Special Agent Dale Cooper and the Good Man

Twin Peaks and me...it finally happened.

And Miss, sometimes thing can happen just like (snap) this.

It wasn't the assertion Twin Peaks saved American television from itself, or the fact every hour long drama owes an immeasurable debt to the show, or even the promise of heavy doses of Lynchian weird bad--death dreams distilled into cinematic ambiance--it was my friend's shirt. The backward speaking dwarf to my Coop in this Twin Peaks conversion (in actuality, he's BOB and I'm MIKE, but let's not mix our already unfocused analogies), my friend would never make an endorsement with anything less than his whole heart. If you could make one of those descending name t-shirts for him it would be:

Coffee&
Guitars&
Cigarettes&
Whiskey&
Weird.

When I saw him wearing the, "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?" tee, it was a watershed moment. His appreciation of Twin Peaks moved from, 'a show I watch,' to a reflection of intrinsic identity. With nothing left but Netflix to distract me from my fallow blog (sorry readers! I mean...I have readers...right?) I watched the first episode and then consumed all 31 hours of Twin Peaks in the next eight days. Not Fire Walk With Me, though. People talk about the film like each frame is made from actual garbage.

The Twin Peaks story--and not the narrative, there's not enough Internets for that...let's just call it 'who killed Laura Palmer?'--is simple: it was too beautiful for this world. An exceptional pilot gave way to a number of strange, disparate threads. Week after week dread pooled like burnt engine oil hemorrhaging from a stomach ulcer, but people wanted answers. When studio execs forced the creator's hand, people didn't like the answers they got. Too horrific to be a soap opera, too surreal to be a police procedural, too funny to be a drama, too lurid to be a parody, Twin Peaks was peyote at the 90's prime time sundae social, and the Beverly Hills 90210 masses were not ready to reach for the secret. It's a tragedy, but an inevitable and necessary one.

I could go on--and on and on and on and on and on--but of Twin Peaks' many splendors, there is one with the touch indelible. A hero capable of shepherding you back to belief in art's healing power. A character who so fully illuminates the palate with which his world is drawn, they are no longer a mere player, but a universe shouldering Atlas. Like Odysseus and The Dude before him, I am, of course, speaking of Special Agent Dale Cooper.

This same friend (maybe I'm BOB and he's MIKE? The perfect relationship. Appetite and satisfaction, a golden circle) sent me a deluge of congratulatory texts upon my arrival in Twin Peaks. Among these was the unprompted gem, "I would do Dale Cooper so gross." Lofty praise from any straight male, and once I saw what was under the G-Man trench coat and load bearing chin, it's a classifiable understatement. Dale Cooper is black coffee and cherry pie served with perfect hair and polished shoes. He's a caricature of the all American do-gooder, and in defiance of this, in the naked light of his tragic undoing; Dale Cooper makes a case for what might be an actual good man.

The Perfect Man
As natural a police as lawmen come, and maybe the only human being on planet earth who likes black coffee more than I do, Dale is not good, he's the form of the good. In an era saturated with the burdened lead--the hero consumed with conflicts internal and external--Dale is certain. Armed with a mini tape recorder and bottomless well of punchy optimism, the man is unshakable. No matter the circumstances, and Twin Peaks is steeped in outlandish ones, the tiller never so much as trembles beneath his steady hand. Cooper--in this vision of supreme virtue--is a work of complete fiction, probably the most reasonable expectation for the ever elusive good man.

An exercise in high camp, this noble Boy Scout come HUAC vision of a Fed is the white cowboy hat. Without a hint of caution, he buckles on his dark water waders and goes at the case like he's playing Hardy Boy's in the backyard. Nightmare tentacles may envelop the entire earth, but it's no matter, Dale is not of this lowly place. Fear and misery reverberate off a discarded prom queen, and Dale replies with toothy grin and thumbs up. Dale can do no wrong. He's flawless, and in this context, far worse than a bad man, he's the perfect man.

The most disheartening thing about perfect people is the limited warranty on their state of being. Perfection implies naïveté. Perfection is an action figure forever sealed in its package. Perfection only survives behind an alcove built from things physical and metaphysical to obscure the ugly world. The premise so thin, a trait so easily compromised, Dale Cooper's abrupt demise is no surprise at all.

