#My Miscel Meta

[drsilverfish]

The English and “The Shame”

The English dir Hugo Blick (Nov 2022 on BBC iplayer UK and Amazon Prime elsewhere) starring Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt.

Discussion under the cut because major spoilers warning

This is a really beautiful tale in every way. It’s also a parable about English colonialism. It’s a reparative story, which takes the Western narrative and, for once, gives the starring part to a Native American.

Chaske Spencer’s Native American hero Eli brings so much to his character through a taciturn yet gentle endurance, which speaks volumes about all that he has suffered (losing wife, children, family). He’s someone with a dual identity, a Pawnee tribe member, having been a scout for the US Army in (I think, from the timeline) The Black Hills War against the Sioux.  

The drama is called The English, for a reason, because on a broader canvass, this is about the brutality which the colonial conquest of the English ruling class wrought on its own working class, on the Scots, on the Irish, on the Native Americans, on the American continent itself. 

Blunt’s character is a representative of that English ruling class. She is Lady Cornelia Locke and she says that her father, “...owned half of Devon”.

She is wealthy, but, she is also a woman in the Victorian era, a period when women (even aristocratic ones) had extremely limited rights, effectively “belonging” to their fathers and then to their husbands. 

Lady Cornelia is on a revenge mission. She was raped (by a duplicitous British butcher out to make his own way in the States) and she and the son that resulted from that rape, were infected with syphlilis (then incurable and ultimately fatal) and suffered from the pain, and the social stigma of that. 

She is a sympathetic character, but she also embodies “the English” colonial project and its repercussions.

In America, she carries around a bag full of a large amount of money throughout her journey, which is often reacted to with shock (and avarice) by those she meets along the way, who are all scrabbling to make a living. This is of course, a metaphor for colonial plunder, which is where English aristocractic money significantly comes from. Yet Cornelia retains a naivety (a protective ignorance) about that. 

It’s also symbolic that Cornelia has been infected with syphillis. Disease metaphors are always a bit narratively dubious, because they tend to reinforce stigma about infection, particularly sexually transmitted infection. Unfortunately, this is no different, as syphllis is partly used to signify sexual and moral corruption in this narrative. Nevertheless, it also functions effectively as part of the colonial critique.

It is believed that Columbus brought syphilis back from the New World to the Old World in the 1400s. On a metaphorical level, we can understand Cornelia’s syphilis as the horrible consequences of colonialism coming home to roost. The character herself did not deserve to suffer, and she is depicted as brave and true-hearted, a victim herself, but the point is that colonialism infects the souls of colonisers as well as colonised. This is a metaphor also carried in the narrative by Cornelia’s identification of herself as a Scorpio, and Eli’s warning that scorpions are often most dangerous to themselves (sometimes stinging themselves to death with their own tails. Looking at the present, a metaphor for Brexit Britain, arguably the self-inflicted wound of imperial hubris coming back to bite us..  

It’s entirely important, therefore, that Sheriff Robert Marshall, played by Stephen Rea, is Irish, the Irish being victims of English colonialism themselves. The Sheriff has compassion and sympathy for Eli and Cornelia and helps them escape culpability for the murder of their common enemy, the English villain Melmont.

The love story, told extremely well with two excellent performances from Blunt and Spencer, is the bow in which the colonial critique is wrapped. Cornelia and Eli love one another, but must part, and it is notable that he accepts they must separate while she first protests, in their final scene. But in the end, she does what “good” colonizers should do; she goes home.

And when, in England years later, Cornelia meets the Native American young man whose life she and Eli saved, and he lifts her veil to kiss her, and she whispers, “But...the shame”, he replies, “Yes, but not yours,” and we understand that ‘the shame” is not the shame of syphilis, but the shame of colonialism itself.

[drsilverfish]

Ouch the Heart Foreshadowing

Oh man this scene in 1x06 The Art of F**kery is so great (sorry everyone having to suffer my OFMD posts “late”, but it only just got released in the UK, on the BBC). 

Blackbeard totally bullshitting, Stede freaking out, Izzy losing his jealous MIND cuz he thinks they’re screwing on deck (which, of course, they are, metaphorically). 

