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FAST-FORWARD SEVENTEEN YEARS OR SO and you'll find that Leland Palmer has, in fact, been reborn.
It's not the kind of karmic (or, "dharmic") rebirth that Special Agent Cooper was shooting for, but Leland and the entire Twin Peaks cast have found new life in a definitive Gold Box set that collects each of the show's 29 episodes, remastered, along with some fascinating behind-the-scenes extras.
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The show was, of course, a true pop-culture phenomenon in early 90s. The brainchild of writer-directors Mark Frost and David Lynch, it posed a now-famous question, one that was never meant to be answered -- Who killed Laura Palmer? -- and then, bafflingly, went ahead and filled in the blank. A full viewing of the series makes clear a sad truth with which even its creators agree: without that question, the show, despite guidance from directors like Diane Keaton, Uli Edel, and Lynch himself, became more or less direction-less. (Luckily, when Coop's nemesis Windom Earle finally appeared in the last few episodes, he brought with him a renewed sense of the old Twin Peaks spirit. By then, though, most viewers had long ago lost the thread and weren't interested in looking for it anymore.)
But throughout Twin Peaks' run, there's one constant: Dale Cooper. Played with quirky confidence by previous Lynch co-conspirator Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet), Coop was young, handsome, and -- by all network TV standards of the time -- seriously weird. Though a bit of a goody-two-shoes, Cooper was somehow, enviably, cool -- a thumbs-up, yet decidedly non-Fonzarelli kind of cool. And his contagious, can-do-it demeanor was upstaged only by his stated work-style, made from a mix of "Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck."
All this, of course, makes him eminently watchable. But he's more than that. He's more, even, than the top-notch lawman that Twin Peaks' Sheriff Harry Truman (yes, that's the character's name) defends Coop as. He may even be a bodhisattva.
Now, it should be said that David Lynch is not a Buddhist, and there's no word on co-creator Mark Frost's spiritual leanings. But no matter. Neither Lynch nor Frost needed to be Buddhist to create Dale Cooper any more than Bob Kane needed nocturnal crimefighting experience to create Batman. Or, to put it another way, as Lynch recently wrote in his book Catching the Big Fish, "The filmmaker doesn't have to be suffering to show suffering."
But: it should also be said that, while Lynch is no Buddhist -- and, fairly or not (probably not), the show is primarily identified with Lynch -- he is in fact a meditator. For some thirty-four years, he's been a practitioner of TM, or Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the famous/infamous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and thrust into the public's collective consciousness by John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney. (Ringo Starr tolerated their dabblings but would have preferred that the other three Beatles focus instead on music.) So it's not a stretch to see, as one astute and excellent friend has suggested, that Coop is Lynch. It's all a matter of, as Bill Clinton once put it, what your definition of "is" is.
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DHARMA-BURGER ARCHIVE 
