It's not about the fact that he likes coffee, it's about the style in which he expresses it and the absurd extent of his coffee obsession. "Damn fine coffee... And HOT!"
It's Cooper's equivalent of all the scenes where the cops chow down on donuts, or the scene in an early episode where the Horne brothers stuff their faces with the sandwiches and can't talk. The show plays up for humor the idea that these archetypal "thriller" characters have over the top, silly appetites for their favorite foods. It's a clashing mix of themes from a serious thriller story together with an Andy Griffith show sort of comedy that works because it doesn't belong.
100%, I think that’s true. I think Lynch is also big on studying base instincts and human pleasures. That includes some of the darker things we see people do but it also includes love and food. Cooper’s extremely human enjoyment of sweet Cherry Pie might even be some kind of flip side to the Black Lodge’s creamed corn cravings (the garmonbozia, meant to represent literal pain and suffering)
And looking at food could further the point of how the differences between Twin Peaks and The Return give us insight into what Lynch is trying to say (if anything). The food in Twin Peaks has this wholesome and fresh quality to it. I would have to watch through The Return again to see if there’s anything actually significant to this, but I remember characters, especially of evil cooper’s sort, eating processed chips like Cheetos and fast food burgers. And then of course there’s Norma’s new profit-oriented boyfriend trying to get her to switch away from locally sourced ingredients.
I'm only about halfway through, but I think you guys missed the rug-pull for Big Ed and Norma's happy ending. It seems like a happy ending for several characters: obviously, Ed and Norma finally end up together after several seasons and years of being kept apart by the cruel hand of fate, but also Nadine has a character growth moment and Dr Jacobi gets to play a hand in reaching someone and changing them for the better. A perfect resolution, literally decades in the making.
But the show isn't over. In just a few more episodes, Coop will decide to go back in time to save Laura, essentially erasing this timeline and replacing it with whatever's going on in the disturbing final moments of the show.
For me, this is similar to the end of season 2, where we've spent ages building up to a climactic battle between good and evil and we see Coop go to the Black Lodge to end things once and for all. We don't get to see the fight, but we see Coop return and go to the Great Northern - a seeming victory and happy ending until the last shot, where Cooper smashes his head into the mirror and starts saying "Where's Annie?" Our hero, the epitome of goodness has been corrupted or replaced. Something evil came out back in his place. Roll credits. The end.
Tolkien coined the term eucatastrophe (or good catastrophe, roughly): he believed the world was getting worse over time, but he also believed God had a plan. In a catastrophe, everything seems to be going well before a sudden unexpected calamity ruins everything; in a eucatastrophe, everything seems lost before a sudden unexpected moment of good fortune changes it all for the good. Theologically, Christ is dead, the sky is dark, and all is lost gives way to the resurrection and redemption.
In Twin Peaks and some other works, I think Lynch likes to do the opposite: give the story a moment where it seems like everything is seems resolved and we get a happy ending only to pull the rug and destroy the resolution.
(The Kingdom, Lars von Trier's Danish show inspired by Twin Peaks, pulls the same move.)
Twin Perfect’s exhaustive YouTube explainers of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are great masterpieces in themselves. Let’s petition him to do an explainer of Inland Empire.
Twin Peaks is such an incredible artistic accomplishment. A singular story that spans 2 seasons of network television, a feature film and an 18-episode streaming series is something that can and never will happen again. It is both "IP" and "anti-IP". It's incredibly accessible and light and also deeply weird and horrifying.
I was around for the first round of hype -- but the show really picked up its cult reputation in college, when people binged the VHS tapes. Lynch's POV is deeply weird, but resonates across the decades because it identifies "the evil in the woods" as the demons that feed on our pain and suffering.
In a world now obsessed with Lynch's visions of evil -- what is One Eyed Jacks if not Epstein Island? -- and filled with Garmonbozia and demands for EEEEEElectricity, Twin Peaks is the definitive horror/noir of the late 20th/early 21st century. The questions of: Who are we? What year is it? Can we save anyone? Is anyone worth saving? Are the core questions driving modern alienation and anxiety.
