“In 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.”
If the monsters are Monarch’s muscle and its chance to show off its imaginative mind, the characters’ relationships are the show’s big soft heart. It’s beating loud and clear here. Takehiro Hira is a quiet MVP as Hiroshi Randa, a man forced to justify to his children why they come from two separate families he kept secret from one another — one where his wife was a coworker and confidante and one where he could leave that world behind. Meanwhile, he’s able to reunite with his mother, who’s barely aged since he last saw her when he was a boy. His life is…complicated.
Equally complicated are the feelings of young Lee Shaw when he hears Kei describe her relationship with his best friend, Billy. She says he’s a far better husband to her even than her son Hiroshi’s father, the sainted doctor who died treating victims of the atomic bomb. Lee knows he shouldn’t begrudge his friends that kind of love, but one look at his face is all it takes to know it hurts him badly all the same.
It makes you appreciate the effort that went into ensuring that the human elements of the show could hold your interest between monster attacks. If both remain exactly as good all season long as they are this episode, then the Great God of the Sea has truly blessed us with a bountiful catch.
The Beauty has been one of the season’s most pleasantly unpleasant surprises — nasty, horny, catty, bloody, and beautifully disgusting. The production and costume design is first rate, referential of past horror/dystopian classics without feeling derivative. Ditto the body horror, which like that in The Substance is reminiscent of Cronenberg and Carpenter but blazes vile new snail trails of its own.
The show’s approach to its titular concept has been multifaceted and frequently fascinating. Fully acknowledging that beauty standards are draconian and arbitrary and designed to be profited from, the show also uses a variety of characters — a lonely shut-in, a depressed teenage girl, a trans woman, a sick child — to make the point that it’s not always shallow to want to look and feel like an idealized version of yourself. The question of “Whose ideal would that be, anyway?” is never far below the surface.
Plus it’s fun as all hell. Beautiful people running around bare-assed. Assassins and mutants and loose-cannon FBI agents (oh my!). Sci-fi lab facilities and pastel commercial parodies. Impeccable stunt casting. Mac Quayle’s creepy synth score. Frank sex talk. My favorite Ashton Kutcher performance ever. If the season had lasted just five seconds longer and shown us the new old Cooper instead of leaving us with a shrug of the shoulder I don’t think I’d have any substantive complaints at all. If they make a booster dose available in the form a second season, I’ll be first in line for a poke.
But more unsettling than anything else is the speed with which this almost entirely untested product, which is so festooned with gruesome side effects that they need to knock their rich patients out to hide it from them, takes over society. It blows past the usual testing and government approval. In fact, it has the full backing of the unnamed, unseen, but Beautified president (you know who it is: he threatens to run for five terms as a result), whose entire cabinet takes the shot by way of endorsement.
This is, in effect, the world we currently live in. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI, a technology known, for a fact, to induce psychosis in its users, to reduce the cognitive abilities of children, to produce child sexual abuse materials and spread Nazi propaganda at scale. This is being done with the White House’s approval and encouragement. Major governmental departments are fusing with AI as fast as they can. There are no guardrails when the people in charge are too insane and corrupt and evil to want them in place.
We know who that killer is now, and that makes Twin Peaks a fundamentally different show than it was an episode ago. With the show’s central mystery solved from the viewer’s perspective, you can already feel the force of storytelling gravity tugging the case towards its resolution. There’s only so long you can leave the killer on the loose without making Agent Cooper and company look incompetent, which cuts against the core appeal of the character.
Fortunately, the lead actors — particularly Sawai, Yamamoto, and the Russells — are uniformly skilled at wielding the show’s secret weapon, a sense of profound yearning thank links one person to another, whether their connection is familiar or romantic in nature. The dynamic in the past between Mari, Bill, and Lee, three people who love each other but who can never properly resolve that love since a romantic pairing is only possible between two of them at a time, is sophisticated, heartbreaking, and acted with both tenderness and humor.At times, this group is asked to take on material that isn’t at their level: big gobs of “I’m going back, it’s what he would have done for us” genre-movie motivation, say, or an underwritten scene in which Cate and Hiroshi finally address his bigamy that should have been emotionally riveting. When that happens, you feel the disconnect between their abilities and the script.
I suppose having a cast strong enough to expose the occasional weakness is one of them good problems, however. Certainly you see the advantages of a cast this stacked come through in the character work: Young Lee’s petulant sneer when Kei cracks a dirty joke about Bill, Kei’s mesmeric connections with both men, Cate wrestling with how her Monarch experiences have completely uprooted her from the world. Sawaii makes it feel like Cate’s quest to rescue Lee is less a matter of hero-of-the-story bravado and more a desperate woman clinging to a man who’s been her literal lifeline.