There is a place, an unspeakable evil in the woods. The kind of place where all hero's quests culminate. The details are scant, but Twin Peaks lore says something about fearless men and the pure of heart being the only ones to survive. A perfect man, when called upon, has done nothing to earn these traits, these traits have simply never been challenged. He is then revealed not as a hero, but a babe in the woods with a hole where his battle hardened resolve should have been.

But this is Coop we're talking about, and what a man puts in his mug says more than word and deed combined. Dale is a black coffee drinker, and if there is a stronger character trait than black coffee, I don't know what it is. When you take it black as midnight on a moonless night, you already know full roasted and bitter is life's best flavor. Sugar and cream are an illusory coping mechanism for the willfully misled. The evidence is pretty obvious; Dale is too good to be perfect.

The Good Guy
Of all qualities, the self-appointed descriptor of "good person" should illicit immediate concern. A cocktail of delusion and self-importance it's seldom overtly sinister, but has less to do with fully evolved morality and more to do with being right. All answers have been collected, belief is fact, purview inflexible, and these value judgments are a prescription for everyone.

Beneath the relentless Special Agent, it's not hard to find this man. Dale always has an answer. His deductive method reminds the world he knows the answers behind all its little details. Never to condescend, perhaps just enough to remind he's better than, but it's a privilege to bask in the Dale whose belief in Dale never waivers. Even his doubt exudes a level of confidence--a complex gesture reminding everyone else to remind him what he's known all along; Special Agent Dale Cooper is right. Special Agent Dale Cooper is one of the good guys.

In a not so different world, Dale is a disgraced FBI agent. Fresh off what is ominously referred to as the Pittsburgh incident--an affair with a witness, his partner's wife, ending in her murder--he arrives in Twin Peaks alone. The way we're dropped into the narrative, it's easy enough to believe this case is Bureau priority, but this is 1990. We've still got Commies and Branch Davidians to suss out. Cast as the intrepid sleuth dispatched to track down public enemy number one, Dale is more likely a laughingstock busted so far down the ranks he's lucky to be chasing ghosts in some Podunk town. Wounded, desperate to validate his correctness, he does just that, he chases ghosts.

Maybe Twin Peaks isn't strange at all. Maybe it's the most normal, bucolic place in the Pacific Northwest replete with quirky small town types and the typically overstated local lore. When the Federal Agent shows up on the heels of literally, the only murder ever in Twin Peaks--and a grisly one--his acute neurosis creates its own momentum. A people and place so innocent, and more importantly, highly traumatized, he's able to manipulate them into following him down an insane bunny trail.

Dale wants this to be something big, a career case, and he's so spun inside himself, he starts to believe his own lie. Visions and dreams are hard evidence. Messages dispensed from a log and interpreted by the woman who carries it around like a baby are case breakers. An exercise where Dale says suspects' names and throws a rock at a bottle is incisive police work. I mean...a giant fed him clues and took his ring while he bled out from a gunshot wound? He and a murder victim had the same dream the night before she was murdered? Yeeesh, the owls are not what they seem, indeed.

It's never the clear cut malevolence indicted here, it's far more frightening. Dale is kind and handsome and earnest. Dale wants to find Laura Palmer's killer. Dale believes he is good. The people of Twin Peaks believe Dale is good. Dale is convinced his approach is correct and his intent pure, and he is certain Special Agent Dale Cooper is the best thing for the people of Twin Peaks.

So what comes of this Dale when he breaches the red curtained void? The Name For The Evil Which Men Do only requires a foothold. He has no use for a bad man, he needs someone far more dangerous, he needs a man who is convinced he's good. As the Genociders and Mass Suicidees before the people of Twin Peaks will tell you, the road to the black lodge is paved with good intentions. And usually by good guys.

The Better Man
All of this, these are things I believe. These are the things I believe about self-styled good men, but Dale Cooper is not just any good man.

