January Meme: Dr. Montague and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby
bimo wanted me to have a go at those psychiatrists played by Russ Tamblyn who despite good intentions (or????) are less than helpful to the massively issue and supernatural phenomenon ridden girls they treat.
(Well, at least neither is Hannibal Lecter.) Lawrence Jacoby, he of the multi-colored glasses and the Hawaii fetish, strikes me as very much a comment on the Zeitgeist, among other things. In the original, late 80s Twin Peaks, he’s an aged Hippie, well equipped to talk with Dale Cooper on shamanism, full of new age trappings. In last year’s third season, he’s become an angry internet radio broadcaster and conspiracy theorist who also uses said angry rants to finance himself. It’s not as drastic a fall as Cooper having spent those decades in between represented by his evil, murderous alter ego, but it fits with the general sense of loss of something essential in Twin Peaks - loss of kindness, perhaps - not least since Jacoby was always one of the show’s least judgmental characters. But Lynch is kinder with Jacoby than with some of the others in this latest installment, because it turns out that Jacoby, this time around, and without planning to, actually was able to help Nadine Hurley to a clear understanding of herself, taking responsibility and freeing both Ed and herself from the past, and thus Jacoby’s story as Nadine tells him this ends on a note of grace.
This was by no means a given. Jacoby tells Cooper even in the original show that he feels a fraud because pre-Laura, he didn’t care for any of his patients. And with Laura he crossed boundaries. (The show doesn’t say whether or not he had sex with her, but it’s clear that he was in love with her, see also the business with the buried heart, and given Laura’s situation the very last she needed was yet another older man in love with her, least of all her therapist. Jacoby did write a self accusatory letter tot he Washington State Medical Review board re: his handling of the Laura Palmer case, which led to the revocation of his medical license, so obviously he did feel he failed her. Jacoby’s non-Laura cases we see on the show are arguably sucessful (getting Ben Horne out of his Civil War fixation), of dubious success (family therapy for the Briggs clan) and having no effect (the original treatment of an amnesiac Nadine). But it’s the Laura one he judges himself by.
Tamblyn’s other psychiatrist, Dr. Montague in the Netflix Haunting of Hill House is Eleanor/Nell’s therapist, his name hailing from the Dr. Montague who spearheads the investigation in The Haunting (where Tamblyn played Luke) and in Shirley Jackson’s novel. The earlier Montague, without meaning to, in the end only gave Eleanor the means to seek out her death (and proved ineffectual at what he set out to do to boot). The later Montague in terms of screen time is only a very minor character, and as opposed to the flamboyant Lawrence Jacoby a very traditional image of a therapist (dark suit, Freudian beard, very serious, restrained demeanor, definitely not crossing any boundaries). The advice he gives to Nell in that short screen time while utterly conforming to psychiatric guidelines - to speak with her siblings about her feelings re: their relationship, to confront her original trauma in Hill House - proves utterly fatal when Nell follows it to the letter. Now, on one level you could simply say that Dr. Montague couldn’t know that what Eleanor told him about her supernatural experiences was, in fact, true and not the result of nightmares or some metaphors her subconscious dreamed up for her family’s devastating experiences, and thus that sending her back to Hill House would mean sending her to her death, any more than the earlier Dr. Montague had meant the earlier Eleanor to die.
But on the other hand, leaving aside the obvious (well meaning paternalism = death) interpretation, the triple casting of Russ Tamblyn (as Luke in The Haunting, Dr. Jacoby in Twin Peaks and Dr. Montague in The Haunting of Hill House) is just an invitation for more inventive and/or crazy connection makings. Luke in The Haunting - the last descendant of the family which used to own Hill House, eager to sell it without having lived there until the movie - starts out as selfish, irreverent and sceptical and ends up deeply shocked and as drawn into the eerie events as the rest. It’s not impossible if you imagine a shared TP/Haunting universe to believe that while this Luke, unlike Eleanor, gets out alive, the House still leaves its seed of possession in him. That’s what supernatural entities do. He changes his name and studies psychology, shamanism and what not to find a way to deal with what happened as well as with his own blackouts and ends up in Twin Peaks as Lawrence Jacoby. The reason why the Laura case scars him so badly isn’t just whatever he felt for Laura but the fact the BOB/Leland discovery made him realise what could be going on with himself, which is why he denounced himself to the authorities and went back to Hawaii for a while. But alas, at some point Hill House brought out the possession in full in order to get the Cranes back, starting with Eleanor, and used him, now under the nome de plume of Dr. Montague (as a black joke), to send Eleanor into the House’s supernatural claws. Having achieved this, Hill House had no further use for him and released him. Horrified by what he’d done, he goes back to Twin Peaks once more in his last incarnation as old Jacoby, his Dr. Amp Rants the expression of his guilty, shattered psyche until, until Nadine offers him the possibility of redemption.
…well, it makes about as much sense as your avarage Lynch production does, is all I’m saying. 😊
The other days
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