The Anthropo-scenic Route

If the original season of Twin Peaks was at a surface level detective television, at heart it was always gothic. In its mix of suburban gothic with forests dark and Grimm, incestuous desires and drug-fueled love affairs, pornography and domestic violence, madmen and freaks (dwarves, giants, cripples, and one-armed men), haunted houses, cabins and lodges, the original season of Twin Peaks was consistently dark, even if also often delightfully and mischievously so. Laura Palmer, the young and seemingly innocent murdered girl who soon turns out to be depravity personified, is but the first of many doubles that haunt the show (Good/Bad Cooper, Good/Bad Laura, Good/Bad Leland). Indeed, as the series unfolds, it is the rule rather than the exception that the population of the apparently sedate town of Twin Peaks harbors sinister secrets. Hinting toward a world in which neither we, the viewers, nor the cast of the show can ever hope to be quite at ease, the original season thus retains a sense of existential dread that even in its most lighthearted and silly moments it never quite manages to dispel.

As Twin Peaks went into its second season, whatever remained of the original scaffolding of the classic detective television show dissolved almost entirely, and along with it a great deal of the gothic too. Laura Palmer, it turned out, had been murdered by none other than her father, Leland Palmer, possessed by the evil demon BOB. With the purpose of identifying the murderer of Laura Palmer gone, the already sprawling postmodern bricolage of the second season spun further into soap opera, comedy, absurd theater, police procedural, noir, and more, while continuing to split into an ever-widening series of increasingly confusing subplots that were only marginally if at all linked to a greater story line. Compared to season 3, however, season 2 nevertheless looks positively clear and purposeful. As the one-armed man asks early on in season 3, mirroring the viewer’s sense of dislocation and disconnection as we try to orient ourselves in a universe that has become unmoored from the woods and mountains of the show’s beginnings, “Is it future? Or is it past?” We are never quite sure.

The sense of the weird, the dark, and the outright freakish was of course always part of Twin Peaks. Yet even at their most obtuse, seasons 1 and 2 still teased toward the potential of narrative closure. As Catherine Spooner has argued in a reading of the recurrent motif of curtains and veils in the two first seasons, what interested Lynch about the original murder of Laura Palmer was “not the solution of the mystery but the process of unveiling.”3 Nevertheless, in seasons 1 and 2 at least we are as viewers presented with precisely such a process of unveiling, even if this process mostly tends to lead to yet another set of velvet curtains, another set of veils.

Season 3 seems intent on thwarting such expectations entirely. While there are plenty of murders and mysterious disappearances, we are not offered the sense of clarity of purpose Laura Palmer’s murder served in season 1, let alone the potential for the resolution of such. Similarly, while season 2 was arguably disjointed and in the end did not offer any clear resolution, the many subplots were nevertheless tied together by a general sense of agency and culpability of a central cast of human or demonic characters (BOB, Leo, Leland, Jacques Renault, Windom Earle). In season 3, any such pretense of pinning down individual culpability is long since gone. Not only is there no errant father possessed by evil demons but there is no singular victim either. Rather, we are offered a grander tapestry of a world in which human agency seems to have dissipated entirely, neatly summed up by the fact that the ingenious and reasoned mind of seasons 1 and 2, Dale Cooper, has been reduced to an idiot savant whose sole purpose in life seems to be the pursuit of, tellingly, a cup of coffee.

Given that Lynch is, generally speaking, committed to “frustrating viewers who seek closure and rational explanation,”4 attempts at unraveling or fully explaining any Lynchian production are usually doomed to fail. Still, we will be arguing that a gothic reading of Twin Peaks season 3 seen in the light (and the darkness) of the Anthropocene can perhaps also explain earlier intimations of anthropogenic change caused by unbridled energy consumption not yet fully formed in the earlier body of work. Always an intuitive rather than a rational artist, Lynch has to some extent proven highly sensitive to what was to come, even as he has always looked to the past with a mostly kind, petro-nostalgic, and patriarchal gaze.