But the best (worst) part is Blackbeard “forgetting” that the frigging heart is on the left side of the body (a pretty important organ dontcha think!) in a massive case of foreshadowing, because Stede is about to break his heart into a million pieces and he never saw it coming. 

And he’s right - being stabbed in the body with a flesh wound you can survive is one thing, coping with that pain on adrenaline and drink and the mania of his Blackbeard persona, he’s done it so many times before. And, being stabbed in the heart means death, so that’s it, you’re done. But getting your heart well and truly broken for love? Well, that’s another thing; the pain lasts so much longer, and when you finally heal, you’re never quite the same person you were before. Poor bastard, he’s so happy here, with his intimate flesh-wound.  

[drsilverfish]

Avatar: The Way of Water

Kids whose bioluminescent freckles mirror the stars, bonding with four-eyed whales via interspecies linguistics; this is the good Avatar: The Way of Water.

The transposition of US patriarchal family values, like flies in aspic, onto an alien world, in a narrative which is supposed to be a critique of colonialism; this is the bad Avatar: The Way of Water. 

Unfortunately, they are one and the same. 

Major spoilers under the cut for those who haven’t seen James Cameron’s Blue Pandora yet...

Come for the incredible xeno-biology, struggle with the sclerotic storytelling, but understand that this film is an ecological polemic, a deliberative morality tale and a call to arms for Mother Earth. Then, forgive, or don’t forgive, its cheesy and clunky moving parts on that basis. 

Cameron’s Way of Water continues his paen to eco-primitivism on Pandora, where Darwinian Jumblie hunter-gatherers, the Na’vi (blue-green, strong, thin and beautiful, and this time at sea, but definitely not at sea in a sieve) live in ecological and spiritual harmony with their Edenic world.

Human Jake Sully, now permanently inhabiting his Na’vi avatar body, brings his US Marine consciousness with him into his new life. He insists his sons call him, “Sir”, and runs his inter-species family like an Earth military unit. His surname is “sully”, which means to damage the purity or integrity of something.  

Yet again, the Na’vi are being invaded by rapacious Earthlings, this time not focussed on mining unobtamium ore. Turns out liquidised alien whale brain is even more valuable, because, as ambrosia for humans, it stops the ageing process. This amrita (Sanskrit for “immortality”) is the new goal for extractive, intergalactic, US-led militarised capitalism. And Earth is dying (or rather, plainly, has been murdered) so Pandora is now earmarked for permanent colonization. 

There are pools of moral and intellectual curiosity waiting to be gazed upon, amidst the sound and fury of adrenaline-filled punch and peril. 

What is the role of humanity’s scientists and scientific capabilities? 

Sigorney Weaver’s xeno-botanist/ anthropologist, Dr. Grace Augustine, rebelled last time around and joined the Na’vi. Now, her child, Kiri (which means, skin of a tree or fruit, in Maori) has a special spiritual connection to Pandora’s flora and fauna. She was born of Grace’s comatose Na’vi avatar body, and it’s implied that her other parent is the Great Mother Spirit of Pandora herself, Eywa. Grace Augustine is itself a symbolic name, referencing Saint Augustine, who believed that human nature was altered by the prideful “original sin” of Adam and Eve in Eden, and required redemption by the grace of Christ. Pandora IS Eden, and it is here that humanity can (I am guessing) unexpectedly find redemption by learning from the Na’vi, as Grace did; “hope” being the last creature to be set free from the box of horrors that Pandora opens in Greek myth. 

We see the other Na’vi-friendly scientists who stayed behind on Pandora with Grace tell Jake and Neytiri that Kiri (whom they have adopted) has epilepsy and should not be allowed to plug into Eywa again or her seizures could kill her. Here human science attempts to be life-saving, but applies a human lens to a Na’vi context and misreads Kiri by failing to understand her biological embodiment of the Pandoran Mother Spirit.

Finally, we have the scientists who are part of the whaling enterprise which hunts and kills the peaceful, sentient Tulkuns, for money, one of whom remarks that he’s drunk all the time because he doesn’t feel good about what he’s involved in.

So, we see that humanity’s scientific knowledge can be harnessed for ecological good when practised with spiritual reverence for life (Grace), can attempt to be benign but misapply itself by failing to understand cultural difference (the scientists’ diagnosis of Kiri) or can vilely prostitute itself in the service of rapacious capitalism (the xeno-biologist whalers). 

