[COLUMN] Twin Peaks: The Return Understands That You Can't Go Home Again | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return remains one of the crowning artistic accomplishments of television as a medium. It is also one the great artistic statements about the modern world.

The Return was an eighteen-episode revival of Twin Peaks, the surrealist drama series that ran on ABC between April 1990 and June 1991. At the most basic level, The Return can be understood as part of a larger wave of revivals of classic 1990s television: The X-Files, Mad About You, Night Court, BH90210, Full House, Roseanne, Frasier and many others. However, part of what made The Return so interesting was its decision to eschew empty nostalgia in favor of something more profound.

There is perhaps an argument to be made for 2017 as the last year that this culture of nostalgia felt capable of meaningfully engaging with more than just a shallow invocation of an imagined past. The Last Jedi tried to figure out what Star Wars actually meant in the modern world, beyond recycled imagery. Blade Runner 2049 rejected the empty epic narratives of these stories to tell a more intimate tale. Even the first season of Star Trek: Discovery tried to pull Star Trek into the 21st century.

The Return was engaged with similar ideas. In many ways, it was a show about the limits of nostalgia, the fact that it is impossible to recapture the past or to step in the same river twice. The show refused to pander to fans, holding back on appearances by beloved characters, demonstrating that not everybody in the eponymous town had a happy ending, and spending large portions of the season focusing on new characters and plot threads.

Obviously, The Return is a direct follow-up to Twin Peaks, and the show is still defined by the death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), but Lynch and his co-writer Mark Frost repeatedly demonstrate that the town has not been frozen in time. Norma (Peggy Lipton) has franchised the “Double-R” diner. Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly) has diversified his family’s holdings into legal marijuana. Doctor Jacobi (Russ Tamblyn) is now a podcaster. More recent arrivals, like Beverly Paige (Ashley Judd), have never even heard about Laura Palmer’s murder or the resulting furore, a quarter of a century ago. 

This was a palpable source of frustration to some viewers. Bryan Bishop argued that The Return had become “the antithesis of the original Twin Peaks.” Nick Fulton complained that The Return suffered from “a distinct lack of what [fans] loved about the original series.” Joanna Robinson acknowledged that long-term fans might see the show’s title as something of a misdirect, given that The Return “spends very little time in Twin Peaks, Washington.”

However, this is the point. The Return is, in many ways, about the impossibility of a return. It is about how the past cannot be recaptured or recreated. Indeed, the show’s finale finds Dale Cooper (Kyla MacLachlan) travelling back in time in an effort to prevent the death of Laura Palmer, the inciting incident of the series, in the hope of undoing the rot that has consumed the small town. Cooper discovers that such a dream is an impossibility. He and Laura become literally different people.

Instead of remaining stuck in the past, The Return extrapolates outward from the original show. When it premiered in mid-1990, Twin Peaks already felt like an object out of time. Lynch’s aesthetic has always harked back to that of the 1950s, and Twin Peaks was so heavily influenced by the 1957 soap opera Peyton Place that Lynch and Frost arranged a screening of it before beginning work on the show. However, much of the original Twin Peaks was about the creeping influence of modernity.

When Cooper arrives in the small town, he is immediately romanced by it. However, it is clear that the murder of Laura Palmer is just the most obvious manifestation of the intrusion of outside forces into this otherwise isolated hamlet. The local sawmill, one of the area’s key industries, is in the hands of Hong Kong immigrant Josie Packard (Joan Chen). Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) courts foreign investment in the town. Drugs flood into the community from across the Canadian border.

Even during that early 1990s run, Twin Peaks was about what it meant to live in a small rural community in an era of globalization. The Return just extrapolates outward from that idea. Jumping forward a quarter of a century, The Return understands that Twin Peaks could not remain frozen in time. Characters repeatedly employ touch-screen tablets. Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) uses Skype. Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) orders furniture online and struggles to understand cellular telephones.

