What year is this?
The meaning of life is that it stops.
Franz Kafka
It has happened again.
Credit: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME
with a bold work that honored the beautiful spirit of the original series and its meanings.
I think Lynch is, too.
To say ShowtimesTwin Peaks: The Returnwas unforgettable is true, at least to the few who watched it.
Was it a dream?
Part 17 and Part 18 devoured me.
The reason why this recap-review is so late is that I couldnt let go of it.
I was also terrified of getting anything wrong.
Theres no solving this thing.
There might be wrong ways to rationalizeThe Return, but there is no single correct way.
There might be an objective read, but I choose a subjective orientation.
Today, I see one thing.
Tomorrow, I might see another.
I have a lot to say aboutThe Return.
I doubt Ill say it all or as well as I should.
Heres how Im making sense of things today.
Im opening my mouth like the Experiment.
It was one of many ways in whichThe Returnwas an ambitious do-over.
A man-child transforms into a superman to liberate an oppressed desert slave-people.
Part 17 and Part 18 also owed much to Lynchs influences, which he always wears openly.
He said, If Kafka wrote a crime picture, Id like to direct that, for sure.
Id argue Lynch fulfilled that goal withThe Return.
It wasDouble IndemnitymeetsVertigo, spliced withThe Wizard of Ozand aPsycho.
An encounter with the wicked witch yields a scream worthy of Janet Leigh that shatters all illusions.
I like to remember things my own way, says Fred Madison inLost Highway.
How I remembered them.
Not necessarily the way they happened.
This theory is imperfect, even in the context of theres no right way to think aboutTwin Peaks.
NEXT: Detective, Search Thyself!
I learned that just beneath the surface theres another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper.
I knew it as a kid, but I couldnt find the proof.
It was just a feeling.
There is goodness in blue sky and flowers, but another force wild pain and decay also accompanies everything.
Like with scientists: they get down to subatomic particles and now they world becomes very abstract.
Theyre like abstract painters in a way.
Itd be hard to talk to them theyre way down in there.
The last line makes me laugh, because Lynchs work inspires us tempts us?
Well, screw that!
For the last time, lets get lost in the weeds.
Fix Your Heart or Die!
Frank Kafka(Also my recap motto)
1.
The beginning was the end.
It is in our house now, said The Fireman, an entity who safeguards time.
The Fireman then tells Cooper to remember three things.
Two birds one stone.
The Fireman is flagging parts of the story worth Coopers reflection.
Cooper listens and replies, I understand.
Which is how Cooper anyone remembers anything.
The problem was Sarah.
Feel it, anyway.
My theory is informed by a meta-theory, which I call the Everything Explains Everything Else Theory ofTwin Peaks.
Hes a man ruled by spirits, robbed of authenticity, and hooked on his pain.
He was incarcerated inside cell No.
And so the drunk was living a half-life.
For a moment, Chad was a complete 10.
And then Freddie knocked his lights out.)
Sarah is Audrey; Alice Tremond, the negative-entity incubus squatting in Sarahs house/person, is Audreys hideous husband.
Sarah needed to fix her heart or die.
That was the real, sweet meaning of that goofy Dr. Amp business.
Fortunately, an intervention was coming in the form of two saviors chasing a very strange redemption scheme.
This would not solve all of Sarahs problems.
She had addictions and pain to treat.
But it would be a start.
Part 18 was a myth retold many times.
Part 18 was informed by a few timeless texts.
She was Eurydice, a woman terrorized by a monster: a satyr.
She died while running away from him, bitten by poisonous vipers.
Put some nine-inch nails in that dream, buddy.
One more time, for the final time, shes gone away.
Remember Orpheus as we move forward.
Part 18 was alsoA Christmas Carolwrit as horror story.
And so remember Scrooge, too.
NEXT: How I make sense ofTwin Peaksmythology.
Mythology 101 as Existentialism 101.
An interpretation ofTwin Peaksrequires an opinion about its supernatural beings.
My perspective is always in flux.
Part 8, or Gotta light?
The Returnsbravura hour was Coopers worldview, expressed through his unique symbol system.
It was framed by a sequence in which Coopers doppelganger, Mr. C, was murdered and revived.
