(Before we begin, a quick little bit of self-promotion. I was a guest on Whowatch 16, with my friend Sean Dillon and his friend David Mann, to talk about the latter half of Series 8 of Doctor Who. You know, Peter Capaldi's first and where I got my start on Doctor Who critique. These two let me talk about Clara Oswald for an Amount Of Time, and I enjoyed the discussion with them and hope you do too. Now, then. Let's finish this journey.)
2023 is a quarter of the way through, and what I am about to tell you may very well be the lynchpin of it for my creative era on the blog. It echoes back to what I wrote before, and echoes forward to what I will write after we put Twin Peaks to bed in this (probably massive) blog post. Let me set the stage for you. Let me tell you a story. I already told you, in part 1 of this impromptu project, how I became aware of Twin Peaks. How I found a secret diary and read it, and how that later got me to tape a TV airing of Fire Walk With Me. I know I taped it, but remember very little of it beyond that. The tape was lost to time, probably taped over long since. Ah well. I forged new memories of the show, the diary, and the movie. I moved on to pace out the gap between Fire Walk With Me and The Return with more of David Lynch's filmography. During that time, other things happened beyond me watching movies. Sometimes you can't just sit on your butt to watch movies or write about them. Sometimes you have to do errands.
In late February, my sister came to the home to help clean out the basement of old clutter and junk that had gone there. In her old bedroom was a disused TV entertainment center, which for years I figured contained both my childhood VHS tapes as well as her old Stephen King ones. I never bothered poking around in there, but she opened one compartment and found the King tapes. As terrifying as it was to be confronted with Stephen King's It on VHS again, there was one benefit of this. I now knew which of the compartments had Stephen King videos in it, and could check the other at my leisure. Later, after they went home, I took a cursory peek in the other compartments. I did not find the childhood VHS tapes I expected, my Goosebumps and Power Rangers videos. Instead, it was a few shelves of blank tapes with various recordings. One stood out though, at the top. It had a sticker on the underside of the tape with various things crossed out, but "Joan Of Arc Part 1" was written there. In my handwriting. I wondered what that was, and vowed to check it when I had a moment. That gets us to February 22nd of this year, when I finally decided to check that tape. So I pop it out of the shelf, take it out of the cardboard caddy, flip it over... and that is when I was confronted with this.
My blood ran fucking cold in that moment. After watching Twin Peaks, finally seeing Fire Walk With Me in full and being haunted by it... after all that, by sheer happenstance, I uncover the original taping I did all those years ago? Of this movie that just recently utterly haunted and destroyed me with its horrors? After all this time, it was hiding behind a cupboard, just feet from a basement center I walked almost every day? The sheer karmic destiny of that rediscovery sent legitimate shivers down my spine. Listen to this video of me confirming the find, popping the tape in and finding that it was indeed a video recording of Fire Walk With Me from the Canadian channel Space (now the CTV Sci-Fi Channel) from 2005. Listen to the reverent terror in my voice, and know that only some of it is performative.
A terrifying rediscovery, to be sure, but why tell you this in a blog post ostensibly about the Twin Peaks sequel series from 2017? I told you. I am both setting the scene for what stood out to me in that sequel series, as well as getting things ready for what comes next. You will notice, on that video tape, that after Fire Walk With Me and John Hughes' The Breakfast Club (what a fucking dissonant double feature, Jesus), there is a spare 90 minutes that the me of 2005 set aside for other taping. Of course I had to see what else I had taped from that time period, on this long-lost video cassette. So, I looked. What I saw threw me back into that time in a way that genuinely hit me emotionally. I was already vulnerable from the seismic psychic shock of having unearthed this curse of a film, Laura Palmer's dying screams echoing on analog tape. What I found on the tape beyond that? I'm not ready to tell you yet. Those of you close to me already know, but I'm not ready to say it yet. This is not the time and place for it. I'm supposed to be talking about Twin Peaks in here, not the other thing... so why am I talking about this mystery 90 minutes?
