‘Twin Peaks’: Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper is the greatest character of all time
David Lynch’s vastly influential Twin Peaks redefined the potential of television storytelling by traversing the mysterious landscape of surrealism in a way that captured mainstream attention. Over the years, the show has garnered a cult-following of avid fans who adore its simultaneous investigations of various genres.
Twin Peaks will always remain one of the best television shows of all time, so it only feels right that at its heart is the greatest character of all time. At the centre of the show’s bizarre experiments with reality and fantasy is Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper, who arrives in a small town in order to make sense of a strange murder case involving a young girl named Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
Deceptively structured as a simple mystery narrative, Twin Peaks branches out into unexplored territory and asks questions that are somehow visceral and metaphysical at the same time. Even after 35 years, the series generates debate and controversy about the various possible interpretations of its events.
“I don’t ever explain it,” Lynch famously said. “Because it’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it much smaller.” Cooper is a fascinating intersection of optimism, wisdom, and infectious enthusiasm for food, who acts as the translator for the audience.
Just like us, he’s also an outsider to the isolated community of Twin Peaks, and he undertakes the gigantic task of deciphering its elusive dialectics. Endlessly charming and thoroughly unperturbed by the weird things happening around him, Cooper is the reliable guide who holds our hands and takes us into a world where logic has been relegated to the realm of redundancy.
As he oscillates between the hallucinogenic landscapes of dreams and the beautiful mountain town, we travel with him and accept him as our chosen navigator. On top of that, Cooper’s philosophy of life is pretty reassuring when compared to the artistic visions of the idiosyncratic filmmaker who masterminded Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Inland Empire, among others.
Even his life motto has been adopted by Twin Peaks fans around the world, and it’s sage advice for anyone to live their life by: “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men’s store, a cat nap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.”
MacLachlan’s character was named after the infamous DB Cooper, although they’re definitely not one and the same, who hijacked a plane, parachuted out with a $200,000 haul, and vanished off the face of the planet. Like his namesake, Cooper jumps headfirst into a hostile world and finds himself in a situation where the rules don’t matter anymore.
The metaphysical mysteries of the Twin Peaks universe don’t care about FBI guidelines, as Cooper himself famously admitted: “In the pursuit of Laura’s killer, I have employed Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck. But now I find myself in need of something new, which, for lack of a better word, we shall call magic.”
MacLachlan always saw the iconic federal agent as the logical continuation of his role in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where he played a teenager caught up in a psychosexual carnival of human depravity. “I see my character as Jeffrey Beaumont grown up,” he said. “Instead of being acted upon, he has command on the world.”
He’s absolutely correct, too. In Twin Peaks, the amateur sleuth of Blue Velvet has grown up to become a competent detective as well as an interesting philosopher who can articulate the absurdity of the world without being impotent. MacLachlan reprised the role of Cooper in the 2017 revival of the show, but he wasn’t the same young and quirky agent we had come to love and admire. That version of the character is immortalised in the first two seasons of the show, perpetually delighting us with his witty aphorisms.
In many ways, Agent Cooper changed the way that artists approached the mystery genre. It was a common practice to pose questions and spend the rest of the time trying to get the answers, but Twin Peaks was different. It focused on the mystery itself, insisting that it was extremely insolent to hurl unsatisfactory answers at grand questions that we were incapable of answering.
More than just an accomplished and acclaimed recurring performance from a talented actor, MacLachlan’s Cooper performs multiple functions both inside and outside Twin Peaks‘ fiction. He’s one of the few reliable narrators, or at least as reliable as they can be based on everything that goes on, and he’s also the audience surrogate who helps us make sense of the world.
Beyond that, he’s eminently quotable, constantly collected, reacts accordingly to his increasingly bizarre surroundings, takes everything in his stride no matter how crazy it gets, and enjoys nothing more than a piping hot cup of coffee. That’s what makes Dale Cooper the greatest character of all time, and nobody summed up his journey better than the man himself: “In the heat of the investigative pursuit, the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.”
All episodes of Twin Peaks launch on MUBI on 13 June in the US, UK, Latin America, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Netherlands and India.
