A Strange and Difficult Path, Season Two, Episode Three

Quick note: As you‘ve no doubt noticed (if you‘ve read this far), I have no interest in doing an interpretation of the episodes, rather I like writing essays inspired by/influenced by the episode in question (although I do think that each of my essays addresses concerns within and without the show). If that‘s not your thing, I get it. W/r/t this particular one, I spend a long time on essentially one part of one scene in the episode. However, since I believe this scene addresses some of the core values and failures of the show, I thought it was worth a discussion. Safety and health to all!



1.

There’s no way to discuss this episode without talking about Miguel Ferrer's brilliant performance as Albert Rosenfield. By the third season, as we begin to realize that Cooper will be playing out his violent fantasies over and over again in a loop under the guise of “fixing the past and saving the girl,” Albert appears as the moral center of the show, and possibly has been the whole time. Just as the second season premier laid the foundation for the posthumous reconciliation between Bobby and his father, this episode introduces Albert’s moral complexity. After telling sheriff Truman that he ought to work on not dragging his knuckles on the floor, Truman grabs Albert and threatens to beat him up. This is Albert’s response, worth quoting in full:

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against vioIence. I pride myseIf in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absoIuteIy revenge, aggression and retaIiation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

It’s worth noting Truman’s original comments from a draft script by the episode writer Robert Engels:

“Albert, you make fun of everyone and everything and then act like you deserve an award for it. That’s just not right. Get out of here before I do something I won’t regret. Again.”

I’m torn between which of these two versions I prefer: on the one hand, the televised script sticks closer to Truman’s character with a gruff, “Now, the Iast time, I knocked you down. I feIt bad about it. The next time’s gonna be a real pleasure,” but the draft comments do a better job setting up Albert’s speech, and the ethos from which Albert opposes the very cynicism and superiority Truman claims to see in him.

But what is Albert’s speech saying? And, because we can’t forget the context of the scene, what does it mean for two men, members of the law and white, to be evoking the names of King and Gandhi, both of whom specifically disobeyed racist/colonialist  law so that a more just world could be realized?

2.

When we are introduced to Albert in the third episode of the first season, he seems to represent the stereotypical authority within the FBI, as opposed to Cooper who, as we had seen from the previous episode, uses intuition and a loosely defined (and orientalist) Tibetan/Buddhist approach to solving crimes. Our sympathies immediately lie with Cooper and Truman—who represent both spiritual and folk wisdom tied to nature and the woods—against Albert’s insistence on the superiority of forensic science, professionalism and reason. This culminates into a physical altercation between Albert and Truman over—and it should be remembered that, like the third episode of season two, the fourth episode of season one was directed by a woman—Laura Palmer’s dead and naked body. Though never truly an antagonist in the first season, the viewer is given no opportunity to really sympathize or identify with Albert.

By the second season, there’s been a subtle shift. In the first episode of the second season, Ed Hurley explains how, during his honeymoon to his wife Nadine, he accidentally shot her eye out. Though the characters to whom Ed is telling the story have the “appropriate” reaction of solemn surprise, Albert, off to the side with Truman, begins laughing. Though this reaction might seem jarring, the truth is, Everette McGill’s delivery of the revelation, the surprise at learning that Ed himself caused Nadine to lose her eye, what we already know about their marriage, and the overall absurdity of the hospital story line in general during that episode, makes Albert’s reaction more natural than it would be otherwise. I laughed then and still laugh whenever McGill says “my god! I shot Nadine’s eye out on that trip!” In this scene, Lynch and Frost evoke one of Bertolt Brecht’s more famous definition of epic theater:

“[T]he theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.”

This alienating effect is just one of the many the writers and directors will use throughout Twin Peaks. It’s referred to in the aforementioned poem “It Was Laura” from the first episode of the second season: "We were crying// And I saw her laughing.” Is it more appropriate to cry with Ed and Nadine in the moment to keep them stuck in a loveless marriage based on nothing more than guilt for an accidental crime? Or should we, like Albert, laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation and hope that the characters, too, can see it as well? The third season will have an answer to that.

This scene allows the viewer to find Albert’s skepticism about the town of Twin Peaks more relatable than in the first season. Maybe these people are absurd? And given the underlying violence of Ed’s story, parodying the underlying violence of the BOB story, maybe there IS something wrong with Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks for sentimentalizing these monsters?

This lays the groundwork for Albert’s speech in the third episode of the second season. Even before we’ve heard everything Albert has to say in his speech, the musical cue of “Laura’s Theme” playing in the background clues the viewer into Albert’s inherent sympathy and goodness here. And by his final “I love you sheriff Truman,” the viewer’s sympathies are completely on Albert’s side.

3.

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence.”

In what are some of his final writings, Michel Foucault concluded his lectures from March 26th, 1984, collected in the The Courage of Truth volume, with undelivered remarks regarding parrhesia (“the courage to tell the truth without concealing anything and regardless of the dangers this involves”) and its connection to cynicism:

“Parrhesia […] appears in two aspects: the courage to tell the truth to the person one wants to help and direct in the ethical formation of himself. The courage to manifest the truth about oneself, to show oneself as one is, in the face of all opposition. It is on this point that the Cynic appears: he has the insolent courage to show himself as he is; he has the boldness to tell the truth; and in his criticism of rules, conventions, customs, and habits, addressing himself off-handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful, he reverses the functions of political parrhesia and dramatizes also the philosophical life.”

