Perspicacity, Season Two, Episode Five

Perspicacity is the ability (faculty, power, Kraft) to mentally understand clearly. For example, "Leo Johnson doesn't currently even have the perspicacity to take the standard CST competency test." Therefore, Leo Johnson doesn't have the mental clarity to take a competency test. Perspicacity is a weird word to use in this context, but, within the context of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks, it isn't unwarranted. Perspicacity moves beyond simply grasping something, suggesting, in its etymology, having an insight into something. From what we've seen of Leo Johnson, it's questionable that, being comatose notwithstanding, he would have the perspicacity to assess anything. Renè Descares in his Regulæ ad directionem ingenii states: "We should totally focus the vision of the natural intelligence on the smallest and easiest things, and we should dwell on them for a long time, so long, until we have become accustomed to intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicaciously." Perspicacity is linked with intuition (German Anschauung) that there is the act of seeing, of observing, yet there is also a concomitant act of intuiting, of obtaining knowledge independent of seeing, looking. This is different than simply looking at something to deduce information, this is the act of intuiting something only through perception beyond the eyes, looking within for knowledge and truth.

The idea of being able to intuit something beyond sight is a recurrent theme in Twin Peaks (think of Cooper's "Buddhist" method of discerning the killer in episode three, season one), as well as the idea of sight and perception being a mis-perception ("the owls are not what they seem"). The episode begins with the tension between seeing and perceiving: Cooper, while upside down, is able to find Audrey's letter letting him know she's being held captive at One Eyed Jacks.  It's only when he is able to see the world anew (upside-down) while doing his "yogic practice" that he has the perspicacity to discern the letter. It's been hiding in plain sight since the end of season one, but its only with a change of perspective (tricking the eyes into seeing the world reversed) that it could be discovered. 

The word perspicacity is introduced in the episode during the double-header criminal hearings taking place at the Roadhouse. We have already been introduced to the judge and his administrative assistant in the previous episode. The first hearing involves whether or not Leland will have bail set before his trial for the murder of Jacques Renault. This doesn't require any perspicacity on anyone's part: Leland has confessed to the murder and will most likely be released before trial because, as Sheriff Truman points out in Leland's defense, he's a well liked member of the Twin Peaks community who just suffered the trauma of his daughter's murder. There is, of course, another layer of perspicacity that has not been utilized insofar as Leland, like the owls, isn't what he seems. Once again, kudos to Ray Wise who, upon hearing the judges verdict that he will be released on his own recognizance, gives the audience a perfectly psychotic Leland/Bob smile. No one there has the perspicacity to see who Leland really is at this point. 

The second hearing involves Leo Johnson's capacity to stand trial for the murder of Leland's daughter Laura Palmer. Leo is then currently in a coma, in the process of being exploited by his wife and her boyfriend for insurance money (there is a scene involving Shelly, Bobby and Mr, Pinkel (sp ?), played beautifully by the late, great David Lander (aka Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley)) and the idea that anyone might think him competent to stand trial, perspicacity or not, seems unbelievable. The character who utters the world perspicacity is Leo's lawyer, Jack Racine, played by Van Dyke Parks. Van Dyke Parks isn't really an actor, he started his career in Hollywood as a child actor but, if he's known at all, he's known as a songwriter and producer, most famously working with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys on the unreleased album Smile, as well as releasing a number of records under his own name. Parks gave Wilson and the rest of the Beach Boys, with Smile, a perspicacity to understand what their band was doing to uphold a certain idea of post-war American culture. I won't get into the essential complexity that is the Beach Boys here, however, Parks arrival as their de-facto songwriter changed their music fundamentally. The pre-Pet Sounds albums, more or less, embodied a post-war optimism replete with symbols representing materially that optimism: cars, bikinis, root beer, surfing, unlimited capital and fun, fun, fun until...well, you know.

