0:00Hello creeps, I'll be your ghost. I mean, host. As we delve the clips of spooky movies and even spooky your theory, welcome to horror Vanguard. Alright, alright, so are you feeling verified today, John, because I am feeling verified I have been verified not only by the special invest investigative podcasters association, but also by the continuing psychic damage that Elon Musk is doing to all of our collective consciousness on Twitter. Yeah, I choose to remain verified by a demonical reflection of myself that listens to too much jazz music.
0:57I have a question. Yes, yes. Do you ever get a feeling of deja vu? Oh, oh lord. Do I ever get the sensation of deja vu? Should we let our listeners in on a little, we'll say HV lodge magic that has happened in relation to the episode we are currently recording? Yes, yes, please do. So for all you listeners out there, we're doing our Twin Peaks retrospective. We managed to record the first five episodes of the retrospective and then I'm uploading them, I'm releasing them things are going well and then Rest in Pain just isn't there.
1:44There are no notes and our shared note document for Rest in Pain. I have no files on my computer for Rest in Pain, no graphics for Rest in Pain, no scheduled episode uploads for Rest in Pain. The episode simply does not exist in any material or traceable way. However, John, will you let our audience know the mystery of Rest in Pain? The mystery is that we remember doing this. We've vividly. We've been here before both of us, both of us remember talking about this episode before. We're trapped in a kind of recursive loop.
2:29This is the most Twin Peaks podcast episode that I think we could possibly do. I legitimately don't know what's going on, which sure, that's true a lot of the time on this show, that's kind of a given around here. But like, there are aspects of this conversation that I just like, we've had this. We've been here. We have talked about Rest in Pain, but it just the episode I am baffled by this. And for a show which is so much about the kind of complete unknowability of existence, the complete struggle to impose some sort of kind of narrative coherence on ourselves, on our community relationships, it is so fitting.
3:20Like what are we? What are we to listeners? We're these disembodied voices. We are these digital ghosts that are temporally and geographically dislocated from one another and from our listenership. Right? I don't know where you are. I don't know what time it is when you're listening to this. Maybe you're re-listening to this because you thought the opening bit was funny. Like, I feel like we are trapped in the podcast as Red Room. Right? This is like, we can't get out. And so much about, so much of Twin Peaks has kind of reduced into this conversation of doppelgangers.
3:57Right? Who's the real one? Who's the good one? Which one is true and which one belongs to this, you know, otherworldly dream dimension? But it becomes much more complex when you realize that you are one of those doppelgangers. And that at some point, we may have recorded this episode. Yeah. And entirely blanked it and somehow managed to delete the document. Yeah. What's worse, the idea that you might have a doppelganger or realizing that you are the copy? Really? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes. This is such an interesting space to be in.
4:38And then realizing that I think even beyond that, there's a conversation to be had about like, what happens when the self collides with its doppelganger? You know, like what happens when we contact the other that is the self and re-record a podcast episode that may or may not have ever been recorded in the first place? Welcome then to the continuing adventures of us as we wander through the metaphysics of Twin Peaks as we find ourselves trapped within a technological metanarrative where the distinctions between waking and dreaming between Twin Peaks and the podcast about Twin Peaks become increasingly blurred.
5:33So I'm just, I gotta be really honest. I'm so happy that we're only at episode four slash episode three, Rest in Pain. And you and I are already subsumed into this world of owls that aren't what they seem, this black lodge mystery. You know, I, where we're simultaneously, I really like it here. I'm thinking about, you know, maybe when this case is overall, you know, by a little house. I mean, I just gotta say rent in the black lodge is just comically cheap, comically cheap. Everyone here and everyone here is honestly indistinguishable from all of the people I regularly know and talk with.
6:11Like if I saw you or labor Kyle or K and Skittles just walk through the through the red room, I would be like, good morning, would you like some coffee? It would not, it would not be a break from the norm here. Well, should we do this? Should we do this again? Either, either about to do this again, or for the first time, or maybe in which I think is a darker potential, you and I are living in a Groundhog's Day loop where we increasingly have this, this hip-negogic deja vu for an episode we eternally record. Let us, let us as Cicifis hit the record button.
