Twin Peaks
3.8: Gotta light?
(SPOILERS) Er…. Okay. An episode presumably conceived by Lynch and
Frost entirely to stymie recap artists. Which is laudable in itself, I guess. It’s
probably the closest the director has come to all-out Eraserhead weirdness since, only substituting fear of the bomb for
fatherhood. Fortunately, unlike that movie – which I don’t really care for too
much, even knowing that makes me a not-we when it comes to Lynchdom – I found Gotta light? mostly engrossing and only
a little dull (these ratios are just about reversed with Eraserhead). It probably helps too that it’s a good 20 minutes
shorter.
And this isn’t going to be too long either. Not because I
think the episode is impenetrable – I suspect most people have roughly the same
the gist as to what’s going on, give or take – but because there are so many
times you can ejaculate “anti-Malick” as a description of what’s going on here,
or hyperbolise that Lynch has just changed the face of television.
Evil Coop gets killed by Ray but is resurrected (and Ray, at
any rate, believes he is on the phone to Phillip Jeffries, even if Coop didn’t
think that was him a few episodes back), it seems, by a bunch of smelly tramps
who were somehow unleashed – from the Black Lodge? – by an atom bomb test on
July 16 1945, and have been milling about ever since (11 years later and now,
most notably). Is Evil Coop still Bob-Coop, or now flying solo? I guess we’ll
see.
It appears that the test has ripped space-time asunder, as a
beautiful mushroom blossoms and bursts, accompanied by the discordant and
disturbing Threnody for the Victims of
Hiroshima by Penderecki. Is Bob a child of the garm-bomb-zia, and Laura
conceived as the counter (by the Giant and his cohabitee of… the White Lodge?)
Or is the bomb merely an all-powerfully negative vessel propelling Bob’s force
into the world? I had the impression he was around long before, both from the original
series and The Secret History of Twin
Peaks, so it may just attract his essential darkness (although, to counter
that, there’s whatever the creature floating in space thing was birthing/puking
up – more garmonbonzia? – containing his mugshot).
With regard to The
Secret History, there’s no hint of Roswell aliens in either of these
sequences (unless the aliens are, in fact, interdimensional beings), but one
might, if one were so inclined, parallel Jack Parsons’ Babalon Working with the
magickal activities of these entities breaking through into our reality. The sequence
plays like an inverted 2001 stargate, the darktopia version, or Malick’s The Tree of Life fed upside down and
backwards through a threshing machine.
And what the hell is that frog-insect thing, and why does it
burrow down an innocent teenager’s throat? It has been suggested this is the
essence of Laura and the girl is Sarah Palmer, but it seems strange then that
this should occur when she’s just been lulled to sleep by the incantation of the
dirty stalker, Mr Gotta Light (whose general apparel and absence of soap
suggests brethren of the guy we saw in the background last week, behind Lieutenant
Knox, and before that in the next cell from William Hastings).
As for his bloody modus operandi, it may not be quite as
messy, but it nevertheless put me in mind of the thing that came out of the box
in the opener (the aforementioned creature floating in space extruding a yard
of snot also resembles the box being). This sequence is perhaps the closest the
episode comes to a traditional cause-and-effect rhythm, as the words of the
Woodsman (Robert Broski) elicit a decisively knockout effect on listeners:
This is the water, and
this is the well
Drink full and descend
Drink full and descend
The horse is the white
of the eyes and dark within.
If I’m honest, using the Trinity tests as a spur to ultimate
evil feels a little, well, obvious, and I definitely can’t excuse, however
inimitable it may be, Lynch pulling a “chosen one” origins story on Laura
Palmer. I’ve been slightly dubious about the keen visual continuity of Laura
and Bob in the season so far; for all that Lynch may not have been overly keen
on Windom Earle – I thought he was terrific – he represented the series moving
on. This run is managing to go in very different places – locations,
characters, concepts – but it is almost morbidly focussed on the same core, to
the extent that it becomes Lynch’s equivalent of the prequel trilogy (but not,
you know, actually bad with it).
Nevertheless, one can’t but admire how unrepentantly
tangential Gotta light? is. It could
only ever be the sort of thing someone with complete control could bring to a
TV screen, and is at least partially brilliant. But it may be more interesting
for what it represents (TV doing something no other TV is doing) than
necessarily how “good” it is. Mostly this
season, I’ve enjoyed Lynch avoiding
cutting to the chase, but abstract Lynch runs the danger of spoiling us with
over-familiarity; a diluted dose may have more persuasive effects. Oh, and NiN.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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