This is one of my ten short essays about Twin Peaks Season 3. Click this link to read my introduction to the series.
Expelled from hell, Dale Cooper crashes to Earth.
Watching Cooper’s cartoonish attempts at navigating real-life Las Vegas, I was reminded of nothing less than a newly 3D Homer Simpson, clambering out of a West Hollywood dumpster after being torn from his animated world and dropped into real life, via the mathematical wormhole behind the bookshelf in ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.
Although nominally the same world from which he disappeared 25 years prior, the world of Twin Peaks 3 is clearly more real than the soap opera/crime drama world he left behind. Thus, the series ironically invokes that most hackneyed of movie tropes in which a beloved fictional character, usually resident within a self-enclosed fantasy world, is forcibly transplanted into (urban) ‘everyday life’, with comedic consequences (recent examples include the Smurfs movie, the Chipmunks movie, the Goosebumps movie, even Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them). The jarring cheapness of this trope is further reproduced through the flattening of Cooper’s character into a few meaningless trademarks: slicked hair, coffee, cherry pie, thumbs up, etc.