6:50Um, okay. I'm gonna just, I'm just gonna log on to my podcast here. Oh dear. Take a big sip of coffee. Hello. Time or day is arbitrary. Hello. The liquor guy. I am sending my psychic emanations through the void. Can you hear me? He's gone back to the tomb, to his heath and God. Hi. I believe, I believe I'm trapped in the formalism zone of this episode. And I can't get out. Listeners, we just, we just attempted to enter the formalism zone and we're forced apart by Damon Islet, but Damon Islet, technological machinations.
7:44But you know what? We're podcasters, Goddamn it. We are the detectives of this audio realm and we will not be stopped by some mere cosmic reality. Look, if we actually managed to record and release an episode on, an episode on cursed, an episode which I think very nearly broke both of us, we can deal with this. That's true. If we, if we were able to, to take cursed into our hands and mold it into some kind of stone of power, we, we can, we can handle you episode three slash four of twin px, rest in pain. Okay. So before, before we're sucked back into the void, what do you feel?
8:26What do you think? What do you know of the sonic landscape of twin px? I know we've talked about this, but can we just, isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't the theme music just unbelievably good? God, this like, it's, this beautiful noirish sort of romance, there's kind of romance to it. What do the music does? Yeah. So I've been listening, oh, go on, which I really love. And I love, I love the kind of like jazz influence on a lot of the music as well. Yes. I, I love the music. I've been listening a lot to a lot of, um, Mount Fogg lately, a folk tronica artist.
9:09And it's, it's, it's got me thinking about like the soundtrack of twin px and kind of like this audio landscape and how it's, by its own nature, very hauntological, right? And Elizabeth Venelferin has an amazing book on the Gothic and music in the Uncanny. And a lot of what that book works through is that music is inherently haunting, right? There's something in femoral about it, right? It's, it's in the air. It's gone. It only exists in memory and contact with the body. And I think that overlay is so well on to kind of the themes and motifs of twin px rest and pain.
9:44Was it created and time itself in some gigantic explosion at some definite point of the past? Johnny there. Oh, what is going on? What is, what is this? So I will not, I will not be defeated like this. I will not be defeated by a mirror. I don't know, I don't even know. I don't even know. But we're not, we're not going out like this. Yeah, sound is this kind of like constantly written and rewritten text. Like how could it be anything other than haunted? Oh, absolutely. And there's something participatory about music too.
10:37It's a very easy genre to create. Not to discredit what musicians do, but anybody can just bang out a song, tap a beat, you know, start humming. It's not as technologically mediated as other forms of art that require a lot of physical material to begin to craft. I mean, yeah, quite arguably it is one of, if not the oldest art form, right? It's, oh, absolutely. In some ways, it's kind of integral to human subjectivity in the first place. Oh, I completely agree. Like if we want to talk about humans as a pattern seeking creature, you know, like these, these er rhythms that carry through the air, these vibrations that are felt through the body, like it's only natural that we would want to play with those series of repetitions.
11:25And it's striking that the big influence on the music is, is jazz related, right? Jazz, the most kind of syncratic of American musical forms, right? Everything gets pulled into jazz, right? In the beginning of the early 1900s, right? When it first develops as a form, goes through different schools, you know, and is informed by genuinely kind of global taste and trends in music as well, right? So much becomes through European, there's a response to European classical music, lots of it comes through the polyrhythms of West African music.
12:11Like it's this, it's this place in which everything sonically collides into something. Jazz is the sound of dialectical possibility. Fight me at Donnell. Oh, yeah. I was going to say like in one hand, jazz has been many forms of jazz, as I should say, have been entirely recuperated into capitalism to the point where like, trite, it been all suffering that is elevator music is literally just jazz. But also jazz is the site of acidic potential, and therefore Adorno, Adorno's soul is now with us. Exactly. Adorno would have loved Twin Peaks.
12:56No, Adorno didn't love anything. He wouldn't have loved Twin Peaks. I don't know about that one. Oh my God, do you know how much I would pay for Adorno to talk about the new Star Wars? Oh, that would have been great. I mean, he suffered a lot in his life anyway. I don't think we need to inflict that on him as well. You mean we don't need him to watch the Stalinist Star Wars show? I don't think so. No, I don't. Okay, well, this isn't Stalinist Star Wars podcast. We are something different. Well, actually, you know what, this whole episode has a kind of dream logic to it.
