Twin Peaks: the Return part 7, there’s a Body all right!

David Lynch & Mark Frost 
Los Angeles CA 2016

It’s worth noting that Laura Dern’s mother is also named Diane.  She gave a ferocious performance in Lynch’s least accomplished film, Wild at Heart (no fault to her or her daughter, Laura.)  Here the daughter is looking a lot like the mother did then, but with her own sorrowful and anguished cries distorting her ample jaw, much as those emotions did in Blue Velvet.  Dern has served Lynch very well over the years, never more so than in Inland Empire, their masterpiece together.  She brings a great deal of this history into these new scenes and this new character, who appears to have been waiting many years for her to embody her.  It speaks well to the skills of these two great actors, Dern and Kyle MacLachlan, that these extra narrative concerns in no way intrude on the present story until contemplating this section well after first viewing.  One assumes that Mr C went pretty far in betraying the trust that Diane Evans had in her beloved boss Dale Cooper.  Rape, violation of some kind, is implied to have occurred shortly after Mr C’s liberation from the Lodge.  The scenes between the imprisoned doppelganger and Dale’s old colleagues have been among my favorite of the new Twin Peaks.