Then we have Spider, the human child of reanimated antagonist Colonel Quaritch. He’s a Mowgli/ Tarzan figure (unfortunately, to a modern eye, that figure feels faintly ridiculous) who has “gone native” and runs around in blue tattoos, dreads and loincloth, spending as much of his time as possible with Jake and Neytiri’s Na’vi kids. 

The Mowgli (Kipling)/ Tarzan (Rice Burroughs) reference isn’t an accident, just as the whale-hunt Moby Dick (Melville) reference isn’t either. These are 19th century (early 20th C in Rice Burroughs’ case) authors who write, in the context of European colonialism, of enchanted (both romanticised and primitivised) encounters with native “others”.  Herein lies one of the difficulties of the Avatar saga. It is intent on critiquing colonialism, but it can’t seem to escape a colonialist narrative framework. Jake Sully was initially constructed as a Hollywood white saviour, someone who miraculously does “native” better than the “natives” themselves, rallying the forest Na’vi to combat victory against his own people, and becoming leader of the tribes as a Toruk Makto (rider of the winged pterydactyl-like apex predator Toruk). 

Ideologically, Avatar: the Way of Water, attempts a bit of a course correct in that Jake steps down as leader and leaves Neytiri’s forest tribe, the Omaticaya, with his family, to try and keep them safe, once they learn Earth invaders have returned and have a bounty on Jake, specifically, as a traitor.  However, Jake becomes instead a “natural” patriarchal leader of his family unit, drilling an, “us Sullies stick together against all” mentality into his kids. The gender politics of the Sullies are subtle, but regressive; we see Jake teaching his son (not his daughters) to hunt, Neytiri (not Jake) preparing family food, Jake telling his eldest son to look out for his siblings, Jake conforting a grieving Neytiri (whose emotions are “wilder” than his). On Pandora, Cameron’s Eden, men are warrior leaders, women are spiritual leaders, everyone is heterosexual, and no one is disabled (indeed in Avatar 2009, Jake “escapes” from his wheelchair-bound disability into his new Na’vi avatar body). This is the eco-primitivist fantasy, which has always had troubling eco-fascist tendencies; ones that go unexamined here.  

On the other hand, we do see Jake and Neytiri’s mixed-race kids experience prejudice for their biological differences, from other Na’vi in the Metkayina (water-living) clan, and struggle for acceptance.

Moreover, Spider, whom Jake and his kids have semi-adopted (but whom, Jake tells us, Neytiri feels prejudiced towards, even knowing Jake once inhabited a human body too) also struggles with outsider status. Spider is another human character (like Jake and Grace before him)  torn between two worlds, and his dilemma is clearly set up to carry great meaning for the next installments of the Avatar saga. He is othered and treated as a hostage by Neytiri against Quaritch Mark 2 (his Na’vi embodied father-clone) and conversely treated with affection by Quaritch 2 himself (on whom Neytiri’s father-blackmail works). Thus, Spider later saves Quaritch 2 (Jake’s main antagonist) from drowning, which he fails to mention that to his adoptive Na’vi family. Spider is thus a child both of two warring fathers, and two warring worlds.

The best elements of the film are clearly those focussed on the Tulkun alien-whales and their symbiotic relationship with the Metkayina. Throughout these, and other (over-long) action fight sequences, it is clear that humans remain the trouble in Pandora’s paradise.

Either Earth must adopt Pandora’s Edenic principles, or Pandora must perish at the hand of Earth’s rapacious ones. This is the choice Cameron seemingly presents us with.  

But, cross-cultural pollination, via inter-breeding and ideas-exchange, have already occurred, and cannot be undone unless all human influence (including Jake, Neytiri and their kids) are erased from Pandora. 

Can there be a third way, for children of both worlds, like Spider and Kiri, neither an eco-fascist Eden, nor an industrial-capitalist wasteland?

For all its (at times excruciating) flaws, I admire Cameron’s attempt to confront us with a global narrative about ecocide, and the corrective need for ecological consciousness, in these times when we are inexorably faced, as a species, with our responsibility for the seismic troubles of climate breakdown and mass extinction which bear down on us (and on our hybrid children, born of nature and technology) in the new century.        