Like many baby boomers, Coopers POV is framed by The Bomb.
The Fireman
A Promethean entity, The Fireman spoke to timeless ideas, including time itself.
He represented Coopers higher self and utopian modernism.
They were time capsules bottled lives, bottled worlds, bottled histories.
Those ideas take root and blossom into stories.
When those stories are over, they return to him for eternal keeping.
This place was the White Lodge, the highest point inTwin Peaksmythology.
The Experiment
A terrifying demiurge, the Experiment spoke to material ideas, including culture.
The Experiment made the world mysterious and dangerous with the stuff it recklessly spews and births.
The Experiment was how Cooper made sense of the problem of evil in America.
The paradox of that conception is this: The Experiment gave Cooper heroic purpose; it gave him identity.
Who is Cooper without the s the Experiment makes?
Does Cooper even want to know the answer to such existential conundrums?
(If he had a heart.)
The image resembled the Experiment.
Mr. C was seeking the negative entity responsible for its creation; he wanted his mommy.
But this, too, was a paradox.
There was nothing authentic about Mr. C. His true creator his true demiurge was Cooper himself.
His quest was an echo of Coopers own quest to find Judy, an entity of negative energy.
A few people, a few people cried.
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
They descended from the sky like acid rain.
They made a home out of a convenience store peddling fossil fuels and corn oil.
One Woodsman in particular blew our minds.
He looked like a Bizarro Abraham Lincoln.
Slouching into a desert radio station on Aug. 2, 1956, the day My Prayer hit No.
They fed on Garmonbozia, or pain and sorrow.
But BOB was greedy, he didnt like to share.
He found a vessel for that revolution in the form of Coopers doppelganger.
It represented the measure of Red Room vitality.
Another prominent figure was Mike the One-Armed Man.
He once sowed and reaped Garmonbozia with BOB until he repented and cut off a limb as a sacrifice.
(It may have seeded The Arm.)
We thought that Mike was an ally to Cooper, and its possible he thought so, too.
But he was a liar at worst, self-deceived at best.
Mike was a cog in the Red Room death machine and perhaps invested in its workings.
The mystery man who called Mr. C in Part 2 and told him I will be with BOB again?
It is not good for a one-armed man to be alone.
In short: Judy is Coopers theory of Twin Peaks.
NEXT: The Great Escape.
Because a ret-con would get them what they wanted all season: BOB, their AWOL harvester of Garmonbozia.
When Mr. C avoided capture in Part 3, the back-up plan was Lauras ret-con.
A reboot would nullify BOBs destruction and restore him to life.
At first, they wanted him dead.
One more note about Dougie.
Every version of Cooper inThe Returnwas an expression of Cooper.
+It took a while for Cooper to commence the operation.
His dark side, the part of him that wants no end to mystery, sabotaged him.
+Cooper arrived in Twin Peaks too late to witness Lucy Lucy of all people!
Hence, The Fireman had to deputize other agents.
+Something weird happened with Cooper after BOBs obliteration.
Suddenly, Coopers puzzled face was superimposed over several minutes of action.
At one point, this ghostly visage said: We live inside a dream.
Here was Cooper as Schrodingers Cat, residing within a box containing many possible worlds.
Twenty-five years of incarceration.
Twenty-five years of limbo.
Twenty-five years hell never get back.
+With that in mind, consider the juxtaposition of Coopers reflective, slo-mo face superimposed upon hyper-caffeinated crusader Cooper.
They were the sirens of bad nostalgia, wooing him to the rocks.
Which is to say, David Lynch.
MacLachlan got his start inDune Lynchs biggest bomb.
It was time for him to be a scientist and get down in the super-string of his innermost being.
NEXT: The Subterraneans
6.
The Theory, Part Two: I am the FBI!
He nearly ghosted himself in the Kakfkaesque madness.
What the author said: You are free, and that is why you are lost.
Fortunately, Cooper got found.
+His first stop was The Dutchmans.
Mike, his alleged ally, guided him.
They are chaos agents with their own agendas and humans are but snacks, playthings, and tools.
+With Jeffries assistance, Cooper traveled back in time to the night that Laura was murdered.
