In the movie Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character says, “Searching for a boy in high school is about as useless as finding meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.” David Lynch passed away in January at the age of 78. And it’s almost fitting his swan song was Twin Peaks: The Return. But sometimes it’s useless to find meaning in his works. Maybe he just always wanted to tell a story and people got confused.
Lynch was mostly known in the arthouse community from Eraserhead in the 1970s to his work in the 1980s before the world saw Twin Peaks. Dune had been such a dud that it almost ruined his career. Twin Peaks returned him to the A-list world and made him a household name with the unusual style of a community in Washington State where a lot of strange events happen. But what the series showed was how real life is stranger than fiction as people could see similarities with their own lives and the lives of the people of Twin Peaks.
Trying to find some type of meaning in any David Lynch movie seems to be an exercise in futility. I’ve often said Lynch is a filmmaker that decided to focus on what others didn’t before it became popular. Again I bring up the scene in the pilot/first episode of Twin Peaks where FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is fascinated by trees he’s never seen in the area and asks Sheriff Harry S. Truman what they are. This is as Cooper as arrived in town to investigate a murder. This type of odd small talk would’ve been demanded cut from every script-writing instructor and studio head.
There’s a scene in Twin Peaks: The Return where someone sweeps a floor at a bar. While this is often an establishing shot as we know something is about to happen, but Lynch manages to linger on this activity as a bar is closing up shop for the night. Maybe Lynch is showing how such normal activities revolve around abnormal activities. Or maybe it was just to pad the run time. Or maybe, even maybe wanted to give the actor doing it a little more screen time than usual.
The Return was broadcast on Showtime during the late spring and summer of 2017. It had a cast of regulars from the original series along with famous celebrities like Jim Belushi, Tim Roth, Matthew Lillard, Naomi Watts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Laura Dern, Amanda Seyfried, Caleb Landry Jones and Ashley Judd in supporting roles. There’s also small cameos by actors Ernie Hudson, Michael Cera and David Duchovny, who do one scene and that’s all.
I mention Duchovny as it’s Pride Month and the interaction between Lynch as FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole and Duchovny as Denise Bryson made the rounds on social media following Lynch’s death for how the scene handled transgendered people. Originally when the series ran in the early 1990s, Duchovny (then an unknown character actor) played the character as Dennis Bryson, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration. She’s now chief of staff for the FBI.
The scene is a nice way on how people can and should accept someone who is transgendered or gay. It’s always been about control and keeping others down so people can feel superior. Twin Peaks just seemed like the place you’d find a federal agent wearing women’s clothing and a wig. What started as an undercover operation led to Bryson realizing she was more comfortable in this clothing.
It’s hard to analyze The Return. Shooting on the series started in September of 2015 and lasted 140 days before it was completed in April 2016 and then edited into the series format. Catherine E. Coulson, who payed Margaret Lanterman, the Log Lady, is featured in several episodes. She was suffering from terminal cancer and you can tell it probably took a day or two to shoot her scenes and then they were edited. She spends most of the scenes talking to Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill (Charlie Horse) on the phone. She would pass away on Sept. 28, 2015.
Miquel Ferrer who played FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield was battling throat cancer while filming. He passed away in January of 2017. Harry Dean Stanton who reprised the role as Carl Rodd from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has a more detailed role. He would pass away a few weeks after the 18th and final episode aired.
It was a huge undertaking by Lynch whose last movie was Inland Empire released in 2006. But as studios pushed for bigger movies, smaller movies couldn’t even get made by independent studios unless they were Oscar-worthy. This is why many well-known filmmakers turned to TV in the 2010s.
And this is a complex story that begins about 25 years or so after Cooper was possessed by BOB at the Great Northern Lodge, which was the cliffhanger at the end of the second season of Twin Peaks. Life has gone on. Since Michael Ontkean had retired from acting, Robert Forster was hired to play Frank Truman, his older brother, who is now sheriff. (Incidentally, Forster was originally considered but couldn’t commit due to scheduling issues for the filming of the pilot.)
Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) stopped his bad boy ways and has become a deputy at the sheriff’s department. Hawk and Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) are still working for the department. Andy’s wife, Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) still works dispatch and the front desk. Bobby married and later divorced Shelly (Madchen Amick) who still works at the Double R Diner where Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) still owns and works.
At the end of the last episode of the second season, Norma and Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), had been very outgoing in their once-secret affair. Ed’s wife, Nadine (Wendie Robie) had a head injury and thought she was still in high school which most people went along with. However, after suffering another head injury, she went back to the original Nadine putting a stop to Ed and Norma’s chances of being together.
Both actors Jack Nance and Dan O’Herlihy have died so it’s just presumed their respective characters, Andrew Packard and Pete Martell, died as result of a blast from a bomb that had been placed in a safety deposit box. And Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) who had chained herself to the vault gate actually survived. Or did she?
Audrey appears in some episodes but she is often arguing with her husband, Charlie (Clark Middleton), about wanting to go out. This has led me to suspect that Audrey may have survived the blast but has been in a coma for the past 25 years. This might explain some of the events of The Return being part of a coma dream Audrey is having. I mean why would Hawk and Andy still be working as deputies when they would be eligible for retirement.
Often in dreams, people have visions of themselves trying to do simple things or going places but unable to do so. But then again, part of the series may be a dream. Since being possessed by BOB, Cooper has turned into Mr. C, a murderous entity with Cooper’s identity and memories. However, a tulpa of Cooper also created Dougie Jones, a crooked businessman who lives in Las Vegas working for an insurance company. But Cooper has also able to escape The Black Lodge and take over Dougie Jones, who is somewhat gullible and ignorant of his surroundings.
It’s a long complicated plot and trying to explain it makes no sense as the plot points keep going from Twin Peaks to Vegas to a Buckhorn, S.D. where a body believed to be the remains of Maj. Garland Briggs has been found in the bed of an apartment but with the head of a woman who lives there. Don S. Davis played this role as the strict but loving father of Bobby in the series. However, Davis passed away in 2008. Garland went missing but it’s reported that Cooper actually visiting Garland before he went missing.
Blending comedic elements along with surreal images, horror and the supernatural, it’s difficult to explain just like all of Lynch’s works. You either like them or you don’t. And I’m no fan of Dune or Wild at Heart, but watching them it’s not as outrageous as John Waters but not as avant-garde as Jim Jarmusch.
In my own opinion, Lynch’s greatest work is The Straight Story, a G-rated movie that was independently financed but later distributed in America by Walt Disney Pictures. It’s the type of odd story that seems like it is something Lynch would’ve created as an elderly man unwilling to be driven in a car to visit his sick brother, purchases an old tractor mower and spends weeks on the road to go a few hundred miles. It was actually based on the true story of Alvin Straight who went from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wis.
People have their own quirks and eccentricities. What makes the Log Lady any different from Linus Van Pelt and his security blanket? “Normalcy” tells us that we must behave according to some criteria but people don’t know who created it. In Cinema Paradiso, a clergy previews every movie to make sure people aren’t kissing at all, by ringing a bell so the projectionist will edited them out.
Social media companies talk of “community standards” but what they really want is control. People swear, tell dirty jokes and watch porn so what’s the difference. If Twitter, or X, ever did away with porno I’m sure people would drop it overnight the way they did with Tumblr. Alvin Straight and his slow-witted daughter from The Straight Story would be so perfect in Twin Peaks as would just about every news report that begins “Florida Man…”
What’s so ironic is that when a family seems “too normal” we always suspect something is rotten in Denmark. Yet we expect this normalcy on a daily basis. Solving the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) might have doomed Twin Peaks during its original series run. But I feel a lot of people might have continued to tune in today and the show might have been more successful.
I guess The Return is less about given the fans some resolution but Lynch himself finishing what he started. Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a pilot for a series that wasn’t picked up. That was before he was able to shoot new scenes to be added to take whatever he had intended on a different path of completion. I myself have become finicky about getting too involved in a series that is later canceled.
