A better place

Note: Spoilers follow for the first and second seasons of The Good Place.

When I began watching The Good Place, I thought that I already knew most of its secrets. I had missed the entire first season, and I got interested in it mostly due to a single review by Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker, which might be my favorite piece so far from one of our most interesting critics. Nussbaum has done more than anyone else in the last decade to elevate television criticism into an art in itself, and this article—with its mixture of the critical, personal, and political—displays all her strengths at their best. Writing of the sitcom’s first season finale, which aired the evening before Trump’s inauguration, Nussbaum says: “Many fans, including me, were looking forward to a bit of escapist counterprogramming, something frothy and full of silly puns, in line with the first nine episodes. Instead, what we got was the rare season finale that could legitimately be described as a game-changer, vaulting the show from a daffy screwball comedy to something darker, much stranger, and uncomfortably appropriate for our apocalyptic era.” Following that grabber of an opening, she continues with a concise summary of the show’s complicated premise:

The first episode is about a selfish American jerk, Eleanor (the elfin charmer Kristen Bell), who dies and goes to Heaven, owing to a bureaucratic error. There she is given a soul mate, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a Senegal-raised moral philosopher. When Chidi discovers that Eleanor is an interloper, he makes an ethical leap, agreeing to help her become a better person…Overseeing it all was Michael, an adorably flustered angel-architect played by Ted Danson; like Leslie Knope, he was a small-town bureaucrat who adored humanity and was desperate to make his flawed community perfect.

There’s a lot more involved, of course, and we haven’t even mentioned most of the other key players. It’s an intriguing setup for a television show, and it might have been enough to get me to watch it on its own. Yet what really caught my attention was Nussbaum’s next paragraph, which includes the kind of glimpse into a critic’s writing life that you only see when emotions run high: “After watching nine episodes, I wrote a first draft of this column based on the notion that the show, with its air of flexible optimism, its undercurrent of uplift, was a nifty dialectical exploration of the nature of decency, a comedy that combined fart jokes with moral depth. Then I watched the finale. After the credits rolled, I had to have a drink.” She then gives away the whole game, which I’m obviously going to do here as well. You’ve been warned:

In the final episode, we learn that it was no bureaucratic mistake that sent Eleanor to Heaven. In fact, she’s not in Heaven at all. She’s in Hell—which is something that Eleanor realizes, in a flash of insight, as the characters bicker, having been forced as a group to choose two of them to be banished to the Bad Place. Michael is no angel, either. He’s a low-ranking devil, a corporate Hell architect out on his first big assignment, overseeing a prankish experimental torture cul-de-sac. The malicious chuckle that Danson unfurls when Eleanor figures it out is both terrifying and hilarious, like a clap of thunder on a sunny day. “Oh, God!” he growls, dropping the mask. “You ruin everything, you know that?”

That’s a legitimately great twist, and when I suggested to my wife—who didn’t know anything about it—that we check it out on Netflix, it was partially so that I could enjoy her surprise at that moment, like a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire eagerly watching an unsuspecting friend during the Red Wedding.

Yet I was the one who really got fooled. The Good Place became my favorite sitcom since Community, and for almost none of the usual reasons. It’s very funny, of course, but I find that the jokes land about half the time, and it settles for what Nussbaum describes as “silly puns” more often than it probably should. Many episodes are closer to freeform comedy—the kind in which the riffs have less to do with context than with whatever the best pitch happened to be in the writers room—than to the clockwork farce to which it ought to aspire. But its flaws don’t really matter. I haven’t been so involved with the characters on a series like this in years, which allows it to take risks and get away with formal experiments that would destroy a lesser show. After the big revelation in the first season finale, it repeatedly blew up its continuity, with Michael resetting the memories of the others and starting over whenever they figured out his plan, but somehow, it didn’t leave me feeling jerked around. This is partially thanks to how the show cleverly conflates narrative time with viewing time, which is one of the great unsung strengths of the medium. (When the second season finally gets on track, these “versions” of the characters have only known one another for a couple of weeks, but every moment is enriched by our memories of their earlier incarnations. It’s a good trick, but it’s not so different from the realization, for example, that all of the plot twists and relationships of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks unfolded over less than a month.) It also speaks to the talent of the cast, which consistently rises to every challenge. And it does a better job of telling a serialized story than any sitcom that I can remember. Even while I was catching up with it, I managed to parcel it out over time, but I can also imagine binging an entire season at one sitting. That’s mostly due to the fact that the writers are masters of structure, if not always at filling the spaces between act breaks, but it’s also because the stakes are literally infinite.

And the stakes apply to all of us. It’s hard to come away from The Good Place without revisiting some of your assumptions about ethics, the afterlife, and what it means to be a good person. (The inevitable release of The Good Place and Philosophy might actually be worth reading.) I’m more aware of how much I’ve internalized the concept of “moral desert,” or the notion that good behavior will be rewarded, which we should all know by now isn’t true. In its own unpretentious way, the series asks its viewers to contemplate the problem of how to live when there might not be a prize awaiting us at the end. It’s the oldest question imaginable, but it seems particularly urgent these days, and the show’s answers are more optimistic than we have any right to expect. Writing just a few weeks after the inauguration, Nussbaum seems to project some of her own despair onto creator Michael Schur:

While I don’t like to read the minds of showrunners—or, rather, I love to, but it’s presumptuous—I suspect that Schur is in a very bad mood these days. If [Parks and Recreation] was a liberal fantasia, The Good Place is a dystopian mindfork: it’s a comedy about the quest to be moral even when the truth gets bent, bullies thrive, and sadism triumphs…Now that his experiment has crashed, [the character of] Michael plans to erase the ensemble’s memories and reboot. The second season—presuming the show is renewed (my mouth to God’s ear)—will start the same scheme from scratch. Michael will make his afterlife Sims suffer, no matter how many rounds it takes.

Yet in the second season hinges on an unlikely change of heart. Michael comes to care about his charges—he even tries to help them escape to the real Good Place—and his newfound affection doesn’t seem like another mislead. I’m not sure if I believe it, but I’m still grateful. It isn’t a coincidence that Michael shares his name with the show’s creator, and I’d like to think that Schur ended up with a kinder version of the series than he may have initially envisioned. Like Nussbaum, he tore up the first draft and started over. Life is hard enough as it is, and the miracle of The Good Place is that it takes the darkest view imaginable of human nature, and then it gently hints that we might actually be capable of becoming better.

Into the West

A few months ago, I was on the phone with a trusted adviser to discuss some revisions to Astounding. We were focusing on the prologue, which I had recently rewritten from scratch to make it more accessible to readers who weren’t already fans of science fiction. Among other things, I’d been asked to come up with ways in which the impact of my book’s four subjects was visible in modern pop culture, and after throwing some ideas back and forth, my adviser asked me plaintively: “Couldn’t you just say that without John W. Campbell, we wouldn’t have Game of Thrones?” I was tempted to give in, but I ultimately didn’t—it just felt like too much of a stretch. (Which isn’t to say that the influence isn’t there. When a commenter on his blog asked whether his work had been inspired by the mythographer Joseph Campbell, George R.R. Martin replied: “The Campbell that influenced me was John W., not Joseph.” And that offhand comment was enough of a selling point that I put it in the very first sentence of my book proposal.) Still, I understood the need to frame the story in ways that would resonate with a mainstream readership, and I thought hard about what other reference points I could honestly provide. Star Trek was an easy one, along with such recent movies as Interstellar and The Martian, but the uncomfortable reality is that much of what we call science fiction in film and television has more to do with Star Wars. But I wanted to squeeze in one last example, and I finally settled on this line about Campbell: “For more than three decades, an unparalleled series of visions of the future passed through his tiny office in New York, where he inaugurated the main sequence of science fiction that runs through works from 2001 to Westworld.”

As the book is being set in type, I’m still comfortable with this sentence as it stands, although there are a few obvious qualifications that ought to be made. Westworld, of course, is based on a movie written and directed by Michael Crichton, whose position in the history of the genre is a curious one. As I’ve written elsewhere, Crichton was an unusually enterprising author of paperback thrillers who found himself with an unexpected blockbuster in the form of The Andromeda Strain. It was his sixth novel, and his first in hardcover, and it seems to have benefited enormously from the input of editor Robert Gottlieb, who wrote in his memoir Avid Reader:

The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept, but it was a mess—sloppily plotted, underwritten, and worst of all, with no characterization whatsoever. [Crichton’s] scientists were beyond generic—they lacked all human specificity; the only thing that distinguished some of them from the others was that some died and some didn’t. I realized right away that with his quick mind, swift embrace of editorial input, and extraordinary work habits he could patch the plot, sharpen the suspense, clarify the science—in fact, do everything necessary except create convincing human beings. (He never did manage to; eventually I concluded that he couldn’t write about people because they just didn’t interest him.) It occurred to me that instead of trying to help him strengthen the human element, we could make a virtue of necessity by stripping it away entirely; by turning The Andromeda Strain from a documentary novel into a fictionalized documentary. Michael was all for it—I think he felt relieved.

The result, to put it mildly, did quite well, and Crichton quickly put its lessons to work. But it’s revealing that the flaws that Gottlieb cites—indifferent plotting, flat writing, and a lack of real characterization—are also typical of even some of the best works of science fiction that came out of Campbell’s circle. Crichton’s great achievement was to focus relentlessly on everything else, especially readability, and it’s fair to say that he did a better job of it than most of the writers who came up through Astounding and Analog. He was left with the reputation of a carpetbagger, and his works may have been too square and fixated on technology to ever be truly fashionable. Yet a lot of it can be traced back to his name on the cover. In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges speaks of enriching “the slow and rudimentary act of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution.” In this case, it’s pretty useful. I have a hunch that if The Terminal Man, Congo, and Sphere had been attributed on their first release to Robert A. Heinlein, they would be regarded as minor classics. They’re certainly better than many of the books that Heinlein was actually writing around the same time. And if I’m being honest, I should probably confess that I’d rather read Jurassic Park again than any of Asimov’s novels. (As part of my research for this book, I dutifully made my way through Asimov’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage, which came out just three years before The Andromeda Strain, and his fumbling of that very Crichtonesque premise only reminded me of how good at this sort of thing Crichton really was.) If Crichton had been born thirty years earlier, John W. Campbell would have embraced him like a lost son, and he might well have written a better movie than Destination Moon.

At its best, the television version of Westworld represents an attempt to reconcile Crichton’s gifts for striking premises and suspense with the more introspective mode of the genre to which he secretly belongs. (It’s no accident that Jonathan Nolan had been developing it in parallel with Foundation.) This balance hasn’t always been easy to manage, and last night’s premiere suggests that it can only become more difficult going forward. Westworld has always seemed defined by the pattern of forces that were acting on it—its source material, its speculative and philosophical ambitions, and the pressure of being a flagship drama on HBO. It also has to deal now with the legacy of its own first season, which set a precedent for playing with time, as well as the scrutiny of viewers who figured it out prematurely. The stakes here are established early on, with Bernard awakening on a beach in a sequence that seems like a nod to the best film by Nolan’s brother, and this time around, the parallel timelines are put front and center. Yet the strain occasionally shows. The series is still finding itself, with characters, like Dolores, who seem to be thinking through their story arcs out loud. It’s overly insistent on its violence and nudity, but it’s also cerebral and detached, with little possibility of real emotional pain that the third season of Twin Peaks was able to inflict. I don’t know if the center will hold. Yet’s also possible that these challenges were there from the beginning, as the series tried to reconcile Crichton’s tricks with the tradition of science fiction that it clearly honors. I still believe that this show is in the main line of the genre’s development. Its efforts to weave together its disparate influences strike me as worthwhile and important. And I hope that it finds its way home.

Musings of a cigarette smoking man

After the great character actor Harry Dean Stanton died earlier this week, Deadspin reprinted a profile by Steve Oney from the early eighties that offers a glimpse of a man whom many of us recognized but few of us knew. It captured Stanton at a moment when he was edging into a kind of stardom, but he was still open about his doubts and struggles: “It was Eastern mysticism that began to help me. Alan Watts’s books on Zen Buddhism were a very strong influence. Taoism and Lao-tse, I read much of, along with the works of Krishnamurti. And I studied tai chi, the martial art, which is all about centering oneself.” Oney continues:

But it was the I Ching (The Book of Changes) in which Stanton found most of his strength. By his bedside he keeps a bundle of sticks wrapped in blue ribbon. Several times every week, he throws them (or a handful of coins) and then turns to the book to search out the meaning of the pattern they made. “I throw them whenever I need input,” he said. “It’s an addendum to my subconscious.” He now does this before almost everything he undertakes—interviews, films, meetings. “It has sustained and nourished me,” he said. “But I’m not qualified to expound on it.”

I was oddly moved by these lines. The I Ching doesn’t tell you what the future will be, but it offers advice on how to behave, which makes it the perfect oracle for a character actor, whose career is inextricably tied up with luck, timing, persistence, and synchronicity.

Stanton, for reasons that even he might have found hard to grasp, became its patron saint. “What he wants is that one magic part, the one they’ll mention in film dictionaries, that will finally make up for all the awful parts from early in his career,” Oney writes. That was thirty years ago, and it never really happened. Most of the entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film is devoted to listing Stanton’s gigantic filmography, and its one paragraph of analysis is full of admiration for his surface, not his depths:

He is among the last of the great supporting actors, as unfailing and visually eloquent as Anthony Mann’s trees or “Mexico” in a Peckinpah film. Long ago, a French enthusiastic said that Charlton Heston was “axiomatic.” He might want that pensée back now. But Stanton is at least emblematic of sad films of action and travel. His face is like the road in the West.

