As a shameless fan of the original Twin Peaks show and movie, the ongoing Return series on Showtime gives me a lot to think about. The 5th episode aired/was released for streaming last Sunday, and I have to admit that up until that episode, I hadn't been all that happy with The Return. Showtime, in its streaming app, officially calls the show "Twin Peaks: The Return," and lists it as "Season 1," an important distinction I appreciate. The first four episodes reminded me more of David Lynch's movies than Twin Peaks itself. As a David Lynch fan, that excited me, but as a Twin Peaks fan, it disappointed me. Now that episode 5 has aired, I see that this series is following the pace of the original: the first 4 episodes, released in one dump together, act as a long pilot movie setting the table and now the weekly releases are going to build and pay off events and arcs. Moreover, it seems that show isn't just going back to Twin Peaks, it's moving on--and that's a good thing. I think Twin Peaks is a pivotal moment in the David Lynch's canon. Discounting Dune (which is a good idea--everyone involved gets a mulligan for Dune), Blue Velvet and Eraserhead were distinct movies structured around small casts of players, with their stories and themes built out of concentrated time with a few important people and their associates. Twin Peaks, on the other hand, forced Lynch (with Mark Frost) to work with a large cast and multiple stories, and their solution was to layer them soap-opera style. The characters, combined with fantastic mystery and creeping ickiness, of Twin Peaks drove it to smash-hit (then cult-hit) status and made it the oft-cited reference point for the new golden age of TV beginning in the mid-2000s. The large cast, I believe, made lasting impact on how Lynch's stories came together. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire all feature larger casts and stories, and all of them, even The Straight Story, feel connected to larger things outside the plot. Until The Return, Inland Empire, to me, was Lynch's masterpiece and the culmination of his philosophy-in-art. So Twin Peaks: The Return is both revisiting old friends, but adding another stone to Lynch's narrative path--perhaps the final one (or maybe not).
It does, however, make following and anticipating the show even more challenging--not because the show is changing the mythology or increasing the weird factor for its own sake, but because The Return is David Lynch iterating not just on his ideas but on a past version of communicating them. In that sense, there are important things I've come to recognize in Lynch's work and Twin Peaks thematically that I'm keeping tabs on to help myself understand the wonderful and strange journey we're on this time:
Externalized Suffering: Lynch's films, regularly feature external entities, usually a mysterious character, representing the suffering of the other characters. The baby in Eraser Head could be an early example of this, but that one isn't quite as simple. The caricature of the mother in Wild At Heart, The Man in Mulholland Drive, and The Phantom in Inland Empire are prime examples of this trope in action, and Bob is probably the most prolific and terrifying incarnation. Making terror and suffering a character allows Lynch's films to explore the other characters' relationships to it, and demonstrate how, while one person may see a friendly face or nothing at all, other people see monsters and horror because of what they've been through. Twin Peaks doubles up this trope with "garmonbozia," materialized human suffering most often represented as creamed corn (outside the Black Lodge) and tar-like oil (inside the Black Lodge). These manifestations don't absolve their character counterparts of wrongdoing; Bob, for example, is a parasite in his hosts driven by, as Mike says, "appetite and satisfaction." A parasite can't outright control a host (with rare exceptions), but it can thrive off what the host does and drain their ability to do other things. In Bob's case, his appetite for suffering manifests in the actions of his host, but the host is the one fulfilling the appetite by doing the bad things. The trope makes a metaphor of abusive relationships: the abused is trapped with a monster only they can see, and the abuser justifies their actions through an internal appetite they don't question. It also means recognizing that abuse isn't magical or excusable: Leland Palmer is the monster who did those things to Laura, and now "Cooper" is one too. Bob is in possession of Cooper outside the Black lodge, but bad Cooper was always there to begin with. DoppelCoop is not a construct like Dougie. A doppelgänger is the side of yourself most people don't acknowledge, but Bob preys on it. Dale's doppelgänger is a part of him he thought he left behind. He couldn't overcome his shadow self, as Hawk calls it, in the Black Lodge and now he's broken into pieces that have to be reassembled into the complex Cooper we know and love. The monster of DoppelCoop will have to be confronted to keep suffering at bay for the time being.
Bob and Doppelgänger Cooper conspire with terrifying delight
Bob and DoppelCoop's plan fulfilled in the product: Mr. C
People In Need of Help: David Lynch's worlds are often bleak and depressing: desolation is at the highest point it can be while still being bearable, and the dream-like quality of his art style and dialogue calls attention too it as well. Something is always wrong, but what is it? The audience can see it, and the characters suspect something, but how can we be sure? The dreamlike quality ramps up especially around trauma. Sherilyn Fenn's cameo in Wild at Heart is a good example: Sailor and Lula arrive too late to save Fenn, but she knows she needs help even though she can't express it directly. In The Return, parts 3 & 4 see Cooper walk up to people and ask them to "call for help," repeatedly. They respond by directing him through the casino to the next stage of the gambling apparatus, assuming nothing is out of the ordinary. Sure, he wins the jackpots and is adorable doing it, but the joy is mortifying cover for his helplessness. David Lynch gave one of his trademark strange interviews after rejoining production of The Return wherein he said that conflict isn't natural for humans and that 'we're supposed to live like puppies playing with each other all day.' I think that sentiment is at the heart of Lynch's focus on people in need: it's rarely within our own power end our own suffering because the world does so much to us we can't stop, but we do have the power to stop contributing to others' suffering by helping them, if we have the courage to do so when faced with the opportunity. Lynch's foundation work addresses this as well.
Electricity: David Lynch loves this mysterious energy force. In his first appearance of The Return, Albert calls the unfolding events "An absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence." This is a subtitle for Ronnie Rocket, an unmade film written by David Lynch about, among other things, electricity. Electricity, as established in Fire Walk With Me, is how Black Lodge inhabitants travel when they don't take physical form, and blinking or flashing lights are typical of crime scenes or other disaster scenes in Lynch's films. The flashing lights are creepy in their own right, but it also means current is being interfered with. The flow of energy is broken intermittently, as if something else is in the wire, trying to get through. Maybe Lynch's interest in electricity stems from its existence as a natural, primordial phenomenon transformed into industrial future. As it stands, the new show has seen Dale escape through an outlet and DoppelCoop violently control all the electricity in a prison. Whatever we're learning about the new world of Twin Peaks, electricity is part of it.
It's my belief, based on what I've seen and heard from David Lynch, that his view is that while we are usually powerless to stop our own suffering, because it's most often visited on us by forces external, it is within our power to stop causing others to suffer by the same token. That's what makes Special Agent Dale Cooper so special: through the original Twin Peaks, he's been the unrelenting bastion of good, and now the bad within him is in the driver seat. That's the first thing people new to Twin Peaks find surprising: Cooper is not dismayed to be trapped in Twin Peaks with strangers, he's delighted, and those people are not eccentric wacko's, they're the people we meet and have known for years.
David Lynch's worlds are dreamlike and terrifying, but that is what makes them realistic. New viewers of Twin Peaks are often caught off guard by the campiness and melodrama. Part of what appeals to me about Twin Peaks, and Lynch's worlds in general, are that the melodrama on screen is the real drama of life. People are weird, dramatic, and scared. Some of them are monsters, and some live in fear of what people will do to them. How Lynch's latest monster, Dale Cooper, is stopped will be the new wondrous and strange journey.