In the movie, that shadow was a death omen.
In the end, Cooper fulfilled that role, too.
He led her away from the satyr, the vipers, and her wilderness doom.
But then he lost contact with her.
Cooper also heard Laura scream one of her screams, a scream that speaks of her subversion.
My conclusion: The Fireman intervened and hosed the ret-con.
He put out the fire in time, blew out the bid to change a story already written.
The scream Cooper heard here was Laura dying in a train car at the hands of her BOB-possessed father.
So deal with it!
+Further proof that the retcon failed was found during a brief visit to the Red Room.
(Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane…?)
The Tree-Brain was losing its mind maybe because it hadnt been fertilized in ages with Garmonbozia.
+Cooper once again crossed paths with the spirit of Leland Palmer.
Find Laura, said Worst Dad Ever.
Team Red Room couldnt let that happen.
It needed to grow a new Black Lodge.
They were growing a promising one in the Palmer house, using Sarah as a demon seed.
But perhaps they could be lured away with a better offer with a whole world.
More on this in a minute.
+Cooper was now a threat to their insurance policy.
He had to be neutralized.
Upon exiting, Cooper was met by Diane, a doppelganger manufactured by the Red Room.
This stirred Coopers competing doppelganger sides: his greedy selfish escapism; his longing for home at all costs.
+They found it somewhere 430 miles away.
One of The Firemans memory markers.
It was soft spot in the fabric of space-time, near an electrical tower crackling with mystery juice.
The top of the tower resembled Mr. Cs Ace of Spaces card.
Cooper was the married man sneaking off to have an affair.
With his secretary, no less!
Here, the omens of hotel key and Diane were being fulfilled.
So, too, the seasons fixations with infidelity and divorce in general.
+It hits me now that Cooper as Dougie was involved in such cheating even in Vegas.
He wasnt Janey-Es Dougie, he was just playing the part of the unreal thing Mr. C had made.
He had turned Janey-E into an unwitting adulterer with this deception.
+While Cooper was checking into the motel, another Diane was checking out Doppelganger Diane.
The two locked eyes.
The new Diane disappeared.
When they locked eyes, the real Diane dominant took over Doppelganger Diane.
+Unfortunately, this new mission wound up triggering Diane just as the previous one did.
(I was reminded of Frank Booth inBlue Velvet: Now its dark.)
Why did Diane agree?
Because she loved the real Cooper.
+This did not go well for her.
Cooper didnt remember or selfishly opted to disregard the fact that Mr. C had sexually assaulted her.
She wanted intimacy with Cooper; she got Mr. C instead.
For Cooper, the sex with Diane mirrored the sex with Janey-E.
But instead of the orgasmic rush of nostalgia, Cooper experienced…nothing.
It was joyless, empty exercise, something maybe only Mr. C could find pleasure in.
In this way, Diane was Coopers Ghost of Christmas Present.
NEXT: Highway to Hell.
The morning after, Cooper found himself alone, in a different hotel, in a different reality.
She had left a Dear John note for him, calling him Richard and herself Linda.
(The names fulfilled The Firemans second memory marker.)
So began Coopers final identity crisis a healthy one that would lead to a breakthrough.
The goal: to propel Cooper into a dimension where he could destroy Judy.
This is an interesting read.
But I dont think Cooper was knowingly doing anything heroic in this moment.
+So where was Cooper?
He wasnt in a timeline where Laura never died, because the ret-con didnt stick.
He was the Experiment and he was Red Room parasite all in one.
The Judy he was searching for?
It was in him all along.
+Cooper was tracking Laura, though he might not have consciously known it.
Just following his gut for mystery, for better, for worse.
Again, Cooper was demonstrating a need for self-awareness.
he might have also been demonstrating a useful, healthy kind of self-deception.
Useful, because it kept his intentions hidden from Judy.
One read on Cooper here: Hes become a sleeper agent.
Healthy, because of what it represented.
We cant navigate life without a little bit of self-deception.
+Cruising downtown Odessa, Cooper passed by a diner named Judys.
I liked how at this point, we couldnt really trust what was motivating Cooper anymore.