It's because they filled me with an incredibly innate and painful sense of nostalgia. I do not mean the fun house nostalgia of Leo DiCaprio pointing at a thing you recognize. I mean the actual textbook definition of nostalgia. The media on this tape from 2005 threw my memory back to that time, a time that was simpler and happier. A time that I remembered fondly along with this media, and a time that I longed to return to. 2005. 18 years ago. Half a lifetime ago. As much as I longed to go back, I could not. 2005 is dead and gone, a time that has eroded to dust in the wind. I did something involving that realization and those 90 minutes of tape which brought me to it, and you'll find out one day. In tandem to tangling with those feelings, I was also watching The Return. Helpfully, as a legacy sequel series from two creative geniuses, The Return is also deeply entangled with the notion of nostalgia and being unable to return home. It is also entangled with God knows how many other things, but this is the part where personal resonance and memory give way to getting to the point. One day, soon enough, I will tell you what I did with my nostalgia and that tape. Today is not that day. We have a journey to finish.
We have to talk about Twin Peaks: The Return.
It would not be wrong to say that, but it would also lead us into a trap. I realized that I had been ensnared in such a trap while I was exorcising Star Wars thoughts a while back. Up until now, I have been focusing on the genius of David Lynch and how that informs Twin Peaks as a whole. This is not incorrect, but it also ignores the truth: Twin Peaks is a collaborative effort. I have, up until now, been ignoring the contributions and voice of Lynch's partner in crime on Twin Peaks, one Mark Frost. The reason that The Return is so harmonious and perfect is that Frost and Lynch are perfectly in sync for the entirety of it. To define what really makes the show work, and just out of plain fairness, we have to examine Frost's ethos and what Twin Peaks means to him. David Lynch got to do a solo work examining what of Twin Peaks was important to him, and the result was Fire Walk With Me. I love that film but it's only fair that if Lynch gets to do Twin Peaks solo, then Mark Frost should also get a crack at it.
What Frost adds to Twin Peaks in The Secret History, and goes on to inject into The Return, is a sense of scope. His macrocosm weaves a web of conspiracy and interconnected threads of fate not just across the people of Twin Peaks, but across the history of America itself. From the Trail of Tears to Roswell to the Manhattan Project, everything is connected on a grandiose scale. At times things get dangerously close to explaining parts of Twin Peaks away, it must be said, but we only skirt the line in Frost's flirtation with the macrocosm. Despite the massive scale, he manages to keep things grounded in the human story. This isn't a lore delivery system like other franchises. This is an expanse of the humanity Frost fell in love with in Twin Peaks, and a real attempt to draft not just the history of this quirky little town he fell in love with, but to tie it into the real history of the world... and it's here where he manages a trick not unlike what the universe pulled on me with that video tape. Here is an actual page from the book, a redacted intelligence report about UFO sightings.
Why am I showing you this? Because sighting #14 took place in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. That's a place I've been to, just a few hours' drive away from me, but it's much more than that. It is the place where, in the mid-1980s, a mother delivered her youngest child. Me. By technical fact, I came into this world in a hospital room in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. I am not just tangled in a Lynchian web of destiny and fate, but in a Frostian macrocosm web. I myself am intertwined in this Secret History, and so here I am playing my part. Frost's other novel, The Final Dossier, is a shorter affair and mostly exists to wrap up what happened in the lives of the people of Twin Peaks who we got to know over the series. Some fates we know from the show, and some fates were left unsaid until Frost made them up. We will return to this dossier when we talk about the ending of The Return, but I think I've set the stage to actually talk about the show now. Lynch's dreamlike genius. Frost's massive scope and intertwined threads, spreading all across America. This perfect unison of microcosm and macrocosm creates the mad genius that is... Twin Peaks: The Return.
