David Lynch and Mark Frost’s tortuous Twin Peaks: The Return drew some lukewarm reviews when it premiered in summer of 2017. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, for instance, complained that “the series’s deliberate, lovingly observational pace, though admirably bold, also turns portentous and vain.” In the six years since it aired, though, The Return has steadily accrued accolades, most notably Cahiers du Cinema’s naming it, provocatively, the best film of the 2010s. One reason The Return’s stock keeps climbing is that it rewards close and careful parsing and re-viewing—see, for instance, YouTube commentator Rosseter’s epic and fanbase-shaking video “Twin Peaks Actually Explained (No, Really),” with its remarkably thoroughgoing dissection (one I’ll reference later).
Another reason The Return continues putting on thunder is less happy, maybe, but worth exploring: it transmits a compelling allegory for the U.S.’s still-darkening political situation—an allegory looking more oracular with each passing month and year.
Though Lynch isn’t generally regarded as a political filmmaker, others have noted The Return’s political dimension. The New Yorker’s David Lam wrote in 2018 that “even though it was written before Trump’s election, and Lynch is not what you would call a social realist, the eighteen-hour Twin Peaks: The Return played out . . . as a summer-long fever dream of dread and dissociation, seemingly tailor-made for our real-life waking nightmare of crisis and collapse.” Indeed it’s difficult, owing in part to the timing of its release, not to take some elements of The Return as anything other than naked political commentary: a single-parent junkie squatting with her kid in a foreclosed-on Mc-mansion; a random-gunfire incident outside our beloved old Double-R diner; the webcasting, conspiracy-theory spewing Dr. Jacoby (now Dr. Amp) in blue- and red-lensed glasses obviously meaning something very different than in 1991. Still, the show’s politics remain oblique: there's no mention of any recent U.S. president, no reference to any branch of federal government, no utterance of the words Republican and/or Democrat.
This all lays the groundwork, naturally, for a fierce case of the return of the repressed. And indeed it’s Season III’s most central plot device—the radical makeover of franchise protagonist Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan—that brings us most unmistakably into the realm of political allegory. Barring the final moments of the original series’ cliffhanger finale, Special Agent Cooper was always a Pollyanna, all-American do-gooder, an FBI-badged paragon of cheerful lawfulness. To say he's changed for the twenty-five-years-later Return barely begins to get at it: fractured, doppelgangered, fugue-stated, demon-possessed, the new Cooper is as plagued and self-divided as the present-day nation he once much less effortfully embodied. (He’s “been under a lot of stress lately,” as Naomi Watts’s Janey-E says.) And if one facet of the disconcerting new Cooper is a commentary on and indictment of red America and its undisputed leader, it’s Mr. C.
Mr. C is the Bob-possessed Cooper the audience met in the last moments of the 1991 season-ending cliffhanger. By 2017 he's a master criminal, loose all these years, internationally connected, maybe a billionaire. God knows how he’s made his fortune, but he’s done it in a haircut half hilarious, half menacing, all 1980s (though its startling weirdness is what makes it especially redolent of the most famous ’80s coiffure still lurking around the culture). One jewel of Mr. C’s mysterious criminal empire is an opaque Manhattan high-rise with an empty glass box inside—a quantum-grade TV from hell that, watched too long, summons demons to gruesomely flay America’s future (this in the form of Sam and Tracy, two horny grad students who don't quite get to conceive the next generation). Politically progressive viewers' guts will churn as they recognize the inexplicability of Mr. C’s power over others. Humorless, cruel, vapid unto what can seem stupidity, his march through the world is relentless: we watch him toy with a man twice his size in an arm-wrestling match, terrify a prison warden with baffling mention of a severed dog’s leg, summon a ghostly cadre of bearded and flanneled “woodsmen” to rescue him where he lies gunshot and bleeding. Most jarringly familiar, though, might be Mr. C’s sheer rapacity: “If there’s one thing you should know about me, Ray,” he tells a henchman early in The Return, “it’s that I don’t need anything. I want.” Woe to anyone who gets in his wantful way.
Frightening as this dream-language version of the implacable Mr. Trump is, progressive viewers will soon realize Lynch and Frost aren’t simply or unproblematically on their side. The other of Agent Cooper’s two major new personas—the one mistakenly identified throughout most of The Return as Las Vegas insurance exec Dougie Jones—indicts two of progressives’ own worst proclivities of recent years: one for sleepwalking in a world of consumer delights, another for fantasizing an inevitable nick-of-time return to liberal social values and good government.
