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finally watched all of the return and this post really brought me back to the emotional core of the finale after i got away with myself opening theory tabs from this thread (though @vikram that synced ending blew me away cheers)
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The real conspiracy is why The Return and Too Old to Die Young have so many similarities. Janey, Jones, Diana/e, cops into schoolgirls, two bent cops, two brothers, casinos, the desert, Montana, Cooper’s changing in the last episode.
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the consequences of splitting the atom
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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.
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yeah i definitely felt like by the end, the only thing i was certain of was his fallibility
i wanna know more about Diane though
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watching season 2 for the first time and noticed benjamin horne’s desk has a copy of “joseph and his brothers”, which may make him the only person in the world to have voluntarily read “joseph and his brothers”
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still watching s2. surprised and relieved to find out billy zane is not the guy from smashing pumpkins. windom earle’s most interesting quality is that he keeps reminding me of chris crawford alas. but still watching for promise of ufo related material to come, and to eventually get to cross compare findings against the Peaks Freaks messageboard hypercard stack archive.
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i can’t think of Windom Earle now without thinking about the fact that the actor is the father of this very self-serious guy who had this Montreal indie band that was popular for like two seconds several years back (also i think he used to date Grimes back when she first broke out… he appears in the “Oblivion” video briefly)
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and i just can’t think of windom earle now
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I covered another Twin Peaks stack back when I first started doing videos forever ago
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incredible
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thanks for this, always endearing to see older web stuff feel awkwardly obliged to wrestle with the question of “don’t you have anything better to do with your time” now that the world as a whole has accepted that no, we don’t really.
Majical Cloudz
a 2010s matador signed indie pop band from montreal called Majical Cloudz really feels like something a time traveller would invent for the sake of deep cover.
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I had no idea they were related!
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they are indeed! now you know that there are 3 degrees of separation between Windom Earle and Elon Musk
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and grimes’ ex, too. unlimited access
this is destroying me @ellaguro cheers. like THAT’S who earle reminded me of!! fuck!
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trying to figure out now the Mr C-R Horne style bad-seed chain that hooks musk up to the black lodge’s influence
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18 episodes into season 2, “let’s not kid ourselves / it gets really, really bad”. heather graham being in it is really throwing off my sense of tv chronology for some reason.
sorry dude but chess-themed serial murders are off-peak riddler at best
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been trying to pitch boeing on using punks in the beerlight for their re-entry campaign for the 737 max, no takers so far
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