0:00Hello everybody, welcome back to another installment of Kookie Small Town Adventures,
0:57episode of the horror of Angaro Twin Peaks review. And then we're going to take a little break and then we're on to missing pieces, fire walk with me, and then the much awaited season three discussion. Indeed, but today, today we are going to be talking through episode 22, slaves and masters. We are going to be talking through episode 23, the condemned woman, and episode 24, wounds and scars. I'm so excited for our conversation on the condemned woman and we can talk about the complex, the complexity is rather of woodworking. I mean, that's mostly that's mostly what that episode is about, I think. So episode 22, slaves and masters, which interesting title, given what goes on in this episode, listener, we will be discussing all of this. It starts off as always with the log ladies introduction. And in this one, the log lady, the log of lady mentions that a distant freight train blows a mournful tone, which is a line that Utah Phillips wishes he would have rode or perhaps
2:01David Lynch show from Utah Phillips or whoever was the writer for this episode. But that like, I think that's like a really appropriate kind of metaphor to use in the context of Twin Peaks, right? Like Twin Peaks is set in the Pacific Northwest, right? That was all rail freight and logging towns. That's kind of perfect for the kind of melancholic, wall bash cannonball imagery, the freight train taking us all off to the great beyond. And it kind of, I think it like for me, what two of these three episodes at least do is kind of like remind me of the actual like rust belt adjacent kind of material and economic structure that's underneath Twin Peaks. I mean, even though it is not technically in the rust belt, don't at me.
2:45You know, it's like a reminder that like, you know, the first thing we see in that opening sequence, right, these birds in flight, but also these logging saws being milled by heavy machinery. You know, it's kind of this reminder that like for all of our discussion of, you know, multi-dimensional lodges, beings of pure evil, serial killers, Twin Peaks is still a working town with this kind of fraught working dynamics underneath it. I think it's very important that the log lady also talks about death masks quite a lot because a death mask is the concretization of memory.
3:25As she puts it, a death mask is almost an intrusion on a beautiful memory. And yet, who would throw away the casting of a loved one? And like these three episodes are in so many ways about the nature of love, I think, actually as so much of Twin Peaks is really what the show is about love. And the ways in which kind of love is love is so easily curdled into something orthogonal to it, but kind of ultimately, I mean, Josie's arc in these episodes, I think is a really good example of this, right? Josie is surrounded by usually older, powerful men who say that they love her. None of them, do any of them, I think, is an interesting question. But I think this show particularly is so interested and invested in the idea of, and the fallibility and ultimate plasticity of memory,
4:28you can't ever really get over loss because for someone to no longer be there, implies a kind of, they've ceased to exist, but Laura still exists and is incredibly concrete in memory. The Windom Earl is driven into madness and violence by memory, by the memory of his lost love.
4:57This is interesting that there is, and in the context of deindustrialization, the neoliberalization of capitalism, which we will absolutely get into in this episode, I think, there are some interesting things happening in the ways in which the subject and the kind of superstructural forces of a given social environment kind of have to wrestle with what memory truly is. Absolutely. And I think the, the desk mask, wow, I work from home too much, the death mask, I think also serves to highlight the kind of material and like kind of capitalistic culture that's accreted around death rituals.
5:44You know, like the burial industry makes a lot of money off of people's grief and sorrow and suffering, right? It is also a rontier space in some cases. You know, and like, it's a source of extraction, right? You have services now where like, oh, you can feed all of your dead loved ones tweets into an AI and have them tweet you forever. And all these kind of like, ghoulish things, but in a way, like, you know, like the log lady isn't just simply gesturing towards the death mask, which is just a much older kind of manifestation of these technologies and practices, but is also gesturing forward to these as well, right? The ways in which these kind of like,
6:24these desperate moments of longing and the wake of someone's passing can like ultimately come back to like bite into their own memory, and recodify how we see them. And I think to to go a bit beyond just capital, right? Like there's almost an inevitability of that. You know, like so someone's agency continues on after their passing in strange ways, and that winds up intersecting in the future with how they're remembered and why and under what circumstances. I think this is a good meta-textual bridge to the next point we wanted to bring up.
6:56You put in the notes that this episode particularly is a kind of thematic turning point for the show. And maybe you can kind of talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so this episode features a new intro where the camera kind of goes low and moves through some chess pieces. And we're going to start to see new intros, new outros, the kind of twin peak sting at the start of every episode is now going to kind of just pop up when characters make revelations, at least a lot more frequently. The kind of the the the the meta-textual presence of editing gets much more heavy handed. And I think there's almost an acceleration of the weird eraserhead style qualities of David Lynch's cinema that just start ramping up in this episode, right? From slaves and masters onward, things get weirder in the town of Twin Peaks. And at least for me in my reading, it's the kind of weirder that necessarily understrict or like that becomes the structure for season three, the return.
