[Two caveats: (1) This was written the week before the airing of the two-part finale of Twin Peaks: The Return. I have zero actual knowledge of what will be in the finale (so, no knowledge of leaks). However, I do make some specific predictions about what will happen in future Twin Peaks installments, based on close analysis of previously aired installments. If you consider highly specific and (possibly?) very well-reasoned speculation to be “spoiler-y” — not an unreasonable view — and thus not to your liking, then stop reading now, and do not read this until after the finale. (I realize the picture and subtitle above themselves give something away, but they’re so vague that I don’t think the underlying import of the connections is conveyed by them alone.) (2) This essay builds upon two prior essays that I’ve written about Twin Peaks: The Return. Because of this, they are intended to be read in order — otherwise, much of the discussion of certain characters being “part of” other characters, and of numerology and other symbols, will completely lack needed context. If you have not read them, this is the first one, and this is the second.]

“I am dead, and yet I live.” Laura Palmer utters these cryptic words to Dale Cooper in Part 2 of Twin Peaks: The Return (“TP:TR”). What does she mean by this? The three essays I’ve now written about TP:TR all attempt to build up a thematically coherent answer to this question. In this essay — the final one written prior to the airing of TP:TR’s two-part finale, and which builds upon the concepts built up in the first two essays (i.e., you should really read those first — see the links above) — I argue that Twin Peaks’ core story is, from start to finish, top to bottom, a story about coping with monstrous abuse. While on some level I think viewers recognize this, I don’t think the full extent to which this permeates every aspect of Twin Peaks has been fully appreciated. In this essay, I attempt to correct that, in the process helping — hopefully! — to explain what “The Return” of TP:TR is really all about.

The very specific symbolism of Lynch’s career

Before we get on to the Twin Peaks of it all, though, I want to reflect for a minute on what seems to be a foundational creative exercise for David Lynch: the “Ricky Board.” What is a Ricky Board, according to David Lynch?

The Ricky Board is my idea, right or wrong, of what the Japanese might do to organize controlled accidents in a formal environment.

Now, the word “Japanese” in this sentence should immediately strike us as strange, I think. Why the Japanese? We’ll return to that question after we finish considering Lynch’s fascinating full explanation:

Do It: How To Make A Ricky Board (2012) This board can be any size you want. The proportions are dictated by four rows of five rickies. Each ricky is, as nearly as possible, exactly the same as every other ricky. The ricky can be an object or a flat image. The thing about the rickies is you will see them change before your eyes because you will give each ricky a different name. The names will be printed or written under each ricky. Twenty different names in all. You will be amazed at the different personalities that emerge depending on the names you give. Here is a poem: Four rows of five

Your rickies come alive

Twenty is plenty

It isn’t tricky

Just name each ricky

Even though they’re all the same

The change comes from the name

(I thank Ramon Torrente for first bringing this concept to my attention on Twitter.)

Let’s note several things about this. To begin, the spirit of the Ricky Board concept aligns well with the idea that Lynch’s art is rooted in having assigned symbolic meanings to every manner of thing. I.e., his art is in significant part based on having “named” (defined) individual numbers, letters, colors, sounds, etc., and then applied those “names” as the basic building blocks of his film scenes, paintings, and songs. They are, of course, not the only creative elements — more conventional narrative and character approaches play critical roles as well (as well as, no doubt, the ineluctable element of raw intuition, untethered from any conscious logic) — but we might think of these other elements as growing upon a trellis made up of his “named” symbols. As discussed in my first essay, since much of Lynch’s art deals with the way that light and dark forces play out in the human subconscious, this role of symbols in his art fits well thematically with our relations to our own subconscious: we usually don’t comprehend many aspects of it, but the echoes of consistent elements popping up repeatedly over time begin to make an uneven sort of intuitive sense to us (“Lynchian dream logic,” or some variant, as critics have often been called)— especially when wedded to macro narrative elements.

The “what is your name?” theme of Twin Peaks aligns well with the “naming” approach of Lynch’s Ricky Board concept.

While, in some sense, no two people will ever look at a single piece of art exactly the same way — because we all bring our own unique experiences and worldviews to the table — this effect is magnified in art like Lynch’s, that directly apes the workings of the subconscious in all its Rorschachian ineffability. Lynch, understandably, given his belief in the connection between unity and diversity (per my earlier essay, one thing for Lynch is never just one thing — it’s many things, each of which are themselves many things, and so on and so forth, with all this infinity nevertheless all contained within one single unity), encourages the multiplicity of interpretations of his work, and — unlike, say, many TV showrunners who immediately do multiple interviews after finales discussing the meaning of their work in great detail (even while making disclaimers that they don’t want to do so — though don’t get me wrong, I love reading these things) — is more resistant than most creators to intruding on the viewers’ own personal connection to a work by suggesting a more authoritative reading of What It All Means. (As Sherilyn Fenn said in an interview recently of David Lynch, “There’s no one way to understand it — however you interpret it, he would tell you that’s correct, and mean it. It’s not about his ego getting one thing across. He’s about all of us being connected on a larger level.”)

The “four rows of five” concept also calls to mind our discussion of the role of hands in TP as symbols of the light and dark elements of the self. “Five” represents a hand (five fingers, see); four rows of five, then, represents the two hands apiece of two different people — much as, in the first essay, we looked at the interaction of Laura’s and Dale’s hands in their scenes together. Similarly, people can themselves represent a single hand; see, the super-triangle discussed in my first essay of Gordon, Albert, and Tammy, which has on its second tier four subdivisions: Mr. C (1.1, or the right hand of darkness), Sarah (1.2, or the left hand of darkness), Laura (2.1, or the right hand of lightness), and Dale (2.2, or the left hand of lightness).