Was he being a good detective and following clues?
Or was he indulging his addictions?
He partook in all these things at Judys, but they gave him no joy.
Cooper intervened to stop a trio of evil cowboys from sexually harassing a waitress.
We understand why he had to shoot one of them in the foot.
This was proof that Cooper was broken, his unthinking hero addiction putting people in danger.
+What followed next was another ironic riff on Orpheus and Eurydice.
Another rescue mission into the underworld, another chance to escape.
He just looked bummed.
+Cooper spied a pale toy horse on the mantle, a death symbol linked to Laura.
Had Cooper made this Laura?
No, because Laura was one of the supernatural beings he was trying to attract in this modal reality.
He might have been getting an assist from The Fireman here.
But it also gave Laura a chance to charge of her story and write a new ending for it.
Christmas lights in other houses suggested Advent season.
The slowing of the pace enhanced our dread and our grief thatThe Returnwas rapidly coming to an end!
but it also mirrored the slowing of our go-go-go characters and their racing, running-away-from-themselves orientations.
Soon, they would be stopped dead in their tracks, and there would be an apocalypse.
+I was expecting revolutionary catharsis through risky triggering as they approached the Palmer house door.
Sarah would be liberated.
NEXT: The final curtain falls.
+But Sarah didnt answer the door.
Instead, Alice Tremond greeted them.
Alice claimed that she and her husband had purchased the house from a woman named Chalfont.
They didnt know who owned the house before Mrs. Chalfont.
Cooper and Laura were gutted.
Their Garmonbozia must have tasted delicious to Alice Tremond, a Red Room demon in disguise.
But I also wonder if Alice was faking the voice, a la Norman Bates inPsycho.)
+The actress playing Alice Tremond was the real-life owner of the house Lynch cast to play the Palmer house.
Once, long ago, Lynch went searching for the mansion that Billy Wilder used inSunset Blvd.
He discovered that the mansion wasnt located on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, but on Wilshire Boulevard.
The revelation bummed him out; it shattered the illusion of the movie.
+Then came the apocalypses.
Cooper was staggered to a halt by an epiphany that prompted him to question reality.
Wait…what year is it?
His thunderbolt jostled Carrie.
Hearing her trapped mother crying out to her from within the house (Laura!)
caused the scales to fall from her eyes.
She did one more thing: She looked back.
With that, Laura Palmer pushed through the fog of Carrie Page, asserted her true identity.
Cooper was the delivery mechanism; Laura was the bomb.
Their existential questioning was the button-push.
It didnt feel like one, but that doesnt mean positive change wasnt achieved.
Lauras scream was pure horror, pure rage, pure grief.
Nope: You cant go home again.
If youre Laura, why would you?
Darkness fell to wrap up the show.
We have threads of clues to dream upon.
One possibility: Cooper and Laura are stuck in a loop of eternal recurrence.
This is not my interpretation.
My belief is that Cooper left his inland empire.
(Sorry, Sarah.
(Maybe she wound up at Ghostwood, in a room next to Audrey.)
NEXT: Dont Water It Down.
Dont water it down.
Dont have a go at make it logical.
Dont edit your own soul to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
It blew minds, then bombed.
It was a miniseries first, a disruptive lightning strike with invigorating zap.
The phenom went from blinding flare, unstable reaction, billowing cloud, and deafening quiet in a year.
For Lynch, a fallout of negativity and a dark period followed the passing ofTwin Peaks.
This legacy re-minted and gilded theTwin Peaksmeta-narrative.
The show wasnt a fleeting flash, but the big bang of a revolutionary spunk.
The show that rebooted television, rewarded with a reboot.
Lynch treated the opportunity as a chance to address unfinished business, he told me earlier this year.
What we saw and felt inTwin Peaks: The Return, especially at the end, was exorcism.
WhatTwin Peaksfan wouldnt want to watch a reunion turn that played all the hits?
And depending upon your sensibilities, you might think and feel that Lynch and Frost delivered on that expectation.
ButThe Returnwas bigger and broader and wilder and weirder than we could have ever imagined.
Not many people watchedThe Return, and thats a shame.
