To me it always was a great horror-scifi-fantasy scene. Something that could've happened in some episode of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. Nothing "for the sake of being weird", but pure imaginative fantasy entertainment.Jonah wrote:Any theories regarding the scene with Cooper checking the security camera repeatedly until he sees himself frozen on it? I always just assumed this bit was weirdness for the sake of being weird - i.e. no hidden meaning. But do you think it relates to a dream? Or to time slowing down because of Jefferies entrance?
It shows that right at that moment, something very unusual is happening in space and time. When we see him walking on a monitor screen that is supposed to be frozen still, we absolutely know that whatever he is going to do or say will be something very interesting. You wouldn't necessarily connect Jeffries to any kind of time-dimension-jumping until just after he has told his story and disappeared, so something odd must be shown before he appears, so that he would have this aura of supernatural mystery even before he says his first words.
Robert Engels had this to say in Wrapped in Plastic magazine issue 58:
"There's a great part of Twin Peaks that's builton sort of an altered reality just behind the reality that is happening. The exact same thing is happening two nanoseconds behind the thing that you're seeing. Or there is another one just in front of it that's exactly the same. For me, that means the Red Room is much more metaphysical. That would explain the two Coopers very easily - there is another Cooper just behind the other Cooper. It wasn't that we consciously put those things in the series, but David and I talked about that. It was a cool thing to think about as you wrote."
And later when talking something about the security camera scene:
"I remember that security camera stuff, and I remember us figuring that out - how you could be on camera. [...] Although it is still science fiction, we didn't want to get into time travel. But, of course, it is time travel. If you go back to what I was saying about those two reality running next to each other, it isn't time travel. They're just sort of here. It was like photographing these realities converging. He is there when he is not there. They are looking at another time."
By the way, wouldn't it be interesting to see something like that in season 3?
Maybe, if it's still Cooper's doppelganger that's walking around Twin Peaks, we see a scene where this bad Cooper is being filmed, and when he walks away from the camera, we see the good Cooper stay on the screen, being two nanoseconds away from the bad Cooper but visible in the camera due to some space-time-dimension thing happening right at that moment.