Twin Peaks: The Return

(David Lynch, TV series, Showtime, USA, 2017)

Without a doubt, the most daring TV series made anywhere in the world in the past 20 years is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch, as is well known, makes no distinction, in his public statements, between film and TV as media: it is simply “a long film in eighteen parts”. But this obscures the fact that, on many levels, Lynch depended for many of the most remarkable coups of the series on the suspenseful, week-by-week unveiling of its content.

The serial form here played – in relation to both cinematic and televisual precedents – an extraordinary game of stretching, distending, or plain withholding. It took almost the entire series for Dale Cooper (Kyle McLaughlin) to “return to himself”, as his familiar identity within a recognisable body and character. We had to wait an almost equally long time to see other characters who were derived from the original series, such as Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn); and when we did encounter them, they seemed trapped in “satellite” plots disconnected from the general flow, in some indiscernible story-space.

This principle of slow return works on every level, micro and macro, of the third Twin Peaks season. Slowness consistently wedges between cause and effect, between the announcement of an act and its completion – such as the several minutes it takes for a French lady to leave the room after she has already announced her goodbye. And slowness especially affects the human body, which is subject to every kind of sensory-motor disconnection (in Gilles Deleuze's terms): body/mind, thought/action.

Gestures of discombobulation abound, hopping from character to character: from the strange arm and hand convulsions of Red (Balthazar Getty) to Jerry’s recalcitrant foot (that answers back to him), via Dale’s need to re-learn the simplest movements and actions (such as going to the toilet or grasping a cup), as a child does.

Not to mention the extravagant bodily eruptions, like the vomiting child in a car, or the “primitive” special effects rendering the Diane-tulpa, for the space of a few frames, as a beast with eight arms and legs …

Back on the macro narrative level: some mysteries scattered throughout the series (was Richard Horne the biological son of ‘Evil Dale’?) were resolved in an offhand, ambiguous way; certain characters (such as the Asian-American woman, played by Charlyne Li, crawling along the floor of the Road House bar and screaming in episode 15) appeared only once, remaining total enigmas.

Above all, the slow and gradual intrusion of an “alternate timeline” – another narrative world altogether, where some of the same characters did somewhat different things – paved the way, stealthily, for the final, devastating episode in which the re-found Dale merely managed to lose himself (and all he had strove for) all over again.

By beginning this elaborate return from a geographical spot far from Twin Peaks, and spreading itself widely across the American map, Lynch allowed himself a wide leeway for narrative diversion or digression – exploring one place, one configuration of characters, one incident at a time. Much of it seemed predicated on an extremely stretched-out principle of delay: from week to week, we wondered when we would ever fully “zero in” on the famous, originary site of Twin Peaks.

Finally, Lynch did bring many key characters together – in the police station in the penultimate episode, complete with a “destined superhero” (Freddie Sykes from London with his almighty glove-fist) to vanquish BOB – only to scatter all the pieces once again in the final hour to follow.

In the boldest move of the series, its already legendary Episode 8 (titled “Gotta Light?”), Lynch deployed the grandest diversionary tactic of all: a long flashback. Such an “extra”, bonus feature is common to serial TV, but not the way Lynch did it here: the flashback was not tied to any one character’s past or consciousness, but rather took an excursion into a formative, mythic moment of history (the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945 in New Mexico) and its diverse, horrific consequences.

Diversions, in general, are a crucial feature of the challenge of narrative in our time of intermingled cinema and television. Why – Lynch seems to ask – can’t I go anywhere I like within my creation, anywhere in time and in space? Why stick to one localised, linear plot (as the first two seasons of Twin Peaks in 1990 and 1991 more or less did)?

This is a sore, contentious point even among TV creators, who are weighing up both the old rules and the new possibilities of long-form storytelling. For example, when Breaking Bad (2008-2013) unveiled its famous “Fly” episode in 2010 – an episode which effectively “stopped the plot” in order to magnify the laborious, blackly-comic efforts of Walter and Jesse to find and kill a fly that had entered the vast meth lab – it was viewed variously as a triumph of innovation or a flagrant waste of story time, a transparent attempt to stretch the gap between major plot developments. There is a giddy sense of playfulness here, of the type that David Lynch fully grasped and explored.

