"Twin Peaks: The Return" and the Fantasy of Returning

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lynch Drops the Bomb (and the Hammer)

I’ll admit it: I’m one of those who winced upon learning, a couple years ago, that David Lynch would be returning to Twin Peaks. Catch lightning in a bottle once, you don’t do anything as silly as it attempt it again, right?

Especially when again is fully twenty-six years later.

I also figured Lynch had to be smart enough to know better than to try.

 

So now, then, this corollary admission:

The new Twin Peaks, eight of eighteen episodes in, is pretty dang good.  

True, the Dougie Jones stuff is thin gruel. (Kyle MacLachlan’s often touching portrayal of a fugue-state Agent Cooper isn’t the problem; Lynch and Frost’s meandering, uninspired vision of suburban and corporate Las Vegas is—a problem only exacerbated by the fact they seem, sometimes, to be trying to spoof Mad Men and Breaking Bad with this stuff.)

Beyond that, though, the show does indeed recapture a fair amount of the surreal, wondrous-strange magic of the ’90 and ’91 seasons.

And at least some of the new season finds Lynch dropping the hammer, leaving behind the delightful, "is this for real?" hokiness that is the show's calling card to do what he did in 1986’s Blue Velvet and 2001’s Mulholland Drive: demonstrate he can hang just fine, thanks very much, with the Kubricks, Scorseses, and PTAs of this world.

Episode 8, which Showtime calls “Gotta Light?,” is pretty much one big drop-the-hammer moment—a not-uncommon assessment, I know, having taken in a fair bit of the best-hour-of-TV-ever! yowling (this, for instance—or this) that started about two minutes after the episode finished airing.

So what is Episode 8?

For its first twenty minutes, it’s just a particularly tense, taut, strong third-season episode—one featuring the most unnerving (as of that moment, at least) incursion yet of surreal/supernatural forces into the show’s universe.

And a Nine Inch Nails musical interlude, too. Because why not?

After that, though, the remaining forty minutes—and they work well as a standalone short, in case anyone’s intrigued but not familiar with the larger, admittedly complex Twin Peaks cosmos—are Lynch’s meditation on…

The bomb.

The nuclear bomb.