Ears Wide Shut: How Agent Cooper Dreamed Blue Velvet

Could the origin story of Twin Peaks’ favourite FBI agent be found beyond the picket fences of David Lynch’s 1986 film?

Special Agent Dale Cooper might be the greatest fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes. That his methods favour intuition over pure intellect also reflects the internal and external narratives of Twin Peaks. Cooper expresses such delight at the world around him that Twin Peaks townspeople and television viewers alike cannot help but fall for his charms. Kyle MacLachlan gives an astonishing and intuitive performance as Agent Cooper, the character brimming with life from his first appearance on screen. David Lynch has stated that “Kyle was born for that role” (Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley) and it is hardly possible to disagree.

Having worked together on Dune and Blue Velvet, perhaps Lynch and MacLachlan were subconsciously developing the character prior to Twin Peaks. Particularly in the case of Blue Velvet, where MacLachlan plays an alter ego of Lynch called Jeffrey Beaumont. A detective’s first case as a young man recast as a dreamlike exploration of how to solve a mystery, Blue Velvet becomes Agent Cooper’s dream of his younger self. The 1986 film might then be considered a heavily metaphorical version of how he found the impetus to investigate.

Fish Out of Percolator

An out of town detective typically offers the audience a relatable point of view upon proceedings, as both are outsiders looking in. There’s a distance maintained between detective/town and also audience/town, with degrees of symbiosis taking place between detective and audience. The usual frictions when Federal meets local law enforcement are absent where Cooper is concerned. He makes it clear to Sheriff Harry S. Truman from the get-go that the FBI is in charge of the investigation, but also that they will work the case together. Cooper is authoritative yet sensitive to others. In fact he takes such an interest in his surroundings that he quickly earns Harry’s respect.

Other television shows have frequently exploited such frictions. The X-Files went on to playfully utilise this trope week after week. Even Twin Peaks does so after Cooper’s character is established in those early scenes. Cooper calls in the brilliant – and brilliantly discourteous – FBI forensics analyst Albert Rosenfield. Albert’s view of the locals as ignorant hicks serves to highlight Cooper’s fine nature, not only in the contrast between the two men, but in how Cooper accepts Albert for who he is. Cooper keeps both Harry and Albert on side. Albert himself undergoes a transformation during the course of his appearances, although Twin Peaks doesn’t change Albert. Rather, his core of decency is revealed. This does not however eradicate his blunt exterior. Like much of Twin Peaks, Albert is full of contradictions.

The prologue of Fire Walk With Me takes the friction further. The town of Deer Meadow is Twin Peaks’ shadow-self. Where Twin Peaks is welcoming, Deer Meadow is downright hostile and so on. The show led us to believe that Cooper investigated Teresa Banks’ murder, but Agent Chester Desmond (played with deadpan cool by Chris Isaak) replaces him in Fire Walk With Me. John Thorne infamously theorised Fire Walk With Me’s prologue as Cooper’s dream in the Twin Peaks magazine Wrapped in Plastic. It’s a theory that not only convinces, but stands up to scrutiny and even lends credence to considering Blue Velvet as another of Cooper’s dreams.

Interestingly, the first half hour or so of the Twin Peaks pilot is Cooper-free. Another show might have adopted a standard cold open approach, not so here. Instead, David Lynch puts the community’s grief about the murder of Laura Palmer under the microscope. All that raw emotion makes for uncomfortable viewing – uncomfortable in the way that you cannot take your eyes off the screen. Truman goes to the Great Northern Hotel to find Laura’s father Leland, who is on the phone to his wife Sarah when he sees the sheriff. The knowledge that his daughter is dead wordlessly transfers to Leland then travels down the phone to Sarah. The unspeakable is unspoken. Lynch takes the idea of hearing bad news and strips it to its primal core. That a severed ear was the entry point into the mystery of Blue Velvet shows Lynch’s thematic consistency.

