Spoiler alert: this blog is for Twin Peaks viewers who have seen episodes five of The Return, showing on Showtime on the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched.
This week we were not so much in Twin Peaks as Uncanny Valley. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the notion of the Uncanny Valley in 1970 to account for the observation that human replicas which appear like real human beings seem eerie and make us uncomfortable. It explains how much horror and sci-fi devices work: zombies are uncanny because they very nearly resemble humans. It also explains why Naomi Watts and Kyle MacLachlan are so creepy in this episode.
Watts plays Janey-E, a woman who apparently hasn’t spotted that her husband has been replaced by someone who only resembles the original. MacLachlan plays both her original husband (a Vegas insurance agent called Dougie) and FBI special agent Dale Cooper. The latter, after coming through an electrical socket in a puff of black smoke, last week rematerialised and took over Dougie’s identity.
What’s especially disturbing, though, is not just how Dougie/Cooper behaves as a kind of adult idiot, but how those around him don’t care to clock that there’s something off in his behaviour. Us viewers experience as a result a double uneasiness – we’re aware that Dougie/Cooper is only an approximation of a human being, and also that his family and co-workers scarcely notice that evident uncanniness. Human society, as depicted in Twin Peaks, is what’s really uncanny – a beguilingly absurd Kafkaesque simulation that satirises the real thing.
At the start of this episode, Janey-E is trying to get her husband into the car to take him to work. She ignores the tear rolling down his face, as well as the fact that he doesn’t know what he does for a living or where he works. Lynch’s absurdist drama works here as a satire of contemporary society and the power of denial.
Why is Janey-E in a state of inhumane denial? Because she is focused on the fact that Dougie came home last night with a sack containing $425,000 of casino winnings. Finally, she thinks, they’ll be able to pay back the 50 grand they owe.
It’s as though it doesn’t matter much that her husband may well have been replaced by another human-like spirit from the purgatorial netherworld of the Black Lodge, so long as he’s got the dough to pay off the goons who want to hurt their family.
Once at the office, Dougie/Cooper carries on this upsetting comedy of the uncanny. He lusts after a coffee that isn’t his. He gets let into the ladies toilet by an obliging co-worker because he’s been standing clutching his crotch. He disrupts a meeting by saying that an agent who is trying to pass an insurance claim off as genuine is lying.
MacLachlan, though, isn’t just playing one uncanny character but two, both of them curious doppelganger of each other. The other is the mystifying approximation of agent Cooper being held in a cell in Buckhorn, South Dakota. In last week’s episode he was there visited by his boss, FBI regional bureau chief Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch), who worried about this simulacrum of Cooper with his snakeskin shirt and leathery skin.
In this week’s episode, the simulacrum gives a scary demonstration that he is not merely human. He’s given a phone to make his one call. He taps out a number and suddenly lights are flashing around the jail, deranging warden Murphy and his staff who are observing their prisoner from the other side of a one-way mirror.
In Twin Peaks, the uncanny is there all the time. Every character comes across as a hyperreal estimation of someone trying to pass themselves off as human but not quite making it and leaving us feeling we’re in the presence of something derangedly strange. Twin Peaks cop Andy and his daffy receptionist wife Lucy are cases in point; their witlessness is played for laughs but simultaneously curdles into something unsettling, as if they were robots trying to play humans.
Equally, the terrifyingly sinister smoker in the Bang Bang Bar at the end of this episode makes a sexual overture to a young woman from the neighbouring booth. Next thing we know he was throttling her saying: “I’m gonna laugh when I fuck you, bitch.” Like Dennis Hopper’s psychotic antagonist Frank Booth from Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, this guy seemed scarcely able to convince us he’s human.
At the end, Dougie/Cooper stands in the square in front of his office at dusk before a statue of a figure waving a pistol while the credits roll. He looks like a robot whose programming doesn’t go so far as to tell him what to do next. He looks like he’ll be there all night.
Things we learned this week
We learned why Dr Jacoby, Twin Peaks’ one-time shrink, was spraying those shovels gold last week. In this episode, he broadcast on his community TV channel loony conspiracy theories before cutting to his sales pitch: his gold shit-digging shovels could be ordered for $29.99 plus shipping. They were, he indicates, what humanity needed to dig themselves out of the mess they were in.
The Pentagon is dispatching a uniformed officer to Buckhorn after discovering that prints have been found there matching those of Major Garland Briggs. He was the US Air Force officer charged in the original with investigating the mysteries surrounding Twin Peaks. He is also the father of Bobby Briggs, Laura Palmer’s one-time badass boyfriend who’s now a grey-haired, middle-aged Twin Peaks cop. We don’t yet know what the discovery of the prints signify (the Pentagon commanding officer suggested this may well be a false trail) but one possibility is that Briggs may have been involved in the murder of the headless corpse found in the first episode. This discovery may well corroborate what FBI special agent Tammy Preston noticed when studying fingerprint samples on her computer: just possibly what she saw there confirmed that he was at the murder scene. Could Briggs be the murderer of the headless corpse? Could he have also decapitated Ruth Davenport? Or was he at the murder scene after the killings – to stage a coverup?
The Buckhorn pathologist found something strange in the stomach of the headless corpse. That corpse had been discovered by Buckhorn cops in Davenport’s bed. Her severed head has been shot through one eye, and placed on top of the corpse. What did the pathologist find in the latter? A wedding ring inscribed “to Dougie with love Janey-E.” How did that get there?
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