Twin Peaks - Fragility of Life

Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton) was leaving the trailer park for some “peace time” on a bench in town. He tells a neighbor riding along with him that he can hear the nails hammering in his coffin. 75 years he’s been smokin’, too. A long life. Maybe not the most fulfilled life. But a long one.

I can’t say this had any emotional ties to the little boy who is ultimately run down by a dopefiend after he snorted some smack provided by Balthazar Getty’s Red and decided to forgo safe driving for he had “places to go”. Crosswalks or stop signs be damned, this fucker had places to go and too unstable a mind to give a shit. Lynch includes a wallop of a score and locals looking on in horror as a mother holds onto her dead son, a game of tag, innocent as it might be, leading to tragedy. Carl had even greeted the mother and son with a warm smile and wave. It was nice to see a mother and son so happy. I reminded him perhaps that even as 75 years hadn’t always dealt him a good hand, there’s something special that passes by from time to time. Of course, life produces death. Some dopefiend comes along to ruin this moment.

Again I don’t pretend to consider that Lynch has Stanton to kneel at the anguished, crouching mother and her dead son as an emotional means to recognize the fragility of life for some while others are granted much longer. I just felt it as that scene carried out. It is what resonated with me personally.

I’m feeling rather bothered and devastated after the murder of a family friend quite close to my daughter. She worked as a bank teller and was murdered by a woman trying to rob the place. That fragility of life hung in my mind with the lurching loss of the child, in his mother’s arms, and Stanton looking down at them, realizing in any moment the end could be near. Life and art can both imitate each other.