7:54Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know necessarily if I agree. And maybe we'll get into why as we go through these three episodes. But I think I think retroactively, yes, season three is the kind of like compliment and apotheosis of things that are starting in the back half here of season two. But I think that's I mean, I think that's credit to to Lynch particularly when season three comes about. I've got to be honest, I'm sort of struggling with this back half of season two. I find it, I find it a little more, I find it a little dissatisfying in some ways, mostly because in order to to keep the show going, you have like a lot of, there's a lot of like, treading water, you know,
8:59Confederate Ben Horn, it all goes on for way too long. You know, the weird stuff about nature conservation, the introduction of so many more characters. I think a big kind of problem is is around Josie's character particularly. So Josie ends up being the kind of fulcrum point for an entire arm of the story, which is like hinging around Hong Kong, organized crime. But a lot of it is like a lot of it is very much told to the audience rather than shown. And it doesn't feel like kind of like it doesn't emerge organically from the kind of broader tensions of the town. Because we have to reintroduce two characters. That we thought were dead or missing or Josie had escaped from. So there are things about this kind of patch of the show. Not that the quality is like low, but
10:05I don't know if for me, I don't know if it's kind of hitting the same kind of high points. The weirdness feels a little more kind of like, manate and like, deliberate aesthetic choices because this is what the viewer or the studio expects Twin Peaks to do. You know? Yeah, definitely. I can see your point there. I do like the same qualities that you dislike about Josie's arc. I do like about Josie's arc. I like that it feels a little manufactured. I like that Josie feels like an intrusion into the space of Twin Peaks with the way her stories handle. Everything with her character is very sudden. Everything is very underdeveloped. Everything is very confused. And I think that kind of, for me watching this now, like it's counter-posing the the quote unquote normal stuff in Twin Peaks, right? The murder mystery, where it's just a detective doing a who-done it. It counterposes that nicely with the, I guess, lodge elements, right? Like the more mystical qualities, the harder to trace, the quote unquote linchy and stuff. And because Josie
11:24Josie has a weird balancing act between those things, right? Like her back story is inconsistent. She kind of just pops up randomly as needed by the show. So do all the characters in her orbit. Oh my god, I just totally lost my trend of thought. No, I agree. I agree, but I think the kind of problem with that is that you end up implicitly or not. You kind of end up sort of re-inscribing a lot of pretty, pretty old-fashioned Orientalist stereotypes about Asian women, particularly. Oh yeah, yeah. And this is something, I mean, this is something that we've talked about before.
12:04And, you know, performance is great, but I feel like, I feel like out of a kind of like immediate necessity to keep the show going, which they had to do. There are choices that being made that make the show feel in some ways much more formulaic. It's not bad, but it is, again, for me, I don't know if it's hitting the same kind of like high points as it could. If the production company in the studio had simply left David Lynch alone to do what he wanted. Yeah, so you could definitely feel the hand of meddling here, guiding elements of the show, guiding its direction in ways that are perhaps corrected in season three. Yeah, I would, that I would totally agree with. And I think that's one of the reasons why season three is such an interesting kind of resolution to so much of what's happening like on screen here. Shane, Shane will never get season four, but also maybe it's okay if we don't get season four. Yeah, absolutely. And I think in regards to like Josie and how we read her character in Orientalism, like I totally agree with you. That's just kind of mechanically what's happening here in the show. And I also think that we can pull that reading against against the grain of the text as well and rough it up a little because we do the sheer artificiality of what goes on with a lot of Josie's stuff, the fact that it's so like her love with the share of Truman, right? Like,
13:47I've seen a lot of people talking about that. It's like, oh, that's her authentic relationship. That's the troubled love in a sea of femme fatale, noir, drama. But in a way that's just another instrumentalized aspect in this greater like, you know, horrifying like chessboard of crime and pain and you know, an attempt to find refuge that has been Josie. And then having having like the show as a thing itself continue that cycle with her, like having that like slot back into Orientalism, having that slot back into the artificiality of what love like besides the end. We'll talk about that in the next episode. Now the next episode of this episode, the next episode of the episode we're talking about in this episode in proper tradition of keeping the Twin Peaks episode numbering complicated.
14:36And listeners, if you want some foreshadowing, we're changing the numbering sequence when we get to season three because the show changes the numbering sequence. So yay for us all. But no, like I do find the kind of, I, and this is something like, like I say a lot on the show, but like I would rather be frustrated than bored. I would rather be sitting there thinking why are they doing this? This is kind of weird than be thinking like, oh yeah, like I got a, I'm running on a rice. I have to buy more serrano peppers like, uh, and it's laundry day. How am I going to get all this done? You know, like that's the worst thing that can happen to a viewer during during a movie is you just check out, you know, in your brain turns out, you might as well be watching Marvel and, and here with this Josie stuff, like it's making me very frustrated. And that is worth something to me. That I agree with. Um, I agree it's frustrating.
