1x06 Cooper's Dreams

[4.8/10] I give this show a lot of crap, so let’s start with two things “Cooper’s Dream” did really well.

First off, it was, at least briefly, intentionally funny! I loved the scene where Leland Palmer hears an old show tune, starts devolving into his usual cry-dancing mania, and Ben Horne sends Catherine Martel in to dance with him so that it doesn’t look so awkward in front of the Icelanders investors. The pièce de résistance is when Leland stops dancing and starts crying, and Catherine kind of shrugs, matching him gesture for gesture, and turns it into a dance, until Jerry and his Icelandic paramour and eventually the whole room starts doing it.

For one thing, it’s just a funny image, with various people turning the act of grief into a room-wide boogie. But there’s also a vein of legitimate pathos in it for once. I haven’t been a fan of Ray Wise’s overwrought performance as a grieving father, and I think the whole dancing thing comes off as farcical rather than affecting most of the time, but the fact remains that his character is going through something difficult (or at least would be if he weren’t a walking caricature of mourning) and all the muckety-mucks of Twin Peaks can do is pretend it isn’t happening.

There’s a perverse irony to this man’s expressions of utter sorrow being turned into a chipper dance, and as funny as that is on first blush, it works better as an indication of how spiritually broken the movers and shakers of this town are than all the secret dalliances, schemes, and mustache twirling from the Ben Horne-types of the show.

The other thing to recommend “Cooper’s Dreams” is how the show treats Audrey, particularly in pairing her up with Cooper again. Their meeting at the beginning of the episode has a different tone than their prior interactions, with Cooper clearly testier and having less patience both from the growing stresses of the murder investigation and the loud, jet-lagged Icelanders in the hotel, and Audrey seeming even more desperate to help Cooper, become a part of his world, and attach herself to him. That adds weight to the final scene of the episode, where Audrey shows up in Cooper’s bed and begs him not to make her leave.

As I’ve talked about before for this show, there’s times where Twin Peaks goes for pure titillation with Audrey that rubs me the wrong way. But when they explore her as a desperate, sad figure, the way she’s trapped in this world and aching to get out of it, there’s a vividness to her as a character that’s missing from a lot of the other figures in the show.

She has a fantasy of joining with Cooper and traveling the globe, but what she’s really yearning for is any kind of escape, from a father who cheats on her mother, who’s involved in shady dealings, and a life and a family that are beyond messed up. More than anyone else in Twin Peaks (and in Twin Peaks for that matter), she and the show seem to understand that Audrey is unhappy and damaged, even if she doesn’t have the most realistic ideas about how to make it better. That makes her compelling and worthy of sympathy in an otherwise four-color show.

Unfortunately those are only two small (albeit significant) parts of a much larger episode, which finds its nadir where it usual does -- in Bobby Briggs. His exchange with Dr. Jacoby brings out his usual mushmouthed, overblown acting that mean to give the character some depth and vulnerability but only serve to make him feel incoherent, and the same goes for his cartoonish interactions with Shelly. In fairness to the actor who plays him, the dialogue isn’t great either, but it’s par for the course in this show using him as a fulcrum rather than the liability.

The same goes for the meant-to-be tender confessional between James and Donna, a pair of dull characters enmeshed in what is supposed to be a passionate romance that instead feels like the cinematic equivalent of Lynch and Frost rubbing two pieces of linoleum together. All these trite ruminations on secrets, and the added ridiculous of Laura’s twin cousin becoming a bigger part of the proceedings, just serve to sink the teen-focused portion of the show.

But hey, it’s not all bad in principle, even if some of the execution is still pretty goofy. The murder investigation is, at least, falling together a bit. The discovery of a creepy cabin with the poker chip that provided the source of the plastic “J” in Laura’s stomach and a myna bird, in addition to the reveal that the evil bartender dude was involved in the “Flesh World” magazines that featured the victims helps put some pieces in place. The “music in the air” callback to Cooper’s dream (and the drapes) are a nice supernatural touch on the margins, and while it’s still kind of silly an uninspired to see the sheriff’s gang traipsing around, I at least appreciate that the show is advancing the story on that front.

The same can’t be said for the conspiracies, romantic and otherwise, around the old lumber mill. We get it, Twin Peaks. Ben Horne is conspiring with everyone -- telling Catherine that he’s going to frame Josey, working with Josey on the side, and conspiring with Leo on the other, who’s being usurped with Norma’s recently released husband, Hank, who also has some kind of connection with Josey. (Are you lost yet? Good.) What’s supposed to make Ben seem like some kind of mastermind/scumbag again veers toward incoherence of purpose and pulp for the sake of pulp. I realize some of that is probably parody of the soap opera tropes the show is half-spoofing, half-embracing, but it doesn’t really work given the broadness of the performances.

Still, at least we can take two nice things away from “Cooper’s Dreams”: the show can, when it really wants to, be intentionally funny, and there’s something compelling about the interactions between Cooper and Audrey that the show is smart enough to go back to. The fact that the mystery is actually moving along helps too, though all the other televised detritus that makes up the teen romances, lovers’ conflicts, and adult machinations in the show still drag it down considerably.