This isn’t incorrect, but it’s still incomplete. In Oney’s profile, the young Sean Penn, who adopted Stanton as his mentor, offers the same sort of faint praise: “Behind that rugged old cowboy face, he’s simultaneously a man, a child, a woman—he just has this full range of emotions I really like. He’s a very impressive soul more than he is a mind, and I find that attractive.” I don’t want to discount the love there. But it’s also possible that Stanton never landed the parts that he deserved because his friends never got past that sad, wonderful face, which was a blessing that also obscured his subtle, indefinable talent.

Stanton’s great trick was to seem to sidle almost sideways into the frame, never quite taking over a film but immeasurably enriching it, and he’s been a figure on the edges of my moviegoing life for literally as long as I can remember. He appeared in what I’m pretty sure was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, Philip Borsos’s One Magic Christmas, which prompted Roger Ebert to write: “I am not sure exactly what I think about Harry Dean Stanton’s archangel. He is sad-faced and tender, all right, but he looks just like the kind of guy that our parents told us never to talk to.” Stanton got on my radar thanks largely to Ebert, who went so far as to define a general rule: “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.” And my memory is seasoned with stray lines and moments delivered in his voice. As the crooked, genial preacher in Uforia: “Everybody’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” Or the father in Pretty in Pink, after Molly Ringwald wakes him up at home one morning: “Where am I?” Or Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ, speaking to the aged Jesus: “You know, I’m glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you.” One movie that I haven’t seen mentioned in most retrospectives of his career is Francis Coppola’s One From the Heart, in which Stanton unobtrusively holds his own in the corner of the film that killed Zoetrope Studios. Thomson describes his work as “funny, casual, and quietly disintegrating,” and when the camera dollies to the left near the beginning of the film as he asks Frederick Forrest’s character why he keeps buying so much junk, it’s as if he’s talking to Coppola himself.

Most of all, I’ve always loved Stanton’s brief turn as Carl, the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in which he offered the FBI agents “a cup of Good Morning America.” And one of the great pleasures of the revival of Twin Peaks was the last look it gave us of Carl, who informed a younger friend: “I’ve been smoking for seventy-five years—every fuckin’ day.” Cigarettes were curiously central to his mystique, as surely as they shaped his face and voice. Oney writes: “In other words, Stanton is sixty going on twenty-two, a seeker who also likes to drive fast cars, dance all night, and chain-smoke cigarettes with the defiant air of a hood hanging out in the high school boy’s room.” In his last starring role, the upcoming Lucky, he’s described as having “outlived and out-smoked” his contemporaries. And, more poignantly, he said to Esquire a decade ago: “I only eat so I can smoke and stay alive.” Smoking, like casting a hexagam, feels like the quintessential pastime of the character actor—it’s the vice of those who sit and wait. In an interview that he gave a few years ago, Stanton effortlessly linked all of these themes together:

We’re not in charge of our lives and there are no answers to anything. It’s a divine mystery. Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah—it’s all the same thing, but once it gets organized it’s over. You have to just accept everything. I’m still smoking a pack a day.

If you didn’t believe in the I Ching, there was always smoking, and if you couldn’t believe in either one, you could believe in Stanton. Because everybody’s got to believe in something.

Out of the past

You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.

—Vertigo

About halfway through the beautiful, devastating finale of Twin Peaks—which I’ll be discussing here in detail—I began to reflect on what the figure of Dale Cooper really means. When we encounter him for the first time in the pilot, with his black suit, fastidious habits, and clipped diction, he’s the embodiment of what we’ve been taught to expect of a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI occupies a role in movies and television far out of proportion to its actual powers and jurisdiction, in part because it seems to exist on a level intriguingly beyond that of ordinary law enforcement, and it’s often been used to symbolize the sinister, the remote, or the impersonal. Yet when Cooper reveals himself to be a man of real empathy, quirkiness, and faith in the extraordinary, it comes almost as a relief. We want to believe that a person like this exists. Cooper carries a badge, he wears a tie, and he’s comfortable with a gun, but he’s here to enforce human reason in the face of a bewildering universe. The Black Lodge might be out there, but the Blue Rose task force is on it, and there’s something oddly consoling about the notion that it’s a part of the federal government. A few years later, Chris Carter took this premise and refined it into The X-Files, which, despite its paranoia, reassured us that somebody in a position of authority had noticed the weirdness in the world and was trying to make sense of it. They might rarely succeed, but it was comforting to think that their efforts had been institutionalized, complete with a basement office, a place in the org chart, and a budget. And for a lot of viewers, Mulder and Scully, like Cooper, came to symbolize law and order in stories that laugh at our attempts to impose it.

Even if you don’t believe in the paranormal, the image of the lone FBI agent—or two of them—arriving in a small town to solve a supernatural mystery is enormously seductive. It appeals to our hopes that someone in power cares enough about us to investigate problems that can’t be rationally addressed, which all stand, in one way or another, for the mystery of death. This may be why both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, despite their flaws, have sustained so much enthusiasm among fans. (No other television dramas have ever meant more to me.) But it’s also a myth. This isn’t really how the world works, and the second half of the Twin Peaks finale is devoted to tearing down, with remarkable cruelty and control, the very idea of such solutions. It can only do this by initially giving us what we think we want, and the first of last night’s two episodes misleads us with a satisfying dose of wish fulfillment. Not only is Cooper back, but he’s in complete command of the situation, and he seems to know exactly what to do at every given moment. He somehow knows all about Freddie and his magical green glove, which he utilizes to finally send Bob into oblivion. After rescuing Diane, he uses his room key from the Great Northern, like a magical item in a video game, to unlock the door that leads him to Mike and the disembodied Phillip Jeffries. He goes back in time, enters the events of Fire Walk With Me, and saves Laura on the night of her murder. The next day, Pete Martell simply goes fishing. Viewers at home even get the appearance by Julee Cruise that I’ve been awaiting since the premiere. After the credits ran, I told my wife that if it had ended there, I would have been totally satisfied.

But that was exactly what I was supposed to think, and even during the first half, there are signs of trouble. When Cooper first sees the eyeless Naido, who is later revealed to be the real Diane, his face freezes in a huge closeup that is superimposed for several minutes over the ensuing action. It’s a striking device that has the effect of putting us, for the first time, in Cooper’s head, rather than watching him with bemusement from the outside. We identify with him, and at the very end, when his efforts seemingly come to nothing, despite the fact that he did everything right, it’s more than heartbreaking—it’s like an existential crisis. It’s the side of the show that was embodied by Sheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer, whose tragic life and horrifying death, when seen in its full dimension, put the lie to all the cozy, comforting stories that the series told us about the town of Twin Peaks. Nothing good could ever come out of a world in which Laura died in the way that she did, which was the message that Fire Walk With Me delivered so insistently. And seeing Laura share the screen at length with Cooper presents us with both halves of the show’s identity within a single frame. (It also gives us a second entry, after Blue Velvet, in the short list of great scenes in which Kyle MacLachlan enters a room to find a man sitting down with his brains blown out.) For a while, as Cooper drives Laura to the appointment with her mother, it seems almost possible that the series could pull off one last, unfathomable trick. Even if it means erasing the show’s entire timeline, it would be worth it to save Laura. Or so we think. In the end, they return to a Twin Peaks that neither of them recognize, in which the events of the series presumably never took place, and Cooper’s only reward is Laura’s scream of agony.

As I tossed and turned last night, thinking about Cooper’s final, shattering moment of comprehension, a line of dialogue from another movie drifted into my head: “It’s too late. There’s no bringing her back.” It’s from Vertigo, of course, which is a movie that David Lynch and Mark Frost have been quietly urging us to revisit all along. (Madeline Ferguson, Laura’s identical cousin, who was played by Lee, is named after the film’s two main characters, and both works of art pivot on a necklace and a dream sequence.) Along with so much else, Vertigo is about the futility of trying to recapture or change the past, and its ending, which might be the most unforgettable of any film I’ve ever seen, destroys Scotty’s delusions, which embody the assumptions of so many American movies: “One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be rid of the past forever.” I think that Lynch and Frost are consciously harking back to Vertigo here—in the framing of the doomed couple on their long drive, as well as in Cooper’s insistence that Laura revisit the scene of the crime—and it doesn’t end well in either case. The difference is that Vertigo prepares us for it over the course of two hours, while Twin Peaks had more than a quarter of a century. Both works offer a conclusion that feels simultaneously like a profound statement of our helplessness in the face of an unfair universe and like the punchline to a shaggy dog story, and perhaps that’s the only way to express it. I’ve quoted Frost’s statement on this revival more than once: “It’s an exercise in engaging with one of the most powerful themes in all of art, which is the ruthless passage of time…We’re all trapped in time and we’re all going to die. We’re all traveling along this conveyor belt that is relentlessly moving us toward this very certain outcome.” Thirty seconds before the end, I didn’t know what he meant. But I sure do now. And I know at last why this show’s theme is called “Falling.”

The number nine

Note: This post reveals plot details from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

One of the central insights of my life as a reader is that certain kinds of narrative are infinitely expansible or contractible. I first started thinking about this in college, when I was struggling to read Homer in Greek. Oral poetry, I discovered, wasn’t memorized, but composed on the fly, aided by the poet’s repertoire of stock lines, formulas, and images that happened to fit the meter. This meant that the overall length of the composition was highly variable. A scene that takes up just a few lines in the Iliad that survives could be expanded into an entire night’s recital, based on what the audience wanted to hear. (For instance, the characters of Crethon and Orsilochus, who appear for only twenty lines in the existing version before being killed by Aeneas, might have been the stars of the evening if the poet happened to be working in Pherae.) That kind of flexibility originated as a practical consequence of the oral form, but it came to affect the aesthetics of the poem itself, which could grow or shrink to accommodate anything that the poet wanted to talk about. Homer uses his metaphors to introduce miniature narratives of human life that don’t otherwise fit into a poem of war, and some amount to self-contained short stories in themselves. Proust operates in much the same way. One observation leads naturally to another, and an emotion or analogy evoked in passing can unfold like a paper flower into three dense pages of reflections. In theory, any novel could be expanded like this, like a hypertext that opens into increasingly deeper levels. In Search of Lost Time happens to be the one book in existence in which all of these flowerings have been preserved, with a plot could fit into a novella of two hundred unhurried pages.

Something similar appears to have happened with the current season of Twin Peaks, and when you start to think of it in those terms, its structure, which otherwise seems almost perversely shapeless, begins to make more sense. In the initial announcement by Showtime, the revival was said to consist of nine episodes, and Mark Frost even said to Buzzfeed:

If you think back about the first season, if you put the pilot together with the seven that we did, you get nine hours. It just felt like the right number. I’ve always felt the story should take as long as the story takes to tell. That’s what felt right to us.

It was doubled to eighteen after a curious interlude in which David Lynch dropped out of the project, citing budget constraints: “I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done.” He came back, of course, and shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the length of the season had increased. Yet there was never any indication that either Lynch or Frost had done any additional writing. My personal hunch is that they always had nine episodes of material, and this never changed. What happened is that the second act of the show expanded in the fashion that I’ve described above, creating a long central section that was free to explore countless byways without much concern for the plot. The beginning, and presumably the end, remained more or less as conceived—it was the middle that grew. And a quick look at the structure of the season so far seems to confirm this. The first three episodes, which take Cooper from inside the Black Lodge to slightly before his meeting with his new family in Las Vegas, seemed weird at the time, but now they look positively conventional in terms of how much story they covered. They were followed by three episodes, the Dougie Jones arc, that were expanded beyond recognition. And now that we’ve reached the final three, which account for the third act of the original outline, it makes sense for Cooper to return at last.

If the season had consisted of just those nine episodes, I suspect that more viewers would have been able to get behind it. Even if the second act had doubled in length—giving us a total of twelve installments, of which three would have been devoted to detours and loose ends—I doubt that most fans would have minded. It’s expanding that middle section to four times its size, without any explanation, that lost a lot of people. But it’s clearly the only way that Lynch would have returned. For most of the last decade, Lynch has been contentedly pottering around with odd personal projects, concentrating on painting, music, digital video, and other media that don’t require him to be answerable to anyone but himself. The Twin Peaks revival, after the revised terms had been negotiated with Showtime, allowed him to do this with a larger budget and for a vastly greater audience. Much of this season has felt like Lynch’s private sketchbook or paintbox, allowing him to indulge himself within each episode as long as the invisible scaffolding of the original nine scripts remained. The fact that so much of the strangeness of this season has been visual and nonverbal points to Lynch, rather than Frost, as the driving force on this end. And at its best, it represents something like a reinvention of television, which is the most expandable or compressible medium we have, but which has rarely utilized this quality to its full extent. (There’s an opening here, obviously, for a fan edit that condenses the season down to nine episodes, leaving the first and last three intact while shrinking the middle twelve. It would be an interesting experiment, although I’m not sure I’d want to watch it.)

Of course, this kind of aggressive attack on the structure of the narrative doesn’t come without a cost. In the case of Twin Peaks, the primary casualty has been the Dougie Jones storyline, which has been criticized for three related reasons. The first, and most understandable, is that we’re naturally impatient to get the old Cooper back. Another is that this material was never meant to go on for this long, and it starts to feel a little thin when spread over twelve episodes. And the third is that it prevents Kyle MacLachlan, the ostensible star of the show, from doing what he does best. This last criticism feels like the most valid. MacLachlan has played an enormous role in my life as a moviegoer and television viewer, but he operates within a very narrow range, with what I might inadequately describe as a combination of rectitude, earnestness, and barely concealed eccentricity. (In other words, it’s all but indistinguishable from the public persona of David Lynch himself.) It’s what made his work as Jeffrey in Blue Velvet so moving, and a huge part of the appeal of Twin Peaks lay in placing this character at the center of what looked like a procedural. MacLachlan can also convey innocence and darkness, but by bringing these two traits to the forefront, and separating them completely in Dougie and Dark Cooper, it robs us of the amalgam that makes MacLachlan interesting in the first place. Like many stars, he’s chafed under the constraints of his image, and perhaps he even welcomed the challenges that this season presented—although he may not have known how his performance would look when extended past its original dimensions and cut together with the rest. When Cooper returned last night, it reminded me of how much I’ve missed him. And the fact that we’ll get him for two more episodes, along with everything else that this season has offered us, feels more than ever like a gift.