And the monsters! Man, this show has not disappointed there. In addition to Kong and the trilobites and (presumably) Biollante, there’s a giant bat thing that barfs electricity, a huge rat monster Kentaro kills with a forklift, and one of those cool giant ram/boar/rhino things whose hides are protected by a layer of trees and plants and giant thorns. Monarch’s thought process for creating and deploying new monsters and Titans appears to be “Hey, you know what would be cool?”, and so far their answers have been correct. The result isn’t a perfect show, but it’s certainly a fun one.
We have this episode’s pleasures to enjoy, and they are many. Foremost among them is Graynor as the Mother, a supervillain just as sexy and insane as Byron, but with the demeanor of a woman who has business to attend to, not a guy who’s got parties to plan.
Mac Quayle’s score, meanwhile, really sizzles in this one; the closing music was so good I let the credits play just to listen to it all the way through. It’s a visually splendid show, too, with director Crystle Roberson Dorsey serving up a series of little treats and terrors for the eye. Even shots that don’t need to be anything fancy, like Cooper and Bennett traveling up the stairs back to their room together, can become an Escher-esque trompe l’oeil. If sometimes that means watching a man’s ribs pop open like that turkey in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, well, beauty always comes at a cost.
The eighth dose of The Beauty we’ve received is the most refined formula yet. In just over half an hour of screentime, this episode encapsulates everything that makes this show what the Tom Tom Club once referred to as “fun, nasty fun!”
Health, wellness, beauty: unobjectionably positive things, right? The last time I watched broadcast television, every commercial that wasn’t for AI or online sports betting was for products pertaining to one of the three. There’s a section in your supermarket named after them and everything.
But whose health? Whose wellness? Whose beauty? That is to say, who’s defining what it means to be healthy, to be well, to be beautiful? What do they stand to gain from those definitions? Most importantly, who stands to lose from them?
I’ve given some thought to the sublime in cinema — moments when it feels what I’m watching has somehow transcended earthly limitations, visually expressing a feeling so huge that it’s impossible for words to articulate. I realize now that for me, this happens in horror more often than anywhere else. In fact, it may only happen in horror.
It happens when characters are made to confront some symbolic representation of…not death, though that’s part of it, and not evil, though that’s part of it too. They confront the darkness we fear exists at the world’s heart, the terrible void that acts as a megapredator for our tiny souls. They confront the true black.
I think of moments like Chief Brody on the beach, the camera dolly-zooming on him Vertigo style as he sees that the shark he hoped had been killed but knew in his heart had not claim another victim. Father Karras and Father Merrin, chanting “The power of Christ compels you!” at a hovering Regan MacNeil. Wendy Torrance turning a corner and watching an elevator unleash a river of blood. The cops gazing down the hall of Barton Fink’s hotel and seeing a demon in human form amidst a blazing inferno. The end of Mulholland Drive. The end of The Zone of Interest.
And this episode of Twin Peaks. Maddy and Leland and Bob and Sarah in the living room. Coop and Harry and the Log Lady and the Giant and the waiter and Bobby and Donna and James in the Roadhouse. Evil incarnate, drawing out grief from people who don’t even yet know why they’re grieving — only that there’s been some tear in the fabric in the world, one that they can sense but never repair.
When Mark Frost and David Lynch’s credit appeared against the red curtains, I couldn’t hold back anymore. The tears I’d withheld came pouring out. This is one of the most deeply awful and awesome things ever aired on television. I have not forgotten it since I first watched it nearly three decades ago. I will never forget it for as long as I live.
There’s room for silly business like this in Twin Peaks for sure. It’s part of the charm. But we’re now getting ever closer to the pulsating black heart of the story — the force of sheer malevolence that claimed Laura Palmer’s life. As such, even the simplest lines that touch on this mystery take on an awesome power. When Mike describes Bob as “the parasite,” attaching himself to human hosts and feeding on their fears and carnal pleasures, it’s like hearing Max Von Sydow talk about the thing inside Regan in The Exorcist.
“He is Bob, eager for fun,” Mike says. “He wears a smile. Everybody run.”
This dialogue moves me to the point of tears, not of sorrow or joy, but awe. A great and terrible thing is at hand.
While the episode looks and feels bifurcated, it’s really best considered as a whole. Byron Forst is a cautionary tale about the obsession with beauty — how in the hands of a vapid sociopath it’s just another weapon, a set of fangs that lets him sink his teeth even deeper into a world he’s already despoiled. He’s human Mar-a-Lago Face, if Mar-a-Lago Face didn’t make you look like a monster on the outside as well as the inside, that is. He’s an obsession with beauty as dominance, beauty as the currency of the world’s masters.
