= i just wanna be a part of your family by paladinsbrainrot | Mike Wheeler is many things, but he is never jealous. Except — maybe this time he is. (Only a little bit.)
= my advice is always ruin the friendship by andiwriteordie | The one in which Robin witnesses a snowball become an avalanche.
= you took my heart (i was sleeping) by lameparties | Seven nights in which Mike and Will have to sleep in the same bed, even though they’re barely friends anymore.
^ (I think everyone and their momma has read this fic but if u haven’t… WHAT are u doing go read it rn)
= we all have a hunger (tell me what you need) by papenathy | Will dresses as a vampire for a college halloween party, but Mike thinks his costume isn’t bloody enough. Will lets him fix it. Mike goes into a crisis.
^ reread this one, still one of my fav fics ever
= If You Don't Kiss Me Now by lupinpoesy | Will's injured after a Demogorgon attack, and Mike insists on patching him up. It should be simple—clean the wound, wrap the bandage, done. But Mike's hands keep lingering, and the air between them feels heavier with every touch. They've been walking this line for months, finding excuses to be close without ever crossing it. Maybe it's time to stop pretending.
= give me a pain that i'm used to by ibrakeforrainbows | Snapshots of Will's experience with chronic pain over the years, and how he navigates it with Mike.
^ read the author’s note !!!
= coming clean (for the first time) by ileikbees | After Will saves Mike from the demogorgon at the MAC-Z, Mike finally lets himself acknowledge a truth he's been running from for years: He is in love with Will Byers.
Now all Mike has to do is come to terms with that truth—especially when Joyce sees it too.
= make a move by astrobi | Mike thinks Will might be psychic. (Kind of.) Will is being very irritatingly vague about the whole thing.
= April Showers (Bring May Flowers) by thehouseisglass | What starts as a distraction from missing Max turns into the most complicated plan of Lucas’s life as he shifts from helping Will get over Mike to setting them up together (because he’s the bestest, most supportive friend ever, obviously!)
^ i absolutely adored this one🥹 lumax and byler yay!
= what's mine is yours to make your own by mugamuchyuu | based on mtfdydgate !
new video about Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy, and how everyone* keeps getting them wrong! this video is sponsored by Nebula, a place where you can watch the original version of this video before I had to tweak it for YouTube's copyright bots. (by clicking that link, you can get an annual subscription for 40% off.) or you can just back me on Patreon, which is also cool and good.
transcript below the cut.
I adore Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy. I flirted with making a video about it ages ago, had a draft of a script, but ultimately decided it wasn’t about anything except “here’s a thing I like, and here are its (I thought) very obvious themes.” So I shelved it. But, in the years since, I have seen multiple video essayists on this here website claim that these movies are about growing up and taking responsibility. (I say “multiple.” It’s not a lot. But it’s more than one! And that’s enough.)
These people are 100% wrong.
Lemme lay it out: the Cornetto Trilogy is not about growing up. It is not about taking responsibility. It is the exact opposite, and that’s not subtext. It is three movies about stunted manchildren thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and each, in the end, is saved - is redeemed - by abandoning his character arc and failing to grow or change. It is a three-part love letter to immaturity.
And I guess I have to set the record straight.
Sometimes making a video about a thing you love is an act of appreciation. And sometimes it’s out of spite.
The Cornetto Trilogy is three movies: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End. All three are written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright; Pegg stars, and Wright directs; all three center on a relationship between Pegg and real-life best friend Nick Frost, which makes each film a reunion of the core team behind Spaced (excepting, but for a small role in Shaun of the Dead, Jessica Hynes). The three films span three genres: zombie apocalypse, buddy cop, alien invasion; each features a Cornetto ice cream cone: strawberry to represent blood, original blue to represent the police, and mint to represent little green men; this is a joking nod to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois Couleur films, Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge, which were based on the colors and themes of the French flag (I don’t care what you say, Emily: #TeamRouge); that nod is funny because Trois Couleur is high-art drama and these are comedies. All three are parodies of, tributes to, and actually surprisingly good executions of their respective genres. And the hook, the gag at the center of all these movies, is that Simon Pegg plays a character wholly unsuited to be starring in this kind of film.
Shaun, the burnout, is the wrong person to survive the zombie apocalypse; by-the-book British bobby Nicholas is the wrong person to lead an American-style bombastic actioner; and alcoholic asshole Gary is the last person to save the world from aliens.
And I think that’s where people get stuck. Because “schlub finds himself protagonist of a genre film” is the elevator pitch for like a dozen Adam Sandler movies. The genre trappings may be as mundane as parenthood or mandated anger management classes, or as high-concept as action movie, whodunnit, or time travel It’s a Wonderful Life if Clarence were Christopher Walken as the angel of death (that… that makes it sound good, it’s not, don’t see Click; leave Frank Capra alone, Adam). But all these movies have the same basic shape: an extraordinary situation forces a guy to confront his shortcomings, which always stem from having never grown up. And you probably haven’t seen all of these movies, but if you’ve seen any, I bet you have assumptions about how the rest end: even though “Adam Sandler acts like a child” is generally the selling point of an Adam Sandler movie, they all end with some lip service toward becoming an adult: hey man, grow up a bit; appreciate your family a little more; square your shoulders; clean your room. This is so standard, it was parodied mercilessly in Funny People.