One of the more bizarre episodes of The Return is the eighth episode titled “Gotta Light?” which is mostly filmed in black and white and has many long, surreal scenes. It’s similar to the end sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey has it has as little dialogue as possible and references the atom bomb testing in New Mexico in the 1940s. It might seem out of place but it’s mesmerizing to watch even if you can’t make heads or tails about it.
For what it’s worth, Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost managed to pull off a fitting resolution to those wondering what happened to Cooper. But I feel they did the right thing by not making everything tied up in a neat package. Nadine who listens to ranting podcasts of Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) finally sees that Ed and Norma deserve each other and gives him her blessing as she’s ready to end their marriage.
McGrill, who had been one of the go-to actors for bad guys in the 1980s and 1990s retired after appearing in The Straight Story. He and Lynch fell out of touch over the years and it was just dumb luck Lynch was able to contact McGill at one of the properties he reportedly owns and was renting. McGill has since returned to retirement. And Lipton passed away in 2019.
However, I think it’s fitting that Bobby and Shelly would get married but later divorce. Their relationship was founded on adultery and it wouldn’t last even if Bobby did grow up. I do think it’s funny Cera would be exactly what Andy and Lucy would have as their child. And when he appears impersonating Marlon Brando from The Wild One, it’s hilarious.
But the series wouldn’t work if MacLachlan didn’t pull off a nice turn in multiple roles. In his younger years, he was able to use his boyish grin and looks to make him appear as a guy you could like and trust. He adds this to Dougie Jones, who looks more like a child in a middle-aged man’s body discovering everything for the first time. He had a few roles as sleazy guys in The Flintstones and Showgirls, but his role as Mr. C is a nice change.
All actors love playing the bad guys but Mr. C is a total scumbag. His hair is longer and he’s got a tan with an intense menacing stare. You know not to get on his bad side or even say the wrong thing around him. And when we finally see that Dale Cooper is back and has returned we feel some excitement and relief.
However, Lynch wouldn’t make it that easy. The last episode leads a lot open that connects back to Lynch’s love of different universes and doppelgangers. Take how Bill Pullman’s jazz musician is thrown into prison for murder in Lost Highway and after complaining of intense headaches turns into a young mechanic played by Balthazar Getty. Are they two different men or the same?
Lynch asks the questions but never does really answer them. I’m reminded the 1993 movie Suture in which Dennis Haysbert and Michael Harris play half-brothers. Even though Haysbert is black and Harris is white, people are often confusing the two saying they look alike even though the two actors clearly don’t. I once thought a judge in a town I lived and worked in was a spitting image double of Kevin Kline. But others thought he looked closer to John Cusack. Maybe we were all right depending on what we saw.
The series ends with the conclusion of BOB being defeated but this creates a riff in the space-time continuum that also hints that Laura wasn’t murdered at all. Therefore the events that would’ve transpired all around the area such as the deal with the Great Northern Lodge between her father, Leland (Ray Wise), and Audrey’s father, Benjamin (Richard Beymer), or the Packard Sawmill were different. And in the last 25 years, things have changed.
When Cooper, who is also acting differently now, discovers a Laura lookalike, Carrie Page, is living in Odessa, Texas, he takes her to Twin Peaks only to discover things have changed as new residents are where the Palmers lived. Is Carrie really Laura and she changed her identity? Did Cooper pass over in another universe where he still has memories of what happened but things changed?
That’s all left up to the viewers. And that’s probably why a lot of people don’t like Lynch – he doesn’t tie things up. He leaves to interpretation. The first DVD I watched was Mulholland Drive which didn’t have scene selections a feature other movies have because Lynch wanted people to see the movie from beginning to end.
Lynch was all about the journey and not the destination. At the end of The Straight Story, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth), reaches the house of his brother, played by Stanton. And that’s it. The two have a silent moment on the porch where they get emotional. That’s all that needs to be told.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 