Diane, 11:13 p.m., April 16th, typing up my blog post for Mark’s class. The scene I selected for this weeks discussion is ‘Cooper’s Dream Sequence’, or the first ‘Red Room’ scene, from David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ (S01E02).

Now, I noticed whilst watching other people’s presentations that the scenes they’d chosen often had some relevance to their childhood. I mean, things they watched with their parents/siblings, that sort of thing. Well, in my household we watched Twin Peaks. There’s nothing my family loves more than a good, old-fashioned murder.

The scene presents us with three characters:

• Special Agent Dale Cooper (To be referred to as ‘Special Agent Sexy’, from here on in)
• The Man from Another Place
• (Not) Laura Palmer

Now, here’s why this particular scene stood out to me.

• Backwards dialogue & action – It’s what I imagine the inside of David Lynch’s head sounds like.
• Riddles/clues – Stroking my pretense of intellectualism, feeding my ego, all that jazz…
• Striking visuals – The patterned floor touches the red curtains in an almost awkward fashion, adding to the eeriness of the scene.
• First time we see Laura (kind of), excluding when we’ve seen her body or in photos/videos.
• Introduces an almost supernatural element to the show.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it was unlike anything I’d seen before. So, when you coupled these particularly unusual elements with the rest of the show it was kind of just one big recipe for ‘YES’. Does that make sense? No? Well, moving on then…



Hey, look, more reasons why I think this scene/show is gr9 (which is one better than gr8):

• It has murder, a detective narrative, dreams, riddles, a mystery and it’s generally weird.
• The sort of ‘what the fuck’ feeling that it gives you.
• Special Agent Sexy
• The Man from Another Place’s dance
• It’s the first sort of really weird scene in the series. Everything up to that point is relatively ‘normal’. (David Lynch normal, that is.)
• It’s really clever, and it provides the viewer with clues wrapped up in riddles, which just makes everything even more mysterious.
• It makes more sense every time I watch it, but I still haven’t quite figured all of it out yet. Eg. why the man wants to help Cooper. I have an idea, but it’s all pretty complicated.
• Audience enters with Cooper, who looks as confused as we are, so even the scene acknowledges that it’s unusual.
• It’s just the best.

Also, The Simpson’s parodied it once in ‘Who Shot Mr Burns? Part 1’.

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