The Old Show

The old Twin Peaks was full of warm, giddy pinks, muted VHS greens, off-white ceilings and undatable ceiling fans. The Return has been grindingly grey, obsidian-sharp, and modern technology has had no choice but to intrude. The pinkest pinks are candy on concrete, and that could just as well sum up the new show in its entirety thus far—and 15 episodes is pretty far.

Twin Peaks has gone grey, and that fact, its new run’s existence, and its message to date is one of the most accomplished tragedies and heroic romances of our time.

Hey, everyone. I’m writing this post with a heavy heart—one that I had a very tough time explaining to myself, until I really admitted it. Twin Peaks is about to die, and it knows it, we know it, and it’s time to start letting go. There’s some fear in letting go.

I thought it was strange at first that Episode 15 was in memory of Margaret Lanterman; I began by rationalizing the decision as another run at memorializing Catherine Coulson, the friend of Lynch who played the Log Lady. But as I ran her last scene, and the rest of this past episode, through my mind—over and over and over—it dawned on me. The Log Lady has been alive, literally through Catherine Coulson and metaphorically through the limbo of a cancelled but still vibrant Twin Peaks, for 25 years. This past Sunday night, she died. There will be no new footage of Catherine Coulson delivering imponderables from her log. No press interviews or retrospectives from the actress, no coyness about continuation. The Log Lady is gone.

In a time where so much is allowed to hover in amber, and death for many can seem so far removed from reality even in the midst of ideological chaos, this is a note of finality that David Lynch allowed to resonate fully in Episode 15, and really, in retrospect, all of The Return from its first episodes.

Let me back up quickly and explain a little theory of mine about living and dead shows. Lost, for all its ins and outs and online discussion, is now a dead show. During its run, as the tension built between weeks and then between seasons (a tension between possibility and eventual execution as much as anything), Lost hummed with the music of engagement, almost like live theatre, throwing a parade for the fanboys and TV theorists, until eventually its series concluded and tied off the flow, the interchange between dissection and production. Yes, new theories can still arise; but even up to the last moments of the last episode, so, so much was still possible within the confines of that world… until it was over. It may or may not stand up to the test of time, but for now, Lost is mainly still watchable. It’s just not the same as when it ran live. It’s no longer living. It’s now a dead show. Something like an extinct volcano. Watch for the effect when Game of Thrones goes, and you rewatch it all knowing the ending (or just that there is an ending)… although the books and murmured prequels will likely keep certain ideas in play.

Other shows can die without resolving storylines; something like Sleepy Hollow springs to mind, those cancellations with supposed cliffhangers that trailed no one behind, or at least not a sizable enough population to make a lasting impact on pop culture.

And then there are shows like Twin Peaks. To a lesser extent, something like Arrested Development or Carnivale or even Futurama. Shows that were cancelled, but somehow still roll forward on their own momentum or the momentum of fan engagement. There is a looming possibility, due to a constellation of influences like a sustainably open storyline with a sufficiently strong plot thrust before its pause to drive imagination forwards and a still-living cast and creative team and a culture that loves a comeback and private enterprises taking up formerly-lost causes, that they could come back. And if they can come back, they must not have been truly dead.

I toyed around with the terminology for a while: zombie shows? Shows in stasis? Cryo-shows? Before finally settling on “heroic shows”. They live on, ranging the mists, waiting for a day when they may return to their homelands: our collective attention.

Twin Peaks is the grandaddy of heroic shows. Twenty-five years is a huge hiatus for such a powerfully creative vision and committed (almost evangelical) following to sustain suspense on a cliffhanger that involves a freaking mirror gag, and yet holy shit, not only did it predict its own return/will it into existence (like a TULPA… or any prophecy), but… it’s… embarking on what would now seem to be a definitively final mission.

Episode 15 felt like the Log Lady’s last call, writ large. My log is turning gold: I know the end is near: we’ve shared so much that there just is no time now to retread (Remember Josie and that wacky doorknob? Gooood times!), but let’s both be realistic: we’ve faced down terror and evil together now for quite some time; soon, you will be facing it alone, and I will be a memory. Please remember. And move forward with what has to be done.

*

Agent Cooper’s story is a powerful, singular thread in a wide tragic tapestry. We know now, after a quarter-century of possibility, that Dale Cooper, much like Twin Peaks itself, has been locked in stasis… just not physically. It's horrible to consider. Like Endymion or Rip Van Winkle, Cooper’s youth was stolen from him in the intervening period, along with all the possibilities those twenty-odd years could have held. Chasing down aliens with Ziggy Stardust? Could have happened, if he weren’t in the waiting room all that time.