Pet Sounds, one of the greatest albums ever recorded, was the result of a very perceptive man in his early 20s asking whether those material pleasures were enough to sustain him. Physical and emotional unguardedness could not be purchased at the car dealership, nor at the root beer stand. The metaphysical certainty of someone being there for you wasn't as sure as the warmth of the sun, the speed of your little Honda, the visual pleasure of California girls. Such metaphysical crises usually lead to drug use, the initial high of perceiving good vibrations everywhere, only to be let down by the limitations of such vibrations. Interestingly, as Brian Wilson was coming down, he partnered with a lyricist who had his own ideas of how to make the most American of post-war bands allow a crack in their particular image. The main refrain of "Heroes and Villains" is "Heroes and villains/ just see what you've done." Within the context of the song, the only evidence we have for what they've done is murder an "innocent girl" from "the Spanish and Indian home" in a "rain of [...] bullets" that "eventually brought her down." 

Van Dyke Parks' father, Richard Hill Parks, was the chief psychiatric officer in the Dachau Liberation Reprisals (the same camp where my grandparents were liberated), responsible, one assumes, for psychologically assessing the allied soldiers who killed fifty to seventy SS guards after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Based on the lyrics he gave to Wilson for "Heroes and Villains" as well as lyrics on his own solo albums, there's a transglobal and trans-historical fascination with the colonial and genocidal events of both the 19th and 20th centuries. The law and reconning Parks' character is confronting in Twin Peaks isn't so lofty nor impactful, yet contains a kernel of the larger questions of law and vengeance echoed in the far greater crimes we've historically committed. Regardless of how we feel about Leo Johnson (the drinker, the abuser, the rapist, the hit man) there's a violation of basic human law in forcing a comatose man to stand trial for a crime he may or may not have committed. 

Within the episode what is the district attorney's rejoinder to this argument? "The trial does more than punish the wrong doing, it also brings a feeling of justice and retribution to the community. The murder of Laura Palmer is the sort that can wound an entire town." Independent of the individual's right to be spared perceived justice because of his perspicacity (here to mean whether or not he's conscious or unconscious), the collective need for punishment and retribution takes precedence over whatever individual right the accused may have. The social cohesion of Twin Peaks requires a scape goat (here literally because, regardless of what one feels about Leo, he is innocent of Laura's murder) so that the town can heal. The one figure we haven't discussed yet is the judge who, without a jury to offer a verdict, must be both the conduit of law as well as the community (of which, it should be noted, he is not even part). Here's where perspicacity comes into play again: the judge, in his deliberations, merely confers with Cooper and Truman to reach his verdict. No evidence is presented in either case: there's no question that Leland killed Renault and, therefore, the question is merely whether or not Leland is trustworthy as well as important enough to the community to be released before trial. In Leo's case, they're not assessing any evidence presented before them (although Cooper, the character who places the greatest faith in perspicacity, assures the judge that Leo is not the killer), rather whether Leo has perspicacity enough to begin the process to assess this evidence. 

Interestingly, the judge himself asks the sheriff for "the temperature of the town" in assessing his verdict. Truman, who, perhaps even more than FBI agent Dale Cooper represents that which is "most just," tells the judge that while the town is shook, it wants "the right man" to be charged with Laura's murder. Punishment is always spectacular (the "spek-" of spectacular is etymologically related to the "spic-" of perspicacity), but why? It's spectacular to remind the citizen (in the town, in the city, in Twin Peaks) what measures will be taken for transgression. It also is spectacular to create a sense of who is outside the community itself. The judge, he who must ultimately be blind and/or as objective as a properly calibrated scale, first asks the police what the "feeling" of the town is like. No judicial verdicts can be rendered objectively without first assessing that the very non-objective community of others think. Not that Harry Truman would say this, but what if he had told the judge the town was at a breaking point? That they absolutely needed a responsible party for Laura Palmer's murder? Would the judge have determined that Leo in a coma should stand trial? 

