I'm going to be sharing a few thoughts about Twin Peaks: The Return in relation to Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (and by extension the feature-length collection of Fire Walk With Me deleted scenes turned into a companion film called The Missing Pieces). If you haven't seen The Return (or any of the other Twin Peaks stuff) yet, some events in the story will be revealed if you keep reading. If that's the kind of thing that bugs you, please avoid the rest of this post.
WARNING/WELCOME
I'm not into puzzle box films or television shows where shuffling the pieces in the right order reveals the answer, and I don't think that's what Twin Peaks is about or what David Lynch does in his work, so this is not a theory explaining what the show means. That's not how I process the art I like, and art that is meant to be solved and discarded is not art I like. This is just me connecting a few ideas in my head and trying to find words for something that hit me pretty hard while watching the last episode for a second time. I'm just adding a few vague trails to the Twin Peaks map in my brain.
Twin Peaks: The Return is a lot of things. An 18-hour movie, a TV mini-series, the third season of a television show separated from its second season by a quarter of a century, a sequel to a TV show, a sequel to a movie, an answer record to the first TV series in the vein of Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," a dream-synthesis of everything David Lynch has ever done, a love letter to frequent collaborators, and a piece of a larger mythology encompassing the show, the prequel film, the outtakes from the film, books, and websites.
Twin Peaks: The Return is about a lot of things. Aging, mortality, the passage of time, the seductive lure and terrible cost of nostalgia, TV and film and how we watch them, the show itself and how we watch it, the characters and the actors who play them, dreams, nightmares, electricity, fragmentation of identity, alternate timelines, survivor's guilt, the lingering effects of trauma, the complementary coexistence of cruelty and kindness and how both will always be here. Mostly, though, it's about Laura Palmer, even when she's not there.
Sheryl Lee is a remarkably gifted actor, and her performance as Laura/Carrie Page from Odessa in the final episode immediately took up permanent residence in those places in me that get lost on the way to the page and the voice but flash brightly in daydream and abstract thought. Lee in Fire Walk With Me and the original series, as Laura and her identical cousin Maddy, respectively, lets loose some of the most harrowing screams caught on camera, and I initially interpreted her scream in the closing moments of The Return as a similar scream of trauma and fear. When I watched the episode for a second time, though, I had a significantly different reaction. When Dale Cooper/Richard/fusion of Mr. C and Cooper stands in the middle of the street, disoriented and confused after expecting Sarah Palmer to answer the door of the Palmer home and finding a different woman who knows nothing of the Palmers, he's rattled and unmoored. Carrie/Laura, meanwhile, whose face until then has been marked by worry or confusion, gets a dreamy look on her face that grows dreamier as Cooper's gets more anxious. Then, the lights flicker, Sarah's voice calls out for Laura, Carrie/Laura screams, and the electricity goes out. Laura's face here snaps into recognition and purpose, and her face during the scream looks determined, defiant, strong, a face that is reclaiming its power and agency.
In the previous episode, Cooper alters the timeline by "saving" Laura from her death, but she is transported somewhere else, removed from the story and the original television show, denied the moment of transcendence at the end of Fire Walk With Me, denied her own death, denied her own agency by the well-intentioned but single-minded Cooper, so focused on the mission and the task at hand that he forgets Laura is/was a human being with her own desires. At the end of the final episode, Laura takes her power back with that mighty scream. I could be so wrong about all this, and I may change my mind on a third viewing. Or this is just one possibility sharing space with all the others in the mysteriously shifting timelines of the narrative. As Judy Berman said in a recent piece for The Baffler, "[i]n a narrative where sentimentality and horror coexist in equal measure, many outcomes are possible."
Twin Peaks, the original TV series, began by killing Laura Palmer, the death of the character the reason for the existence of the show. Laura in the original series was a symbol, a projection of the other characters' desires, fantasies, fears, and identities. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the movie, turned Laura from a symbol into a complicated, three-dimensional character. Lynch's decision to set the film in the weeks leading up to the TV show instead of continuing the story, his shifting of emphasis from Cooper to Laura, and his darker and more serious investigation into the effects of the abuse Laura suffered as well as his willingness to deepen the mysteries of the show's supernatural elements without providing any answers angered audiences and critics at the time, and the film, arriving in the midst of a Lynch backlash, was unfairly trashed, but I think it's one of his best pieces of work, and it's been nice seeing its reputation improve over time. (I suspect some internalized sexism in the negative response from mainstream male critics who didn't care about spending time with a complex teenage girl and wanted more of Cooper solving problems and enjoying coffee and cherry pie, along with the understandable frustration and disappointment in not finding out what happened after Cooper/BOB returned from the Black Lodge.) In Twin Peaks: The Return, Laura is again present by her absence, this time found in the tension between the symbol of the original series and the three-dimensional person of the film and their overlap in grief, guilt, and memory, most notably in the Sarah Palmer scenes (Grace Zabriskie, so fucking great). When Laura finally returns in that last episode and lets out that powerful scream, she, in effect, kills the show that began by killing her. The electricity goes out. The Lynch/Frost production logo at the end of the episode, usually accompanied by the sound of crackling electricity, is this time soundtracked by a couple of tinny plinking noises as it searches in vain for an electrical charge. The show is about Laura, and Laura got the last word (or scream) in, turning the lights out. "It's about me, not you," I imagine Laura whispering in Cooper's ear in the closing credits.
Lynch's stories are knottier than my interpretation allows, and much in The Return also implies that Laura is a martyr-vessel of pain and trauma, forced to endure her abuse and death repeatedly in different timelines. This may contradict my take above, but I think the show allows enough space for these impressions to intertwine. Since the show is also about the actors and the show itself, the audience can always re-inflict the trauma by hitting play again, watching the story as many times as we want, over and over, putting Laura Palmer through it all again and again. Maybe the audience is Judy?
With a few loud exceptions from people who thought they weren't on screen as much as they should have been, most actors love working with Lynch, and from their stories and from interviews with Lynch himself, he loves working with them. That last episode carries some extra emotional heft if, like me, you think that his work, especially in the last twenty years, is about both the characters as written and the actors who play those characters. In that episode, the real world (or at least the world we seem to live in outside of the show) creeps in. The RR Diner is missing the "To Go" sign. The real diner used for those scenes doesn't have a "To Go" sign. Cooper and Laurie/Carrie stop at a Valero for gas, its corporate chain logo a common sight for most of us but a glaring disruption in the world of the show. Instead of Sarah Palmer, the door is answered by a different woman who's never heard of the Palmers, a character played not by an actor, but by the woman who actually owns the home. (Her character's last name, Tremond, and the name of the woman she said owned the home before her, Chalfont, are important names in Twin Peaks mythology, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole tonight.) Our world and the show's world are uneasily mingling.
Sheryl Lee has a complicated relationship with Laura Palmer, the character she's been most identified with since 1989. (Click this link for some fascinating thoughts Lee shared about her relationship with Laura and the emotional costs of playing her.) Sheryl Lee is not Laura Palmer, but Sheryl Lee is Laura Palmer. This is a deeply strange thing about acting. Like Carrie Page, who agreed to be taken to a strange town and to at least entertain the idea that she was Laura Palmer by Cooper, Sheryl Lee keeps agreeing to let David Lynch take her to Twin Peaks, to be Laura, again and again, in different contexts and timelines. Maybe that last scene is about Carrie Page, Laura Palmer, and Sheryl Lee, and maybe that scene is all of Twin Peaks in miniature.
Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the damnedest things I've ever seen, and I'll never stop returning to it.
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