i’ve seen the Return all the way through a few different times and i’ve thought a lot about how things end. here are some thoughts on the finale:
Summary
i think the ending shows that Cooper never really understood the nature of Laura Palmer’s suffering. he has defined himself as this embodiment of the state (“i am the FBI”) and he has too much love for like a traditional order and hierarchy to understand the basic fact that - why would Laura Palmer ever want to return home? even if she was still alive, why does bringing her home do anything but re-traumatize her? your home is not really a home when it’s the place of your abuse. there’s no home there. you see the place Laura’s mom is in, before the end of the series - and it’s a really dark one. Laura’s moved on, both spiritually and metaphorically. and yet Cooper is still obsessed because he sees her as the perfect victim to be saved. without him the world of Twin Peaks descends into a sort of chaos where things have both become more feral… but also Twin Peaks is weirdly taken over by hipsters too, perhaps romanticizing the same things about that part of the world the original series does while the core rots away. i was a bit confused by that juxtaposition when i first saw the series but actually i think it makes a lot of sense in retrospect. maybe this is just what Twin Peaks always was, or where it was always destined to be headed - some combo of the horrid Deer Meadow from Fire Walk With Me and the romantic, mysterious Twin Peaks of the original series.
to me i really felt that Lynch never fully understood and in fact might have been a little disgusted by some of the rabid fandom for Twin Peaks and the way it romanticizes a particular aesthetic. to me this series just shows the ugliness - people get old and die. some things heal (Bobby is a more functional person now, Ed finally gets together with Norma)… but other things fester and get worse. you can’t go back and fix the past. maybe Cooper, not Evil Cooper, actually was the one who raped Diane? and maybe he was the one who was creepy with Audrey? the original Coop sort of walks the line between a lot of things, and the Return kind of destroys that line. maybe Cooper never actually escaped the black lodge to begin with (an interpretation i haven’t seen much of but was my first thought on rewatch of the series). or maybe the Black Lodge actually represents some guilt or purgatory for bad things that he’s done that he cannot undo. or maybe not, but in either case his fantasy is not something that can be transposed over reality any more. Cooper’s the real subject of the Return for me (instead of being the glue that holds the show together like in the original series), and specifically examining why romanticizing Cooper as this flawless wonderful guy is not a good thing to do.