David Lynch

[BomberPat]

We just got past Episode 13 of The Return in our weekly watchalong, and it feels as good a point as any to start having some heavily spoilered and rambling thoughts (mostly about the episodes I've seen so far, but with some vague recollections of what's to come):

Spoiler

Something I never really picked up on the first time around is that timelines in this show are - intentionally - all over the place. There are indications of the time and date across different scenes, and they don't add up at all - the FBI scenes seem to be taking place at completely different times to the scenes in Twin Peaks or elsewhere, and Twin Peaks in particular is very muddied.

There was a scene in episode 13 where Bobby Briggs is in the diner, and says that earlier today they found some stuff his dad left for him at work - that's something that happened back in Episode 9, and we've seen the show change from day to night multiple times since then, including scenes with Bobby in them. So are we seeing things happen out of order, or is there something weirder going on? Is it future, or is it past? 

Similarly in the diner, there's a scene as the credits roll in episode 7 where someone opens the door and asks "has anyone seen Billy?". The camera cuts a few times, and every time it does, the extras in the diner change. It's not a continuity error, it's a conscious choice. Kind of like The Shining, I tend to eschew all the mad theories about why it's disorienting and just assume that it being disorienting is the point; it's telling us that something's not right, but it's not clear what.


I'm also starting to wonder about the musical performances at the Roadhouse. The Roadhouse is weird in this series (and I haven't even got to Audrey getting there yet). It feels like a liminal space, out of time/out of sync with the rest of the town, full of characters that we mostly never see or hear from again or never see anywhere else. But I'm also wondering if the specific acts, or how they're presented, are meant to mean anything - Nine Inch Nails being announced as "The Nine Inch Nails" might just be Lynch joking around, and the timing of their performance coming earlier in the episode rather than with the closing credits might be meaningless, but in such an abstract episode, it feels like it should mean something. Do Au Revoir Simone and Chromatics showing up twice suggest that those episodes, or at least those Roadhouse scenes, take place on the same days? Rebekah del Rio showing up feels like a conscious Mulholland Drive/Club Silencio connection. When Eddie Vedder shows up, he's credited as his real name rather than his stage name - is that another "the Nine Inch Nails" gag, or is that another message about doubles, and layers of reality?  That it's followed up with "Audrey's Dance" only makes me wonder more.

 

I had forgotten, speaking of Audrey, that when Charlie weirdly threatens to "end her story", she asks "is that the story of the little girl who lives down the lane?", echoing something said by The Arm back at the start of the series. Something I have long believed from series one, which gets more or less ignored in all of series two, was that  there is something other about Audrey - she has her own theme tune, and seems to be aware of it, dancing to it, and playing it on a jukebox. The only other character who seems aware of the soundtrack is The Arm - "where we're from, there's always music in the air"; there's something that ties Audrey to the Red Room, or to something else entirely. Given how time seems completely non-linear from Fire Walk With Me to The Return, what with Laura seeing Annie in her dream and writing about Dale in her diary and then all the time-related fuckery in The Return, could one explanation (obviously not intended when the show was first made) be that Audrey's ordeal at the hands of the Black Lodge Cooper doppelganger have projected a connection to the lodges/red room back through time? 

Then it comes down to - and I'm not here yet on the rewatch - "who is the dreamer, and who is the dream?". I remember briefly thinking maybe it's Audrey's dream that we're experiencing, but then deciding it was Dale Cooper's - he's "asleep" in Dougie Jones, and Mike is repeatedly telling him to wake up. But there's multiple dreamers within the dream - Cooper, Audrey, Gordon Cole, Sarah Palmer, maybe more - all dreaming each other, and maybe one of them is dreaming the whole lot, but perhaps not. 

My girlfriend has been getting annoyed at how few people are allowed to be happy in Twin Peaks; that Shelly is back to dating a criminal, that if Big Ed and Norma ever did get together then it's all over by the time we see them again. There's a sense of certain people being stuck doing what they've always done. I kind of see that as a meta-narrative on bringing the story back after 25 years - it would have been easy to give everyone the ending you wanted, but the story kept on going, there isn't an ending. But the flipside of that is that, while there are some significant changes (mostly Bobby Briggs joining the sherrif's department), a lot of characters are exactly where they were left - Shelly and Norma are still at the diner, Ed's at the Gas Farm, Andy and Lucy are in the same jobs at the sheriff's office - and maybe that ties into, if it is all a dream, who is dreaming it; is everyone more or less where they were 25 years ago because it's being dreamed by someone who hasn't seen them in 25 years? So is that Dale Cooper? Or Audrey, depending how long she was in a coma/institutionalised for?