There is nothing inherently sad about Kyle MacLachlan aging, per se; but comparing that youthful shot of Cooper in the first episode with the man he is now, and realizing that in the show, as in real life, he’s been on the shelf as the world grew dire… well, although it’s possible we’ll meet a familiar Dale Cooper again, it’s no longer possible that we’ll have 18 episodes of him, or even 10, or even 5.

That is almost embarrassingly depressing as a thought. After all, how lucky are we with the masterpiece we’ve gotten? To feel cheated not to be on madcap red-curtained adventures with the same protagonist we’ve chased for decades is close to petty. What we’ve gotten, in my opinion, is far better. Feel free to debate; but X-Files and a dozen others have filled that certain void. The Return is telling a far more affecting, substantial story while not betraying its original intent, and that verges on alchemy.

You see, I think The Return has acknowledged that, and moved on. David Duchovny’s appearance (cameo?) as Denise Bryson seemed to hit it like a dead horse for me—gone was Duchovny’s girlish glee as DEA in Season 2 of Twin Peaks, and in its place were the balls of steel Duchovny wore in the halls of the FBI as Special Agent Mulder. Denise even intones, just like Mulder in almost every single episode of the X-Files (at least the ones where Duchovny showed up), “the Federal Bureau of Investigation”, as opposed to the more succinct (and probably official) “FBI” that appears throughout Twin Peaks.

Lynch—excuse me, Gordon—reminds Denise that “there’s room for more than one beautiful woman” at the Bureau; the X-Files can rest easy, he tells her; Twin Peaks has its own Blue Rose beat, and it’s sticking to it, and clearing the way for whatever x-file might come next.

Instead, Lynch has hewn tight to unveiling the background and context of the Black and White Lodges (with very special help from Mark Frost in the Twin Peaks novels, particularly the last one—featuring a fellow Archivist!), as certainly not entirely separate from the alien abduction and domination storylines of the X-Files cases and other television realities, but divergent enough to merit the investigation.

One notable distinction: the centrality of the atom bomb.

Where, you might ask, does the atom bomb rear its head in the original run of Twin Peaks? The answer is nowhere, and everywhere. For these characters, even those as young as Gersten Hayward, the threat of nuclear war has hung above them for much of their lives. Some of these characters were old enough to have experienced the aftermath of the first detonations… or even participate in their execution.

Now, most of those characters would have let that threat fade into memory; odds are, Big Ed doesn’t think much about his duck-and-cover days. Becky and Stephen have never lived in a time when nukes were much more than a vague threat brandished by politicians in exchange for ideological tariffs and sanctions. Even Deputy Director Gordon Cole seems to need a huge, constant visual reminder of the bomb’s presence in our world: his chair sits before a wall-sized mural of the first blast.

You see, as this generation—Gordon’s, and Cooper’s, and Ben Horne’s, and the Sheriffs Trumans’—ages towards an end, their first-hand experiences are soon to be substantively extinguished. Gone will be the voices of those who first-hand witnessed devastation and widespread despair; gone will be their instruction for how to avoid their mistakes, how to maneuver more ethically, how to bring ourselves forward instead of hovering in stasis before a backslide; but remaining will be the responsibility they took on on our behalf.

We never asked for the atom bomb, or nuclear power, but we have them both now, thanks to our fathers (because they were mostly men), and we must be constantly vigilant in their employ, dissemination, and management, because the stakes are far, far, far, far, far too high to take with an iota of lightness. It is an honor and a horror. A challenge we have no choice but to rise to.

Twin Peaks has always considered the evil of man towards man, and what seemingly-otherworldly forces influence and mitigate it. The Return is diving as deeply into that investigation as possible, because as the Log Lady’s death proved this week, there is just no more time for waiting, and this coudl be the only right time.

*

Let’s pause for a moment in all this talk of ending and, well, despair… to look at the hope that is its constant companion and mirror image, one and the same. Big Ed we learn has indeed been with Nadine, held hostage for 25 years; yes, Nadine just this past episode shoveled them both out of the shit… but we had every reason to believe it was too late. 25 years is a long time; and like Agent Cooper, Ed and Norma have lost their youth and its possibilities. But in that moment as they come together at the Double R, that almost ceases to matter.

You see, timing is everything.

If at any time prior they had tried to be together more substantially, Nadine would not have been ready. She’d probably have tried (again) to kill herself, maybe this time succeeding. If she had, neither Ed nor Norma would be able to continue their relationship without considering that fact in every embrace. It took the passage of time for Nadine to let go (the passage of time and some properly timed video posts); in a still-sad but reaffirming way, Big Ed and Norma were always meant to be together: and here they are (and well off, too). Late truly is better than never in these things. And sometimes, late can be better than now.

