Notes on Twin Peaks: The Return

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Notes on Twin Peaks: The Return

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I was probably at my unhappiest in the late spring of 2017 when Twin Peaks: The Return started airing. My personal unhappiness had nothing to do with why I wasn’t watching Twin Peaks: The Return. I wasn’t watching Twin Peaks: The Return because I’d never seen Twin Peaks beyond its pilot episode, and my familiarity with David Lynch’s work began and ended with a museum installation of one of his short films that I saw a few years prior.¹ But my unhappiness pervades most memories of that time, specifically May and June and early July of that year, when my then-career was stagnating and my then-relationship was floundering and my then-migraines were out of control.² I funneled my disinterest into another television show about feeling like the world is ending in a mundane and loosely allegorical way, The Leftovers. I’ve not since rewatched, though I often think of that show fondly and will occasionally search Carrie Coon’s final monologue from the series finale. I vaguely recall someone writing at the time that The Leftovers was “about depression”³; I don’t really agree, but my skepticism over revisiting is that I don’t think I’ve been quite so desolate as to tempt a rewatch in the intervening years (brag).

Tessa and I were texting last night, and she said: “I think the best thing was knowing all my friends were watching but there was zero discourse. A collective private experience.” In 2017, I was sick and spiraling, and I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing someone talking very loudly about Twin Peaks: The Return. I don’t think I really was surrounded by people constantly talking about Twin Peaks: The Return, but the memory stands as a kind of droning, loud noise — inescapable, incomprehensible. I have a distinct memory of a coworker crossing a room to explain the infamous eighth episode in a near-shout over the din of quiet office work. This was, at the time, maybe the worst thing to which I was subjected.

In retrospect, I am a little nostalgic for the notion of a collective television-watching event, even one I was not taking part in and even one in which the collective television-watching experience pissed me off. As I started watching Twin Peaks this summer through the early fall, and especially once I started Twin Peaks: The Return, I became somewhat baffled by the extent to which this show was, for a period of time, able to fuel a discourse economy. That’s not to say there isn’t stuff to talk about. There’s always stuff to talk about; I know this as a career yapper. For a little while I was consulting some articles and companion readers, mostly out of gentle curiosity, but I just about abandoned that completely when I started The Return. Perhaps it’s because I was tired of the Lindelof showrunner prestige “weird” drama that encourages it or because I can’t remember what happened in House of the Dragon a mere four months after it aired, but I was completely content to abandon myself to feeling and sensation.

This shift literally occurred somewhere in the middle of watching Fire Walk with Me a month ago. I understood the conceit of the movie as a shaky “movie” — one thirty minute prologue or episode, followed by an extended look at the finals days of Laura Palmer’s life. I understood why this might be interesting to fans of the show in terms of getting at other details regarding the mystery and aura of incredibly bad vibes that surround Palmer, but in watching, I couldn’t really take away anything from it beyond the fact that it’s one of the saddest and scariest movies of all time. But that is, essentially, the point of it, and all that follows in Twin Peaks. What happened to Laura Palmer is extremely sad, and it cannot be undone.

Part of what feels thrilling about watching Twin Peaks: The Return is the extent to which it’s a television show⁴ that understands you’ve watched other television before, having some idea of form and function of “an episode” and “character arcs.” Even as bizarre and unnerving and original as the original run of the show is, these episodes fall into pretty conventional episode structure with occasional tangents and dalliances into indulging a shift or form break. Twin Peaks: The Return, on the other hand, smashes that form up — reimagining and resetting the standards for how an episode can function, for what a “bottle episode” is and can be, what does and does not satisfy a beginning and an ending. Part of what worked so well for me about Twin Peaks: The Return is its relationship with Fire Walk with Me specifically, and how the final episodes of the show work to undo and disrupt the tragic, albeit slightly cathartic, ending of Lynch’s film. Does one past negate another? Is one Laura in heaven and one in hell? Neither answer matters, nor does it satisfy, nor does it comfort.

Through the dual storylines in Las Vegas and Twin Peaks, Lynch is able to execute both the kooky, folksy appeal of the original Twin Peaks as well as double down on all that is miserable and frightening about the show and its extended material as well. The Jones family’s happy ending is pleasant, but negligible. They strike me only as safe for now, safe while we are watching, blessed to be free of cursed them prior to the events of the show.

