0:00Hello creeps, I'll be your ghost. I mean, host. As we delve the crypts of spooky movies and even spooky your theory, welcome to horror vanguard. Greetings dear listeners, producer and co-host Ash here. What would the Twin Peaks retrospective be without our show being beguiled by technological mischievous demons from our realm that we truly can't see? In other words, I was having some mic troubles on this episode and the audio quality isn't where it usually is. But the conversation's still great and I hope you enjoy it.
0:59Of course, of course, I can absolutely lead us in. I just need you to sit in this lumber mill that night alone tied up if you don't mind. It's probably best if you don't ask questions, but we're podcasting out of this lumber mill today. Um, I mean, that's, that's fine. I'm sure it's going to be okay though. Although I'm assuming you're going to take the weird ticking noise that I can hear out of the final, final audio track, right? Yeah, I'm going to edit that out and post. Yeah, we're fine. Okay, cool. That's, that's, that's, that's great.
1:40That's great. Um, so how, how are you doing? How are you doing the, the podcasting equivalent of the log lady? How are you? I'm doing, I'm doing quite well by the time this episode comes out, it'll be 2023. Um, our, our Twin Peaks retrospective has come at, at, at somewhat of a cursed time in terms of the people who made Twin Peaks happen. Yeah, this is very true. And I, I do wonder what dark forces are conspiring against us that have taken, uh, Angela Badlimenti, uh, from us, uh, that we've recorded multiple episodes multiple times.
2:21I, I think, yeah, yeah, Angela Badlimenti, uh, unfortunately passed away a few weeks ago, um, Al Strobel, uh, the one arm of the man himself, uh, Daryl V. The day we released the one arm demand episode. So it's been, it's been a really sad time. I, I think for people who've been inspired and, and really connected with Twin Peaks is kind of an art piece more broadly. Indeed. And we are coming to the, the conclusion, uh, the, the high point, the, the, the, the new man of the first season of Twin Peaks. This is our episode on, episode six realization time.
3:07Um, where would, where would you like to begin? So this episode, I, I really like this episode. It's weird. It's exciting. And if it does anything, it makes me think about Elden Ring. Um, I'm very excited. I'm very excited for this take. So please do, please do lay out at length, the connections between David Lynch's, uh, Twin Peaks and, uh, Miyazaki's Elden Ring. So, so what I really like about this is that, um, I guess, I guess, I, the log lady's praises the new, is the praise of the, um, Twin Peaks retrospective series.
3:50Um, but for realization time, the, the log lady asks us, where is the beauty? And, and more broadly, where does it, what does it mean to find and become beauty in a world that is in the process of becoming soulless? Right. We, we exist, we find ourselves rather in a world that is very, very dark. It's, it's tragic in political terms and material terms and environmental terms and, and just about anyway, you can, you can arrange these numbers or paint this picture. It is a grim world we find ourselves in. And what does it mean for there to be beauty in a place like that?
4:32To, to, is it, is it really just nothing more than this kind of like, baldelerry and approach to, to finding, to finding beauty in the killer's knife? Right. Is it really just that crass? Um, but I was thinking about the log, which is praise, and there's a line from, uh, recent, from soft game, uh, that you may or may not have heard of called Elden Ring. Oh, and the line is actually a bit of cut dialogue that was data mined out of the game, but is not in the release itself. Um, and the line, the line reads, let all things flourish, whether graceful or malign.
5:10And it's about the rot that spreads through the game, right? There's this, if you haven't played the game, there's this kind of like cosmic, cosmic, uh, slime mold going throughout the world of Elden Ring. That's, that's, you know, turning everything into monsters. Um, in addition to like four other things that are spreading throughout the world, turning everything into monsters, it's a from soft game. But what would I find really enjoyable of that is like, you know, like, a lot of the, the things that we approach as malign have their own inherent beauty, right?
