Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017)

From the beginning, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks had its horror firmly rooted in the supernatural, and the more terrestrial unnatural, i.e. father-daughter incest. Both the story of a hero-agent sent to find the limboed spirit of a dead blonde, and the undercurrent of that blonde’s ongoing rape, then murder, at the hands of her “demonic” father, it has always owed as much to Nabokov’s Lolita as to the traditionally cited noir, soap opera and whodunit genres. In this year’s new incarnation, Twin Peaks: The Return — it might be technically more accurate to say “this year’s third series”, but then how can something be third in a series when it also looks like nothing else on earth, and when its own creator has described it as “a film, [and] not a TV show”? — horror is still crystalised in black eyes and blue roses; violence in the home, the diner and the trailer park, and violence in the ether. It’s electric, and a shock.

There is humour, black as midnight on a moonless night and totally absurdist, but the fear sticks. In its eighth and most surreal, most freeform episode, a meditation on the atom bomb as genesis for evil, there is no hand-holding, and no opportunity for a synopsis. Critics calling Lynch’s work “misogynist” have always baffled me, perhaps because to build a world without misogyny, without male violence, would be to not build this world, by which I mean our world, at all — a lover of the mirror-image as device, it figures that he’d hold a glass up to the age. “Some events”, he simply said when asked what The Return’s finale meant, “concluded.”

PS