15:29But for me, it's frustrating because I'm like, oh, it's an American TV show, right? No, and it's not, it's not frustrating because it's, it's not frustrating because it's weird or like surreal. It's frustrating because in a way, uh, there's so much about the show that starts to feel more conventional. And maybe that's why I'm sort of like, this feels like American network TV. And so a good example of what I mean is like, what happens to James in this storyline? So he's, he's kind of like, he's sort of wandered into like a 1950s Gothic melodrama. Yes.
16:07Yes. In a way, I don't hate. Um, he ends up being framed for someone's murder, which again, is great. He's a completely clueless chump. Um, it's like thank goodness he's pretty because good Lord. He is, he is able to ignore so many red flags and so many strange things happening around him. Um, a lot of it, in a way, it sort of feels like it feels wrote. It feels like we're kind of repeating like aesthetic and formal and narrative gestures that have come before it. I like it's like, I like, I like a lot of the stuff with Evelyn. I think that's really cool. A kind of classic, um,
16:48Gothic throwback. But I'm like, there's, there's something, there's something about this which feels like it's, it's missing some juice. It's missing some like, uh, Jennie say, Quas. It's, it's, it almost feels like it's from a different show, to be honest, the stuff that winds up happening with James Hurley. Um, at least in this like brief, in very brief too, little narrative arc with, uh, James and Evelyn and Malcolm. Um, and of course Donna gets, gets roped into that as well. I think a lot of your feelings for Josie's character arc, I have for James. James's character arc because this is, this is, this is like the thing that I still appreciate about James is it's, it's doing, like, like David Lynch is doing one of the things he does best or at least the lynchie and more broadly, right? That exists both inside and outside of David Lynch's particular creative endeavor. Like it's, it's making something, it's taking something, quote unquote, real, quote unquote, normal. This is something very tropic at this point. The, the, the James Dean biker figure, the rebel without a cause type, the teen exploitation arc and kind of returning to it. The fact that James is still a child and he's still a teen.
17:54Yeah, yeah. You know, so it's, he's, he's not this like, he has the appearance of the world, the street tough kid who knows it all and it's done it all and like, you know, he's gonna, he's gonna play the guy for his car, get the damn, you know, he's bad, he doesn't care. No, he's like, he's still a boy, right? And so he's being victimized right left in center and there's a kind of tragedy to it. And that sort of retroactively is used as justification for why he treats Donna actually really badly. So horribly. Which, which I got like, I think like, it again makes me contrast it with how that character is often portrayed in the teen exploitation genre, which I think James just clearly just rode his bike right out of an old teen exploitation movie and into Twin Peaks. Cause then, yeah, the, and we'll get to this in a few episodes, but when he like leaves Donna and sends the postcard and he's like, I'm off to Mexico to find myself. And like a teen exploitation movie that would be portrayed as like romantic and poetic and again, like there's almost like Carol wacky and, you know, beat road character. But in this, it's like, oh my god, he's like, this poor like abused kid is just making horrible decision after horrible decision as he spirals away from the people who love and care for him.
19:15Yeah. And one of the elements of this that I actually really do enjoy is the adenoma. Yeah. Big adenoma. Because this is has just become one of the most kind of like heart-breakingly straight forward relationships in Twin Peaks. And honestly, it's all in the performances. It's a genuine romance right. It's a genuine like romance for the ages. They talk about the fact that, you know, they were they were kids and then 20 years have gone by and they have, you know, air, air even says it's like, oh, it's our turn to be happy. It's like you would have to be you would have to be like deeply cynical
19:58I think to find to find it like not affecting in the slightest. And it's such a good kind of like example of the ways that the show is actually like quite achingly sincere about the nature of love. As this sort of like transcendent moment of like self-actualization you find yourself in the other. So yeah, I love all of that stuff. I like kind of the way it's handled by the show. And I think it contrasts nicely with like James who's related to Big ad, right? Like Donna who's kind of spiritually related to Norma like like she James is to add as as Norma is to Donna. And like
20:46I like how it's I like how Norma's given the agency to be like like Hank it's over like you're going to jail our relationships done by. And also like the agency's given to Nadine to be like yeah like I know I know you've been hooking up with Norma on the side. I don't really care because I've also got my own side piece. And quite frankly I like him better. So that's Danzo. And I'm going on. I was going to say like this mirrors James and Donna and kind of like the immaturity, the irresponsibility, the recklessness with with which James handles that relationship contrasted with the like you one could easily argue too kind of prudent maturity with which Norma and Big ad have been handling and managing theirs for years. Yeah, I think the two of them and again I do think it's entirely it's in the performances. They they really do ground these two characters as a gentle and as self-sacrificing. They're and there's something quite old fashioned about this relationship, right? This idea of like it's sort of like come out of like brief encounters. But it's just it's just being put put into this small town Americana setting which I really like. I guess the other kind of question if we're talking about love is like what do you think about
22:18the love triangle between windom all Cooper and Earl's now deceased wife Carolyn, is it name? What do you think of that? What do you think of the revelation that Cooper says that Carolyn was the love of his life? So I think this is really interesting right because if we you know we can either see Earl's descent into madness as being the kind of slow loss of Carolyn first to Cooper and then when he kills her or we can see it as something that predates it and kind of you know like the reason why Carolyn starts to perhaps drift towards Cooper is because windom Earl is obsessed with finding the source of evil and becoming a sorcerer and not a good husband. Yeah and not to say those two goals can't overlap right you can be a great partner and a sorcerer committed to harnessing a world's worth of evil to change the course of human events. You know you just have to learn how to balance the family life and the work life and that's something that you can learn in my new 10 step series how to become an evil sorcerer and keep the kids which will be coming out later from Penguin Random House.