The world has grown so much more interconnected in the decades since the original show. However, it has also grown even more disconnected. The Return sprawls across America, with key plot beats happening in New York City, South Dakota and Las Vegas. The characters in these disparate locations are often interconnected, even if they don’t realize it. Much of The Return unfolds in transitional and liminal spaces: motel rooms, hotel bars, convenience stores, concert venues, ghost estates, anonymous offices.

It seems like the town has been hollowed out. There is no mention of the Packard Mill in The Return, although the ruin of an old mill is visible outside the sheriff’s department. The Great Northern Hotel, the town’s other big employer, seems smaller than it did on the original run. Back then, every episode featured some convention or other filling the halls. In The Return, there is no life in the place. Ben Horne sits alone in his office. James Hurley (James Marshall) patrols the boiler room.

The Return portrays America as a vast continent crossed by roads and electricity pylons. Indeed, electricity is one of the central thematic preoccupations of Lynch’s work, often representing an invisible force of industrialization that ties the world together. Many of the characters in The Return seem to spend their time crisscrossing America, journeying through endless night or desert. Trailer park owner Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) even works out of his VW minivan.

This might explain why so much of The Return takes place in Las Vegas, even beyond the city’s status as a monument to American Capitalism. Las Vegas is itself another place between places, a city that thrived because of its prime location on the way towards California. The city really took off during the economic boom that followed the Second World War, which feels relevant given that Lynch and Frost’s “origin story” for Twin Peaks takes the audience back to the first atomic blast in 1945. Indeed, nuclear tests were a major tourist draw to Las Vegas during the 1950s.

It is difficult to summarize the plot of The Return. The show often feels like a collection of disparate threads. Some of those threads come together, and others do not. Lynch and Frost will often introduce new characters, detailing the intimate details of their lives, only to never return to them again. This is most obvious in scenes set at the bar known as the Roadhouse, which introduce one-shot characters played by actors like Sky Ferreira and Charlyne Yi.

Indeed, The Return often suggests a sprawling mythology. Characters frequently reference other characters who never appear on-screen, with the viewer having no sense of who these characters are or how they are supposed to relate to what is actually happening on screen. There’s an inherent chaos to the world of Twin Peaks, a sense of information overload, as if everything is happening all at once and it is too much to take it all in or understand it.

At the same time, as the title implies, the world of Twin Peaks is populated with doppelgängers and duplicates. Sheryl Lee played multiple roles over the course of the franchise, including Laura and her cousin Maddy. MacLachlan plays multiple characters over the course of The Return, including Cooper, the dim-witted Dougie and the sinister “Mr. C.” This ties into the show’s recurring emphasis on connectivity; at the climax, Lucy realizes that there are two versions of Cooper because she finally understands how cell phones work. A person can be in two places at the same time. The world is largely signal and transmission.

Unsurprisingly, characters often struggle to make meaningful connections in this overstuffed world. High school sweethearts like Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) and Shelly (Mädchen Amick) have divorced. James Hurley pines for Renee (Jessica Szohr), who is married to Chuck (Rod Rowland). Ben has divorced his wife Sylvia (Jan D'Arcy). Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) is trapped in a loveless marriage to Charlie (Clark Middleton), but may also be trapped in a dream. Beverly struggles in her marriage to Tom (Hugh Dillon).

Entropy is a defining natural force in The Return, which makes sense given the show’s meditation on aging and death. In the world of The Return, things get broken but they rarely get fixed. When Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones) throws a mug through the window of his trailer in the midst of an assault upon his wife Becky (Amanda Seyfried), the window remains broken for the rest of the series. Despite attempts at outreach from Deputy Chief Tommy "Hawk" Hill (Michael Horse), Laura’s mother Sarah (Grace Zabriskie) sits alone in the house where her husband Leland (Ray Wise) abused their daughter, hollowing herself out.