And yet, the narrowness and smallness of the endeavor contributed to its extraordinary achievement.
Or maybe he just wanted to meet his maker and go: What up with the black eyes?
Why am I so miserable?
And must I rape so much?
What is this?!
fumed Mr. C, seething from the betrayal.
In the end, Mr. C hitched his meaning to finding God or becoming one and got cast down.
He and Killer BOB turned all of their stomping grounds into Black Lodges of despair.
Yes, that happened.
NEXT: The Passing of Time.
Meanwhile, Twin Peaks mirrored the movements in the world around it.
The Packard Sawmill was the engine of Twin Peaks industry in the original series.
Here, it was the Roadhouse.
The crowds were young, but also distracted and troubled.
Many installments featured cutaways to a pair of twentysomethings discussing their dead-end lives, sordid affairs, and damage.
They wereWaiting for Godotfigures.
The location of some MIA guy named Billy was one itchy matter.
The songs of the Roadhouse were trying to minister to their savage souls, but no one was listening.
Like a lot of cultural hot spots, Twin Peaks attracted cultures parasites, mirrors to Red Room predators .
She was conspicuously isolated from the rest of the cast.
But then: breakdown.
The beat echoed a similar twist inMulholland Driveand foreshadowed more extreme shifts to come.
It also brought more Lynchian misc.
oozing into the mix: according to legend,Mulholland Driveoriginated as a spin-off for Fenns character.
Perhaps Lynch made that wish come for her with this surrogate experience.
like a lookout attuned to psychic emergencies greater than just her own.
The week-to-week experience was impressionistic, each part a collection of distinct tones or thematic riffs.
And apparently, the Experiment is furiously opposed to distractedness and loveless boredom sex.
It vibrated, broke free, and killed the lovers by shredding their faces.
Eventually, we got intel that correlated this segment to the larger plot.
Lynch and Frost played to the passing of time.
In their storytelling, old modes of being werent easily regained, and death and change left irreplaceable voids.
Some choices pushed on bruises.
Somewhere far away, Ziggy Stardust is digging the irony.The ReturnwasThe Man Who Fell to Earthwith aBlackstarsoundtrack.
Lynch and Frost basically wrote Coulsons condition into the show.
Similarly, Lynch made a decision to recast the role of The Man From Another Place, a.k.a.
A tree topped with a brain.
A tree with a brain and raspy voice that called itself the evolution of the arm.
The show was an act of metamorphosis itself, more next-life reincarnation than revenant resuscitation.
It was true in spirit, but not in form.
Suddenly,The Returnwas clicking as a fully rounded entertainment with an endless ability to surprise.
The season was jammed with so many random scenes that it played like an interjection of performance art.
NEXT: The Art Life.
In an overstuffed picture book of sterling moments, one chapter distinguished itself as a singular masterpiece.
Part 8 (or Gotta light?)
was a Lynchian fantasia about the big bang of super-power America.
Depicting the detonation of the first atomic bomb (a.k.a.
It was Lynch doing a death-metal cover of2001: A Space Odyssey.
Theories and interpretations exploded across the internet like an electron swarm.
You could also see Gotta light?
as a metaphor for what happens when an artist bombs.
And so Part 8 was aboutTwin Peaks.
It defied easy analysis, except for this: We wanted more.
As a fan ofTwin Peaksand of Lynch, I enjoyedThe Returnbest as a Lynch thing, not aTwin Peaksthing.
It felt handmade, like one of his handmade, mixed media paintings.
You got the sense the director was reflecting on his mortality through the story, too.
Lynch doesnt like to explain himself.
On the contrary, Lynchs work is intensely personal; he makes art to be known.
You wonder if he wanted us to.
It contains a massiveTwin Peaksspoiler.
The camera lingers on a notepad on his desk filled with notes forThe Return.
The handwriting is beautiful.
That wasThe Return, too.
Didnt water it down.
Didnt have a go at make it logical.
Didnt edit his own soul to the fashion.
It could have even been you, the pining fan who wanted this revival.
It could have been me, the ridiculous Lynchian obsessive who has pined for his pop comeback.
But first and foremost, the dreamer was Lynch himself.
And the handwriting was beautiful.