23:29Oh my god. So what if I had to be really itch dig about that is the kind of like the horrible tension between Cooper and Windom Earl in terms of like they're both kind of they're both federal agents they both are in love with this one woman and as we'll see in a few episodes their homosocial triangle doesn't resolve it just gets hinged on a different woman in a second here. And I think the the tension for them is in something that we'll learn at the final episode of this conclusion is that Cooper has never been quite as far from Windom Earl as he has has felt himself to be as he sees himself you know every time he talks about Earl he talks about like Earl as if he's like almost like a fallen angel right he's this Luciferian figure you know he he's the one who turned his back on the kind of patriarchal father that is the FBI and its sacred values you know he's the one who instead of following the holy scriptures has turned this darker path you know but I think there's you know like you know much like Paras lost much like Dante there's there's there's something kind of horribly compelling and our proximity to these devilish fiends compelling I mean I mean Cooper says that like he's never beaten Windom Earl in game of chess right yeah uh oh is this is he is the he is the he is the Wario to Cooper as far as you know like the inverse right the thing that Cooper could have been
25:15but it still shows oh gone gone no no gone I was gonna say like like even I think the chess metaphor is really telling it's something that gets leaned into really heavily for the next couple episodes are very much about chess a sport currently ruled by a bunch of transphobic dorks so go play something more intellectual like Yu-Gi-O instead um part of greed but like oh my god now I'm thinking about Yu-Gi-O uh memories but so I think I think the chess metaphor is really apt right because like how what's the kind of like social weight of chess right what's its superstructural qualities you know like chess is the the masterful game for people of intellect right if you're great at chess you're brilliant irrespective of all of your other qualities and pursuits in life you know chess chess is a game that is very much favored by this kind of like homogenized a hegemonic cultural aesthetic and here we still have like despite like what's going on like they're not playing chess they're like Cooper is trying to stop a serial killer right Cooper is pre-saging criminal minds you know like they're not they're not playing chess together also they're not playing go as we see in criminal minds wow criminal minds is just bad twin peaks now isn't it um I mean you're right you're right yeah writers of criminal minds uh more wizards that'll that'll fix your show right up a couple UFOs two three wizards now we got a program but no I think like like it's again it's that proximity between Cooper and
26:54Windom Earl right like it's this focus on like you know like Cooper almost sets aside the fact that he killed the love of his life that he's murdered all these women that he killed Laura Palmer this other woman that he's fixated with to to be like you know he was the best agent he was the best of us he was never beat him in chess you know still hanging these honorifics almost as if he's like like the the samurai master in like a curusava movie or something and again I think the title of the episode here is very important um you know you have you have uh it's a very jossie heavy episode you have the reintroduction of Thomas Eckhart um you have uh Leo being enslaved by Windom Earl um uh there's one other aspect of the episode that we should probably pick up on in relation to the title and I think this would be a good way of wrapping up before we move on to the condemned woman is we have to talk about uh civil war revisionism oh we are back to our old confederate hobby horse uh so but the thing out it's about to be over um so in this episode uh Dr. Jacobi uh along with the horn family and a bunch of other people suggest that the way to get we're actually Audrey's the one who who makes this suggestion and sets this planet action I think that's important too that the way to bring Ben horn back to the world of the real is to let him finish his kind of uh civil war revisionists like a fugue state which on one hand is like very forward thinking in a horrible way for like treatment of mental health to not like imprison him and load him up with Hallopare at all and like hope that he eventually sains himself out but to inside be like okay let's resolve this break then right he's having these tensions who he wants this thing that's not real let's re-flass all of it and see what happens but it's also like it's the title of the episode it's so much that's in the rest of the show it's who's got power over whom and I think it's in this this might be the bridge into your episode 23 the condemned woman but it's what Ben horn does with his sanity that I think reveals a lot about why twin peaks is using civil war revisionism to be the kind of fugue narrative that that not only makes
29:18Ben horn sane but makes him quote unquote on the path to being a good person again what are your thoughts you want to do well I'm very interested do you want to say more about that uh yeah so okay like uh actually it's not in the condemned woman it's in wounds and scars where I think this this really rounds out so maybe maybe we save listeners you'll have to listen another 30 minutes to find out what I'm talking about uh well let's let's talk about the condemned woman then this one's like log lady opening I think is very like ponderous the log lady is pondering her wooden her wooden cylindrical orb yeah and today's one and I think I think it winds up like you know she's asking us what could possibly be happening and for me those really reminding me of the black tower right the black tower black lodge overlap right this kind of like level of alienation that we're stuck under the fact that like not only do we not know what's happening but we like legitimately like cannot know what's happening right