Gothic Auto-geddon

The car and the motorized vehicle are at the heart of Lynch’s artistic vision. As an artist often “charged with having an unhealthy obsession with the United States of his own adolescence,”5 Lynch’s work invariably includes direct or indirect references to an age of innocence in which “the charisma of energy, as an American idea and a force,”6 could be cherished without disconcerting thoughts of global warming and rising seas. Industrial wastelands, suburban streets, and the motif of the diner aside, the automobile and the road are recurrent features of most, if not all, of Lynch’s central body of cinematic work set in contemporary times. From the crazy antics of the road movie Wild at Heart (1990) to the frenetic opening of a car blazing down a blacktop in Lost Highway (1997) set to David Bowie’s track “I’m Deranged,” from the mysterious and intimidating nighttime rides of Blue Velvet (1987) and Mulholland Drive (2001), even to the uncharacteristically sedate plot of The Straight Story (1999), Lynch’s movies inevitably revolve around a fetishistic, nostalgic, and sometimes manic fascination with gas, machinery, and mobility. This was certainly also the case in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, in which we view Cooper in his sedan speaking into a Dictaphone as he fondly observes the passing firs, the power of Leo’s menacing (albeit often immobile) truck, the confused and almost always unspent potency of James’s motorbike, on to the giddy energy of Bobby’s rides.

If “to be modern is to be mobile as never before,” and if “the automobile has been imbricated as a normal and necessary tool for personal independence and the successful management of a nuclear family,”7 Lynch has from his debut with Eraserhead to the release of Twin Peaks season 3 consistently seemed queasy about the latter but rarely the former. Insofar as one can discern a plot in Eraserhead, for instance, it seems primarily to be about the estrangement, alienation, and struggle of upholding the integrity of the nuclear family in the face of the modern world. As the protagonist attempts and fails first to keep his wife and then ensure the survival of his child, Lynch paints a clear and horrifying picture of the nuclear family, a warning that continues throughout Lynch’s career, from the rot, death, and decay at the foot of the white picket fence in the opening of Blue Velvet on to, of course, Twin Peaks and the murder of Laura Palmer. A similar consistent sense of dread cannot be said to pertain to the automobile and the open road as such. For while they can be menacing and ominous, they are as often expressions of a wild, erotic, and exultant freedom, as when Lula and Sailor of Wild at Heart escape the strictures of, precisely, suburbia and the life of the nuclear family to express their freedom and the wildness of their hearts on the open road. In comparison, Twin Peaks season 3 seems more willing to commit to a critique of the pursuit of limitless energy, albeit of course in a distinctly Lynchian and ambiguous manner in that he never commits to an outright critique of petro-culture. Indeed, as we shall be arguing, season 3 seems to gesture toward the White Sands nuclear explosion as the serpent in the garden, the moment in which American innocence was ripped apart by a mushroom cloud.

Reflecting on her first encounter with Twin Peaks a quarter of a century after it first premiered, Linnie Blake remarks that “Twin Peaks was first broadcast . . . in a world in which the certainties of state and nation, society and self, were being changed utterly by the radical energies of neoliberalism. This is the world we inhabit today.”8 While Blake is more concerned with “the twin energies of neoliberal economics . . . and postmodern philosophy”9 rather than with “energy” as such, her critical assessment of the original two seasons, delivered in 2016 just one year prior to the release of season 3, foreshadows some of the concerns on energy addressed by Lynch in the latter season. While season 3 contains its fair share of Lynch staples in terms of automobile pleasures, a sense of foreboding linked to energy as such runs through the entire season. This is at its most explicit in episode 8, “Got a Light?,” in which imagery of coal, gas, and nuclear intermix explosively, literally as well as figuratively.

