Twin Peaks: The Return

TWIN PEAKS: 

THE RETURN

Well, the Twin Peaks revival just wrapped up. I've yet to read any reviews or wrap-ups of either the finale or (for the most part) the revival in general. 

I read a few of the week-to-week analyses here and there, of course, but such an approach seemed wrong to me. I sympathize with the TV critic's dilemma; there's really no other option but the episode-by-episode review/discussion. But for me it felt like I could either attend the museum opening of one of my favorite artists - and not just some retro exhibit but seventeen brand new works revisiting his most popular subject matter, and his first public work since 2006's Inland Empire - by myself and moving at my own pace, or I could go with a group of critics, pausing after each new work to hear them talk to each other about it, then open the floor to an unsupervised rabble of theories and complaints and asides, etc., before moving on to the next and going through it all again.

Like I say, total sympathy for said approach - and there are some reviewers whose take on things I'm really looking forward to catching up with, such as The Little White Mask Blog - but it just wasn't the way I wanted to go with the new episodes. (And from the little of it I saw, I felt vindicated in my choice. But more on that later.) 

First things first, I loved it. I have some reservations and you'll hear them but there it is up front. Yes the very ending refused any attempts to pull it in any but its own stubborn direction, yes there were plot threads left dangling and roads left unexplored, and yes the pacing was questionable at times. I looked at that stuff as just the price of doing business. In many ways, The Return felt like the anti-season-two and even anti-the-idea-of-revival-itself, turning nostalgia into an unexpectedly raw meditation on death. That sort of thing is easy to say, though, and I don't know if I can explain it properly.    

I'm a huge Twin Peaks fan, but whenever the subject's come up in the twenty-five years since the finale (and I was one of the ones out there in TV land watching) I usually say something like "The first season's awesome, the second season is awful, don't even bother, except the very last episode, which is essential. The movie is absolutely crazy but don't expect any answers." Confusing advice to follow for the aspiring Twin Peaks fan.

I felt okay dismissing the second season because (a) both Lynch and Frost have done so over the years, with Lynch doubling down on it shortly before the Return episodes aired, (b) neither Lynch nor Frost really had all that much to do with it, so (c) the writers were kind of on their own and resentful about it. I don't have all the links handy, but I've been reading any and all Twin Peaks scraps out there over the years and it's all out there somewhere. There was a Reddit with a couple of the original writers quoted as saying they basically just made stuff up from day to day. And when you absorb the developments, sudden reversals, beauty pageants, sudden love interests, old partners out for revenge, and imposed wackiness of s2, it really shows.

None of it ever felt authentic.

Nor Denise. How do you solve this problem in the climate of 2017, though? Lynch and Frost solved it neatly by basically promoting her out of the show. (I know! A cross-dresser as head of the FBI?! Outrageous.) And Gordon's "Fix your heart or die" line is great. This makes it clear there's no transphobia here in cutting her out of the cast. (Honestly, IMO, getting rid of her honorably fixes the uneasy transploitation of her character in s2.)

While we're here Fire Walk With Me fixes the s2 incestsploitation-device of Leland Palmer.

For all I know, all of the above were Lynch/Frost ideas badly explored and not "hey! Ya know what'd be weird?!" inventions of too many lattes in the s2 writing room. In the end it doesn't really matter; Twin Peaks as a TV show - at least the type of TV Lynch and Frost wanted to explore and the angle of approach they preferred - was doomed from the start. That it was a huge genuine hit with the type of buzz advertisers and studios kill for just hastened its demise. (I mean - Lynch never even wanted to solve the murder of Laura Palmer. Consider the implications of that for a moment.) S2 is the smoldering battleground between incompatible visions and ambitions.

So, when I first heard Lynch was directing and that he and Mark Frost were co-writing each and every one of the new episodes, any (well most) reservations I had went away. I was  curious to see how they were going to write themselves out of the various messes of season two - even though I think they did a masterful job of doing just that in the original series finale (I mean: Jesus) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which features an extended version of that scene-just-linked-to, which points the way pretty precisely to Maclachlan's Bad Cooper performance in The Return.)  

Of the many revivals of the past few years - from The X-Files to Stephen King's Doctor Sleep to Gilmore Girls - The Return gets my vote for most vital. Lynch and Frost succeeded in making something that both honors and - if you can get coffee and pie and other s1 elements out of your expectations - even transcends its source material. 

