Twin Peaks: The Return, The Experience
Ramble from the thoughtscape after watching the first four episodes of the new season of Twin Peaks:
Do you know, there was a time earlier this year where I remember hipsterly hoping that the new season of Twin Peaks wouldn’t end up feeling too accessible and anodyne. Ahaha. Hahaha. To quote my guy Matt Zoller Seitz quoting a friend of his: “Everybody thinks they’re ready for more David Lynch, but are they ready for pure, uncut, post–Mulholland Drive, mind-fucking, T.S. Eliot-I-will-show-you-fear-in-a-handful-of-dust David Lynch?” Were we? WE COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE.
But I like that Lynch makes you go through stuff if you want to experience his work. That’s an interesting position for an artist. Remember the opening credits of the original run of Twin Peaks, how they were sooo loong, like a musical overture in every damn episode. That synth-y transporting Angelo Badalamenti track going on and on until it’s off-putting, then somehow it emerges into mesmerizing, and he has you. That’s what I feel he does in his scenes too, even across his seasons. He places nightmares in front of you, and you have to get through them if you want to see what else he’s gonna do. Whole stretches of television that are tedious, or unlikeable, or fucking horrifying, and Lynch is just sitting casually under the camera like #you choose to follow this blog. You can leave, or you can stay.
And if you stay, you’ll get things you will not experience with any other filmmaker on this planet Earth. Other people think they are doing weird, and they are not, because David Lynch does weird in a way that throws the whole curve off. I don’t think anyone scares me more than he does. I don’t think anyone else makes me feel SO BOTHERED.
But then he does things where you just know you’re experiencing a masterpiece. That air of the singular, that it’s impossible for there to ever be anything else like this. We watch Laura Palmer stepping back-forwards across the zigzag parquet of the Red Room toward Agent Cooper, and it’s 25 years later, just like she’d said, and It’s Happening Again. Twenty-five real years written across their faces, and they tilt their chins and it’s like time travel, because there they are. You start thinking about the magic of acting, you start thinking about what it means to be defined by a role. Kyle MacLachlan is Dale Cooper, is Dale Cooper.
And I think what we’re watching is Agent Cooper coming home.
It’s gonna be a long journey. There are some rough patches of road. There are long detours, and dark side roads, and potholes that come out of nowhere and jolt through your car like a clap of thunder. (You ever have those moments where you can’t even tell if you just screamed because you were too scared to remember.)
But as you get closer, things start to look so familiar, something in how your headlights sweep the black trees like a flashlight….
It won’t be the same when we get there, we know this. We’ll miss that beloved uncle who retired to Canada. (I feel Harry Truman’s absence like an old lost coat.) It’ll be strange to see people who haven’t changed at all, and stranger still to see new people in places we know so well.
But I’m willing to let David Lynch take me on this trip. This literal, literal trip. And when the man himself showed up in Part 3, reprising his astonishingly appropriate casting of himself as earnest oddball Gordon Cole, marvelous malcontent Albert Rosenfield at his side, I felt assured. Not of the destination, but in who I’m taking the journey with. Twin Peaks is harrowing, but there have always been hearts of gold shining in the darkness.