5:37Like the fungal is such a great exploration of this. Like, like fungi and slimes and their fruiting bodies are, are so visually appealing when we kind of let go of the baggage that prevents us from seeing that. And I think the log, ladies introduction to this episode is, is nudging us in a, in a similar direction to the from softwares video games. How, how did I know? How did I foresee as soon as you started talking? Oh yeah. How, how did, like a kind of like, uh, uh, an abyssal part of my mind. I put up and I knew we would come back to slime.
6:25I knew we would come back to goo. Is there, is there anything else?
6:35But no, no, I don't, I, in all seriousness, no, I don't think there is. I'm, I, dear listeners, I have a terrible confession to make. I'm getting paid by big slime to make these statements. Uh, big goo is, is cutting me these checks every, every episode to say positive things about fungi and slimes. And I, you are, you are the slimer of this generation.
7:07I guess I need to start eating more hot dogs. And weirdly though, I kind of do so and see what you mean. I do see what you mean, especially because this is an episode which has a really interesting line, a kind of like line of flight or thought about the human animal relationships. Because finally, oh my god, yes. Finally, Cooper has a witness. It has a witness who can give reportage about what happened in that cabin. I am of course talking about the bird that they find that they find. Uh, and then the bird is murdered.
7:44The witness is snuffed out. Um, what do you think about that? What do you think about that in the context of the human animal relationship? And what do you think about that in the context of like, detection and crime? So one thing, one thing that we talked about earlier in this retrospective is that Cooper is recognizing broader systemic implications of crime, right? He's not looking for a killer in kind of a trite sense, right? He's attempting to detect something in these kind of social connections that are happening.
8:24And the thing, the thing that about the bird, the detail that I hadn't noticed until this was true was that it's an Indonesian bird. They specifically say it's from Indonesia. Right? So we have this Indonesian bird that is the, the bearer of truth, the only witness, the thing that pushes the story forward. We have a South American llama walking randomly through an episode prior to this. We have Cooper's like, like, strange statements about Tibet that pop up. And there's this, there's this weird meditation that's coming up in this show, especially with its, its use of animals about like colonialism and ways of knowing it, especially for you know, when we consider the fact that like, the town of Twempiaks itself, it's just as it is, is nevertheless a colonized space, right? It exists because of the colonization of North America. And like, you know, the owls are not what they seem, right? Like, like, there's this kind of, and it does, you know, kind of like reduce things to like animalistic qualities, which is problematic when talking about indigenous communities. But it does nevertheless point to these like, there's this whole first season is setting up ways of knowing, right? How do we derive information from our surroundings? And it's reminding us, I think that there is a lot of information in the areas where we are that we wholly disregard because of how colonialism teaches us to see the land that we're on.
9:57Yeah, exactly. And it's like, the interesting thing for me is that the crime in animal relationships in the, in the webs of nature, crime does not exist. Right? There's, there's, there's, but there are, there are acts often of like quite shocking violence, but that's not the same thing as being crimes. And there's something interesting here when like, not only the modes of knowledge get rearticulated, but actually systems of law are necessarily like a kind of they have an ecology to them. Right? Because if you accept that kind of knowledge, if you accept the kind of knowledge that comes from non human agents, not only does it make responsibility harder to pin down necessarily because, but of course, but it also widens out questions of blame or it like makes blame much more diffuse, which is exactly the whole point of this first season, right?
10:59Our first, our major witness is the bird and the bird that can easily be killed. But really, the whole point of that scene is not just like a funny, weird joke, but is in a sense a kind of exploration of action network theory. Right? This notion of like, where is the single point of origin of violence? And the whole point is, well, that doesn't exist, but we can include multiple points of knowledge that give us a kind of systemic understanding of this whole thing.
11:29Oh, I really like that. That's really interesting. And it's interesting how it's mediated through technology as well. Like, they're able to discover the information that this bird holds because Cooper has a voice activated recorder. Yeah. Yeah. Of course he does. Of course he does. So I love that because that feels like that's almost like this trekkian bit of speculative fiction thrown in there. There's this weird kind of like machinek thing going on, right? Like identifying like it's not human where this information comes from. It's an animal speaking to a machine.
