We have been here before. The respective rises of cinema, radio, television, and home video each, in their way, worked to internally rewire generations of cultural consumers, both as spectators or listeners and as individuals. The devices that have altered the speed of life are present not only in Dr. One night, while Sam is away, Coop, en route back to this terrestrial plane from the Black Lodge, suddenly appears suspended in the glass box, and as he does the rectilinear space appears to accordion into a series of increasingly small nested boxes, the result looking like nothing so much as the bellows of a folding camera.
These New York scenes have been interpreted as something like cheeky viewer instructions for the slow-paced Twin Peaks: The Return βbe patient and watch the box in front of you and something may yet happen. The technology has improved from those days, so along with surreptitious snapshots and stakeouts we have tracking devices, prison and casino cameras, and a gigantic state-of-the-art security monitor that turns the epic arm-wrestling match and subsequent execution into spectator sport.
Many of the ostensible good guys here are, not insignificantly, in the employ of the FBI, the agency responsible for laying the groundwork of the modern American surveillance state. While the Blue Rose force watches the harried homefront, mankind in his folly is monitored and interfered with by remote intelligences.
What follows from this is quite fantastic, but scarcely less so than the idea that when ordinary, run-of-the-mill American civilians saw the first publicly-available footage of an A-bomb blast, quite a few of them would have watched it in an ornate, palatial space much like this.
Today the screens are smaller, but there are millions of them, and some of them look back. This is, perhaps, a comfort: In August, Jeremy Lindholm, the actor who plays a disheveled resident at Fat Trout, was arrested in Spokane, Washington, after attacking his girlfriend with a baseball bat, and convicted on the basis of surveillance footage.
