Twin Peaks: The Return

In Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War memoir The Things They Carried, he directly addresses the role that fiction takes when we intellectually interact with the world around us. More eloquently than I'm able to in the coming clause, he asserts that sometimes things that are entirely fictional are more true than objective, factual accounts of the world. So, if our emotions warp the way we subjectively experience the world, why should art present reality objectively or with any respect to traditional "narrative" at all?

Maybe the answer to this question is why the avant garde movement has been such a successful one; we see but through a glass darkly. Our experiences are subjective, and so esoteric and subjective presentations of the world have a way of triggering an emotive response perhaps more than other types of presentations. And maybe this is why David Lynch was able to rock my shit again. 

As many, many have noted, the arc of the Twin Peaks storyline is a strange and interesting one, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. The first two seasons of the show were a boiling pot of tropes, archetypes, and symbolism intermixed with elements from police procedurals, soap operas, science fiction, and horror, all topped off with occasional sitcom and slapstick comedy. The follow-up film and prequel before there were prequels, Fire Walk with Me, divided fans and critics, garnering a rare booing when it debuted at Cannes, and focused almost entirely on the duality of human beings and the strange parsing of good and evil in the human psyche. Gone are the humorous moments that helped break the tension of the television series (which would finally appear in The Missing Pieces, the deleted scenes from Fire Walk with Me). All we were left with was the horror of Laura Palmer’s life and the beauty of her sacrifice, made so that others didn’t have to die. Well, for a short time at least.

Given all this, and given the fact that I found myself in my living room late on the debut night, pacing across the floor furiously smoking a joint while attempting to calm a mind that, if I’m honest with myself, got a little bit too excited about this whole thing; given this, it might be better to put my initial thoughts on the show into Q&A format: 

NE (Author): Was this what you expected? 

NE (me): What do you say when you expect something to happen, and your reaction to the event is pretty much what you expected, but the event itself wholly occurs in a way unlike anything you could have predicted? What do you say when you expect something you can’t predict, and you expect that you’ll probably find it interesting, and then you get something you didn’t predict and you find it interesting? I don’t know. I guess it’s exactly what I didn’t expect, and I liked it just as much as I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. 

NE (Author): So is this still the same show? 

NE (me): Yes. Mostly. But also kind of no in a lot of ways, but even yes when it’s no. 

NE (Author): How does that work? How is it the same? How does it differ from the original series? 

NE (me): Stylistically, it’s exactly what you’d expect from an artist following up on his or her work 25 years later. It’s just more Lynch, more Frost. Remember that Frost is a plot and story guy, and while Lynch is great with story, he’s better with the telling than he is with the creation itself. In that sense, this series is, so far, just like the five or six episodes from the original run that both Lynch and Frost were a part of. Lynch only ended up directing six episodes I think, so we didn’t get to see that combo very often. If you go back and watch the original episodes they did together, and then you watch one of these, they’re similar more often than being different. 

I’d say this season is much more like Fire Walk with Me than the first two seasons in terms of technique. Lynch uses a camera like a painter would use a brush. He’s not in a hurry, and he’s not afraid to spend as much time on one element as he needs to make sure the audience sees his message. They don’t necessarily have to understand it, but they need to see it fully I think. It’s clear that in this series he’s pushing the envelope as far as he can, and he’s using the camera to make sure the audience knows to be patient. 

Once the opening credits roll and we see Jacoby for the first time, the cameras stay distant. We see the action from far away behind several trees. When we head to New York and enter the room with the glass box, the physical dimensions of the room limit where the camera can be, but it still stays as far away from detailed action as possible. It’s not until we return to Twin Peaks and get to the sheriff’s station that the camera finally lets us in. 

NE (Author): David Lynch has often been accused of making nonsensical film and television, or film and television that seems to have purpose but actually has none. How does this return stack up against these criticisms. What about the audience's experience? Is this accessible?

NE (me): I’m not going to lie. There were a few points where I asked myself if this really meant anything, if Lynch had executed the most elaborately staged practical joke of the century. It’s hard to follow. It takes patience to watch. But like anything in life, it’s worth the work. It’s not for nothing. At least I hope it’s not because I’m pretty much locked into dying on this hill.

Look it's like I was saying earlier before we started the questions. Part of the reason things like Twin Peaks resonate so much is because of where they take us emotionally. I can watch an opera that's sung entirely in German and cry like a baby not because I understand the words, but because I feel what the characters behind the performers feel. Lynch deliberately shows you things, and then he forces you to look at them, and look at them, and look at them until like an ink spot they elicit a reaction. Because of the way he presents his art, he can coax that reaction out of us without forcing what that reaction is. Stomp on someone's foot and you know they're going to yell. You just don't know what words will come out when they do.

NE (Author): Do you have a favorite part or a least favorite part so far? 

NE (me): Maybe… 

NE (Author): … 

NE (me): … 

NE (Author): And? 

NE (me): I’ll get back to you on that one on September 4th, after the last two episodes. Things may have changed dramatically by then.

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