And this was a formative microgenre for my generation! Whole universe turns itself upside down to teach some shitty dude to, like, do the dishes and pay his wife a compliment now and then - Liar Liar, Bruce and Evan Almighty (all directed by the same guy, by the way). So I don’t blame people of a certain age for seeing the first act of Shaun of the Dead and thinking “I know where this is going.” And when, at the last minute, it swerves and goes someplace else, you could read that as a gag, a final subversion of expectation, still the same basic shape. But no! No! Once is a gag - thrice??? Thrice is a thematic statement!
So lemme make my case. I’ma take you through these movies one by one - we’ll talk about the manchildren and the expectations set by the genre, and then we’ll talk about that last-minute swerve and what it means. And then you’ll tell me I’m right and apologize!
Shaun of the Dead:
Shaun is a man in his twenties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the slacker.
What is his problem? He needs to sort his life out. Shaun doesn’t know how to take action. He hasn’t advanced since college - he’s been working the kind of job a teen takes over the summer for like a decade, lives with the same best friend, has the same petty fights with his stepdad, goes to the same pub every week with the same group of people. He can’t make a reservation, he can’t manage a calendar, he’s a washup. This makes his girlfriend, Liz, feel stifled, trapped; he is a weight around her ankle, taking her on the same date week after week, keeping her from living her own dreams, having her own adventures. She gives him one last chance to prove he can sort his life out, and he blows it, and she dumps him.
And then: a zombie movie happens.
The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: to survive, and save his loved ones, he’ll have to take action, make plans, be decisive. This is a common fantasy: when you feel ground down by the mundanity of life, you might imagine, oh, if only a crisis would happen, like a zombie virus outbreak, where my normal-life problems like “am I gonna make rent,” “is my girl gonna take me back,” “is my roommate gonna kick out my stoner buddy who’s crashing on the couch” become meaningless, and it’s immediately clear what’s really important, what matters. Then I’d know exactly what to do. It’s why disaster movies work as escapism: a necromantic plague - or at least the fantasy of one - is sometime preferable to normal life.
Hot Fuzz:
Nicholas is a man in his thirties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the hall monitor.
What is his problem? He can’t switch off. He is a hypercompetant police officer with a rulebook where his brain should be. He’s so good at being a cop that he’s spotting and unraveling crimes even on his day off. He can’t maintain a relationship, has no friends, all his coworkers hate him because he keeps finishing their work for them, and his stats show up the rest of the force so badly that they scuttle him out to the country.
Now you might be thinking, “Mmm. A fastidious police officer who can’t have fun? How is that a manchild? Sounds pretty grown-up to me. You’re reaching, bud.” Ohhhh ho ho, smartass, do you remember this scene? [bar scene] Yeah! Nicholas Angel has a five-year-old’s notion of law and order. He’s still playing cops and robbers.
And that’s a problem, because then: an action movie happens.
It doesn’t happen all at once: he goes out to the country and finds they do things a bit differently there. They are (ostensibly) less concerned with rules than what than the rules are for: if the purpose of drinking laws is to keep the streets safe and orderly, and letting some people off with a warning or allowing kids drink so long as they do it inside achieves that end, the rule can be bent. That’s a judgment grown-ups can make; I mean, they’re the ones who wrote the rules in the first place. So be lenient with shoplifters, don’t hassle people for speeding; this isn’t the Big City, you can use your better judgment. But Nicholas never got past doing whatever Mom & Dad said; obedience, and trusting whoever’s up the chain, is his entire moral framework. He can’t accept that bending the law could be more righteous than following it.
But also maybe there’s a criminal conspiracy murdering people and writing it off as accidents and the police chief might be in on it. Or maybe Nicholas is so desperate for a big case with no moral ambiguity that he’s seeing things where they aren’t.
The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: either there’s nothing going on and he needs to chill out about procedure, or the department is corrupt and he’ll have to go rogue like it’s Point Break - and this is how he experiences Point Break. [“paperwork”]
No matter what, he’ll have to bend the rules, which he constitutionally cannot do.
The World’s End:
Gary is a man in his forties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the delinquent.
What’s his problem? Pfffft. What isn’t his problem? Gary is a manipulative, narcissistic, lying, self-destructive, ignorant, violent, thieving, shit-talking, unapologetic asshole who peaked in high school when being all those things was still kind of badass. The greatest night of his life was the drunken pub crawl after graduation he and his friends didn’t even finish, and he’s been tumbling downhill ever since. He’s spent his life ruining everyone who knows him until there’s no one left to ruin but Gary King. So now it’s time to bully the old gang into going back home with him to relive that night by finishing the pub crawl, because, in his own words, it’s all he’s got. And he and his friends have to confront how home has changed since they left - the bars have gentrified, not everyone recognizes them; the defining, epic deeds of Gary’s youth have been forgotten. You can’t actually go back because that place doesn’t exist anymore.
And then: a sci-fi movie happens.
Turns out the town’s been taken over by aliens, and all the people who couldn’t conform to their new order have been replaced with robots! That’s why no one recognizes them! And that’s why the pubs all look the same: the aliens are homogenizing everything! And it’s clear, if they can’t get Gary and his friends to play ball, they’ll roboticize them as well! The obvious move is to get the hell out of town, but Gary keeps inventing excuses to stay and finish the pub crawl, and they sound pretty sensible because the group’s already five pints in. The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: sooner or later he’s gonna have to give up on recapturing his youth and do what’s best for him and his friends now, even if it means running back to the city where all his problems live.