[drsilverfish]

BBC Dracula - Moffat and Gatiss (review) 2019

I’m putting most of this under the cut, so I don’t spoil anyone who hasn’t seen it yet (it’s now on Netflix for international audiences). 

Contains some discussion of queer-coding/ queer-baiting, and some discussion of Sherlock “Easter-eggs”. 

Claes Bang is an amazing Dracula.........

I know Moffat and Gatiss are frequent hate-objects on Tumblr. And I think, unfortunately, there can be a “contagion of hate” which happens in relation to creatives online, which is different from thoughtful critique of the work.   

They are, in my view, good writers and (as are we all) flawed humans. 

I’ve enjoyed their Doctor Who, their Sherlock and now their Dracula, whilst, at the same time, being critical of some elements (e.g. Moffat writing Amy, River AND Clara as “mysteries” for the Doctor to “solve”, as if women, a la Freud, were inherently mysterious, or their version of Sherlock’s contemporary London as, almost entirely, white, when London’s population these days is 30-40% BAME).

However, if we can only enjoy totally “unproblematic” art, there will be precious little art left to enjoy.

Sherlock, in particular, became embroiled in the great queerbaiting debate.

And I think that raised a number of interesting questions, and complex questions, about different generations of LGBTQ+ people, their expectations, histories, and (sadly) failure to communicate well with one another (inter-generational queer culture can be regrettably absent, as there are often no social spaces for it outside sexualised spaces).

Moffat and Gatiss (the latter is gay) at once openly disavowed and archly acknowledged the queer subtext in Sherlock in interviews, whilst BBC PR (and this element, I think in particular, was problematic) frequently used it as part of their marketing for the show.   

Moffat here appears to disavow Sherlock as gay: 

"There's no indication in the original stories that he was asexual or gay. He actually says he declines the attention of women because he doesn't want the distraction. What does that tell you about him? Straightforward deduction. He wouldn't be living with a man if he thought men were interesting."

Moffat is not saying that Sherlock, like Austin Powers, misplaced his mojo. "It's the choice of a monk, not the choice of an asexual. If he was asexual, there would be no tension in that, no fun in that – it's someone who abstains who's interesting. There's no guarantee that he'll stay that way in the end – maybe he marries Mrs Hudson. I don't know!"

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/20/steven-moffat-sherlock-doctor-who

And also here:

“[Sherlock]’s not interested in [sex]. He’s willfully staying away from that to keep his brain pure — a Victorian belief, that. But everyone wants to believe he’s gay. He’s not gay. He’s not straight.”

https://www.vulture.com/2015/03/sherlock-is-not-gay-not-straight-steven-moffat.html

Whilst Gatiss, on the other hand, here acknowledges a homoerotic subtext, which he prefers as subtext:

“No, I don’t think I’d make a kind of gay programme. It’s much more interesting when it’s not about a single issue.  And equally, I find flirting with the homoeroticism in Sherlock much more interesting.” 

http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1p89f/BuzzMagazineOctober2/resources/index.htm

Buzz Magazine, Oct 2010. 

In viewing their, post-Sherlock, Dracula, I think Moffat and Gatiss have taken on board some of the “queerbaiting” accusations (although don’t expect them to admit it). 

For instance, in Sherlock, the only confirmed LGBT characters on-screen are Irene Adler and her companion, and Kenny Prince and his housekeeper/ lover Raoul (there is also John Watson’s sister, whom we never meet on-screen). All the main male characters who might be queer, remain queer-coded - Moriarty, Sholto, Mycroft, Sherlock, John Watson himself. 