But what about the reference to “the Japanese” in his introduction? Here I think we can understand it in at least two ways. First, as discussed in each of my previous essays, TP has a major “nuclear” metaphor baked into its core; in this metaphor, “the Japanese” (equivalent, in some ways, to “Judy”), who are intimately acquainted with nuclear destruction, are representative of the victims of catastrophe trying to cope with the fallout and rebuild their metaphorically-splintered-selves anew, ordering the chaos. (Remember, the Japanese/Judy in this case represent a side of Laura, who also, in one sense (though not in another, perhaps!), set off the “bomb” in the first place; as I’ve explored earlier, this is a very complicated metaphor, and it is only a metaphor. Thus — and I cannot stress this enough — my statement that TP equates “the Japanese” with “victims trying to rebuild themselves” should not be read to suggest that Lynch / Frost literally equate real-world Japanese persons with victims, any more than TP’s equation of “right hand” with “darkness” should be read as literally suggesting that our real-world right hands are full of darkness. One may nonetheless still object to art, no matter the context, using an entire nationality or similar category of persons as a symbol — but let’s please at least try to understand the complexity, and underlying humanistic themes (e.g., unity out of diversity, and the fact that we are all contained in one another, all part of each other), of the context in which it does in fact seem to be used here.)

David Lynch, Angel of Totality (2009). Note the use of letters, numbers (seven lights), a hand, a triangle, electricity, and colors — all central symbolic elements of Lynch’s work.

Second, “Japanese” starts with a “J,” a letter that appears to hold a special 2-mode meaning in TP. As alluded to in my second essay, TP — and Lynch himself — seem to use a special symbolic alphabet of their own, where each letter has been assigned a specific meaning. Now, a full exploration of this concept is well beyond what I can do justice to in the time that I have to write this essay (in order to post it prior to the finale of TP:TR, that is), and I also do not claim to have a full understanding of Lynch / Frost / TP:TR’s symbolic use of the alphabet, which seems to be both very complex and also possibly quite irregular / loose in its usage of its symbolic rules — much like, say, the poetry of T.S. Eliot displays “constant vacillation between adherence to, and departure from, rhyme and regular meter.” I am, nonetheless, strongly inclined to believe that such symbolic meaning is intended. I note that Lynch’s second student film, from 1968, is called “The Alphabet,” and that his paintings and sketches are suffused with letters and texts displayed in curious ways. (I credit Ramon Torrente for helping to interest me in Lynch’s artwork. See examples of such art above and below this paragraph.) In a 2013 article about an art exhibition by Lynch at Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles — “Naming,” it was appropriately called —the curator of the exhibit, Brett Littman, gave several interesting quotes about Lynch’s art that are of some relevance here:

“‘David Lynch Naming’ highlights how in the Lynchian universe the use of words, sentence fragments, and the act of naming something is never a simple gesture…. David is very into transcendental meditation, and there is a spiritual belief that when the gods name things they come into existence. To me, that felt like how David described his own process of naming…. David does not title many of his works but for this show but I think there is always some fragment of text draws him to the work in the first place. To me it’s clear that the core of his images is the text itself, that’s what drew his eye.”

I think that many additional layers of meaning are baked into the dialogue, names, and on-screen text of TP:TR. To allude to just one example, which I’ll have to try to fully explicate on some other occasion: I believe William Hastings’ simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious extended blubbering about how “we were gonna go to the Bahamas” (a mixture of 1/2/3 symbols) so as to “drink mixed drinks on the beach” (2 symbols), “soak up the sun” (1 symbols), and “go scuba diving,” (3/1.2/2.1 mix) was, on one level, a touching poem of sorts (in TP:TR’s own symbolic world of letter-assignments) about trying to find unity of 1- and 2-ness in loving romantic relationships with another person.

David Lynch, My Arm Was Grabbed Hard (2010), from: David Lynch, the Unified Field, by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Senior Curator Robert Cozzolino. In addition to the key use of letters in the work, note the recurrent important of hands in his work.

(A note: the letter “o” appears to be capable of nullifying the letters around it — think BOB, where the O nullifies the non-1 letters around it, or “Garmonbozia,” where the O nullifies the non-1 letters of m, n, b, and z. Yes, I realize this may all sound a little tin foil hat-ish absent a deep dive. I mention the role of the “o” here only in case someone should notice that I’ve assigned “B” a non-1 meaning in the above paragraph and object that, no, that can’t be right, since “BOB,” the ultimate 1, is a veritable B sandwich. It’s the “o” that changes things, I believe, nullifying the Bs.)

Teresa Banks and the repercussions of taking the ring

FWWM has a moderately (in)famous scene at its outset that underscores to viewers the feasibility of fishing out intentional, specific meanings from the ocean of symbolism under TP’s surface: the “Lil the dancer” scene five minutes into the movie. Using the knowledge and context we’ve reviewed in my first two essays and the beginning of this one, I believe that I now understand the gist of the hidden meanings that Lynch intended to convey in the scene. I think it makes sense to review this in the reverse order of what we usually might: I’ll tell you the conclusion first, and then go back to review the evidence first. (Otherwise, the piece-by-piece reading of evidence might be too tedious or difficult to follow, absent the context of where it’s heading towards; and moreover, I was aided in decoding the scene by already having a sense of what I thought it might be getting at, given context from the rest of TP.)

