Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When David Lynch first began speaking to the press last spring about the impending premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return, he frequently referred to the limited series as “a feature film in 18 parts.” The show was unitary; rather than consider each episode its own discrete entity, they served as panels that solidified into a single work of art upon completion.
Of course, none of us were able to experience Twin Peaks: The Return as a feature film in 18 parts as the show was airing throughout the summer. We now have that ability. I decided to see what Twin Peaks: The Return was like as a movie, so I sat down and watched the series’ entirety in one go. There were a few bathroom breaks along the way, but otherwise, I plowed through from beginning to end, giving Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost’s magnum opus its intended treatment. I discovered some things along the way that I didn’t pick up on the first time around, and probably couldn’t have revealed themselves in week-to-week viewing.
“It all comes out now, flowing like a river.”
Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson), declares this to Hawk (Michael Horse), ostensibly as a declaration for what Hawk and his cohort will discover about Dale Cooper, his doppelgänger, and the epic battle between the forces of good and evil that we call “Laura” and “Judy.” The statement could just as easily refer to the way that Lynch and Frost assembled the show. While each episode presents certain intrinsic norms with regard to narrative, theme, and character, those melt away when each episode is strung together. What emerges is a continuous narrative flow, where every disparate storyline seems to flow effortlessly together.
This matters in two significant ways. First, information important to the central “plot” is embedded from the very beginning, slowly and intricately opening the mystery up as the series progresses. The very first scene in the new series contains shots from the season two finale of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the Red Room telling Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) that she’ll see him again in 25 years. When Part 1 aired back in May, this repetition felt like a cute way to announce that the revival had arrived as promised. Now that we have seen what happens to both Cooper and (possibly) Laura, we understand that the entire series was a setup for the reunion of these two individuals.
The second scene is of Cooper and the Fireman (Carel Struycken) in the White Lodge, where the Fireman rattles off a series of clues whose meanings will pay off in the story’s conclusion. “4-3-0” refers to the mileage Cooper and Diane (Laura Dern) must travel (from where?) in order to cross into a potentially new metaphysical space. “Listen to the sounds” now reads as a warning, since the scratching sound emanating from the Fireman’s phonograph suddenly seems to erase Laura Palmer from Cooper’s attempt at rescuing her from her murder back in 1989. “Richard and Linda” are not characters we’ve met during the series, but rather names assigned to Cooper and Diane in the new reality they enter after crossing over.
This technique of depicting a mysterious event, only to have it pay off later, emerges in smaller storylines, too. Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) receives a mysterious delivery of shovels in Part 1. He is seen painting them gold in Part 3. It’s not until Part 5 that we are treated to the first appearance of Dr. Amp, and that the shovels are intended for sale to credulous viewers as a means of “shoveling your way out of the shit.” Lynch stretches the story across three different episodes, and the big reveal ends up being that much funnier as a result.
The Log Lady’s first admonition to Hawk in Part 1 that pays off in Part 7. The discovery of a body in Buckhorn in Part 1 that turns out is Major Garland Briggs (Don S. Davis) in Part 9. Jerry Horne’s (David Patrick Kelly) odyssey that begins in earnest in Part 7 and becomes both hilarious and horrifying in Part 16. Sarah Palmer’s slowed-down cry of “Laura!” that Gordon Cole confronts in Part 10 and seems to trigger an awakening in Carrie Page (Lee) in one of the series’ shots. The haunted nature of both Sarah Palmer and her house, hinted at in Parts 2 and 12, delivered to devastating effect in Parts 14, 17, and 18. Over and over again Lynch and Frost plant narrative seeds that slowly start to grow and finally flower by series’ end.
Indeed, the biggest thread of them all—the battle between “Laura” and “Judy,” and Cooper’s failed intervention therein—stitches together once you watch it unfold in toto, particularly the identity of “Judy” and its function in the story from the very beginning. The Experiment (Erica Eynon) appears in the glass box in New York in Part 1, murdering the two young lovers. Cooper’s doppelganger tells Ray and Dariya in Part 2 that he is after coordinates to get to something that Hawk later suggests to Truman in Part 11 is a dark and all-powerful force.
The Experiment reappears in Part 8, unleashing BOB in the aftermath of the Trinity nuclear test, implying its status as an overarching evil. Preston shows Cole and Albert a photo of Cooper’s doppelganger inside that New York warehouse in Part 11, suggesting that he is the “mysterious billionaire” funding the project, and that the Experiment is what the doppelgänger is really after.
The Experiment also releases the egg that will hatch the flying insect and crawl inside the young girl’s mouth in 1956 New Mexico. That insect, incidentally, wears the same proboscis as seen beneath Sarah Palmer’s face when she attacks the trucker in Part 14. When Cooper’s doppelganger finally reaches the coordinates, he is taken to the White Lodge and a picture of the Palmer house shows up on the theater screen. The Fireman swipes it aside, instead sending the doppelganger to the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station. Each of these data points adds up to the Experiment and “Judy” being one and the same, and that Cooper’s doppelganger wishes to find and perhaps draw power from this “extreme negative force.” This may not be a conventional way to narrate a series of events, but it is nonetheless monumentally effective once you see all the pieces in their places. Lynch often refers to his work as a complete jigsaw puzzle in another room, and he receives each piece one at a time, out of order. His reconstruction is what makes his best work so unconventional, and so compelling.
Of course, not all of these narrative strands reach any kind of conclusion. We don’t know what becomes of Red (Balthazar Getty) and his drug-running operation. We don’t know what happens to Shelly’s daughter, Becky (Amanda Seyfried), or if her wayward husband, Steven (Caleb Landry Jones), killed himself in the woods. And don’t get me started on the long list of kids in the roadhouse who appear for a couple minutes, never to be seen again.
If the notion of “flow” characterizes the narrative function of the primary storylines, the concept can also apply to the thematic function of these narrative dead ends. Lynch has said repeatedly that one of the strongest appeals of Twin Peaks was the opportunity to tell a never-ending story—to have narrative exist in a state of continuous unfolding, so that it might envelop everything the way that a constantly expanding universe might swallow negative space. That’s what Red, Becky, Steven, Beverly and Tom Paige (Ashley Judd and Hugh Dillon), Deputy Jesse Holcomb (James Grixoni), and the collage of roadhouse kids represent. Twin Peaks (and Twin Peaks) blossoms out from a central conceit—the murder of Laura Palmer—and renders a world where stories lurk around every corner. They may not all resolve, but they all exist. We just happen to be seeing their middles, rather than their beginnings or endings.
This is where I think that a critic like Alan Sepinwall fails to grasp Lynch and Frost’s ambitions. In his final recap column at Uproxx, Sepinwall summarized a theme he had harped on all season: that the series was “was padded out with non-characters, narrative dead ends, and other indulgences that only served to distract from the things Lynch, Frost, and company were doing so well.” Why were these stories in the show to begin with? They served “Lynch’s need to fill all those extra hours he leveraged Showtime into giving him.” According to Sepinwall, Lynch was able to con Showtime into giving him more money and more episodes, and then didn’t have enough interesting story to fill all the time with. So he just started throwing paint at the wall and didn’t bother fleshing out all of these characters and the narratives they instigated.
Sepinwall is operating from a standard view of narrative and characterization. Every story worth paying attention to has to resolve itself, and be populated with rich, well-rounded characters with full backstories and recognizable goals. Lynch and Frost seem to reject this idea. Narrative can be found anywhere, but they choose to depict those narratives—to narrate them—in ways that demonstrate the sprawling enormity of the very world they are depicting.
This makes a lot of sense, strategically. After all, Twin Peaks contains not only the town itself, but an alternate dimension that could serve as stand-ins for heaven and hell, with forces that now appear locked in an endless Manichaean struggle. Maybe Twin Peaks: The Return would have been just as effective if Lynch had cut all that so-called extraneous material and focused solely on Cooper, Laura, Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfield, and the Twin Peaks sheriff’s department. Such a sacrifice would have diluted the experience of this world as a world, and worlds contain multitudes.
What Sepinwall and others who might share his views choose to ignore is that the original series functioned similarly, albeit in a different narrational mode. The Packard-Martell-Horne entanglement essentially played the same role next to the Palmer murder investigation. The same goes for the Norma-Ed-Nadine love triangle. Lynch and Frost essentially stripped those types of narrative branches to their essences in The Return. We get snatches of conversation that hold great meaning between the characters, but Lynch and Frost actively suppress that meaning.
It’s also no accident that almost all of these characters live in Twin Peaks. The characters in the Las Vegas and South Dakota storylines, from Diane to the FBI to the Buckhorn PD to Cooper’s doppelgänger and associates to Janey-E Jones, Bushnell Mullins, and the Mitchum brothers, all of these people work either to solve the mystery of Cooper or ultimately to aid his mission. It is from Twin Peaks, however, where this narrative sprawl emanates. It is, in many ways, the center of the universe and the vastness it contains.
Finally, Lynch and Frost’s structural design brings these two narrative functions together by editing them next to, around, and through each other, so that each one carries equal weight. The comedy of Dougie Jones, and the suspense surrounding Cooper’s awakening, lives next to Ben and Beverly’s almost-tryst, which lives next to Shelly’s struggle to help the struggling Becky, which lives next to Cole, Albert, and Tammy Preston’s investigation into Briggs, Diane, and Cooper, which lives next to Cooper’s doppelganger’s quest to gain the coordinates that will take him to “Judy.” I wouldn’t argue that Steven Burnett’s suicide threat in the woods carries the same narrative or emotional weight as Cole’s Monica Bellucci dream, but Lynch’s editing implies that either could take pride of place in the story. This story never ends, and that means every character can step up and be important.
Watching the series one episode at a time deadens this remarkable effect. We aren’t given the opportunity to see as clearly how deftly the plot advances thanks to Lynch and Frost’s seeding strategy. We don’t feel the textural unity of all of these new characters, or the meandering stasis of some old ones. (Someone should write about the significance of Ed, Norma, Nadine, Jacoby, Bobby, Janey-E, and Sonny Jim being the only characters to get happy endings.) Only when we see the work in its entirety can its full power be brought to bear on our senses and emotions.
Nobody has ever come close to attempting something like this in mainstream narrative American television. Certain flourishes may have found their ways in tidy, concentrated ways, but nobody has ever dared attempt to structure an entire season of television in this way. Hell, not too many movies attempt it, either. The scholar Kristin Thompson once asked if, just how there is an “art cinema,” could there ever be an “art television”? She used the original series of Twin Peaks as evidence that there could yet be such a tradition. Twin Peaks: The Return proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @EvanDavisSports.
