Gotta Light?

Another four parts along, parts five through eight, in my rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return. In some ways, Lynch and Frost are systematically examining the signifiers of Twin Peaks from the 90s and placing them in a new context; usually, a mocking or ironic context. For example, cigarettes. Lynch, a long-time smoker, fetishized cigarettes (as do many smokers) and made them very sexy in Twin Peaks. (Less so in Fire Walk With Me, when Donna, observing endless overflowing ashtrays, says to Laura, "If I had a nickel for every cigarette your mom smoked, I'd be dead.")

This time around, there is much less smoking, if any. Even Lynch's character, "old school" FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, has quit smoking. (I wonder if Lynch has?) But it lingers, appropriately—Cole refers to having quit, a few people (such as Sarah Palmer) still smoke. Richard Horne, the sharp-angle-faced bad seed grandson of Ben, smokes at the Roadhouse and gets reprimanded. Beautiful, 90 year old legend, Harry Dean Stanton, returning as Carl Rodd, laughs when he hears a young man say he quit smoking, says, "I've been smoking for 75 years, every fucking day." The way Stanton smiles and laughs after saying this it's clear that it's the truth; Lynch (and HDS) has the proud ambivalence about his habit only a longtime smoker can fully comprehend (as I was once myself). Cole's teeth (Lynch's teeth) are a yellowed wreck.

The youth barely smoke now. They chase after harder drugs and many other things. But not cigarettes so much.

Along with other Twin Peaks fifties-era signifiers like the Double R Diner and hot rod car culture, we also reexamine the signifiers of Dale Cooper, as he slowly picks up the pieces of his self. Coffee is a big one—when Cooper-Dougie first tastes hot coffee a lot of bells and whistles go off for him. He learns to give his patented thumbs-up again. He shows a fascination with shiny police badges. In one strangely moving sequence, he spends hours gently exalting in the statue of a lawman in the plaza of his office building. He eventually has to be hauled off home again by a thankfully observant and kind cop because he won't stop loitering by the statue acting like a crazy person.

Lynch seems to be asking about identity—what is it, really, how do we construct one? And what is "Twin Peaks," too? If I told you there were new episodes of Twin Peaks, what would you expect to see? How will we know when Cooper is back for real?

Dougie's wife, Janey-E Jones, is shown to be a fighter, pushing her family's life forward by sheer force of will. Whether negotiating with gangsters or making pancakes for Dougie and Sonny Jim, or hauling her childlike husband to his job so he won't get fired, Janey-E is tenacious. But who is Janey-E Jones and why does she dress so much like Betty Elms from Mulholland Drive? Is this Betty, sixteen years later, hard as nails thanks to a series of tough choices, having grown in to her suburban mom's clothing? Or is this another performance of Betty's?

I don't mean that I literally think Janey-E is supposed to be Betty. But questions of identity suffuse Twin Peaks, most often represented by doubling—doubles, doppelgängers, mirror-images, pairs, twins, multiple personalities; it's in the title of the show. And Janey-E and Betty are remarkable doppelgängers, not only because Naomi Watts plays both roles, brilliantly, of course, but also very much in line with how returning Peaks characters are portrayed here. Take Shelly—one of the ingenues of the original show, a beautiful, resilient young woman, horribly abused by her terrorizing husband, but strong enough to ultimately stand up for herself and be with the man she really loves. All these years later, she has barely moved an inch. She still slings cherry pie at the Double R, working for Norma. She and Bobby had a daughter, many years ago; they're many years divorced now. She still chases romance of the bad-for-her kind. Life hasn't been bad for her; but it's a far cry from what we might have dreamed of for the character in the 90s. There is an element of eternal doubling, repeating, an endless cycle, to so many of these characters. They are stuck in a loop, in a way that is deeply unnerving and also in the same way that nearly all of our lives go.

I gave this post the title of Part 8, Gotta Light? because I have to address this episode on its own for a moment. It's something of an outlier in the series, in terms of structure. Throughout The Return, we get more and stranger diversions into the mythology—or cosmology—behind the supernatural events of the series than at any other point in Twin Peaks. Some of it ties in with pieces of Fire Walk With Me or with the original series. Some of it—such as The Arm—take us to Eraserhead-levels of Lynchian strangeness.

Part 8 is the most sustained avant-garde segment in all of Twin Peaks, if that's the right term. David Lynch has been a visual and sound artist for fifty years, known primarily for his films; he is also a fine artist, a painter, sculptor and non-narrative filmmaker as well as a musician and sound designer. Parts of Part 8 bring his narrative film work closer to his painting, sculptural and non-narrative work than at any other time I can think of in his film career. It's a stunningly beautiful, terrible vision, shocking, embarrassing, profound; as unforgettable as it can be difficult to parse. Lynch pushes us, hard, to let go of our prejudices, our demands, our expectations. His miraculously handmade cinema can whipsaw the viewer between beauty and bathos, between joy and contempt, to break us down into our parts, to reassemble us anew. A clue for watching this: don't ask what it means, ask what is it doing to you? This is not to say that it doesn't mean anything—in terms of the larger mystery of Twin Peaks, this episode holds the key—but that there's something even more important here than missing pieces.