Diane… #17: Twin Peaks Episode 15 – Drive with a Dead Girl
September 21st, 2016
Welcome to Diane… #17.
Rosie, Adam and Mark eat too many sweets and stay up waaaay past bedtime to watch the fifteenth installment of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, Drive With a Dead Girl.
Naughtiness is afoot, and the theme is mischief. Leland’s dancing on the furniture. Norma’s new dad is betting on the sly, and Catherine Martell toys with Ben’s freedom. She’s a caution, isn’t she?
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…within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths…
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2 Responses to “Diane… #17: Twin Peaks Episode 15 – Drive with a Dead Girl”
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September 21st, 2016 at 8:57 pm
A classy plate presentation as always, with a proper side of tongue in cheek. Bravo on another one, Rosie, Adam and Mark.
You were mentioning how Bob is being much less careful in this episode…but it’s not that Bob’s being less careful than usual, he just has more time in the driver’s seat after he kicked out his roommate from the smiling bag they’ve both been sharing (white flash during Maddy’s murder), and therefore Leland’s not there to jump back in and course-correct when Bob goes too far off the rails. Leland-as-smiling-bag is such an amazing metaphor, Mark. I doubt the writers did that intentionally but there’s the beauty of Twin Peaks once again, leaving so much room for interpretation that your metaphor can ring 100% true.
So yeah. As far as I read this episode Leland isn’t there this episode, and he won’t BE back until the ripcord gets pulled.
I would love to hear Team Diane dig into this using the gradient scale introduced over twitter the last week where you have Lynch’s Painterly Device on one side and Frost’s Codes & Symbols on the other side, and where you place this (and the giant, and next episode, dopplegangers, etc, etc, etc) on the scale (and, of course, why you did so).
Using the Moby song sampling Laura’s theme was a nice bit of nostalgia (right after talking about nostalgia) while also setting the scene while talking about the timestamp of 90s fashion and hair…your production is consistently doing double-duty. Yum.
Pete as mischief-maker shows up here for I believe the first time while delivering Catherine’s message to Ben? He’s been looking at the books w Josie back in Season One but he never seemed like an imp until this scene. Jack Nance is wonderful.
And your talking about the imps in regards to Leland/Bob sets the table nicely for what you’ll have to talk about when Earle shows up. Nicely seeded.
September 22nd, 2016 at 8:28 pm
I’d suggest that Bob is revelling in getting full control of Leland’s body and is driving it around like a crazy clown car. Which makes the later scene of Leland/Bob’s reckless driving much more pointed a metaphor.
If I can get a little drama teachery, the Puckish demeanor of Pete here of course reminds us that the whole mise en scene of Twin Peaks could be said to mirror that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The complicated divisions of various star crossed lovers, A court (the lawful characters of the Sherrif’s office and the FBI but also Ben Horne as King of his own domain at the Great Northern) comedic rude mechanicals (Hank, Pete, Big Ed, Andy) and of course the fairies in the woods. “Lord what fools these mortals be!”
In Shakespeare, woods and forests have a whole series of symbolic meanings. As well as magical spaces they can be places of unlawful and horrific violence: the rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus and the near-rape of Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona take place in forests. The near mythical Forest of Arden is a recurring setting and there’s the whole Burnham Wood prophecy by the Witches and its eventual fulfillment in Macbeth.
On the subject of Lucy’s sister’s clumsy ethnic stereotyping of Hawk. As someone who was old enough in the Nineties to clock these things I can confirm that this would certainly have been a noticeable attitude. The whole New Age fad was at its height with its concurrent facile interest in ‘Native American’ culture. Feathery Dream Catchers hung over a lot of middle class beds but a lot of people would have recognised and cringed at this even then as cultural appropriation even if the terminology probably wasn’t codified yet. And yes, isn’t Michael Horse’s performance here perfectly dignified.