There are many things you could say about this show, but here's what I want to focus on: its unique take on being a legacy sequel to a classic piece of media from long ago. You don't have to look very far these days for examples of legacy sequels played straight: peek over at what any of the space franchises are doing and you'll see it. What impresses me most about The Return is the many facets of how it chooses to be an anti-legacy sequel. It's easy to forget, given our warm fuzzy memories of associating Twin Peaks with the funny man who likes cherry pie and damn fine coffee, but Twin Peaks was a fucked-up place. Everyone was cheating on each other, there were drug smuggling rings, crooked businessmen made deals and plotted the betrayal of everyone else for the sake of profit... and, oh yeah, the sweet and innocent homecoming queen was a cocaine-addicted abuse victim who got murdered by her abuser, wrapped in plastic, and left to drift down the fucking river.
The series ended with Agent Dale Cooper losing himself, quite literally, between worlds. His double (and/or Bob) escaped back into the real world, and the fact that Cooper just wasn't Cooper was the cliffhanger it ended on. When Fire Walk With Me dared to be an empathetic piece for the dead homecoming queen, all the people who didn't care about that and wanted to know what happened next stewed in their little theater seats in Cannes, ready to boo the shit out of Lynch. Well, here's what happened next. The inexorable ravages of time, and the slow decaying forces of entropy. The big satisfaction people get from all these legacy sequels is seeing all their old favorite characters back again. Luke Skywalker is a heroic Jedi once again. Captain Picard is back on the bridge of the Enterprise-D. Doctor Who has regenerated back into David Tennant. The Return has many familiar old faces back again, it's true, but it's what it does with the remaining faces that plays into entropy.
The fact of the matter is, a lot of people who were in Twin Peaks passed away between the end of the original show and The Return. Frank Silva (Bob), Don S. Davis (Garland Briggs), and David Bowie (Phillip Jeffries) are just a few. In addition to that you have people who are in the show but died during production, or not soon after, like Miguel Ferrer or Harry Dean Stanton. Perhaps the most poignant loss is that of Catherine Coulson, who played the enigmatic Log Lady on the show. She is in The Return, and it is a case of a beloved character from the old show being back. You are also watching a woman on the last legs of her life, dying of cancer but acting her heart out all the same. It's tragic, poignant, heartbreaking, and uncomfortably real. It's not just pretend. That really is an old lady on her deathbed, knowing that she's about to die but playing her part in her friend's show all the same. Catherine Coulson would not live to see The Return air. (A further bit of fiction bleeding into reality: Episode 1 is dedicated to the memory of Coulson. The episode with her final appearance is dedicated to Margaret Lanterman, her character.)
The entropy doesn't just extend to people who have passed away, but also to people who chose not to partake in the show. Michael Ontkean played Sheriff Truman on the original show, and was beloved. In between shows he retired from acting, and did not come out of retirement for The Return. Lynch and Frost could have written him out of the show in any fashion and made it plausible, but the fashion they chose was to also give the character of Harry S. Truman a life-threatening illness implied to be a cancer. Robert Forster instead plays Harry's brother Frank and takes on the role of Twin Peaks sheriff, and does a fine job, but it's that specific choice of also giving that character cancer which sticks with me. It's when you combine that material reality and those narrative choices with Mark Frost's macrocosmic scope that this shit spreads.
The "bad" Cooper from the end of the original show (who you could call many names, but fans have settled on calling "Mr. C" and so will be called that hereafter in these words) has been spreading such misery and evil across America for the past 25 years. Building a vast network of underhanded criminals and hit people, he goes across the country leaving death and destruction in his wake, all to satisfy his petty wants. This is the perfect marriage of microcosm and macrocosm. Frost's grand scope is used to expand the canvas and show that this entropy and rot is like a cancer of the country. The show moves beyond Twin Peaks to show events in New York, South Dakota, and Las Vegas. In all places we see corruption and bleakness, Mr. C's influence spreading fast. This Return is not a happy one, but a return to a place blighted by negativity. If only we had a man who could fight back against that. If only our hero, Agent Cooper, would come back. He could talk about cherry pie and black coffee and stop the bad people from doing crimes. He could fix all this.
