Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is the audience: once delighted, now disintegrating

 


"All protagonists are mediators who help tell audiences how to interpret the narrative around them, but Dale Cooper is something else entirely: he is the audience, stumbling through Lynch’s obscure vision, and mutating along with it. The show’s tone, budget, and format have all changed with the 2017 revival, and Cooper, too, has changed — more so than any other character on the show. But he’s changed in ways we should recognize. They’re the same ways we’ve changed, as Twin Peaks has progressed from era-defining hit to weird cable art-experiment. The old series followed Agent Cooper through the painful, awkward process of maturing as an agent and a man. And his development happened in parallel with the maturing of a TV audience that had to learn how to follow a new kind of story.

Today, viewers have more sophisticated expectations than they did in the 1990s. They expect long arcs, slow character development, and mysteries that may take hours of air time to explore, let alone to decode. But Showtime’s new series is still leaving viewers curious, frustrated, baffled, and without the tools to translate what they’re seeing — which is exactly what Agent Cooper seems to be feeling right now as well. "

read analysis by Tasha Robinson

Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is the audience: once delighted, now disintegrating - The Verge