So too did I become fascinated and frustrated by who “gets” to move through the world of Twin Peaks: The Return with relative ease and who remains trapped in cyclical patterns — who is free from the form of television, and who is trapped in episodic repetition. I was especially unnerved by the late-occurring appearances of Audrey Horne — so omnipresent in the show’s initial run, and almost an afterthought in The Return. When we’re finally reintroduced to Horne, she’s arguing with her husband — a man we don’t know — about other characters we don’t know. The scene is frustrating and tedious, almost reminiscent of turning on a soap opera (Invitation to Love much??) and trying to understand what is happening out of context. Horne’s persistent ire and stress builds over the course of a couple episodes, her misery unceasing and scary, impossible to pinpoint on any kind of visible chart of reasonable frustrations. What arc there is dissolves in a dream-like dance and a brief shift in reality — she is stuck in whatever she’s in, there’s nothing more complicated to it than that.

I was most moved and compelled by characters who are able to show some sign of growth, even if they are trapped in a hell of their own making or whatever is going on in Twin Peaks more broadly.⁵ This is best articulated in what is probably my favorite scene in the whole show — outside of the ending, which floored me — in which Bobby goes to investigate an errant gunshot and gets sucked into a conflict with a woman who won’t stop honking her horn.

Dana Ashbrook’s performance across all of Twin Peaks is likely my favorite of the show, on par with Sheryl Lee and Kyle MacLachlan and Miguel Ferrer.⁶ I am sort of weak to a bad boy learning to be good trope — Logan Echolls, Sawyer, Angel, etc. etc. — but Ashbrook’s turn as Bobby Briggs both rebukes a type of male violence that becomes inherent to Twin Peaks (and Lynch’s work at large) and what terrifies within that world. We mostly have very bad characters who remain that way, and very good characters who remain that way. (Some very bad characters — Ben Horne — are simply tired of being alive towards the end of the run, not so much “good” so much as exhausted with sin.) Bobby is violent and predatory, motivated by power and money and women so long as they can benefit his status. His bizarre Season Two arc of trying to “go legitimate (kind of)” crashes out — he can’t really convince himself that this is what he wants or needs. By the time we’re reintroduced to him in Twin Peaks: The Return, he’s become a cop and has softened tremendously. We’re not given much reason or evidence to trust his turn, other than what Ashbrook is doing⁷ — providing a weary softness to the character, still capable of being moved to tears by the sheer memory of Laura.

The scene above became quite emblematic of the show in general — the kind of thing that is probably funny when described aloud, and maybe even a little funny while watching, depicting a type of mundane annoyance that grows into something horrible. What delighted and frightened me on multiple rewatches of this moment is Bobby’s silence — this is both a shock and a kind of routine horror, the likes of which he has seen plenty of in his life. The explanation for the scene is non-existent and unimportant. Who is this lady? What is she talking about? Why won’t she stop screaming? Why won’t she stop talking? What is happening to the person next to her? Bobby is rendered speechless, but there’s little else he can do. What’s happening is clearly and obviously very bad. It can’t be stopped. It just keeps going, again and again.

1. I believe this was Memory Film in 2012. I saw Rabbits at some point too, but can’t remember when.

2. I suffered from frequent migraines from about 2012-2018 — probably two or three a month, at least — and now, knock wood, I only get about two really bad ones per year. I am not sure what really changed between then and now besides a greater commitment to regular sleep hours and less (or at least, different) stress. I used to think it was alcohol-related, but that doesn’t even really seem to be true anymore (except for wine and champagne, the latter especially, which can sometimes give me a migraine almost instantly). Maybe it was just an age thing.

3. lol

4. Sorry… this is not a movie to me… it was on Showtime. Forgive <3

5. lowkey giving “The Hellmouth” iykyk

6. I think Lynch himself is quite good in The Return, and not so much prior to that. Many of The Return-only players — Forster, Watts, Dern, Seyfried, Belushi <33 — are great talents but don’t have the benefit of two decades and more of embodying a character.

7. And what he looks like! The shock of a full head of gray hair is giving Johnny Knoxville.