The world spins

Note: This post discusses plot points from Sunday’s episode of Twin Peaks.

“Did you call me five days ago?” Dark Cooper asks the shadowy shape in the darkness in the most recent episode of Twin Peaks. It’s a memorable moment for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that he’s addressing the disembodied Philip Jeffries, who was played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me, and is now portrayed by a different voice actor and what looks to be a sentient tea kettle. But that didn’t even strike me as the weirdest part. What hit me hardest is the implication that everything that we’ve seen so far this season has played out over less than a week in real time—the phone call to which Dark Cooper is referring occurred during the second episode. Admittedly, there are indications that the events onscreen have unfolded in a nonlinear fashion, not to draw attention to itself, but to allow David Lynch and Mark Frost to cut between storylines according to their own rhythms, rather than being tied down to chronology. (The text message that Dark Cooper sends at the end of the scene was received by Diane a few episodes ago, while Audrey’s painful interactions with Charlie apparently consist of a single conversation parceled out over multiple weeks. And the Dougie Jones material certainly feels as if it occurs over a longer period than five days, although it’s probably possible to squeeze it into that timeline if necessary.) And if viewers are brought up short by the contrast between the show’s internal calendar and its emotional duration, it’s happened before. When I look back at the first two seasons of the show, I’m still startled to realize that every event from Laura’s murder to Cooper’s possession unfolds over just one month.

Why does this feel so strange? The obvious answer is that we get to know these characters over a period of years, while we really only see them in action for a few weeks, and their interactions with one another end up carrying more weight than you might expect for people who, in some cases, met only recently. And television is the one medium that routinely creates that kind of disparity. It’s inherently impossible for a movie to take longer to watch than the events that it depicts—apart from a handful, like Run Lola Run or Vantage Point, that present scrambled timelines or stage the same action from multiple perspectives—and it usually compresses days or weeks of action within a couple of hours. With books, the length of the act of reading varies from one reader to the next, and we’re unlikely to find it particularly strange that it can take months to finish Ulysses, which recounts the events of a single day. It’s only television, particularly when experienced in its original run, that presents such a sharp contrast between narrative and emotional time, even if we don’t tend to worry about this with sitcoms, procedurals, and other nonserialized shows. (One interesting exception consists of shows set in high school or college, in which it’s awfully tempting to associate each season with an academic year, although there’s no reason why a series like Community couldn’t take place over a single semester.) Shows featuring children or teenagers have a built-in clock that reminds us of how time is passing in the real world, as Urkel or the Olsen twins progress inexorably toward puberty. And occasionally there’s an outlier like The Simpsons, in which a quarter of a century’s worth of storylines theoretically takes place within the same year or so.

But the way in which a serialized show can tell a story that occurs over a short stretch of narrative time while simultaneously drawing on the emotional energy that builds up over years is one of the unsung strengths of the entire medium. Our engagement with a favorite show that airs on a weekly basis isn’t just limited to the hour that we spend watching it every Sunday, but expands to fill much of the time in between. If a series really matters to us, it gets into our dreams. (I happened to miss the initial airing of this week’s episode because I was on vacation with my family, and I’ve been so conditioned to get my fix of Twin Peaks on a regular basis that I had a detailed dream about an imaginary episode that night—which hasn’t happened to me since I had to wait a week to watch the series finale of Breaking Bad. As far as I can remember, my dream involved the reappearance of Sheriff Harry Truman, who has been institutionalized for years, with his family and friends describing him euphemistically as “ill.” And I wouldn’t mention it here at all if this weren’t a show that has taught me to pay close attention to my dreamlife.) Many of us also spend time between episodes in reading reviews, discussing plot points online, and catching up with various theories about where it might go next. In a few cases, as with Westworld, this sort of active analysis can be detrimental to the experience of watching the show itself, if you see it as a mystery with clues that the individual viewer is supposed to crack on his or her own. For the most part, though, it’s an advantage, with time conferring an emotional weight that the show might not have otherwise had. As the world spins, the series stays where it was, and we’ve all changed in the meantime.

The revival of Twin Peaks takes this tendency and magnifies it beyond anything else we’ve seen before, with its fans investing it with twenty-five years of accumulated energy—and this doesn’t even account for the hundreds of hours that I spent listening to the show’s original soundtrack, which carries an unquantifiable duration of its own. And one of the charming things about this season is how Lynch and Frost seem to have gone through much the same experience themselves, mulling over their own work until stray lines and details take on a greater significance. When Dark Cooper goes to his shadowy meeting above a convenience store, it’s paying off on a line that Mike, the one-armed man, uttered in passing during a monologue from the first Bush administration. The same applies to the show’s references to a mysterious “Judy,” whom Jeffries mentioned briefly just before disappearing forever. I don’t think that these callbacks reflect a coherent plan that Lynch and Frost have been keeping in their back pockets for decades, but a process of going back to tease out meanings that even they didn’t know were there. Smart writers of serialized narratives learn to drop vague references into their work that might pay off later on. (Two of my favorite examples are Spock’s “Remember” at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the Second Foundation, which Isaac Asimov introduced in case he needed it in a subsequent installment.) What Twin Peaks is doing now is analogous to what the writers of Breaking Bad did when they set up problems that they didn’t know how to solve, trusting that they would figure it out eventually. The only difference is that Lynch and Frost, like the rest of us, have had more time to think about it. And it might take us another twenty-five years before we—or they—figure out what they were actually doing.

The sense of an ending

Note: This post discusses details from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

When I was working as a film critic in college, one of my first investments was a wristwatch that could glow in the dark. If you’re sitting through an interminable slog of a movie, sometimes you simply want to know how much longer the pain will last, and, assuming that you have a sense of the runtime, a watch puts a piece of narrative information at your disposal that has nothing to do with the events of the story itself. Even if you’re enjoying yourself, the knowledge that a film has twenty minutes left to run—which often happens if you’re watching it at home and staring right at the numbers on the display of your DVD player—affects the way you think about certain scenes. A climax plays differently near the end, as opposed to somewhere in the middle. The length of a work of art is a form of metadata that influences the way we watch movies and read books, as Douglas Hofstadter points out in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

You have undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories—but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can feel that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels…A lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book.

Not surprisingly, I tend to think about the passage of time the most when I’m not enjoying the story. When I’m invested in the experience, I’ll do the opposite: I’ll actively resist glancing at the clock or looking to see how much time has elapsed. When I know that the credits are going to roll no matter what within the next five minutes, it amounts to a spoiler. With Twin Peaks, which has a narrative that can seemingly be cut anywhere, like yard goods, I try not to think about how long I’ve been watching. Almost inevitably, the episode ends before I’m ready for it, in part because it provides so few of the usual cues that we’ve come to expect from television. There aren’t any commercial breaks, obviously, but the stories also don’t divide neatly into three or four acts. In the past, most shows, even those that aired without interruption on cable networks, followed certain structural conventions that allow us to guess when the story is coming to an end. (This is even more true of Hollywood movies, which, with their mandated beat sheets—the inciting incident, the midpoint, the false dawn, the crisis—practically tell the audience how much longer they need to pay attention, which may be the reason why such rules exist in the first place.) Now that streaming services allow serialized stories to run for hours without worrying about the narrative shape of individual episodes, this is less of an issue, and it can be a mixed blessing. But at its best, on a show like Twin Peaks, it creates a feeling of narrative suspension, cutting us off from any sense of the borders of the episode until the words Starring Kyle MacLachlan appear suddenly onscreen.

Yet there’s also another type of length of which we can’t help but be conscious, at least if we’re the kind of viewers likely to be watching Twin Peaks in the first place. We know that there are eighteen episodes in this season, the fourteenth of which aired last night, and the fact that we only have four hours left to go adds a degree of tension to the narrative that wouldn’t be there if we weren’t aware of it. This external pressure also depends on the knowledge that this is the only new season of the show that we’re probably going to get, which, given how hard it is to avoid this sort of news these days, is reasonable to expect of most fans. Maybe we’ve read the Rolling Stone interview in which David Lynch declared, in response to the question of whether there would be additional episodes: “I have no idea. It depends on how it goes over. You’re going to have to wait and see.” Or we’ve seen that David Nevins of Showtime said to Deadline: “It was always intended to be one season. A lot of people are speculating but there’s been zero contemplation, zero discussions other than fans asking me about it.” Slightly more promisingly, Kyle MacLachlan told the Hollywood Reporter: “I don’t know. David has said: ‘Everything is Twin Peaks.’ It leads me to believe that there are other stories to tell. I think it’s just a question of whether David and Mark want to tell them. I don’t know.” And Lynch even said to USA Today: “You never say never.” Still, it’s fair to say that the current season was conceived, written, and filmed to stand on its own, and until we know otherwise, we have to proceed under the assumption that this is the last time we’ll ever see these characters.

This has important implications for how we watch it from one week to the next. For one thing, it means that episodes near the end will play differently than they would have earlier in the season. Last night’s installment was relatively packed with incident—the revelation of the identity of Diane’s estranged half sister, Andy’s trip into the void, the green gardening glove, Monica Bellucci—but we’re also aware of how little time remains for the show to pay off any of these developments. Most series would have put an episode like this in the fourth slot, rather than the fourteenth, and given the show’s tendency to drop entire subplots for months, it leaves us keenly aware that many of these storylines may never be resolved. Every glimpse of a character, old or new, feels like a potential farewell. And with each episode that passes without the return of Agent Cooper, every minute in which we don’t see him increases our sense of urgency. (If this were the beginning of an open-ended run, rather than the presumptive final season, the response to the whole Dougie Jones thread would have been very different.) This information has nothing to do with the contents of the show itself, which, with one big exception, haven’t changed much since the premiere. But it’s hard not to think about it. In some ways, this may be the greatest difference between this season and the initial run, since there was always hope that the series would be renewed by ABC, or that Fire Walk With Me would tie off any loose ends. Unlike the first generation of fans, we know that this is it, and it can hardly fail to affect our impressions, even if Lynch still whispers in our heads: “You never say never.”

The secondary lights

Note: This post discusses plot details from the most recent episode of Twin Peaks.

When I first heard about the return of Twin Peaks, I have a feeling that I was picturing something pretty much like last night’s episode. There are some undeniably strange scenes, including Dark Cooper’s deadly arm-wrestling match and another extended interlude with Dougie Jones, but their weirdness is mostly contained, and they serve a fairly obvious purpose in moving along the story, even as these subplots continue to advance at drastically different speeds. But the second half is unusually devoted to giving us the kind of quiet updates on familiar characters that the revival has so far resisted, including Sarah Palmer, Nadine, Big Ed, Norma, Shelly, Bobby, Dr. Jacobi, Audrey, and James. None of these vignettes are particularly memorable or dramatic. As Big Ed says to Bobby at the diner: “Nothing happening here.” Yet after all we’ve been through this season, there’s something oddly comforting about watching the series pause, regather itself, and offer a homeopathic dose of nostalgia before it plunges into whatever the hell it has in mind for its last five episodes. And it may not be a coincidence that it focuses on characters from a corner of the show that hasn’t always been fondly remembered by fans. Two of its storylines from the second season—James’s dalliance with the widow and Nadine’s transformation into a high school girl with superhuman strength—have become proverbial for the show’s loss of direction. But we still care about these people, and when a graying James sings “Just You and I” at the end, it’s both an uncharacteristically specific piece of fan service and the closest the show has yet come to Mark Frost’s promised meditation on aging and time.

If the third season of Twin Peaks had been content to give us just this and nothing else, I think that a lot of fans, possibly including me, would have been more than satisfied. (I was curiously touched to see Nadine and Dr. Jacobi meet again, mostly because I haven’t thought about them much at all over the last two decades, and Big Ed’s solitary meal of soup and coffee underneath the closing credits may be the purest stretch of simple emotion that the season has allowed itself.) But if this had been all that the show had provided, we wouldn’t have known what we were missing. Instead, the series has repeatedly gone into strange, haunting, and frustrating places, and while I hesitate to attribute any motive to David Lynch and Mark Frost before seeing the big picture, this episode felt like both a breather and a nod at what else this season could have been. It’s like a piece of an earlier draft that somehow survived all the revisions. This doesn’t make it better or worse. But it also serves as a baseline to remind us of how far the show has strayed from whatever we thought it was going to be. When Norma’s new business partner advises her on franchising her brand—he tells her that the new restaurants are following her recipe to the letter, but have discretion over the ingredients—it’s tempting to read his words in the voice of a network executive: “Norma, you’re a real artist. But love doesn’t always turn a profit. It’s just about tweaking the formula to insure consistency and profitability.” It isn’t even clear if this new season of Twin Peaks is profitable, and it’s only consistent on its own terms. And while many of the ingredients are the same, the recipe has changed.