So there we have it: the characters cross the threshold into an unfamiliar world where an external conflict cannot be addressed without resolving the tension within. The slacker will have to get his shit sorted, the hall monitor will have to break the rules, and the delinquent will have to do what’s good for him. And, to an extent, all three know this! The movies Wright and Pegg pay homage to exist in these stories - Shaun knows what a zombie is, Danny keeps Nicholas up watching Point Break and Bad Boys II, and Gary and friends know bodysnatcher movies so well they have philosophical debates with the robots about whether “robot” is the PC term.
So, yeah, if you turned the movies off there, I could forgive you for thinking that’s where they’re headed. But you goofballs watched them to the end and then made content about them, what is wrong with you???
What actually happens in the second halves of these movies?
Shaun twigs that he’s in a zombie movie and, at first, tries to play the part - his survival plans are miniature hero’s journeys with him as protagonist, wherein he’ll save the day by neatly confronting all his flaws. He’ll resolve parental conflict by saving his mom from his zombified stepdad, resolve romantic conflict by showing his girl he can come through when it counts, and resolve internal conflict by being a man who saves the day. And all his plans suck! It’s just the same plan he always comes up with! Dragging around the same useless liability of a bestie, collecting the same group of people, and holing up in the same pub! He doesn’t save his mom: his stepdad apologizes, resolving their conflict for him, and then survives in zombie form but Shaun’s mom gets killed; most of the friend group gets killed because the crisis does not actually suspend but in fact amplifies their personal grievances; and he doesn’t save the day, just manages not to die long enough for the military to show up.
But… well, Liz wanted adventure and now she’s had enough for a lifetime, so… she’s down to just be boring with him for a while - sit on the couch, watch TV, hit the pub. Beats running for your life. Tensions with the roommate are gone cuz roommate died, but rent is covered cuz Liz moved in. Zombies don’t get eradicated, just folded into normal life, so Shaun can mindlessly play video games with his bestie forever, and it’s not a problem that bestie doesn’t have an income cuz he doesn’t need food or shelter.
The zombie apocalypse doesn’t make Shaun sort his life out, it changes the world til he doesn’t have to.
When Nicholas discovers that, yes, there is definitely a murderous criminal conspiracy inside the police department, he recognizes the only way to bring about justice is to become what Danny has always wanted and go Dirty Harry on the town. It’s either that or just swallow the crimes. But he does neither. He and Danny go on an epic shooting spree, recreating famous movie scenes, taking out the entire criminal organization against all odds, and spouting badass one-liners… but everyone who helps them is a cop, they don’t actually kill anyone, all perps are formally arrested, and they fill out all the paperwork. I think he even properly signs out the weapons. He never switches off, never breaks a rule, does absolutely everything by the book, only… louder. And this violent showdown saves him from the chill town with lax rules he thought he’d moved to. Now he, with his five-year-old notion of right and wrong, is in charge of the police department.
The buddy cop actioner doesn’t make Nicholas bend the rules, it changes the world til he doesn’t have to.
Gary knows exactly how a movie of this sort is supposed to go and spends the whole movie running from it. Friends and secondary characters keep sharing these poignant moments with him, because they know this story, too: yeah, he’s gonna reject help at first, but sooner or later he’ll hit rock bottom and then someone will get through to him. And, as the night goes on, and the characters get drunker and drunker, and Gary passes up more and more opportunities to abandon the pub crawl and go home, these moments take a tone of desperation. They start to sound more like interventions; like, Gary, we all know you’re going to come to your senses but could you hurry up with it??? How many of your friends need to literally die for you to shape up? Are you gonna get them all killed?
And the answer is: Gary will never shape up! To Gary the Human Dril Tweet, his friends trying to save him, psychiatrists trying to treat him, and aliens trying to assimilate him are all the same thing. He doggedly makes it to the end of the pub crawl and confronts the alien overlord who tells him all the technological advancements of the past few decades - all the efficiency and homogenization that’ve changed the face of his home town - are their doing. The Information Age is an intervention on behalf of Earth, a pan-galactic effort to save humanity from itself. And the reason they’ve been replacing people with robots is some people are too fucked up to go along with it.
And here’s Gary, King of the Fuckups, brashly declaring that fucking up is what makes us human. There is no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life. We are endowed by our creator with the right to be drunken, ornery pieces of shit.
He tells the aliens to piss off and he’s so fucking annoying that they do, and they take the Information Age with them.
Now… I know… ugh… I know a lot of people love this movie, say it’s the best of the three. Some friends who’ve struggled with mental health or just being an adult under late capitalism really identify with Gary, and the valorization of being a mess. I see you, you’re not wrong, I get it, I really do. But can we just… not “but” but “also” can we… can we also admit that this ending is… this is Space Brexit.
Like, literally it’s an alien invasion but symbolically this is Gary rejecting the adult world of rules and authority and doing what’s best for the community and that’s how Brexiters view the EU. And people keep telling him “Gary, this is in your best interest” and Gary says, I don’t want my best interest! I am registered in the anti-Gary’s Face Party and I will cast my vote by cutting my nose! I choose to do what’s bad for me.
And, like a true Brexiter, he chooses for everybody.
Now tell me that’s a movie about growing up. Gary collapses human civilization in its entirety rather than change, and in the world that follows, he thrives… by being an immature, irresponsible bag of garbage.
To Wright and Pegg, growing up is death, and these are movies about being alive. These characters don’t cross the threshold back into the ordinary world with the ultimate boon of character growth; all three stay in the extraordinary world. The zombies remain, the robots remain, Nicholas is offered his London job back and chooses to stay in the country. These are stories about normal life spontaneously turning into a genre film, and they are made with deep love for those genres; why would they end with leaving those genres behind? Because it’s what Adam Sandler would do?