Personally, I am all in favour of the surrealist possibilities of TV narrative that have been created by the often uncertain fluxes and flows of its “supersize” long-forms. But, beyond the special case of Lynch, how consciously are TV creators embracing these possibilities?

Has TV ever really encountered modernism? Is it likely to do so in future? “Modernist TV” is indeed a paradoxical creature to contemplate. On the one hand, we can say that modernist TV – just like avant-garde film – has existed, for short periods of time, within the largely bourgeois sphere of the art world, as “video art” (which often took as its subject the critique of mainstream, broadcast TV). But that is not TV as we generally know it, only its dark simulacrum, mostly stationed far away from a mass audience.

On the other hand, just like popular film, TV as a mass medium has a proud, retroactive claim on the type of “vulgar modernism” that is defined by wild comedy, surrealistic cartoons, and some of the less straitjacketed forms of live broadcasting (J. Hoberman hails Ernie Kovacs, for instance, as one of the vulgar kings of modernist comedy).

And yes, there has always been a vein of “art TV”, running in literal tandem with art cinema: many of the greatest European auteurs, from Maurice Pialat and Federico Fellini to Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Rivette, either made works specifically for the TV medium, or had their films produced via dual-distribution agreements with TV networks. It is the USA, in this scenario, that has been late to the modernist table – still only now, and very gradually, opening itself to the possibility of the type of “auteur TV” that Twin Peaks: The Return represents and embodies.

Yet it can seem to many of us that, not long after TV, at least in some parts of the world, welcomed modern art in the 1960s or ‘70s, then a completely different wave of global culture – namely, postmodernism – utterly submerged the televisual medium in the 1980s. This is what Umberto Eco theorised, at the time, as Neo TV. It brought in its own pleasures and possibilities (such as the vast Reality TV phenomenon) and, on many levels, TV is only just now beginning to emerge from its massively postmodern era.

So TV today confronts a startling paradox: very familiar with the postmodern, it has yet to fully face the modern! And, in fact, the frontline on this battlefield is the bald fact of narrative itself. Can TV ever manage to forego its obsession with making narrative the dominant driver of production?

This question crystallised for me during another viewing experience – this time, of the fourth season of the British TV series Black Mirror in 2017. In many ways, this is an impressive and innovative televisual experiment, with each episode’s different tale set in a new story-world, and usually framed within a specific movie genre (horror, action, science fiction, comedy, etc.).

Yet, approximately every ten minutes, I felt a nagging itch; I needed something to happen, some outlandish development, some twist, some revelation. My itch was, I realised, an incredible hunger for narrative intrigue. And it is surely felt by every single TV viewer in the world! Because TV conditions us to this hunger – and has done so, for each of us, since we were very small children. Very few filmmakers (Lynch and Fassbinder excepted) have managed to avoid, dilate or subvert the medium’s almost neurotic obligation to spin a fast-paced, incessantly surprising story.

So there is a strange split going on in the collective cinephile unconscious. On the one side, we addictively imbibe narrative TV; on the other side, we celebrate the preciousness of Slow Cinema, which is contemplative and often altogether plotless. What we cherish in the films of Béla Tarr, José Luis Torres Leiva or Lisandro Alonso – the suspended habitation and exploration of a rich, atmospheric world – is something we would find unbearable, unthinkable as television if it happened for longer than a single episode of a series (if even for that long!).

Twin Peaks: The Return has gone about as far as any artist could go toward plotless Slow TV in our time. Yet even the weirdest breaks, gaps and flagrant contradictions in its diegetic unfolding needed, in the final instance, an outrageous narrative alibi to justify and convey them: that previously mentioned conceit of parallel worlds in different time-lines – one happening in the town of Twin Peaks that we knew, and another created by the supreme evil entity.

In its final seconds, only the whispered echo of Laura Palmer’s mother’s voice, and the almighty scream of Laura herself, could bridge these worlds – thus short-circuiting the entire narrative machinery, hurling it into some infinite seconds of pitch blackness and silence. In TV today, wrestling with the challenge of narrative, that is indeed a precious void.

Note: This text is adapted from a section in the 1st version of my essay “The Challenge of Narrative”, published in Korean and Spanish translations in 2018. The 2nd, more developed version of the essay from 2020, lacking the above discussion of Twin Peaks: The Return, is the one featured on this website.

MORE Lynch: Mulholland Drive, Lumière and Company, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

© Adrian Martin February 2018