This applies as much to its leading man as to anything else. If you had asked me a few months ago how I would feel about a revival of Twin Peaks in which Dale Cooper never actually returned, I probably would have responded with something unprintable. But today I’m almost okay with it, and it’s no longer a theoretical consideration. Now that we’re well into the season’s closing stretch, it’s clear that whatever “return” the subtitle promised won’t take the form that we were expecting. (The fact that so many of us continued to hope otherwise, long after the series had demonstrated that it wasn’t going to be like anything we had anticipated, is a testament to the power of wishful thinking.) By stretching out Cooper’s transformation for so long—to the point where it feels less like a transition than a destination in itself—the series has complicated our response to it in fascinating ways. The Dougie Jones subplot has unexpectedly grown into the show’s emotional center, and it’s hard to imagine Cooper giving up his surrogate family. This dilemma is clearly intentional, but it’s thanks less to the writing than to Naomi Watts’s quietly dazzling work here. If this one seemingly minor part had been miscast, or if Watts didn’t approach even her reaction shots with so much commitment, the whole edifice of the show would start to seem shakier. It’s possible that Lynch and Frost simply lucked into the performance that they needed, but it’s more likely that they knew exactly what Watts would bring to the role, revealing aspects of herself as an actress that have remained all but unexplored since Mulholland Drive. By taking Cooper away, they’ve forced every other part of the show to work harder to compensate for it.

And that’s the primary difference between this version of the show and whatever else we might have been expecting—and also the reason why the rest of us aren’t Lynch or Frost. I’ve said elsewhere that it can be a valuable exercise to remove one crucial piece of a work of art to see see how it affects what remains. In Behind the Seen, the film editor Walter Murch refers to this as “blinking the key,” in an analogy drawn from lighting a film set:

In interior might have four different sources of light in it: the light from the window, the light from the table lamp, the light from the flashlight that the character is holding, and some other remotely sourced lights. The danger is that, without hardly trying, you can create a luminous clutter out of all that. There’s a shadow over here, so you put another light on that shadow to make it disappear. Well, that new light casts a shadow in the other direction. Suddenly there are fifteen lights and you only want four.

As a cameraman what you paradoxically do is have the gaffer turn off the main light, because it is confusing your ability to really see what you’ve got. Once you do that, you selectively turn off some of the lights and see what’s left. And you discover that, “OK, those other three lights I really don’t need at all—kill ’em.” But it can also happen that you turn off the main light and suddenly, “Hey, this looks great! I don’t need that main light after all, just these secondary lights. What was I thinking?”

Which does as good a job as anything of explaining this season of Twin Peaks. Cooper may or may not return. But even in his absence, we’ve been left with the secondary lights.

The conveyor belt

For all the endless discussion of various aspects of Twin Peaks, one quality that sometimes feels neglected is the incongruous fact that it had one of the most attractive casts in television history. In that respect—and maybe in that one alone—it was like just about every other series that ever existed. From prestige dramas to reality shows to local newscasts, the story of television has inescapably been that of beautiful men and women on camera. A show like The Hills, which was one of my guilty pleasures, seemed to be consciously trying to see how long it could coast on surface beauty alone, and nearly every series, ambitious or otherwise, has used the attractiveness of its actors as a commercial or artistic strategy. (In one of the commentary tracks on The Simpsons, a producer describes how a network executive might ask indirectly about the looks of the cast of a sitcom: “So how are we doing aesthetically?”) If this seemed even more pronounced on Twin Peaks, it was partially because, like Mad Men, it took its conventionally glamorous actors into dark, unpredictable places, and also because David Lynch had an eye for a certain kind of beauty, both male and female, that was more distinctive than that of the usual soap opera star. He’s continued this trend in the third season, which has been populated so far by such striking presences as Chrysta Bell, Ben Rosenfield, and Madeline Zima, and last night’s episode features an extended, very funny scene between a delighted Gordon Cole and a character played by Bérénice Marlohe, who, with her red lipstick and “très chic” spike heels, might be the platonic ideal of his type.

Lynch isn’t the first director to display a preference for actors, particularly women, with a very specific look—although he’s thankfully never taken it as far as his precursor Alfred Hitchcock did. And the notion that a film or television series can consist of little more than following around two beautiful people with a camera has a long and honorable history. My two favorite movies of my lifetime, Blue Velvet and Chungking Express, both understand this implicitly. It’s fair to say that the second half of the latter film would be far less watchable if it didn’t involve Tony Leung and Faye Wong, two of the most attractive people in the world, and Wong Kar-Wai, like so many filmmakers before him, uses it as a psychological hook to take us into strange, funny, romantic places. Blue Velvet is a much darker work, but it employs a similar lure, with the actors made up to look like illustrations of themselves. In a Time cover story on Lynch from the early nineties, Richard Corliss writes of Kyle MacLachlan’s face: “It is a startling visage, as pure of line as an art deco vase, with soft, all-American features and a comic-book hero’s jutting chin—you could park a Packard on it.” It echoes what Pauline Kael says of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet: “She even has the kind of nostrils that cover artists can represent accurately with two dots.” MacLachlan’s chin and Rossellini’s nose would have caught our attention in any case, but it’s also a matter of lighting and makeup, and Lynch shoots them to emphasize their roots in the pulp tradition, or, more accurately, in the subconscious store of images that we take from those sources. And the casting gets him halfway there.

This leaves us in a peculiar position when it comes to the third season of Twin Peaks, which, both by nature and by design, is about aging. Mark Frost said in an interview: “It’s an exercise in engaging with one of the most powerful themes in all of art, which is the ruthless passage of time…We’re all trapped in time and we’re all going to die. We’re all traveling along this conveyor belt that is relentlessly moving us toward this very certain outcome.” One of the first, unforgettable images from the show’s promotional materials was Kyle MacLachlan’s face, a quarter of a century older, emerging from the darkness into light, and our feelings toward these characters when they were younger inevitably shape the way we regard them now. I felt this strongly in two contrasting scenes from last night’s episode. It offers us our first extended look at Sarah Palmer, played by Grace Zabriskie, who delivers a freakout in a grocery store that reminds us of how much we’ve missed and needed her—it’s one of the most electrifying moments of the season. And we also finally see Audrey Horne again, in a brutally frustrating sequence that feels to me like the first time that the show’s alienating style comes off as a miscalculation, rather than as a considered choice. Audrey isn’t just in a bad place, which we might have expected, but a sad, unpleasant one, with a sham marriage and a monster of a son, and she doesn’t even know the worst of it yet. It would be a hard scene to watch with anyone, but it’s particularly painful when we set it against our first glimpse of Audrey in the original series, when we might have said, along with the Norwegian businessman at the Great Northern Hotel: “Excuse me, is there something wrong, young pretty girl?”

Yet the two scenes aren’t all that dissimilar. Both Sarah and Audrey are deeply damaged characters who could fairly say: “Things can happen. Something happened to me.” And I can only explain away the difference by confessing that I was a little in love in my early teens with Audrey. Using those feelings against us—much as the show resists giving us Dale Cooper again, even as it extravagantly develops everything around him—must have been what Lynch and Frost had in mind. And it isn’t the first time that this series has toyed with our emotions about beauty and death. The original dream girl of Twin Peaks, after all, was Laura Palmer herself, as captured in two of its most indelible images: Laura’s prom photo, and her body wrapped in plastic. (Sheryl Lee, like January Jones in Mad Men, was originally cast for her look, and only later did anyone try to find out whether or not she could act.) The contrast between Laura’s lovely features and her horrifying fate, in death and in the afterlife, was practically the motor on which the show ran. Her face still opens every episode of the revival, dimly visible in the title sequence, but it also ended each installment of the original run, gazing out from behind the prison bars of the closing credits to the strains of “Laura Palmer’s Theme.” In the new season, the episodes generally conclude with whatever dream pop band Lynch feels like showcasing, usually with a few cool women, and I wouldn’t want to give that up. But I also wonder whether we’re missing something when we take away Laura at the end. This season began with Cooper being asked to find her, but she often seems like the last thing on anyone’s mind. Twin Peaks never allowed us to forget her before, because it left us staring at her photograph each week, which was the only time that one of its beautiful faces seemed to be looking back at us.

The secret museum

A while back, I published a novel titled The Icon Thief. It was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic installation Étant Donnés, which Jasper Johns once called “the strangest work of art in any museum.” From the moment I first saw it, I knew that it was destined to form the basis of a conspiracy thriller, and since someone clearly had to do it eventually, I figured that it might as well be me. (As Lin-Manuel Miranda said to Grantland: “What’s the thing that’s not in the world that should be in the world?”) Here’s how two characters in the book describe it:

“I went to see the installation last year,” Tanya said. “It’s in its own room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When you go inside, you see an antique wooden door set into a brick archway. At first, it looks like there’s nothing else there. But if you go closer to the door, you see light coming through a pair of eyeholes. And if you look inside—”

“—you see a headless woman on a bed of dry grass,” Maddy said. “She’s nude, and her face is missing or obscured. In one hand, she’s holding a lamp. There’s a forest with a moving waterfall in the background. Duchamp built the figure himself and covered it in calfskin. The illusion is perfect.”

And while I’ve noted the affinities between David Lynch and Duchamp before, last night’s episode of Twin Peaks, which featured the discovery of a headless body in a field—with one hand raised in a familiar pose—is the clearest indication that I’ve seen so far of an ongoing conversation between these two remarkable artists.

I’m not the first one to propose that Lynch was influenced by Étant Donnés, a connection that the director recently seemed to confirm himself. Five years ago, Lynch produced a lithograph titled E.D., pictured above, which depicts a mirror image of the body from the installation, partially concealed by what looks a lot to me like a velvet curtain. In his spectacularly useful monograph on the piece, the scholar Michael R. Taylor writes:

American filmmaker David Lynch…attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1966 and 1967 and had a solo exhibition in 1969 at the Paley Library Gallery in Philadelphia, a time period that coincided with the public unveiling of Duchamp’s final work. Lynch’s interest in erotic tension and forbidden pleasure are particularly evident in the unsettling yet spellbindingly beautiful film Blue Velvet. In one particularly disturbing scene, the teenage character played by Kyle MacLachlan peers from behind the slats of a wardrobe door to witness a violent sexual encounter between a psychotic criminal (Dennis Hopper) and his female victim (Isabella Rossellini), apparently referencing earlier readings of Étant Donnés as a voyeuristic scene of sadistic violence.

In reality, Blue Velvet seems like less an intentional homage than a case of aesthetic convergence. Lynch has spoken of how the story came out of his youthful fantasies: “I had always wanted to sneak into a girl’s room to watch her into the night, and…maybe, at one point or another, I would see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery.” This is very close to the experience of seeing Étant Donnés itself, although, according to one source, “Lynch states to this day that he has not actually seen the piece in person.” And while I don’t think that he has any reason to lie, I also don’t see any particular reason to believe him.

In short, I was wrong when I wrote two weeks ago: “This might represent the only time in which my love of Twin Peaks will overlap with my professional interests.” And for those who are inclined to dig deeper, there are plenty of parallels between Lynch and Duchamp, aside from their obvious interest in voyeurism and the exposed female body. There’s the waterfall in the background, for one thing, and the fact that no photos of the interior were allowed to be published for fifteen years after it was unveiled—which reminds me a little of Laura telling Cooper that she’ll see him again in twenty-five years. But they also form a line of succession. Temperamentally, the two men couldn’t seem more different: Duchamp may have been “the most intelligent man of the twentieth century,” as Guillaume Apollinaire famously said, but his career came down to a series of chilly, not particularly funny jokes that can be appreciated solely on an intellectual level, not an emotional or visceral one. In other words, he’s very French. By comparison, Lynch is quintessentially American, and even his weirdest visual byways come from a place of real feeling. He’s not as penetrating or rigorous as Duchamp, but far more accessible and likable. On a more fundamental level, though, they can start to seem like brothers. Duchamp spent two decades building Étant Donnés in secret, and there’s something appealingly homemade about the result, with its trompe l’oeil effects cobbled together out of bits of wire and a biscuit tin. Lynch has always been the same sort of tinkerer, and he’s happiest while working on some oddball project at home, which makes it all the more amazing that he’s been entrusted on a regular basis with such huge projects. When you try to imagine Duchamp tackling Dune, you get a sense of how unlikely Lynch’s career has really been.

And the way in which Lynch has quietly revisited Étant Donnés at unpredictable intervals beautifully illustrates how influence works in the real world. When the installation was first put on display in Philadelphia, Lynch was in his early twenties, and even if he didn’t see it in person, it would have been hard to avoid hearing about it at length in art circles. It was a scandal, and a striking image or a work of art encountered at a formative age has a way of coming back into the light at odd times. I should know: I spent my teenage years thinking about Lynch, sketching images from his movies, and listening to Julee Cruise. Every now and then, I’ll see something in my own work that emerges from that undercurrent, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time. (There’s a scene in The Icon Thief in which Maddy hides in a closet from the villain, and it’s only as I type this that I realize that it’s an amalgam of Lynch and Duchamp—Maddy fights him off with a snow shovel inspired by Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm.) And Lynch seems to have been haunted by his spiritual predecessor as much as he has haunted me. Lynch has said of his early interest in art: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it. Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” He claims that it was Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit that inspired him to construct his existence along those lines, but Duchamp was the best possible model. Of the countless artists who followed his example, Lynch just happens to be the one who became rich and famous. And as we enter the closing stretch of Twin Peaks, I can think of no better guide than Duchamp himself, who once said, in response to a question about what his work meant: “There is no solution because there is no problem.”