Mike and especially Clara, by contrast, illustrate that it’s not always vain or frivolous or shallow or incel to care about how you look. Mike’s not really that much of a schlub, he’s just kind of leading a low-effort life when he’s not at work. Clara’s spent decades living as a man, getting married, having kids, the whole nine; now she’s finally out and transitioning, but she can feel the wasted time hanging over her already, and the process itself is immiserating to her.
These people don’t want to bang stewardesses and then order their murder with their genitals still wet. They don’t want to deplete children’s college savings funds to overcharge for a miracle drug. They want to have the confidence that looking amazing, the way they want to look, will give them. Are they reckless, maybe selfishly so, given how little they know about the drug? Yes. But they care about each other before, during, and after their transformations. They’re friends. Their motives are not alien to us, as Byron’s are. Clara and Mike are fascinating books to read, but they get judged by their covers. It’s hard to begrudge them their redesign, even though we know that disaster follows.
In the present, the newly Beauty-fied Jordan convinces Cooper she is who she says she is by repeating her nickname for his dick: Provigil, an anti-narcolepsy drug, that “brings me back to life.” (I mean this sincerely: Stay classless, The Beauty.) At dinner, she explains how after fleeing the hotel in a panic after transforming, she initially enjoyed the attention her youthful new body and face received, until increasingly unpleasant interactions with men made her feel objectified and stupid. Cooper assures her she was beautiful long before the drug got in her system.
I’d like to see that explored a bit more, to be honest. Rebecca Hall, the actor who plays original-version Jordan, is in fact stunning, and the character is not even 40 yet. Ashton Kutcher, the transformed version of Byron, is 47 years old. He can absolutely play younger, but so can Hall, so what gives?
At the risk of shooting the show bail, I think the double standard is deliberate. Men made this drug, mostly for a male userbase, entirely for a patriarchal world. For these guys, and for a lot of people in fact, it’s okay to be a handsome 47-year-old man in a way it’s not okay to be a beautiful 40-year-old woman. Men online will speak of “the wall,” some completely mythical barrier women hit as they age after which their looks evaporate, as if it’s an incontrovertible fact of life. Would a scientist willing to take these bastards’ money be any different?
The sequence that follows is fascinating for how directly it addresses female desire, a constant theme where Laura is concerned. To help flesh out Harold’s “living novel” and satiate his thirst for secrets — in exchange for which he’ll read to her from Laura’s diary — Donna tells the story of a time in junior high when she and Laura dressed up in their tightest clothes to pick up boys at the Roadhouse.
The college boys who pick them up wind up going skinny dipping with them, which is Donna’s idea, not Laura’s. Laura had begun dancing provocatively, and Donna is desperately trying to keep up. She imitates the dance, half in shadow, to make her point.
As Laura makes out with two of the three young men in the water, the third swims out to where Donna is and kisses her hand, then her lips, a feeling she remembers almost physically even now. “I never saw him again,” Donna tells Harold with tears in her eyes. “It was the first time I ever fell in love.”
Harold is blown away. He takes her back to show her his orchids, paying special attention to the “lower lip” of its petals, “called a labellum.” The words hang in the air, dripping with innuendo.
“So delicate,” Donna purrs. When Harold explains it’s a landing pad for pollinators, Donna replies, “Romantic, isn’t it?” The two kiss before Harold, suddenly anxious or self-conscious, breaks it off and scampers away.
There are any number of taboos being violated here, giving the scene the heat of the forbidden. There’s the obvious erotic power of that story over Donna even now, yet it’s not presented as some lascivious Lolita kind of thing. In how she tells the story, Donna is clearly expressing feelings she experiences now, as a young adult…and which Harold experiences as an older one. So there’s that age gap aspect, too.
But at the same time, Harold’s severe mental illness, and his ignorance of Donna’s true motives, put her in control of the much older man, not the other way around. The whole thing is a psychosexual bramble, and its thorns are hard to disentangle yourself from.
Leland Palmer has a confession to make. Once again sobbing like the devastated father we knew before his hair went white, Leland admits that he killed Jacques Renault, the man he believed to be Laura’s killer. His motivation, he explains to Sheriff Truman, Agent Cooper, and Doc Hayward, was “absolute loss…more than grief. It’s deep down inside. Every cell screams. You can hear nothing else.”
And indeed, we do hear the sound in Leland’s head as he sits in the interrogation room in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, staring into the holes in the paneled walls. It’s the voice of his daughter, Laura, calling “Daddy!” over and over.
The only glimpse I caught of Twin Peaks during its initial run occurred on October 13, 1990. I was 12 years old, it was after 10 p.m., and I must have been flipping through the channels absent-mindedly before bed after the Golden Girls/Empty Nest block on NBC had ended. I was aware of the show by then, even as a person who’d only freshly become aware of “pop culture” as a phenomenon; the cast and the parodies were absolutely everywhere for months. But this was my first look at the show itself.
