “What’s it like today? Are they together or not?” And usually the answer was, “I don’t know”, “Pam threw him out” or “Jim left.” It seemed to me to be stormy, although there always seemed to be a lot of caring and a lot of love there, too. Volatile; very volatile. So I didn’t have any strong feelings about Pam one way or another. She seemed a little standoffish, a little arrogant sometimes. At times when she was around giving him trouble, Jim was more of a drag.
Salli Stevenson, journalist for Circus Magazine: "The only woman that Jim ever took seriously was Pamela Courson. They experienced every facet of a relationship that could be experienced together: friends, lovers, partners. She was his old lady. She is the only woman he ever allowed to say she was his wife. Jim for many reasons completely bonded to Pamela. I knew that nothing could come between them. I felt that they both deserved Purple Hearts for weathering the challenges of their journey together. I met and interviewed Jim on October 13, 1970. Jim and I were in contact after that until he and Babe Hill left for Miami on October 29th. When Jim returned, he called me. We got together for a movie with Frank and Kathy Lisciandro. We were in touch on and off until January 17, 1971. We finally spoke to each other twice in March, before he left for Paris."
Raeanne Bartlett: I don't particularly trust Eve Babitz or her sister Mirandi. They are resentful, bitter storytellers, and unpleasant about absolutely everyone. I know the prostitution rumors, said by several people who hated Pamela (especially Mirandi Babitz and Max Fink). In a research of over 14 years, I've never found any evidence of it. Patricia Butler never found any evidence, nor in the early 60s phase, nor in Pamela's later days. Patricia Kennealy was upset when her cover-up was exposed by Jerry Hopkins, who wrote the foreword of Patricia Butler's book. According to Jerry Hopkins (who was not either the fairest judge towards Pam, whom he called 'manipulative'): "Except for Pamela, there was no one girl that Jim saw often for periods of more than a few days, in the months since they'd met. Jim and Patricia had been in the same room only a few times. Nor had there been many phone calls. Nothing that signaled a passionate courtship." Kennealy, however, tried very hard in Strange Days to model the character of herself after Pamela Courson. Patricia describes herself as a stylish redhead who kept Jim in check and didn’t take any guff from him, making herself out to be the muse who inspires his work. Others, like German actress Nico, couldn't understand why were left behind for Pamela and dyed her hair red to no avail. Ray Manzarek talks about how Nico went gaga over Jim and tried her best feminine tactics to win him over, chasing him desperately for a while, but Jim only felt a romantic protective connection to Pamela that was irreplaceable.
Raeanne Bartlett: I don't particularly trust Eve Babitz or her sister Mirandi. They are resentful, bitter storytellers, and unpleasant about absolutely everyone. I know the prostitution rumors, said by several people who hated Pamela (especially Mirandi Babitz and Max Fink). In a research of over 14 years, I've never found any evidence of it. Patricia Butler never found any evidence, nor in the early 60s phase, nor in Pamela's later days. Patricia Kennealy was upset when her cover-up was exposed by Jerry Hopkins, who wrote the foreword of Patricia Butler's book. According to Jerry Hopkins (who was not either the fairest judge towards Pam, whom he called 'manipulative'): "Except for Pamela, there was no one girl that Jim saw often for periods of more than a few days, in the months since they'd met. Jim and Patricia had been in the same room only a few times. Nor had there been many phone calls. Nothing that signaled a passionate courtship." Kennealy, however, tried very hard in Strange Days to model the character of herself after Pamela Courson. Patricia describes herself as a stylish redhead who kept Jim in check and didn’t take any guff from him, making herself out to be the muse who inspires his work. Others, like German actress Nico, couldn't understand why were left behind for Pamela and dyed her hair red to no avail. Ray Manzarek talks about how Nico went gaga over Jim and tried her best feminine tactics to win him over, chasing him desperately for a while, but Jim only felt a romantic protective connection to Pamela that was irreplaceable.
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2020), a documentary directed by Nick Broomfiled, is an in-depth look at the relationship between the late musician Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen. Leonard Cohen's ballad songs from this time reflected what was happening: "So Long Marianne" and "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye." In his dying moments Leonard Cohen recognised the value of his deep connection with Marianne Ihlen and sent her a farewell letter when she was in the hospital. "Dearest Marianne, I'm just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now. I've never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you already know that. I don't have to say any more. Safe travels, old friend. I'll see you down the road. Love and gratitude always, Leonard." Source: www.spiritualityandpractice.com
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