So there you have it. I rest my case.
“Okay Ian. Why does this matter?”
…what was that?
“You’ve made your point: these movies aren’t about growing up or taking responsibility. So what?”
Uhhhh.
“Bring it home for us.”
…
“Why do you care so much?
[breath]
I wrote the first draft of this script when I was around Shaun and Nicholas’ age, and “so what?” is why I shelved it. Now I’m Gary’s age, this video’s been in the back of my brain the whole time, but I got this far and “so what” is where I got stuck, again. This is why the CO-VIDs came out quicker, cuz I let myself end with “so that’s interesting!” and got on with my life. But there’s clearly something sticky here, more than “someone is wrong on the internet.” (Also, to the YouTubers I’m vaguebooking, who said these were movies about growing up - I’m way more annoyed at the folks I’ve argued with on Twitter about this, you just made a better rhetorical device; you do not owe me an apology!) (Also, to the commentariat: I am not extrapolating this from like two data points, this is chronic and recurring and has been bothering me for years.)
There are a few directions I could take this to give it some “cultural weight.” I could put on my social justice hat and talk about how the “crisis of adulthood” doesn’t play as broad comedy unless you look like Adam Sandler or Simon Pegg, or put on my class analysis hat and talk about how signifiers of adulthood are, traditionally, ways of spending and accruing capital which are, today, often inaccessible to people under 40.
And that’s all legit, but here’s the real deal: I’m just mad at Gary. The world changed around Shaun such that he could stay a child. And Nicholas ended up somewhere he could stay a child. If you missed that, you’re wrong, but whatever. But to say that Gary grew up grinds me, because Gary chose this. The whole movie is people telling him to grow up, and he says no! He says it out loud! He says it to the literal end of the world. To walk out of the theater and say “that’s a movie about growing up” is more than a mistake, it’s a refusal. It’s trying to “fix” the movie by fitting it into a more familiar shape, so it doesn’t say what it says, so Gary isn’t who he is, who he chooses to be.
I’m being cheeky when I say this because he’s a fictional character, but saying Gary grew up is enabling.
Gary says there’s no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life, which is the problem with alcoholics and libertarians: it’s not just your life, Gary! You live in a community, a culture, and an ecosystem! Your actions - everybody’s actions - impact other people! That’s just the way the world is! You can’t shit yourself at the bar without other people having to smell it. We’re all fuckin’ connected, man! You don’t want anyone’s will imposed on you; you spend the whole movie imposing your will on everyone else! You say humans don’t wanna be told what to do, and then you decide humanity’s future by yourself with no input or consent from anyone!
People point to Gary ordering water in the last scene instead of beer as evidence that he got sober, like that’s proof that he did grow up in the end, which are you fucking joking??? Getting sober is a shorthand for maturity the way buying a house is, it doesn’t signify anything in and of itself! Gary drank to escape the adult world of rules and responsibilities! So, yeah, under normal circumstances getting sober would mean he’s made peace with that world and is ready to integrate. But that’s not what happened! The thing he was escaping doesn’t exist anymore! He literally destroyed it!! People died! Probably millions! Now he lives a happy life LARPing as Omega Doom - no I don’t expect you to catch that reference! He doesn’t need to drink! He is literally reliving the best day of his life forever. And even if it did mean personal growth, the idea that a person could make what would be, unequivocally, the most selfish decision in human history, and then spend his life celebrating the outcome, oh but if he overcame a personal demon in the process then on balance that’s maturity? That is lightspeed solipsism! Who are you if you think that way? Are you all Adam Sandler???
And none of that makes this a bad ending, or Gary a bad character. I mean, he is the reason The World’s End is my least favorite, and I don’t like the ending, but I don’t think it’s bad that I don’t like the ending. Rather than watch another addict pull his life together or destroy himself, we watch a downward spiral with so much gravity the whole world self-destructs alongside him. And that’s why The World’s End is the most interesting of the three: it is a bold choice, and I think we are free to feel however we want about the conclusion Gary engineered for himself. I don’t think it’s valid to pretend it didn’t happen.
In the context of the trilogy, we see that Shaun’s immaturity is mostly a problem for Shaun: he would be, at worst, a footnote in the lives of the people who love him; “yeah, I liked Shaun a lot, but I couldn’t carry him through life anymore.” Nicholas is the kind of overachiever that is useful if pointed in the right direction; juvenile code of ethics aside, he is, empirically, helping the community (within the entirely fictional framework where that’s a thing police do). If the world hadn’t changed to turn their flaws into strengths, they would still be relatively harmless. Gary is what happens when immaturity isn’t harmless, and shows us how a world built by that immaturity would look.
There is an appeal to Gary King, a wish fulfillment. Letting your id fully off the leash because you no longer care what anybody thinks - it’s why some people drink, and it’s why some people would like to drink with Gary. But if that’s not just your Friday night, not just your twenties, but that’s your life? There is a destination at the end of that road, and it’s Gary doing something truly ugly. And we see that ugly thing the way Gary sees it: as awesome. But then you see the reality: the Monday morning after the Friday night. We went out with Gary and he did something terrible.
And I’m not telling you to hate Gary for it; I’m not saying Gary can’t be forgiven. In fact, seeing it for what it is is the only way Gary could be forgiven, because, if he “grew up and took responsibility,” there’s nothing to forgive.