 

Here's Mark Frost, too. Don't want him to feel left out.

One last bit of business: I listened to Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks on audiobook, and I highly recommend it both to fans of the show who weren't sure if it was just some skippable tie-in (aka The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer of the Return) and to fans of audiobooks in general. Great production quality here. Multiple narrators - including many original cast members - and considerable worldbuilding. You won't learn anything that blows the lid off anything or solves any mysteries, but it certainly deepens them most agreeably. Looking forward to The Final Dossier.

And away we go!

MY TEN FAVORITE THINGS

FROM TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN

10.

 

COOL NEW CHARACTERS

Too many characters and performances to mention, but some of the more surprising (Jim Belushi and Tom Sizemore and the are-they-or-aren't-they-Stepford-robots? trio of Candie, Sandie, and Mandie) sit comfortably next to the more familiar elements.

What was up with Agent Preston's swoosh-walk, though? Was it the sort of body language code Cole prefers in his Blue Rose agents?

Some I wanted a little more time with. Well not the love child of Audrey and Evil Coop - perhaps I wanted more plotwise from him but not necessarily screentime.

Like I say, I'm leaving way too many out, but each of them added their own unique little something to the new surroundings. With three new locales, there was room for the canvas to expand for sure. That said, the heart of any revival will rest with:

9.

SEEING OLD FRIENDS

Including old motifs.

Let me look at some of these (not all of them) in the order they're in my Pics folder. Not including Andy and Lucy, who get the header-of-this-section honors. (Lucy's confusion about cellphones was a lovely nod to the passage of time between the original series and now.)

Hawk got some big scenes and was great to see again. Harry (Michael Ontkean) declined to return.

Heidi and Shelley were still at the RR. The Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson)'s cryptic warnings and journey into death (both the actress' and the character's) provided a lot of counterpoint to the proceedings. This is a run of stories where absent friends and unreturnable journeys are both micro and macro.

James' and Bobby's respective fates both seemed about right. (Sidenote: I guess Bobby's killing that one guy in FWWM wasn't held against him when joining the force. Got away with one, Bobby!)

The Horne brothers got some great scenes. I'm convinced Jerry's story, in particular, is more important than it lets on. (What possesses his leg out there in the ghostwood?)

I thought Audrey's return was spectacular, myself - clearly this was all in her head, right? Sexual contact with evil doppelgangers seems to lead to a lot of this sort of mind-splintering.

"Charlie, help me - it's like Ghostwood here."

Albert was great to see. (And likewise re: real-life mortality verisimilitude) His s2 sudden reversals and dialogue outbursts never sat well with with me. The Albert of The Return is the older version of the s1 Albert. I liked the suggestion of his romance with the mortician (Jane Adams) in South Dakota.

Appropriate fates for Dr. Jacoby and Nadine. (Incidentally, that Run Silent Run Drape joke never gets old.)

And aww.

9a.

NEW OLD CHARACTERS

I made this its own sub-category for four reasons: 

1) Kyle Maclachlan, who was gifted this wonderful chance to piggyback two whole new characters onto his original iconic one, then fuse them all together for the very last episode (aka New Universe Cooper.) Remarkable performance. I get being disappointed there wasn't 17 episodes of the old Dale Cooper, but I preferred seeing the "real-life" damage/ consequences of that immersion in the Black Lodge. Poor Coop.

Still, some aspect of him gets a happy ending of sorts. I loved all the unexpected warm bits with Dougie and Sonny Jim.

(2) Those characters who were so creatively re-purposed from their original incarnations, whether from being unavailable due to death -

or from a cranky disavowal of the whole shebang.

(3) Although it was quite uncomfortable at times, I loved all the side-glimpses of how the same blend of mystical malevolence, drugs, and prostitution was playing out in the new generation.

And how some of the older generation were unable to change or escape.

And (4) Sarah Palmer. 

So many questions! Is this alternate-reality Sarah?

Is she Judy? Is she the little girl swallowing the bug-frog in episode 8?

8. 

GORDON COLE AND THE FRENCH LADY

"She’s here visiting a friend of her mother whose daughter has gone missing. The mother owns a turnip farm. I told her to tell her mother that her daughter will 'turn up' eventually. (long pause). She didn't get it, either. Being French it didn't translate. (Longer pause) Albert, do you realize that there are more than 6000 languages spoken on Earth today? (longest pause) What is it, Albert?"