This isn't the only point in the episode in which the "town" must become a metaphor, a placeholder for some other discourse. Later on we see Deputy Andy on the phone with the doctor's office finding out that while he previously had a low sperm count, he now has brought his sperm count up to a "normal" amount. Andy, who isn't particularly blessed with perspicacity, doesn't understand what the doctor is telling him so the doctor's office offers the following metaphor: "before you were three men in a fishing boat, now you are a whole town!" The town is sacrosanct: a metaphor beyond all metaphors. It represents, in one scene, the ultimate arbiter of justice mediated through the law. In another scene it represents potency, procreation, the survival of the species (it's hinted, though not made explicit, that Lucy, Andy's long-standing romantic interest, has lied about visiting her sister and has, rather, sought an abortion for a child who may or may not be Andy's...this is a soap opera after all). In a show entitled Twin Peaks, the town is a fundamental metaphor, a metaphorology, in which all things related to the reality of the show may be subsumed. I think the appearance of Van Dyke Parks and his thorny, dark understanding of the "American dream," suggests that everyone involved in Twin Peaks may not romanticize the town as much as everyone involved in Twin Peaks does. 

Odds & Endings

Quick note: Before I jump back into my episode by episode discussion of Twin Peak's second season (episode watched and notes taken!) I wanted to post a mix of Twin Peaks related writing I somehow did in the last couple of years (I genuinely have no memory of writing these notes), focusing on a number of things related both to the Return, the series as a whole and David Lynch's other films (specifically, Inland Empire). Since Lynch has suggested that he can only direct remotely (if it all), it seems like a good time to assess Twin Peaks within the larger context of his work. It seems more likely than ever that Twin Peaks will be considered his major, career spanning work that offers a Lynchian cosmology of our universe (as understood by one very creative subject). Hope you enjoy these little reflections. 

The Final Scene of Twin Peaks the Return and Late Style 

The final images we have of the town Twin Peaks (one of the most iconic locales ever to have been on television) are crushing in their banality. It shows the viewer a perspective of the town never seen before: entering over a rickety bridge—perhaps the same bridge that Ronette Pulaski walked across in the pilot episode—a car approaches a cross-street that might be located anywhere in suburban America. Gone are the waterfalls, the fog enshrined Great Northern Hotel, the humble yet iconic Sheriffs’ Station. Gone too are the haunting images of everyday objects swaying ominously in the breeze: the stop light, the trees. As the car finally reaches its destination, we’ve seen that particular street before: it’s the street where the Palmers’ house is located. But even here something is off, flat: the house which had provided so much of the horror of the series (both inside and out) looks positively dull in its suburban street lighting. 

Even the two figures who emerge from the car are both (possibly) literally and (at least)  figuratively different from the characters we have come to know and care about greatly: Dale Cooper (who may also not be Dale Cooper but “Richard”) and Laura Palmer (who is named Carrie Page) are returning to the Palmer house to reunite Laura and her mother. However, as we have known throughout the entire series, these iconic figures are older, more tired and more uprooted than their original incarnations. The context of this final scene, in which Twin Peaks looks nothing like the Twin Peaks we’ve come to know, the natural aging of the actors’ bodies and faces conveys how lost they are. Laura isn’t Laura, the Palmer house isn’t the Palmer house and, in a very real sense, none of the characters can go home again. What makes this tragic ending especially poignant is that Kyle MacLachlan (who gives the performance of his career) continues to play Cooper as if we were back in season one. He’s so certain of his plan to restore the order caused by Laura’s murder 25 years earlier, that you can see the pain of realization on his face as he slowly becomes aware that Sarah Palmer no longer lives at the house and might never have lived there. Of course, Lynch being Lynch, he can’t leave Twin Peaks (or Twin Peaks) in such a depressingly ordinary predicament: a voice inside the house (most likely Sarah’s) yells “Laura” and Sheryl Lee (as Carrie Page) looks up and screams in familiar Laura Palmer fashion. Just then all the lights go off in the house and the improbable third, and possibly final, season of Twin Peaks is over.

