Cops in Culture #6: Twin Peaks

by Lucy Freedman

For years, a friend of mine wore a black patch on the back of their denim jacket. On the patch was a picture of Agent Dale Cooper standing above gothic lettering which captioned him ‘The Only Fed I Trust’. More recently, another friend named their lockdown kitten Cooper in homage to the character. There’s something about Twin Peaks’ sort-of protagonist which has rendered him, at least in certain circles of the anti-cop left, somewhat of an exception — a kind of solitary good apple. But why? And is this exception justified?

David Lynch’s cult 1989-91 TV series (there is also a 1992 film and 2014 reboot, but I’m only discussing the first two series here) is a surrealist dreamscape of crime thriller. Set in a small logging town on the US side of the Canadian border, the show is ostensibly a murder mystery/police procedural, but as the narrative twists and turns and dream merges with reality, it quickly becomes so much more than that.

In the first episode, Cooper, an FBI agent, is brought in to lead the investigation into the murder of local homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. Like us, Cooper is an interloper in the town, and this identifies us with him. We see myriad mysteries unfold through his eyes; townspeople hide things from him just as the unfolding plot obscures things from us. Bizarre encounters, for instance with a woman who claims a log has prophetic qualities, or the mill owner who absent-mindedly puts fish in his coffee, are just as strange to Cooper as they are to us. We are even given access to Cooper’s internal monologues via the recordings he makes for the mysterious ‘Diane’ — whom we never meet or learn anything about. Through these recordings we are made privy to his bewilderment and desperate attempt to grab at whatever clues he can find, seemingly in real time. In a sense, solving the murder becomes (particularly given the comic ineptitude of the entirety of the Twin Peaks Police Department) a joint endeavour between Cooper and us. Using the ‘outsider’ cop as a way in for the viewer is a well-worn narrative device in crime drama, but Twin Peaks’ deep weirdness melds us closer to Cooper than it would in a more run-of-the-mill show. Perhaps this is partially why people who would never normally find themselves identifying with a cop come to identify with him.

But Cooper is an unusual character too, and his investigative tactics match the surrealism of his setting. Throughout the show Cooper follows leads, often doggedly and against the advice of his co-workers, from clues derived from dreams or the cryptic premonitions offered by ‘the giant’, who visits him in visions. He also employs a range of non-sensical methods. In an early episode he has the entire police department go into the forest to throw rocks at bottles with the names of potential suspects written on them, which he claims will help him eliminate the innocent. All crime dramas have one maverick cop, and Twin Peaks in no exception. But Cooper isn’t the noir-esque hard-boiled maverick with a troubled past and problematic coping mechanisms we usually see in cop shows. Instead he’s clean-living and emotionally intelligent (if a little naive). By riffing on the traditional stock characters of the police procedural in this way, David Lynch uses Cooper to satirise the form.

One of the things I think people who don’t like cops like about Twin Peaks is that, although it is not exactly antagonistic towards cops or cop culture, it takes the piss out of the police, and goes further than the reverential teasing that was common in cop comedies of its time. The series is full of cop show spoofs. Much like The Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum (another portrayal of a cop which is neither sympathetic nor full on ACAB), the officers are all constantly eating donuts, and Cooper is rarely seen not drinking coffee (“a damn fine cup of Joe”). The local police officers are all clichés. There’s Sheriff Harry Truman (named after the president) who is by-the-book, fastidious and uninspired. Then there’s Andy, Truman’s sweet and bungling deputy; the corrupt and lazy Chad Boxford; and Agent Rosenfield, the abrasive and bullying FBI forensics expert who is a foil to the unconventional and mild-mannered Cooper. The only ‘original’ character in the department is Deputy “Hawk” Hill, a (possibly parodic?) problematic depiction of a native American who is strong, silent and expected by others to have an innate connection to the mystical. And then, of course, there’s Lucy — the impeccably dressed, squeaky-voiced, peroxide blonde receptionist who is possibly my favourite character in the whole show, and who the officers consistently write off as a bimbo, but is actually often the most perceptive person at the station.

