0:00Hello creeps, I'll be your ghost. I mean, host. As we delve the grips of spooky movies and even spooky your theory, welcome to horror vanguard. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to you my fellow co-host John aka at the lit crit guy. How are you doing on this fine day? Special investigative podcasted lit crit guy signing on here for another session. And I'm feeling good. How about you? Doing good. Doing good. I just wrote up on my motorcycle with my like little Sherpo collar leather jacket and I'm ready to record an episode on David Lynch and Mark Frost twin peaks. This episode three of our twin peaks retrospective aka episode two is
1:05Senator the art or the Zen or the skill to catch a killer. Yep, we probably gonna have to explain this a lot, but the numbering system for twin peaks is very very irritated. Extremely.
1:21Oh, dear. So this is episode two which is episode three if you count the pilot which is actually episode one it's twin peaks is staying confusing. They're using some weird CCRU numerology on their episodes that I just don't understand. I mean, I think that's really the only explanation. That's really the only explanation. So I think that I think there's a lot of a lot of things to discuss in Zen or the skill to catch a killer. I think this is one of the this room is where twin peaks starts to kind of like become what everybody knows of is twin peaks.
1:58This is this is where things start to get really strange. Well, I mean, this is this is this is where we have the kind of like momentically referenced moments start to emerge, right? The first of the dream sequences you have a lot of very weird. There's a lot of weird stuff about dreams in this episode. Yes. Which I think we will have to get into. But yeah, this is where it's like, oh yeah, it's like the chef's kiss. This is the vintage twin peaks that you might have been expecting starts to arrive on the scene. Oh, absolutely. Like this is this is a great A twin peaks.
2:39And I think for me, you know, I always want to start with the log ladies, presee before each episode because I feel a natural connection there. Of course, of course. So in this one, lead us into the episode log lady. So so in this one, the you know, the log lady is kind of talking. So she says, sometimes ideas like men jump up and say hello, you know, and then she begins to talk about how, you know, ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. And I think is something really interesting is going on there because her or dialogue is stressing this interesting boundary. We usually have a very clean sense of separation from our dreams. You know, they're they're ephemeral. They're not eternal. They're they're being conducted by a different part of our minds. There are there's some very clean and easy ways to separate ourselves from them. But what the log lady's doing here is she's either anthropomorphizing thoughts and dreams. She's adding human qualities to this very human activity. Or she's and I couldn't think of a good way to phrase this. She's hypnotizing us. You know, she's she's making us in the shape of ideas and dreams.
3:57What are some of your thoughts about the log ladies in trail here? Well, I think this depends on how how Freudian you want to be. And I mean that in the kind of technical sense of like how how much do you want to take from the Freudian of psychoanalytic model of dreams? And how much which because there there's a there's an interesting contrast that we can draw right. So you have you have what ends block calls the the the dreams at night which are self self recursive and are kind of inward focused. They're about kind of sorting through our own mind as it were. But you also have the dreams of the day.
4:43And this is the dreams that the log lady is describing. The dreams of the day are things which are oriented towards the future. They are in a sense a kind of revelation of something. And it's those dreams which are the ones this show kind of this episode specifically I think revolves around. I completely agree. And there's also I think a troubling a gentle quality to both nocturnal and daytime dreaming. You know there is in a sense this way of dreams to have their own lives. Separate and often against the lives that we wish to have. You know like that kind of revelatory rupture that you were just talking about. You know the way that dreams just crack through the surface that that can often be in spite of what we consciously wish for. And I think that that creates a troubling multiplicity right. Often when we talk about oh I contain multitudes I'm a multiplicity you know where we're internally you know head of a genius. That is in an anthropomorphized way right like that that is in a very classical egotistical way right all of those things are sharpened and you know directional. But but then you have dreams and even day dreams right they they wander and they live outside themselves and like they they can be a source of guilt or pain but they're always a source of a rupture and kind of a placid surface of the self. Well I think it's because people don't necessarily want to take seriously the idea of the multiplicity of subjectivity right.