Honorable mention.

7.

ARM-WRESTLING FOR CONTROL OF THE MOB

 

"Starting positions." Like everything else, so meta. Every comment seems to double (!) as a deconstruction of the entire idea of Twin Peaks, of revivals, etc. Right down to the last line - "What year is this?"

6.

GOOD COOPER RETURNS TO THE WORLD

Things got cosmic pretty fast in The Return. Agent Cooper's departure from the Black Lodge involved some interesting (and Eraserhead-esque) visual and thematic flair.

 

The whole traveling to and fro the Black Lodge (or the White Lodge) really seems to do a number on people! In general, I prefer the less-is-more approach to explaining inter-dimensional travel, and no one creates an otherworldly transportation system (or destination) like Lynch.

5.

BAD COOPER'S (FIRST) DEATH

Jaysus, this whole business. When this was going on, every time it cut to Ray I said aloud to my television "Better get a move on, dude." Anyway, this was utterly shocking, creepy as hell, and gross. I loved it.

4.

WALLY BRANDO

"My family, my friend, I have crisscrossed this great land of ours countless times. I hold a map of it here, in my heart next to the joyful memories of the carefree days I spent as a young boy here in your beautiful town of Twin Peaks. From Alexandria, Virginia to Stockton, California. I think about Lewis and his friend Clark, the first Caucasians to see this part of the world. Their footsteps have been the highways and byways of my days on the road... My shadow is always with me, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes to the left, or sometimes to the right. Except on cloudy days. Or at night." 

This is probably the revival's most lighthearted moment and yet even it re-enforces the whole shadow/ time displacement deal. Wonderful. On any credible list of Television's Most Shocking Moments, Wally Brando has to be there. 

3.

 THE BIRTH OF BOB

I should say I'm not 100% certain that what we see in episode 8 is the Birth of Killer Bob, but that seemed to be the immediate consensus and is certainly suggested by the context and visuals we see. To the strains of Pendericki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima the camera descends into the mad electricity of the atomic cloud, whereupon we hear that strange electrical scratching that the Fireman showed Cooper in the Return's first episode.

A strange being vomits up a stream of garmonbozia ("pain and suffering") and within it, Bob.

Also technically (technically?) the birth of Laura Palmer, who (seemingly) descends in counter-spirit upon the world as manifested from the Fireman and Senorita Dido. (Which lends this creepy-ass deleted scene from FWWM some interesting subtext.)

I mean, do I completely get it? Like all Lynchian mysteries, there's just enough there to formulate some ideas but no smoking gun. It's enough if it feels right. And brother, this felt right.

2.
 

"I AM THE FBI."

The most common thing I hear while the Return was going on was "Enough with all the Dougie crap! Where's Cooper?" Like I said before, I can understand the frustration but the caterwauling was annoying and entitled. There was all this expectation and unreasonable demand wrapped up in it.

By doing it the way they did and withholding gratification, it made the Good Coop's return - with all his facilities - and his subsequent sacrifice all the better.

Moral of the story: if you have to choose between the pace demanded by fan-nerds online or the one set by David Lynch, you're better off trusting Lynch. He was an Eagle Scout, after all.

1.

"GOTTA LIGHT?"

And the award for Best Use of a Lincoln Impersonator goes to...

What can you say about this sequence from Episode 8? WTF works in a pinch, but man.  

"This is the water, and this is the well / Drink full and descend /
The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within..."

Whether the Woodsman is one of the soot-and-ash-men that mind the Bob-bubble inside the Evil Cooper (and the convenience store) or his own separate evil being - and what exactly this whole goddamn sequence means in the scheme of things - is unknown. I'm tempted to tie the appearance of these sorts of spirits with disruption of the environment on a profound level (the atomic blast, the endless sawing of the ghostwood in Twin Peaks, the fracking in and around Buckhorn, South Dakota, etc.), but there's also the intriguing possibility, suggested by the Roswell setting in which the Woodsman appears, that he's one of the aliens around which the entire Project Blue Rose (nee "Blue Book") originated.

Either way, they're creepy as hell - the disturbing evolution of that thing behind the dumpster at the Wimpie's from Mulholland Drive.

~

Okay, so now that I've typed up all the above and edited it a bit (sorry/not-sorry for all the screencaps) I've had a look around Facebook and Reddit and the usual suspects (Alan Sepinwall, AV Club et al). I'm happy to see the big guns and I agree on a lot of the meta-ness. 