I think this is the only way the trilogy could have ended. I mean, you make stories about boys who get older and older and don’t grow up, it eventually becomes a problem. There’s only two ways to resolve it: you either end with a guy actually sorting his shit out, or you go for broke and show what happens if he doesn’t. And I think some of us boys saw that and said, “no, noooo, they did grow up! all three of them!” rather than say, “haha! hahaaa! ……………shit.”
I just watched Hot Fuzz again and I need to talk about it.
The writers for Hot Fuzz have said several times that Nicolas originally had a female love interest but she took up too much time without being connected to the murder plot so they removed her completely and instead gave her core dialogue and scenes to Danny, making him the love interest.
The movie constantly makes connections between Danny and Nicolas’ ex-girlfriend. For example, she complained about Nicolas forgetting her birthday so later on Nicolas panics when nobody told him it was Danny’s birthday. She told him he has to find someone he can love more than work and by the end he chose Danny over working in London. He gifts Danny flowers and wins him a stuffed toy. They spend the night out together followed by Danny inviting Nicolas home. They have a romantic theme that only plays during their emotional scenes. We even see the exact moment Nicolas realise he’s in love with Danny when the old lady asks if he’s buying flowers for a special someone and he says “….Yes” with a shy little smile.
The only thing missing is an actual kiss but in the Cornetto trilogy romantic relationships are rarely sealed with a kiss. In Shaun of The Dead the main romantic couple Shaun and Liz never kissed once and they had as much physical contact as Nicolas and Danny.
It’s funny to watch this movie and realise it has more queer content than some more modern movies and shows that are hailed as good queer media.
Like, I’ve never heard anyone accuse Hot Fuzz of queerbaiting but because it treats Nicolas and Danny’s relationship the same way most movies treat straight romances in the genre (it was literally originally written as a straight romance) people just didn’t notice it was a queer movie or thought it was a joke on homoerotic buddy cop movies. If it came out today it would absolutely be on the queer movie list.
thinking about the parallels between bertha mason and st. john rivers... how they both die lonely in foreign lands by sacrificing themselves to the narrative... how they're both the main respective romantic interests of jane/rochester outside of each other and serve to teach both of them important life lessons... how one is male, the other female, one religious, the other deemed blasphemous, and how both of them are tied to colonial operations (one, the esteemed daughter of a wealthy english plantation owner in slavery-era jamaica, the other an esteemed missionary to a colonial operation in british-rule era india...), how they're both rejected by jane/rochester, one for religious madness delving into mania and the other for a general madness far surpassing mania. one (st. john) partly for his patriarchal attitudes which cling too tightly to the social order so as to bring jane internal ruin should she stay with him, and the other (bertha) partly for her anti-patriarchal attitudes which disrupt the social order too much and become scandalous to the point of threatening her and rochester with public ruin. one having a madness that is deemed respectable by society but is nevertheless a madness which gets him killed, and one having a purposeless madness which is deemed as such... the idea that some people can mask their symptoms well enough to become high-functioning productive people who therefore aren't deemed ill by societal standards because they're still "serving" in some way (and the idea of servitude in general) and the idea that the way society views disability and pain is tied to how they view productivity and the mere appearance of being normal and how that ties to jane/rochester who are also both mildly mad in their own ways. the idea that one of them (st. john) is humble enough to live a life of labor and servitude in the name of religion and the idea of how the other (bertha) treated her servants brutally and preferred the high life she was accustomed to. the idea that both of them represent some of the same qualities jane and rochester represent but in differing proportions. the idea that jane being tied up in the red room parallels/foreshadows bertha being tied up in the attic. st. john and rochester both refusing to wed willing beautiful young women (blanche and rosamond) and instead preferring jane but each wanting to marry her for essentially opposite reasons, one wanting her to live a life of harsh labor as a missionary and the other originally wanting to marry her so as to give her a life of luxury as a bedazzled lady.
Thoughts Roundup - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 17 & 18
“It is a story of many, but begins with one - and I knew her. The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one”. So said the Log Lady in her iconic introduction to the first ever Twin Peaks. Just as Laura became a conduit to the town and its people, all these people led right back to Laura Palmer. She was at the end of every road, her photograph lived in all the town’s buildings, and even decades later in The Return, her face emerges slowly from the trees during the opening credits. What was about her always will be about her, and that cannot be changed.
Everything in these two hours presents easier answers than Laura does, but that has always been true of her - she’s the one still filled with secrets. There is something of a heartbreaking, world-changing realisation in this finale, the kind of realisation that the patrons of the Roadhouse had when Maddie Palmer was killed. There was no way for them to know what had happened, but they felt it. Twin Peaks has always been about feeling rather than knowing. It feels like falling, like the world is being rocked from its axis, and it is the show at its most powerful.
There is a common idea in Television Finales that the last episode is where something concludes - where the world, for better or worse, is put to rights. And when this finale feels like it’s heading towards that, it takes a violent u-turn and reminds us that Twin Peaks has never been normal television.
The hellish final fight between Freddie and Bob is visually very Lynchian, yet there is an unusual amount of literalness and resolution to it. Just as Freddie punches Bob through the floor, the BobBall (there’s gotta to be a better word for it) rises again, a terrifying and unstoppable anthropomorphised nightmare that violates our screen, bursting from it with visceral and unknowable force. When Bob crawled over the couch in the Palmer house and came directly towards the camera, that was an invasive and affective moment, but this is that moment amplified to unbearable measures. But he still is vanquished, broken into small pieces and absorbed through the ceiling of the office. And after everything Doppelcoop had been through, after all the vicious, hardened monsters he’d come up against - it was Lucy who killed him with a single gunshot and sent him packing back to the black lodge.