6:27Oh yeah. Oh I contain multitudes but those multitudes are not cohesive necessarily right they're contradictory and antagonistic even. I mean this is Ernst Bloch's famous book The Principle of Hope was originally going to be titled Dreams of a Better Life. Daydreams of our future oriented they're about the possibility of things that could come into being. Oh absolutely and like I think David Lynch has even brought this up in interviews you know where people ask him about his dreams and he kind of discounts night time dreaming in favor of daydreaming. Yeah precisely precisely. Basically what we're saying is that David Lynch is right Ernst Bloch. Would would and would not shock me I contain multitudes in that I would both be shocked and unshocked by that. So something that I often have unvoluntary night time dreams of are the horn brothers eating sandwiches. What a great character introduction for such an unbelievable piece shit. Like there's something almost kind of cartoonish about the horn brothers. Is it not? There's something where they have this they have this kind of like manic quality to them. This kind of hypercinesis. What do you think about that that introductory scene?
7:50I couldn't agree more with like the shape of your analysis there. They're they're so large in their presence right like and I think that that weirdly has always for me drawn the horn brothers in conversation with the kind of phantasmal elements of twin peaks. Especially Jerry horn in a weird way right like a lot of the characters in twin peaks are very like even the ones that are violent and vulgar and cruel. They're very like organic and subdued in a certain way right like they're they're very resting in who they are and the kind of path that they're walking. And then and then you have characters that are like you like coop is an extremely loud character in his eccentricity everyone in the lodge is extremely loud and on so many levels. And then you have the horn brothers and they're just like there's this kind of like violently unrestricted hedonism that they have this hedonism that that has like totally embraced capital P power patriarchal violence capitalistic violence.
9:02You know they they they feel like characters out of like some some Greco-Rome in play about two two minor lords who are about to be struck down by Zeus for their hubris. I also think that they are their setup as like figures if the the part the punchline right where he's like oh try the sandwich and they both sit there like just like shoveling these french baguettes into them out so like they look ridiculous they look and they sound ridiculous and that's entirely deliberate. Oh yeah absolutely. So it's like they're not they're not they're not just these kind of like headnists. Like they're also they're also kind of simultaneously they're simultaneously both powerful and deeply pathetic. Yes. Which is why this episode more perhaps than the previous two is also one of the funniest. Oh I'll agree yeah yeah yeah. I definitely agree with that assessment of the horn brothers as being this like just they're just pathetic depressing in a way to like they're excess the way that that lines up and shapes them they're the the but of a joke but it's a very much a piece of like black comedy right like they're very much they're there's something more rose and more and full about them too like because a line there's like a line that always like makes my skin crawl a bit and like it's it's Ben and Jerry the I you can't refer to the horn brothers as Ben and Jerry because that changes the context. Do you get it? Do you get it? There's a joke in there somewhere yeah but when Ben and Jerry's ice cream is eating the like weirdo imported sandwiches that they're just just shoveling into their faces they start making these like really crass perverted comments about some women that they had encroached encountered once and it's it's all in front of like
11:04Benjamin Horns family in the middle of this like awkward and pained conversation and like it's just get steamrolled by like oh man this this vulgar sandwich feels like that's a jizek comment that doesn't exist this vulgar sandwich consumption well it's it's a very good example of like what what Lynch kind of argues is exists within the constructs of the you know apparently rock wellian nuclear family right it's this it's this scene of kind of pained dignified manner and then you have this kind of libidinal excess that's just sort of teeming away you know the inside of the way the entire show is about taking the the very almost formulaic social gestures of American bourgeois small town existence and just blowing them up oh yeah and I think I think like there's a really powerful distinction that also happens in this episode right because we get this contrast between the horn family and the hayward family you know and so the the horn family is like it reminds me of some of those passages and monsters of the market that talked about how the building of economic wealth generates a negative psychic heat that perpetuates one's own rot on a spiritual level and I from the outside looking in the horns would be the best family in town right Benjamin