Television Review: David Lynch returns to haunt our dreams in the new season of “Twin Peaks”.
There was a time when many cinephiles, myself included, worried that David Lynch would never make another movie again. After the brain-rattling one-two nightmare punch of “Mulholland Drive,” the best movie of the 2000’s so far, and his feverish and assaultive “Inland Empire,” fans couldn’t fault the reclusive director for wanting to go out on the highest of high notes.
And yet, I think most of us can agree that our current artistic landscape is a far richer and more rewarding place with David Lynch in it. There have been countless imitations of his work — everything from the hypersexual neon dread of Nicolas Winding Refn, to the anti-comedy of “Tim and Eric,” who seem to regard “Wild at Heart” as a source of lowbrow inspiration — but no one who can match Lynch for the unnatural power of his dreams, or for his seemingly effortless ability to summon the uncanny out of thin air. He is one of the great cinematic sensualists since Federico Fellini, and perhaps the greatest living dream filmmaker since Luis Bunuel. Suffice to say, the recent announcement that Lynch would no longer be directing movies was one that struck a blow to the hearts of film-lovers the world over (though, given Lynch’s penchant for caginess, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out NOT to be true).
Alas, Mr. Lynch isn’t quite done with us yet. The much-hyped return of “Twin Peaks” — the bizarre and beloved cult show that Lynch created with Mark Frost in 1990 that helped to usher in an era of defiantly postmodern, auteur-driven T.V. — is finally upon us, with the first four installments currently available on Showtime. Lynch deliberately avoided screening advanced episodes for critics, and it’s only now (I started writing this review the Monday after the first few episodes aired) that mainstream critics are beginning to let their thoughts on the new season be known.
This strategy is a bold one one: pre-movie/pre-T.V. buzz has a way of warping our preconceptions in a way that isn’t always healthy, and Lynch has stated that he wanted both newcomers to the show and longtime fans to go in without any white noise clouding their judgment. You can call it precious, you can call it artsy-fartsy, or you could call it the loving touch of a genius aesthete who no longer has anything to prove to anyone.
We currently live in a culture where shows like “Westworld” and “Game of Thrones” are think-pieced to death, and where fanboy conjecture is threatening to rob truly artful shows of their capacity to surprise. As an amateur critic, it would be hypocritical of me to say that thoughtful analysis is the enemy of art, and it would also be inaccurate. But if you’re one of those people who gets annoyed when Lynch, as he has in many interviews, refuses to explain his method or the many mysteries behind his process… then boy oh boy, is this new season of “Twin Peaks” going to bug the shit out of you.
The first four episodes of “Twin Peaks” in its third season are less a continuation of that show’s kooky Northwestern murder mystery and more of a sustained, wildly experimental Lynchian freakout in the vein of “Inland Empire” or his early, controversial short films. “Twin Peaks,” at least in its first two seasons, felt of a piece with Lynch films like “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart”. These masterful films were surreal works of grotesquerie that flaunted their un-reality at every turn, but nevertheless felt rooted in some idea of a traditional narrative structure.
By the time, however, that Lynch had made “Mulholland Drive,” he seemed all but completely disinterested in narrative as we have come to define it. Instead, every Lynch project post-“Mulholland Drive” feels like an extended, exquisitely painted hallucination (critic Matt Zoller Seitz has suggested in his excellent piece on the new season that Lynch’s past work as a painter has some degree of relevance here). This is true of the new “Twin Peaks” as well. This season goes easier on the oversexed teenagers and “damn fine coffee” and shows us extradimensional phantom monsters every bit as scary as the dumpster demon in “Mulholland Drive,” plus moaning, eyeless ghost-women, spiritual revelations taking place in dumpy casinos, and The Man From Another Place (the original series’ most iconic character, save for Killer Bob) reincarnated as a menacing, sentient talking tree. There will be those who love it, those who hate it, and I suspect very few people who find themselves in between.
Myself? I consider David Lynch to be one of our most important filmmakers, and any new release from him in the wake of “Mulholland Drive” I consider to be a major event. All the considerable pre-show hype aside, this new season of “Twin Peaks” does not disappoint on any level. From the shuddering antiseptic dread of its initial return to the batshit absurdist comedy of the fourth episode, season three of Lynch and Frost’s water-cooler show is as unclassifiable, unreadable and unforgettable as it’s ever been.
