Nonsense? It would have been far easier to give us eighteen hours of nonsense. Given David Lynch's prodigious talents as a director, some of that nonsense might even have been brilliant. Instead, in Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch gives us eighteen hours of material that challenges us to the very core as lovers of narrative art. He leads us to believe, despite our past experiences with Lynchian dream-logic, that we are progressing toward the gratifying conclusion that we expect (and that we feel we deserve). He can only pull this off by satisfying -- intermittently, at least -- the expectations of genre that we have encoded into ourselves by our years of TV viewing. Then, in what might be taken for an act of cruelty, he completely annihilates our expectations just at the moment when they finally seem to be on the verge of being fulfilled.
--
In Twin Peaks, as in any narrative, character is the mechanism upon which everything depends. Plot unfolds naturally from well-crafted characters, and Lynch gives us an array of compelling ones in whom we invest ourselves emotionally, though none compare, of course, with Special Agent Dale Cooper, who embodies everything that we expect to see in "the good guy" -- he's handsome, clever, smart, kind, skilled, judicious, etc. -- and yet he's convincing. He's impossible not to like. Nevertheless, the show has been asking since the end of season two (twenty-five years ago): Who is this man? What is he? Can anyone really be so good? And will anything come out of the good that he so doggedly and earnestly pursues?
Buddhism teaches us to detach from the self because the self is impermanent. It's not that there's no such thing as the self, but rather that the self is temporary, ephemeral, soon replaced by something else. You can also learn this lesson from a TV or film character -- especially if it's a character in something by Lynch, who creates a sense of self for each of his best characters and then systematically robs them of their identities. He does this over and over again. We should have expected it this time, as well.
So, who is this man? -- Cooper is, first and foremost, really a character in a TV show. Lynch seems to be aware, in a way that other directors are not, that this means the usual rule of impermanence of self is amplified. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper spends much of the series wandering around, not knowing who he is, and wondering what is happening around him, which is the same experience the viewer has. At one moment in the new series, we see David Lynch himself as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole wondering in like fashion, and we gasp at the realization that no one seems to be in control here. The story hangs on and marginally remains a story by the barest of threads. In the lead-up to the show finale, we see, for the better part of two episodes, the original Cooper make a return. In the final episode, he's gone again. Will he ever come back? Did he ever really exist?
--
There are elements of every television genre at work in the original series, and Lynch plays masterfully with them all: soap opera, suspense, horror, comedy, sci-fi -- and, of course, the detective procedural. Lynch revisits most of these genres in Twin Peaks: The Return. The feel of the new series is different, though, the most conspicuous change being the absence of soap opera in the new series, which seems like a completely appropriate change, since soap operas are no longer the dominant genre that they once were. In a series that is so self-consciously a TV show, from a director who seems to deliberately anticipate and then confound the expectations of his viewers, it wouldn't be right to linger on a deflated genre. Nevertheless, the show strings us along by adhering just enough to conventions until the end, when it denies us the satisfaction of a conclusion that can be interpreted in anything like a sensible way. As one reviewer pointed out, there are scenes that could have taken place in a classic film noir. There are also scenes that could occur in nothing else but a David Lynch production.
Of the many genres the show employs, though, the dominant one in the end is horror, which we might say, by definition, is the embodiment of the fear that supernatural forces can visit evil upon us at will. There is no self so strong or so good that it can resist the power of possession, and there is no self that can rescue us from it. That is the resonant theme at the end of season two of the original series and perhaps at the end of the new series, as well. Horror is also the genre that is least likely to embrace resolution. That corpse just keeps popping out of the grave. In the end, it may be that not only did Cooper's efforts to undermine and reverse a tragedy come to naught; they may have made things worse -- though neither of those conclusions can be made with any certainty.
--
Thematically, the question that Twin Peaks, taken as a whole, answers is not whether good and evil exist -- not whether they are transcendentally signified. Rather, the question is: What do good and evil mean to us? I think that David Lynch is asking himself: How do you tell a story about good and evil with integrity? We all long for the triumph of good over evil, but is that the real story? If you tell the story right, the show insists, there won't be any definitive answers. Each ending is just a temporary stay in a series of ongoing narratives. Maybe it's dishonest to say that a story ever ends.
