The source of
Evil in the cosmic struggle that was the
David Lynch/
Mark Frost series
Twin Peaks : the Black
Lodge was seemingly an extra-dimensional
portal into the world of
Nightmare and more-or-less the
headquarters for the
diabolical forces of the show. Its entrance moved from place to place and its internal size
seemed to grow or shrink at will.
Special Agent Dale Cooper's former partners and fellow FBI agents (like
Wyndham Earl, or Phillip Jeffries (
David Bowie) in the film,
FWWM) seemed to stumble into
the Black Lodge with alarming frequency, and were usually quite insane when they emerged. Essentially it was the
lobby to
Hell, and from its red-curtained, checkerboard floored hallways (...if you'd care to see it, check out
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/prospero.milan/black_lodge) sprang the show's ultimate
manifestation of Evil,
BOB. The show's characters often dreamed themselves inside the antechambers of the
Black Lodge, usually engaged in
cryptic conversations (like "In my country, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air.") which ultimately referred to events or places in the real world. However, the actual space itself could only be intentionally entered by a physical form, via a small circle of sycamore trees, called the
Glastonbury Grove in
Ghostwood Forest outside the town of
Twin Peaks.
The show's final showdown (
David Lynch is, afterall, a notorious
dualist and his constructed universes about as
fairytale Good vs. Evil as you're likely to find) takes place inside the Black Lodge, as
'Coop' attempts to rescue his sweet-heart Annie, the former nun(!), after she's been kidnapped by his ex-partner
Wyndham Earl, and dragged to the Lodge at the behest of the evil demonic spirit,
BOB, who has it out for Coop ever since, in the second season finale of the show, Cooper confined
Bob and forced him to abandon his 'host' Leland Palmer,
Laura Palmer's father, whom
Bob had possessed. Under the sway of this demon, Leland had been compelled to tempt Laura into becoming a similar vehicle, but after she resisted, Leland was ultimately forced by the spirit to kill her (getting all this so far?). The
real question (for the
Peakies anyway): why couldn't Cooper beat
BOB in this final showdown, why he
buckled and ran when confronting his own
doppelganger, and how he ended up a
vessel for the demonic? He was the show's
White Knight (the finale heavily borrowing from
Arthurian legend), yet in the end, he didn't keep it together despite a
Zen cool and hyper-
caffinated thought processes.
Lynch, it must be said, tends to project a very
deist worldview into almost everything he works on or writes. Angels and demons seem to exist, all manner of supernatural being stumble through our human reality. But as for a God, an ultimate higher Order, binding principle or law - that seems glaringly absent. Subsequently, there is an ever-receeding perception, an always tenuous grasp, to the way we understand our selves and our world. Always another layer to peel away, or another curtain to peek behind. The entire show was a rambling, operatic
case study for this sensibility, with the investigation into the murders acting as the core of the argument. After all, despite all the time, analysis and deductive talent focused on the deaths, it is made fairly explicit that none of the "human" characters in the show
ever grasp why people are being killed, who is really doing it, or to what ultimate end. The humane forces of
order and
good,
law and
rationality (all seemingly synomynous) presented in the show are ultimately relegated to cleaning up after a string of grisly killings, which they are powerless to stop. The real impact on the viewer derives not from the
surreality of the situations or peoples (we all know the world can be strange), but rather the realism of the endgame he presents: ultimately, there is simply too much
contingent,
occluded or incomprehensibly complex for us as human beings to always make the right choices. Bleak, but fairly convincing, given the evidence.