The genius naïf

Last night, after watching the latest episode of Twin Peaks, I turned off the television before the premiere of the seventh season of Game of Thrones. This is mostly because I only feel like subscribing to one premium channel at a time, but even if I still had HBO, I doubt that I would have tuned in. I gave up on Game of Thrones a while back, both because I was uncomfortable with its sexual violence and because I felt that the average episode had degenerated into a holding pattern—it cut between storylines simply to remind us that they still existed, and it relied on unexpected character deaths and bursts of bloodshed to keep the audience awake. The funny thing, of course, is that you could level pretty much the same charges against the third season of Twin Peaks, which I’m slowly starting to feel may be the television event of the decade. Its images of violence against women are just as unsettling now as they were a quarter of a century ago, when Madeline Ferguson met her undeserved end; it cuts from one subplot to another so inscrutably that I’ve compared its structure to that of a sketch comedy show; and it has already delivered a few scenes that rank among the goriest in recent memory. So what’s the difference? If you’re feeling generous, you can say that one is an opportunistic display of popular craftsmanship, while the other is a singular, if sometimes incomprehensible, artistic vision. And if you’re less forgiving, you can argue that I’m being hard on one show that I concluded was jerking me around, while indulging another that I wanted badly to love.

It’s a fair point, although I don’t think it’s necessarily true, based solely on my experience of each show in the moment. I’ve often found my attention wandering during even solid episodes of Game of Thrones, while I’m rarely less than absorbed for the full hour of Twin Peaks, even though I’d have trouble explaining why. But there’s no denying the fact that I approach each show in a different state of mind. One of the most obvious criticisms of Twin Peaks, then and now, is that its pedigree prompts viewers to overlook or forgive scenes that might seem questionable within in a more conventional series. (There have been times, I’ll confess, when I’ve felt like Homer Simpson chuckling “Brilliant!” and then confessing: “I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.”) Yet I don’t think we need to apologize for this. The history of the series, the track record of its creators, and everything implied by its brand mean that most viewers are willing to give it the benefit the doubt. David Lynch and Mark Frost are clearly aware of their position, and they’ve leveraged it to the utmost, resulting in a show in which they’re free to do just about anything they like. It’s hard to imagine any other series getting away with this, but’s also hard to imagine another show persuading a million viewers each week to meet it halfway. The implicit contract between Game of Thrones and its audience is very different, which makes the show’s lapses harder to forgive. One of the great fascinations of Lynch’s career is whether he even knows what he’s doing half the time, and it’s much less interesting to ask this question of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, any more than it is of Chris Carter.

By now, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lynch knows exactly what he’s doing, but that confusion is still central to his appeal. Pauline Kael’s review of Blue Velvet might have been written of last night’s Twin Peaks:

You wouldn’t mistake frames from Blue Velvet for frames from any other movie. It’s an anomaly—the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition…It’s easy to forget about the plot, because that’s where Lynch’s naïve approach has its disadvantages: Lumberton’s subterranean criminal life needs to be as organic as the scrambling insects, and it isn’t. Lynch doesn’t show us how the criminals operate or how they’re bound to each other. So the story isn’t grounded in anything and has to be explained in little driblets of dialogue. But Blue Velvet has so much aural-visual humor and poetry that it’s sustained despite the wobbly plot and the bland functional dialogue (that’s sometimes a deliberate spoof of small-town conventionality and sometimes maybe not)…Lynch skimps on these commercial-movie basics and fouls up on them, too, but it’s as if he were reinventing movies.

David Thomson, in turn, called the experience of seeing Blue Velvet a moment of transcendence: “A kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director had made the medium alive and dangerous again.”

Twin Peaks feels more alive and dangerous than Game of Thrones ever did, and the difference, I think, lies in our awareness of the effects that the latter is trying to achieve. Even at its most shocking, there was never any question about what kind of impact it wanted to have, as embodied by the countless reaction videos that it inspired. (When you try to imagine videos of viewers reacting to Twin Peaks, you get a sense of the aesthetic abyss that lies between these two shows.) There was rarely a scene in which the intended emotion wasn’t clear, and even when it deliberately sought to subvert our expectations, it was by substituting one stimulus and response for another—which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t effective, or that there weren’t moments, at its best, that affected me as powerfully as any I’ve ever seen. Even the endless succession of “Meanwhile, back at the Wall” scenes had a comprehensible structural purpose. On Twin Peaks, by contrast, there’s rarely any sense of how we’re supposed to be feeling about any of it. Its violence is shocking because it doesn’t seem to serve anything, certainly not anyone’s character arc, and our laughter is often uncomfortable, so that we don’t know if we’re laughing at the situation onscreen, at the show, or at ourselves. It may not be an experiment that needs to be repeated ever again, any more than Blue Velvet truly “reinvented” anything over the long run, except my own inner life. But at a time when so many prestige dramas seem content to push our buttons in ever more expert and ruthless ways, I’m grateful for a show that resists easy labels. Lynch may or may not be a genius naïf, but no ordinary professional could have done what he does here.

The search for the zone

Note: This post discusses plot points from Twin Peaks.

Last night’s episode of Twin Peaks featured the surprise return of Bill Hastings, the high school principal in Buckhorn, South Dakota who is somehow connected to the headless body of Major Garland Briggs. We hadn’t seen Hastings, played by Matthew Lillard, since the season premiere, and his reappearance marked one of the first times that the show has gone back to revisit an earlier subplot. Hastings, we’re told, maintained a blog called The Search for the Zone, in which he chronicled his attempts to contact other planes of reality, and the site really exists, of course, in the obligatory manner of such online ephemera as Save Walter White and the defunct What Badgers Eat. It’s a marketing impulse that seems closer to Mark Frost than David Lynch—if either of them were even involved—and I normally wouldn’t even mention it at all. Along with its fake banner ads and retro graphics, however, the page includes a section titled “Heinlein Links,” with a picture of Robert A. Heinlein and a list of a few real sites, including my friends over at The Heinlein Society. As “Hastings” writes: “Science Fiction has been a source of enjoyment for me since I was ten years old, when I read Orphans of the Sky.” Frankly, this already feels like a dead end, and, like the references to L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, it recalls some of the show’s least intriguing byways. (Major Briggs and the villainous Windom Earle, you might recall, were involved in Project Blue Book, the study of unidentified flying objects conducted by the Air Force, but the thread didn’t really lead anywhere, except perhaps to set off a train of thought for Chris Carter.) I enjoyed last night’s episode, but it was the most routine installment of the season so far, and this attempt at virality might be the most conventional touch of all. But since this might represent the only time in which my love of Twin Peaks will overlap with my professional interests, I should probably dig into it.

Orphans of the Sky, which was originally published as the two novellas “Universe” and “Common Sense” in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941, is arguably the most famous treatment of one of the loveliest ideas in science fiction—the generation starship, a spacecraft designed to travel for centuries or millennia until it reaches its destination. (Extra points if the passengers forget that they’re on a spaceship at all.) It’s also one of the few stories by Heinlein that can be definitively traced back to an idea provided by the editor John W. Campbell. On September 20, 1940, Campbell wrote to Heinlein with a detailed outline of the premise:

Sometime along about 3763, an expedition is finally launched from Earth to outer space—and I mean outer space…[The ship is] five miles in diameter, intended for about two thousand inhabitants, and equipped with gardens, pasturage, etc., for animals. It’s a self-sustaining economy…They’re bound for Alpha Centauri at a gradually building speed…The instruments somehow develop a systematic error, due to imperfect compensation for the rotation; they miss Centauri, plunging past it too rapidly and too far away to make landing. A brief revolt leads to the death of the few men aboard fully competent to make the necessary changes of mechanism for changing course and backtracking to Centauri. The ship can only plunge on.

But the story would be laid somewhere about 1430 After the Beginning. The characters are the remote descendants of those who took off, centuries before, from Earth. And they’re savages. The High Chiefs are the priest-engineers, who handle the small amount of non-automatic machinery…There are princes and nobles—and dull peasants. There are monsters, too, who are usually killed at birth, since every woman giving birth is required to present her baby before an inspector. That’s because of mutations, some of which are unspeakably hideous. One of which might, however, be a superman, and the hero of the story.

If you’ve read “Universe,” you can see that Campbell laid out most of it here, and that Heinlein used nearly all of it, down to the smallest details, although he later played down the extent of Campbell’s influence. (Decades later, in the collection Expanded Universe, Heinlein flatly, and falsely, stated that the unrelated serial Sixth Column “was the only story of mine ever influenced to any marked degree by John W. Campbell, Jr.”) But the two men also chose to emphasize different aspects of the narrative, in ways that reflected their interests and personalities. Most of Campbell’s letter, when it wasn’t talking about the design of the spacecraft itself, was devoted to the idea of the “scientisthood,” or a religion founded on a misinterpretation of science:

They’ve lost science, save for the priest class, who study it as a religion, and horribly misunderstand it because they learn from books written by and for people who dwelt on a planet near a sun. Here, the laws of gravity are meaningless, astronomy senseless, most of science purely superstition from a forgotten time. Naturally, there was a religious schism, a building-up of a new bastard science-religion that based itself on a weird and unnatural blending of the basic laws of science and the basic facts of their own experience…Anything is possible, and might be darned interesting. Particularly the queer, fascinating system of science-religion and so forth they’d have to live by.

The idea of a religion based on a misreading of the textbook Basic Modern Physics is a cute inversion of one of Campbell’s favorite plot devices—a fake religion deliberately dreamed up by scientists, which we see in such stories as the aforementioned Sixth Column, Isaac Asimov’s “Bridle and Saddle,” and Fritz Leiber, Jr.’s Gather, Darkness. In “Universe,” Heinlein touches on this briefly, but he was far more interested in the jarring perceptual and conceptual shift that the premise implied, which tied back into his interest in Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics: how do you come to terms with the realization that the only world you’ve ever known is really a small part of an incomprehensibly vaster reality?

“Universe” is an acknowledged landmark of the genre, although its sequel, “Common Sense,” feels more like work for hire. It isn’t hard to relate it to Hastings, whose last blog post reads in part:

We will have to reconcile with the question that if someone from outside our familiar world gains access to our plane of existence, what ramifications will that entail? There might be forces at work from deep dimensional space, or from the future…or are these one in [sic] the same?

But I’d hesitate to take the Heinlein connection too far. Twin Peaks—and most of David Lynch’s other work—has always asked us to look past the surface of things to an underlying pattern that is stranger than we can imagine, but it has little in common with the kind of cold, slightly dogmatic rationalism that we tend to see in Campbell and early Heinlein. Both men, like Korzybski or even Ayn Rand, claimed that they were only trying to get readers to think for themselves, but in practice, they were markedly impatient of anyone who disagreed with their answers. Lynch and Mark Frost’s brand of transcendence is looser, more dreamlike, and more intuitive, and its insights are more likely to be triggered by a song, the taste of coffee, or a pair of red high heels than by logical analysis. (When the show tries to lay out the pieces in a more systematic fashion, as it did last night, it doesn’t always work.) But there’s something to be said for the idea that beyond our familiar world, there’s an objective reality that would be blindingly obvious if we only managed to see it. With all the pop cultural baggage carried by Twin Peaks, it’s easy to forget that it’s also from the director and star of Dune, which took the opposite approach, with a unified past and future visible to the superhuman Kwisatz Haderach. Yet Lynch’s own mystical inclinations are more modest and humane, and neither Heinlein nor Frank Herbert have much in common with the man whose favorite psychoactive substances have always been coffee and cigarettes. And I’d rather believe in a world in which the owls are not what they seem than one in which nothing at all is what it seems. But there’s one line from “Universe” that can serve as a quiet undertone to much of Lynch’s career, and I’d prefer to leave it there: “He knew, subconsciously, that, having seen the stars, he would never be happy again.”

The X factor

On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an article on the absence of women on the writing staff of The X-Files. Its author, Sonia Rao, pointed out that all of the writers for the upcoming eleventh season—including creator Chris Carter, Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, James Wong, and three newcomers who had worked on the series as assistants—are men, adding: “It’s an industry tradition for television writers to rise through the ranks in this manner, so Carter’s choices were to be expected. But in 2017, it’s worth asking: How is there a major network drama that’s so dominated by male voices?” It’s a good question. The network didn’t comment, but Gillian Anderson responded on Twitter: “I too look forward to the day when the numbers are different.” In the same tweet, she noted that out of over two hundred episodes, only two were directed by women, one of whom was Anderson herself. (The other was Michelle MacLaren, who has since gone on to great things in partnership with Vince Gilligan.) Not surprisingly, there was also a distinct lack of female writers on the show’s original run, with just a few episodes written by women, including Anderson, Sara B. Cooper, and Kim Newton, the latter of whom, along with Darin Morgan, was responsible for one of my favorite installments, “Quagmire.” And you could argue that their continued scarcity is due to a kind of category selection, in which we tend to hire people who look like those who have filled similar roles in the past. It’s largely unconscious, but no less harmful, and I say this as a fan of a show that means more to me than just about any other television series in history.

I’ve often said elsewhere that Dana Scully might be my favorite fictional character in any medium, but I’m also operating from a skewed sample set. If you’re a lifelong fan of a show like The X-Files, you tend to repeatedly revisit your favorite episodes, but you probably never rewatch the ones that were mediocre or worse, which leads to an inevitable distortion. My picture of Scully is constructed out of four great Darin Morgan episodes, a tiny slice of the mytharc, and a dozen standout casefiles like “Pusher” and even “Triangle.” I’ve watched each of these episodes countless times, so that’s the version of the series that I remember—but it isn’t necessarily the show that actually exists. A viewer who randomly tunes into a rerun on syndication is much more likely to see Scully on an average week than in “War of the Coprophages,” and in many episodes, unfortunately, she’s little more than a foil for her partner or a convenient victim to be rescued. (Darin Morgan, who understood Scully better than anyone, seems to have gravitated toward her in part out of his barely hidden contempt for Mulder.) Despite these flaws, Scully still came to mean the world to thousands of viewers, including young women whom she inspired to go into medicine and the sciences. Gillian Anderson herself is deeply conscious of this, and this seems to have contributed to her refreshing candor here, as well as on such related issues as the fact that she was initially offered half of David Duchovny’s salary to return. Anderson understands exactly how much she means to us, and she’s conducted herself accordingly.