Deus ex ibis notwithstanding, the final scenes in the town of Twin Peaks are part of a larger thematic within the show: the passage of time and mortality. There are many long-dead characters that haunt Twin Peaks: the Return: Bob (Frank Silva, who passed away shortly after the original series); Major Briggs (who also passed away long ago); Pete Martel (Lynch’s long-time friend and collaborator Jack Nance). There are also the haunting figures within the series who are visibly ill and passed away shortly after the production was finished: Albert (Miguel Ferrer, who passed away from cancer) and the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson, who appears to have filmed her scenes while undergoing treatment). The Log Lady’s death is dealt with in the plot itself, in what turns out to be the most moving sequence of the third season. There is also the very large specter of Phillip Jeffries that haunts the whole series. Jeffries was played in Fire Walk With Me by David Bowie, and by all accounts David Bowie had planned to appear in some of the series. Sadly, Bowie passed away before his part could be filmed, but his very absence in the series mimics his very real absence in the larger cultural landscape. And I can’t help but think that Bowie would have been amused to see Lynch turn him into an industrial sized kettle. 

So, why does Lynch end Twin Peaks this way? After finishing the final hour last night, I couldn’t help but turn to the notion of late style that first Theodore Adorno and then Edward Said addressed in their work. David Lynch is 71 years old. He certainly has many more years in which he can continue to make films and tv series. Louis Bunuel, arguably Lynch’s favorite filmmaker, would make two of his greatest films after 71: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise and The Obscure Object of Desire; Hitchcock, another influence on Lynch’s style, made Frenzy at the age of 73. Even Billy Wilder, whose Sunset Boulevard plays an essential role in the plot of the third season, made several films after the age of 71 and had expressed a desire to make films up until his death in 2002. Yet, Lynch mentioned in the publicity leading up to the start of the third season that not only would this be his last return to Twin Peaks, but that this might be his last filmed project. After the warm reception he received for the third season, Lynch has been walking back some of those comments, even suggesting that he might be up for a forth season. However, this means little for the third season itself: regardless of what goes on after the lights go off in the Palmer house, the landscape of Twin Peaks has forever altered. The two most important characters of the show, Laura and Dale, are nothing more than the walking dead at this point. Lost on a suburban street that neither one really recognizes (and it, by extension, doesn’t recognize them either), they are completely out of their context and the context of the show. If the register of the phrase “the owls are not what they seem” for most of the show’s run suggested mystery and metaphysics, the play that comes with the mythological and the animal, by the end of the series “the owls are not what they seem” seems like an all-too-human fact of dissimulation than the play of the divine. In which case, the owl’s not being what they seem appears more appropriate for the register of anxiety than wonder. 

In discussing the idea of late style in the third season of Twin Peaks two quotations come to mind from Adorno and Said respectively: "The maturity of the late works of major artists does not resemble the ripeness of fruit. They are commonly not round but furrowed or even torn. They often lack sweetness, and their bristly, austere husk resists straightforward tasting. They do not possess the harmony that a neoclassical aesthetics is wont to demand from art. They exhibit more of history than of growth." (Adorno, “Beethoven’s Late Style” 293) 

Compare this passage to the following passage in Said’s late style book: "Each of us can readily supply evidence of how it is that late works crown a life time of aesthetic endeavor…[b]ut what of artists lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness is all'?" (Said, 7)

The difficulty in applying Adorno and Said’s category of “late style” on Lynch is the question whether or not one can apply the categories of “harmony,” “resolution” or “straightforwardness” to Lynch’s work (the way one could to the distinction between Beethoven’s fifth symphony and the late string quartets, for example). Thus, the question would be, would the category of late style apply either to all of his work (thus rendering the temporal “late” in late style meaningless for Lynch) or none of it. 

Yet, if there is a late style in Lynch, it has become discernible in his recent works. Inland Empire, the last “film” Lynch directed, certainly seemed to be a change. Even Lynch’s most non-narrative works, perhaps most recognizably Eraserhead, flirt with an internal narrative logic. We could summarize Eraserhead as the story of a young man who accidentally becomes a father and then has to live with the anxiety that comes with this role. And, indeed, cataloguing all of Lynch’s other films, they all could be easily summed up by their plots, regardless of how inessential those plots might ultimately be to the overall feel of the film. Inland Empire was different insofar as Lynch himself didn’t really know where the film was going, wrote scenes shortly before they were shot and interpolated scenes from other, extant works (the rabbit sections) into the ongoing film. The result is Lynch’s most disjointed film to date, a sequence of disassociated dream-like scenarios, all anchored by Laura Dern’s heroic performance. From the perspective of late work, however, Inland Empire seems to be an exemplary film, grasping for an “objective” plot that would put all the pieces together. 