The real world is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. The classic hero of modern memory, though, inhabits a world in which that ambiguity is erased. The hero's actions are decisive and just. Cooper initially convinces us that this is so, and it is only as the machinations of plot draw toward their conclusion that we realize Cooper also inhabits a world in which there is no good act without its corresponding evil twin of an act. The fantasy of unambiguous good is ultimately dissolved.
--
Throughout both the original run and the new series, Lynch plays brilliantly with the old binaries. As the title makes clear, twins are always thematically present, though the series eschews literal biological twins, identical or fraternal. Doppelgängers abound, as do binary archetypes: male and female, black and white, this world and the other one, and, of course, the aforementioned good and evil. But Lynch is no mere traditionalist; he's a post-modernist. Or, rather, he's both a traditionalist and a post-modernist, but the post-modern strains win out in the end. From the start, the series has been both retro and avant-garde. He plays relentlessly with these binaries and archetypes, slowly, meticulously, methodically, until suddenly they are no longer recognizable as such. It's disorienting, but it also ultimately enables the viewer to understand the truths underlying these archetypes more truly.
With his mastery of traditional conventions, Lynch comes across, despite his many diversions from convention, as a connoisseur of generic traditions, but he is ultimately a post-modernist because he denies us the satisfaction of resolution. But it is his particular genius that he can lead us to expect one, that he can give us enough to go on that we long for one (as surely he must himself, right?), that he drives us toward one, only to strand us alone at night on that dark highway that is such a quintessentially Lynchian image.
--
The end of Twin Peaks: The Return gives us a Cooper who is utterly confused. (He may not even be Cooper anymore, but rather someone in an alternate reality named Richard. But let's just continue to call him Cooper, because that's who he is to us.) The FBI man, confident in his pursuit of right, is disoriented. "What year is it?" Cooper asks, only moments from the end credits. This question is a stand-in for the larger question: "What just happened, when did it happen, and what happens next?" Both Cooper and the viewer are in utter disarray. Maybe Lynch is trying to say that there isn't a narrative of integrity that can sustain a character like Cooper. He can only be an imaginary character, and when the line of thought that animates him runs out, there can only be this: a character in the dark who can only ask the most basic of questions about the situation he finds himself in. (Just like the viewer when the screen goes dark.)
The return referred to in the title is certainly that of Agent Cooper -- to himself, and to the town of Twin Peaks. The return, though, is ultimately no less Laura Palmer's, as well. Not only does Laura Palmer return to Twin Peaks; she also returns to her memory of her self, to the knowledge that she was murdered, horribly, without mercy. This is the crushing resolution, which is also not a resolution.
It's fitting that we have Cooper and Laura Palmer together at the end -- together, they form the x-y axis that the show’s story arc is graphed upon. Cooper's original project was to solve the murder -- to find out who killed Laura Palmer. We realize only at the end that the project gained much greater significance along the way. Cooper was trying to negate the murder, to neutralize it, and thus to do the impossible: to bring Laura Palmer back from the dead. And maybe he did, only to find out that she was doomed to suffer the same fate once more. What was the project that the Arm and the Fireman had given him? Did they trick him? Did he fail? Will he have another shot at it? Are things caught in a cycle of repetition, stuck in a loop, like the electrical circuits that figure largely in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and as the central motif of the new series?
We can hope, certainly, that there is still a good Cooper out there. What I was really hoping for was that Cooper would walk through the door to Room 315 and simply disappear. He could enter the Black Lodge and remain there, like Mike/Philip Gerard, as a guide or mentor for others who find their way to this other dimension. However, Lynch chooses to end with a Cooper who is not superhuman, but only human. He has become unmoored in time -- "What year is it?" -- and place -- given that it seems that he no longer inhabits the same reality he (and we) thought he inhabited.
I'd like to answer Cooper's final question. I'd like to tell him what year it is, but I find that when he asks the question it turns out that I don't know the answer myself.