13:47So you know what, we're free associating, right? This is podcasting as jazz. It's about the things we're not saying. That's so true. And if you would like to support this avant-garde experimentation in the podcasting form, then please do check out patreon.com slash horror avant-garde where you get early access to every single episode that we release a bonus episode every single month, exclusive content that doesn't go anywhere else and access to the HV Discord where you get to suggest things that you would like me and Ash to cover.
14:26Uh, Chippen, a few bucks a month, help us keep making the show speaking of which. Let's get back to that. That was actually one of our better Patreon blogs. Thank you for that one. It's only taken nearly four years. I will say though, as academics, we are probably in like the upper 10% of academics who are good at asking people to pay us for things. So take that where you will. I want to talk about, I want to talk about, uh, graphology. Oh, go on. So right at the, right at the beginning of this episode, Kupo goes downstairs and runs into
15:15Audrey. Um, who, by the way, we should have talked about this. The two of them have insane chemistry. Like, yes. It's, it's so good. And Kupo asks Audrey about the note, uh, by, by getting her to write her name out. And then says by judging by the slant of, of the R that she's written, uh, it indicates romantic nature. And I think there's something super interesting about beginning with graphology because in a way, Twin Peaks could be considered an exercise in experimental language, right? So it has its own visual language that it's constructing on the kind of metaphorical level.
16:03But the internal language of it is this simultaneous track between Cooper's like free associative psychoanalytic dream logic of investigation and the rational linguistic structures of the law. And I think it's super interesting that Cooper already knows something about Audrey, but it's revealed through writing through, uh, through script, right? Uh, there's some super complex things happening on the level of language in this scene, especially as it proceeds Cooper explaining his dream. Um, writing reveals character, right?
16:45How do you know? How do you know who somebody is? You don't pay attention to what they do. You pay attention to what they say, right? That's how you, that's how you gain access. You become a kind of like cognitive graphologist, right? You, you unspool consciousness through language, which is an incredibly kind of interesting way of getting beyond like the deductive process of action, right? What we're interested in is the psychic landscape and you only get that mediation through the linguistic sign. Ooh. I love that.
17:21That is a wonderful take. I love, I love the balance too between these kind of a mundane tool of detection and the Tibetan mysticism that Cooper was wielding in a previous episode. I love the kind of balance that struck there, right? Like his kind of like this again, this goes back to comments on jazz. You know, like like this, this is an acidic, freely connected, you know, series of hermeneutics that Cooper is just wielding to move himself closer and closer to an inevitable conclusion. Yeah, absolutely. And like the connection here is the dreaming, right?
18:00How does Cooper describe the dream? He describes it as a code, right? You become a graphologist, right? Like my weird out of pocket theory is that for Twin Peaks, actually for so much of Lynch's work, hermeneutics is the ultimate aim, right? What is, what is the, what, you know, it isn't, life is about the kind of, it's made through its interpretation and its exegesis. So like dreams are not anything other than these things. I think code is quite a kind of cold way of putting it, but dreams are symbolic invitations into the into the act of interpretation itself.
18:49And interpretation is not quite the same thing as detection, right? So that's why there's this conflict or this tension between the sheriff and Cooper. Oh, completely, right? And like so much of Twin Peaks is dedicated to solving not just the murder of Laura Palmer, but what happened to Laura Palmer? And that is a much more complicated question that we've talked about in previous episodes. But it's, I think it's worth flagging up in the context of rest and pain. That a lot of that is, it's not about like this tripe piecing together of facts and figuring out who was where and who had a good alibi.
19:27It's about kind of just shattering and reforging like ontologies, right? It's about discovering new ways of knowing so that you can be revealed the information that was just kind of sitting there to begin with. Yeah, I mean, it's like, this is why I love invitation to love, which keeps popping up. I, I love invitation to love so much. I love that people who kind of worked out what the plot is. Yeah. From the little snippets that you get shown, because it's like, again, if existence, if subjectivity is an act of hermeneutics, all of existence is meaningful in some way, even if that meaning is still to be disclosed, right?