I found so many scenes to be commentary on the audience, from millennials abusing and stealing from their elders, to watching this empty box waiting for violence or sex (or both) to engage them, to the whole discussion of purity vs. franchise between Norma and her new lover/ manager (while her old one looks on, forlorn) at the RR.

And I especially high-five the following from the AV Club (sent on to me and highlighted by my buddy Mike:)

"If Twin Peaks: The Return is about itself, and the process of its own creation, it seems to primarily explore three anxieties about returning to this material: the fear of repeating itself, the fear of meddling with the original, and the fear that the entire project is irrelevant or impossible.

Repetition is used to unflattering effect throughout the series. Repeating sound effects or vocal clips are used to invoke anxiety and dread when Richard Horne robs his grandmother, and when Sarah Palmer is at home drowning her sorrows alone. The borderline monstrous creature locked up in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department jail repeats words and noises seemingly unthinkingly. The Woodsman’s incantation, repeated over and over again through a radio broadcast, puts everyone who hears it to sleep. And of course Dougie Coop, famously, just repeats back to people whatever they say to him—and achieves fawning adoration in so doing, since he’s essentially telling people exactly what they want to hear. Without wishing to read too much into the filmmakers based on their work, it’s not hard to imagine this as being a nightmare scenario for Lynch and Frost: just repeating themselves without thinking, flattering their audience, and being met with uncritical adoration and success for just giving people what they claimed they wanted."

There's a lot to unpack right there. Amen. 

  And then there's stuff like this (excerpted from way too many places:)

"I'm sorry he's so damn afraid of death, but like, he clearly nevertheless knew who Judy was and he wasted seven minute s on highway shots. I know what happened, I know what it meant, but I honestly can't get behind the choices he made this time."

"Are we ever going to see the real Cooper again? Enough Dougie Jones!"

"Dear David Lynch, I love your work, but you lost me at episode six. I have been watching a series of shitty events that don't add up and that with celebrity cameos, molasses pacing and pointlessness that have no place in Twin Peaks. I care about maybe 5% of what I see, and that's not enough to hang on. That plus the horrible killing of a little boy, which was tasteless even for Lynch, and a random dwarf with an ice pick stabbing women in an office do not belong here. Subscription to Showtime canceled. I'll see you again in 25 years." (Spoiler alert - this particular disgruntled commentator watched all the way to the end.)

"After more than 18 weeks we get a bullshit Terminator Genesis skewed timeline ending. Bullshit, it wasn't thought provoking, it was nothing."

"Overall, this is the worst piece of trash ever to be broadcasted on television. If I was Showtime, I would be embarrassed to have this pathetic excuse of a story amongst its programming. This was 18 hours of senseless scenes and story lines filled with the worst acting I have ever seen. For all you DL fan boys who claim this is art; well I guess if I was to take can of black spray paint and just spray the canvas randomly, that would be art, too. Here's a news flash: IT'S NOT. And neither is Twin Peaks The Return. What this season did was to destroy the mystery of the series and the movie, FWWM. The story was perfect before this piece of crap was released."

"Not fucking happy. I have been with this show since the very beginning. We, the fans who have been here for so many years, deserve closure. I am hoping and praying that we get some. I barely saw Audrey and I barely saw Coop. This just was not cool."

And so on and so on. Opinions seem pretty evenly divided and slightly skewed towards negative for the very finale. Myself, I see much cognitive dissonance in so many of these objections and wouldn't know where to begin. Can't please everyone I guess. Surrealism has a way of bringing out the worst in people. People screaming about the pacing or what is or isn't "real" Twin Peaks - I mean, it's inevitable to some extent, and I don't dismiss it out of hand, but I certainly disagree with the approach. And I just feel bad for them, honestly.  

As for me, I've some reservations, sure. What the hell was with the green-fist guy? Why would the Fireman be so cryptic and roundabout with all the principal cast but so direct and unencrypted with the greenfist guy? Maybe it'd have made better sense if he gave Andy the green fist when they met in the woods... I don't know.

And what the hell was up with HDS? Meh.

Mainly, though, I loved being challenged once again by this weird and wonderful world and am enjoying puzzling over it all. Two big thumbs up from Dog Star Omnibus.

 

"The Owls Are Not What They Seem."