The Return has some important insights into the culture of the mid-2010s, and it fills a spiritual vacuum in our most popular medium in a thoughtful and equanimous way. Yes, this world has tumbled into incompetence and violent greed, and there is a general lack of visible fraternity—still. Mobsters can give gifts unto seven heavens. Escorts can give two rides for the price of one. Even killers-for-hire are given something of a pass as a product of a more malevolent effort to pull us all apart: as Hutch and Chantal remind us, we are a nation of killers—after the genocides, there are government employees performing more or less the same tasks, aimed in directions which can be just as harmful to our common humanity.

It is the roots of evil we have to unequivocally condemn and battle against: Dark Cooper and the Experiment and the Woodsmen and BOB—the inhuman that can play between and among us, disguised as us and possessing us and swaying us through means both subtle and shockingly violent. The men among us, Chad and Mr Todd and Anthony Sinclair, are being moved, mostly unwittingly, to destroy the ties that bind us. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it just takes a nudge at the right time to repent and work for the good—just ask Anthony after his massage.

And sometimes we have to take the whole net into account if we’re to tear it down—or stand firm together against its onslaught.

This new Twin Peaks comes in a different movement in pop culture—one it may have inadvertently helped spread into the mainstream all those years ago. Much like two harmless germs intermingling to produce hypervirulent H1N1, Twin Peaks collided with comic book geekery at just the right time to transmute the kind of worldbuilding and fandom native to sprawling comic systems onto television.

It’s moved outwards from there: minor characters who arrive late swelling into fully-realized influences on even the earliest events, muddied timelines, parallel storylines and sometimes universes, stories more interconnected by shared experiences and spaces than strict classical narrative. Universes. Cameos and callbacks and crossovers are the currency of this movement, and when it’s executed properly, it’s incandescent—because it we recognize in it something true of the way we currently understand our lives.

We are in an interconnected, crossover world; much as Darwin and Freud paved the way for Realism as an artistic movement, scientific and technological advances in digital connectedness and the microbiome are effectively justifying a move towards a more “democratic” narrative form, in which confluences of players are more important than single protagonists. Compare the first Twin Peaks and its constellation of protagonists with the unholy sprawl we’ve encountered in The Return. (We can talk more expansively about Explosionism later…)

Jade has played as integral a role as Janey-E; Diane is much a player as Tammy; even the Log Lady was placed on equal footing with Sheriff Truman as Hawk finally achieves a parallel significance. And yes, both Coopers receive top billing—but has their work borne any less impact than that of the disembodied Philip Jeffries? Meanwhile, at the Roadhouse, tiny whorls of conversation in the booths flow into the larger setpieces of Richard’s hit-and-run, the shooting at the Double R, and Stephen’s moment in the woods (not to mention whatever precipitated it—let’s all start dreading that reveal now): together, they reveal that the decadence and horror impacting Cooper’s life, the lives of all our old friends (like poor Audrey, who’s probably still in her coma), has not been confined to Washington. The evils at work there have been at work indiscriminately throughout the town… and they have been doing the same work across the world, in New York, in Buenos Aires, in Las Vegas…

Those moments at the Bang Bang Bar have been jarring for a number of reasons (not the least of which their seeming disconnectedness from the “main storyline”)—but they are all, to a tee, stories of extinguished hope and degraded expectations for how we treat ourselves and each other. Getting high at work cost you your job? Spread that wicked rash at the next burger joint down the road. Someone ran you off the road on your way to the bar? They’re madmen and it’s time for your beer. (I’m still waiting for time to loop back and for us to see that Dale was driving that car, but it functions just as well as a standalone vignette: a free man indeed.) None have had quite as much impact on me as last week’s moment set to the Veils’ “Axolotl”. The actions of the bikers were disgusting (as were, in all fairness, the actions that left our unnamed beglassesed girl waiting alone), and like all of those actions, it happens in plain sight, in public, and people are all-too-understandably unable to engage with what’s happening for any number of reasons—not the least of which? It’s a busy bar; who would even notice something was wrong until Ruby starts to scream?

It’s a reminder to us, much like the “Donut disturb” sign towards the top of the new run, that we have to at least take a beat to take everything that we’re given at multiple levels. Those three boxes with X's on them in the TPPD conference room look suspiciously like slots… but how could Hawk and Co. know what we know about where Dale is? The very first time we see Sarah Palmer this season was in front of dark mirrors full of violence, drinking Bloody Marys. We didn’t need to see her out in the world to infer the stories people spread about her: that Bloody Mary reference couldn’t be clearer. Of course, her moments at the checkout and at the bar kinda clinch it for us.