like the pathways to this is I think very capitalist realism point but the pathways to humiliating alienation's effects are currently outside of the realm of imagination right like the old forms no longer work and we have yet to cook up sufficient new forms to escape the kind of like gravity well here yes sorry I was I kind of got a little bit lost in thought that um did you enter a few sides but in this one you were a heroic and victorious Ned Ludd um yes exactly the the past is this unfinished uh utopian site of possibility um uh Ned Ludd the captain will ride again that's that's all all I I actually think this probably brings us back to chess yeah well what what are some chess ticks yeah uh the chess is a chess is a deeply weird sport um that's my primary take I guess uh there's uh there's like a there's like a I've only like seen this like tangentially out of the corner of my eye on internet discourse is that there was a there was a there was a um a twitch streamer who started playing chess from from like no experience and got to like a professional level within three months and I'm sort of like there's something there's something terribly addictive about chess right so if you look at Magnus Carlson or like even someone older like Bobby Fisher or Gary Kasperov there is a sort of like a terrible obsession with chess right chess ruins your life if you let it right it will become the kind of master discourse of the way in which he makes sense of the world and it's because chess promises um control of the future right the whole point of chess is in your ability to predict and your ability to think ahead you are essentially temporally projecting your subjectivity into a future which is yet to be constructed and depends upon the contingencies of not even yourself but your opponent to come into being right there's something like yes there's something terribly intimate frighteningly intimate about a chess game um I guess those are my chess takes I couldn't agree more chess has this hyperstitial quality right like it is this this mythic metaphoric social thing that now kind of creates its own reality right like how like chess grandmasters don't get anywhere near the publicity that
33:17I don't know sports stars get and and listener you can pick the third down sport in your country and compare them to chess stars in terms of relative notoriety that would probably be accurate but nevertheless like you know like we we still have the kind of like linguistics of chess programmed into how we speak about the world right we use chess metaphors to talk about a variety of different subjects like it is kind of the game when it comes to making metaphors and comparisons and you know flexing intellectual prowess and so it does have this kind of like deep historic cultural kind of hypnotic logic power that in a way now continues the legacy of chess right like and this is like just like hot game studies debate zone but like does chess like does chess continue to be a game because it's just so perfect or it doesn't continue because it's got this kind of like superstructural and base power that fuels this kind of economic engine is it some horrible combination therein and you're right like it isn't really romantic game in a way too like chess chess has I think and it's and I maybe what wasn't always historically but what is now like it has this beautiful minimalism at least in my appraisal right like the rule set for chess is painfully simple the the pieces never changed the board never changes the move never changes but in that simplicity there are near infinite combinations you know and to like you play a game like that with someone is to get to know them on on a level that you wouldn't have access to otherwise right it's like making love or writing something together or making music right it's this act of mutual creation in which to become one yeah which is uh because that was getting too serious listeners which is now going to be the tagline advertisement for my adult uh chess themed uh remote control toy set if you get my drift uh you can use a cheat at your local tournament or have fun with your partner when you can't be together in person and so much of this this episode specifically is about those is about cheating at chess yes
35:40well or rather to be a bit more serious it's about it's about the kind of like the the intimate connection between two people trying to resolve a conflict um Josie of course is a big kind of issue here but you have um Hank is going back to prison uh and Norma there's the great line I'd rather be his whore than your wife yes I love that just such a fucking ball the line um it's so just a couple of doing I fucking love it yeah absolutely um you have Donner and James kind of wrap up their story uh where James is like yeah sorry I was really shitty but I was very sad and disappears um and you have and you have Josie and Thomas Eckhart because Josie is clearly the condemned woman of this um um episode right uh so what do you think about these these these duo these kind of like two diads of like these these dialectical paths that the show is returning to
36:51I I think I think again like I think the chess metaphor is really apt here you know because there's also