Over-arching all of it, I think it's a series about social isolation. In the original, Twin Peaks was a small town where everyone knew everyone, everything was connected, and everyone had secrets; and it was all upended by a murder at the heart of it all. This series is full of anonymous characters with no connection to one another, and there's no Laura Palmer to pull them together. 

 

[RedTwoster]

I loved The Return on first viewing, and I was well up for a second season. I actually thought it surpassed the original quite significantly, with Lynch taking some bold risks with his storytelling and creating episodes of television that stuck with you, even if you didn’t always know why. I’ll need to revisit it. 

[Merzbow]

The latest episode of Skibidi Toilet just bloody quoted The Return... I'm going to have to actually watch the brainrot now, aren't I?

[SuperBacon]

Thought this might interest a fair few of you, a whole BFI David Lynch season.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/david-lynch-season-january-2026

[Merzbow]

Rebekah Del Rio, best known as the brilliant singer in Mulholland Drive passed away at 57. Technically another Twin Peaks cast member to leave us as she was also in The Return.

[FLips]

My wife is watching Twin Peaks and any time she tries to explain any of it to me she might as well be making it up on the spot. 
The bits I have seen are absolute nonsense. She just showed me a bit where a woman was dressed as an offensive Asian stereotype man and then it cut to a woman crawling on the floor and a ghost horse appeared. I saw a bit the other day where someone shot Kyle MacLachlan three times and he laid on the floor bickering about his room service. 

I know it’s a harsh comparison but it reminds me of The Room. 

Edited June 28, 2025 by FLips

[LaGoosh]

I can definitely understand why seeing scenes completely out of context might seem that way.

That's why context is very important. Twin Peaks is brilliant but its tone is very unique and specific. It's not something you can just "see a few bits of" and even remotely understand. And considering how hugely popular and critically acclaimed it is I'd recommend you try giving it a proper go. It's not something for casual viewing. It's magic.

Edited June 30, 2025 by LaGoosh

[BomberPat]

We finished our Twin Peaks (re-)watch, and I tied it all up by re-reading The Final Dossier, a book I gave a two star review to on Goodreads first time around - on second read, I can safely say I upgrade it to a 2.5 or a generous 3. It's not as annoying as how the previous Mark Frost book is all about UFOs and conspiracy theories - partly because you can at least retcon a lot of that into "this is what the FBI and the military think is going on" - but it's also fairly pointless. Most of it is tying up loose ends from Series 2, and I think that's partly what annoyed me on the first read - in classic Twin Peaks mode, the series ends with a load of questions, and then the follow-up book barely addresses them and bangs on about something else instead. The most egregious part is an autopsy report, apparently written by Albert in 1989, in which he uses the phrase "trigger warning".

As for the series itself, my partner was furious at the end of the final episode, and I couldn't help but find it hilarious. 

Some scattered spoilered thoughts:

Spoiler

Cooper asking what year it is, and "Laura Palmer" screaming to close the series is something that will always stick with me. I don't need to ever make sense of it, it's just perfectly chilling. The impending sense of dread as Cooper and Carrie Page travel almost silently through the night, just escalating as the woman at the Palmer house gives her name and the names of the former owners as Tremond and Chalfont is unmatched. That the woman in question is played by the woman who genuinely owned that house in real life just adds another layer of confusion and unreality to it all.

What I remembered from the first watch was how "what year is it?" tied into The Arm asking "is it future, or is it past?", but this time around it was clearer that time is really essential to unpicking this series - you are given lots of indications of time passing, of dates and times, and none of them really add up; the Twin Peaks, Las Vegas, and South Dakota plotlines are all running on completely different and incompatible timelines, yet still somehow manage to all come together at the same place and time, and then the actual line "what year is it?" is reflected in Philip Jeffries' dialogue from Fire Walk With Me - the same scene where he asks Gordon Cole who he thinks Dale Cooper is. The Lodges clearly exist outside of time, or have a different relationship with time, so it's possible that the Jeffries that appears there had already encountered the Bad Cooper doppelganger. Jeffries seems like the key to understanding the whole series, somehow.


One thing I did like from The Final Dossier is that Tammy Preston visits the offices of Twin Peaks' newspaper to find how the disappearance of Dale Cooper was reported, and finds that the stories describe how he arrived in Twin Peaks to investigate the disappearance of Laura Palmer - every reference to her being murdered has vanished, and Leland Palmer commits suicide in 1990. So we know that Dale Cooper successfully changed the timeline to one in which Laura Palmer wasn't murdered, but to what end? She wasn't saved, she was just removed from her timeline, and it seems like everything else continued more or less the same. Dale Cooper is, essentially, a man with a saviour complex, and he tried to do the impossible and save Laura Palmer, a girl he never knew, from her fate before it even happened. Whether in doing so he was successful in saving Laura, we don't know - it was a lot more ambiguous whether Carrie Page was Laura Palmer or not than I remembered; in my memory, she wasn't Laura at all, but actually she never quite denies it, and gets slightly freaked out by her parents' names - and maybe that wasn't the point, maybe preventing Laura's death preventing some kind of union of Bob and Judy, and that was the point, but I struggle with that too.