--
In Twin Peaks, as in any narrative, character is the mechanism upon which everything depends. Plot unfolds naturally from well-crafted characters, and Lynch gives us an array of compelling ones in whom we invest ourselves emotionally, though none compare, of course, with Special Agent Dale Cooper, who embodies everything that we expect to see in "the good guy" -- he's handsome, clever, smart, kind, skilled, judicious, etc. -- and yet he's convincing. He's impossible not to like. Nevertheless, the show has been asking since the end of season two (twenty-five years ago): Who is this man? What is he? Can anyone really be so good? And will anything come out of the good that he so doggedly and earnestly pursues?
Buddhism teaches us to detach from the self because the self is impermanent. It's not that there's no such thing as the self, but rather that the self is temporary, ephemeral, soon replaced by something else. You can also learn this lesson from a TV or film character -- especially if it's a character in something by Lynch, who creates a sense of self for each of his best characters and then systematically robs them of their identities. He does this over and over again. We should have expected it this time, as well.
So, who is this man? -- Cooper is, first and foremost, really a character in a TV show. Lynch seems to be aware, in a way that other directors are not, that this means the usual rule of impermanence of self is amplified. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper spends much of the series wandering around, not knowing who he is, and wondering what is happening around him, which is the same experience the viewer has. At one moment in the new series, we see David Lynch himself as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole wondering in like fashion, and we gasp at the realization that no one seems to be in control here. The story hangs on and marginally remains a story by the barest of threads. In the lead-up to the show finale, we see, for the better part of two episodes, the original Cooper make a return. In the final episode, he's gone again. Will he ever come back? Did he ever really exist?
--
There are elements of every television genre at work in the original series, and Lynch plays masterfully with them all: soap opera, suspense, horror, comedy, sci-fi -- and, of course, the detective procedural. Lynch revisits most of these genres in Twin Peaks: The Return. The feel of the new series is different, though, the most conspicuous change being the absence of soap opera in the new series, which seems like a completely appropriate change, since soap operas are no longer the dominant genre that they once were. In a series that is so self-consciously a TV show, from a director who seems to deliberately anticipate and then confound the expectations of his viewers, it wouldn't be right to linger on a deflated genre. Nevertheless, the show strings us along by adhering just enough to conventions until the end, when it denies us the satisfaction of a conclusion that can be interpreted in anything like a sensible way. As one reviewer pointed out, there are scenes that could have taken place in a classic film noir. There are also scenes that could occur in nothing else but a David Lynch production.
Of the many genres the show employs, though, the dominant one in the end is horror, which we might say, by definition, is the embodiment of the fear that supernatural forces can visit evil upon us at will. There is no self so strong or so good that it can resist the power of possession, and there is no self that can rescue us from it. That is the resonant theme at the end of season two of the original series and perhaps at the end of the new series, as well. Horror is also the genre that is least likely to embrace resolution. That corpse just keeps popping out of the grave. In the end, it may be that not only did Cooper's efforts to undermine and reverse a tragedy come to naught; they may have made things worse -- though neither of those conclusions can be made with any certainty.
--
Thematically, the question that Twin Peaks, taken as a whole, answers is not whether good and evil exist -- not whether they are transcendentally signified. Rather, the question is: What do good and evil mean to us? I think that David Lynch is asking himself: How do you tell a story about good and evil with integrity? We all long for the triumph of good over evil, but is that the real story? If you tell the story right, the show insists, there won't be any definitive answers. Each ending is just a temporary stay in a series of ongoing narratives. Maybe it's dishonest to say that a story ever ends.
The real world is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. The classic hero of modern memory, though, inhabits a world in which that ambiguity is erased. The hero's actions are decisive and just. Cooper initially convinces us that this is so, and it is only as the machinations of plot draw toward their conclusion that we realize Cooper also inhabits a world in which there is no good act without its corresponding evil twin of an act. The fantasy of unambiguous good is ultimately dissolved.
