I really wanted to like this show and I realized it was good as I watched it, but darned if I couldn't get to the end of the first season

Just rewatched.. Finale's even weirder than I remembered..

great stuff

We're doing a rewatch too. Just finished season 1. John, it's 8 episodes! Such a loser. Gotta get better at watching TV.

Yeah, c'mon. No duds in season 1 at all. And season 2 is still worth it if only for the finale, which is one of the best hours of television ever made.

Rewatching the show is such a treat too, I do it every year and never get tired of it.

What do you guys think the coffee symbolizes?

Dunno, but I rewatched the first season in my second try of finishing the show and I'm in love all over again. My favorite use of symbolism thus far is the show-within-a-show satire of "Invitation to Love"...

I've never heard someone say they thought the coffee was symbolic. To me it's just to create the setting. The pacific northwest drinks a lot of coffee. If there is any symbolism, my guess would be that Coop's pie and coffee is just meant to illustrate his innocence. It's a really old timey/innocent combo to begin with, and his earnest love of the pie and coffee takes it even further.

What do you think?

I'm not sure it's symbolic of just one thing. It's more like it's a key semiotic element which takes on various functions as the show goes along. At first it's sort of a continuation of the lush grass and bright red roses at the beginning of Blue Velvet. Much of Lynch's work is about taking iconography of innocence and a beautiful facade and variously contrasting it, comparing it, and commingling it with images of corruption, etc. So the coffee and pie is this representation of innocence, but then it's also sort of associationally contaminated by its eventual presence in the Black Lodge. Upon rewatch the most seemingly innocuous things take on the most unsuspected meanings. It starts to take on a kind of bizarre, sexual-racial tone, and even then very strangely mixes that into moralistically/religiously evil undertones as the show goes on ("damn fine" going beyond just meaning really good and morphing into meaning hellishly fine, given how the show also eventually spirals into demon possession, evil alternate dimensions, etc). Nothing is what it seems is basically the whole point of the show. There are no truly stable signs or structures, everything from grief over a girl's death to the significance of a cup of coffee is potentially contaminated by "impure" meanings. This video gives you a good sense of how the meaning changes over the course of the show:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcoMrwEa5o[/youtube]

As a side note, coffee is omnipresent in Claire Denis films as well and takes on similarly complex meanings over the course of her career.

I'm obviously going to have to re-watch the series again to really zero in on it - but having just finished it (for the first time) I feel like the coffee and Cooper have a symbiotic relationship or something. I didn't really zero in on that until Windom Earle shows up - and Coop says "I'm going to go get some more coffee" while he's doing something (I don't remember what at the moment - trying to learn chess? trying to figure out what something means?) and the coffee machine is broken. I think that's a very significant point in the show and has something to do with the coffee turning to oil in the red room. I need to re-watch that scene to see if it is indicated whether the coffee machine is broken, out, or clogged. If it is clogged, I think I have a pretty good chance to develop the coffee/Coop idea further, but of course with Lynch there's just as many questions as there are answers and every answer births a new question, etc etc etc.

Can you imagine if Lynch was the one in charge of Lost?

Also - I wonder if coffee was used because it is thin like water but it is the color of oil (two obviously important symbols in the series). Perhaps Coop's obsession with coffee (other characters drink it but he makes it a ritual) is why he has flashes/dreams of the red room before he becomes a resident.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNHsA4WIFvc[/youtube]