20:12Yeah. By the examination of how somebody writes their name, you can like unlock the deepest aspects of their character, of who they are as a person, which honestly, I find, I find kind of beautiful. And I think that that's key here, because like a lot of, like a lot of graphology and a lot of handwriting analysis, it's like a lot of ways of knowing is kind of bound into systems of ideology. And I think one of the things that makes Cooper so interesting as a character is he, he's got some outspoken ideological commitments, right?
20:51You know, like his comments about Tibet and things like that, like Cooper, he's not, he's not a kind of like wishy, washy character, right? He's grounded in who he is. But I think first and foremost, he's, he's open to potential and open to mystery. You know, he's, he's willing to be guided by things that other people would not listen to. And I think that when, when he's using graphology to, to analyze Audrey, it doesn't fall back and get like subsumed into, I guess like these ideological frameworks that an FBI detective might be beholden to.
21:29Yeah, because like what, what's the point of interpretation? The point of interpretation is not to prove anything, but is to allow someone to know themselves. Yes. Right? You know, he says, you know, you should be careful. You have a very, you have a very romantic nature, you know, a heart that gains. She doesn't say that he's, she doesn't say that he's wrong, right? Yes. Yep. And I love, I love Cooper's kind of like meta awareness of this too, right? Like he's, you know, we get, we get that scene where they're, where they're questioning people and he's like, I'm going to leave the room because I'm a strong sender, you know, like I,
22:05I really, really like his kind of, I don't know the way he, the way he plays with kind of like the language of spiritualism as a character is just like this kind of like neospiritualism. Yeah. I really enjoy it. I mean, a lynch has made his interest in like transcendental meditation super clear for a very long time. Oh, yeah. But I'm like, I don't necessarily think that's the only way of reading it. I really do think that like understanding existence as an act of how many ticks takes you into some super interesting places.
22:37Speaking of going into some super interesting places, would you like to talk about the Briggs family? We should, we should the pool, pool Bobby Briggs. And also poor Major Garland, what is this, this, this, this family has the most going on. Oh, yes. Oh, where, where, where do we even stop? Well, I think this is, so this is the episode where we first see the, the kind of conflict of character that is Bobby Briggs, Laura Palmer's ex lover and kind of the wayward bad boy of the Twin Peaks universe. And Major Briggs simultaneously the Paragon of like the respectable American man and this kind of like American masculineized virtue.
23:23But also a guy who is involved in a secret government project that sends deep space UFO signals into the forest outside of, you know, like like somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and also communicates with owls, but they're not owls. And I, they're Major Briggs, Major Briggs, how did you escape the ex files? That's my question for you. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Simply because like he's the exemplar of everything Bobby talks about in it like the speech at the funeral, right? Like this idea that appearance and even like outward fidelity to institutions to the ideological investments that those institutions underpin always conceals this kind of like churning surreal psychodrama that has to be, has to be kind of disciplined out.
24:21It's like, it's like psychic futcodeanism, right? It's not about not, it's not even about like an internalized penopticon. It's about an internalized kind of system of bio political generation where all of that stuff that happens out in the woods has to be sublimated. It has to be repressed literally repressed in order to maintain the facade of like the military and the army and its fidelity to the state. It's about, there's this like kind of anadonia to Major Briggs too. He's a very like, when he talks, he's a very passionate man.
25:02You know, like I often, when I consider him, I consider him with the log lady's introduction with every episode. They both have these kind of like prosaic musings about the nature of existence that both frame and emerge from the text. And I think that for Briggs, you're absolutely correct. Like that internalization that's happening, that kind of swallowing that's going on, needs to kind of de-libidenize the world. And I think what makes Bobby really interesting for me is that it's tempting to read Bobby as kind of like a corrective force to that.
25:37If Briggs needs to become anadonic in order to swallow the world into this like way of seeing it, then Bobby is kind of like, he's the white hole to Major Briggs's black hole. He's the rupture. He's the James Dean, right? That's, that's, you know, the, the, the, the Baboy, the leather jacket and bike, right? Like I think he's like his speech at the funeral is great, right? But it shows that he's only partly articulated the problem where he says everyone knew she was in trouble. We didn't do anything. All you good people, you want to know who killed Laura?
