Anti-Climacus

The Great Albert Rosenfield Debate of 2011, Round Three:

Short version: we probably just have to agree to disagree.

(Leaving aside the culture and identity stuff for the moment because that seems more complicated.)

"For those of us who study representations of Jews in the arts, it's often a case of, there's some Great Work in which a Jew makes only a minor appearance. (The inevitable usurer in 19th C French novels, for example.) If what you're looking at is to some degree how a writer depicted Jews, to perhaps a greater extent what the limits of possibility were for depicting Jews/ for Jews at the time, if a realist novel set in the the present, then even a brief appearance is enough to make for a data point."

I've read enough 19th century French novels to be prepared to cede the point that brevity is no argument against Phoebe's position; she is also unquestionably the expert on that topic. I will maintain, though, that Albert seems to me to not be playing the part of Big City Jew as Other, and instead the Tough Cop Who Maintains His Objectivity Even If He's Gruff and Unlikeable.

The police/FBI characters that have arcs function along a spectrum of police stereotypes: Deputy Andy is Barney Fife to Sheriff Truman's Andy Griffith: one is bumbling but lovable, the other small town but not stupid. Dale Cooper is the guy who thinks he can let go of objectivity and still be a good cop, but can't. If this weren't clear enough from Cooper's season 2 arc, it gets re-inscribed in the story of his relationship with Windom Earle's wife.

Albert always maintains his objectivity, which is why he is right and Cooper and Truman are wrong about Josie. It's why he's the guy who comes in periodically when it looks like Cooper can't handle things. He is, essentially, Greg House, or Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity: he's kind of a jerk but we like him anyway. I think that explanation is economical and fits within the bits of story Albert gets without reference to Jewishness or a lack thereof, and if one takes Lynch to be a small-town American at heart, it seems both more likely and more charitable a reading that the connection between the name and possible ethnic backgrounds was just never made on Lynch's part.

(Also, as was pointed out to me a few days ago, Lynch collaborates on Twin Peaks with Mark Frost, who was responsible for Hill Street Blues. Little is known about their creative partnership, though people have their suspicions. So to the extent that I or anyone else has been relying on Lynch as small-town America guy, Frost's presence complicates that story. Also also, it occurred to me that I've been assuming either Lynch or Frost wrote all the episodes, but that's probably not the case. The problem of assigning authorship is going to be complicated.)