Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

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rebeccaharrison
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Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by rebeccaharrison »

Wow...what an amazing exhausting 18 hours. For Twin Peaks fans since 1989, like me, it's finally concluded. I've taken some time to think everything over.

Waiting 25 years after being left with "How's Annie? How's Annie? How's Annie?" was difficult. It was difficult knowing that we may never get a conclusion to something that was so open ended. To something that wasn't supposed to end like that.

On that wonderful wonderful day, when we got the dual Lynch/Frost synchronous Tweets: "That gum you like is going to come back in style.", my heart leapt out of my chest. I thought to myself...oh my God, we're finally going to get a continuation. We're finally going to find out how Twin Peaks will finally end. The wait for "How's Annie?" was finally going to be resolved. And to have Lynch and Frost solely responsible for the 18 hours, not Showtime, nor ABC, nor network executives, nor Ciby 2000, nor interference from anyone. Just Lynch, and just Frost, coming up with the conclusion for Twin Peaks.

Everything was right with the world. And then, Season 3 started. The Giant and Cooper....3 more clues....and we were underway.

And then, Monica Belluci talked to David Lynch. It was at that point, in my subconscious, that everything fell into place. I realized exactly what was going to happen in the next 3 episodes.

Monica Belluci, Philip Jeffries and of course David Lynch, all knew the horrifying reality of Twin Peaks. That none of it was real. No doughnuts and cherry pie, no black coffee, no fish in percolators.

Philip Jeffries, in his Blue Rose Task Force duties, discovered the secret before anyone else. And in FWWM, he told us as plain as day:

The most important 2 sentences in all of Twin Peaks:

"IT WAS A DREAM. WE LIVE INSIDE A DREAM."

When I first watched FWWM, at that time, excited that we were getting a continuation of Twin Peaks, fearing that we may never get anything at all, those 2 sentences never really registered with me, as it seemed like Philip was in some sort of PTSD trauma, and was just verbalizing gibberish.

But I believe that those 2 sentences exemplified the true HORROR about what he discovered. That none of them were real. Not Jeffries, not Cooper, not Cole. That they are like the dreamer that dreams, then lives inside the dream.

Philip learned that horrible truth from going to one of "their" meetings.

BOB, MIKE, The Tremonds, the Jumping Man, the Electrician, all of them, are sick twisted spirits playing horrible games within a dreamworld. They've terrorized the characters in the dream, and they've terrorized us, the dreamer.

I believe that when Mark Frost and David Lynch sat down to write Twin Peaks Season 3, that they decided to start with: "This is all just a dream. None of this is real. None of Twin Peaks was ever real. And Philip discovered that 25 years ago and Monica Belluci will tell Gordon Cole about it 25 years later. And no one will have any fucking idea what time it is or what year it is. It may be 2:53 time and time again, it may be 10:10 on February 16th, or as Sarah Palmer/The Polish Neighbor from Inland Empire states, if it was 9:45, I would think it's after midnight. Is it future, or is it past?"

Yes, it's cruel. Lynch and Frost didn't give us what we wanted. They didn't wrap everything up with a pretty pink bow. They shattered our illusions.

It is my belief that they decided to not take the easy road. They wanted this to be remembered far into the future as the one television show that not only took risks, but took risks that would shatter its most sacred and caring viewers. There would be no straightforward narrative ending to Twin Peaks, and even now, as I'm still stunned by the horrific ending of Twin Peaks, I now realize that that is how David Lynch always intended it to be.

He foreshadowed that by having Philip Jeffries tell us 25 years ago, that "IT WAS A DREAM. WE LIVE INSIDE A DREAM." And he threw it in our faces more directly by having our own Gordon Cole, Lynch's direct link to us, the viewers, by relaying his recurring Monica Belluci dream to us.

So we really are the dreamers who dream and then live inside a dream.

Any other director would have had Cooper rescue Audrey, and told us how Annie was, and would have concluded the Laura Palmer story with finality. And Twin Peaks would have ended happily ever after.

But David Lynch doesn't work that way. Henry Spencer discovers that in heaven everything is fine. John Merrick discovers that nothing will die. Dorothy Vallens discovers that she still can't see blue velvet through her tears. And Philip Jeffries discovers that they are living inside a dream.

All dreams end. And let's be honest. We'll never see any more Twin Peaks ever. It's over. It ends with Laura whispering something into Cooper's ear that we will never ever be privy to, and it really doesn't matter. Because the dream is over. But what a beautiful dream it was. And if this is how Twin Peaks is supposed to end, then I'm ok with it, because it was never my Twin Peaks or your Twin Peaks to begin with. It was David Lynch's Twin Peaks. He chose this ending without any interference from anyone, and with his full meditative conscience and subconscience working together. He had 25 years to think about this, but I think he had decided 25 years ago to tell us that none of this was real, and that in watching Twin Peaks, and within Twin Peaks itself, we lived inside a dream.