Throughout both the original run and the new series, Lynch plays brilliantly with the old binaries. As the title makes clear, twins are always thematically present, though the series eschews literal biological twins, identical or fraternal. Doppelgängers abound, as do binary archetypes: male and female, black and white, this world and the other one, and, of course, the aforementioned good and evil. But Lynch is no mere traditionalist; he's a post-modernist. Or, rather, he's both a traditionalist and a post-modernist, but the post-modern strains win out in the end. From the start, the series has been both retro and avant-garde. He plays relentlessly with these binaries and archetypes, slowly, meticulously, methodically, until suddenly they are no longer recognizable as such. It's disorienting, but it also ultimately enables the viewer to understand the truths underlying these archetypes more truly.
With his mastery of traditional conventions, Lynch comes across, despite his many diversions from convention, as a connoisseur of generic traditions, but he is ultimately a post-modernist because he denies us the satisfaction of resolution. But it is his particular genius that he can lead us to expect one, that he can give us enough to go on that we long for one (as surely he must himself, right?), that he drives us toward one, only to strand us alone at night on that dark highway that is such a quintessentially Lynchian image.
--
The end of Twin Peaks: The Return gives us a Cooper who is utterly confused. (He may not even be Cooper anymore, but rather someone in an alternate reality named Richard. But let's just continue to call him Cooper, because that's who he is to us.) The FBI man, confident in his pursuit of right, is disoriented. "What year is it?" Cooper asks, only moments from the end credits. This question is a stand-in for the larger question: "What just happened, when did it happen, and what happens next?" Both Cooper and the viewer are in utter disarray. Maybe Lynch is trying to say that there isn't a narrative of integrity that can sustain a character like Cooper. He can only be an imaginary character, and when the line of thought that animates him runs out, there can only be this: a character in the dark who can only ask the most basic of questions about the situation he finds himself in. (Just like the viewer when the screen goes dark.)
The return referred to in the title is certainly that of Agent Cooper -- to himself, and to the town of Twin Peaks. The return, though, is ultimately no less Laura Palmer's, as well. Not only does Laura Palmer return to Twin Peaks; she also returns to her memory of her self, to the knowledge that she was murdered, horribly, without mercy. This is the crushing resolution, which is also not a resolution.
It's fitting that we have Cooper and Laura Palmer together at the end -- together, they form the x-y axis that the show’s story arc is graphed upon. Cooper's original project was to solve the murder -- to find out who killed Laura Palmer. We realize only at the end that the project gained much greater significance along the way. Cooper was trying to negate the murder, to neutralize it, and thus to do the impossible: to bring Laura Palmer back from the dead. And maybe he did, only to find out that she was doomed to suffer the same fate once more. What was the project that the Arm and the Fireman had given him? Did they trick him? Did he fail? Will he have another shot at it? Are things caught in a cycle of repetition, stuck in a loop, like the electrical circuits that figure largely in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and as the central motif of the new series?
We can hope, certainly, that there is still a good Cooper out there. What I was really hoping for was that Cooper would walk through the door to Room 315 and simply disappear. He could enter the Black Lodge and remain there, like Mike/Philip Gerard, as a guide or mentor for others who find their way to this other dimension. However, Lynch chooses to end with a Cooper who is not superhuman, but only human. He has become unmoored in time -- "What year is it?" -- and place -- given that it seems that he no longer inhabits the same reality he (and we) thought he inhabited.
I'd like to answer Cooper's final question. I'd like to tell him what year it is, but I find that when he asks the question it turns out that I don't know the answer myself.
--
In the end, I have only two complaints about the new series.
In the end, I have only two complaints about the new series.
One is the absence of Annie Blackburn. She was, if not the ultimate, at least the proximate cause of Cooper's entry into the Black Lodge in the original series. Her brief appearance in Fire Walk With Me indicates that she remained in the Black Lodge with the good Cooper -- and this appearance in the film is one of the keys to understanding the entire series. But she's virtually nowhere in the new series. Aside from the quotation from the missing pages of Laura Palmer's diary, she's hardly mentioned. I wouldn't expect closure at this point, of course, but an acknowledgement of her role seems sensible at the least. Unlike, say, Donna Hayward, whose non-appearance in the new series can be explained perfectly (she left Twin Peaks, she started a new life elsewhere), Annie Blackburn's absence makes little sense.
