Diane

Yesterday I wrote about Dale, Dougie and the Doppelgänger in the new season of Twin Peaks, but there was something essential I forgot to say about the 4th D: Diane, who comes face to face with Dale Cooper’s evil doppelgänger in the latest episode.

I wrote that the doppelgänger is “a soulless shell of a man, human antimatter. He is the manifestation of absence, a thing that is the inverse of its true self, defined by what is missing.” What I didn’t consider was how, in Diane, he was confronted with his opposite, a person who has always been present even in her absence. If the doppelgänger is a terrifying embodiment of the ways in which a person can be utterly absent in our lives despite physically being there, Diane speaks to how we can be connected to a person and feel their presence in our lives even when they’re not physically there. This is how it always was with Dale for Diane. From the very first time we saw him in the very first episode of the show, it was as if she was with him, a witness to his life despite the distance between them.

How he shared things with her. The ordinary things that can take on more meaning when we share them with someone than when they’re only ours alone. “Lunch was $6.31 at the Lamplighter Inn. That’s on Highway Two near Lewis Fork. That was a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat, a slice of cherry pie and a cup of coffee. Damn good food. Diane, if you ever get up this way, that cherry pie is worth a stop.”

And now, because she’s needed, because it’s what you do for the people you’re truly connected to when you’re needed, she shows up, and the fullness of her presence is as captivating as the doppelgänger’s manifestation of absence is chilling. He cannot meet her presence. He can’t contend with it. 

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He tilts his head awkwardly but doesn’t actually shift his gaze to meet hers. He can’t. Because he isn’t really there, he has never really been there, and she has always been there, with and for Dale, present even in her absence. That’s how she knows it’s not him.