26:15You did. We all did. Pretty words. I'm going to bring it back. So save your prize. You would have laughed at them anyway, which is great. So good. It was so good. So good. I do, I do think, I do think we can, we can make the reading of Bobby Briggs a little bit more complex too. And that's through, at least for me, this realization that like Bobby Briggs isn't a corrective, right? He's not really a disjarring of the kind of systems that Major Briggs represents. He's, he's like an inscription of them, right? He's the counterbalance, right?
26:49He's the wayward kid, but he's wayward in all the ways that you're kind of like James Dean Teenager is supposed to be wayward. You know, like, you know, he's, he's dealing drugs and he's getting into fights and he's, he's skipping school. He's like your classic 1950s American bad boy. But like the grand arc of the classic 1950s American bad boys to ultimately become your father, right? Like you, isn't the actual escape. Isn't that the source of his angst, right? That's completely the source of his angst, right? The unshakable awareness that no matter how much you, you kick against it.
27:24That's who you'll turn it turn into. Bobby and his father don't get on because Bobby thinks that he's looking into the future and he's correct. Yes, absolutely. And I think that there's, like for me, there's a lot of tragedy in Bobby's character. And one of them is that I think Bobby can't recognize that his kind of omnidirectional chaos is in and of itself a direction is a choice is a path that he's walking down. It's just a path that he's abnegated the control over. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is exemplary, right?
27:55Of the countercultural rebellion of the late 50s and 60s. Yes. That's the late 50s and 60s, right? Who did these people all grow up to be? Right? Yep. Exactly. Yeah. All of the hippies, all of the first wave of punk rockers, all of the greasers, they all became the generation that brought about climate collapse, you know, like none of them became what they wanted to be, which, which dear listeners, let that, let that grim reaper's bell told deep within your heart as we must avoid said fate. What else, what else do you want to bring up from this episode?
28:34Oh my God. Let's, let's talk, let's talk about not friend of the podcast. The first time we've had a not friend in a while, Albert. Yes. The wonderfully kind of like, there's this weird sort of external law enforcement seems to be this kind of like strange chaos that gets introduced into this town. Yes. And this immediately got me thinking of caro clover's men, women and chainsaws, like about 90% of the things on this earth do. And there's a line in caro clover's men, women and chainsaws that has always stuck with me.
29:13And it's when she's talking about ice bed on your grave. And she's talking about ice bed on your grave, both as this kind of revenge of a gendered underclass cis women against a gendered overclass cis men, but also as a revenge of a kind of economic overclass, the urban over an economic underclass, the rural, right? So it's not quite as cut and dry of attacks as it would seem. And we have that here with Albert, especially Albert is the revenge of the proper urbanized core of like respectable capitalism coming out to discipline the outskirts.
29:50Well, I think that that moment is super interesting, right? It's like, Cooper takes Harry side. Yep. Like he chooses, right? Like, there's suddenly you have this kind of tension, right? In Cooper's character where there is now a kind of choice that's being made between the FBI and like that, the antagonism that's always there in the relationship between ordinary people and law enforcement agencies that overpoliced them, you start to kind of see it a little bit, right? He's talking about he like he picks his side. He's starting to choose the community that he's come to rather than simply continuing to be this outsider who's there to quote unquote, solve something.
30:39And I think this speaks to a lot of what Cooper's character is, especially by the time 100 years from now when we have escaped this kind of groundhogs day, a black lodge loop that we're trapped in. And we can finally be free to discuss Twin Peaks the return. You know, like one of the most interesting things about Cooper's character is that increasingly through his presence in the show, his identity as a quote unquote detective melts off of him and he becomes a member of Twin Peaks. He becomes one with those Douglas firs.
31:09Well, I think this brings up the backwards boys, right? The bookhouse, the bookhouse boys rather. The backwards, that's a logic equivalent. The backhouse, if the backlight, the bookhouse boys. And there's this, there's that great line. Harry says in the diner, Twin Peaks is different along way from the world. You've noticed that. That's exactly the way we like it. But there's a back end to that. That's kind of different too. Maybe that's the price we pay for all the good things. There's a sort of evil out there, something very, very strange in those old words.
