3x12 Part 12

[6.1/10] One of the things that put me off the original Twin Peaks was the acting. I’m used to a certain amount of naturalism, and going back twenty-five years and seeing the exaggerated emotions and overwrought performances led to a wave of eye-rolls from yours truly. Outside of a select few (chief among them Kyle MacLachlan), it felt like some combination of the performers, the way they were being coached, or the material they were given, lead to an onslaught of unbelievable cheese that I had real trouble getting on board with.

And yet, “Part Twelve” kind of turns that on its ear for me, with some of my least favorite performers from the original seasons of the show delivering compelling character moments in the here and now.

Take Sarah Palmer, for instance. Her overdone shrieks and contortions in 1990 just lent to the essential ridiculousness of the original Twin Peaks, and brought hokiness to what should otherwise been the horror of a mother mourning her daughter. They didn’t lean on Sarah much, but when they did, it was usually to the show’s detriment.

But in “Part Twelve” there’s something so sad and so unnerving about the way Mrs. Palmer breaks down in a grocery store, or tries to stay calm in front of a wellness-checking Hawk before revealing the distraught, barely-holding-it-together person underneath. It’s great work from Grace Zabriskie, who communicates the way in which a woman who effectively lost her daughter and husband in increasingly devastating ways is destined never to be whole again. She is a bellweather, sensing a change in the air and, as one of those who suffered the most the last time that type of electricity ran through this town, she knows enough to warn others about what’s coming, even if she doesn’t fully understand it herself.

The same goes for Ben Horne. In the original Twin Peaks, I wrote him off as a generic sleazy businessman, an archetype you can find in multiple James Cameron films that Richard Beymer played with all the hamminess of a soap opera-styled Gordon Gecko.

And yet here, in the moment where Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster, who’s settled into the role nicely) tells him his grandson has committed one murder and attempted another, the response from Beymer-as-Horne is nicely understated. There’s the sense of Ben knowing this sort of thing was coming, a “not again” “why does it have to be this way” fatalism and resignation to the news of his grandson. Even his reflections on his dad buying him a bike, his warm inquiries about Harry, all evince a more well-rounded person instead of the one-note wheeler-and-dealer who walked the halls of the Great Northern twenty-five years ago.

But what’s strange is that Audrey Horne (and with her Sherilyn Fenn) was always one of the better performers on the original Twin Peaks. It’d be hard to call the slinking sexpot of a character subtle, but there was a layeredness to her -- a sense that her come-ons were a mask she wore, or at least an overcompensation, to make up from a hurt that came from home, ways in which she felt ignored or marginalized by her father in particular that made her reach out for a better life that might never come.
Here, however, we get our first glimpse of Audrey in “The Return” and instead of that layered figure we get an interminable, overacted scene where she harangues her Droopy Dog-esque husband as she browbeats him into getting information about the man she’s cheating on him with. It’s a bizarre, miscalibrated scene, and not in the “weird but cool stuff is happening” way that Lynch can sometimes muster. It’s just bad, with puzzling details that may or may not have anything to do with anything, a runtime that seems to extend into infinity, and a particularly poor performance from Fenn herself.

That extends into the last real scene of the episode, where a couple of young women whom (I think) we’ve never met before remark that some guy they know is cheating on some girl they know with some girl they hate. As with the Audrey scene, we have no idea who these people they’re talking about are; the scene goes on forever, and the acting is bad enough that it would fit seamlessly into the original run of Twin Peaks.

I don’t know what to make of it, other than chalking it up to Lynch & Frost returning to old habits. They pick up more of those habits by embracing even more extraordinarily long scenes with extended, awkward pauses and silence. We get essentially a repeat of the prior scene featuring Dr. Jacoby as “Dr. Amp” while being admired by Nadine. (Did Lynch just forget he’d done that already?) Worse yet is the episode tediously male gazing the hell out of Gordon’s lady friend as she gets ready to go down to the bar. I can appreciate some rake gag humor here and there (and there we amusing moments between Cole and Albert, as always) but sometimes Lynch just goes too far with it.

But hey, at least the episode keeps giving us a few more details to stitch the odds and ends of this scruffy world together. We learn that the Blue Rose deal is a task force picking up where Project Bluebook left off, which included Philip Jeffires, Agent Chris Isaak, Cooper, and Albert, and which now Tammy is inducted into. It’s a confirmation of what many already suspected, but it’s still nice to get something solid.

We also get something close to confirmation that Dianne is working for the other side, as she’s memorized the coordinates on Ruth’s arm, and they end up pointing her toward Twin Peaks. (Dun dun duuuuuun.) We also learn that Richard Horne grew up without a father, lending credence to a theory about his parentage that’d been making its way around the internet. Even as Twin Peaks is at its indulgent with nonsensical, badly acted scenes, it at least gives us some meaningful details.

And in addition, it gives us a series of uncharacteristically brief scenes, and they are some of the best in the episode. A rule of thumb for the original run was the less Cooper you got, the worse the episode was likely to be. That’s evident here where the funniest scene in the whole episode is a 15-second bit where Sonny Jim futilely tries to play catch with his dad. There’s the casual tragedy of Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh taking out (I think) The Warden, leaving him to be found by his young son, and then dashing off to Wendy’s. And last but certainly not least, there’s Carl Rodd, expressing his moral concern and principled help to keep one of his tenants from having to sell his blood in order to eat. Long scenes are a Lynch trademark, but some of his best work comes from letting those moments be quick and punchy.

Still, those moments depend on the quality of the performers, and they’re a testament to the likes of what actors like Kyle MacLachlan, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Harry Dean Stanton can bring to the table, even in small doses. “Part Twelve” is an episode of Twin Peaks that shows how much some of the cast has improved in the twenty-five years since the show left the air, but also seems to show how much some have regressed, with other parts of the show regressing to match.