The meaning of the ring

As reviewed in my first essay, Teresa Banks was a part of Laura Palmer. I mean, just look at this sequence of moments in FWWM — once we understand the 1/2/3 concept of persons that TP employs, this seems pretty obvious:

This flashback scene occurs after Phillip Gerard (the decent form of MIKE) pulls up next to Leland and Laura while they are out driving, then begins shouting a number of things at them: “You stole the corn! I had it canned over the store! And miss [addressing Laura], the look on her face when it was opened! There was a stillness. [a dog barks] Like the Formica table top! The thread will be torn, Mr. Palmer! The thread will be torn! [then, holding up his right hand, with green ring displayed on his pinky finger] It’s him!” There’s a lot packed into those few lines; let’s just focus on two aspects.

One, he seems to be talking about Teresa Banks. We saw Teresa wearing the ring earlier in the movie; now Phillip is displaying the ring and shouting about “her.” He also seems to be referring specifically to Teresa’s death. Creamed corn, as we know, is garmonbozia (pain and suffering). Corn by itself, however, I believe is not a bad thing at all — think of, e.g., the large photo of corn in Gordon Cole’s office. Phillip had the corn protected (“canned”), but then Leland “stole” the canned corn and “opened” it, causing a “stillness” for her (i.e., he killed her).

Two, Phillip seems to be trying to tell Laura that BOB, the man who has been abusing her, is Leland, her father (“it’s him!”). Part of the language that he seems to be using to convey this idea is very curious: “the thread will be torn!” Keep that language in mind, we’ll return to it later.

It is immediately after this confrontation — after being accused in front of his daughter of being “him” — that Leland has the flashback to the scene pictured above. “You look just like my Laura,” he says to Teresa’ picture. Then, lying on top of Teresa in bed (her left hand hidden, her right hand smoking), he places his (right) hand over her eyes: “who am I?” he asks. “I don’t know,” she replies. “That’s right,” he replies, apparently relieved. At this point, Laura, sitting next to her father in the car, interrupts his flashback: “Dad? Who was that?”

It seems clear from this that Laura and Leland are both living in denial of the rape and incest, the unthinkable abuse, that Leland is inflicting on Laura. They obviously arrive at this space of denial from very different places; Leland is trying to find a way to live with himself, given what a monster he’s become, while Laura is trying to find a way to live, period, given what monstrously traumatic things Leland, her own father, has done to her. Thus, both tell themselves the story that Leland is not raping his own daughter, he is “having an affair with Teresa.” (Just as, later in FWWM, we will see Laura and Leland both struggling with whether Laura knows that it is not just “BOB,” but her father, who visits Laura in her bed at night.)

At other points in the movie (pictured above), we learn more about Teresa and Leland’s knowledge, or denial, of the reality of what’s actually going on. Teresa, at Leland’s urging, invites some of her “girlfriends” to show up to one of their motel meetings; specifically, she brings Ronette (another part of Laura, likely her 2.1) and Laura (or, technically, probably just Laura’s 1.1, identically played by Sheryl Lee). When Leland shows up and sees Laura among the girls present, he “chicken[s] out.” Meanwhile, after Teresa notices Leland respond this way to seeing Ronette and Laura, she calls Jacques Renault to determine if Leland is in fact one of their fathers. (A scene in the Missing Pieces, deleted from FWWM, shows Teresa after this call apparently trying to blackmail Leland by threatening to inform Laura — whom she still doesn’t seem to recognize as part of herself — that her father is, at a minimum, an adulterer.)

Both of these near-brushes with knowledge of the true reality of what’s going on are connected up with the extradimensional mythology of TP (as seen in the shots pictured above). Teresa is shown to be wearing the green ring — the same green ring that the Arm offered Laura in her dream, and that Phillip Gerard displayed to Laura while shouting “the thread will be torn!” and “it’s him!” Moreover, when Leland leaves Teresa, he sees Mrs. Tremond’s grandson jumping and wearing a mask that looks very much like the Jumping Man’s painted/sharp-nosed face. The confluence of all these elements is very intentional, for these core supernatural aspects of TP are intimately connected to TP’s core emotional theme of denial-for-survival.

In my first essay I argued that TP:TR has a central analogy between Laura’s decision to wear the ring and mankind’s decision to create and use nuclear weapons to end World War II. With all the context above now in mind — including the reminder that Teresa Banks, the first part of Laura to be murdered by Leland, wore the ring even “before” the murder at the end of FWWM— we can understand just how far-reaching that analogy is. For the ring represents Laura’s splintering of herself to “survive” — that is, Laura’s splintering of herself, including “killing” more knowledgeable parts of herself, to protect other parts of herself from having to face the truth of the horrible reality of her secrets, instead allowing those parts to live in a story where none of these monstrous things are their reality— just as the bomb represents the splintering of the atom for mankind to “survive,” and the killing of parts of itself in a stated effort to help other parts of itself live.

There are several elements of this theme worthy of discussion here. We’ll address them in turn.