Starting out with the typical Lynchian setting of two people racing in a car to escape the law, the episode shifts gear radically once we move from the intimate space of the interior of a car and, later, the equally intimate interior of the club the Roadhouse to a setting and a perspective where the human cannot be. As the camera tracks the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945, we at first witness the explosion from afar only to then dive into the explosion itself in a phantasmagoric five-minute sequence of a continuous explosion going all the way down to the level of the atom. Eventually, however, as the perspective draws back from the molecular level, once again to settle at a level perceptible and familiar to the human eye, the camera rests—tellingly—at a lonely desert road as well as a gas station. The atomic explosion ushering in a new and terrifying energy regime has released a demonic force into the world never before seen in history, and yet it manifests in both location and form in versions of energy consumption that now belong to the past. The so-called Woodsman, called into being by the Promethean effort of humans playing with the fire of the sun, stands as a conduit and reminder of energies traditional, modern, and mythic.

Dressed in a plaid shirt, sporting a full and unkempt beard, and wearing a padded hat with ear flaps, the Woodsman seems the stereotype of a logger of a kind populating the backwoods of the logging town in which the original series was set. And while the appearance of the Woodsman in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico (rather than in the woods of Twin Peaks), is at first incongruent in the treeless expanse of the desert, the incongruity is of course also to some extent the point. The malevolent force called into being by humanity’s decision to invoke nuclear fission—the most powerful of energy’s demons known to date—in fact alludes to almost all of civilization’s main sources of unclean energy.

Evoked by nuclear fission (atomic energy), but dressed like a logger (wood), the Woodsman also resembles a miner, smeared from top to toe in soot and dark dust (coal), yet his first interaction with humans is—significantly—through a car window (oil). Fast-forwarding eleven years after the atomic blast in White Sands in 1945 and the initial advent of this new dark force at the gas station, the Woodsman makes his presence known to humankind in 1956. Stepping out of the desert late at night, the Woodsman flags down an older couple to ask if they have “got a light?” Driving off in a panic, the older couple flees the scene, leaving the genie unleashed by the light of the atomic blast by the roadside. This is no Frankensteinian monster, though. For unlike Shelley’s forlorn creature, there are no redeeming qualities about this Promethean being. The fire has indeed been lit. But it gives off neither light nor warmth.

Drink Full, and Descend

Intersecting with human lives primarily in settings that involve oil in some form or other (cars, gas stations, roads), the appearance of the Woodsman in episode 8 clearly portends the appearance of evil in an otherwise harmonious world. Once again, Lynch may seem to express petro-nostalgia, for it is telling that it is again the 1950s that stand as the time both of innocence and also, of course, of the fall. Having failed to get a light from the older couple in the car, the Woodsman walks to a local radio station, kills off the receptionist and the DJ, takes over the broadcast, and repeatedly chants, “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend.” Nuclear power and thus immeasurable energy unleashed, humanity will have its fill but fall from grace as a result.

Yet to read the dark currents of energy coursing through Twin Peaks: The Return solely and literally as a mediation on the gradual loss of innocence due to increasingly reckless use of energy would be to do both Lynch and the series a disservice. Indeed, the very form of the third series is about the amplification of energy of all kinds. Furthermore, each strand of the series—Cooper’s charismatic “idiotic” serendipity, the search for reasons why the Black Lodge exists, the drug deals over the border—are separated, amplified, and intertwined in a glorious spiral of what in Greek rhetoric is called enargeia. The intention, perhaps, is to subvert entropy, in that the third series makes an endless loop of the previous series, feeding off itself and its own energy in, precisely, the constant “returns” of the third season’s title, but (perhaps?) also generating a return of energy invested.