Lucy gets her heroic moment (She has always been an unsung hero, a smarter-than-you’d-think character who, despite struggling with mobile phones, still gets things done when she needs to) and even though all of these moments feel suspiciously neat and tidy, it’s hard not to be delighted by them. It turns out Naido is Diane as many suspected (and we finally learned earlier that Judy is the ancient evil being referred to in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, and most likely the experiment we saw in the box in New York) and her and Coop’s embrace is satisfying but again, very convenient. And then - right on time! - here’s Gordon, Tammy and Albert! And Bobby, The Mitchum Brothers, James and Freddie! They’re all here, all your favourite characters! And at any moment it almost feels like someone is about to come in and say “Coop, this telegram came for you - your old pal Harry Truman says ‘Coop, i’ve sent you a piece of cherry pie and a coffee, and i’ll be home soon. Hee-Haw, and Merry Christmas!’”. It feels unreal and purposefully kind of artificial. But something tells us this is off.
After interacting with Naido/Diane, Dale looks as though he’s almost regressing back to who he was before waking up. But instead, he’s remembering something. He’s met her before, in another world. His moment of realisation echoes throughout the scene, as a transparent and ghostly image of Dale’s face dominates the frame and the rest of the action occurs, visually, inside his head. He remembers something, and we begin to suspect that none - or all - of these worlds are real, including the one we’re in now.
Earlier in the episode, Cooper commented that the time 2.53pm is 2+5+3 which is “10, the number of completion”. The clock in the sheriff’s office cannot move on. It is stuck between 2.52 and 2.53. Time moves strangely and completion cannot be reached. There is something missing, which the transparent Dale comments on: “We Live Inside A Dream”. He also says that past dictates the future and that things will change, and suddenly, everything does start to change. As Dale will soon change the course of history, the moments in the office begin to feel unreal. Their current existence can’t exist as it does if what happened in the past is undone. The dream will soon be shattered, and it’s already starting to fracture. Is it future or past? One and the same.
The past dictates the future, so if the past can be changed, then there are infinite ways that the story could turn out. There are versions where Laura was killed, versions where she lived, versions where she was never born in the first place. The version that we know is a dream inasmuch as it is just one version of events. It’s a version that was directly affected by Bob because he killed Laura. And so, as the sinking feeling begins again, the lights go out in the office and Dale, Gordon and Diane find themselves removed from the office and walking through darkness. Is this what it’s like to go missing in Twin Peaks? Is this what it was like for Jeffries or Desmond? And are the people in the Sheriff’s office still there, wondering just where the hell those three went? Or are they non-ex-ist-ent?
The trio find themselves in the basement of the Great Northern hotel. The door to which Dale has the key is maybe the final and most important precipice that he pushes himself through. Though he has been guided by The Fireman, this decision is what changes everything, and it’s a decision that we now know was not the right decision. It’s so painful, in hindsight, to see Dale so plucky and optimistic going into this. He so selflessly wants happiness for everyone, and not only that but wants to remove pain that exists now and has existed seemingly forever. He wants to be the ultimate hero, and once he’s in 1989 and writing himself into Laura’s history, he begins to act as a version of The Fireman. Jeffries has sent him here, after telling him where to find Judy, (”Say hello to Gordon. He’ll remember the unofficial version”), and at first Laura sees him hiding and screams. It’s an absolutely ingenious retconning of events, and visually it is seamless. The events that we see from Fire Walk With Me feel and look like a distant dream that Dale tries to wake her up from. When Laura stumbles through the woods, she sees Dale, looking tall, benevolent and completely out of place, much like The Fireman did whenever he appeared.
As Laura Palmer’s theme chimes in, and as you hear her voice again, sounding so young and so sweet, it is overwhelmingly moving. You know that he is here to save her, and it is the bittersweetness of wishing this could happen and knowing that it cannot that makes you ache. As he lead her away, her plastic-wrapped corpse disappears from the beach, and Pete Martell finally gets to go fishing. It is almost too much to fathom, but as Dale leads her through the darkest woods, through complete silence, we know that it cannot be that simple. The sound the Fireman played back in Part 1 finally triggers something, and Laura is gone again, her agonising scream shattering our hopes. Laura is gone. She hasn’t been saved, she has been entirely relocated, and Sarah Palmer - or Judy, who seems to live inside her - feels this. The smashing and stabbing of Laura’s portrait by Sarah is violently ugly, and the editing as her strikes are reversed and chopped up is masterful. Someone has stolen her Garmonbozia.
When Dale makes it out of those dark woods, he’s in the Black Lodge again, and this is where things start to look familiar. Laura’s whispered secret causes Dale some confusion, and she is ripped out of the lodge and placed in another time and another place. Her whisper is something we will never know, but it isn’t something Dale is happy to hear. “You can’t save me”. “You killed me”. “I’m in Odessa”. Who knows - it could’ve been any of these things, or none of these things. The point, really, is that we don’t know. We almost feel as if her words would somehow answer a cosmic question that’d make everything fall into place, but would they really? What could she say to make any of this okay? I think Dale’s reaction - an incredulous “huh?” - says that he is realising what we are all realising throughout this episode. Some awful, horrible truth. And even still, he listens to Leland - “find Laura”.