In many ways, it presages Twin Peaks: the Return.  

“Through the darkness of future past…” 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the opening line to the poem that gets endlessly repeated throughout the show. It’s linguistically knottier than it first appears: through the darkness of future seems understandable enough—the opacity of being able to see future events—the addition of past at the end throws us off temporally. What is a future past? Is it something like the future perfect tense? Something that will have happened? As in: in 25 years Dale Cooper will have been sitting in the Black Lodge for a long time. If you watch the international version of the pilot you will see the subtitle “25 years later” before the start of the pilot’s end, what will eventually be the ending of episode 2 (the dream sequence). So, in a sense, Twin Peaks already starts off in the future perfect tense. However, even if you see the sequence within the context of episode 2 you will already notice that Dale Cooper looks much older. So we’ve always been given glimpses of a future that is already past (especially if you consider the ending to somehow be before the beginning (“what year is it?”).  Think about Nadine Hurley waking up from a coma and believing herself to be 16 again. Think about that transformation within the context of the story Ed tells of their honeymoon, when he shot her eye out hunting. Nadine will have already been a one-eyed 16 year old, eyeless from a honeymoon she will have already taken but will have no memory of.

Final episode rewatch in 2021 thoughts: 

The tension between narrative closure (the scene in the sheriff’s office) and desire. Subjective desire is at odds with narrative closure, this has always been one of the central points of Twin Peaks: Lynch had little interest in solving the murder of the first series. 

Moving out from that: there is a structural similarity between Twin Peaks and Lacan's Seminar XI—we can intellectually understand something like Spinoza’s universe, a totality. The “meaning” of the world—even something as abstract and allegorical as the white lodge/black lodge, Bob, the Fireman, Judy, etc.—can be grasped cognitively, yet not subjectively. Desire trumps understanding. You can even show how that very subjective identity is tenuous at best (“I, he, it—or thing that thinks,” Richard/Linda/Dale/Dianne etc.) and the residual desire of the subject remains (the möbius strip?) 

This is the scene in the sheriff’s station: as the narrative literally wraps up—Dale Cooper’s announcement “I hope to see all of you again!”—the camera pauses on Cooper’s recognition of Dianne, triggering a superimposition of Cooper’s face over what ought to have been the ending of the Mr. C/Cooper/Bob story. This residual image of another story remaining as the main narrative moves towards its end is both ghostly (Cooper’s face haunts the actions in the frame) as well as a very much material hinderance in being able to make sense of what’s going on.

The viewer understands this imposition as the imposition of desire onto the plot. Desire is that—like the blue rose—cannot be realized because of its imaginary nature. The plot of Twin Peaks attempts to become broader as it moves forward: the penultimate episode reaches a kind of metaphysical peak with the introduction of Jowday, as an ultimate “evil” that feasts on human unhappiness. While it would appear that this metaphysical entity cannot be represented other than through allegory, Jowday seems to be represented most plainly in the eighth hour with the detonation of the hydrogen bomb. 

Yet, as the story of Twin Peaks seems to deal with the previous “ultimate evil” of Bob, this metaphysical battle is interrupted by the much more physical/psychological topography of desire. We may seek the completed hermeneutics of monism, but we live in the world of human desire. 

Are we back at the beginning of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents? Yes, but with a modification offered by Lacan: we may very well live in a world with metaphysical entities like Jowday, Bob, the Fireman (really a stand in for gods, goddesses, angels, etc), but human desire—and under the rubric of desire we might be able to include the phrase “the past dictates the future”—makes such understanding impossible. 

Metaphysics collapsed in the subjective unconscious. The thing that metaphysics and psychoanalysis have in common is that “we live in a dream” as constitutive. We are not who we think we are and reality is not what we think it is.