The original Twin Peaks was a deeply mediated fantasy meditation on fantasy meditations about being American. It laughed at soap opera and cherished it at the same time, a love letter to the format even as it ridiculed it over and over and over again. In contrast, Twin Peaks: The Return refuses to do any such thing. This is seen most clearly, or perhaps obliquely, in Lynch’s refusal to live up to fans’ expectation of the “return” of Dale Cooper to the realm of humankind. With season 2 infamously ending with the entrapment of Cooper in the Black Lodge, the source and sanctum of dark energy on an alternate plane, season 3 frustratingly continues to defer this return. With Lynch teasing the original show’s fans for almost the entirety of the third season with a Cooper that is the exact opposite of the original Cooper (smart and full of energy vs. Dougie’s idiotic lethargy), the seeming satisfactory release of energy unleashed by episodes 16 and 17 once we finally get Cooper back is frustrated once again in episode 18. It is as if episode 18 of season 3 is the tulpa10 of the “good” episodes 16 and 17, an uncanny double that (like the episodes prior to episode 16 stupidly goes on and on [like that road] or Dougie before Cooper becomes him). Whatever release may have momentarily been released by watching Cooper munch sandwiches and finally make critical decisions is doubly deflated by the intrinsically unsatisfying conclusion, a seemingly endless shot from what seems to be Cooper’s dream. It’s your worst nightmare of an ending, worse than a nightmare one.

Still, at least Laura gets to remain herself. So is she redeemed? And how? The tulpa of Laura has already appeared. She has appeared as part of the horrifying world of murder-incest that objectifies her, as a hallucination from which Laura suffers—not unlike what is perhaps the golden tulpa of that image, scary-crying Laura in Donna’s doorway that Cole hallucinates. And so, in the interior scene with Harold, BOB-Laura appears as a Kali-like blue demonic being with tongue hanging out, enjoying power. Presumably that is what BOB thinks he can become once he has messed with Sarah and totally fused with Laura. The basic energy of having sex and producing a baby has nothing to do with the teleological narrative of it. But one can’t actually “become death, destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer famously didn’t say during the White Sands test. Nothing can become that.

Here are the demonic thoughts of dark energy released: thinking that one can be God, and an idea that God can see everything and is all powerful—or all good, or all evil. The energy in the atom is not intrinsically dangerous. It is one’s idea of what that power makes of you. The essence of Wyndham Earle of season 2 is therefore also here in a distributed way, the inverse of the collected droplet, the bindu that is Laura, that contains the enlightened essence. And who is responsible for this energy? The White Lodge, if the black-and-white format of the “Got a Light” episode is anything to go by.

Yet the trouble with light is that it oscillates, shuddering like the inside of the White Lodge basement to which Cooper descends in season 2. With the hindsight of episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, we can now speculate that the White Lodge appears to be installed during the first millisecond of the atom bomb test, when foolish people who opened their eyes beheld a gorgeous violet light, symbolized by the rippling ocean (of ultraviolet and gamma) energy around the lodge into which Cooper falls. A kind of supercollider supersymmetry seems to operate in which black and white, real and tulpa/fake, particle and antiparticle, zoom out of the 1945 explosion that inaugurates for geological science the Anthropocene in its fullest, most demonic and patriarchal aspect.11

This is exemplified by the entity Jowday/Joudy/Judy and the manner in which she (?) symbolizes the development of the series as a whole, as of the expectations of the fans to see Cooper redeemed from the demonic transformation in which season 2 culminates. An ancient mythological being known to take female form, Judy is (negative) energy, here separated from matter by the bomb. Judy is, like energy, in several places at once. Demonic Judy is the tulpa, the zombie-like husk, the manufactured one, just a body without a face, that releases the demon of energy when the Gadget detonates. Later, we are introduced to Smile Judy, the one inside of Sarah who eats the neck of the rapist at the bar in episode 14, the mature form of the creature that at the end of episode 8 crawls down her throat in an obvious nasty and misogynistic sinthome image of fellatio of an utterly passive woman. Watching the first two series of Twin Peaks, in which righteous men like Cooper work to save the girls from themselves, Twin Peaks: The Return offers something a monster of a third series that is the TV equivalent of the larval demon that comes out of the egg. We want stories to be incestuous, but we do not want to know that—this horrible, twisted, sick thing happening to our beloved series in which we can depend on the reasoned, and reasonable, logic of the male detective to save the day. It’s like Lynch ripped the series’ skull off, a horrible desecration of that Twin Peaks Umwelt where the top lawyer in town can rape and murder his daughter in front of everybody, where what looks like mammal behavior is actually insect behavior (insect, incest).