In Dracula, it is clear that Drac himself is a seducer of both men and women. Yes, Moffat refers to him as “bi-homicidal” not bisexual:

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/12/28/bbcs-new-dracula-is-bi-homicidal-not-bisexual-yes-really/

I don’t have a problem with that. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was all about feeding not overt fucking too, but his “desires” for male victims were more sublimated - it was Mina and Lucy he most directly targetted, and his vampire “brides” at the castle were all women. What we see on-screen in Moffat and Gatiss’ version is a more overt equal opportunities gorging, on both men and women, using the tropes of sexual seduction (hands on knees, intense looks, suggestive conversation). In that sense, Moffat and Gatiss are bringing the subtext of the original much further into overt text. Their Dracula is being read as bisexual by audiences who don’t approve as well as audiences who do (i.e. it’s pretty damn visible):

https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/131015/viewers-defend-dracula-being-bisexual-in-terrifying-new-bbc-series/

https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/02/calling-dracula-gay-vampire-totally-misses-point-11991772/

Alongside that, there are several LGBTQ characters, including Lord Ruthven (a nod to Polidori’s The Vampyre, 1819) whom Dracula seduces. Renfield (played by Gatiss) and Jonathan Harker, are also “enthralled” by the Count, with Agnes Van Helsing directly asking Harker whether he had “sexual intercourse” with Dracula, and Gatiss’ Renfield appearing quite besotted with the Count. 

 But the key to this version of Dracula is the relationship between the Count and Van Helsing, whom Moffat and Gatiss have re-written as a nun, Agatha Van Helsing, incorporating also some of Stoker’s original Mina into the character as well.

The three episodes, “The Rules of the Beast”, “Blood Vessel” and “The Dark Compass” are set 1) In Dracula’s castle, in the original time-period of the novel, 2) On the Demeter, the ship Dracula takes to England, in the original time-period of the novel and 3) In the present day UK.

Episode one was a hammer-horror tribute, really. Episode two was an Agatha Christie tribute (and a nice piece of fan-fiction too, as it fleshed out the novel’s account of the voyage). Episode three was, really, in many ways, a tribute to their own Sherlock. 

Their Van Helsing was brilliantly written and brilliantly acted by Dolly Wells, as a sort of Sherlock character - celibate by choice, cold, brilliant, and absolutely commanding.

I think this Dracula played with the source material quite beautifully (“bloofer lady”) and found a way to incarnate the Victorian gothic themes of sublimated carnality, purity, corruption and death into the contemporary world.

Claes Bang’s Dracula is a creature of mesmerising seduction, but he is, in fact, always seducing himself, searching for “brides” who seem not to fear death (which he personifies, in the midst of his rotting eternal life) and forever coming up short.

And Agatha Van Helsing, his counter-part, his match, is, as a nun, a woman who has sworn vows of anti-seduction (celibacy).

But she does seduce Dracula, and she does it with her mind, through her own fearlessness, because she is so open about her doubt in the reality of God and salvation, yet she is bravely ready to meet her death anyway (twice).

I loved the final tableau of Death and the Maiden, only it is the maiden who seizes hold of death, even across time, and in the end wrests the Count into the loving arms of the finite.

I think Moffat and Gatiss definitely had some fun, in terms of thematic cross-overs with their Who and Sherlock, quite apart from the evident cross-over casting (Jonathan Aris, who played Anderson in Sherlock, appears in Dracula episode 2 as the Captain of the Demeter, and Sacha Dhawan, who plays The Master in the new Doctor Who episode “Spyfall” which just aired, also appears in Dracula episode 2 as Dr. Sharma). 

The time travel element was there – Agatha “re-incarnated” in her descendant Zoe and then inhabited by her spirit (via blood transference) and so was the duelling “frenemy” dynamic of the Master vs The Doctor and Sherlock vs Moriarty, echoed again here in Dracula vs Agatha.

I suppose we could say that all three productions (in Moffat/ Gatiss’ hands) share the sentiment that real seduction happens in the mind.

Agatha, of course, drinks Dracula’s blood in episode 3, and, given much subsequent vampire lore (e.g. The Vampire Diaries) which frequently attributes healing properties to vampire blood, it is quite possible that both she and the Count survive what seems to be their final encounter in “The Dark Compass” - her blood no longer deadly to him, as his blood heals her cancer.

The “game”, as Agatha/ Zoe says, is not, in fact, in that case, “over”. 

For Sherlock fans looking for cross-over textual commentary, there was plenty, including that reference to “the game”, a favourite saying of BBC Sherlock’s - “The game is afoot!” and, of course, episode 1x03 The Great Game.