Horns a massively successful businessmen they they live in opulence you know like they're the picture of the successful American business family and then like but you once we once we pull back to curtain when Lynch lets us look into the mechanics of their family there's this like spiritually corrosive perversion that's just gnawing at each and every one of them and letting them all like fall freely into this abyss and then the hayward family you know like by by today's standards especially they're living incredibly comfortably but nevertheless they are a working class family especially at the time period that the show is roughly attempting to depict and like they're they're like a wholesome supportive calm you know like like focused on nurturing and I think that there there's a compelling class antagonism that unrolls in episode two slash three I mean again this is always part of it right the the external realities you know the rich betray themselves as you know dignified and successful and the the the top of the merit meritocratic pile because they exemplify the kind of best set of sort of values in the non economic as well as the economic sense but like what's sort of so refreshing as that Lynch just isn't convinced by any of that and and quite rightly exposes it as a kind of joke through this through the device of the the hedonistic sandwich and and speaking of hedonistic sandwiches if you'd like to support us as we try to sustain our fragile podcasting bodies by importing the finest in French cheeses you can do that for just a few dollars a month over at patreon.com slash horror van god where you get early access bonus episodes and membership to the hv prep the spookiest discord server on the podcasting left back to the show. That was that was one of the best we've ever done really supporting our show is putting a sandwich in our hands.
14:42Absolutely like very practically. And is a one thing one thing that I really love here is that like it kind of occurs to me now in conversation with you that the log lady is offering us a religious ecchi and analysis of what's going on here because what is not a dream that can take the form of a man other than ideology you know like the the horns are not just a family they're they're a fictitious construct right they're they are the pillar of capitalistic ideology in real form so something that it is completely internally how hollowed out by its own rusting corrosion but externally is meant to be revered to the point of worship and and I think that that that's another uninterrogated dream right that's this kind of collective unconscious shared dream state that we all live in right what walking around to kind of deferring to our social better's whether that's literally in the case of when you have to take your bosses shit just to keep your job or that's figuratively in the sense that you know like we live in a society that's that's willing to let that that's willing to strip mine mountains in Kentucky to perpetuate flooding eternal that that lets COVID run rampant you know we we can come up with examples of this eternal yeah precisely precisely but what that to kind of undo this kind of ideological mystification what you need is kind of ways of thinking that will help break you out of it and given given what you just said maybe that sheds more light on uh on the role and function of dreaming specifically in this episode yes here we go um so oh gone what are your thoughts about Tibet well allow me to pull down a an extremely large and comically oversized map so I can point to you where Tibet is located um well Dale Dale Dale Cooper uh agent coop has has some very poignant ideas about the politics of Tibet as they relate to China um but I think that's that's a separate issue from our focus on the dream state here so through the course of this episode uh Cooper realizes in a dream how to find the killer he has this elaborate ritual that involves writing writing names on a chalkboard having the sheriff say the names to him then he throws a rocket a bottle and then based on how hard the rock hits the bottle it determines the proximity of an individual to the murder yes yes um it says this is a little hard to describe what do you what do you think about this what do you think about this how do how do we make sense of this so um I think there's kind of like several things that I sacked in this um the thing the thing that I would want to look at in relation to that scene is kind of it's it's to bring that in context with the rest of the episode like what is Dale doing yeah we're what is coop doing on like a very material level like like kind of like what is happening here and that's he's he's bringing the dream back into reality right he's he's the the first of the characters in the show that's willing to like openly interrogate the the kind of material seriousness of the dream space and not dismiss it as something of femoral and other and kind of outside of the balance of normal society he just unflinchingly brings it in and I think that that that's extremely poignant in in a show or in an episode specifically where the B plot is the psychic heat death of the family that owns most