In just two short months’ time, Agent Cooper will return in the new chapter of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. A show which has captured the hearts and minds of a generation, been referenced by just about any on-trend band out there and inspired film-makers and television bosses alike. Recent shows like Stranger Things of The Kettering Incident may have hundreds of articles printed out with comparisons to Twin Peaks, but the comparisons often fall flat.
Amidst the tide of articles comparing other new shows to Twin Peaks, there have been tiny bits of news here and there, some of it more interesting than others. Foremost, Sheryl Lee has narrated an audio version of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, out at that start of May. Many longtime fans will be keen to listen to that, whereas others may be less excited and keen to hear what’s been going on with Agent Cooper since we saw him trapped in a wooden bathroom in The Great Northern.
Alongside Miguel Ferrer in January, February was a sad month for Twin Peaks fans with the passing of Warren Frost (Doc Hayward in the show), the father of co-creator Mark Frost. Warren did film for the new show and Twin Peaks Worldwide remembered his remarkable scenes in The Missing Pieces from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in a video linked at the end of this article.
In February, the Reddit Twin Peaks forum held host to a parasitical member claiming to have a SPOILERIFIC screen shot from the latest Lynch documentary, The Art Life. This has already been released in the US, with upcoming screenings occurring in Europe and elsewhere. If it’s a decent documentary, it will surely do best on home release but it has to be said, there has been a lack of great documentaries made about either Twin Peaks or Lynch. In the shot from The Art Life, which is focused mainly on Lynch’s life as a painter and artist overall, we can see what are notes made by Lynch with a script idea for the new ‘volume’ of Twin Peaks. If this is anything to go by, it seems a very generalized impression of a scene which we can only surmise would be whipped into shape by Mark Frost, who does all of the typing for Lynch on a computer. This is the same way they worked on the original show, back in 1989-91.
Some viewers of The Art Life in US screenings did glimpse ‘COOPER’ on a shot of Lynch’s computer monitor, so obviously the level of secrecy is still being maintained despite this documentary. Tight-lipped Twin Peaks fans on social media and message boards are doing a grand job of ‘Keeping the Mystery Alive’, with some reacting in surprise that Showtime have released a new teaser trailer featuring the bathroom scene of Agent Cooper. That is an interesting case of to spoil or not to spoil, since the new show will presumably be dealing with the mystery of whether Agent Cooper is somehow ‘possessed’ or in thrall to the demonic entity we know only as BOB. Yet, that ending of the second season only led to even more questions, which is a big part of why the show has this intense level of interest over 25 years later…
Whilst it would be stretching it to claim that Cooper was an innocent in the original series, at this stage he must have gained a lot of experiences and maybe learned a lot more about ‘the evil that men do.’ We would not go so far as to claim that the new show will be about understanding the nature of evil, but Cooper’s empathy and sensitivity as we knew him must have made him open to the forces of evil that he encountered in Twin Peaks. Was Cooper somehow preyed upon by BOB because of his past traumas or did he open himself to evil, as Leland did? We can only surmise that Lynch and Frost will deal with such profound issues in the new episodes – but it is quite a massive achievement that we are this near to the start of the show and know nothing about how they will do it! For that, we can only applaud Lynch, Frost and Showtime.
In other news, trailers released last month featured glimpses of Cooper in the bathroom, a seemingly new shot of the portrait of Laura Palmer as if stuck up on a presentation and also some eye-catching posters of Cooper and Laura against the famous Douglas Firs in Washington State. The new posters feature the Twin Peaks lettering in a strong red, which seems a good choice for the opening titles in the new season – perhaps a more modern update of the garish red and brown high school lettering we saw on the original season?
The actor Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk) was quoted most recently of all cast involved as saying:
“I’m so excited and I hear the people at Showtime are excited, but I would be absolutely floored if the fans didn’t go crazy. This time David gets to do what he wants to do with no restraints on him, and this is Twin Peaks gone to a whole different level. David is more mature person than he was then and so is Twin Peaks.”
We can only look forward to being floored by Twin Peaks with much merriment and glee – some great words from Michael Horse.
Here are the latest videos from Twin Peaks Worldwide and Obnoxious and Anonymous on all of the topics mentioned above and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUhueFRnZOU
