the world we knew (over and over)
two-part initial musings on "twin peaks: the return"
**SPOILERS FOR TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017) GOING FORWARD. PLEASE READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.**
“there’s some fear in letting go.”
the above quote is one of the last lines uttered by the log lady, margaret lanterman (played by the inimitable catherine e. coulson in footage filmed four days before her death from terminal illness). two scenes later, the lights in her woodsy log cabin go out. the log lady is dead. now it’s dark.
twin peaks: the return aired in 2017 on SHOWTIME, nearly 25 years after laura palmer stated she’d see us again. pop culture at-large associates david lynch with damn fine coffee, cherry pie, uncanny sunset boulevard glitz & glamour, & both red and blue velvet. however, to me david lynch is dark-stained wood, electricity, industrial society, smoke, and bloody, severed limbs. and that’s what i luckily got in the return. the twin peaks i’ve come to love is dead now, leaving behind entrails ghastly enough to devastate an entire population. in the words of indiewire journalist hanh nguyen, “the dream was sweet while it lasted.”1
give david lynch a studio budget and full control and he will give you a fully rounded-out stylistic companion to eraserhead — an 18-part, 18 hour odyssey of a television event that turns the town we thought we knew completely onto it’s head. if the original run of twin peaks envelops people in a warm embrace while the dark poison of a small town slowly seeps out, twin peaks: the return pushes you out of it's arms as you rapidly plummet into the cold streams of the snoqualmie falls. in the critically acclaimed third season of david lynch & mark frost's baby, reality bites.
the small glimmers of hope that typically color lynch’s work are barely present within this season. there are no happy endings in the return.
james was forced to return to twin peaks after longing to leave for two whole seasons, confronting everything he wanted to leave behind. shelley and bobby are divorced with a daughter (incredibly portrayed by amanda seyfried) who is suffering a similar fate to her mother in season 1. sheriff harry s. truman is fighting cancer while his older brother, frank, takes over his post while dealing with a complicated family dynamic. sarah palmer is suffering from alcoholism and black lodge delusions. special agent dale cooper spends most of the season trapped in another person’s life without his consciousness, only his body. his black lodge doppelgänger has devastatingly taken advantage of the people he cared for, including audrey horne, who’s entire plotline in the return is revealed to be a hallucination from a mental asylum.
in a perfect world, audrey would have matured into an fbi agent. harry and coop would be solving cases side by side, with minimal otherworldly interference. shelley and bobby would be living happily while james and donna would still make it. laura palmer would still be alive. but this isn’t a happy-go-lucky sitcom that panders to the audience. this is a david lynch joint. this is a reality check. there are no happy endings in a town where innocence was forced to die.2
we can be as idealistic as we want, but here we are forced to confront what is oftentimes the outcome of extensive and irreparable trauma. glimpses of it were seen through laura in fire walk with me, as well as her mother in the original series, but it bitterly plays out in the plot lines of this season. speaking from firsthand experience, navigating life and interpersonal relationships while dealing with trauma is so extremely difficult, overshadowing every interaction like a dark storm cloud. it makes things complex, and has the potential to destroy the life you once knew, mangling it into anonymity.
vulture critic matt zoller seitz expertly compares the atomic bomb in “part eight” to the death of laura palmer in the pilot - “a metaphor for the awesome transformative impact of Laura’s death on the lives of everyone who knew her or worked on her case.”3 everyone in the radius of the disaster is left with an aftershock, some more severe than others. no one goes home empty handed. how could we ever expect the denizens of twin peaks to live happily ever after? were we ever so naïve as to think after those first two seasons that everything would go back to the way it was, or that we’d get what we want? unfortunately, twin peaks: the return’s outcome was a worst case scenario.
dale and laura are the ones.
in part 17, dale cooper places the owl ring on his evil doppelgänger, mr. c, who is lying dead on the floor of the twin peaks sheriff department while our beloved cast of characters looks on. a perfect hollywood ending, right? minutes later, there’s apparently more plot and one more job to finish. diane and gordon cole look on as cooper unlocks and enters a mysterious door, saying “see you at the curtain call.” he never does.
i went into the series expecting an abundance of cooper time. however, most of the season plays out without him. well, sort of. i KNEW dale’s frazzled consciousness was trapped in the life of dougie jones, morally dubious insurance agent. it was agonizing to watch. i wanted to jump into the tv screen and shake him back to his former self, but i couldn’t. mr. c, his tulpa, mere minutes away from a win in the final hour, got too close to getting what he wanted for comfort. did this foreshadow that darkness would win in the end?
the last episode of the series fully realizes dale cooper as a tragic hero. as diane urges him to make sure that he wanted to follow through with this world-altering plan, he was already halfway out of the car. cooper’s white knight syndrome was always palpable in the original run, but here it strikes it’s final blow. it’s fair to assume most people expected him to have this big, heroic finale (myself included) — this was foolish to imagine. the ambiguous fate he was left with parallels the cliffhanger ending of season 2, where he follows annie blackburn, who deceivingly represented everything he once wanted, into the black lodge, trying to recover what he could never have. coop attempted to go back in time to prevent laura palmer from even being murdered by her father, which at first it seems like he effectively accomplished. seconds later, he lost her. it is evident that he alone could not go back and reimagine the fate of not only laura, but the entire town. yet, he forges on despite the warning signs, bringing a woman he believes to be laura palmer back home, reopening her mental wounds and reigniting a cycle of harm.
sisyphus wanted to cheat death but couldn’t. he was forced to push a boulder up a hill for all of eternity. dale cooper wanted to go back in time and save laura palmer. he was punished by getting trapped in the wrong timeline. “through the darkness of future’s past, the magician longs to see. one chants out between two worlds, fire walk with me.” cooper, the “magician”, longed to see a world where no one would have ever been harmed for what he considered to be the betterment of everyone we’ve come to love in this universe. that’s the kind of person he is. he failed to consider that “the past dictates the future” despite stating it himself. jumping between worlds and endings, the fbi agent dared to play with fire and inevitably got burnt.
dale believed he could patch up the holes of a broken town, even going so far as to try preventing senseless tragedies from ever occurring, which proved futile. because even if laura didn’t die, she would continue to experience a cycle of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of her father. shelley johnson would remain in her loveless abusive marriage to leo johnson. at large, the residents of twin peaks would never be free of the presence of evil that that runs rampant around the town. dale cooper, as pure-hearted as his intentions are, unfortunately can never prevent “the evil that men do.” 4
twin peaks more than anything brought to the surface the violence that is embedded and intertwined within american culture and history. the original run was conceived upon the exit of a decade of reaganism, and the final season upon trump’s initial campaign for the presidency. this is by no means a coincidence. sure, we can focus as much as we want on the will-they-wont-they’s, the mystical happenings, and the cherry pies of it all, but what really drives the show is the real world horror — moral depravity, unbalanced power dynamics, gendered violence, and stoicism.
the return, what became the final reckoning of david lynch’s storied career, did an incredible job at shocking it’s audience back to reality, serving as a reminder of why we were spending so much time in this small, woodsy washington town in the first place. the show’s happenings can get as lynchian as they want, but it all traces back to a seventeen-year-old homecoming queen who was addicted to hard drugs, raped by several older men, looped into a prostitution ring, and was sexually abused for years and murdered at the hands of her own father. laura will always be “the one”, no matter how hard we try to look away.
we as audience members are all complicit in the events of twin peaks. we always have been. we cannot with one swift action save laura palmer in any universe no matter how hard we may want to. it’s far more deep rooted than we could ever fathom. but like dale cooper, we sure as hell can have the heart to try.
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/twin-peaks-finale-review-episode-18-part-18-david-lynch-recap-spoilers-1201872796/
DISCLAIMER: this is a situational statement regarding twin peaks, not a real-life end all be all thing. of course you can move past trauma and live happily.
https://www.vulture.com/2017/09/twin-peaks-the-return-showtime-review.html
redditors and letterboxd reviews calling him a BAD PERSON… when i fucking get you…