My other complaint is the discrepancy between Laura Palmer's story from Fire Walk With Me and that in the The Return. At the end of Fire Walk with Me, we see Laura Palmer surrounded by angels, free from pain. It is a triumphal moment: she escaped BOB by embracing fate and death, and her reward is perhaps not heaven but the Lynchian equivalent. In The Return, to see her suffering after-death agony both in the Black Lodge (when she disappears with a scream) and again in the show's final moment (in the form of Carry Page, who perhaps at that moment realizes she is Laura Palmer, and who suddenly understands her fate, and who then disappears with a scream) seems to be at odds with what seemed to be a longed-for (but seemingly impossible) positive resolution. This comes across to me as less an example of the skewed realities of Lynchian dream-logic and more a lapse in the narrative design. These two examples bother me more than the many other ambiguities and uncertainties of the series because they seem least consistent with the internal logic of the entire project.
My other complaint is the discrepancy between Laura Palmer's story from Fire Walk With Me and that in the The Return. At the end of Fire Walk with Me, we see Laura Palmer surrounded by angels, free from pain. It is a triumphal moment: she escaped BOB by embracing fate and death, and her reward is perhaps not heaven but the Lynchian equivalent. In The Return, to see her suffering after-death agony both in the Black Lodge (when she disappears with a scream) and again in the show's final moment (in the form of Carry Page, who perhaps at that moment realizes she is Laura Palmer, and who suddenly understands her fate, and who then disappears with a scream) seems to be at odds with what seemed to be a longed-for (but seemingly impossible) positive resolution. This comes across to me as less an example of the skewed realities of Lynchian dream-logic and more a lapse in the narrative design. These two examples bother me more than the many other ambiguities and uncertainties of the series because they seem least consistent with the internal logic of the entire project.
--
As for the other characters and their story arcs -- or the lack thereof -- I acquit Lynch on all accounts. He gave us a few good endings here: Norma and Ed, the bittersweet passing of the Log Lady, Dougie and Janie-E. That last one I found particularly poignant. As vacuous as Dougie and Janey-E are, there is something endearing about them both. And Sonny Jim has his dad back.
As for the other characters and their story arcs -- or the lack thereof -- I acquit Lynch on all accounts. He gave us a few good endings here: Norma and Ed, the bittersweet passing of the Log Lady, Dougie and Janie-E. That last one I found particularly poignant. As vacuous as Dougie and Janey-E are, there is something endearing about them both. And Sonny Jim has his dad back.
One of my favorite characters from the original series was Audrey Horne. As for her return, I can say that I’m fine with the mystery. It was worth it just to see her dance again.
I found two other moments in the new series to be profound and powerful. When Special Agent Dale Cooper first returns in body and in self and delivers his unforgettable line -- "I am the FBI" -- no amount of subsequent disillusionment can negate the thrill of that moment. We got our hero back, even if only for an episode and a half.
The other moment that I simply cannot forget involves the completely unexpected appearance of Monica Bellucci -- as Monica Bellucci. Or, rather, as a version of Monica Belucci that Gordon Cole dreams into being. In Cole's dream, Bellucci gives us one of the great lines of the series: "We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream .... But who is the dreamer?" It's a summary of the whole experience of watching Twin Peaks from the beginning to the end. The primary dreamer is David Lynch, and it is his dream-logic that animates the show. And if we are honest with ourselves, we have to realize that his dreams are at times frighteningly similar to our own.
I found two other moments in the new series to be profound and powerful. When Special Agent Dale Cooper first returns in body and in self and delivers his unforgettable line -- "I am the FBI" -- no amount of subsequent disillusionment can negate the thrill of that moment. We got our hero back, even if only for an episode and a half.
The other moment that I simply cannot forget involves the completely unexpected appearance of Monica Bellucci -- as Monica Bellucci. Or, rather, as a version of Monica Belucci that Gordon Cole dreams into being. In Cole's dream, Bellucci gives us one of the great lines of the series: "We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream .... But who is the dreamer?" It's a summary of the whole experience of watching Twin Peaks from the beginning to the end. The primary dreamer is David Lynch, and it is his dream-logic that animates the show. And if we are honest with ourselves, we have to realize that his dreams are at times frighteningly similar to our own.