It’s a fitting reminder, as we’re starting to have indications, yes, even this late into what is looking like the very last outing for Twin Peaks, that many of the most tangential mysteries of the first run (and its film companion) will be at least addressed if not outright solved by series’s end. Yes: even Philip Jeffries’s cryptic remarks about Judy. It’s as prudent a reminder within the confines of only these episodes: just remember 430, and the Richard and Linda we already know about (Richard Horne and the as-yet-unseen, wheelchair-bound Linda at Fat Trout Trailer Park).

We’ve waited a long time, and there will probably be room for analysis in Twin Peaks for years, if not decades, to come. But the time has come to start the letting go—the truths are starting to come to light. And light begets light. Even in the grittiest, greyest of worlds.

*

We’re quickly butting up against the end of possibilities for The Return, as far as that statement can go for the work of David Lynch. We’ll know soon whether Dale will survive his return; we’ll know whether Mr C and Richard will be expelled to the Black Lodge or eradicated; we’ll find out whether we’re in Audrey’s coma dream, if Becky has survived her husband, whether Freddie is supposed to defend Naido against the repulsive Experiment, if Blue Pine Mountain will spell the end of the Bookhouse Boys or if the influence of the Fireman is enough to expel Them from his house.

Perhaps most crucially, we’re running towards the end of the line for help from such characters as Albert, Gordon Cole, Hawk, the Sheriffs Truman, Bushnell, Good Cooper, and maybe even the Horne brothers and Sarah Palmer. This old guard has pulled bacon out of the fire over and over again, as younger generations let details slip (the detectives Fusco queried Cooper’s prints, got the right results back, and threw them out; Duncan Todd can’t squash a man who doesn't know how to toast; Chad abets murder and drug trafficking while fussing at Hawk for prying open a bathroom stall door; even the assistance Bobby and Shelly give Becky seems to have put their daughter back into harm’s way, while Bobby is wrapped up with his father’s legacy and Shelly falls into old romantic patterns away from the father of her daughter; it’s a world of truck drivers)… and as Margaret Lanterman proved to us last night, any of this old guard could go at any time, never to return.

Meanwhile, David Lynch seems to be giving us keys to understand his old works: Philip Jeffries does not literally live inside a radiator… but in the frame of reference that we encounter on a daily basis (encounter and accept, I should say), he may as well. What a nice throwback to Eraserhead. Find the protagonist swap in Lost Highway difficult? I imagine the braiding timelines in The Return will offer a clearer context to understanding it. The same goes for the dream-logic setup of Mulholland Drive and its eventual horrible payoff.

It’s a scary step for a man like Lynch; I half expect him to keel over the second Episode 18 hits the Frost-Lynch stinger.

There will, as I’ve said, continue to be much to parse from this run. 3/15? I have several theories about this as it relates to being deposited back into our spacetime from a vantage point in higher dimensions (think of room numbers: the 3 at least gets you to the right floor even if you end up in 308 instead of 315, but if you’re only able to access the 15s without the hallway that connects them, you’ve got gravity and some ceilings and floors to contend with if you need to leave 115 to get back to the “right room”). How about 430 and 6? Like in Lost, I suspect the numbers mean everything and nothing, but I’m willing to defer to better minds. And DO NOT GET ME STARTED about the Dao of Dale, especially his instructive moment as Mr Jackpots for himself and others. Yes, of course that article will come later.

Has anyone seen Bing yet? I’m starting to wonder if Billy is the guy Andy was supposed to meet about a truck. And doesn’t that truck look familiar? Audrey just asked Charlie “Who are you???” (all three question marks definitely included), just as Diane asked Bad Cooper and Laura once asked BOB. Whether or not that’s conclusively resolved is yet to be seen. And and and—

Point being: I’m hoping against hope that Twin Peaks will somehow live on still as a heroic show in 3 weeks’ time. All the while knowing that’s not realistic in the way I’ve known it to be true before. Zombie show, perhaps. After all, Tammy’s the new guard. But without Gordon, what could we realistically expect?

At any rate, we have three episodes left, and I intend to enjoy every last picosecond of them. I will of course obsessively rewatch all 48 episodes with the fervor and zeal and scrutiny I usually devote to Harry Hardiner, and probably write all about it on this blog or in emails to friends (sorry in advance). But the log is turning gold.

There’s some fear in letting go.