As a theme, Lynch has of course gestured toward this before, so perhaps this should not come as such a surprise. Take the opening scene of Blue Velvet, for instance, where the camera gradually tracks from the supposed harmony of white picket fence America only to descend to the creeping and crawling insect life of rot and decay but also teeming insect life just below the surface of a neatly manicured lawn. Later, through the incestuous howl of Dennis Hopper’s Frank screaming “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Baby wants to fuck!,” a young Kyle MacLachlan plays the part of amateur detective Jeffrey, who voyeuristically witnesses the Oedipal display partly in horror, partly aroused. Significantly, Frank also instructs Dorothy/Mommy, but in effect also Jeffrey, and by extension us as viewers, “Don’t you fucking look at me!”12

Judging from the outraged responses of fans and critics alike, we do not, in fact, want to look at it, or at least not too closely. The cozy nostalgia of the earlier seasons that seemed to somehow still promise, incestuous rape or not, that everything will be fine is not allowed any foothold in Twin Peaks: The Return. While Good Cooper is finally restored in episode 16, this seeming reestablishment of patriarchal reason and righteousness is in fact a ruse. As we move to smiling Laura at the end of the season in episode 18, we are shown a transition from the fantasy image of the sexually powerful and politically empowered woman as demonically enjoying (just a grin without a mind) to the knowing noir smile of an actual woman who actually saves the whole thing, even when someone like Cooper is ready to shoot another guy in the balls through a table (and by the way, what a scene that is). And looked at another way, even the misogynist fantasy can be used as a stepping-stone to achieve this result; otherwise, that doesn’t work either. For the series deals with the ways in which assuming one can violate a woman’s body as a condition of being a certain kind of person are expressed in all kinds of ways in all kinds of forms, conjured in that misogynist image of a smile that will eat you like a spider, with the implication (because of what the man is saying) that this could be after sex—the vagina dentata. The threat of sexual display, which in the end is the threat of appearance as such.

Logs of Ignorance

We long for the good old days, when we knew what Lynch (and everything else) was all about. Just remember the pre–World War II magic of the silver screen. The magic of cinema. The magic of making people feel things. The weird music. The weird living room warmth. The weird electrical stuff making weird noises. It looks weird, like an old black-and-white film of itself. It’s almost as if we have tried to get to the end of Twin Peaks only to find ourselves back not just with Blue Velvet but with that Lynchian Ur-text Eraserhead, albeit now with the terrifying and inescapable totality of the Anthropocene that was only then beginning to take shape when the film came out in 1977, four years after the oil crisis of 1973.

Remember, there can be magic. Things can be different. In the end, you can split atoms because you know quantum theory, and you know quantum theory because at a basic level, things aren’t static lumps, they are quivering alive, yet not—they are dead, yet they live. That’s what a magic world feels like. It can be a bit spooky. Or a bit lame, like a 1980s video effect, of which season 3 is so full. But often in a good way, like the White Lodge, which exists in the femtosecond during which the atom begins to split, where the light is way off the edge of the spectrum and hence can only be represented to humans, as a deep violet ocean of energy in which is floating a lodge/electrical device of yore/Jack Rabbit’s palace, a place where you can visualize things.

As a conclusion, we must turn to the expenditure of energy, in all its forms, of the ecology of a twenty-first-century Twin Peaks set against a late twentieth-century Twin Peaks. For if in the latter it was still possible to be nostalgic for a 1950s America ruled by petrol and patriarchy, this position seems untenable, to say the least, today, in which the oeikeios of the Anthropocene has so radically upset the cozy petro-nostalgia of an earlier Lynch. If “the protagonists in film noir appear cursed by an inability to dwell anywhere” even as “nostalgia and longing for older urban forms combined with a fear of new alienating urban realities pervade film noir,”13 this sense of unease seems to have been doubled down on in the Anthropocene. “Insecurity, estrangement and lack of orientation and balance are sometimes so acute in Lynchland that the question becomes one of whether it is possible to ever feel ‘at home,’”14 Chris Rodley remarks in Lynch on Lynch—Revised Edition (2005) a decade and a half ago, and certainly Lynchland has become ever more so in Twin Peaks: The Return.