12:16And then humans have to parse that data later on. Like we are, you know, like we were just kind of like these low level augurs trying to parse this greater data we've been given. Yeah, precisely. Precisely. But the consequences of that is like really, really billiasing it. Right. You know, I'm thinking back to the scene at the funeral who killed Laura Palmer? Everybody did. Everybody did, right? Everyone is, everyone's implicated. Everyone's implicated. Even though eventually we will come to the point right that where there'll be, oh, the blame will be situated here. Nobody is outside of this network of actors. Not even crucially, not even the non-human. Yes. Oh my God. Yeah. That is such twin-piece just keeps on giving. And in the spirit of keeping on giving, horrorvangard.com, patreon.com slash horror.vangard. There was a really clat crass Patreon plug.
13:13You know, to be honest, like midway through doing that, I was like, in the spirit of giving, like now, now I sound like I'm the cashier at Sears asking you to donate $5 to offset the yearly corporate profits. If you would like at this most seasonal time of year to support your local podcasters, you can do it through patreon.com slash horrorvangard for bonus content, early access, access to the HP crypt, the spookiest discord server on the left, and a whole lot more. Yeah. So I knew. So I knew you. Artisanal small batch podcasts here. Independent podcast roastery. Yeah. Then you're not supporting big podcasts when you support horrorvangard. Yeah. It's like podcast.
14:05That's a big slime though. Yeah. You're supporting big slime, but it's like the podcast microbrewery.
14:13That's where we are. We're in the podcast microbrewery. And if you'd like to see more, more of the podcast microbreweries than we can't do without you. You know what I should, I think we should talk about. Yeah. What? I think we should talk about insurance. Let's let's let's do it. What would you like to talk about?
14:38Insurance is essentially the capitalization of ontology. Right. Insurance is this idea of like your own existence can be a new kind of glorious sublimity of human existence can be subjected to this epistemic of violence of quantification and turned into like numbers on a balance sheet. And I think in the context of this show, it's so interesting that this is exactly what are big are big kind of like climactic moment in these two episodes, the last two episodes of this first season are really about our about insurance fraud. Right. That's that's that's we will we will get to the the idea of burning down the castle. But like it's done because existence can be reduced down to numbs on a balance sheet. Right. It gives you a neat it gives you a neat solution to a problem. And in a way, it sets there's this contrast here that's constantly being worked out in this show between deterministic simplistic answers to questions of causality of agency of subjectivity. Right. All of these people who initially at the start of the show seem to be just like so much stereotypes. They've become kind of deep and made more contradictory in it.
16:01And ambiguous the show has gone on. And the same happens here. Right. What the act of violence is actually to try and re-inscribe the domination of quantification. Right. The idea of reducing the subject into quite literally dollars and cents. Oh, I really really like that too. And you could especially see that in the way that the Packard Mill treats its workers. Oh yeah. And the fact that it doesn't, they do not enter into the math. There are non entities. They are hardly even in the show. You know, they're they are a presumed background creature.
16:42Yeah. This kind of like absence, right? The worker is literally unthinkable. Which as we've talked about before in previous episodes, like the the worker is nothing for capitalism if an impediment to profits. Yeah, precisely. I mean, isn't that it's not that needs to be done away with? Isn't that like, isn't like that true of how Ben and Jerry and the rest of them treat the women at one hijacks, right? Yes. They're literally unthinkable. This idea that they, that they, these people have kind of thoughts in an internal reality seems to be completely alien to these, to the men that go there. And so it is not surprising that our, our queen and icon,
17:32Audrey ends up going there as well. All hail Audrey Horn. The third benefactor of anger. It's we have our patreon supporters big slime and Audrey Horn's estate. Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on how Audrey gets her job? So I find this to be interesting. And I think like obviously the first thing is like solidarity and critical support to sex workers everywhere. You know, like the one hijacks, it's such an interesting thing to include in this show and an interesting way in which it's depicted in like, God, there's so much to pick apart with Audrey working at one hijacks. I hardly, hardly know where to start with this. But what I find to be interesting about this is, again, like Audrey is conveniently counterposed next to Cooper, right? Because Cooper also goes to one hijacks, but he goes with a principled and de-libidonized desire to detect, right? He is there as the detective to draw information forth from this CD operation. His engagement with it is a hollow dishonest one, even if his motives are good, right? You know, he's not there for any libidinal purpose. He's there because he has work to do. Meanwhile, Audrey is also there because she has work to do, but it is expressly through a libidinal means. Well, this is the thing, right? It does Cooper investigate in a kind of dry, de-libidonized way. Weirdly, I actually think the commonality is a lot closer.