36:59so chess for all of his positive qualities also is like imbued of many negative ones you know like like you know we we have and we see them play out in these episodes right these disposable pawns who is the disposable pawn it's this poor traveling underaged music not underage but this poor traveling musician is the disposable pawn right like people are sacrificed on the chess board and yet coop is still willing to play in hopes of pinning down windom Earl and then you've got like Josie both attempting to play a chess game of her own while also being a pawn in a larger chess game which like damn doesn't that just feel like capitalism and oppressive dynamics playing out yeah absolutely and as far as the james and donna wrap up goes like oh I find it to be deeply unsatisfying james isn't even like on camera there's just a goodbye james went back to his home planet yeah he gets the poochie exit yeah yeah yeah which which is appropriate for like it's it's again it's appropriate for the rebel without a cause teen's flirtation archetype right that he's just like babe I gotta go think things out I'm so lonesome and dark I'm gonna take my bike down to teawana and find my soul like like that is that is someone doing an incredibly tired reworking of caroac you know like it works in the kind of parodic quality that I think james is the the peak embodiment of but in terms of like what that means for donna and how that resolves donna's arcs I think the the kind of washes donna ashore right she she feels a bit stranded in in in that moment and like I think the we'll get into this when donna starts trying to figure out who her father is her biological father rather like that I feel like like okay that's the that's the resolution of donna's character and it's kind of a shame that the stuff with james didn't line up with that better you know it just feels like we okay we gotta tie the bow on james's character to get rid of him and then donna can be free so there's like two final things I want to talk about in this episode which is uh josey what happens to josey and the very end of the episode um and we should probably talk about the introduction of john justice weeler uh played by the dashingly handsome billy zane um and what's interesting is that john weeler has been brought into town brought back to twin peaks by bennhorn who is uh essentially trying to do uh neoliberalism um yep and I don't mean and I don't mean like neoliberalism in the subordinate as in the subordination of like institutions and decision making to the rationality of the market but rather trying to do this kind of like neoliberal capitalism with a human face of horn industries is now going to be like environmentally conscious and that's going to be the they're kind of like a wedge against Catherine um and weeler is this oh he's a sustainable capitalism guy right he's brought in to turn around struggling businesses and make them more environmentally friendly um what do you what do you think of the introduction of uh john weeler okay okay so first billy zane billy zane movie discussion what what are some of your favorite zane picks oh uh choices choices choices i gotta go with the fan team stone tombstone uh classic choice he stones a classic back to the future uh love it love everything about it um he's in a tale from the movie he's in uh he's in zulanda as well a movie i have not seen listeners all these years and i have never seen zoolander you're not missing huge amounts i'll say i either hear i'm not missing anything or it's one of the most influential films if it's time what are you doing not watching it and i never hear anyone just say it's made and and because there's no middle ground i think i'm just like oh yeah i don't know it's not interested i'm sorry listeners if any of you had a head cannon that i'm like this diehard zoolander fan but no i'm not gonna burst your parasocial bubble right here that's uh it needed to be done it needed to be done uh yeah what do you what do you think of this about about john weeler the the uh the environmentally friendly construction tycoon oh so i think it's interesting that james leaves and john weeler shows up i mean like obviously we have like from from a televisual standpoint you can't have two young heart throbs on your show at the same time unless that's like a high school drama show they'd be competing for each other in terms of the writing and the screen you know they they they would have to be they would overlap strangely which is a shame that they didn't keep uh james early around for this one like i would have loved to see him and weeler play off of each other you know like because i think i think it would have been james's first moment of like james is the high school football hero except in this case he's the bad boy you know like he's always been the hottest he's always been the coolest and now weeler's in town and he's hotter he's cooler and he has a jet you know the motorcycle is just completely trounced um but like but i also find like you know like there's that compelling charm to his character that underlies the fact that his business colleague is suddenly murdered in brasil and now he has to go fly to south america to continue his uh happy face capitalism which uh uh this uh this uh this uh this uh my sus meter goes up a bit when when you suddenly have to go to south america because your business partner was killed and you have a an environmentally friendly business to run yeah i got to defend the pine weasel oh and uh yeah so what do you do you have any uh weeler takes well it's just about the instrumentalization of nature isn't it it's this idea of of i suppose they're doing corporate greed well-shing but as a leverage move yes yeah i mean like it's this is this is again like this is very capitalist realism because you have the resistance is still capitalism right you have the resistance that's like oh we're gonna we have to like set up an l lc to save the pine weasel you know and what what we're gonna do is we're gonna buy this land and we're gonna convert it into a nature park and sell tickets and the pine weasel will have a home and then you've got the the kind of like more conservative approach which is just like no just grind make make pine weasel hats and burgers well we while we strip the land down for whatever resources there well what is it the jerry says he's like that delicious roasted yeah exactly at least at least he's kind of like honest about it and that's something that's something i appreciate about jerry's character as he is he is just the open avarice of the capitalist every everything has an extractable utility to him which which is like it's a level of greed that's up to you skated by a lot of discourse about the kind of like business owning class i mean it's something that the show is actually very honest about and i think um