The fact that the vast majority of the show’s episodes were written by men also seems to have fed into one of its least appealing qualities, which was how Scully’s body—and particularly her reproductive system—was repeatedly used as a plot point. Part of this was accidental: Anderson’s pregnancy had to be written into the second season, and the writers ended up with an abduction arc with a medical subtext that became hopelessly messy later on. It may not have been planned that way, any more than anything else on this show ever was, but it had the additional misfortune of being tethered to a conspiracy storyline for which it was expected to provide narrative clarity. After the third season, nobody could keep track of the players and their motivations, so Scully’s cancer and fertility issues were pressed into service as a kind of emotional index to the rest. These were pragmatic choices, but they were also oddly callous, especially as their dramatic returns continued to diminish. And in its use of a female character’s suffering to motivate a male protagonist, it was unfortunately ahead of the curve. When you imagine flipping the narrative so that Mulder, not Scully, was one whose body was under discussion, you see how unthinkable this would have been. It’s exactly the kind of unexamined notion that comes out of a roomful of writers who are all operating with the same assumptions. It isn’t just a matter of taste or respect, but of storytelling, and in retrospect, the show’s steady decline seems inseparable from the monotony of its creative voices.

And this might be the most damning argument of all. Even before the return of Twin Peaks reminded us of how good this sort of revival could be, the tenth season of The X-Files was a crushing disappointment. It had exactly one good episode, written, not coincidentally, by Darin Morgan, and featuring Scully at her sharpest and most joyous. Its one attempt at a new female character, despite the best efforts of Lauren Ambrose, was a frustrating misfire. Almost from the start, it was clear that Chris Carter didn’t have a secret plan for saving the show, and that he’d already used up all his ideas over the course of nine increasingly tenuous seasons. It’s tempting to say that the show had burned though all of its possible plotlines, but that’s ridiculous. This was a series that had all of science fiction, fantasy, and horror at its disposal, combined with the conspiracy thriller and the procedural, and it should have been inexhaustible. It wasn’t the show that got tired, but its writers. Opening up the staff to a more diverse set of talents would have gone a long way toward addressing this. (The history of science fiction is as good an illustration as any of the fact that diversity is good for everyone, not simply its obvious beneficiaries. Editors and showrunners who don’t promote it end up paying a creative price in the long run.) For a show about extreme possibilities, it settled for formula distressingly often, and it would have benefited from adding a wider range of perspectives—particularly from writers with backgrounds that have historically offered insight into such matters as dealing with oppressive, impersonal institutions, which is what the show was allegedly about. It isn’t too late. But we might have to wait for the twelfth season.

White Sands, Black Lodge

Note: This post discusses details of last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

Before the premiere of the third season of Twin Peaks, I occasionally found myself wondering how it could possibly stand out in an entertainment landscape that it had helped to create. After all, we’re living in an era of peak television—it’s right there in the name—and it seemed possible that its “quirkiness,” which now seems like a comically inadequate word, would come across as more of the same. By now, it’s clear that my fears were groundless. Last night’s episode was one of the strangest things I’ve ever witnessed in any medium, and it confirms that this series is still capable of heady stylistic and conceptual surprises. The first ten minutes are as close as it gets to business as usual, with Dark Cooper ensnared by a surprisingly routine double cross. Then it gets deeply weird, with an extended musical guest performance by Nine Inch Nails and a Kubrickian star gate sequence emerging from the atomic bomb at Trinity, with some atypically good special effects. (David Lynch is usually happier with camera tricks that he seems to have cooked up in his basement.) The rest is alternately bewildering, lovely, horrifying, slow, incomprehensible, and hypnotic, and it just keeps going. Any one element wouldn’t have been totally out of place, but taken together, it’s the longest sequence of its kind in Lynch’s entire body of work, and it aired on Showtime. We aren’t even halfway through this season, but it feels like a hinge moment, the dividing line in which all the ways we thought we were learning how to watch this show literally blew up in our faces. A girl also swallows a giant bug.

Yet if this was possibly the weirdest hour of television I’ve ever seen, it’s also the most conventional episode of the season so far. This observation deeply annoyed my wife when I came up with it last night, but hear me out. Instead of a collection of sketches and dead ends, this was a hugely eventful episode in terms of how it affected its viewers, and it was full of information—weird information, but information nonetheless. Without trying to parse or interpret the images themselves, I feel comfortable in saying that they’re the equivalent of an origin story, however vague the details might be. In the extended scene between the Giant and the new character identified in the closing credits as Señorita Dido, there’s even the implication that the whole series is about restoring balance to the Force, with Laura Palmer’s spirit migrating earthward, decades before her birth, in response to the rise of evil. Even if we end our speculations here, this is more data than we’ve ever been given about the show’s backstory. The very idea of a “mythology” seems uncharacteristically prosaic for a series that has always stubbornly resisted being pinned down, but in its period setting, it feels kind of like one of those episodes of The X-Files in which unexplained events unfold decades ago in the New Mexico desert. (Between Alamogordo and Roswell, that state has come to play a very specific role in the American collective unconscious, and I almost wish that Twin Peaks had gone elsewhere for inspiration.)

In other words, if you’re approaching Twin Peaks as a code or a series of clues, this episode gave you more material than any previous installment. In its particulars, it was as crazy as hell, but its functional role was curiously straightforward. And while it’s always a fool’s game to pick apart the contributions of the show’s creators, the impulse to ground the story in the past feels less like Lynch than like Mark Frost, who published an entire book last year, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, that went over similar ground. (I haven’t read it, but a quick browse reveals that it mentions L. Ron Hubbard and his sojourn with the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons, which means that I’ll probably need to take a closer look.) Frost has an odd resume, with a body of work since the show’s initial run that includes conspiracy thrillers, nonfiction books about golf, and the scripts to the first two Fantastic Four movies. He has an unusual interest in the past, but it feels literal-minded in comparison to Lynch, who uses the iconography of previous eras as a backdrop for dreams. Their interplay, like that of Lynch and his other longtime collaborator Barry Gifford, yield results that are strikingly different from what you get when the director is off working on his own. Among other things, their cultural reference points—like The Wizard of Oz in Wild at Heart—are more transparent. And we seem to be reaching a point in the series in which that shape is becoming incrementally more visible.

That’s why I’m slightly wary of what comes next, as much as I loved what I saw here. I don’t want Twin Peaks to become a crossword puzzle, or to have a coherent mythology that can be picked apart online. It was always most fascinating when it hinted at the existence of a pattern that lay behind the surface of the series, and even the viewer’s own life—a dream world, overheard in the soundtrack, that grows more elusive the older we get, and then revisits us in old age. At its best, it was a show that seemed knew something that we didn’t. If anything, it may have just shown us too much, although that depends on what happens next. The episode ends without returning us to the present, but I’d be very happy if, when it picks up next week, we moved on without referring to any of it, as if it were an extended footnote or appendix that didn’t need to be read to appreciate the text. It’s information for the audience, not the characters, and the nice thing about this revival is that it allows for the kind of massive structural digression that wouldn’t have been feasible twenty-five years ago. (Some of the least successful scenes in the original run of Twin Peaks involve Cooper and Sheriff Truman speculating about the true nature of the Black Lodge. The fact that we just got so much backstory in visual form hopefully removes the need to spell it out in the dialogue. And I only wish that The X-Files had taken the same approach.) It was brilliant and unforgettable. And I hope that we never have to talk about it again.

Invitation to look

Note: This post discusses plot elements from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

In order to understand the current run of Twin Peaks, it helps to think back to the most characteristic scene from the finale of the second season, which was also the last episode of the show to air for decades. I’m not talking about Cooper in the Black Lodge, or any of the messy, unresolved melodrama that swirled around the other characters, or even the notorious cliffhanger. I mean the scene at Twin Peaks Savings and Loan that lingers interminably on the figure of Dell Mibbler, an ancient, doddering bank manager whom we haven’t seen before and will never see again, as he crosses the floor, in a single unbroken shot, to get a glass of water for Audrey. Even at the time, when the hope of a third season was still alive, many viewers must have found the sequence agonizingly pointless. Later, when it seemed like this was the last glimpse of these characters that we would ever have, it felt even less explicable. With only so many minutes in any given episode, each one starts to seem precious, especially in a series finale, and this scene took up at least two of them. (Now that we’ve finally gotten another season, I’m not sure how it will play in the future, but I suspect that it will feel like what it must have been intended to be—a precarious, unnecessary, but still pretty funny gag.) Anecdotally speaking, for a lot of viewers, the third season is starting to feel like that bank scene played over and over again. In theory, we have plenty of room for digressions, with eighteen hours of television to fill. But as the tangents and apparent dead ends continue to pile up, like the scene last night in which the camera spends a full minute lovingly recording an employee sweeping up at the Roadhouse, it sometimes feels like we’ve been tricked into watching Dell Mibbler: The Return.

Yet this has been David Lynch’s style from the beginning. Lynch directed only a few hours of the initial run of Twin Peaks, but his work, particularly on the pilot, laid down a template that other writers and directors did their best to follow. And many of the show’s iconic images—the streetlight at the corner where Laura was last seen, the waterfall, the fir trees blowing in the wind—consist of silent shots that are held for slightly longer than the viewer would expect. One of the oddly endearing things about the original series was how such eerie moments were intercut with scenes that, for all their quirkiness, were staged, shot, and edited more or less like any other network drama. The new season hasn’t offered many such respites, which is part of why it still feels like it’s keeping itself at arm’s length from its own history. For better or worse, Lynch doesn’t have to compromise here. (Last night’s episode was perhaps the season’s most plot-heavy installment to date, and it devoted maybe ten minutes to advancing the story.) Instead, Lynch is continuing to educate us, as he’s done erratically throughout his career, on how to slow down and pay attention. Not all of his movies unfold at the same meditative pace: Blue Velvet moves like a thriller, in part because of the circumstances of its editing, and Wild at Heart seems like an attempt, mostly unsuccessful, to sustain that level of frantic motion for the film’s entire length. But when we think back to the scenes from his work that we remember most vividly, they tend to be static shots that are held so long that they burn themselves into our imagination. And as movies and television shows become more anxious to keep the viewer’s interest from straying for even a second, Twin Peaks remains an invitation to look and contemplate.

It also invites us to listen, and while much of Lynch’s fascination with stillness comes from his background as a painter, it also emerges from his interest in sound. Lynch is credited as a sound designer on Twin Peaks, as he has been for most of his movies, and the show is suffused with what you might call the standard-issue Lynchian noise—a low, barely perceptible hum of static that occasionally rises to an oceanic roar. (In last night’s episode, Benjamin Horne and the character played by Ashley Judd try vainly to pin down the source of a similar hum at the Great Northern, and while it might eventually lead somewhere, it also feels like a subtle joke at Lynch’s own expense.) The sound is often associated with electronic or recording equipment, like the video cameras that are trained on the glass cube in the season premiere. My favorite instance is in Blue Velvet, when Jeffrey stumbles across the tableau of two victims in Dorothy’s apartment, one with his ear cut off, the other still standing with his brains shot out. There’s a hum coming from the shattered television set, and it’s pitched at so low a level that it’s almost subliminal, except to imperceptibly increase our anxiety. You only really become aware of it when it stops, after Jeffrey closes the door behind him and, a little later, when Frank shoots out the television tube. But you can’t hear it at all unless everything else onscreen is deathly quiet. It emerges from stillness, as if it were a form of background noise that surrounds us all the time, but is only audible when the rest of the world fades away. I don’t know whether Lynch’s fascination with this kind of sound effect came out of his interest in stillness or the other way around, and the most plausible explanation is that it all arose from the same place. But you could build a convincing reading of his career around the two meanings of the word “static.”

Taken together, the visual and auditory elements invite us to look on in silence, which may be a reflection of Lynch’s art school background. (I don’t know if Lynch was directly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, a work of art that obsessed me so much that I wrote an entire novel about it, but they both ask us to stand and contemplate the inexplicable without speaking. And when you see the installation in person at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as I’ve done twice, the memory is inevitably entwined with the low hum of the room’s climate control system.) By extending this state of narrative suspension to the breaking point, Twin Peaks is pushing in a direction that even the most innovative prestige dramas have mostly avoided, and it still fascinates me. The real question is when and how the silence will be broken. Lynch’s great hallmark is his use of juxtaposition, not just of light and dark, which horrified Roger Ebert so much in Blue Velvet, but of silence and sudden, violent action. We’ve already seen hints of this so far in Twin Peaks, particularly in the scenes involving the murderous Ike the Spike, who seems to be playing the same role, at random intervals, that a figure of similarly small stature did at the end of Don’t Look Now. And I have a feeling that the real payoff is yet to come. This might sound like the wishful thinking of a viewer who is waiting for the show’s teasing hints to lead somewhere, but it’s central to Lynch’s method, in which silence and stillness are most effective when framed by noise and movement. The shot of the two bodies in Dorothy’s apartment leads directly into the most dramatically satisfying—and, let it be said, most conventional—climax of Lynch’s career. And remember Dell Mibbler? At the end of the scene, the bank blows up.