Revisiting the ending of FWWM with this reading in mind

First, let’s note how well this reading fits with the end of FWWM. (Much, much more could be explored about these themes in connection with the rest of the movie — which systematically rotates between the impact of this all on, and the sinking disharmony/splintering in, Laura’s 1.1 (her “relationship” with BOB, most notably), her 1.2 (her relationship with Bobby), her 2.1 (her relationship with James — which Leland is notably jealous of), and her 2.2 (her relationship with Harold; not to mention her relationship with Donna, her 2, being interspersed throughout all of this).) Leland intervenes in a night that Laura and Ronette are spending with Jacques and Leo — two men who are seemingly a part of Leland’s personal triangle set, and a further demonstration of how Leland and Laura are, again, distancing themselves from the full reality of the situation. Even after Laura had all the dots connected for her earlier in the film, seeing Leland leave the house right after she saw BOB, she nonetheless still strained to maintain a state of denial, yelling to herself: “No. No, it’s not him! It’s not!” (Notably, shortly after that scene earlier in the movie, Laura has the dream where the Arm directly offers her the ring.)

Leland forcibly takes Laura and Ronette to the abandoned train car. Now Laura is seemingly crystal clear about what has been happening to her, fully fathoming Leland’s abuse. She cries and screams uncontrollably: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” As we reviewed in my first essay, Ronette starts to say some very interesting things at this point. Now that we’re starting to grasp more fully the core meaning of the green ring, let’s take a look at them again and see what else we notice:

Ronette says: “Father. If I die now will you come and see me?” Very curiously, immediately after she starts saying this second sentence the camera cuts to a shot of Laura looking into a mirror that Leland has placed on the ground in front of her — as if the sentence is, in a sense, being said by both Laura and her other present part, her “reflection,” Ronette. Ronette then says, crying: “Don’t look at me. I’m so dirty. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I’m — I’m sorry.” Listening to this, Laura’s distraught crying suddenly ceases, as a look of sudden awareness appears on her face. Immediately after this, an angel with two clasped hands appears floating in front of Ronette. (See above and below for pictures of all these moments.) Upon seeing this, Ronette’s hands are suddenly no longer bound, and Phillip Gerard arrives outside the train car to help Ronette open the door; Leland hits her on the head next to the open door, and she tumbles out, injured but still alive. The door closes again behind Leland; the ring appears on the floor in front of Laura, and she puts it on. Leland then murders her.

Ronette’s question — “Father. If I die now will you come and see me?” — I believe has multiple intended meanings: (1) Ronette is praying (which fits with the context given the religious symbol, an angel, that then seems to intervene on her behalf). (2) Ronette is wondering whether resigning herself to death is possibly the only way to stop Leland, her true father (as she is a part of Laura), from abusing her. Death, surely, will stop you from abusing me, won’t it? (3) She is asking the “good” (or at least less monstrous!) side of her father — for surely, we have seen that part of him at times in TP, horrified and disgusted with himself for what he has done to his daughter (or, alternately, in deep denial that he could ever do such a thing to a daughter that he loves) — whether he will remember her, and visit her gravesite, should she die. (On this interpretation, one can construe her request as either a symptom of stubbornly persisting denial about the true monstrosity of her father, or possibly as a belief that deep within her father there is still a part, somewhere, that truly loves her as a decent father should.) And finally, the most important, key intended meaning of the question, which — as the shot of the mirror suggests — both Laura and Ronette are simultaneously asking:

(4) If the part of me that fully grasps the horrific abuse you’ve subjected me to my entire life dies— if my unity of self is killed, shattered into now-free-floating component parts— then will that, finally, be a way for at least parts of me to keep living my life, free from abuse? Might those parts of myself be able to in some sense carry on with life, living a story, a useful fiction, in which their father has not been repeatedly raping them?

This, I now believe, is the key reading of the question — as well as, in one sense, the foundational idea of all of TP— and it appears to be borne out by the remainder of the scene. As we discussed, Ronette then says: “Don’t look at me. I’m so dirty. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I’m — I’m sorry.” The part of Laura that is represented by Ronette — part of her 2 side (her 2.1, I believe) — is simply “not ready” to deal with the “dirty” truth of her abuse at the hands of her father. If absolutely forced to face that reality, then it will so warp that part of her (and thus, Laura as a whole) that, in a sense, her soul will curdle and she herself will become abusive and destructive to those around her. In other words: she will become inhabited by BOB, allowing him to possess her soul. This point is underscored by the fact that, immediately after Ronette asks the question discussed above, about whether “Laura’s” “death” (and consequent deep denial and shattering of the unity of self that goes along with it) is the only answer to their problems, Laura then looks in the mirror and has a vision of what will happen if she doesn’t go this route. She will be “inhabited” by “BOB”:

We understand now why, upon hearing Ronette straightforwardly (and apologetically!) tell her that she’s simply not ready to deal with reality, Laura has a look of sudden understanding about what she needs to do. She needs to “wear the ring” — i.e., kill and splinter herself in order to save herself. When the angel then appears floating in front of Ronette with two clasped hands (a mirror of the unity displayed in FWWM’s final scene of Dale and Laura together in front of the other angel), it signifies Laura’s realization that she can possibly one day piece back together the fractured shards of herself and find a unified, harmonious, and even fully-awake-to-reality life — but only if she first saves her soul from utter annihilation (i.e., “inhabitation by BOB”) by taking the only route available to her, desperately flawed though it may be: deep, deep denial. As we explored in great depth in my first essay when discussing Dougie, denial — or escapism, perhaps, is a better word— can at times be an arguably unavoidably necessary fix, creating for one’s psyche the breathing room needed to assemble the life tools required if one is to be ready to face with clear eyes and no illusions a horrifying reality.