Twin Peaks isn’t anti-cop per se, but it is a kind of anti-procedural. The surreal and often supernatural character of the case(s) they are trying to crack mean that despite all their efforts, the police are often completely unable to figure out what’s going on, and their failed attempts often provide the show’s comedy. Here, the traditional police procedural, where brilliant and experienced cops are revered through their ability to solve what would appear unsolvable, is upended. And finding out whodunnit isn’t really the point of Twin Peaks anyway.

Another reason that I think my friends and I let Agent Cooper off the hook is that he, unlike ‘real life’ cops, consistently punches up. Twin Peaks’ ‘bad guys’ (with the exception of the ambiguously racialised gangsters the Renault brothers and their domestic abuser associate Leo Johnson) are the town’s petit bourgeoisie, and it is through Cooper’s insightfulness that they are exposed. Real-world policing punishes small-time coke dealers and teenage sex workers for the wrongs of their higher-ups, who are protected by the carceral, capitalist state. But Twin Peaks doesn’t shy away from the fact that it is respectable business owners and seemingly loving middle-class fathers who are really responsible for causing harm. Moreover, David Lynch presents the ‘victims’ of these harms with remarkable nuance. Twin Peaks is full of young women (not least Laura Palmer, whose murder Cooper is here to investigate) who are simultaneously vulnerable to deliberate and well-organised abuse by powerful men and fully fleshed out characters with agency and complex desires. Quite unlike actual police, who fan the flames of moral panics around sex trafficking, propagate one-dimensional understandings of victimhood and perpetuate violence against those they consider unworthy of victimhood, Cooper is sensitive to the nuances of abuse. His investigations uncover and respect the complicated and contradictory contours of Laura’s short life, rather than flattening them.

Cooper is, in fact, one of the only men in the show who doesn’t abuse his position of power. On his arrival in town he checks into The Great Northern Hotel, owned by the irredeemably sleazy Ben Horne, and quickly befriends Horne’s lonely and misunderstood teenage daughter Audrey (another fantastic character). He quickly realises that Audrey has a crush on him, and in response he kindly but firmly imposes boundaries on their relationship. Of course, he shouldn’t be commended for behaving in this way, anything less would be completely unacceptable, but in a town where the sexual exploitation of young women by powerful men is rampant, the bar is on the floor. We know that abuse of power, particularly in regards to sexual exploitation, is endemic within the police, but we also know that Cooper is not your average cop.

Sometimes, a TV show uses a good cop as a vehicle through which to say #notallpolice, and portrayals of fair and diligent cops become attempts to redeem the police as an institution. But I don’t think this is what Lynch is trying to do with Cooper. I don’t think we’re really supposed to think of Cooper as a cop at all. And in a way, he’s not. His policing (and in many ways the policing of Twin Peaks in general) doesn’t seem particularly beholden to a system which protects property owners and punishes the dispossessed, and as such isn’t really policing as we know it.

I’m not arguing that David Lynch’s portrayal of policing in Twin Peaks is particularly radical, although I do think a lot of its satirising of cops both in the real world and in popular culture is pretty funny and gently subversive. The alternative model of policing he offers, where cops are basically independent from both the state and capital, is some improvement of current state of things, but it’s far from an abolitionist dream. It also, I would argue, plays into a narrative which abounds in crime dramas whereby noble policing (catching serial killers) is totally separated from petty policing (e.g. arresting homeless people and shoplifters), where in fact they are both part of the same carceral system. We are led to forget that the detectives who now have little contact with the public got to their position only after years of petty policing, public order policing and other ignoble activities. It seems, then, that Lynch’s representation of cops in Twin Peaks stems from an optimistic misunderstanding of what the role of police is in our society, rather than a place of deep critique.

Despite all of this though, Twin Peaks is really excellent and compelling TV, and within Lynch’s dark and daring dreamworld, Agent Dale Cooper is one of the only characters we are invited to fully identify with. Is he really the only fed we should trust? Well no, obviously we shouldn’t trust any fed, but Cooper is certainly better than any cop I’ve ever encountered, and I think we’re all allowed a problematic fave.