THE DARK SIDE
Kyle MacLachlan
“You want to know why I’m whittling?” says the FBI’s Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) to local Sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) on a stakeout at the Roadhouse. “That’s what you do in town where a yellow light still means slow down, not speed up.” “Agent Cooper is full of funny little turns of phrases and hokey, small-town aphorisms and in the feature-length pilot to Lynch’s Twin Peaks television series, he fires off some great ones about cherry pie and hot black coffee, but that is just the sunny side of this quirky G-man. Cooper is an accomplished, capable detective who employs mysticism and the supernatural in his quest to stop a demon serial killer who is terrorizing young women in the gauzy, emerald Northwestern United States, with which Cooper has become positively enchanted. “Smell those trees. Smell those Douglas Firs,” he breathlessly says while riding in the car with Harry, and familiarizing himself with what will be his newest hunting ground, in the unforgettable wake of local golden girl Laura Palmer’s murder.
What makes Cooper such a miraculous creation, and MacLachlan’s performance such a gloriously low-key, underrated achievement, is the way both men glue the pieces together. MacLachlan expertly plays the hackneyed bumble-headedness like Gary Cooper crossed with Jimmy Stewart; the kind, empathetic eyes; the sardonic deliveries and grins; and the specific look of slicked back black hair and fitted suit to match without Cooper ever losing his air of authority. These are all familiar characteristics of cinematic government agents—the stoicism, the cool facade, the vast knowledge of the criminal mind, the trench coat—yet when the actor unites each individual aspect, external and internal, the final product is an iconic, landmark character that people are still talking about 20 years later and still blissfully discovering new things about. The chivalrous armor Agent Cooper wears is forged in molten steel and his sheer will and determination to piece together the mysteries of the oddball Twin Peaks and to bring a murderer to justice is romantic, scary and completely original. Agent Cooper stands with the greatest heroic leading man turns in film history, a true blue good guy fighting absolute evil. Diane: please note that without Special Agent Dale Cooper, it is hard to imagine other similarly eccentric FBI agents existing at all.
-MM
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