19:14They're both there for this kind of like, there is no abstraction in their modes of thought, right? It's this intensely lived and embodied mode of experience and of engaging with the world. Cooper's is kind of like free-associative and the psychedelic order is is much more direct in some ways, but also much more aware of her own kind of vulnerability under these systems of patriarchy, right? The whole point of one eye jacks is like this idea of like small town America being like, oh, you thought that doesn't happen here? Like this is like a classic Foucault's repression hypothesis, right?
20:07The whole point is like the libidinal desire is not simply repressed or excluded, but heavily regulated. And it has to be done in this space, which is literally across the border, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It's outside of the colony to use your language from earlier. That's where it's allowed to happen. So I always think one eye jacks is just created as this kind of really interesting space, especially in contrast to the lodge that also exists beyond the border, but that border is not just kind of like legal, geographic, but kind of like metaphysics as well.
20:49Oh, absolutely. And to kind of like bring back a point you made earlier about how kind of like the boss class sees the worker or more importantly does not see them. Ben Horn is visiting one eye jacks with his new Scandinavian business clients. And he is there to avail himself of all of the pleasures that one eye jacks has to offer, which now includes his daughter, the new girl. Yeah. And now that Audrey Horn has been subsumed into an employment position, who is she is now a worker. She is now a member of the working class, full and true. Ben can literally no longer see her.
21:30Yeah. And it's the way of it kind of like negating the incest to be, right? Yeah. Or like the quasi incest to be a classic gothic. Right. 100%. 100%. Yeah. You do the, this is like if you thought porn hub was the first source of like your convenient new step sister getting caught in some kind of like, I don't know, modernist, industrialized hellscape and then pursued by some kind of familial patriarch. I guess again, because then the 1700s, there were several steps ahead of the game. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
22:12Help, help step, bro. I'm caught in the psychosexual anti-Catholic labyrinth beneath the old monastery. Oh, dude, we have fun here. We have fun here. It took me way too many post graduate degrees to understand that joke. I know. That one, that one's for the gothic studies fans in the audience. Oh, but speaking of this, speaking of this idea of like displaced identity or like negated identity, that's exactly what happens with Maddie James and Donna, right? Like Maddie, who is Laura? Yes. Oh, not. And it's often seen to be Laura. And in fact, that's the crux of the plan that they come up with to deal with everybody's most fukodian psychiatrist, Dr. Jacobi.
23:19And here, and here begins the completion of Dr. Jacobi. We'll get to this when we get to Dr. Jacobi selling golden shovels. But this is, I think, the beginning of Dr. Jacobi realizing who he truly is and escaping the kind of like the psychiatric prison he created for himself. And it first involves his heart dying, which I find to be incredibly fascinating because he's a fictitious character. This isn't a literal heart attack. It's not a biomechanical failing of valves and pumps and muscle. It's a metaphysical heart attack, right? The heart of him, the heart of this man, his very core cannot sustain the world he has found himself in. The world he is also responsible for creating. And before he can kind of move as a character, that has to die. That has to fail him. And I find it's so interesting that it's Laura's doppelganger that is the force that pushes him over. It's our little twin peak Scooby Doo gang. Yes. Yes. We, we, I love that there is essentially a Scooby gang in the end of this first season. I like it. And I think it's so important too because like, again, this whole, this whole first season is ways of knowing. You know, you have, you have knowledge coming from machines, you have knowledge coming from animals, you have knowledge coming from individual minds and minds interconnected with others. You have knowledge coming from libidinal bodies. And you've also got knowledge coming from, you know, like young adults, teens, having their first serious encounters with the world around them. Yeah, this idea that actually, you know, again, this is, this is why I like Lynch a lot, which is that he very much respects the agential capacity of young, young people. Oh, yeah. Give some of the freedom to do very stupid things.