Given that Laura was rescued only on the day she should have died, then Bob presumably remained in the body of Leland Palmer at least until his suicide in 1990. Judy, or whatever it is that possesses Sarah Palmer, remained part of her. Without Laura's death, what happened there? It's interesting that the woman in the Palmer house at the end is talking to someone off-camera who we never see or hear, while when Hawk visited Sarah Palmer at home, she seemed to be distracted by something or someone else in her house, yet denied there was anyone else in there. All of the scenes of Sarah at home are weird; there are skips and time loops and repetition that only otherwise occur around portals/entrances to the Black Lodge. Sarah herself is obviously unhinged too. It feels like the Palmer house is inhabiting two realities at once, and whether through whatever is inside her or just through the sheer force of her grief, Sarah is caught between them - the reality where Laura died and she was left alone in the house, and a reality where Laura didn't die, and her connection to the house is less clear; Sarah attacking the photograph of Laura when she's removed from her original timeline is a really powerful moment.

Then there's Dale Cooper in the final episode. Or Richard? He doesn't feel like Dale Cooper, even before he wakes up as "Richard". He's very singular and driven, and intense. The sex scene with Diane is horrible. There's an echo of Diane's traumatic memory of having been raped by the evil Cooper, but also of Dougie's sex scene in how Cooper just lies there almost emotionless. At the same time, there's the coldness of Bad Coop to him. Almost as if all of Kyle McLachlan's roles in the series have merged into one, but not how you'd like. There's a fair bit in the first Mark Frost book about occultism and Aleister Crowley via Jack Parsons, and this scene does feel like it has a bit of Crowley sex magic to it - the "real" Diane having red hair makes me wonder if she's supposed to be one of Crowley's "scarlet women", or if the hair is meant to bring the curtains of the Red Room to mind.


Speaking of the Red Room, there's also the question of "Who Is The Dreamer?". I think, first time around, I assumed it was Dale Cooper - he was "asleep" in the form of Dougie Jones, with Mike from the Red Room even telling him explicitly to "wake up". When Dale Cooper's face is superimposed over the screen in episode 17, it's him that says "we live inside a dream". But I think there's something to Audrey "waking up", presumably in Ghostwood Hospital, in the same episode that Dale Cooper "wakes up". It might just be narrative symmetry, or it might be them being connected somehow. I always found it interesting in the original series how Audrey seems aware of things that a character in a TV show shouldn't be aware of - she has her own theme tune, and dances to it, even when there's no diegetic reason for there to be music playing, and is also able to cue up that same theme tune on a jukebox; the only other character that interacts with music in the same way is The Arm, and where he comes from, there is always music in the air. Audrey always felt somehow connected to the Red Room or the Lodges to me, and in this series more than ever, between the unreality of her presumed dream sequence appearances (although The Final Dossier does state that Audrey married her long-time accountant, presumably Charlie) and then the musicians in the Roadhouse playing "Audrey's Dance". So could she be the Dreamer? The Roadhouse itself feels on various levels of unreality throughout the series - strange things happen there, we're constantly introduced to new characters and their relationships that seem to never intersect with the main plot (though, likewise, this could be Lynch & Frost saying, "it's been twenty-five years, this town has moved on, it would be weird if it hadn't"), and then of course you finally have not only Audrey's Dance, but that same band playing music backwards over the credits, a clear Red Room inference. In that scene, the stage looks different to previous episodes too, and has red curtains - I'm half-tempted to go back through every Roadhouse scene just to look at the colour of the curtains, or to see if the few repeated musical acts suggest something happening in the same time across two or more episodes. There's more layers of weirdness and unreality there too; Eddie Vedder being announced under his real name, and "The Nine Inch Nails". 

 

But then, maybe it's Gordon Cole's dream. He's the one who introduces the concept, is the closest thing The Return has to a main character, and interacts most explicitly with dreams. Or maybe it's Carrie Page/Laura Palmer's dream - what prompts her to scream at the very end is Sarah Palmer's voice calling out to Laura to wake her, not knowing that she isn't there. Only this time around, she is there, and Sarah sort of isn't? One of the criticisms of The Return is that it leaned too heavily into the metaphysical and supernatural, that by making the Lodges, the Red Room, BOB, and Judy, and so on, explicitly true and integral to the plot, it overshadowed how the story could be interpreted as entirely a metaphor for trauma and abuse - it's possible to read into the original series and Fire Walk With Me that BOB was never real, but a coping mechanism created by Laura Palmer to deal with the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, by externalising it and giving it a name. But if Laura is the dreamer, then all of that could still stand - the story of The Return, at least in part, could be a continuation of Laura Palmer's coping mechanism, that she has dreamed an entire world into being, one where she died (and in doing so, in an extreme sense, escaped her life of abuse) but in which she remained the centre of the universe, and where a heroic figure (Dale Cooper, who from Laura Palmer's perspective is someone she only saw in her dreams) is out to save her and save the world. 

