Mr. Strawberry wrote:
I'll say this about Windom Earle. The first time I watched Twin Peaks, I was terrified of what he might do to Cooper and the townsfolk, and saw real potential for danger, and you know what? He came through. Just look at what he brought to the table. Look at that happened to so many lives. Coop, Annie, Major Briggs, Audrey, they all suffered tremendously and their lives were ruined. What's more, the result of Mr. C being out in the world means that Windom's machinations are still being felt, and in many ways the events depicted in The Return are the cold and brilliant echoes of his diamond-like mind.
So in fiction I would say about 99% of the time, there is no actual threat at hand, from the villain or otherwise. They bark and all that, show some fangs, maybe a "major character gets killed off" in a cheap attempt to present the notion of danger or tragedy, but in the end everyone wins against evil and the protagonist goes home with his arm around a babe. You know the routine. Windom and BOB demonstrate how to do this right and truly make someone threatening, frightening and dangerous, but that ties into Twin Peaks as a whole too, 'cause it's got an earnest and engaging presentation unlike any other. I'd never seen anything like it before, it just felt so real and believable the first time I watched it.
Well said. I still maintain that there are a lot of genuinely creepy Windom scenes -- the first time he meets Leo, the scene where he delivers the voiceover with Caroline's death mask in Coop's room, his final goodbye to Leo, taking Annie into the red curtains at Glastonberry Grove, etc. I like a lot of things he brings to the show, and his character is the primary driver of plot in the final episodes.
Unfortunately when people think of Windom Earle, that scene with him wearing pajamas and playing the flute probably comes to mind. I think it's from the Diane Keaton episode..? Also that scene where he dressed as the metal head at the Double R, he just looks so intensely conspicuous and different from everyone else in the whole town. How did Cooper not notice him then? Windom, in a few scenes, seems to embody the goofier and less realistic tone than the realistic (and at times Lynchian, which itself is a blend of realism and absurdism) tone established in Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. I don't think this is necessarily a flaw of the character though, as much of the second half of Season 2 is colored with a sort of gimmicky, over the top humor. Ben as Robert E. Lee, Nadine in high school, Little Nicky, "the mayor and his brother". At least in the case of Ben and a few of the other characters, we can still remember how great they were earlier in the show, so the characters aren't really diminished by the Evelyn era of Peaks episodes.
With Windom, who we don't actually meet until this era, we can't really weigh his appearances here against appearances from a better time in Twin Peaks. Had we caught more glimpses of him prior to Leland's death, he probably would've been handled with more seriousness, and we might have an overall fonder recollection of him as a character. But yeah, Windom just seemed to come along during that period where Lynch/Frost weren't ultra engaged with the day to day of the show, and I think that might have hurt his depiction a little bit.
I think that breakfast scene where Windom is first mentioned as having escaped is great and really builds a lot of dark mystery around his character, but it takes the show a few episodes to even mention him again. The show probably does spend too much time setting up his storyline, as Mark Frost himself has admitted in interviews.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Phillip Jeffries character, and how in Fire Walk With Me he exists as a pure anomaly. Like, it's not clear at all what his character contributes to Laura's story, or Cooper's story. Sure, his appearance sets up that whole Convenience Store scene, but couldn't Lynch and Engels just use the disappeared Chet Desmond in that role? Like most people, I've been stumped by Phillip Jeffries.
Even in Season 3, where he exists as some disembodied gatekeeper who can send people back in time (he reminds me of the Guardian of Forever (
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Guardian_of_Forever) in Star Trek here). He somehow makes less sense this time around, as he speaks in this vague, almost confused manner that suggests even he doesn't know what or where he is anymore. And on top of that, there is the Jeffries impersonator that Mr. C speaks with, which seems to totally blow up any chance of deciphering Jeffries at first, but having had time to chew on it, it's given me a degree of perspective on Windom Earle.
I think that the Jeffries impersonator is Windom Earle. Mr. C is using the same sort of computer briefcase that Earle did, and the impostor alludes to New York. The room with the glass box had bonsai tree, very similar to the one Earle used to spy on Cooper with during the original series. Also, who else would want to kill Cooper and be with BOB again? I think the Jeffries impostor is Earle, or at the very least, written in a deliberately vague enough way to let viewers who want to think this, think this.
But getting back to Jeffries in Fire Walk With Me, I wonder if in some early iteration of the story Windom Earle was in it, and filling the role that Phillip Jeffries came to fill. In a way, Jeffries and Earle can both be described as FBI agents driven mad by their interactions with the Spirit World. I can see Lynch and Engels using Earle initially, as he was a pretty important character in Twin Peaks, but then deciding on not mentioning him at all, as a way of moving the story away from the perceived shortcomings of Season 2. Supposedly at that point in the story, Earle was locked away in a mental institution and heavily medicated. Were he to just suddenly appear in Gordon's office, he might sound very similar to the incoherent Phillip Jeffries. Also, if he were to just appear at Gordon's office from his padded room at the asylum, then magically reappear there without alerting anyone else, it would create a situation where Cooper and the gang couldn't be sure that Earle really came to visit them at all, or if they were having some sort of shared vision, hence Cooper's insistence on finding video evidence of the encounter. And all of that is assuming that this would be Earle from that point in time, from the asylum. He could also very well be some echo or fragment of Earle from the Black Lodge itself. After BOB destroyed his soul, perhaps part of what was left of himself flew back in time to try and warn the Blue Rose Task Force, only to confuse them though.
But maybe David Lynch didn't want anything in his movie to remind people of that one scene where Windom Earle plays flute in his pajamas, so he and Engels just created a whole new character instead. Which is unfortunate, because I think Windom had a lot of juice left as a character, but obviously he left a sour taste for too many. It's funny that Gordon describes Jeffries as "who might not really exist anymore", because if he was created to fill in for the controversial Windom Earle, than he "who might not really exist anymore" is standing in for a character who, in the eyes of his creators, really doesn't exist anymore.