i think there's an intentionally uncomfortable sort of dissonance in how happily he talks about what a nice town twin peaks is, his excitement over the douglas firs and the diner pie, how kind and welcoming he thinks the people there are. the woods laura was murdered in, the town that killed her, the people who participated and were complicit in her abuse, all of it is just sort of pleasant to him. optimism can be a strength, but i think his often crosses into a naivëte, a willful ignorance and refusal to face the gravity of the situation head-on. he clearly takes his job seriously, and he wants to solve the murder, but there's something in him incapable of really getting at the core of the problem. he thinks of what leland did to laura as something literally unthinkable, something harder to believe than the supernatural. albert is portrayed as cynical, but he is correct. he understands that BOB is just "the evil that men do", where cooper doesn't want to. cooper's idealized view of and blind faith in the role of the family (and especially the father) as inherently Good, means he doesn't even consider leland a proper suspect until it's far too late. and this ignorance is something that gets people killed. first laura, then maddy. and however indirectly it may be, cooper is partially responsible for that! every character in twin peaks turns a blind eye to what went on in their town, but i think cooper is the character who represents this the most clearly in a thematic sense. his entire role in fire walk with me, and in laura's life, is literally just Guy Who Was Too Late (and again, albert gets it in a way that's almost too on the nose, with his response to cooper's vision of laura as the next victim being "you're talking about half the high school girls in america". laura's death was not an unpreventable and unique tragedy, it's a systemic problem.) and in the case of maddy, well. cooper was there. he could have stopped it. but he was still too late. because he didn't want to see
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