Agatha and Dracula play chess on the Demeter, in Agatha’s mind. And if you listen, as they sit down to play, a few bars of the Sherlock theme tune play:

Remember this publicity shot for S4 of BBC Sherlock?

With its perhaps give-away pieces flying at John like bullets?

The fact that Agatha and Dracula’s chess game takes place in her mind, whilst, in fact, as she later realises, she is dying (being drained of her blood by Dracula) could be read as giving credence to the theories that S4 of Sherlock, in fact takes places significantly in John’s mind, whilst he is lying in a coma after being shot. 

Dracula also refers to “the losing side”  in relation to the chess game, as being Agatha’s. And that phrase is used by Sherlock -  ”sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side” in A Scandal in Belgravia in his confrontation with Irene Adler, when he guesses that she has used his name as her phone password. Dracula is eventually bested by Agatha because he succumbs to sentiment - he cares about her. 

Lucy rather resembles the bride of The Abominable Bride (as she becomes the abominable “bride” of Dracula) and Agatha Van Helsing is very much in the vein of the suffragettes who outsmart Sherlock in that episode. 

Key take-away being that dreamscapes are a common feature of Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock and Dracula - Sherlock’s drug-dream of The Abominable Bride, John’s possible coma-dream of much of S4, and the dreams Dracula’s bite gives to Harker, Lucy and Agatha. 

Things are not (simply) what they seem. 

Dracula also talks a lot about mirrors - he avoids them because they tell him the truth about his living corpse, whereas, interestingly the mirror lies to vampire Lucy, showing her a still-beautiful and un-burned version of herself (whilst the selfie tells her the truth). Mirrors, of course, featured heavily as a narrative device in BBC Sherlock (e.g. Molly as a mirror for John).

There’s plenty more to say, but I’ll leave it there for now!  

[drsilverfish]

Twin Peaks: The Return - Unravelling Lynch’s Heterosexual Mystery

In one sense, there is no unravelling this text. Lynch sets out to resist “decoding”. His Jiāo dài or Judy, the malevolent spirit Major Briggs was on the trail of, translates from the Mandarin as “to explain” - Lynch’s joke about critics (”explainers”) as an “extreme negative force”. 

In another, Twin Peaks The Return is a canvass for Lynch to grapple once again with his passions, obsessions and motifs for the tragedy of heterosexual relations...

The new work is postmodern in its sensibility, just as the original Twin Peaks was, marrying pastiche and pathos, with a strong relationship to surrealism. However, The Return is postmodernism  on steroids.  Whilst Original Twin Peaks gently sent-up the soap opera and the detective genres, whilst making seductive use of their conventions (melodramatic love affairs, stoic heroes) in The Return Coop passes through melodrama, the gangster, Western and superhero movies on his way back to Twin Peaks. Lynch is comfortable riffing on the black-and-white surrealism of Jean Cocteau (see La Belle et La Bete, 1946) the ultra-violence of Tarantino (already a fan of pastiche himself) and the comic-book kid-on-a-mission staple, in the form of Freddie Sykes, the English lad with his magical green gardening glove which packs a superhero  punch.

La Belle et La Bete (Beauty and the Beast)

It is in Lynch’s portraits of men and women and the relations between them, that the real mystery lies.

In fact, Twin Peaks The Return is a heterosexual drama where an “impossibility” of relations between straight men and women is made mythic, and the roles often created between them by film tradition are the fabric of the interplay. The three girls in pink who act like ‘50s “dumb blondes”, attending to the needs of the comedic criminal Mitchum Brothers, the erotic thrill of Janey-E as Coop tells her he’s in control and will do the driving, Shelley’s daughter’s refusal to tell her parents about her boyfriend’s domestic abuse, her masochistic obedience to him, Agent Tammy Preston’s perfect pose as the younger, beautiful, somewhat icy female subordinate learning from her wise male elders, Diane’s trauma as she sleeps with Coop and cannot but re-remember her rape by Dark Cooper (leading her to cover up Cooper’s face during the act), Cooper’s own relationship to Laura - he as a white knight on a quest to save her, she a damsel in distress. 