It's not about the fact that he likes coffee, it's about the style in which he expresses it and the absurd extent of his coffee obsession. "Damn fine coffee... And HOT!"
It's Cooper's equivalent of all the scenes where the cops chow down on donuts, or the scene in an early episode where the Horne brothers stuff their faces with the sandwiches and can't talk. The show plays up for humor the idea that these archetypal "thriller" characters have over the top, silly appetites for their favorite foods. It's a clashing mix of themes from a serious thriller story together with an Andy Griffith show sort of comedy that works because it doesn't belong.
100%, I think that’s true. I think Lynch is also big on studying base instincts and human pleasures. That includes some of the darker things we see people do but it also includes love and food. Cooper’s extremely human enjoyment of sweet Cherry Pie might even be some kind of flip side to the Black Lodge’s creamed corn cravings (the garmonbozia, meant to represent literal pain and suffering)
And looking at food could further the point of how the differences between Twin Peaks and The Return give us insight into what Lynch is trying to say (if anything). The food in Twin Peaks has this wholesome and fresh quality to it. I would have to watch through The Return again to see if there’s anything actually significant to this, but I remember characters, especially of evil cooper’s sort, eating processed chips like Cheetos and fast food burgers. And then of course there’s Norma’s new profit-oriented boyfriend trying to get her to switch away from locally sourced ingredients.
I'm only about halfway through, but I think you guys missed the rug-pull for Big Ed and Norma's happy ending. It seems like a happy ending for several characters: obviously, Ed and Norma finally end up together after several seasons and years of being kept apart by the cruel hand of fate, but also Nadine has a character growth moment and Dr Jacobi gets to play a hand in reaching someone and changing them for the better. A perfect resolution, literally decades in the making.
But the show isn't over. In just a few more episodes, Coop will decide to go back in time to save Laura, essentially erasing this timeline and replacing it with whatever's going on in the disturbing final moments of the show.
For me, this is similar to the end of season 2, where we've spent ages building up to a climactic battle between good and evil and we see Coop go to the Black Lodge to end things once and for all. We don't get to see the fight, but we see Coop return and go to the Great Northern - a seeming victory and happy ending until the last shot, where Cooper smashes his head into the mirror and starts saying "Where's Annie?" Our hero, the epitome of goodness has been corrupted or replaced. Something evil came out back in his place. Roll credits. The end.
Tolkien coined the term eucatastrophe (or good catastrophe, roughly): he believed the world was getting worse over time, but he also believed God had a plan. In a catastrophe, everything seems to be going well before a sudden unexpected calamity ruins everything; in a eucatastrophe, everything seems lost before a sudden unexpected moment of good fortune changes it all for the good. Theologically, Christ is dead, the sky is dark, and all is lost gives way to the resurrection and redemption.
In Twin Peaks and some other works, I think Lynch likes to do the opposite: give the story a moment where it seems like everything is seems resolved and we get a happy ending only to pull the rug and destroy the resolution.
(The Kingdom, Lars von Trier's Danish show inspired by Twin Peaks, pulls the same move.)
Twin Perfect’s exhaustive YouTube explainers of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are great masterpieces in themselves. Let’s petition him to do an explainer of Inland Empire.
Twin Peaks is such an incredible artistic accomplishment. A singular story that spans 2 seasons of network television, a feature film and an 18-episode streaming series is something that can and never will happen again. It is both "IP" and "anti-IP". It's incredibly accessible and light and also deeply weird and horrifying.
I was around for the first round of hype -- but the show really picked up its cult reputation in college, when people binged the VHS tapes. Lynch's POV is deeply weird, but resonates across the decades because it identifies "the evil in the woods" as the demons that feed on our pain and suffering.
In a world now obsessed with Lynch's visions of evil -- what is One Eyed Jacks if not Epstein Island? -- and filled with Garmonbozia and demands for EEEEEElectricity, Twin Peaks is the definitive horror/noir of the late 20th/early 21st century. The questions of: Who are we? What year is it? Can we save anyone? Is anyone worth saving? Are the core questions driving modern alienation and anxiety.