Laura’s interactions with Leland in this scene add further context to this reading:

Laura begins the train car scene by asking Leland: “Are you gonna kill me?” On one level, obviously, she is fearfully asking her abuser whether he is literally going to kill her. On another level, though, I believe she is trying to ask the slightly less monstrous side of her father — the non-BOB yet self-aware kernel of Leland that’s still left — if he will assist her in her wish to splinter her self and “kill” the part of her that’s aware of what’s going on. Shortly after that, Leland holds up her diary pages to her (exhibiting her at least temporary awareness that her father is BOB) and says plaintively: “I always thought you knew it was me.” I now believe he means this: of all the absolutely horrific things that Leland has done to his daughter, the one thing that the kernel of self-aware non-monstrosity in Leland has always believed to be the very worst thing he’s done to his daughter is that he has turned her into someone like himself. I.e., someone “inhabited by BOB.” Now that that kernel in Leland perhaps realizes that at least in this limited sense it’s not too late for Laura — that if he in some sense twisted sense “assists” her by “killing her,” i.e., allowing her at least to maintain her survival technique of escapism — then perhaps Laura can “escape BOB” and one day somehow find peace and harmony.

(BOB, on the other hand, is thrilled to understand that Laura didn’t realize until now that Leland is the one who has been doing this all to her: as he says enthusiastically says to her in this scene, “I never knew you knew it was me.” Why is he thrilled? Because now he understands that — where his previous desires to “inhabit Laura” may have gone unfulfilled not because Laura was self-aware and yet harmonious enough fend off the soul-warping consequences of the knowledge, but because she didn’t then fully understand the reality of what Leland was doing to her — now his attempts to “inhabit” her may succeed given her newfound, and possibly soul-warping, knowledge.)

That kernel within Leland that wants to in some twisted but genuine way “help” Laura finds some backup when Phillip Gerard shows up outside the train car. As you can see in the picture above, after Ronette has exited the car, Phillip holds flush against the train car the part of his torso where his left arm used to be. Recall that Phillip is part of MIKE, the 2 to BOB’s 1. (Not to be confused with the Jumping Man, who is the 2 to BOB’s 3.) As explained in TP’s original two seasons, after MIKE “saw the face of God” he cut off his left arm; i.e., he severed his direct connection to BOB, creating the Arm that we’ve seen so often in TP, and who in fact fittingly — given his status as a living embodiment of the splintering of the self — offers Laura the ring in her dream. (Interestingly, then BOB himself is part of a fractured whole. This will no doubt be part of the endgame of Twin Peaks’ fourth and final season, should it occur —MIKE finally confronting BOB once and for all, and somehow resolving their fractured selfhood. Obviously the characters we care more about will almost certainly be centrally involved in that process as well.)

One might read this move by Phillip Gerard several ways. One, he’s the light side of MIKE (part of his 2 side) and he’s seeing if he can get into the car and save Laura. Two, he’s the dark side of MIKE (part of his 1 side) and — by putting his left torso flush against the train car — he’s briefly reuniting with BOB and further empowering him to murder Laura. Three — by far the best reading, I think — he’s the light side of MIKE and, by briefly reuniting with BOB, he’s helping to force BOB and his vessel, Leland, to acquiesce to Laura’s desire to avoid inhabitation, and survive, by “being killed.”

BOB/Leland are therefore forced to “kill” Laura, compelled by the combined power of: Laura’s wearing of the ring; the intervention of the light side of MIKE (who, after all, can very well relate to the general idea of what Laura is trying to accomplish); and the desire of the less-monstrous, self-aware kernel of Leland to “help” his daughter in the only remaining way available to him. In both a protest against these forces by BOB, as well as likely a protest by the less-monstrous side of Leland against the repugnance of what he’s about to do (even though he understands Laura’s desire for it), Leland yells “Don’t make me do this!” before finally murdering Laura. Or “murdering Laura,” as we should continue to say, for as we have been describing, this is really more of a symbolic “murder” of Laura’s unified self and self-awareness — and as we discussed in my first essay, there are some strong suggestions that this “murder” is likely only happening in the subconscious 1 and/or 2 realities of TP, while in the 3rd reality Laura remains alive in some sense to likely revealed in Part 18 of TP:TR — most likely, I’d guess, a coma (which even in reality 3 would in an important sense only be a “symbolic” coma, I’d guess, since many of the sundry fractured parts of Laura have seemingly continued to carry on their existence in that reality and the others).

There’s one last thing worth noting in this subsection. After Teresa puts on the ring, her left arm goes numb for three days — and likewise after Laura is proffered the ring in her dream, she is shown waking up rubbing her left hand (as well as looking at her closed white door to her bedroom — all symbolizing, we are left to assume, the incipient denial/escapism setting into the parts of Laura). Similarly, when we first see the original, tulpa Dougie Jones briefly in Part 3 — wearing the green ring, no less— the very first full line of dialogue is this question by Jade about his left arm: “Dougie, what is wrong with your arm?” To which he responds, “I don’t know. I think it fell asleep.”