It's hard for me to articulate my attachment to this character, except he's so much of what I'm not, and contrary to my reflexive reaction, I loved him for it. Love. All four letters, the L, the O the V, and the E, and, yes, in all caps. I was fully invested and accepted Dale was mostly perfect and the rest percent a "good guy," but in an admirable way. Then it all ends, and the end of Twin Peaks is a cruel animal. After the credits rolled, I was devastated. If you heard me tell it, and lots of people did, I would say, "I was..." take a moment to steady myself, work the mist from my eyes, and choke out, "DEVA-stated." It felt like a complete betrayal. I don't mind crushing and unexpected endings, but this was a moral defeat on a molecular level. If Dale Cooper's soul wasn't pure enough and heart fearless enough, it was all a lie. We're fucked. All of us. There is no hope, love is not enough, we all killed Laura Palmer, and that gum you like will never come back in style. 

Reeling, I turned to the Internet for...something. Anything to contradict what I felt had occurred (Doppelganger? Uggghhhh...a cop out, and somehow even worse). In my Twin Peaks vision quest, I stumbled on an article. It's mostly about David Lynch, but there is a section with Kyle McLaughlin that caught my attention. McLaughlin, the actor who plays Dale Cooper as wells as Jeffery Beaumont--the lead in Lynch's Blue Velvet--says he believes Dale Cooper and Jeffery Beaumont are the same person:

"I see my character as Jeffery Beaumont grown up," says Kyle McLaughlin, who plays the Federal Agent. "Instead of being acted upon, he has command of his world."

If you haven't seen Blue Velvet, get a tank of nitrous, a case of PBR's, and let it all just wash over you, but this is about Jeffery. Jeffery, a naïve college student, returns to his idyllic home town to visit his ailing father. He finds a severed ear, begins his own sleuthing (amateur detective work? That is SO Coop), and is consumed by a sinister underworld teeming beneath the rose bush, picket fence patina.

The end of the film is a reasonably happy place, but after the credits roll, and before we see Dale Cooper in his government issued sedan, there is a critical decision this man--this Cooper/Beaumont hybrid--had to make: What do I do with what I know?

Jeffery Beaumont does terrible things. He sees things. Drugs, psychosexual horror, kidnapping, Roy Orbison, murder, sociopaths just mucking around in their sociopathy--these are all parts of Jeffery Beaumont now. He didn't catch a whiff of the darkness in the world, he was water boarded with ink.

It's easy to make this man a cynic. Credentialed with hard evidence the world is an awful place, Jeff has license enough to disappear into a bottle. Every person kept at arm's length, an endless outpouring of animosity, heaving sobs alone in the bar parking lot, all little methadone fixes of badness. Not as a cure, but to keep it from happening all at once. The slow rot. The world is corrupt, man is depraved, and letting controlled doses in and out is the only protection.

But Jeffery Beaumont chose another path. He made the irrational decision to be the irrational response to the evils in this world. He went to college, worked his way up in the FBI, and I can even picture the moment where he sat in front of a legal pad columned with the names of American icons, looked at Dale Carnegie and Gary Cooper and thought, "That's the name of a good man." He's not unblemished, but in a rejection of conventional wisdom, there is no cynicism, only an adamant good built on an affirmation of so much bad.

To experience evil is common. To understand evil, a sneering evil with no earthbound limitations, is rare. To have this unstoppable evil deliver bodies to your door, smear blood on your hands, and slip through your fingers is defeat. But Dale returns to the darkness, and somehow shines brighter than ever. The tar pitch sinkhole has no power to tarnish or choke out, but through some Dale Cooper engine far beyond my comprehension, he converts it to fuel for the blinding effulgence that is his heart light.

In the minutes after I watched the finale, I broke through the turgid surface of my misery long enough to send a text, and this same friend who brought me to Twin Peaks, said it all better than I could myself:

     Me: No. Not like that.

Friend: How's Annie?

Friend: Yeah, it hurts bad.

     Me: I'm devastated.

Friend: The pain never dissipates. You just learn to live with it.

     Me: But Coop was made to [redacted]. If he can't make it...

     Me: Oh, Coop...I guess you were just a man, too.

Friend: He poked a hole in the paper that separates what we are and the brilliant light that we're capable of being dilating the pupil of complacency. Sweet dreams.

It's Dale's most important lesson. Our ultimate destruction cannot be escaped. It will come for us and consume us whole, but as an eventuality, it's less powerful than ever before. It's the countable days before bathed in darkness and light. It's Black Lodge and White Lodge within us all. It's calibrating the internal gyroscope to be fluid between both sides, yet prevent them from collapsing into each other. A whirling tuning fork with a steadfast vibration set not to be perfect, or good, but better.