Moving through time

Note: Spoilers follow for last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

For all the debate over how best to watch a television show these days, which you see argued with various degrees of seriousness, the options that you’re offered are fairly predictable. If it’s a show on a streaming platform, you’re presented with all of it at once; if it’s on a cable or broadcast channel, you’re not. Between those two extremes, you’re allowed to structure your viewing experience pretty much however you like, and it isn’t just a matter of binging the whole season or parceling out each episode one week at a time. Few of us past the age of thirty have the ability or desire to watch ten hours of anything in one sitting, and the days of slavish faithfulness to an appointment show are ending, too—even if you aren’t recording it on DVR, you can usually watch it online the next day. Viewers are customizing their engagement with a series in ways that would have been unthinkable just fifteen years ago, and networks are experimenting with having it both ways, by airing shows on a weekly basis while simultaneously making the whole season available online. If there’s pushback, it tends to be from creators who are used to having their shows come out sequentially, like Dan Harmon, who managed to get Yahoo to release the sixth season of Community one episode at a time, as if it were still airing on Thursdays at eight. (Yahoo also buried the show on its site so that even fans had trouble figuring out that it was there, but that’s another story, as well as a reminder, in case we needed one, that such decisions aren’t always logical or considered.)

Twin Peaks, for reasons that I’ll discuss in a moment, doesn’t clearly lend itself to one approach or another, which may be why its launch was so muddled. Showtime premiered the first two hours on a Sunday evening, then quietly made the next two episodes available online, although this was so indifferently publicized that it took me a while to hear about it. It then ran episodes three and four yet again the following week, despite the fact that many of the show’s hardcore fans—and there’s hardly anyone else watching—would have seen them already, only to finally settle into the weekly delivery schedule that David Lynch had wanted in the first place. As a result, it stumbled a bit out of the gate, at least as far as shaping a wider conversation was concerned. You weren’t really sure who was watching those episodes or when. (To be fair, in the absence of blockbuster ratings, the existence of viewers watching at different times is what justifies this show’s existence.) As I’ve argued elsewhere, this isn’t a series that necessarily benefits from collective analysis, but there’s a real, if less tangible, emotional benefit to be had from collective puzzlement. It’s the understanding that a lot of other people are feeling the same things that you are, at roughly the same time, and that you have more in common with them than you will with anybody else in the world. I’m overstating it, but only a little. Whenever I meet someone who bought Julee Cruise’s first album or knows why Lil was wearing a sour face, I feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit. Twin Peaks started out as a huge cultural phenomenon, dwindling only gradually into a cult show that provided its adherents with their own set of passwords. And I think that it would have had a better chance of happening again now if Showtime had just aired all the episodes once a week from the beginning.

Yet I understand the network’s confusion, because this is both a show that needs to be seen over a period of time and one that can’t be analyzed until we’ve seen the full picture. Reviewing it must be frustrating. Writing about it here, I don’t need to go into much detail, and I’m free to let my thoughts wander wherever they will, but a site like the New York Times or The A.V. Club carries its own burden of expectations, which may not make sense for a show like this. A “recap” of an episode of Twin Peaks is almost a contradiction in terms. You can’t do much more than catalog the disconnected scenes, indulge in some desultory theorizing, and remind readers that they shouldn’t jump to any conclusions until they’ve seen more. It’s like reviewing Mulholland Drive ten minutes at a time—which is ridiculous, but it’s also exactly the position in which countless critics have found themselves. For ordinary viewers, there’s something alluring about the constant suspension of judgment that it requires: I’ve found it as absorbing as any television series I’ve seen in years. Despite its meditative pacing, an episode seems to go by more quickly than most installments of a more conventional show, even the likes of Fargo or Legion, which are clearly drawing from the same pool of ideas. (Noah Hawley is only the latest creator and showrunner to try to deploy the tone of Twin Peaks in more recognizable stories, and while he’s better at it than most, it doesn’t make the effort any less thankless.) But it also hamstrings the online critic, who has no choice but to publish a weekly first draft on the way to a more reasoned evaluation. Everything you write about Twin Peaks, even, or especially, if you love it, is bound to be provisional until you can look at it as a whole.

Still, there probably is a best way to watch Twin Peaks, which happens to be the way in which I first saw it. You stumble across it years after it originally aired, in bits and pieces, and with a sense that you’re the only person you know who is encountering it in quite this way. A decade from now, my daughter, or someone like her, will discover this show in whatever format happens to be dominant, and she’ll watch it alone. (I also suspect that she’ll view it after having internalized the soundtrack, which doesn’t even exist yet in this timeline.) It will deprive her, inevitably, of a few instants of shared bewilderment or revelation that can only occur when you’re watching a show on its first airing. When Albert Rosenfeld addresses the woman in the bar as Diane, and she turns around to reveal Laura Dern in a blonde wig, it’s as thrilling a moment as I’ve felt watching television in a long time—and by the way Lynch stages it, it’s clear that he knows it, too. My daughter won’t experience this. But there’s also something to be said for catching up with a show that meant a lot to people a long time ago, with your excitement tinged with a melancholy that you’re too late to have been a part of it. I frankly don’t know how often I’ll go back to watch this season again, any more than I’m inclined to sit through Inland Empire, which I loved, a second time. But I’m oddly consoled by the knowledge that it will continue to exist and mean a lot to future viewers after the finale airs, which isn’t something that you could take for granted if you were watching the first two seasons in the early nineties. And it makes this particular moment seem all the more precious, since it’s the last time that we’ll be able to watch Twin Peaks without any idea of where it might be going.

Live from Twin Peaks

What does Twin Peaks look like without Agent Cooper? It was a problem that David Lynch and his writing team were forced to solve for Fire Walk With Me, when Kyle MacLachlan declined to come back for much more than a token appearance, and now, in the show’s third season, Lynch and Mark Frost seem determined to tackle the question yet again, even though they’ve been given more screen time for their leading man than anyone could ever want. MacLachlan’s name is the first thing that we see in the closing credits, in large type, to the point where it’s starting to feel like a weekly punchline—it’s the only way that we’d ever know that the episode was over. He’s undoubtedly the star of the show. Yet even as we’re treated to an abundance of Dark Cooper and Dougie Jones, we’re still waiting to see the one character that I, and a lot of other fans, have been awaiting the most impatiently. Dale Cooper, it’s fair to say, is one of the most peculiar protagonists in television history. As the archetypal outsider coming into an isolated town to investigate a murder, he seems at first like a natural surrogate for the audience, but, if anything, he’s quirkier and stranger than many of the locals he encounters. When we first meet Cooper, he comes across as an almost unplayable combination of personal fastidiousness, superhuman deductive skills, and childlike wonder. But you’re anything like me, you wanted to be like him. I ordered my coffee black for years. And if he stood for the rest of us, it was as a representative of the notion, which crumbles in the face of logic but remains emotionally inescapable, that the town of Twin Peaks would somehow be a wonderful place to live, despite all evidence to the contrary.

In the third season, this version of Cooper, whom I’ve been waiting for a quarter of a century to see again, is nowhere in sight. And the buildup to his return, which I still trust will happen sooner or later, has been so teasingly long that it can hardly be anything but a conscious artistic choice. With every moment of recognition—the taste of coffee, the statue of the gunfighter in the plaza—we hope that the old Cooper will suddenly reappear, but the light in his eyes always fades. On some level, Lynch and Frost are clearly having fun with how long they can get away with this, but by removing the keystone of the original series, they’re also leaving us with some fascinating insights into what kind of show this has been from the very beginning. Let’s tick off its qualities one by one. Over the course of any given episode, it cuts between what seems like about a dozen loosely related plotlines. Most of the scenes last between two and four minutes, with about the same number of characters, and the components are too far removed from one another to provide anything in the way of narrative momentum. They aren’t built around any obligation to advance the plot, but around striking images or odd visual or verbal gags. The payoff, as in the case of Dr. Jacoby’s golden shovels, often doesn’t come for hours, and when it does, it amounts to the end of a shaggy dog story. (The closest thing we’ve had so far to a complete sequence is the sad case of Sam, Tracey, and the glass cube, which didn’t even make it past the premiere.) If there’s a pattern, it isn’t visible, but the result is still strangely absorbing, as long as you don’t approach it as a conventional drama but as something more like Twenty-Two Short Films About Twin Peaks.

You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like a sketch comedy show. I’ve always seen Twin Peaks as a key element in a series of dramas that stretches from The X-Files through Mad Men, but you could make an equally strong case for it as part of a tradition that runs from SCTV to Portlandia, which went so far as to cast MacLachlan as its mayor. They’re set in a particular location with a consistent cast of characters, but they’re essentially sketch comedies, and when one scene is over, they simply cut to the next. In some ways, the use of a fixed setting is a partial solution to the problem of transitions, which shows from Monty Python onward have struggled to address, but it also creates a beguiling sense of encounters taking place beyond the edges of the frame. (Matt Groening has pointed to SCTV as an inspiration for The Simpsons, with its use of a small town in which the characters were always running into one another. Groening, let’s not forget, was born in Portland, just two hours away from Springfield, which raises the intriguing question of why such shows are so drawn to the atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest.) Without Cooper, the show’s affinities to sketch comedy are far more obvious—and this isn’t the first time this has happened. After Laura’s murderer was revealed in the second season, the show seemed to lose direction, and many of the subplots, like James’s terminable storyline with Evelyn, became proverbial for their pointlessness. But in retrospect, that arid middle stretch starts to look a lot like an unsuccessful sketch comedy series. And it’s worth remembering that Lynch and Frost originally hoped to keep the identity of the killer a secret forever, knowing that it was all that was holding together the rest.

In the absence of a connective thread, it takes a genius to make this kind of thing work, and the lack of a controlling hand is a big part of what made the second season so markedly unsuccessful. Fortunately, the third season has a genius readily available. The sketch format has always been David Lynch’s comfort zone, a fact that has been obscured by contingent factors in his long career. Lynch, who was trained as a painter and conceptual artist, thinks naturally in small narrative units, like the video installations that we glimpse for a second as we wander between rooms in a museum. Eraserhead is basically a bunch of sketches linked by its titular character, and he returned to that structure in Inland Empire, which, thanks to the cheapness of digital video, was the first movie in decades that he was able to make entirely on his own terms. In between, the inclination was present but constrained, sometimes for the better. In its original cut of three hours, Blue Velvet would have played much the same way, but in paring it down to its contractually mandated runtime, Lynch and editor Duwayne Dunham ended up focusing entirely on its backbone as a thriller. (It’s an exact parallel to Annie Hall, which began as a three-hour series of sketches called Anhedonia that assumed its current form after Woody Allen and Ralph Rosenbaum threw out everything that wasn’t a romantic comedy.) Most interesting of all is Mulholland Drive, which was originally shot as a television pilot, with fragmented scenes that were clearly supposed to lead to storylines of their own. When Lynch recut it into a movie, they became aspects of Betty’s dream, which may have been closer to what he wanted in the first place. And in the third season of Twin Peaks, it is happening again.

Beyond life and death

Note: This post discusses plot points from every incarnation of Twin Peaks.

A few days ago, I went back and rewatched the last scene of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I’ve never quite been able to work myself up to the belief that this movie is some kind of lost masterpiece, and I think that my true opinion of it may be closer to that of David Thomson, who called it “the worst thing [David] Lynch has done—and, I trust, the least necessary or sincere.” Set it alongside Blue Velvet, or even Mulholland Drive, and it shrivels at once into a collection of superficial notions, precious conceits, and inadvisable ideas. Yet it has also been a part of my life to an extent that puts most better films to shame. I’ve always loved the soundtrack, or, more precisely, about half of it, which I knew by heart years before I saw the movie. When I got a video store membership in college, back in the days when this actually meant picking up and returning physical videocassettes, it was literally the first tape I rented. I watched it alone in my dorm’s common room, and I got sick later that night, which may not have been the film’s fault, but has always colored my impressions of it. That was half a lifetime ago, and I haven’t watched it from start to finish in over fifteen years, but it still feels like a movie that I’ve only recently discovered. A lot of it has faded, perhaps mercifully, but I still remember pieces of it—mostly the sequences that have the least to do with the original series—as vividly as if I’d seen them only yesterday. And on a stylistic and tonal level, it’s clearly the closest precursor to the revival of Twin Peaks.

The only problem with taking Fire Walk With Me as a spiritual prequel to the third season is that final scene, which just doesn’t fit. It comes right after what must be one of the ugliest and most depressing sequences ever to conclude a movie that got a wide theatrical release. Laura Palmer is bound, tortured, and killed by her father, in excruciating detail, and it seems both gratuitous and obligatory: Leland lays out the clues—the locket, the plastic sheet—as dutifully as if he’s dressing the set for the production crew, and he reports to his superiors to be milked for all the pain and suffering that has just been endured by the audience. If the film ended there, it would be unbearable, to the point where it would be hard to go back and enjoy the series on its own terms ever again. Instead, we’re treated to a strange, unspeakably moving coda in which Laura, joined by Cooper, has a vision of an angel in the Black Lodge, set to Angelo Badalamenti’s gorgeous instrumental “The Voice of Love,” followed by a fade to white. The implication is that Laura has gone on to a better place. On some level, it’s a concession to the viewer, who has just been forced to watch one of the bleakest hours of cinema imaginable, but it also feels true to its director, half of whose movies end with a similarly hokey but heartfelt moment of transcendence. I may not entirely believe in the golden, glowing images that open and close Blue Velvet, but I think that Lynch does, and they’ve always felt closer to his deepest sensibilities than the despairing endings of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive.