31:48Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence. It takes many forms. But it's been out there for as long as anyone can remember. And we've always been here to fight it. Men before us, men before them, more after we're gone. Ooh, this, this, this, this, okay. So what do you, what do you make of the bookhouse boys? Because this could so interesting. Well, there's a, there's an interesting. There's, there's, I think it's very interesting what you said. It's about this idea of the identity of the detective kind of starting to fall away from someone.
32:26And instead of the detective, right, if you really try and understand existence, do you get drawn into not a legal problem or a hermeneutic problem, maybe you get drawn into an ontological problem? Right. What is there out in the words? Yes. And I do, I do like the idea of, so I think a lot of, and I think this isn't, this is an artifact of our, our pop culture informed ways of communicating. But we often have an antagonistic approach to generational ways of knowing. We, we talk about boomers as being the, these kind of damned withered souls that, that threw off the reins of power and cursed us all to a November that 70 degrees in the Midwest.
33:10But, you know, like, there are also a lot of boomers who are committed to left politics and have, have made achievements and strides that, that we can aspire to and we can learn from. And also we can learn from those failures and shortcomings. And I think the book house boys like this kind of acknowledgement that like, to achieve anything meaningful and lasting and good in this world is necessarily an intergenerational project. It's, it's, it's, it's powerful in a disturbing way. Because if you're going to fight something that's like a human that lives kind of outside and beyond us, you need to generate something that is equally abhuman, right?
33:47You need to bind yourself over time and through death. Oh, what a great line. What a great line. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Eddie. Right. That's why they call me podcaster. Eddie, any, any final thoughts? Um, I would just, I'd quick shout out to my log lady, quick, quick shout out to the best character in the show. Um, I do the quick shout out to those like, like and subscribe, hit some likes in the chat for the log lady, everybody. Uh, that's me. Me with a pair of Oakley sunglasses in a backwards hat. That's my log, my black lodge version coming.
34:20I mean, I, I, I've always, from the beginning of doing this, I've always thought of you, it's the log lady of Haravan God. Oh, you know, honestly, that's the sweetest thing I've ever heard. But when it was, so the log lady's introduction for this one, she's talking about sadness, right? Like, like what, like, and I think this wonderful line, this is what is this thing called a tear? Like that, that really like this whole episode is, and this is exactly what you were talking about when you were talking about graphology, but it's about analyzing, you know, like symbols and symbologies as ways of knowing, as ways of understanding of their own ontologies.
34:54And I think we, you know, like, Albert is in town because he's doing the autopsy on Laura Palmer's body. You know, he's there from the FBI. He's the big gun with all the know how and all the equipment and he's refusing to let the townspeople bury her body. He needs to study it more to get more clues drawn out of it. And this raises a question of who is Laura Palmer's body for. But I think the log lady gives us a clue here, right? What does this thing called a tear? Laura's body, when it's originally found, looks like a gigantic tear.
35:24Yeah. It's this crystalline frozen thing washed up on the shore from this lake. And it's washed not up onto the shore of Twin Peaks, but onto the shore of the cell, fun to us. Right, we're living in a world where you can buy a wrapped in plastic Laura Palmer Funko pop. And there are people who wear that as a costume for Halloween too. Like this, this is something, this is a symbol that like, what is the meaning of this tear? This thing that has kind of like fractured and moved away from its original core. And I think this is, this is, it's a beautiful way of putting something which I think is a real clear theme, which is the way Laura's body in particular is turned into the public commodity, right, which is directly tied into what I think is a very strong feminist theme in so much of, so much of Twin Peaks, which is about the ways in which women's bodies are both sought to be controlled, fetishized, commodified, whereas at the same time, women's consciousness is this thing which always eludes and goes beyond the kind of like slavering grasp of patriarchal power.
36:40Yes. I really cannot wait until we can start talking about David Duchovny's character because we are going to be head over high heels talking about some fantastic gender discourse later on. Absolutely. Well, let us, let us conclude there for the first, second, or maybe another time. Oh, this is, it's been great to finally record this episode and to hopefully have physical proof that we have done so. Thank you, dear listeners, for joining our continued journey through the Twin Peaks retrospective. We'll be back next time with the next episode or maybe this episode again because something that you should grapple with is that it could be you trapped in the time loop of the lodge. We could be merely an adornment on your repeating cycle of reality. Good night, good morning and goodbye.
37:39We hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse. Until next week.