of the town I mean what are your thoughts there's there's something else to work here which I think is important which is about a certain kind of way of knowing or way of understanding what crime is so in typical modes of detection you identify the one a gentle party you identify the guilty person the coop doesn't seem particularly well it doesn't seem particularly interested in just doing that because that's not what this method is designed to do right this method is designed to uncover the kind of psychic reality of the town itself crime is symptomatic of something right crime itself or oh it's such a good point murder is murder itself is is is obviously horrific and horrible and yes you have to find the person who committed crime but actually murder is symptomatic of something it's symptomatic of kind of like a deeper myosematic field through which the entire social formation of the town moves and so the way that you tap into that is through dream logic is through kind of revelatory knowledge right because you're not just trying to understand you're not just trying to solve the you know solve the equation to find the acting agent who did X trying to understand how X was even produced in the first place yeah oh absolutely that is such a brilliant way of analyzing agent coops mystic definition for the killer like like to recognize the inherently interconnected nature of this as well as the kind of networked revelatory potential of dreams because dreams are never like isolated right like they are they are free associations done by parts of our mind that that you know for better for worse stay away from our conscious aspects is that there's a disinhibition with that this probably brings us on to talking about the dream sequence yeah okay so let's let's talk about the lodge because if if you unless you watch the version of the pilot that was actually made for TV movie that contains extra scenes which includes the lodge this is the first time where we really get to meet the lodge in our lodge citizens yes so how would you how would you describe this so this is this I think is part of the beauty of twin peaks right because so so like like Lynch as as kind of a creative right loves to be open to kind of open ended metaphors in the dream and not having to pin himself down to singular meanings and you know like in a first episode on this you know we talked all about this how this isn't a prescriptive we're not here to solve twin peaks we're here to get lost just like everyone else and I think that when I watch this when I watch this dream sequence right I'm I'm I'm drawn in to the how do I say this there there's a direct reality of the dream sequence that is extremely like like almost like anti-real it's not it's not weird in the sense that love crafty and weird fiction it's emphatic confront us with this erupting strangeness that that can't be ignored this is this is like outstandingly subtle outstandingly calm but at the same time everything is just shifted just a little bit in one direction and that I think is kind of the beauty of using like because again in this episode we've got like this little like tri-phasic thing with dreams going on by the time we get to the end we have we have the horn family hiding behind the dream that is ideology we've got Cooper using this kind of you know like dream hermeneutic to to realize that crime is like socially constructed and socially bound in a network and then you get this passage into a like dream dimension into a total dream state that that is nevertheless like the thing that is needed to to solve the immediate material problems that Cooper is facing. Yeah everything is connected right the the the this is in a way this is a kind of a really interesting cosmology a really interesting philosophical understanding of like what knowledge knowledge and like to solve a problem is not kind of is not to kind of have like a discrete slice of knowledge so to understand the murder of that that started the show you have to understand the entire community and everything is connected everything is connected but this can only be understood kind of like orthogonally right you have to sort of approach it abruptly because if you do it in a two direct way you end up you end up with a show that would be kind of like almost unwatchable so you can read that you can read the lodge perfectly literally as a kind of dimensional problem as a kind of ontological or even pan-psychist issue you can or you can read it kind of metaphorically as a as about the kind of layers of consciousness that human subjectivity operates with them. Yeah there's such a phenomenal phenomenal way to look at the lodge and I think that one of the beauties of this is that through this episode we also find out that there's a lot of people in the town that kind of maybe not to the intimacy that Cooper now does but a lot of people here know that there's something in the woods that's just not quite right. Yes there is there is there's a there's a focalized point of kind of evil that people just sort of know about and it becomes one of those things which is just unspoken. So do you want to talk about them for a minute the bookhouse boys?
