Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror: Appraisals and Reappraisals of the Show That Was Supposed to Change TV by John Thorne

Author:John Thorne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

"Border Runs"

The border between civilization and forest is the most apparent one, but borders are ubiquitous in Twin Peaks. The main investigator of Laura's death, FBI Agent Cooper, is by definition one who deals with border crossings (Nochimson 25). As Sheriff Truman says of the comatose girl who was present at Laura's death, "Kinda lucky . . . Ronette stepped out across the state line," because that is the reason the FBI sent an agent. One of the most vivid early images of the series is of Ronette, making her way back from the woods, bleeding and disoriented, slowly crossing the bridge from savagery to safety. Cooper's first words in the series are about almost nothing but borders: "Diane—11:30 a.m. Entering the town of Twin Peaks. Five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line." At almost noon, he crosses the border into a town that he identifies by its liminal nature. Furthermore, Cooper's spiritual hero is a man who lives in exile, outside the borders of his own land, the Dalai Lama. In the course of his investigation of Laura's murder, he discovers her involvement with drugs; and since "somebody's running drugs into Twin Peaks from across the border," he decides to step outside the law and the country with the Bookhouse Boys. The place he goes to, One-Eyed Jack's, is frequented by Audrey's powerful, licentious, and phallically named father Ben Horne; when, in viewers' earlier introduction to One-Eyed Jack's, Ben and his brother go there, they travel through the night in a hell-red boat, like damned souls crossing the river into Dante's inferno. The pig-like Jacques Renault, bartender at the Roadhouse, is involved in Laura's death; he makes a "border run" to escape the law, and begins work at One-Eyed Jack's. Cooper wants to lure Jacques back across the U.S.-Canada border by promise of a drug deal, so he convinces Jacques that he, Cooper, is the money man behind Laura's drug sales. As Cooper gains the man's confidence, Jacques describes, with the camera locked in close-up on his mouth, Laura's torture before her death. "See you on the other side," Cooper says to Jacques; Jacques does cross over and is arrested, but in his zeal to punish Laura's killers, Cooper has crossed a more important border, and is in some ways now on the side Jacques occupies—outside the law. Later, Jacques’ much more suave brother Jean takes revenge on Cooper (whom he holds responsible for Jacques’ death while in custody) by trapping Audrey and using her as bait to make Cooper return. As Cooper says to Truman, "I went outside of my jurisdiction—twice. I violated my professional code and now Audrey is paying the price."

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