It was a brilliant adventure, and I am convinced that I will never be able to experience another world like this again. David Lynch set the bar high with Twin Peaks, and we all got to live it to the finality that was always meant to be.

A true Magnum Opus, by one of the greatest artists of our time.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by MarkAnthony »

I love what you wrote here and I agree completely. In my own life, reality and the subconscious often clash in very fascinating ways. If they did not, existence would be boring and drab like seeing everything in perpetual monochrome. I came into this season with zero expectations. I bought the ticket and I took the ride. I had complete faith that Lynch and Frost would take me, once again, somewhere wonderful and strange. I do not regret one moment of it and I avoided the pitfall of judging it by conventional standards for TV and film. This defied all conventional standards which Is why watched it so closely. I also believe that all the follow-up analysis and discussion is just as compelling as the show itself.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Deep Thought »

Not for nothin', but everyone calling Philip a teapot is a little funny to me. He obviously is or is inside the white light oval and is being sustained by and or communicates with the teapot. In 17 Dale and Mike are talking to the light oval, not the teapot.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Novalis »

It's slippery in here. :o :lol:
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Mystery Roach »

Deep Thought wrote:Not for nothin', but everyone calling Philip a teapot is a little funny to me. He obviously is or is inside the white light oval and is being sustained by and or communicates with the teapot. In 17 Dale and Mike are talking to the light oval, not the teapot.
I've been wanting to say this too. I believe he's the 'steam' coming out of the 'kettle', not the kettle itself. Or maybe like you said the steam is actually interacting with whatever he is, but either way the attention is never focused on the 'kettle'.

This theory is an interesting notion. So then at the end Dale and Laura both realize that they are only characters in a dream, which promptly vanishes and we the dreamers wake up. I could buy that.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by IcedOver »

Negative. It's a throwaway line. Thinking that it's a literal nighttime dream is too simplistic, and doesn't flow organically from anything in either the original series or movie, or anything in this series. Calling something a dream is incredibly lazy. While this season had its share of laziness, that isn't part of it.
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Isis Unveiled
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Isis Unveiled »

And if this is how Twin Peaks is supposed to end, then I'm ok with it, because it was never my Twin Peaks or your Twin Peaks to begin with. It was David Lynch's Twin Peaks
Oh my... Can you please give credit to Mark Frost?

Twin Peaks

Created By:

Mark Frost
&
David Lynch

(note the order in which the names are credited)

Now, I will admit that the general point you make about the two lines from Jeffries in FWWM had occurred to me as well. It even earned itself some time occupying my attention on more than one occasion since the end of TP:TR.

That being said, I have always ended up coming to the same conclusion that those two lines, while important and powerful, were merely a superficial juxtaposition of the harmonious polarity between conscious/unconscious. Perhaps it is when we think that we are awake that we are really dreaming? Reality is of course, only a matter of perception. Not to mention quite illusive, always quite illusive.

A better question to occupy yourself with might be, why are the lines (or one line rather) "We are living inside a dream," repeated by Cooper in TP:TR? It can't possibly be to construe the entire series of events that unfolded in TP:TR as merely the dreams of another ambiguous character.

I think the most important line in the world of Twin Peaks comes from some cut footage from the convenience store scene in FWWM. BOB says, "I have the fury of my own momentum."

I can assure you that line was written by Frost. Think about it for a little while, and you might find that it is related to the other two lines spoken by Jeffries, and the one line repeated by Cooper.
"I have the fury of my own momentum." - BOB
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Cde. »

Isis Unveiled wrote: I think the most important line in the world of Twin Peaks comes from some cut footage from the convenience store scene in FWWM. BOB says, "I have the fury of my own momentum."

I can assure you that line was written by Frost.
A line from a movie not written by Frost was written by Frost?
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by N. Needleman »

Frost had nothing to do with FWWM.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by claaa7 »

Deep Thought wrote:Not for nothin', but everyone calling Philip a teapot is a little funny to me. He obviously is or is inside the white light oval and is being sustained by and or communicates with the teapot. In 17 Dale and Mike are talking to the light oval, not the teapot.
yep.. i think most of us who call Jeffries a talking teapot, does it with a humorous twist. i never believed he was actually the teapot.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Voided »

IcedOver wrote:Negative. It's a throwaway line. Thinking that it's a literal nighttime dream is too simplistic, and doesn't flow organically from anything in either the original series or movie, or anything in this series. Calling something a dream is incredibly lazy. While this season had its share of laziness, that isn't part of it.
I'm fed up with this cliche of saying that dream theories are lazy. Whilst I'm not necessarily advocating a dream theory myself, I do think it is now a lazy criticism. Dream stories can be lazy but they can be used in perfectly complex and interesting ways....the same as any other stories.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Isis Unveiled »

Cde. wrote: A line from a movie not written by Frost was written by Frost?
Yes, and I will tell you why.