Outside of the Lodge at Glastonbury Grove, it’s hard to tell what is real in the darkness of the woods. Diane is there, and Dale and her confirm to each other that they are their real selves. But by this stage, we don’t know who they are anymore. This is further obfuscated by the purposeful lack of time that we spend with Dale and Diane together. They are suddenly driving somewhere far, far away from Twin Peaks - 430 miles to be exact - to the place that Doppelcoop crashed and was nearly taken back to the lodge at the top of the season. And it’s here, next to crackling electric pylons that physically resemble the owl cave symbol we’ve seen time and time again, that Dale and Diane go through the final door. (Speaking of final doors, i’m so delighted to see a version of Coop/Dougie returning home to Janey-E and Sonny Jim. It was a long time coming, but it’s nice to see that sometimes you really can go home).
They know things will be different on the other side, but don’t they already feel different? We have been entirely disconnected from the rest of the characters in the finale, and that makes wherever Dale is seem completely isolated. The last of Dale as we know him is gone after one final kiss, and the blue skies turn into the darkest of nights once again - we are in another place. In this other place, Dale and Diane are still themselves, but they’ve lost something. Dale is colder, slower and quieter. Diane seems to be in pain again. At a motel, she stares out of her car window and sees herself emerge quietly from behind a wall. Perhaps this was a warning to her to get away. That the identity of Diane would be dead by the morning if she stayed. She stayed, and the world changed.
Nothing has ever felt as wrong as their sex scene feels. Dale is emotionless and still throughout, not even reacting as Diane claws at and mashes his face; she looks towards the ceiling, desperate to be far away. It feels like they are becoming other people, they are slipping away from who they are into entirely different roles. It feels sickly and uncomfortable, as if the more they try to get closer, the further apart they drift. They aren’t themselves anymore.
She is gone when he wakes up, and in this other world they’ve passed into, she has fully accepted her identity as Linda. It is a continuing theme from Lost Highway, a nightmarish concept of finding out that you are not who you thought you were. Dale doesn’t accept that he’s Richard, and is confused by the letter he finds naming him as Richard, and signed Linda. Dale is holding on for dear life, but even he has to acknowledge that outside, the motel is not the one they entered last night, and the car he gets into is not the car they drove last night - if it even was last night. Identity is a big theme in Lynch’s work, and Dale bases his identity on being an enthusiastic, kind and hard-working man, but now he is being pushed further and further away from that until he is literally somebody else.
Dale seems to drive without direction. He’s not his usual determined self, and not a note of music is heard now. He drives through a flat, faceless but realistic looking town. The banality receives a jolt of terror, as a giant “JUDY’S” sign makes the place feel manufactured again. Inside the cafe, Dale is different. He doesn’t enjoy his coffee, he is far more violent than usual when dispatching the three men in the cafe (though gotta admit: they deserved it), and there is a spark gone from his eyes. He’s Dale minus something. He leaves Judy’s with his information on where to find “Laura” and waiting outside Laura’s - or Carrie’s, as she’s known in this reality - is that same buzzing telephone pole that was found in the fat trout trailer park. It is a symbol, a warning, a normal object repurposed as a symbol of something evil and dangerous. It is directly outside her house. Dale recognises this but continues.
There is such pain in seeing Laura not as Laura. She has disappeared from one reality to be thrown into one manufactured by Judy which sees her as Carrie, someone with a great deal of pain inside her too. Nervous and unsettled, she reacts with a stuttering dread to the name “Sarah”. She is on the verge of a realisation, even if she brushes off being told by Dale that she is a girl named Laura. He seems to have such a lack of control in this scene. He asks rambling, untidy questions that don’t get him anywhere. He has little sense of authority, and is easily confused by what he learns. He is Richard in this timeline, or at least, he was supposed to be. He’s holding onto Dale but he’s not as strong as he was. He wants to wake Laura up and to take her home, but what does he expect from that? Does he really think Laura can be saved, and Judy defeated? Would Laura really want to return home? Dale doesn’t think of this because he’s fixated on fixing things. But he ruptured something when he went back to 1989.
It’s hard to say what is more troubling in Carrie/Laura’s living room: the corpse, or the figurine on her mantle of the white horse. “Woe to the ones who behold the pale horse”, we were told by the Log Lady. Woe to Dale and woe to Carrie/Laura. We have descended fully into this netherworld with them and cut off contact with what is familiar. The focus that they get in this last episode begins to hint that this is it. As the minutes go on, we know there cannot be an encompassing closure. There are threads and stories that won’t be tied off. You can think of these last moments as a detour, but they’re a detour that close the story in an eternal, figure 8 loop. Just as the first ever episode of Twin Peaks shifted gear with Dale driving into the town, the final parts close with the same journey. The first time, he’d gone to save the memory of a girl named Laura Palmer. The second, he’s come to bring that girl back to life.
And so they drive, and drive, and drive. She is happy to be leaving Odessa, to be far away from Judy’s and White Horses. She doesn’t know exactly what to expect, but she accepts the ride. The dark night ahead of them is the longest yet. The headlights on the road linger for so long. They are leaving Odessa on an odyssey through the lost highways and into woods of Laura’s memories. The blackness becomes all encompassing, this becomes their dark night of the soul. We are going deeper into this world and deeper into Laura, and we wait for any sign that she is who she was. She looks out the window and the douglas fir trees fail to trigger anything for her. They pass the Double R diner - the lights are off and the streets are empty - and still nothing.
This isn’t home anymore. It wasn’t home when Laura was alive, either. It was a trap for her, just as Odessa was a trap. Twin Peaks was not a dream, but a nightmare for Laura. It was her dream - her nightmare - that they all lived inside. And Dale fails to recognise this and now he’s broken it. He wants for that to be erased and replaced with something better, but if she is erased, then how can it all exist? The Log Lady once said: “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”. Dale is a hero for trying to put that fire out, but Margaret was right: goodness is in jeopardy, and it isn’t easy, or possible, to save it this way.
