(OBVIOUSLY ONE IMPERIAL FUCK TON OF SPOILERS FOR “TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN” FOLLOW)
Three years ago, when we found out there was going to be new Twin Peaks, it was the most inconceivable thing imaginable. The notion that after all this time, we’re headed back to that tiny town in Washington – well, what did I say when I rediscovered the series a year before the announcement?
The thing is, Twin Peaks in its time tended to parallel my life. It started with a bang in the spring of 1990, when I was through with high school and anxious to get on with my future. I even bought the cassette single of the theme, deliberately thinking to myself “you know, this would make a fine song with the new girlfriend which I will undoubtedly meet once college gets going.” And then, when the show came back in the fall, it slowly deteriorated until petering out in April…which is just about how my freshman year went. One long slow deterioration until by April, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to save this bird from a hard landing. And just like my college career, the series didn’t have a happy ending either – just a cliffhanger with no obvious hope for how things could be saved.
Twenty-five years on and eighteen episodes later, it turns out – surprise – everyone got old. It’s jarring to have gone from the original series straight into the new one. Everyone got older, everyone got tired, you could see the weight of the years on every single person in that town of 51,201. Hawk especially struck me – hair gone white, moving slowly, connected to a dying friend who maybe only he understood. Special Agent Albert Rosenfeld, gone from incisive snark wielder to just-hanging-on veteran agent with the sort of world-weary hangdog look normally associated with Tommy Lee Jones characters. Big Ed, Norma, Nadine, Dr. Jacoby, Shelly, Bobby – everyone’s older, everyone’s put on weight or gotten gaunt, and if you were already in the workplace back then…well, guess what, you’re probably doing the same job. I was off to college when Twin Peaks came out, and in some ways, I’m still there myself. There’s no question of picking up right where you left off, and when you haven’t seen these people in forever, they certainly aren’t going to look like you remembered.
It’s definitely dated, I admit. The pacing isn’t quite as bad as you’d expect of an 80s prime-time soap opera – and make no mistake, that’s what this is – but then, some of the slowness could be camouflaged by the abiding weirdness David Lynch brings to the table every time out…So many plots and story lines that went nowhere, seemingly. Anything with the Packard Mill got boring in a hurry – Piper Laurie’s scenery-chewing bitchery seems much more suited to something like Dynasty. The switch from the plot being driven by the expanding Renault crime organization to being propelled by Windom Earle seems fairly abrupt. And James off with his mysterious woman served no purpose whatsoever. No wonder it went off the rails – there was just too damn much to keep track of. Lesson learned: you can be complex without being complicated…
The pacing sure didn’t change. If anything it got worse, and you wonder what the show would have been like if it had stuck to the original order of only nine episodes. And the hanging threads – worse than before, if anything, including having no idea what’s the story with some of our most beloved characters. This is one you definitely have to go back and watch from the beginning to see if it starts to make any more sense after the fact, but I’m not a hundred percent sure it will. And in some ways, that’s OK. This isn’t really about driving the plot to its conclusion, it’s about the setting and the atmosphere and the presence of a strangeness that you will never understand or see the end of. Like, well, life. We’ll never know why Sarah Palmer was like that. We’ll never know what happened to Audrey. We’ll never know if that was really Laura or what kind of world they’re in or when or where. There’s every chance that this whole thing is some sort of Owl Creek fever dream in Coop’s dying moments somewhere in Philadelphia in 1989.
Oh, and Josie Packard’s never getting out of that drawer knob, I guess.
The look is equally dated, although once again that could be partly Lynch and possibly just an affinity for the era. Let’s be honest; I was 18 and pretty much every one of the women on the show still holds up… Norma in particular is still lovely, although she (and presumably Big Ed) are younger then than I am now, which is kind of disturbing to think about. I’m still rooting for those two, of course – it’s tough to be with the one you love when one has a spouse in prison and the other has a superhumanly strong one with an eye patch and a drape-runner fixation.
The feel was dated, and deliberately so. Lynch is committed to his surreal 1950s horror beneath the surface ethos, although nobody does black-and-white better. But so were the actors dated. Many others have said it, but this show didn’t shy away from the brutal fact that we all get old, we all die, and not everyone gets a happy ending. In so many ways, the payoff was in episode 16, when Dale Cooper wakes up, pulls out the IV, is back in the suit, crisply demands a revolver and a flight to Spokane, and says “I AM the FBI.” That’s what we all want to imagine it could be like – that we wake from the dream, somehow, and are fresh and ready to go, capable and confident, with the opportunity to take care of that unfinished business. And just like Coop, the dream of unfinished business runs headlong into the reality that time runs one way, you can’t go home again, and everything that happened really happened with no undoing it. The notion that you can always proves to be an illusion. Always.
But that said, I’ll say this, spoiler free: if you didn’t jump off the couch screaming and punching the air triumphantly at the 10:00 of episode 15, you don’t have a soul. If that’s the only payoff from the original that we ever get from this series, it’s the one I would have wanted. And it’s proof that sometimes, rarely, you get that piece of a dream you hadn’t thought would ever come around again.
It wasn’t the old Twin Peaks. It never could have been. But it was enough.