Here we must return to the Woodsman once again, a creature of the atom bomb that looks, incongruously, like Abraham Lincoln.15 Supposedly born in a log cabin and often portrayed as being somewhat wooden, Lincoln is of course America, and the American home, epitomized. Yet the trouble with Twin Peaks’s Lincoln is that he’s a burned log. He’s an idea. He’s an old bad idea that thinks of matter as fuel. It’s the stripping of things to stuff you can measure (such as e = mc² squared) that can do a lot of damage, so be careful what you think. In contrast, the Log Lady is the in-between figure: her log is surely not dead. But is it alive? For while she dies, her log is turning gold. And so, looking back on all three seasons in light of the latest, we must ask ourselves, Was this story about the bunny going down the hole? Or about the bunny girls? Was this the story of the little girl who lived down the lane? Ultimately, we find ourselves no further forward. The uncomprehending stupidity of the obviously central Lucy and Andy is what we all are, how we even in our knowing come close to knowing as the sound our most dumb idea of a thing makes. The energy of knowing, which, as a meditator, Lynch knows is in the end awesome.

Hyle, the Greek for what the Log Lady is holding, is used figuratively, by stripping it of its woodiness (to produce a bland manipulable substance, a.k.a. the anthropocentric idea of fuel) to mean matter. Despite how many think art is this demonic force from another dimension that needs to be tamed, you need to kind of sort of get on its side. That’s because the problem really is in the appearance dimension, including your basic default idea of appearance as an ineffective surface. Everything is fuel for this predictable human-scaled future which is actually the past eating the future—your bastard demon going round and round and round.

Dancing: Coda

To attempt to offer any conclusive reading to a Lynchian text is, as remarked earlier, a futile gesture. Still, while Lynch seems as averse to politics as he is to narrative resolution (if not revolution), it is significant for the purposes of this volume that the characteristic sense of Lynchian unease seems to have shifted in recent years. That staple of the gothic, the uncanny, is as prevalent as ever in Twin Peaks: The Return. Yet, rather than manifesting locally—in the woods outside of Twin Peaks, in the living room of the Lelands, in the ballroom of the Great Northern—there is a sense in season 3 that it is the world as such that is broken, uncanny, not to be put together again. “Fuck Gene Kelly, you motherfucker,” the always belligerent Albert Rosenfield utters when caught in a rain shower in New York City in episode 6 of season 3. For Albert, as for David and all the rest of us, there is no more dancing in the rain, no more pretending not to be aware that the fossil fuel dream was in fact a nightmare.

Notes

1. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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2. Reza Negarastani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (New York: Re.Press, 2008).

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3. Catherine Spooner, “‘Wrapped in Plastic’: David Lynch’s Material Girls,” in Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory and Genre on Television, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 119.

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4. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “‘It’s a Strange World: David Lynch,” in The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton (London: Routledge, 2020), 348.

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5. Linnie Blake, “Trapped in the Hysterical Sublime; Twin Peaks, Postmodernism, and the Neoliberal Now,” in Weinstock, Return to Twin Peaks, 234.

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6. LeMenager, Living Oil, 4.

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7. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, “On Petrocultures; or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else,” in Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 9.

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8. Blake, “Sublime,” 231.

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9. Blake, 230.

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10. A being or object that is created through spiritual or mental powers, hence essentially a being created solely out the energy of mind.

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11. Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, Anthony D. Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Paul Crutzen, Erle Ellis et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383, no. 5 (2015): 196–203.

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12. David Lynch, dir., Blue Velvet (Wilmington, N.C.: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986).

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13. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7.

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14. Chris Rodley, ed., Introduction to Lynch on Lynch, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), x–xi.

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15. The actor Robert Broski, who plays the Woodsman, was prior to his appearance in Twin Peaks: The Return primarily known for playing Lincoln both on television and in film.

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