I may be sidling up closer to having something to say, if not something to conclude, about my recent foray into Twin Peaks.
I’m about 100 pages into “In Dreams” by H. Perry Horton, which is a wonderfully-long connective study of most of (I accidentally typed “lost of”) David Lynch’s work. And I don’t think I agree with much of it so far. But that’s okay! He says he may not either, but it’s one viewpoint in. I DO appreciate very much the observations and care he’s given to sources I hadn’t paid much attention to.
I’m not trying to find The Answer. I don’t want one, and I don’t think there is one. DL’s work is too associative, too improvised to have one conclusion. It’s collage, but carefully-edited and considered.
I like many aspects of Lou Ming’s “Find Laura” study, and I think there’s a great deal of emotional truth in it. One of his ideas I keep coming back to us the “Bad Transformer.” The flickering light in Laura’s autopsy, blamed on a “bad transformer.” The electricity and flashing lights throughout, which could be emblematic of so much, but so far work very well as indicators that something we’re seeing isn’t exactly what’s happening. Misinterpretation, mishearing, or deliberate obfuscation. Something’s wrong, emotionally and materially. Film itself is light, and when something’s wrong with the light, it means we aren’t seeing “the truth.”
Maybe! And so he looks for other Bad Transformers, and identifies Gordon Cole as a major one. He consistently hears “the wrong thing.” This might make him a source of hidden truth, but rarely verbal truth; “it cannot all be said now,” and we see at the beginning of Fire Walk With Me that Lil’s symbolic instruction is required to say something Gordon doesn’t trust words to convey.
David Lynch himself has made it clear that he doesn’t trust language, not for the big truths. I like that in an interview he says that unless you’re a poet, words usually just make a big idea smaller. He uses images, sounds, and their unity in movies to try to address the (to him) unspeakable. Horrors and truths.
SO ALL OF THIS TO SAY, almost everybody I’ve read who says anything about The Return… just buys what Gordon says about “Judy” really being “Jowday,” an ancient goddess, etc etc…
They just buy the line. Hook, sinker, and all.
But despite seeming quite lucid in this scene, when has Gordon ever heard and repeated a word correctly? He gestures, he directs, and his intuition may be sound enough. But as the head of the Detectives in the dream of Twin Peaks, he gets an awful lot wrong. And words? Forget it. That may be important, especially in Lou Ming’s read, but what matters here is that almost every other scene featuring Gordon Cole shows us that he is almost incapable of hearing or repeating the truth directly.
So I think the “Jowday” thing is a misdirection! And yet it has the appearance of Revelation, so everybody latched on to it. And this book, “In Dreams,” uses the concept of Jowday as a great, metaphysical evil, in opposition to “the Dreamer who Dreams and then lives inside the Dream,” as a foundational concept.
And I just don’t buy the Jowday thing at all!
Who is Judy? I mean, hell if I know. I have a couple conceptual ideas. You’ve gotta acknowledge that the most important thing for DL isn’t encoding a secret message; it’s building a mystery McLachlan-style (Sarah, not Kyle), and choosing so carefully which parts to keep in so that there is no center, no solution. I watched people drive themselves nuts looking for the secret “grand staircase” theory of House of Leaves, when all the fun was happening elsewhere. Same principle applies here, I think. Anchoring “good and evil” in the “Dreamer” and “Jowday” is a too-simple mapping of binary onto art which repeatedly shows us that binaries… aren’t.
The question for us is, can we look out the window without our shadow getting in the way? And when it inevitably does, can we find unity with the shadow?