24:41I guess should we talk about the the the the the the the the Avengers of Twin Peaks? Oh my god like so oh my god so a few years back I found a god and I severed an arm that had a tattoo on it that went on to become its own killing spiritual entity and I just felt him in immense pain when you said Twin Peaks Avengers. Well I think it's a super interesting idea but and it's again something super old in the American cultural imagination which is just like the vigilante gang right the law itself in certain spots in America doesn't operate in an explicit way right because so much of America socially politically philosophically depends upon these things which you never spoken about right there is yeah if if America is a place there is evil in the woods right there is there is there is evil in all of it and it's an evil it's never spoken about it's never acknowledged and so like there are certain places where the law just doesn't or not even doesn't go but can't go and that's why you have things like the the outlaw gang or you have the vigilante hero who arrives into town or you have like the you know the posse you'll you round up a posse and you kind of solve the problem yourself because the external law capital L law can't deal with it what what do you think
26:17I think that this is one of the most interesting things that's going on here because I think that this is the episode where lynching frost kind of put their foot down and they're not put their foot down that that's a bit too dramatic but but this is the episode where they really make a statement about this show as it relates to Copaganda because I think I think Twin Peaks up until this point ran the risk of hero cops hero sheriff you know wrangling the criminals of their town you know and in a very like cliched almost western way but with with this I think we see like like there's like a founding tension to the cultural project that is the United States of America and that is simultaneously a total reverence and honest direct worship of you know the state's unilateral access to violence right hero cops praising the military at every possible public event being unable to to lower police or military funding in the slightest because that is borderline blasts for me but at the same time it also inherent to to a lot of these founding mythologies is a total rejection of of governance and capital L law and centralized power and all of these other things that creates this total discordance and here we see that in Twin Peaks you know we we we even have the law officers themselves recognizing that their their trade and profession is insufficient for solving the world's problems yeah you you have to have the kind of revealed knowledge of your free associative psychic powers rather than any kind of like it's very notable that you know what the character who comes up the worst in this opening sections of the show is like the really if he FBI science guy who hates them all and thinks they're all kind of like backward yo-kills and you know he's the one who's there to provide the answers but the longer he's on screen the more you realize he can't provide any answers really oh absolutely and I think you know you know with his character I was thinking so much of Carol Clover's analysis of I spit on your grave and specifically the idea that there is this kind of the city has an impulse to enact violence on the the kind of metaphysic entity that is the countryside you know like like he he is very much this kind of emblematic figure for the the concentration of class signifiers that comes with like you know the the elite individual from the urban core you know being totally dismissive and and load some of the suburbs he's he's the he's the equivalent of like those liberal politicians on Twitter that post things like oh well if southerners didn't want to be beaten to death regularly they would vote blue no matter who yeah absolutely absolutely uh the very least he deserves a punch in the face the very least and I think I think again because now now agent coup has to resist the machinations of the central office right because now he's he's in conflict with this guy who's kind of in emblem of the the the centralized access to violence that is law enforcement and I think that this show doesn't come down on a on a clean answer right coup never says a cab but it does start to stress and strain against the boundaries it does provide openings to have these conversations well let's recognize the inherent okay it exposes limitations of like what what what do the police do what does it mean to try and what does it mean to try and solve a crime and you go well you arrest the person yeah the show is like well that's completely insufficient that's that's in fact that's maybe worse than doing nothing because even it because even if you're not there communities can organize their own ways of trying to deal with the the the the the psychic metaphysical evil that dwells within the ontological incompleteness of all human subjectivity that is the that's the best way
30:39I've ever heard that phrase that was fantastic uh but we we are we are past past the limit of our mortal powers on this the third episode of our twin peaks retrospective the first season of our twin peaks retrospective future seasons forthcoming uh do you have any closing thoughts or commentary for our audience it's a great this is a great episode this really feels like the show kind of like it's established itself now and it starts making some just massive swings and I think all of them pay off this is this is maybe in terms of just everything really starting to sing I think this is the best episode so far oh I totally agree I think my only my only outgoing comment would be kind of an open any question for our listeners and that's this this is the episode where we really start to see sex work become a a prominent kind of like tent pole feature of the twin peaks landscape and I would say I would ask how how is it being represented right here what is what is its representation with and against to the presence of law enforcement specifically and wealth as well as that uh things we didn't have time to get to today but are definitely extent in this episode and thanks for listening to the third installment of our twin peaks retrospective we'll be back next week with episode three resting pain we hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse until next week today's boogie