If you have followed Lynch from his early days as a midnight movie bad boy to his later years practicing Transcendental Meditation and designing the interiors of Parisian nightclubs, you know he’s not an artist who’s bound to one particular way of doing things. As such, those who are expecting a nostalgic return to the land of “Twin Peaks” — one that dutifully checks the boxes of what the earlier show did well — are going to be left badly wanting by this new season, which is as confounding and impenetrable as anything Lynch has ever made, including the show’s skin-crawling, nasty prequel, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”. However, for those who can place their trust in this master storyteller and follow him wherever he goes, the new “Twin Peaks” is a world unto itself of virtues. It will test your patience at times and there’s absolutely no making sense of “what it all means,” but that’s part of Lynch’s magic. As always, you have to be willing to meet him halfway.
I’m not going to spend too much time in this piece talking about the plot particulars of these first four episodes, as I don’t know how important they are, and I don’t think there’s really any way to summarize this show in a fashion that does justice to its execution. What I will say is that Cooper is still (sort of) our hero, though real Cooper is still technically trapped inside the crimson hell of the Black Lodge while Dark Cooper — a greasy, long-haired, black-eyed menace (also played by longtime Lynch muse Kyle McLachlan) — wreaks havoc on our earthly backroads. The Log Lady is still around too, issuing ominous portents to Deputy Hawk (now looking a bit long in the tooth, though his air of Middle American stoicism remains very much intact) whilst cradling her cherished piece of wood. There’s also some new faces to the “Twin Peaks” universe, including “Scream’s” Matthew Lillard as a drab suburban dad accused of murder, and Madeline Zima as a young woman whose decision to seduce her boyfriend in front of a giant, curiously imposing steel and glass box has lethal consequences.
Instead of mere plot synopsis, I’d like to do in this piece mainly is talk about what the return of David Lynch means for our film and television culture, and what exact role “Twin Peaks” plays in all of that. For the last couple of years, there was a kind of unspoken acceptance among cinephiles that “Inland Empire” would be the last piece of narrative (there’s that dirty word again) that Lynch would ever have a hand in fashioning. In that regard, the very presence of a new season of “Twin Peaks” seems like a miracle. The fact that season three of “Twin Peaks” — which Showtime is selling as “Twin Peaks: The Return” — is as aggressively weird as something like the director’s underappreciated cult nightmare “Lost Highway” seems like an even greater anomaly.
I have no idea where this remaining season of “Twin Peaks” will take us, but I will say that I have yet to see a T.V. show this year — with the possible exception of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Young Pope,” which admittedly stumbled in the second half of its brazen first season — that so blatantly disregards the basic rules of television as this one does. Lynch seems wholly, almost defiantly uninterested in the overly schematic guidelines of today’s television dramas, and the result is a brilliantly sustained free-flowing art project cut up into eighteen hour-long chapters.
And so, where does that leave the die-hard fans — the ones who might tune into this new season expecting fan service and callbacks to the original series? Honestly, the best way to enjoy this new season of “Twin Peaks” is to suspend any and all expectations about what you might “want” from a series like this and simply let Lynch play his gonzo symphony. After the original “Twin Peaks” helped to write the blueprint for today’s age of “peak T.V.,” it seems like Lynch and Frost are trying to write a whole new rulebook: to usher in a new era where television is more ambitious, more artful, less bound by obligatory plot-related restraints than it is even now. Make no mistake: the creators of “Twin Peaks” know the guidelines of the game they’re playing, even if they don’t feel like following them. This new season gives credence to the old maxim that one has to learn the rules perfectly, if only so one can know how to break them.
Will we ever see David Lynch make another “Mulholland Drive” before he decides to hang up his mantle for good? It’s tough to say. Unlike contemporaries like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese, who seem to work at a pace of releasing a film every one to two years, Lynch seems to be in no rush to release anything just for the sake of doing so. As a result, the ingenious stir of “Twin Peaks: The Return” feels less like nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake and more like a long-simmering culmination of every obsession or phase the director has ever been through — the psychosexual small-town malaise of “Blue Velvet” and “Fire Walk with Me,” the nervous, clammy phantasmagoria of “Lost Highway,” the unwound dream logic of “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire” — that nevertheless announces itself as something entirely new in the television landscape. When’s the last time you could say that about a pre-existing film or television property?
Grades: “Part 1,” A. “Part 2,” A. “Part 3,” A-. “Part 4,” A.