Albert begins his speech by aligning himself with the cynics cautiously, but reveals that his cynicism is in service of a greater ethos: naysaying and being a hatchet man in the fight against violence. His cynicism can only be partial because of his position of authority: to truly give in to cynicism would be to go against the very reason and professionalism—all the way up to the legitimacy of the law he is sworn to uphold—he continuously shows with regard to his FBI work. Rather, he balances the need to show the world the FBI agent he is with a tension that acknowledges the righteous justice he seeks in aligning himself with King, Gandhi and the global non-violent protest movement.

As I wrote about last week, these slang terms evoke a certain phrasing that I associate with the 1950s and film noir. In reality, the term hatchet man comes from the late 19th century as a racist term for hired Chinese assassins. In searching the etymology of the word, I found the following transcription from testimony given on 25th October 1876 by Michael A. Smith, a San Francisco police officer, before the joint special committee of the Senate and House of Representatives (the law always looms) appointed to investigate the character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration:

“Q. Why are they called hatchet men?—A. A great many of them carry a hatchet with the handle cut off; it may be about six inches long, with a handle and a hole cut in it; they have the handle sawed off a little, leaving just enough to keep a good hold. Those are called among the Chinamen bad men or hatchet-men.” —from Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1877)

So not only does Albert identify with the cynics, he also identifies with those who carry with them a hatchet, a weapon and, perhaps unconsciously, the immigrant. Rather than as a racist boogeyman, however,  Albert redefines the term as something heroic. Rather than the nameless, faceless petty criminal who commits crimes for hire, Albert‘s willing to do the dirty work in the name of non-violence: “I choose to Iive my Iife in the company of Ghandi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Cooper expresses his global concerns in the guise of a wide-eyed optimist that does not chaff against his outward appearance as the straight-edged lawman. Yet his clearly expressed sympathy for the people of Tibet demonstrates that he too has global concerns. This juxtaposition, or possibly dissonance, between the FBI lawman and the empathetic globalist, presents Cooper as, according to Chion among others, a cross between an alien (neither relatable, nor believable) and a boy scout (an innocent).

Albert expresses his global concerns in the guise of a cynic, who fights for the same global concerns as Cooper, but does so by picking fights with figures of authority (“I’ll gladly take a punch”), speaking “off-handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful,” and generally being an asshole but in the name of love. If we return to Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, this is the truth that Cooper’s wide-eyed optimism and metaphysics cannot admit: that the world is essentially as violent and random as accidentally getting shot in the eye by your husband and must be confronted as such. In allowing the cracks into Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks, Albert lets the light get in…albeit a different one than the robins bring when they return.

4.

And yet, perhaps because he evokes King’s name, it’s time for us to ask this beloved show what it means that three white officers of the law are listening in awe as the path of Gandhi and King are being rhapsodized as a manifestation of agape. We all know what the FBI did to MLK Jr. throughout his life. Even if we were to grant the idea that Cooper and Albert walk a “strange and difficult” path, the institution of the bureau and its authority is fully intact. Obviously, this is reading against Albert’s very message of agape: dole out and take the punches in the name of the long arc of justice and love. But justice and love, to paraphrase William Gaddis, are what you get in the next life. In this life you get the law. Which is why King and Gandhi were far more radical than Albert Rosenfield: they‘re commitment to the power of non-violence undermining the very law Albert is set to defend.  And while the show might have many strange and difficult things to say about justice and the cosmos, it’s pretty conservative when it comes to the law.

The institutions of the law in the show are never really called into question. Moreover, they are made more homely than not: sheriff Truman, deputy Hawk, deputy Andy, Lucy, Cooper, Albert, the eventual appearance of Lynch as Gordon Cole, David Bowie as Philip Jeffreys, even the secondary characters like the public defender played by Van Dyke Parks, or the quirky, nomadic judge and his Native American female law clerk, all of these characters come to represent the earthly law in its various manifestations. None of them seem in the least to be corrupted or cruel. In fact, the cruelest of all of them seems to be Albert, and now we know that his cruelty is in the service of love.

What does it mean for a show that is so willing to represent the very unheimlich world of the domestic space that the institutions of the law become so homely? The detective’s tool kit of deduction can become an intuitive spiritual practice, but the very institutions by which the lawman does his work (the police, the FBI, the arrests, the jails, the judges, etc) are never really called into question. Their foundations and general correctness are presented throughout all three seasons of the show as well as Fire Walk With Me. If there is a discordant conservative streak that runs through Lynch’s often radical work, it’s that the only reason we are allowed to sink into our dreams is that the social functioning—of which dreams are merely a sorting and cataloging according to Major Briggs—circumscribed by the institutions of law, is allowed to go on undisturbed while our nightmare owls ascend and descend before its well-guarded doors.