25:24But also, but also like goes, no, you can go out into the world, you can exert your agency on circumstances, you can actually try to solve something to try and make the world a better place. And I think that's, you know, it's remarkably open-minded, you know. I really love how, you know, because the adults,
25:47infrequently to the adults in Twin Peaks kind of scold the kids for being kids, you know, Donna's parents are incredibly understanding of her occasional wayward teenage activities. And even when Cooper is, is kind of like, you know, warning James that he's like, okay, like you're investigating this lower thing, but there are some dangerous players in this game. Like you're doing something like very risky. Yeah, I mean, that's essentially the question that he poses to Audrey, right, when she turns up. Yep. At the very beginning of this episode in his bed.
26:21And he's like, do you know what, do you know what you're doing here? Do you know? I don't, like, he's very kind of like, he's very kind of kind. Just goes, I don't think you, I don't think you really understand what it is that you're going to get yourself into here. And it's completely impossible for it to happen in the first place. That's so, how about I get some dinner? I think there's a one line exchange that really like expresses, I think like a core difference between their characters. And then that's that's the slumber. Audrey says something like, oh, Cooper,
26:54I've got such dark secrets. I have so many dark secrets. Do you have any secrets? Which is, which is a very, that's very juvenile. That's very, that's very, that's very, that has the honesty of youth is in that line. And then Cooper, who's, Cooper, he's, he's, he's a young man, but he's crossed that line. He's an adult now. You know, he, he looks at him and he's like, no. And then he moves the conversation on. Cooper absolutely has skeletons in his closet. This man has seen some shit. He's hunting a serial killer across state lines. You know, like, like he is full of darkness, but he knows that the answer to that question in that moment is just a simple no. And then to move the conversation forward. He also has a remarkably cool attitude towards, yes, like, there's a good life philosophy in Cooper's mode of living, I think. Should we talk about our favorite line from this episode? Yeah, yeah, it's, should I, should I read it? Should I read it? Yes, please, yes, please.
27:49Uh, I'm going to let you in on a little secret every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt and a men's store or a cat nap in your office chair or two cups of good hot black coffee. Or it could be subscribing to the Patreon page for horror van Gogh. You'll get a, you'll get my opportunity to save my bad read from earlier in my failed Patreon plug. That, that, that, that part of the, that part of the line was cut. Yeah, tragic, tragically tragically, David Lynch did go on record as saying that that was his favorite line that had ever been written ever in the course of human events, but tragically, they, the, the, the horror van Gogh show didn't exist yet, so they couldn't put it in there because no one knew what he was talking about. Sham. Truly, truly. Uh, self-cat king right there, self-cat.
28:49I, I really, I really, you can keep, you can keep, you can keep your mandated mental health and resilience training. You can keep your, uh, you know, 10 minute meditation practice every day. Just give yourself a little present like such a great tip. Yeah, I really, I really like that. I really like that, especially the framing as a gift, too. Right because I know like a lot of gift giving has been some student into capitalism, but on a conceptual level, the gift is an anti-capitalist social device. It is something given without the assumption of reciprocity. You are, you are, you are, you are escaping the kind of material chain of capital when you freely surrender material goods to another party, simply because you want to see them happy. And in this case, that other party is the many internal subdivisions of the self. Part of you is in pain. Give it a little gift today.
29:41Do we are approaching the, the, the, the, the high point of this first season? Do you, do you have any final thoughts as we wrap up this installment of our journey? Oh, I am just, I'm so excited to, to get to the final episode of season one, the end of season one of our Twin Peaks retrospective, in two weeks time when we talk about episode seven, the last evening.
30:10Boom, there we go.
30:17We hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse. Until next week, stay spooky!