 

I don't think any of that is quite right, though. The phrase "we are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream" is from a Hindu text, and suggests that this is true for all of us. Twin Peaks isn't happening in one person's dream, but multiple. Everyone is constructing their own story, and the questions are about where they intersect and what disrupts them.

 

[LaGoosh]

Great post Pat. I often wonder if there even is an answer. Did Lynch and Frost come up with a definitive plot of what is happening then lay out various clues for people to decipher or is it almost a mystery to them too? Never intended to have a true answer.

Edited June 30, 2025 by LaGoosh

[Chris B]

11 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Great post Pat. I often wonder if there even is an answer. Did Lynch and Frost come up with a definitive plot of what is happening then lay out various clues for people to decipher or is it almost a mystery to them too? Never intended to have a true answer.

I think it's a bit of both, and that's part of the strengths they both brought to it. Frost was more traditional television, while Lynch has his own artistry and style that he beings to it.

It's not quite as simple as this, but I think Frost tends to want to explain and Lynch doesn't give much of a shit about that.  

Also, I think Lynch is reactive as much as anything. When Twin Peaks changed in S2, I think he reacted to it, and thats why we get the end of S2 and the film as they were - they were engaging and responsing to what Twin Peaks had become, so we end up returning to Laura Palmer and really going into exploring her trauma, making that the lynchpin (tee hee) of the rest of the show.

The Return was, I think, a mixture of that and exploring a lot of what was important to Lynch on a wider level. 

[LaGoosh]

22 minutes ago, Chris B said:

Frost was more traditional television, while Lynch has his own artistry and style that he beings to it.

It's not quite as simple as this, but I think Frost tends to want to explain and Lynch doesn't give much of a shit about that.  

That's what I find so fascinating about the Twin Peaks creative process. As a TV show it's set up in an often very traditional way where watching it you expect there to be a clear resolution and ending but you throw in Lynch who is a brilliant avant garde artist who incorporates things into his work that even he doesn't understand where they come from - they are just expressions of his subconcious, or he's not sure what they mean from a story perspective - he's trying to create a feeling and emotional reaction rather feed the audience plot points. It merges into being one big, beautiful headfuck where because it's TV you are searching for a resolution but because it's Lynch there probably isn't one.

[organizedkaos]

On 6/30/2025 at 11:18 AM, BomberPat said:

Some scattered spoilered thoughts:

  Hide contents

she has her own theme tune, and dances to it, even when there's no diegetic reason for there to be music playing, and is also able to cue up that same theme tune on a jukebox; the only other character that interacts with music in the same way is The Arm, and where he comes from, there is always music in the air.

 

Amazing post! So many things i might return to to chat about when not in the thick of work but just a quick note as to the point i snipped out above

Spoiler

Just off the top of my head there's at least one moment where Cooper reacts to digetic music too.  After the first Red Room dream he wakes up and phones Truman delivering something along the lines of "I know who killed Laura Palmer.. yes it can wait until tomorrow" and he then snaps his fingers twice in time with the (digetic) music that's playing (can't remember which one but immassume it's dance of the dream man, Cooper's theme)

Just one of those little moments that always stuck with me because it's such a wonderully stylish little button on an iconic scene

 

Edited July 3, 2025 by organizedkaos
Julee Cruise - Into The Night (HOLTOUG Edit)

[BomberPat]

21 hours ago, organizedkaos said:

Amazing post! So many things i might return to to chat about when not in the thick of work but just a quick note as to the point i snipped out above

  Reveal hidden contents

Just off the top of my head there's at least one moment where Cooper reacts to digetic music too.  After the first Red Room dream he wakes up and phones Truman delivering something along the lines of "I know who killed Laura Palmer.. yes it can wait until tomorrow" and he then snaps his fingers twice in time with the (digetic) music that's playing (can't remember which one but immassume it's dance of the dream man, Cooper's theme)

Just one of those little moments that always stuck with me because it's such a wonderully stylish little button on an iconic scene

 

 

Spoiler

That's a really good catch, I had forgotten that moment, and it does add weight to the idea that music is connected to the Red Room, that Cooper was able to interact with that music while still in that sort of liminal post-dream state.