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| Dougie also does stuff like this, or fixates on coffee and pie, little nostalgic signifiers to tease Twin Peaks fans while he remains his strange mute self. |
What changed, then? Simple. I put my faith in Lynch and Frost, and went with the vibes instead of the plot. This has always been how I've approached the filmography of David Lynch, and it's perhaps at its most rewarding here. Somehow, the storyline of Dougie Jones is in itself vibes over plot. As I said, Dougie can only shuffle along aimlessly and repeat back anything said to him. Dougie is also tangled in a web of conspiracy at his law firm, with attempts placed on his life by Mr. C's vast criminal network and machinations to make people distrust him. There's no way in hell someone like Dougie should be able to survive that, but everything works out for him in exactly the right ways, entirely by shuffling along and repeating things. Dougie Jones just vibes with whatever happens, letting fate carry him like a leaf on a current, and it all works out. His relationship with his family improves, he exposes the conspiracy, he survives every attempt on his life and brings everything together. All by just... being Dougie. There's an innate goodness in our protagonist, and it comes through in the end by this zen act of karmic balance.
As are the final two episodes, which feel like a dichotomy all to themselves. Reductive as it would be, it's tempting to split them by creator. Episode 17 feels like the macrocosm, the culmination of all the plot threads and bringing everything together... whereas episode 18 is a strange ethereal microcosm, a mystery which focuses on but a few people and has one final message from Lynch about nostalgia. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. In many ways, 17 is the last hurrah for what you would want out of a Twin Peaks legacy sequel. Everyone has come together. Agent Dale Cooper has returned, not just to his body but also to Twin Peaks itself, just in time to confront his dark mirror. The final battle between good and evil commences, and... uh... Well, the dark heart of evil comes out of Cooper and then gets punched to death by a British person who got super strength in one hand from his own destined journey between worlds. No, I'm not making that up.
And then episode 18 comes in, and so does the point. Nostalgia in its actual definition. The wistful longing of a time that cannot be returned to. Agent Cooper changes the past, but it doesn't change the past. He has pulled Laura Palmer away from her murder, yes... but it's Mark Frost who shows us how little that matters in the grand scheme of things. As The Final Dossier notes, Laura Palmer is now a missing person instead of a corpse wrapped in plastic. The grief of her loss still shatters the town. Leland Palmer still dies, a monster lurking within him. Laura Palmer lives, and yet she does not live. We cross over into another world, a world which might be an alternate and might be our own. Laura Palmer has never existed, but a middle-aged woman looking like her is found by Cooper and taken back to Twin Peaks, back to her home. The Palmers have never existed. This is not her home. The literal definition of nostalgia; you cannot go home. With one final ambiguous burst of terror, Twin Peaks goes away with that message, probably for good.
So. That's The Return. What do we make of it? It is, as I said, a masterpiece. It is two creators with a lot of feelings about this little town they created coming together and crafting stories about what happened next. A perfect blend of microcosm and macrocosm, showing the moral rot that has spread while giving a way to fight back against it, with a zen-like care. It is the most finely crafted legacy sequel ever made, because it interrogates the very concept and desire behind an audience's desire for such things and throws it back at them. It forces deep introspection upon these things, and there's so much more brimming underneath that I didn't even talk about. I had to maintain some brevity, and strike the most important points. I hope I have. I implore you to delve into this world for yourself, to see its depths and genius for yourself. As for me, I say goodbye to it, and move on... as we must learn to do.
I said goodbye to something else, a very long time ago. It was on that very tape I told you about, and it has not left my mind for the months since. I have to go back. I will go back. I will go back with the knowledge I have learned here. You can't return to the past, true... but you can fish new memories in the present from its artifacts. That is what I will be doing next time, as we leave Twin Peaks behind and go on to new experiences trapped in analog.
The past is the water, and history is the well. Time to go fishing.
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