First and foremost, you do realize that before they got cancelled after Season 2, both Lynch & Frost had some material culminating in the back burner for what would have been Season 3 in the 1990s. The mythos of BOB (not specifically BOB from TP but one american indian tribe's concept of a devil/satan), the lodges, the dweller on the threshold, etc... were all used and mentioned in The List of Seven, which Frost began writing immediately after TP was cancelled.

Lynch, of course, went in another direction. Despite not having really been approved by Frost, FWWM was written by Lynch with notes and ideas that he & Frost had on hand and were planning to use in the imaginary 90s season 3 that never was. I believe the convenience store scene was visually all David all day, but the mythos behind say for example E-LEC-TRI-CITY being a paranormal conduit, and a means for spiritual transportation, is STRAIGHT OUT OF ISIS UNVEILED by Helena Blavatsky, recommended apocrypha for anyone trying to understand all things Occult in TP.

If you read Frost's written fiction (The List of Seven being a great place to start because Frost was channeling his frustrations with TP's cancellation into that work) the first thing you will realize is what an incredible writer Frost really is (Dan Brown totally ripped him off!), but also the way he uses (written) dialogue by certain characters to convey multiple layers of symbolism, it could be alliteration or rhyming for example, meant to preclude (foreshadow) or allude to more than one thing.

In The List of Seven, which is historic fiction, Helena Blavatsky is actually a character that gets a brief moment to speak to the book's protagonist Arthur Conan Doyle (he wasn't knighted yet in The List of Seven). In fact, in the first chapter of The List of Seven, via third person omniscience, Frost describes the books stacked on Doyle's desk in his study and mentions Isis Unveiled by name, as being at the very top of the stack (as to imply that it was read most recently by Doyle).

However.... I don't want to discredit Lynch's ability to come up with catchy one-liners like the quote in question. He may very well have written that line, but I doubt it. It's straight up Blavatsky, I don't think Lynch reads a whole lot. And why that line was cut from FWWM in the first place is a mystery itself, although I'm sure it was to trim down runtime.

I'm not surprised that a forum for Twin Peaks fans that is occupied by Twin Peaks fans would underscore or even totally ignore Frost's many allusions to TP in his written fiction. I find that in the real world, most die hard Twin Peaks fans I run into (including myself) think they've got it all figured out (including myself).

We don't.

But reading Isis Unveiled will tie up some loose ends that I see many people bitching about on this forum.
"I have the fury of my own momentum." - BOB
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

Isis Unveiled wrote:I believe the convenience store scene was visually all David all day, but the mythos behind say for example E-LEC-TRI-CITY being a paranormal conduit, and a means for spiritual transportation, is STRAIGHT OUT OF ISIS UNVEILED by Helena Blavatsky, recommended apocrypha for anyone trying to understand all things Occult in TP.
It's also straight out of Ronnie Rocket, which revolves heavily around electricity and "reverse electricity" as life forces. Lynch's fascination with electricity as a mysterious otherwordly element is well-documented and has been a theme in most of his films to a greater or lesser degree.

BTW, Isis, have you seen the thread speculating on Mark's contributions to S3? viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3851

It seems like you're more qualified than most of us in the thread, who aren't too familiar with Mark's non-TP works. I'd love to see your perspective.
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by Isis Unveiled »

Mr. Reindeer wrote:
It's also straight out of Ronnie Rocket, which revolves heavily around electricity and "reverse electricity" as life forces. Lynch's fascination with electricity as a mysterious otherwordly element is well-documented and has been a theme in most of his films to a greater or lesser degree.
Oh I absolutely agree. Lynch's obsession with electricity, Eraserhead in particular, seemed to make him and Frost a match made in heaven for collaboration. Frost had the Occult history as a foundation for ideas, Lynch had a way of translating them into visual art via film.

There was an interview I read with Mark Frost from around... 2001-2002ish I want to say. I wish I would have archived it as I seemed to have misplaced the URL. I can't remember the interviewer or the publication, and what I read was a transcribed version of what I assumed was a taped interview. Basically it was a "What's Mark Frost been up to these past 10 years?" sort of interview. Some things I remember that jumped out at me and seem somewhat relevant to this topic... At one point in the interview Frost had lamented FWWM dearly. He didn't think a prequel was necessary, although he must have given Lynch permission to use some of his/their intellectual property to do the film in the first place, I assume. Lynch couldn't possibly have just up and made FWWM without Frost's knowledge let alone guidance. Frost was obviously not involved in the production but, clearly Lynch and him were in contact during pre production because there is no way Lynch could have written the screenplay for FWWM without some help from Frost. This is why I think some of the dialogue in FWWM had already been written before the TV show had been cancelled, and FWWM was Lynch's last ditch effort to revive the public's interest in Twin Peaks (shame it was so heavily panned at Cannes).