Now, if you recall from my first essay, I believe that all of the beginning Dougie scenes — including those of the original, tulpa Dougie — are inversions of the story for Dale Cooper that will develop at the end of TP:TR. Thus, if Dougie’s left hand has fallen asleep at the beginning of his story in TP:TR, then we can expect that Dale Cooper’s right hand should wake up at the end of his story in TP:TR. Further recall from that essay that Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer represent the two hands of a single, larger “self” — Dale is the 2, and Laura is the 1. This means that, in one significant sense, Laura is Dale’s right hand. Thus, using the rules we’ve been teasing out from TP, we should fully expect that Laura Palmer will “wake up” — from her escapist denial (at least partially), and more literally from a likely coma — in the very last scene of TP:TR. With Dale Cooper by her side, his right hand on her left shoulder just as Jade has at the beginning of Dougie’s first scene (with Dougie propped upright against the wall as if he is in a coma), and just as Dale and Laura do in the final scene of FWWM.

Assessing the effect of Laura’s decision to take the ring on “others”

Let’s now assess the impact of Laura’s decision to take the ring on “others.” I put quotations around “others” because, as we shall see, these characters we will be assessing are in certain ways either part of Laura, or part of the same whole of which Laura herself is but a part.

First, let’s recall that Leland, at one point in FWWM while leaving a visit with Teresa, saw Mrs. Tremond’s grandson jumping around while wearing a mask that looks very similar to the Jumping Man’s face. Notably, we also see this grandson (and his grandmother) in the room above the convenience store during the Phillip Jeffries montage flashback earlier in the movie. In that scene, after lines and images of garmonbozia and the “formica table” (the latter of which we saw Phillip Gerard mention in the apparent context of describing Teresa Banks’ death — indicating that it, like garmonbozia, is likely a negative symbol of victimhood), Jeffries says: “It was a dream. We live inside a dream.” We then immediately see the grandson point with his right hand (seemingly in the direction of where BOB is sitting) and say: “Fell a victim.” We also see him holding a white mask (with no eye-holes) to his face with his right hand, occasionally peeking out behind it, the image alternating between him peeking out behind the mask and a monkey peeking out behind the mask.

The message in all this appears to be consistent with the escapist/protective denial theme that we’ve been discussing. “It” — BOB himself , in a fundamental sense — is a dream (indeed, BOB is shown to us while this is being said), a fiction created as a survival mechanism to disassociate oneself from the full horror of the incestuous rape. BOB “fell [the] victim,” not Leland — and at any rate, the grandson has his eye-hole-less white mask on, preventing himself from seeing any of the situation, BOB or not, cloaking himself in happily ignorant 2-ness with only brief glimmers around the edge of the mask making their way in. The “jumping” aspect, moreover, as displayed in the earlier brief grandson scene with Leland, appears to likewise be an attempt to escape out of any association with the horrible 1-ness at issue; remember that 1-ness can be symbolized by things low to the ground, so by “jumping” one seeks to evade this low, 1-ness zone. This all, moreover, seems thoroughly consistent with the traumatized-self concept of the monkey and “Judy” that we examined in my prior essay — and rightly so, given that we see the monkey peer out from behind the mask as well.

Now, as the éminence grise of TP fan-theorizing, John Thorne, has long ago pointed out, Jeffries said that he attended this meeting (indeed, he is the one describing it to us) — which suggests that he must be one of the people we see attending the meeting. Thorne has theorized that Jeffries is represented here by the monkey itself. That may well be right. While, as I discussed in my previous essay, the monkey seems intimately connected to Laura’s “Judy” concept, I think it also makes sense to think of the monkey as a universal sign for anyone’s “Judy”-ish concept.

But I want to suggest a different (or at least, additional — for they can both be true) answer here. In this scene Jeffries is, or at least is one vessel within, the Jumping Man (whom I believe to be the 2 to BOB’s 3). Indeed, we’ve seen evidence in TP:TR that this might be true, as some sharp-eyed viewers have spotted what appears to be Jeffries’ face, seemingly alternating with Sarah Palmer’s face, in the images of the Jumping Man that briefly flicker before teapot/percolator-Jeffries’ appearance in Part 15. (I believe the twitter account of the Diane Podcast was the first one to bring this to my attention.) Moreover, it makes some sense. Look at the steam/smoke emanating from where the Jumping Man is standing in the FWWM convenience store scene — it is, in fact, very similar to the steam/smoke emanating from Jeffries’ teapot in Part 15. And the symbolism of using a teapot to represent a consequence of the splintering of the self (as we’ve considered the use of the ring to be metaphor for) connects well with the fact “Operation Teapot” is the name of “a series of fourteen [!] nuclear test explosions conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the first half of 1955.” (The name of the fourth nuclear device used in that operation? “Linda”! Indeed, looking through the list of U.S. nuclear tests yields a host of potential connections to names in Twin Peaks lore — Charlie, Sycamore, Mike, Uncle, etc. — something I first saw suggested here, albeit not the connection to Operation Teapot.)

Why would Jeffries be possessed by Jumping Man? He’s not a member of Laura’s personal 1/2/3 triangle set, seemingly (although he was an apparent friend to her “Judy”) — and at any rate, if Jumping Man is part of BOB, and Laura has avoided possession by BOB, then it wouldn’t make sense for Jumping Man to be part of her anyways. Could Laura have nonetheless in some sense “caused’ Jeffries’ possession by the Jumping Man? I believe so.

