In ‘Twin Peaks’ Part 16, Nobody Gets Out Alive

Death consumed the events of “Part 16” of Twin Peaks: The Return, perhaps the most action-packed installment of the narrative since the end of season two all the way back in 1991.
Where to begin? Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) gets torched and is confirmed to be the son of Cooper’s doppelgänger (Kyle MacLachlan). Chantal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Hutch (Tim Roth) are gunned down by a random stranger while waiting for Cooper-as-Dougie to return home. The Dougie persona is finally laid to rest, and in so doing, Janey-E (Naomi Watts) may have lost a husband, and Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon) may have lost a father. Diane (Laura Dern) confirms the long-suspected rape at the hands of Cooper’s doppelgänger, and then admits to being a manufactured being—a tulpa—before being shot by Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell) and Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) and disappearing into the Red Room. Audrey’s (Sherilyn Fenn) sense of identity may have finally been annihilated, after a hallucinatory night at the roadhouse revealed her to actually be in some sterile, unspecified environment.
This is a simple cataloguing of the episode’s events, which belies their haunting, harrowing power. In each, a permanent loss was endured. Some of those losses were gleefully welcomed; others were tragic; still others reminded us that collateral damage will be left in the wake of this story. I want to home in on three particular deaths, namely, Dougie, Diane, and Audrey. They leave the most profound impact on the remaining characters, and each tell us a great deal about David Lynch and Mark Frost’s greater intentions.

First, to the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Many have wondered what Cooper might be like upon emerging from his Dougie Jones stupor. He had been trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years. He had been shocked into an infantile mental state upon re-entering the world. The trauma of both incidents would most assuredly have changed Cooper forever.
Nope. Cooper is Cooper, and not only that, apparently had been able to internalize his experiences with Janey-E, Sonny Jim, the Mitchum brothers (Jim Belushi & Robert Knepper), and Bushnell Mullins (Don Murray). He seemingly knows all about his doppelgänger’s plans, and the method for making tulpas. But he is also the fast-talking, straight-shooting FBI man he’s always been.

Lynch subtly signals to the audience that this change—or lack thereof—is imminent. For all the praise the original series received for its visual style, it was still hamstrung by the aesthetic limitations of broadcast network television. High-key lighting that illuminated the entire space, simple staging that would cleanly and quickly capture all necessary action, and editing that emphasized continuity of a scene all anchored the otherwise lush textures of Twin Peaks. There was a lot of convention in the show.
Needless to say, such conventions have more or less flown out the window this time around. In Cooper’s hospital room, however, those techniques re-emerge. The lighting brightens and flattens. Quick, crisp setups delineate space. Angelo Badalmenti’s theme blasts forth on the soundtrack. Cooper is his old self again, and the visual style of the show matches that, beat for beat.
For Cooper to be his old self means that Dougie has to die. Cooper has MIKE (Al Strobel) make a tulpa to replace Dougie, but for Janey-E and Sonny Jim, it means that the man who they believed to be their husband and father—a man who has restored their sense of love and family—is leaving them. Cooper must get back to Twin Peaks, but Janey-E and Sonny Jim are abandoned in the process. Dougie really has died for them. The looks of grief on Watts and Gagnon’s faces are palpable. They must now grieve. Lynch and Frost are showing us that we can’t have the satisfactory conclusion of Cooper waking up and riding to the rescue. He is causing pain and sorrow, even if he doesn’t wish to.

Diane’s “death,” if we can call it that, is a far darker sequence. It puts Dern’s incredible gifts on full display, while also deepening the mystery of Diane’s involvement with the machinations set forth by Cooper’s doppelgänger. Dern has already demonstrated the shivering, full-body pain that Diane feels toward Cooper. That master class in “Part 7” has colored and confused everything that has come since. If Diane could feel such genuine revulsion toward the man she thinks is Cooper, then how could she be conspiring with him? We don’t get the answer; rather, we see the conflict possibly living inside Diane. The text she receives—ostensibly an order to murder Gordon Cole (Lynch), Albert, and Tammy—triggers fear, and the memory of the full coordinates from Ruth Davenport. Why does she send those coordinates to Cooper’s doppelgänger? Why does she decide to finally tell the FBI agents about the night he raped her? What did that rape do to her besides shatter her? If she is a tulpa, then where is the real Diane?
Those questions matter little in the moment. In the moment, we bear witness to a woman remembering the most violent and traumatizing thing she has ever experienced. She is a psyche on fire once more, a state of being that Diane has kept hidden since that first encounter with Cooper’s doppelgänger. The revelation seems to shred what remained of her sense of identity. She may be a tulpa, but here, all that means is that she is a woman who has manufactured a sense of self in order to protect whatever remains of her life after Cooper’s doppelgänger took most of it away. The tulpa “remembering” her original form’s life symbolizes the release of repressed trauma. Diane’s death is supernatural, but it is no less devastating.

Audrey doesn’t die, per se, but her sense of self, like Diane’s, might have exploded when she realizes she is staring not at Charlie (Clark Middleton), but into a mirror. Nothing about Audrey’s storyline has been clear; in fact, it has felt as though she was re-enacting No Exit or Waiting for Godot inside her and Charlie’s home. This time, they finally make it to the roadhouse, apparently on the hunt for Billy. Edward Louis Severson III (Eddie Vedder) takes the stage, and foreshadows what’s to come with such lyrics as “I am who I am; who I was I will never be again.”
Lynch has smacked us with refracted images of the original series, warped, repurposed, made strange. He did it with Bobby Briggs and “Laura Palmer’s Theme” in “Part 4.” He did with cherry pie in “Part 11.” He did with James Hurley and “Just You and I” in “Part 13.” None match the gobsmacking ethereality of when the MC (JR Starr) announces “Audrey’s Dance.”
The song originally appeared in the first season’s third episode as a marker of Audrey’s pretensions toward femme fatale-dom. She was a girl who was enraptured with the romanticism of being an alluring woman caught up in the intrigue of a murder mystery. Her subsequent forays into prostitution and her kidnapping at the hands of her handlers took some of her innocence away. But nothing captured that essence quite like the moment she got up from her stool at the Double-R Diner and began to sway to the music.
Audrey has lost that identity now, from what we can surmise. Lynch foregrounds that distantiation by having Audrey be practically possessed by the song, an attempt to become the girl she once was. She tells Donna Hayward all the way back in 1989, “I love this music. Isn’t it too dreamy?” That feeling becomes text itself. The roadhouse patrons clear the dance floor as if on cue, and sway back and forth in unison as Audrey sways as she once did, this time bathed in an eerie purple light. It is all too intoxicating.

But it is too dreamy. A bar fight snaps the reverie, but instead of Charlie rescuing her, she is suddenly staring into a mirror, in an all-white room, her makeup and dress off, replaced by a white garment of unknown provenance. Is she in some sort of mental health institution? Is she trapped in some other supernatural space? Is she still in the coma she fell into 25 years before? We don’t know. We do know that the old Audrey can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead.
In these three “deaths,” we see Lynch warping our sense of nostalgia. To return to the old way of being is a comfort. It is also a ruse. We can never truly return to the past, even if we try. Cooper is about to confront that head on. Diane remembered it, and it destroyed her. Audrey had it ripped away from her, and she will never be the same. Whatever happens in next week’s two-part finale, one of the themes of Twin Peaks: The Return remains clear: The past is a seductive, destructive force.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

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