Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (Twin Peaks, #2)

by Mark Frost

the Dweller scenario, in the Double’s case, at least, seems more likely to me than the tulpa.

Was the Double somehow similarly possessed?

the moment of its death, something appeared to rise up out of the Double and disappear: something not Cooper.

no sooner had Cooper appeared to “defeat” this … whatever it was … than he almost immediately appeared at the location of the coordinates that his damn double was after from the start—and you went with him, Chief—and from there Cooper promptly disappeared again and hasn’t been seen since.

fractured fairy tale

Phillip Jeffries had been on an extended and highly classified Blue Rose assignment that involved a long-term posting in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On February 16, after spending six months completely off the Bureau’s radar, Phillip Jeffries showed up, without warning, in our offices in Philadelphia. He was wearing a white linen suit more appropriate for a tropical clime—it was the middle of a particularly nasty winter in Philadelphia, but summer in Argentina.

Buenos Aires—where Jeffries had, by the way, been seen by multiple witnesses in the lobby of his hotel that same morning, at roughly the same time, while wearing the same damn tropical outfit—

neurophysicists,

?

What I went looking for was the moment when Phillip Jeffries stopped investigating these things and started living them. The conclusion I would submit is this: It happened in Buenos Aires.

“I’m not going to talk about Judy; in fact, we’re not going to talk about Judy at all, we’re going to keep her out of it.”

Joudy, it turns out, is also the name of an ancient entity in Sumerian mythology. (This dates back to at least 3000 B.C.) The name was used to describe a species of wandering demon—also generically known as an utukku—that had “escaped from the underworld” and roamed freely throughout the earth, where they feasted on human flesh and, allegedly, ripped the souls from their victims, which provided even more meaningful nourishment. They particularly thrived while feeding—and I quote—“on human suffering.”

These beings were said to appear in both male and female forms—“Joudy” indicated the female, and the male was known as “Ba’al”—and, while they were considered beyond dangerous individually, if a male and a female ever united while on the earth, the ancient texts claimed, their resulting “marriage” would create something far more perilous.

Ray Monroe believed he had been recruited by and was working for Phillip Jeffries, a man the Bureau had not seen or heard from since he disappeared from your Philadelphia office in 1989.

I believe it’s not only possible, but likely, that the Double went to all that trouble to spring Ray Monroe because he had reason to believe that Monroe would tell him where he could find Phillip Jeffries.

Why did the Double want to find Jeffries?

what if this not only made it possible to go forward in time, but also backwards? Could that explain the shock and dismay Jeffries exhibited in your office when he learned what year it was?)

And also Cooper at the very end?

After Monroe died, our investigators found a matchbook in his pocket, for a roadside motel called The Dutchman’s Lodge, in rural western Montana.

there was such a motel at that exact location dating back to the early 1930s. It was built, owned, and operated by a man named Horace “the Dutchman” Vandersant,

Is it possible that, after killing Monroe, the Double went to this “Dutchman’s Lodge,” looking for Phillip Jeffries?

If Jeffries is still out in the ether somewhere, in the same way that Briggs was, lost or hiding in some kind of neither-here-nor-there netherworld, could this experience be so assaultive and disorienting to the senses that one consequence is you’re never completely sure exactly where or when you are?

As is Cooper

Did Jeffries think he was seeing not Special Agent Dale Cooper, but the Double?

“Agent Cooper had come to town a few months earlier, to aid in the investigation into the disappearance, still unsolved, of local teenage beauty queen, Laura Palmer.” Let me repeat that phrase for you: “still unsolved.” No mention of “murder,” “wrapped in plastic,” or “father arrested for shocking crime eventually dies in police custody of self-inflicted wounds.” It’s right there on the front page: Laura Palmer did not die.

Laura Palmer disappeared from Twin Peaks without a trace—

Laura had wandered off into the woods before she and Leo and Jacques entered the railroad car. Laura was never there.

on February 24, 1990—the one-year anniversary of her “disappearance”—Leland Palmer committed suicide.

Sarah Judith Novack Palmer.

her childhood in New Mexico,

all of this took place a few hours away from the air base at Roswell, where, as we know from the dossier, a young army officer named Doug Milford allegedly witnessed the mysterious “UFO” crash nine years earlier.

it was all there, in that one town. All of life, cradle to grave,

I feel like I laid my hand on a third rail that should be of concern to all of us: that a core fundamental of human existence is wonder—and its analogue is fear. You can’t have one without the other, flip sides of the coin.

And even as we “wonder” at what we’re doing here, so do we also fear—so deep down below the surface of our lives that few can bear to look at it—that life is a meaningless jest, an extravagant exercise in morbidity, a tale of sorrow and suffering lit by flashes, and made bearable only by moments of companionship and unsustainable joy. Along the way, as we struggle to come to terms and comprehend why this strange fate has befallen us, time becomes no longer our ally—the spendthrift assumption of our youth—but our executioner. It all feels at times like a merciless joke made at our expense, without our consent.

Again this is why i suspect Lynch engages in cryptic anti-natalism. See Eraserhead

Look at all that’s happened here. One town. The commonplace, familiar, and ordinary—everything we think we know, until you sense the deep, unsettling strangeness informing all of it.

How much of what I know, what I’ve been culturally attuned to believe, feels like the set of a play on a strange stage I’ve wandered onto without knowing why I’m here. I don’t know the lines, I don’t know what part I’m playing, I don’t even know what the play’s about or what it’s called. I’m just here onstage, stuck in a dream, lights shining in my eyes. Is anyone out there watching? The play stumbles ahead, feels like artifice, mistakes, frippery, an endless series of false starts, bad assumptions, all the while shadowed with the constant horror that something unforeseen could drop down on me from above or lurch in from the wings at any moment, that the floor could open beneath me and instantly erase even this small, pitiful existence, put out the lights for good.