In this post I discuss my interpretation of the finale 60 minutes or so of Twin Peaks: The Return.
If you haven't seen this and don't want to be made aware of the details therein, I suggest you stop reading now. It may well be the case that this is unintelligible anyway.
"I'm not gonna talk about Judy"
I think that extreme negative force, "Judy" inhabits Sarah Palmer and probably always has (which is why she could see BOB and didn't particularly mind her husband serially abusing Laura Palmer). To my mind there's little other explanation as to who lives behinds her face and kills rude truckers.
Dale Cooper has a plan to rescue Laura and then somehow lure out Judy ("two birds with one stone"). He takes advantage of some Dutchman/Jeffries/Black Lodge magic to return to the final scenes of Fire Walk With Me. There, Cooper prevents Laura from attending her orgy with Leo Johnson and in doing so prevents her death a the hands of Leland/BOB. It is clear that, at this point, Cooper's plan has worked when see Laura's corpse disappear from the lake shore.
I think it's reasonable to conclude that the forest clearing east of Jack Rabbit's palace is a portal into the Fireman's cinema (which may or may not be the White Lodge) and it seems that Cooper was leading Laura here. I theorise that this was the strategy for saving her once and for all from BOB without having her put on the ring and end up in the Black Lodge. We saw in part 8 that Laura's soul did at some point originate from the picture palace in the form of a golden orb, so possibly Cooper is trying to get her back to her real family, as opposed to her Judy/Bob possessed parents.
However, Cooper's machinations are interrupted when think when Sarah (and/or Judy) starts smashing up the framed photo of Laura, who then vanishes. I would argue that this represents Laura being transported into a dream-reality or false consciousness in which she is trapped as Carrie Page.
The fingerprints of the Black Lodge are all over this faux reality, not least when we come across the buzzing telegraph pole with the number six, Judy's diner, the white horses and the names Chalfont and Tremond guarding the Palmer house.
Cooper and Diane pass through an electrical field (430) to enter Carrie's dream world and become Richard and Linda. Cooper, unlike Diane, retains both a sense of purpose and a sense of identity. He leads Carrie Page to the Palmer house, where he encounters a puzzled middle aged woman who denies any knowledge of the Palmer family.
However, we hear Sarah's call from the pilot episode: "Laura!", her mother trying to wake her shortly before she finds out she's missing. Carrie's universe collapses, she is Laura, and all the horrors of her original timeline come back to her. She screams. This and the sudden blackout at the Palmer house at the end mark the termination of Carrie's false reality and a reversion to the original timeline: dead Laura wrapped in plastic.
“We live inside a dream. I hope I see all of you again. Every one of you.”.
At the end of Fire Walk with Me we see a laughing, smiling Laura in the company of a very benign looking angel. She dies, yes, but never got possessed by BOB and she looks pretty upbeat so this looks like a happy ending. Maybe the angel takes her (back?) to the White Lodge.
Cooper, however, may have derailed this conclusion by preventing her original murder (I wonder if the image in the final credits of Laura whispering something to visibly perturbed Cooper is him realising that he's risked changing a pretty good outcome into a less than perfect one).
The Philip Jeffries teapot warns Cooper (by puffing out a steam infinity symbol) that by interfering he could become stuck in an endless cycle of trying to save a doomed Laura Palmer. In this case, Leland's request that he "FIND LAURA" becomes somewhat more sinister.
The real puzzle for Cooper is not now trying to save Laura but working out which of these narratives is reality and attempting to reclaim what remains of his life - his conversation with the Fireman possibly takes place between these two stories ("one chants out between two worlds") and serves to try and remind Cooper that all the events after 430 were merely a distraction.
What remains unanswered then is: if Laura is the one (cf. Log Lady), some kind of benign spiritual being sent by the Fireman to counteract the evil emanating from Judy and the experiment, what is it she's actually achieved other than dying? This seems to sit pretty nicely with BOB and with Sarah/Judy, and it doesn't strike me as a big win for the White Lodge.
"I feel like I know her but sometimes my arms bend back"
So what is it she's telling Cooper that makes him so disturbed? My final guess is this: Laura Palmer, tragic dead high school girl, can never be saved and attempts to do so will be futile and always curtailed by the Black lodge entities, or by Judy. By crossing through 430, Cooper did nothing to alter her ultimate fate and got himself caught in this strange half world.
Last thing: Does spirit Laura, encapsulated in a golden orb, the work of the Fireman and Senorita Dido, still have some unfinished work to do?