As we were recently reminded, Laura and Dale are two hands of a single whole (albeit a fractured whole for practically the entirety of TP to date). This means that if one of them does something, it can impact the other, even if they’re worlds apart from one another. Thus Laura’s decision to take the ring intimately impacted not just herself, but her complementary hand, Dale Cooper. When Laura took the ring, I think it in some important sense caused Dale to take the ring also, splintering and twisting his self-hood as well. Here, the interpretation gets a little murky: if the ring saved Laura from inhabitation by BOB, then how could it have in some sense also caused Dale’s subsequent inhabitation by BOB? I can think of several possible answers. One, Laura is a 1 and Dale is a 2; in a twisted way, it takes a great deal of 1-mode strength to “kill” oneself as Laura did [a quick aside: I do not think I am recasting Laura as a committer of suicide in the traditional sense, given the highly idiosyncratic symbolic / non-literal sense in which she “killed” herself here, or at least allowed herself to be], a particular type of strength that Dale, a 2, perhaps did not have. Two, Dale’s job as a 2 is in part to try to order the chaos. Indeed, he’s an FBI agent. As the agent investigating her case (fittingly), he is incapable of failing to see, on some fundamental level, the horrific abuse that Laura (his other half, someone who he in an important sense loves) suffered at the hands of her own father. I think this made the dark side of his splintered self particularly susceptible to being warped, and then “inhabited by BOB.”

Earlier I said that BOB himself is, in one significant sense, just a dream, a survival mechanism. Does that mean that Dale Cooper himself — not his BOB-infected doppelganger — has been committing all these horrific crimes to which Mr. C is linked? No, I don’t think so. Because just as Laura has been creating fictions to cope with her ugly reality, so too has Dale been creating fictions to cope with the very same ugly reality of his splintered other half. One might think of his crimes as stories, fictional artwork even, that Dale’s splintered selfhood has created as a safer outlet for the tremendous amounts of pain in life, a type of therapy. (A parallel will immediately jump out here: TP itself — the shows / movie that we’ve all been watching — is a form of artwork that explores inner darkness and violence, replete with all manner of fictional horrific crimes.) In this sense, then, it may (may!) be correct after all to say that BOB has never inhabited Dale Cooper in the same way he inhabited Leland — and that the meaning of the ring is then perhaps consistent in its impact on Laura and Dale. Admittedly, this reading of Mr. C’s “crimes,” if one looks at it that way, raise many questions as to how, precisely, the overall story of TP:TR might hang together, given that we’ve seen many other characters interact with Mr. C — though perhaps no more questions than are raised by the many other central concepts discussed in the essay for which we’ve recounted substantial direct evidence in TP:TR (persons being split into personal 1/2/3 triangle sets; the existence of multiple / subconscious realities; tulpas; and the list goes on). And also keep in mind that many (all?) of the crimes that Mr. C commits are against persons representing parts of himself — including against Laura’s half of himself, such as in his rape of Audrey. (Which is, in a sense, arguably a symbolic symmetrical — this show *loves* symmetry — “violation” of Laura’s half of the greater whole in return for Laura’s initial “violation” of Dale’s half by taking the ring, splintering self-hood, and in a sense causing him to also take the ring. Given that I believe the ultimate resolution of harmony in the greater whole requires Dale and Laura, the two halves of the whole, uniting in a shared love, I expect that a subtext theme of any possible future fourth season of TP might be (and arguably already is in TP) a question that Candie asks in great heaving sobs at one point this season: How can you ever love me after what I did?)

As with many things, I suspect Lynch and Frost would genuinely encourage, and in an important sense intend in the first place, these multiple possible readings and the internal open-ended-questions of self-hood that they raise.

Jeffries, Chet, and Sam

Let’s revisit the Jeffries scene from FWWM once more, to see if we can find evidence to support the hypothesis that he is part of Dale Cooper, and is in fact inhabited by the Jumping Man. Only this time we’ll use the special video version of it I created above, which adds to the original scene two elements. First, it’s synced up with Gordon Cole’s flashback to the same scene in Part 14 of TP:TR (specifically, it’s synced up at the moment when Dale tells Cole: “Gordon, it’s 10:10am on February 16th” — see the 7:05 mark in the video). As we saw in my previous essay, Lynch and Frost appear to have enjoyed creating such moments of synchronicity in TP:TR, where — using a shared element between two disparate scenes (like the flashback here to the scene from FWWM) as a hint that, once synced up side-by-side, the two different TP parts may in a sense comment upon one another in sometimes interesting ways.

Second, I’ve added a clock to the bottom of the video that’s synced to read “10:10:00 am” when Dale begins to tell Cole that it’s 10:10am. (Apologies for the clutter behind the first “10” on the clock; video editing is a skill I “learned” about two weeks ago, so I’m still very much improvising.) Knowing TP’s love of numerology, and recognizing how otherwise strange it was that Dale began the scene by stating the time so specifically, I wondered if syncing the scene to that actual time would yield any interesting information. And, indeed, it does: Phillip Jeffries first appears on screen precisely at the 10:11:00am mark. As we’ve reviewed in my earlier essays, “11” indicates that a 1 (even if only a 2.1, like Jeffries here) has become inhabited by another 1 (even if only a 1.2, like Jumping Man here). (The clock also yields other interesting moments in the video, some of which are noted in the text in the video, but in the interest of time and space we won’t explore those here.)