44:45Thomas Eckhart is a good example of this and so we should probably wrap this up by talking about what happens to poor josey what is a drawer pull the law the way he's the ultimate question here that is the question isn't it so for people who've not seen this how would you describe the end of uh this episode so like Cooper is starting to circle Cooper is starting to realize that that josey has been is in some deep shit basically um and she's shining she was the one who pulled the trigger that night she's the one who shot him so she goes goes to josey's hotel goes to
45:34goes to Thomas Eckhart's hotel room um to find Eckhart and josey and why don't you why don't you pick it up from there i so so Cooper stumbles upon Eckert and josey guns are drawn josey shoots Eckert and then josey is killed by magic is the only explanation she's killed by some unseen force some unseen power which uh the the town the town doctor later reveals that josey only weighed like 65 pounds she was impossibly light which which again like i think that slots in with how her character has been in the plot for the entirety of twin peaks she's been impossibly light she's never really existed unlike all the other characters outside of the walk-ons like weeler gets more backstory than josey and weeler is in like three four episodes of the show and its entirety and josey is a much bigger player with much more episodes uh for her character and i think that the parallel is interestingly there and then like josey's face is seen in a door knob as we see uh yes yes so so we see kupesee's a vision of the man from the other side dancing on the bed after josey dies and bob is also seen but then we see josey's face in a drawer pole and josey will now be seen in wood in in the in the in the great northern hotel like her face keeps popping up in wood instructors so what do you what do you make of josey being turned into a drawer pole or rather her soul being imprisoned in one i guess well i think this is really the ultimate exercise in control right um i mean what is what has happened to her constantly is that she has been enslaved and like robbed of agency even in a way harry harry was not really interested in her but was interested in kind of possessing her yes yes he wanted to say of her to free her yeah yeah but like to kind of like to keep her safe yes yes yes safer and free her not for her for him yeah so so there's there's something kind of like very metaphysically bleak about this happening to josey specifically um and it's it's a very kind of like it's a very stark horror that this ending this is this is i think one of them the major downers in twin peaks and i think this is for me like arguably one of the worst because at least everyone else gets to die right at least they could because even like when windom url uh murders the man in the pond right like the the kind of like poor traveling musician you know he you know he he's like hey like at least you know he's like you're lucky you're good to go see what's on the other side you know like you're about to go on a great adventure and then he kills him but for for josey she's just kind of imprisoned in the wooden edifices of this hotel and then under completely uncertain terms too like josey's character doesn't come back you know like this is the resolution for her yeah she's not freed at some point from from this terrible fate this is just kind of her terrible fate other people in twin peaks they get to come back as tolpa as your doppelganger is you know like they they have more life in them it's kind of it for her and i also think it's telling that like in often underdiscussed especially like i mean like how many horror movies have been done and like this doesn't come up very often in the context horror cinema oh at least if i'm not aware listen to you have any options uh for viewing send them down in the comments below comments below see youtube video is this is this 20 clip put them in the doobly do and subscribe um click the link above uh but it might not be where i'm pointing because they move it all the time they're twenty fourteen is true um oh the old heads know by the old heads i mean people who were alive ten years ago if you're telling and listening to this podcast is it time for bed because it is for me and i'm much older than ten um oh my god what was sorry i what in the world oh so what i was kind of building towards there is like it was asian labor that built so much of the real infrastructure that headed out west right so much of these logging towns are entirely structured independent on that and to have jozy be just just completely extracted by this orientalist plot and then ultimately kind of spiritually imprisoned totally unacknowledged completely unresolved besides a shrug from Cooper and the coroner you know like that you're right that is so metaphysically dark because it does kind of nod to that greater social fate that happened we could also talk about Japanese internment like there is this kind of imprisonment of japanese and asian peoples in both the capitalistic machinery of the united states and the political machinery yeah it's the it's the it's her ultimate end point right the ultimate kind of punishment in a way you know she owned the mill uh at the very beginning of season one and like this is the the logical endpoint of the commodity fetish right you literally is become the thing that she used to make um it's it's it's honestly really really bleak it's such a sad ending um and leads really well into wounds and scars yes yes i think this will be a bit of a quicker episode to discuss but i uh so there's a log lady's introduction right she she's talking about like and this is i think like so so pressing because this gets us all she's talking about those feelings you have alone at night when it's just kind of you and your thoughts and no one else is awake or it's too late for you to commune with someone else you can't really you're too tired to watch anything and you're kind of stuck with your shame you stuck with those old bad thoughts of failures and social faux pas and all that kind of like negative like directs from the mind and like but she kind of like