Throughout The Return, there is a repeated emphasis on casual cruelty and lack of empathy. Corrupt sheriff’s deputy Chad Broxford (John Pirruccello) mocks the inability of Frank’s wife Doris (Candy Clark) to get over the suicide of their son following his return from overseas combat. At one point, a bullet comes through the window of the “Double-R”, shot by a kid (Elias Parenzini) who found it under his mother’s (Charity Parenzini) car seat. As Bobby tries to calm the situation, other drivers honk loudly and scream about their own need to get home. Compassion seems to be a finite commodity. The kids are anything but all right.

This theme of alienation and disconnect is reflected in the visual language of the show, in Lynch’s directorial style. Lynch strips out a lot of the background music from scenes and often shoots sequences in long takes at a distance from the characters. The result of these choices is to place the viewer at a remove from the show. The audience feels as distant from these characters as they do from one another. It’s unsettling and uncanny, rendering what should be familiar distinctly uncomfortable.

Those connections that do happen seem almost to occur by accident. When Nadine (Wendy Robie) bumps into Jacobi, he admits that the last time he saw her was seven years ago. Since then, she’s simply enjoyed a parasocial relationship with him by watching his podcasts. However, this in-person meeting encourages Nadine to divorce her husband “Big” Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), so he can finally marry his teenage sweetheart Norma. Still, such connections are the exception, not the rule.

For the most part, the world of The Return exists beyond linear cause and effect. The villainous “Bob” (Frank Silva) is not defeated by a legacy character, but by new arrival Freddie (Jake Wardle) who moved to Twin Peaks from England with a magic glove, a development Frost described as a “deus ex machina.” The sheriff’s department cannot arrest Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) for the murder of a child (Hunter Sanchez). Richard dies later in an unrelated incident, a result of the machinations of Mr. C, his biological father.

After carving a path of destruction through the season, assassins Chantal Hutchens (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Gary "Hutch" Hutchens (Tim Roth) aren’t killed by Cooper’s FBI colleagues led by Randall Headley (Jay R. Ferguson) or Dougie’s mob friends the Mitchum Brothers (Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper), but in an argument with an anonymous Polish accountant (Jonny Coyne) over a parking space. This is the essence of The Return, a show about the disconnected chaos of modern life.

The Return is the rare piece of art that captures what it feels like to live in an increasingly fragmented and random world. This is apparent even in the show’s production. Twin Peaks aired on ABC. It was a genuine cultural phenomenon, sparking sketches on Saturday Night Live and jokes on The Simpsons. In contrast, The Return aired on cable and streaming. It was much less of an event. Although Showtime insisted that the show attracted the subscribers it wanted, its ratings were low.

The Return is a reminder that the monoculture no longer exists in the way that it did when Twin Peaks was on the air. Indeed, an early scene in The Return riffs on this idea, set in an anonymous and largely windowless New York skyscraper, where Sam Colby (Benjamin Rosenfield) is paid to sit in a dark room and stare at a big empty box in secret. He cannot talk about what he sees. It feels like a metaphor for watching television in the modern streaming age, where it is no longer a shared experience. Everybody is alone, disconnected, separated.

Writing in February 2017, author Mohsin Hamid pondered this wave of cultural nostalgia. “Why are we so strongly attracted to nostalgia today?” he wondered. “In part, I think, because the pace of change is accelerating. Despite our close relationship with technology, at this point in our evolution human beings are still animals, and animals struggle to adapt to change that occurs too rapidly.”

The Return is the rare piece of nostalgia to comprehend this impulse. The future is scary; much of the show finds kids placed in danger, their parents unable - sometimes unwilling - to protect them. Who wouldn’t retreat into the past when confronted with that reality? The Return knows the audience longs to revisit the comforts of Twin Peaks, while acknowledging the impossibility of such a journey. It’s about the folly of trying to escape into an imagined past, while understanding the appeal of such a retreat in a disconnected present.