It doesn’t take long for the new season to throw it out. When we’re reunited with Laura, or her doppelgänger, she’s still in the Black Lodge, visibly aged but mouthing the same words as always, and when Cooper tells her that Laura Palmer is dead, she chillingly replies: “I am dead. Yet I live.” She removes her face like a mask, revealing a glowing void, and when we last see her, she’s sucked upward, screaming, into space. There’s no angel there, either. It’s enough to make the ending of Fire Walk With Me seem like an apocryphal footnote, discarded as soon as it was no longer useful, in the manner of a show that has always assembled itself out of its own rough drafts. (It’s worth remembering that Cooper’s first visit to the Black Lodge was originally the ending to the European cut of the film, which was repurposed as a confusing vision that looked exactly like what it really was—a deleted scene recycled as a dream sequence, complete with clumsy cuts back to Cooper tossing and turning on his pillow.) You could even argue that the scene is no longer necessary. When Fire Walk With Me first came out, it felt like the climax of a frustratingly long wait, and it’s startling to realize that it premiered at Cannes less than a year after the final episode aired. These days, viewers wait longer between the regular seasons of your average prestige drama. The series and its movie prequel were conceived as a continuous whole, but after Kyle MacLachlan declined to come back for anything but a cameo, Lynch and Mark Frost were unable to tie up any of the tangled threads that the show had left unresolved. Instead, they gave us Laura and the angel, which doubled as an emotional farewell to Twin Peaks itself.

For more than twenty years, that was the last image of the show that we’d ever have. We didn’t know what happened to the characters, but we had reason to hope that they would find peace. Now we’re being given eighteen more hours, which seem likely to provide more information about what happened next than we ever wanted, even if much of it is yet to come. Even after the third and fourth episodes, there’s a sense of the pieces being laboriously being slid into place: we’ve seen a lot of familiar faces, but they often just deliver a line and then disappear, as if they were among the wax figures on display in the Black Lodge—and the fact that several of the actors have since passed away makes their reappearances seem even more ghostly. (This isn’t to say that there haven’t been a lot of incidental pleasures. The latest episodes have been bewildering, but they also serve as a reminder of how funny Twin Peaks can be. My favorite moment so far hasn’t been Michael Cera’s Wally Brando, but the way in which Robert Forster turns away without a word at the end of the scene, as if even he realizes that there isn’t anything else to say.) Eventually, we seem destined to learn a lot more about what Shelley, Bobby, James, Audrey, and the rest have been doing, and those reunions will feel more bittersweet than they would have if a quarter of a century hadn’t elapsed. As Frost warned us, this is going to be a season about aging and death, a remarkable epilogue for a series that covered about a month of real time in its original run. But I have a hunch that its ending will be very much like the one that we’ve already seen. In the premiere, Leland whispers to Cooper: “Find Laura.” I think he will. And I suspect that we’ll see the angel again.

The darkness of future past

Note: Spoilers follow for the first two episodes of the third season of Twin Peaks.

“Is it future, or is it past?” Mike, the one-armed man, asks Cooper in the Black Lodge. During the premiere of the belated third season of Twin Peaks, there are times when it seems to be both at once. We often seem to be in familiar territory, and the twinge of recognition that it provokes has a way of alerting us to aspects of the original that we may have overlooked. When two new characters, played appealingly—and altogether too briefly—by Ben Rosenfield and Madeline Zima, engage in an oddly uninflected conversation, it’s a reminder of the appealingly flat tone that David Lynch likes to elicit from his actors, who sometimes seem to be reading their lines phonetically, like the kids in a Peanuts cartoon. It isn’t bad or amateurish acting, but an indication that even the performers aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing there. In recent years, accomplished imitators from Fargo to Legion have drawn on Lynch’s style, but they’re fully conscious of it, and we’re aware of the technical trickery of such players as Ewan McGregor or Dan Stevens. In Lynch’s best works, there’s never a sense that anyone involved is standing above or apart from the material. (The major exceptions are Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet, who disrupt the proceedings with their own brand of strangeness, and, eerily, Robert Blake in Lost Highway.) The show’s original cast included a few artful performers, notably Ray Wise and the late Miguel Ferrer, but most of the actors were endearingly unaffected. They were innocents. And innocence is a quality that we haven’t seen on television in a long time.

Yet it doesn’t take long to realize that some things have also changed. There’s the heightened level of sex and gore, which reflects the same kind of liberation from the standards of network television that made parts of Fire Walk With Me so difficult to watch. (I’d be tempted to observe that its violence against women is airing at a moment in which such scenes are likely to be intensely scrutinized, if it weren’t for the fact that Lynch has been making people uncomfortable in that regard for over thirty years.) The show is also premiering in an era in which every aspect of it will inevitably be picked apart in real time on social media, which strikes me as a diminished way of experiencing it. Its initial run obviously prompted plenty of theorizing around the nation’s water coolers, but if there’s anything that Twin Peaks has taught us, it’s that the clues are not what they seem. Lynch is a director who starts with a handful of intuitive images that are potent in themselves—an empty glass cube, a severed head, a talking tree. You could call them dreamlike, or the fruits of the unconscious, or the products, to use a slightly dated term, of the right hemisphere of the brain. Later on, the left hemisphere, which is widely but misleadingly associated with Lynch’s collaborator Mark Frost, circles back and tries to impose meaning on those symbols, but these readings are never entirely convincing. Decades ago, when the show tried to turn Cooper’s dream of the Black Lodge into a rebus for the killer’s identity, you could sense that it was straining. There isn’t always a deeper answer to be found, aside from the power of those pictures, which should be deep enough in itself.

As a result, I expect to avoid reading most reviews or analysis, at least until the season is over. Elements that seem inexplicable now may or may not pay off, but the series deserves the benefit of the doubt. This isn’t to say that what we’ve seen so far has been perfect: Twin Peaks, whatever else it may have been, was never a flawless show. Kyle MacLachlan has been as important to my inner life as any actor, but I’m not sure whether he has the range to convincingly portray Dark Cooper. He’s peerless when it comes to serving as the director’s surrogate, or a guileless ego wandering through the wilderness of the id, but he isn’t Dennis Hopper, and much of this material might have been better left to implication. Similarly, the new sequences in the Black Lodge are striking—and I’ve been waiting for them for what feels like my entire life—but they’re also allowed to run for too long. Those original scenes were so memorable that it’s easy to forget that they accounted for maybe twenty minutes, stretched across two seasons, and that imagination filled in the rest. (A screenshot of Cooper seated with the Man from Another Place was the desktop image on my computer for most of college.) If anything, the show seems almost too eager to give us more of Cooper in those iconic surroundings, and half as much would have gone a long way. In the finale of the second season, when Cooper stepped through those red curtains at last, it felt like the culmination of everything that the series had promised. Now it feels like a set where we have to linger for a while longer before the real story can begin. It’s exactly what the Man from Another Place once called it: the waiting room.

Lynch and Frost seem to be reveling in the breathing space and creative freedom that eighteen full hours on Showtime can afford, and they’ve certainly earned that right. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, Twin Peaks may have benefited from the constraints that a broadcast network imposed, just as Wild at Heart strikes me as one of the few films to have been notably improved by being edited for television. When Lynch made Blue Velvet, he and editor Duwayne Dunham, who is also editing the new season, were forced to cut the original version to the bone to meet their contractually mandated runtime, and the result was the best American movie I’ve ever seen. Lynch’s most memorable work has been forced to work within similar limitations, and I’m curious to see how it turns out when most of those barriers are removed. (I still haven’t seen any of the hours of additional footage that were recently released from Fire Walk With Me, but I wish now that I’d taken the trouble to seek them out. The prospect of viewing those lost scenes is less exciting, now that we’re being given the equivalent of a sequel that will be allowed to run for as long as it likes.) In the end, though, these are minor quibbles. When I look back at the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, I’m startled to realize how little of it I remember: it comes to about three hours of unforgettable images, mostly from the episodes directed by Lynch. If the first two episodes of the new run are any indication, it’s likely to at least double that number, which makes it a good deal by any standard. Twin Peaks played a pivotal role in my own past. And I still can’t entirely believe that it’s going to be part of my future, too.

The voice of love

Note: I can’t wait to write about the return of Twin Peaks, which already feels like the television event of my lifetime, but I won’t be able to get to it until tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m reposting my piece on the show’s indelible score, which originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on August 10, 2016.

At some point, everyone owns a copy of The Album. The title or the artist differs from one person to another, but its impact on the listener is the same: it simply alerts you to the fact that it can be worth devoting every last corner of your inner life to music, rather than treating it as a source of background noise or diversion. It’s the first album that leaves a mark on your soul. Usually, it makes an appearance as you’re entering your teens, which means that there’s as much random chance involved as in any of the other cultural influences that dig in their claws at that age. You don’t have a lot of control over what it will be. Maybe it begins with a song on the radio, or a piece of art that catches your eye at a record store, or a stab of familiarity that comes from a passing moment of exposure. (In your early teens, you’re likely to love something just because you recognize it.) Whatever it is, unlike every other album you’ve ever heard, it doesn’t let you go. It gets into your dreams. You draw pictures of the cover and pick out a few notes from it on every piano you pass. And it shapes you in ways that you can’t fully articulate. The particular album that fills that role is different for everyone, or so it seems, although logic suggests that it’s probably the same for a lot of teenagers at any given time. In fact, I think that you can draw a clear line between those for whom the Album immersed them deeply in the culture of their era and those who wound up estranged from it. I’d be a different person—and maybe a happier one—if mine had been something like Nevermind. But it wasn’t. It was the soundtrack from Twin Peaks, followed by Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night.

If I had been born a few years earlier, this might not have been an issue, but I happened to get seriously into Twin Peaks, or at least its score, shortly after the series itself had ceased to be a cultural phenomenon. The finale had aired two full years beforehand, and it had been followed soon thereafter, with what seems today like startling speed, by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After that, it mostly disappeared. There wasn’t even a chance for me to belatedly get into the show itself. I’d watched some of it back when it initially ran, including the pilot and the horrifying episode in which the identity of Laura’s killer is finally revealed. The European cut of the premiere was later released on video, but aside from that, I had to get by with a few grainy episodes that my parents had recorded on VHS. It wasn’t until many years later that the first box set became available, allowing me to fully experience a show that I ultimately ended up loving, even if it was far more uneven—and often routine—than its reputation had led me to believe. But that didn’t really matter. Twin Peaks was just a television show, admittedly an exceptional one, but the score by Angelo Badalamenti was something else: a vision of a world that was complete in itself. I’d have trouble conveying exactly what it represents, except that it takes place in the liminal area where a gorgeous nightmare shades imperceptibly into the everyday. In Blue Velvet, which I still think is David Lynch’s greatest achievement, Jeffrey expresses it as simply as possible: “It’s a strange world.” But you can hear it more clearly in “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” which Badalamenti composed in response to Lynch’s instructions:

Start it off foreboding, like you’re in a dark wood, and then segue into something beautiful to reflect the trouble of a beautiful teenage girl. Then, once you’ve got that, go back and do something that’s sad and go back into that sad, foreboding darkness.

And it wasn’t until years later that they realized that the song had the visual structure of a pair of mountain peaks, arranged side by side. It’s a strange world indeed.

If all forms of art, as the critic Water Pater famously observed, aspire to the condition of music, then it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Twin Peaks aspired to the sublimity of its own soundtrack. Badalamenti’s score did everything that the series itself often struggled to accomplish, and there were times when I felt that the music was the primary work, with the show as a kind of visual adjunct. I still feel that way, on some level, about Fire Walk With Me: the movie played an important role in my life, but I don’t have a lot of interest in rewatching it, while I know every note of its soundtrack by heart. And even if I grant that a score is never really complete in itself, the music of Twin Peaks pointed toward an even more intriguing artifact. It included three tracks—“The Nightingale,” “Into the Night,” and “Falling”—sung by Julee Cruise, with music by Badalamenti and lyrics by Lynch, who had earlier written her haunting song “Mysteries of Love” for Blue Velvet. I loved them all, and I can still remember the moment when a close reading of the liner notes clued me into the fact that there was an entire album by Cruise, Floating Into the Night, that I could actually own. (In fact, there were two. As it happened, my brainstorm occurred only a few months after the release of The Voice of Love, a less coherent sophomore album that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.) Listening to it for the first time, I felt like the narrator of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who once saw a fragment of an undiscovered country, and now found himself confronted with all of it at once. The next few years of my life were hugely eventful, as they are for every teenager. I read, did, and thought about a lot of things, some of which are paying off only now. But whatever else I was doing, I was probably listening to Floating Into the Night.

Last year, when I heard that the Twin Peaks soundtrack was coming out in a deluxe vinyl release, it filled me with mixed feelings. (Of course, I bought a copy, and so should you.) The plain fact is that toward the end of my teens, I put Badalamenti and Cruise away, and I haven’t listened to them much since. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t give them a lifetime’s worth of listening in the meantime. I became obsessed with Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted, the curious performance piece, directed by Lynch, in which Cruise floats on wires high above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, not far from the neighborhood where I ended up spending most of my twenties. Much later, I saw Cruise perform, somewhat awkwardly, in person. I tracked down her collaborations and guest appearances—including the excellent “If I Survive” with Hybrid—and even bought her third album, The Art of Being a Girl, which I liked a lot. Somehow I never got around to buying the next one, though, and long before I graduated from college, Cruise and Badalamenti had all but disappeared from my personal rotation. And I regret this. I still feel that Floating Into the Night is a perfect album, although it wasn’t until years later, when I heard Cruise’s real, hilariously brassy voice in her interviews, that I realized the extent to which I’d fallen in love with an ironic simulation. There are moments when I believe, with complete seriousness, that I’d be a better person today if I’d kept listening to this music: half of my life has been spent trying to live up to the values of my early adolescence, and I might have had an easier job of integrating all of my past selves if they shared a common soundtrack. Whenever I play it now, it feels like a part of me that has been locked away, ageless and untouched, in the Black Lodge. But life has a way of coming full circle. As Laura says to Cooper: “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years. Meanwhile…” And it feels sometimes as if she were talking to me.