I saw a one-armed man with a syringe have a seizure in a men’s room stall, then emerge in perfect calm, talking to an unseen figure like a man possessed.
I was a squeamish kid. That was plenty of Twin Peaks for me.
Keep that in mind as you watch Coop’s subsequent actions throughout the episode. When he’s interviewing the GQ guy, he learns that the man was in love with the woman who blew up, though he knew she didn’t feel the same. When he starts to sob with grief, Cooper actually takes the risk of reaching out and holding the man’s hand. “Thank you for being kind,” the man says with shocking directness. “They’ve kind of been treating us like animals.” Light shines on them from above, transformed from the harsh glare of an interview room to a kind of visual benediction.
The same thing happens with Platt’s character. When Cooper enters the plastic-lined chamber where doctors are working on him, he’s struggling against his restraints, begging them to “talk to me like a real person” over and over. That’s exactly what Cooper does, calming Manny down by discussing their dogs and, again, holding the man’s hand. “You have a kind face,” Manny plaintively tells Cooper at one point, not incorrectly. Things go south after that, but that’s the virus’s fault, not Cooper’s.
If you’re not a heterosexual cis man and you’re reading this, I need to impress upon you just how not done it is to reach out and hold the hand of basically any man, let alone a stranger. You have to willingly leap a pretty big gap of societal convention, patriarchal conformity, homophobia, and emotional stuntedness to do it — and you have to count on the recipient to be willing and able to do the same. I found these moments strangely beautiful as a result. Even amid all the camp body-horror shenanigans, the show makes time for men to treat each other decently.
What’s more, Ashley and Manny aren’t simple stereotypes. Ashley, who’s kind of a gym bro, feels looked down upon by the elite fashionistas at Vogue. He knew Manny was cruisy in the men’s room — but he didn’t mind, because letting the guy check out his dick gave him a little confidence boost. “I’d give him a little show. Made me feel superior. Picked me up on down days or something.” Only after rambling like that does he catch himself: “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
It’s a humanizing comment, a funny and unexpected detail, and an illustration of how even straight gym bros who are madly in love with beautiful women and absolutely love to kiss and tell about it also engage in a little homosociality now and then for various reasons, all in one. It’s excellent writing from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson, and the entire hospital segment is engagingly acted by Peters, Platt, and Halper.
The final surprise? Like his boss, Antonio loves him some yacht rock. In another American Psycho riff, he defends the artistic legacy of Christopher Cross at length, decrying the image-first MTV era for tanking the average-looking singer-songwriter’s career. “The world is cruel to people who aren’t beautiful,” says the murderer-for-hire.
But he only says this after he sings the entire first verse and chorus of Cross’s smash hit single, the definitive yacht rock song, “Sailing.” And I mean the whole thing, every note, for approximately one minute and forty seconds of screentime — all while Jeremy, who’s both a) not a fan of Christopher Cross, and b) convinced this man is going to kill him at any moment, watches in perplexed horror.
And dude, Anthony Ramos sings that song. He puts his heart and soul into it the way you do when you really want to kill it at karaoke. The funny, pop-culture-referencing hitman is an old archetype now — Pulp Fiction is over thirty years old — but rarely have I seen it done with this kind of cheerful gusto. Between this and his fine work on Marvel’s Ironheart, the guy plays a great villain precisely because he doesn’t really read as villainous.
“I think everything that we do, from the minute we hit puberty to the second we die, is about sex. We go to the gym, we work on our bodies, we cut our hair, we fix our teeth, our tits, torturing ourselves for some promotion — and everything that we do is about our universal, unquenchable thirst to all be considered attractive enough to get laid.” —Agent Cooper Madsen
Put a pin in that speech. We’re gonna come back to it.
The series premiere of The Beauty, co-created, co-written, and directed by Ryan Murphy, depicts a deranged model played by Bella Hadid going on a killcrazy rampage at a Balenciaga runway show, embarking on a high-speed motorcycle chase on the streets of Paris, resuming her killcrazy rampage with bone shards sticking out of her leg, then exploding like a blood-filled water balloon, while the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” plays.
There. I’ve now told you everything you need to know to determine whether or not you’ll enjoy The Beauty. It’s a Ryan Murphy joint through and through, from the high-profile cameo by a beautiful famous woman to the emphasis on sensation over substance. Of course, sensation can be its own kind of substance, and your mileage on whether Murphy ever makes it so may vary. I find all this work in the true-crime genre to be excellent, for what it’s worth. The crimes going on here, however, are very much not true.