Lynch fetishises the dominance of men and the submission of women - Blue Velvet taught us that. Yet he worries at it, as a moral problem in the world, the problem of its attraction and repulsion (for him, and in male-dominated cinematic tradition) - the dark side of male violence and female battering as a mythic triumphing of Evil over Good. Yet one Lynch’s cinematic eye is forever  in thrall to. 

If Agent Cooper and Dark Cooper are “one and the same” (as the giant and the dwarf claim of themselves in the Red Room in the original Twin Peaks) if they are light (Dougie Coop being the extreme light manifestation, as an idiot sauvant) and shadow selves, with the final Coop,  who is called Richard, somewhere in the middle, then Lynch seems to be saying that violence towards women lies as a kernel of possibility at the heart of every man, even one as upstanding as Original Coop. And that violence, for Lynch, is always tied to sexual violence.  A dark possibility blooming at the heart of heterosexual relations.

 BOB’s mission is to feed on suffering (garmonbozia) and where women are concerned that means sexual suffering. As Leeland he rapes Laura. As Dark Coop he kills women in their underwear. Dark Coop, we learn, raped Diane. And given that Audrey appears to have been either in a coma or an asylum, and her monstrous son is also Dark Coop’s, it is strongly suggested he may have raped her too. Plus, what did happen to Annie? 

Both Diane and Audrey, twenty-five years after the events of the original Twin Peaks, are portrayed as bitter bitches. Their suffering at the hands of Dark Coop has soured them. Diane tells everyone to fuck off and Audrey treats her stoic husband (inside her coma/ dream-world) to an unending tirade of put-downs. Sarah Palmer’s suffering after learning of her husband’s rape and murder of their daughter has also led to her becoming monstrous, eventually apparently inhabited by Judy. 

It seems, for Lynch, that the evil that men do in turn, turns women into shrewish monsters.

 Laura Palmer’s saccharine beauty-queen photo - a blonde white teenage girl, presented as the embodiment of innocence, is actually framed by angels during her creation by The Fireman in The Return Part 8. She becomes a sort of passive Jesus figure, sent to earth by the White Lodge to “counter” the evil spirit of  BOB created by the Black Lodge.

Good vs Evil as feminine suffering vs masculine violence

But whilst BOB is self-aware in terms of his membership of the Black Lodge and his active, evil nature, and is capable of inhabiting different bodies, the Laura entity fully inhabits the body of Laura Palmer and does not seem to know she is an agent of the White Lodge. She only knows that she is born into a household where her father rapes her, from a young age.  Active masculine evil vs a more passive feminine suffering (although Laura successfully fights to stop BOB possessing her). 

Perhaps ultimately, Laura has been sent by the White Lodge  to recruit Coop to the eternal (infinity loop) fight against the Black Lodge, as manifested by Jiāo dài. Laura is the perfect lure for him - her beauty and her tragically corrupted innocence tap into his own tragic guilt about the death of Caroline, Windom Earl’s wife and the love of his life. Laura Palmer has been  perfectly designed to push Coop’s buttons.

Thus Laura  and Agent Cooper are chess pieces on a cosmic board, Queen and White Knight, like the game Coop was playing with Windom Earl in Original Twin Peaks.

The final shot of The Return, in which Laura  wears the velvet of a femme fatale and whispers in Coop’s ear in the Red Room,  while he looks transfixed with a kind of horror, signifies the Lynchian paradoxical paradigm of an eternal potential for corruption of men by women and women by men.

 Because, as part of Cooper’s recruitment process, he has unleashed Dark Cooper on the world for twenty-five years, destroying two women he cared for,  Diane and Audrey, in the process. And now, he has had to integrate part of that shadow self into his being (as manifested in Richard’s rather scary behaviour in Cafe Judy) in order to join the cosmic fight, as well as deliberately  reconnect Laura with her own suffering by bringing her back to the scene of her trauma, her parents’ house in Twin Peaks. 

Cooper is walking with fire now.

For Lynch, male/ female sexual and romantic relations seem to be a lightening rod for darkness, as well as,  forever, a poignant out-of-reach dream of transfiguration. 

“My dream, is to go, to the place, where it all began... on a starry night...” 

 They are the infinity loop of light and dark, in which there seems no choice but to play out endless gendered roles of dominance and submission, violence and trauma, a bitter seduction. 

Heterosexuality has never been darker.