I am once again thinking about Part 17 and Part 18 of Twin Peaks: The Return, and especially about the character of Richard/"Cooper" in the final episode. I think it's a huge testament to Frost/Lynch's writing abilities (and Kyle's acting) that so much can be inferred about Richard with so few lines. But he's also, in a way, one of those key characters of Lynch's later period: there's no "puzzle" for him, he is, in part, what you as a viewer bring to the table.
I like to think that one of the more interesting parts of Richard is that he's some sort of meta-commentary on the evolution of traditional heroic masculinity in American television. The original run of Twin Peaks is set both during a more conventional approach view of masculinity in Lynch's career (before he started leaning towards female leads starting with Fire Walk With Me) and during a more sunny view of masculine heroism and law enforcement in American television. Coop the FBI agent is a man without secrets in a town where no one is innocent. The show approaches him less as a accurate representation of how the Bureau works and more as a symbol of competence, someone who is smart, capable, warm, kind, and can put things right, "solving the crime by cracking the code".
Richard is this constant tension between past and present in The Return embodied in a single person. He's a modern Prestige TV antihero wandering through a drab Texan small city and not through a gorgeous small town in the Pacific Northwest. He's saggy and worn out and haunted by something, the sense of certainty from Cooper morphed into something greyer and meaner. Look at the way he disarms those cowboys at the club, he's like some avenger from a John Ford western, coming to exact retribution. It doesn't quite feel as clean and triumphant as Coop, does it?
Has all of Twin Peaks been a dream of this man who claims he is an FBI agent but who just looks good in a suit? The story of someone who dreamed and lived inside the dream? I don't really care that much about answering that. What interests me more is that The Return is also operating on this meta-level: it's a show about growing old as an artist, as a country, as a program that used to be popular twenty-five years ago. It's about the experience of watching TV and leaving those characters behind. And there's a bit of that in Richard too: in 2017 America, you can't go back to the past anymore. Much like how the original Twin Peaks was absorbing and commenting on primetime soaps like Dallas and Dynasty (the former ended in 1991, and the second in 1989), that final episode of The Return is absorbing something about the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos: the "complicated men" of television.
There's also something about how the woman living in the Palmer house is actually the real-world resident/ something something about these characters breaking from their characters on the show, but I think that's enough for now. This isn't a story about definitive answers, it's a collection of motifs, moods, sensations; it's a mirror to the viewer.
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