puts a hopeful spin on it in a way and like the thing the thing that i was kind of like reflecting on after listening to her talking about that and also in the same context jozy is like and this is something that kind of we come back to on the show for now and then but like at least there's potential for the new here right like like shame does give us some prodding which is occasionally useful right like not to say that giving into the shame is a good thing right like if you feel shame about your like gender sexual orientation right say shame about like any of of your kind of like subaltern qualities like the answer isn't to give into the shame but to rather explore the source of that shame and to why you feel that yeah what does shame do or what is what is shame kind of symbolically kind of important for is is a often disciplinary mechanism as you point out but is also often a a response or recognition of our
52:55of our vulnerability of our essential contingencies yes yes shame is a sort of shared human condition absolutely yes we are all cringe therefore we could all be free i was just going to say go listen to my people's joker praise and find the freedom that your cringe is trying to guide you to oh listener yeah exactly exactly so speaking of big cringe do we want to talk about dictraman's fashion show and a giant hook pulls me off stage the ultimate fancy lad is is back so i do all the oh go on go on go on go on go go i was just gonna say i joke all the time about how i like like i want like i want don as fashion what Audrey's fashion what enormous fashion i want Annie's fashion you know i i i dress like Andy from the fashion show it is just this horrifying amalgam of plaid that the human eye can't fix on with any good accuracy um goals frankly that's what i'm gonna say so what do you what do your fashion fashion show takes i i had to something endlessly adhering about to in peaks it will just be like here's something really heartbreakingly sad or depressing and then it's like but you also want some sitcom is that sprinkled in that
54:28did you enjoy did you enjoy the fashion show business i i i like the fashion show i i love i love these little sitcom elements of twin peaks right like they they make the world so much more lived in even though a lot of it is like weird and dead end and this isn't even weird and dead end right this is setting up lucy beginning to not like dictraman right this is setting up lucy finding him kind of unsufferable um so that you know this is still within to finally yeah right it's like Jesus come on like i know he looks like he has money but he doesn't but like so so benhorn we have to return to our confederate general fugue state benhorn for i think the close out of this episode so uh the save the pine weasel fashion show brings a live pine weasel into the great northern um because as as as dictraman accurately points out a stuffed pine weasel would kind of uh uh unfortunately subvert the point of saving the pine weasel wouldn't it so they bring a live on the cut what they're trying to do yeah yeah and and the live pine weasel owing to its nature as being a weasel escapes from its cage and and causes havoc at the fashion show and shenanigans ensues shenanigans um and i think that this is really important because i think that this this takes us right back in a weird way to benhorn being robberty lee right benhorn having to do uh uh lost cause civil war revisionism to find his soul and to become a better person in quotes because you you hit the nail in the head with your greenwashing comments right benhorn actually just goes full circle right he he's he's back where he started right he's just greenwashing his entire experience he's he's he's not he's not scrubbing clean his soul he's white washing it right and the kind of reaction to the live pine weasel is is very revealing right because everyone is kind of upset it kind of ruins the event benhorn takes it and stride but he's not particularly thrilled and this is this is the kind of ultimate conflict here because benhorn is is a capitalist right he has vested economic interest formally in creating the the ghost would expansion but now in stopping it because that will keep him as the biggest dog in town right though they'll keep keep him on top of the town's financial pillar right without the competition of a new fancy establishment opening up across the across the river yeah and and his kind of like the the detest for the actual pine weasel itself like the the the kind of like the the real pine weasel removed from its symbolic order as the screenwashing symbol is something he loads and cannot stand yes exactly you know the material reality is always far inferior to the image right to the thing which you can control absolutely so do you have any do you have any parting thoughts um yeah I think once again it's like uh I mean we have the introduction of normal sister we have uh Donna we have
57:43Joe's so many like really good to so many good moments for the the women of twin peaks who are once again carrying the show in so many ways um benhorn continues to be just the worst and insufferable loser who's never changed um and and finally Lucy is starting to see sense about dick-traumane and maybe maybe the end of the season is going to pull me around but I'm like I'm I now that we've gone through episode by episode I feel like uh I'm starting to get like a deeper appreciation of just what exactly it is that makes the show so good I can't think of better words to end today's discussion on thank you listeners for tuning in to this episode of the twin peaks retrospective season two rather we will be back uh with our two remaining episodes of season two next week with episode 25 on the wings of love episode 26 of variations on relations and episode 27 the path to the black lodge
58:46diet is that we have more questions than we have answers a new episode new episode plan time it's time you're going to kick out of this one if the long history of the reception owls or reveals the one thing is that we have more questions than we have answers