A Special Agent

Cooper displays a delighted inquisitiveness at the start of his investigation in Twin Peaks. When he pops open Laura’s diary and finds a key inside, it leads to a safety deposit box which contains an issue of Flesh World magazine. “Here’s a page that’s marked,” Cooper tells Truman. The way he says it and the glint in his eye shows how thrilled he is at the mystery of it all. It also recalls would-be girlfriend Sandy’s questioning assessment of Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. “I can’t figure out if you’re a detective or a pervert,” she tells him. “Well, that’s for me to know and you to find out,” Jeffrey replies. 

Mysteries often have a sexual component in David Lynch works, but sex is not what drives Cooper. That is not to suggest he is sexless, but love and compassion take precedence for him. He finds the world full of mysteries that he delights in, whether it is discovering the name of the trees around Twin Peaks (“Man… smell those trees. Smell those Douglas Firs.”) or solving a murder. Cooper’s moral compass is not faulty however, far from it. Yet perhaps he embodies a contradiction: Cooper is invigorated by the world, yet in some ways cannot help but rise above it. He is both of and beyond this place. That he becomes a denizen of the Lodge at the end of season 2 makes absolute sense. Cooper is one of those cosmic beings and always has been.

Episode 2 reveals Cooper’s uniquely intuitive approach to detective work. Cooper recites suspects’ names then throws rocks at a bottle. This is his Tibetan method:

“Following a dream I had three years ago, I have become deeply moved by the plight of the Tibetan people, and have been filled with a desire to help them. I also awoke from the same dream realising that I had subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique, involving mind-body coordination operating hand-in-hand with the deepest level of intuition.”

At the beginning of Blue Velvet, Jeffrey throws stones in a field as a way to pass the time while walking home. It is how he finds the severed ear. The act of throwing stones alerts him to the mystery. Is Blue Velvet the dream where Cooper gained this knowledge?

Private Eye / Secret Ear

“Are you the one that found the ear?” asks Sandy. For a film about voyeurism, Blue Velvet is strangely concerned with ears rather than eyes. Despite the iconic image of MacLachlan peering out through a wardrobe, the film bears little similarity to Rear Window. Its mysteries instead play out as overheard conversations. Notably, Sandy has overheard her father, Detective Williams, talking about a case. She relays this information to Jeffrey and pushes him further into his own investigation. Of course listening in is itself a voyeuristic act.

Jeffrey brings the severed ear to Detective Williams. He wants to know more, but Williams warns him that it is a police matter now. “I’m just real curious, like you said,” Jeffrey tells him. Williams explains that he was also curious at Jeffrey’s age, which he supposes is what got him into the detective business.

David Lynch has stated that he “got this idea for finding an ear in a field. And this ear would be an opening into another world” (Mysteries of Love documentary). It is a world of mystery, a dream through which Cooper gets to the source of his abilities as a detective. Perhaps it is one of many dreams he has while trapped in the Lodge.

The Blue Suitcase

There’s a fascinating anecdote in Brad Dukes’ Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks concerning the colour blue. Episode 24 director James Foley decided one of the characters should be carrying a blue suitcase, but the art department refused his request. It turned out that David Lynch “did not want the colour blue to appear in the series.”

Had Lynch had his fill of blue in Blue Velvet? After all, blue velvet drapes open and close that movie, sealing it off like a dream. Although maybe Lynch simply had other plans for the colour. The murder of Teresa Banks is a “blue rose case” according to the Fire Walk With Me prologue, a designation which refers to the supernatural, the unexplained. A blue object would go on to play a significant role in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: a box which allows the transition between worlds. When the camera moves into the blue box it pulls the entire story in with it. Narrative stability is disrupted as the film recalibrates itself. What has gone before was a dream, what follows is reality.

If Blue Velvet is Cooper’s dream of his younger self then he is listening to his subconscious in order to learn something from it. Listening in this context means being receptive to the unspoken language of mystery. The camera pushes into the severed ear at the beginning of Blue Velvet, which is where the mystery starts. It later pulls out of Jeffrey’s ear to deliver an all too perfect happy ending. A case of in one ear and out of the other? Not for Agent Cooper, who retains the knowledge that others cannot.

This is a revised version of an article originally published by RetroZap in April 2017

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