If you haven't seen this and don't want to be made aware of the details therein, I suggest you stop reading now. It may well be the case that this is unintelligible anyway.
"I'm not gonna talk about Judy"
I think that extreme negative force, "Judy" inhabits Sarah Palmer and probably always has (which is why she could see BOB and didn't particularly mind her husband serially abusing Laura Palmer). To my mind there's little other explanation as to who lives behinds her face and kills rude truckers.
Dale Cooper has a plan to rescue Laura and then somehow lure out Judy ("two birds with one stone"). He takes advantage of some Dutchman/Jeffries/Black Lodge magic to return to the final scenes of Fire Walk With Me. There, Cooper prevents Laura from attending her orgy with Leo Johnson and in doing so prevents her death a the hands of Leland/BOB. It is clear that, at this point, Cooper's plan has worked when see Laura's corpse disappear from the lake shore.
I think it's reasonable to conclude that the forest clearing east of Jack Rabbit's palace is a portal into the Fireman's cinema (which may or may not be the White Lodge) and it seems that Cooper was leading Laura here. I theorise that this was the strategy for saving her once and for all from BOB without having her put on the ring and end up in the Black Lodge. We saw in part 8 that Laura's soul did at some point originate from the picture palace in the form of a golden orb, so possibly Cooper is trying to get her back to her real family, as opposed to her Judy/Bob possessed parents.
However, Cooper's machinations are interrupted when think when Sarah (and/or Judy) starts smashing up the framed photo of Laura, who then vanishes. I would argue that this represents Laura being transported into a dream-reality or false consciousness in which she is trapped as Carrie Page.
The fingerprints of the Black Lodge are all over this faux reality, not least when we come across the buzzing telegraph pole with the number six, Judy's diner, the white horses and the names Chalfont and Tremond guarding the Palmer house.
Cooper and Diane pass through an electrical field (430) to enter Carrie's dream world and become Richard and Linda. Cooper, unlike Diane, retains both a sense of purpose and a sense of identity. He leads Carrie Page to the Palmer house, where he encounters a puzzled middle aged woman who denies any knowledge of the Palmer family.
However, we hear Sarah's call from the pilot episode: "Laura!", her mother trying to wake her shortly before she finds out she's missing. Carrie's universe collapses, she is Laura, and all the horrors of her original timeline come back to her. She screams. This and the sudden blackout at the Palmer house at the end mark the termination of Carrie's false reality and a reversion to the original timeline: dead Laura wrapped in plastic.
“We live inside a dream. I hope I see all of you again. Every one of you.”.
At the end of Fire Walk with Me we see a laughing, smiling Laura in the company of a very benign looking angel. She dies, yes, but never got possessed by BOB and she looks pretty upbeat so this looks like a happy ending. Maybe the angel takes her (back?) to the White Lodge.
Cooper, however, may have derailed this conclusion by preventing her original murder (I wonder if the image in the final credits of Laura whispering something to visibly perturbed Cooper is him realising that he's risked changing a pretty good outcome into a less than perfect one).
The Philip Jeffries teapot warns Cooper (by puffing out a steam infinity symbol) that by interfering he could become stuck in an endless cycle of trying to save a doomed Laura Palmer. In this case, Leland's request that he "FIND LAURA" becomes somewhat more sinister.
The real puzzle for Cooper is not now trying to save Laura but working out which of these narratives is reality and attempting to reclaim what remains of his life - his conversation with the Fireman possibly takes place between these two stories ("one chants out between two worlds") and serves to try and remind Cooper that all the events after 430 were merely a distraction.
What remains unanswered then is: if Laura is the one (cf. Log Lady), some kind of benign spiritual being sent by the Fireman to counteract the evil emanating from Judy and the experiment, what is it she's actually achieved other than dying? This seems to sit pretty nicely with BOB and with Sarah/Judy, and it doesn't strike me as a big win for the White Lodge.
"I feel like I know her but sometimes my arms bend back"
So what is it she's telling Cooper that makes him so disturbed? My final guess is this: Laura Palmer, tragic dead high school girl, can never be saved and attempts to do so will be futile and always curtailed by the Black lodge entities, or by Judy. By crossing through 430, Cooper did nothing to alter her ultimate fate and got himself caught in this strange half world.
Last thing: Does spirit Laura, encapsulated in a golden orb, the work of the Fireman and Senorita Dido, still have some unfinished work to do?
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