With even one year’s retrospect, the early-’90s Cooper must have seemed a herald for the Clinton-Gore era and its eight years of power for handsome, cheerful young White men who looked good in suits and seemed ready to help middle America (think Twin Peaks, Washington) recover from the innocence-shredding traumas of the Reagan and Bush-41 years. It’s this good Cooper—the true Agent Cooper—the audience spends 15 of 18 episodes of The Return tearing its hair out waiting to wake up and get back on the case again. The case, of course, isn’t just zooming off to the Sherriff’s Department in Twin Peaks to confront the evil Mr. C; it’s resurrecting the good old days of the early ’90s and making everything right with America again. (Stoking this desire is the fact that we see far more of U.S. in The Return than in the two original seasons.)
Turns out it’s a fool’s errand. After getting off to a promising and poignant start, the finally-jolted-awake Agent Cooper's make-everything-right-again project goes sideways in a hurry. First his own face appears as an unsettling double-exposure atop the ludicrous sheriff’s-office scene in which Demon Bob (Mr. C's soul, if you will) is pummeled back to hell—an image suggesting, following Rosseter’s assertion that Agent Cooper has always shared a mind with the audience, our own awakening to the ridiculousness of the belief that evil like Mr. C’s will be defeated by do-gooder citizens, one of them a kid from London in, bizarrely, a magic green glove. (“We live inside a dream,” the superimposed Cooper face groans significantly.) Then Cooper’s time-travel expedition to 1989 to save Laura Palmer on the night of her murder goes awry as she vanishes with a scream into the ether of nothingness, no longer available, it seems, for rescue or redemption.
Laura, of course, is, in this allegory, the old-fashioned American goodness and innocence we're sorely lacking these days. In case those qualities’ hopeless gone-ness wasn’t evident enough upon her disappearance in the woods as the time-travelling Cooper tries to prevent her death, Lynch and Frost spend The Return’s final episode making us watch Cooper try and fail again to get Laura home. The last Cooper incarnation we meet in The Return—a taciturn, soulless FBI agent whose name may or may not be Richard—finds, in Odessa, Texas, an odd woman (she's got a brains-blown-out dead man in her living room) who looks like Laura Palmer but isn’t: her name, she truly believes, is Carrie Page. This, though, doesn’t prevent “Richard” from taking her “home” again, driving her all the way to Laura’s old house in Washington State. No one named Palmer lives there, though, they learn—and as our old, befuddled G-man wonders aloud to himself on the dark street outside what year it is, Carrie/Laura looses still another blood-curdling scream—this one ending the show, answering Cooper’s politics-adjacent question, and letting us know for absolute certain that sleepwalkers can't go home again.
“Returns” aren't tenable, this is to say. And in light of both this unhappy formulation and the show’s corollary one that there’s something indefatigable in Mr. C’s creeping malice, there's precious little comfort for progressives in Lynch and Frost's allegorical vision. Two possible suggestions the show makes are both tough pills to swallow. One is that the fugue state we as audience spend so much time wishing “Dougie” would wake from is no curse but some supreme Nirvanic blessing: just look at all the fantastic things, after all—new cars and slot-machine winnings and massive insurance checks—that fall into the laps of characters with the great good luck just to share oxygen with our blissed-out astral-plane traveler, freshly arrived in gunned-up, stressed-out Nevada from the purple-ocean realm Rosseter identifies as the “unified field” known to all Transcendental Meditators. What worry is evil to anyone grounded in such bliss?
The show’s second suggestion might be no less grating. It involves remembering that Laura Palmer was never, in either the original series or the 1992 prequel Fire Walk with Me, an emblem of all-American innocence or goodness: she was always, as Rosseter says, an emblem of balance of a sort Lynch and Frost found woefully lacking in American television and culture. The mysterious “extreme negative force” referred to as Judy throughout The Return is simply, Rosseter suggests, finality or closure of a sort Laura Palmer’s dualistic nature, light and dark, was intended to countermand, even if ABC, in 1991, forced Lynch and Frost to “solve” the should-have-been-eternal mystery of her murder.
Refusing to let us see Laura go home again, The Return insists that the finality of a light-defeats-dark ending is both impossible and undesirable. Its political advice to both red and blue America is that we embrace the light and dark rather than imagining some ultimate victory for either one. In this it accords with philosopher Andrew Potter, who warns in The Authenticity Hoax that present-day dreams of returns to things real and authentic (thoroughly decent Twin Peaks, Washington, might emblematize such a "thing" for both red and blue Americans) demonstrate “a dopey nostalgia for a non-existent past, a one-sided suspicion of the modern world, and stagnant and reactionary politics masquerading as something personally meaningful.” Foregoing going back to accept a simultaneously dark and bright future might be how we negate the prophecy of the horseshoe pendant Laura—or Carrie Page—wears around her neck as she lets loose her world-ending scream upon being dragged “home” again. It’s upside-down as no such charm should be, all its American good luck run out.
A version of the above was presented at the Popular Cultural Association's 2021 national conference.
