10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Finale
5. The Most Uncomfortable Sex Scene In The History Of The Moving Image
As Cooper and Diane emerged from the Black Lodge, after Cooper's failure to find and save Laura, into a new dimension/reality, they drove into a motel parking lot. There, Diane encountered her shadow self. She eventually Cooper into the room. He had already, with an uncharacteristically cold insistence, demanded a kiss from her in their car. In the room, he spoke with a yet more chilling tone. "You come over here," he said.
They then proceeded to have sex, the consensual connotation of which did not seem apt. Nothing did. This felt entirely, disturbingly wrong; MacLachlan, in a performance surpassing even his dual roles as Dougie Jones and Mr. C, blended the two characters with a blank, dispassionate expression. The Platter's 'My Prayer' - the siren song of the woodsmen - rose in the mix in parallel with the heightening sense of unease. Diane seemed to attempt to wring any kind of emotion from him with a firm kiss, before the memory of Mr. C's rape awakened within her palpable anguish. She had to literally block him out. As the cold light of day pierced the window, so too did the realisation that, perhaps, Mr. C was never really a doppelgänger - a manifested polar opposite - but the repressed, dark id within him.
Part 10, in particular, sparked the ever-burning debate of Lynch's treatment of women. This brutal sequence unspooled everything; Cooper - now Richard - as a flawed human being who loses his identity and good core through an echo of his impure sexual impulses. The tragedy that befell Laura in the closing seconds also supports a sympathetic feminist reading.
When agency is removed, so, too, is our soul.