At the house, Dale bumbles through questions to the owner. No, there’s no Sarah Palmer here. No, we didn’t buy the house from her. The answer that we do get says so much: her name is Alice Tremond, and she bought the house from Mrs Chalfont - both names given to a woman who existed both in our world and in the black lodge. Though she was largely benevolent, this hammers home that this isn’t the Twin Peaks we know. Something is very off. We are in their house now. Is this the same woman who will one day give Laura the painting of a doorway? There is too much to comprehend in these questions, and back on the street, it all washes over Dale as he is wounded in confusion. He tries to hold onto some semblance of reality, like a dream upon waking. But he is powerless again - he hasn’t delivered Laura home, he hasn’t saved her, and home doesn’t really exist anymore.
The curtains are torn down and the realities crash into one, the dream has ended, and now we face a world where he and Laura possibly don’t exist. By taking Laura from the woods and delivering Laura back here, has he killed the memory of her? The question that strikes Dale is “What year is this?”. He staggers around in confusion; Laura looks down, beginning to tremble. She doesn’t know what year it is. She is on the cusp of a realisation, of a memory, of this dream she is in being shattered as the other one was. It is all too much to bear, until a familiar sound sends everything crashing to the ground.
The sound is the haunted, ghostly voice of Sarah Palmer calling “Laura?” from the house. It isn’t just her calling the name - but the exact clip from the first episode of Sarah calling upstairs to Laura. A memory, a fragment of who she was and what happened to her, is calling out from some deep, dark and distant world. And like Doppelcoop’s ominous “:-) ALL” text message, the sound lights a fire and and she remembers everything. She does the only thing she can do, and we hear maybe the most famous, haunting and agonising sound in all of Twin Peaks: the primal scream of Laura Palmer.
Dale looks in fear, in shock. He has got what he wanted, but he’s realising what he wanted is not what is right. A pain that has lasted forever and will last forever is reawakened in her. Dale can go back and try to change history, and he can destroy the timeline as we know it: but he cannot undo the pain and the fear. Laura was killed. He tries to kill two birds with one stone: to save her from death, and then bring her back home. But she cannot be brought back home without remembering what happened to her. This kills her all over again. It is a paradox of anguish, a full circle that is destined to loop forever. Her scream shatters the dream, and the lights in the Palmer house suddenly shut off. She has broken something. And before we see where they go next - to non-existence, back to the start, or wherever else you like to imagine - it cuts to black, the only sound lingering is the echo of her scream. It will always echo. It will always have been, and it always will be.
As the credits begin to roll, Dale and Laura are in the Lodge again, and she is whispering a secret into his ear in slow motion. Fear and confusion are written across his face. He is realising she cannot be saved. Perhaps he is realising his attempts to fix things have made them worse. He has shattered her dream, the dream of Twin Peaks, and as a result undone his reality as well as her’s. He has trapped himself between worlds. He longs to see, but he has never been able to wake up fully from his own dream. He has never been able to stare reality in the face and realise that he cannot save the world. If Twin Peaks has been Laura’s dream, it makes it no less real. It all happened, she saw it all unfold in her dreams, she saw herself sacrificed and much later, she saw Bob finally defeated. But then Dale undid this.
It is impossible to think of this all in literal terms. I don’t think any of it was invalidated, and I don’t believe that it was all as simple as a literal dream. I think instead that we’ve been privy to a version of events and everyone has played inside that. Maybe that version was Laura’s dream and that’s the one that should’ve been. The Return has asked us repeatedly to question who the dreamer is, to challenge everything we are seeing, because nothing is ever simple, and nothing is ever really finished.
Everyone believed The Return referred to Dale’s return to Twin Peaks. It didn’t. It referred to Dale trying to return the world to how he believed it should be - a place free from the abuse and murder of Laura Palmer. And he’s right, we shouldn’t live in a world where that kind of thing happens. But ultimately it did happen. Dale is powerless and misguided, because instead of learning from past trauma and building a healthy road away from that, he attempts to drive back down that dark road and delete and invalidate the existence of that trauma. That can never be done. You cannot remove it without removing everything along with it. Where he should’ve focussed on dismantling the evil going forward, he focussed on undoing the damage.
I don’t know if Laura will ever find peace in this, or any dream. I don’t know if Dale will, either. It is a painful realisation that home will never be the home you thought it was, and that you cannot go back and recapture what once existed. And the ending is certainly a bleak one that argues that we get caught in desperate cycles of trying to control and fix our pasts and futures. But what it also applauds is thorough and dedicated goodness, as well as the benefit of attentiveness and listening. Dale was goodness incarnate, but he didn’t listen as he should have. Perhaps we can make things better, perhaps we can help others and overcome evil. But we have to listen to do that. We can’t strip away the experiences of others, but we can listen and learn from them. The reason the ending was so dark was because of Dale’s flaw - that he didn’t learn this.
The Return has been about learning and about listening. It is a testament to understanding and appreciating the world around us, and loving each other enough to hear what they tell us. We shouldn’t give up. We should pay better attention. We should listen to what those in pain tell us. We should do as the log lady told us and listen to the trees blowing and the river flowing. We might never find answers that will satisfy us entirely, but we can pursue these questions, we can behold the mystery, and in this, we can try and make things better. And if we listen and look closely enough, we might just find a light shining in those darkest of nights.
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