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THE LEGEND
Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI arrived in the logging town of Twin Peaks, Washington, to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer, the homecoming queen found wrapped in plastic by the river. He came with a black suit, a microcassette recorder and a set of methods the local sheriff had never seen. He records his observations for someone called Diane, ranks the town's coffee and cherry pie with real seriousness, gives a thumbs up when things go well, and trusts his dreams as evidence.
The dreams are not wrong. The case leads him past diners, lumber mills and a roadhouse into the woods, and from the woods into the Black Lodge, a red-curtained place where time runs backwards and the dead talk in riddles. Cooper went in looking for a killer and came out changed, with a dark double loose in the world. It took him twenty-five years to find his way back.
OFF THE PAGE
Dale Cooper was created by David Lynch and Mark Frost for Twin Peaks, which began on ABC in April 1990 and ran for two seasons. Lynch named him after D. B. Cooper, the unidentified hijacker of 1971. Kyle MacLachlan has played him in every appearance and has described Cooper as a grown-up version of Jeffrey Beaumont, his character in Lynch's Blue Velvet. The role won MacLachlan a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination, and his recordings to Diane were released as an album that earned him a Grammy nomination.
Cooper also appears in the prequel film Fire Walk with Me. When Showtime revived the series in 2017 as Twin Peaks: The Return, MacLachlan played Cooper, his evil doppelganger Mr. C and a Las Vegas insurance man named Dougie Jones. His sincerity, his love of a damn fine cup of coffee and his total lack of irony made him one of television's most loved detectives, and the template for a generation of odd, gentle investigators who followed.
IN SIXTH SCALE
Twin Peaks waited a long time for a proper twelve-inch Cooper. Kaustic Plastik, working with Infinite Statue, made him in a standard edition, a deluxe edition with evidence props and a diorama stand, and an exclusive edition limited to hand-numbered pieces. The same partnership also built a Red Room diorama carrying a Showtime copyright line, so a Cooper can stand on the zigzag floor where the story ends up.
A Cooper figure lives or dies on small things. Collectors look for MacLachlan's neat side-parted hair and earnest half-smile, a black suit that is sharply cut without looking like a costume, and the props that tell the story: the tape recorder, the coffee cup, the badge. He has no superpowers to pose, so the craft is in the tailoring and the face. He sits happily on a Movies & TV shelf near other screen detectives, or next to Kaustic Plastik's Toshiro Mifune tribute figures for a shelf of film-lover favourites. Fans of strange small towns will find more in Horror and The X-Files.
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Kaustic Plastik
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