Anywho.... that Frost interview. Yea so I remember Frost saying something like, "David is a painter, he's not a story teller." To which the interviewer replied with "Have you seen Mulholland Drive yet?" I distinctly remember reading Frost's response being "No, but I hear it's a bloody mess."

Other things that stood out from the transcribed Frost interview that are worth mentioning, I swear I remember him telling the interviewer that he had been working on and off on a book he planned to release which would have been a non-fiction piece, about..... get this: America's Occult history. So when I finally got my copy of TSHoTP in the mail and I opened it up I had a brief de ja vu back to to that interview and thought to myself... Wait a minute... was this written with the material he had compiled for that never released non-fiction piece about America's Occult history he talked about?

It sure seemed like it with all the references to Jack Parsons, Sex Magick, Blue Book, and not to mention some slightly embellished (but to what degree I am not able to comment) history about Lois & Clark's expedition west through the new world and their encounter with a tribe of white indians. He even used the dreaded "I" word (illuminati) in the dossier to refer to a group of renegade freemasons hellbent on subverting the free world for their own sick occult desires. And this, remember, is supposed to be the secret (Occult) history of Twin Peaks... or the United States.

So really, I think Frost was killing two birds with one stone when they got the green light from Showtime for The Return. Essentially letting all us fans know that the essence of Twin Peaks was derived from Frost's lifelong fascination with mystery & conspiracy, and the culture in the United States in particular has always thrived on secrets, mysteries, & conspiracies. Keep in mind that the word Occult literally means hidden from its latin derivative. The noun version of Occult is the word occulter, which is a device used to obscure light from the naked eye (such as a pinhole on a piece of cardboard to witness a solar eclipse, or even sunglasses for that matter).

One last take away from that interview that bugged me at the time but now seems to make sense in light of everything being uncovered as of late with the powers that be and institutionalized pedophile syndicates operating within some of this country's most bonafide political and religious sects.... at one point in the interview Mark Frost referred to the people that run Hollywood and the Fashion/Entertainment industry in general as Satanists but didn't elaborate... Perhaps Luciferian would have been more appropriate, as I was confused and assumed he meant La Vey's Satanism. In retrospect it seems like he was hinting at something that Kubrick had alluded to in Eyes Wide Shut. I would refer you to a piece I wrote earlier this year for AboveTopSecret.com titled Eyes Wide Shut, Scientology, & Vivian Kubrick - The Conspiracy (link is http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1155562/pg1)

I've always taken for granted that Lynch's obsessions with things like electricity, and the organic decay of manmade structures, like rust consuming the facades of factories and machines, etc, are mostly on an unconscious level. He has a hard time articulating his obsessions with words (have you read Catching the Big Fish?). He's definitely made all things biomechanical in the realm of film somewhat of his trademark area of expertise (there's an interesting story about how Lynch absolutely hated H R Giger, I won't get into it here).
Mr. Reindeer wrote:BTW, Isis, have you seen the thread speculating on Mark's contributions to S3? viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3851

It seems like you're more qualified than most of us in the thread, who aren't too familiar with Mark's non-TP works. I'd love to see your perspective.
I did glance at it, I believe. I don't think I made it past the first page but I'll definitely give it another look since you've indulged my ego a bit. Maybe I should just copy and paste the bulk of what I have written above in this post and plop it there with some more elaborations. I've thought about making a thread specifically outlining quotes from Isis Unveiled with common themes and motifs from not just The Return but the entire Twin Peaks universe as a whole. I just get really annoyed with the know it all attitude some people (not everybody) have given me since I've registered, though I've been lurking here for many years.

And please, I am not a lady nor am I an Egyptian deity of ritual magic & ecstasy. You may refer to me as CW (short for ColdWisdom, my username on AboveTopSecret.com). Although in these parts I suppose I can accept Mr. C for short :D.

Anyways, if someone can find that Mark Frost interview that I know I didn't imagine, it would help clear some things up I'm trying to convey and may be useful for possible threads in the making.

Thanks again, Mr. Reindeer, for noticing me in the shadows.
"I have the fury of my own momentum." - BOB
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Re: Philip Jeffries learned the horrific truth about Twin Peaks before we, the viewers did...

Post by DangerMo »

I am really sorry, but I had to quote this, it made me laugh so hard :-)
Isis Unveiled wrote: [...] about Lois & Clark's expedition west through the new world [...]
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