Let’s just note a few quick other things about the video before moving on: (1) at the 7:27 mark, when the dialogue in one video is “Phillip? Is that you?” in the other video we see Cooper turn around to face us at that exact moment. We are then shown a close-up of a TV image of Cooper’s face while, in the other video, Gordon says: “Meet the long-lost Phillip Jeffries.” These strongly suggest that Jeffries is a part of Cooper. (2) Around the 8:10 mark, as Cooper steps away we see Jeffries immediately behind where he had been. (3) When, at the 8:53 mark, Jeffries points at Cooper and says “who do you think THIS is THERE?” the Jumping Man image that then materializes on screen appears directly between where Cooper and Jeffries are standing, partly covering each of them. This all lines up with Jeffries being part of Cooper, and inhabited by the Jumping Man. Moreover, the fact that the dialogue in the scene so closely links Desmond’s sudden disappearance to Jeffries’ sudden disappearance suggests that Desmond is linked to Jeffries, and thus likely to also be a part of Cooper’s personal 1/2/3 set (see the 10:45 video (not clock) mark, and the 11:06 mark as well (which curiously corresponds precisely to the 10:04:00 mark on the clock, suggesting the unnatural 4-ness of Jeffries and/or Desmond)). Finally, remember that literally the very last thing that happens in FWWM before this scene with Jeffries starts is that Chet takes the ring.

Let’s return now to the “Lil the dancer” scene we briefly mentioned much earlier. You might consider taking a quick look at it again now to refresh your memory:

The Lil scene.

Ironically, the actual meanings that the characters decode from the symbols here — “the eyes are the local authorities,” “there’s gonna be a lot of legwork involved,” “the sheriff’s uncle is in federal prison,” etc. — are not the real ones that the scene is trying to convey. The very first time I watched FWWM, I read this scene merely as a funny, self-deprecating scene where Lynch plays off of his reputation in some quarters as someone who employs impenetrable or self-indulgent symbolism. (It may, perhaps, also be read as gentle needling of the fancifulness of some of his would-be interpreters. [Us?!]) The interpretations the characters come up with, after all, involve leaps of logic that are impossible for viewers to take and reapply as direct tools in interpreting the rest of the movie. I now believe, however, that the scene has some very specific meanings in mind. So what IS the scene trying to convey, then? (Fair warning: I’m sure that some of my interpretations in what’s to follow will seem so hyperspecific and, in cases, convoluted, that they couldn’t possibly be correct; but maybe let’s wait to judge the overall weight of the cumulative interpretation until the end, keeping in mind that this interpretation is being done against the backdrop of all the other scenes we’ve discussed in my prior two essays. And yes, some of the individual interpretations here may be stretches — but definitely not others, I think.)

The scene begins with Chet Desmond landing in an airplane, symbolizing that we have moved down to a lower area of the subconscious. (Emphasizing the levels of subconscious at play here, there is a wooden ladder with three rungs visible behind Gordon.) Gordon asks Chet to “give Sam Stanley the glad hand” — i.e., the friendly hand, an indication that Sam will be acting as the 2 to Chet’s 3 (i.e., Sam is Chet’s left hand). Emphasizing Sam’s 2-ness, Gordon says “Sam’s the man” — recall the discussion in my prior essay of “M” and “man” indicating 2-ness — “who cracked the Whitman case,” which, with its inverted Ms (i.e., Ws), is a somewhat more ominous sign (Waldo, Windom, the “Great Wendt,” etc. — although the existence of Wally Brando perhaps suggests that “W’s” need not always be bad).

Curiously, hanging from Sam’s right shoulder is a dark green case with a knob on it that looks conspicuously like a clock’s hands; if it were a clock, the hands would seem to be pointed roughly at 5 and 11. (As the two sides of the knob — i.e., the clock hands — are roughly the same size, we can assume that it’s the 5 and 11 that are important, rather than the specific time indicated, like 11:25 or 5:55.) Since it’s on his right arm, it seems likely that the 5 is meant to indicate the right hand. The 11, on the other hand, is a symbol that we’ve seen repeatedly now; again, it indicates that another 1 (an extradimensional 4, seemingly, since it’s capable of inhabiting another) has now taken residence with the original 1 at issue. Since Sam has nobody representing his own sub-1 in the scene (i.e., his right hand, or the 1 to his 3), and further since Chet has nobody representing his own sub-1 in the scene (his right hand / the 1 to his 3, and thus the 1 to Sam’s 2), we can surmise that the 11 is intended to refer to Chet — much as, in my first essay, we saw Tammy, Gordon’s 2, use her right hand as a way to represent Gordon at one point (i.e., the Diane smoking scene). Since Chet will end up taking the ring by the end of this sequence of FWWM, it perhaps seems fitting that he should be referred to with an 11.

Note that there is another “clock” stand-in in the picture above: the propeller of the orange plane in the background. Its “hands” appear to be set at 2 and 6, suggesting that the 2 in this scene — Sam — is also inhabited, or otherwise linked, to a 6 (i.e., a bad 1-type entity, if you’ll recall). This, too, makes some sense; if Chet is inhabited by something bad, and Sam is a part of Chet, then Sam too must be inhabited by something bad.

Now, I recognize that following what I’ve been saying about 1/2/3s, sub-1s, and whatnot, may be difficult. I’ve therefore placed below a triangle-based visual aid, which may or may not help to visualize the types of relationships I’m discussing. For now just focus on Chet and Sam’s relationship to each other and to Dale, shown on the right hand bottom/middle side of the picture, and don’t worry too much about the rest (which you can refer back to later, if/when needed, after we’ve walked through some of it more slowly):