Twin Peaks The Return

I have now completed my rewatch of all of Twin Peaks.

Watching Twin Peaks: The Return for the first time watching since it aired on Showtime, I noticed some things.

Maybe it was because I was prepared for the awkward Dougie scenes, I enjoyed them a lot more than I remembered. I also thought that some of the very experimental storytelling was more interesting the second time around. Just as in the original series, there were some plot lines that didn’t work for me, but just as I had in the rewatch of those weeks earlier, I found it a lot easier to ignore those and focus on the multitude of things that worked very well for me.

One thing I liked is Lynch and Frost’s tendency to have a whole lot of extraneous characters in the Roadhouse talking about things that are clearly important to those characters and could’ve been the focus of the plot, but were not. I’ve often wondered when watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for instance, if this is what they’re investigating how many things go uninvestigated. I’ve tried putting this into my writing a little, but I think it usually comes out wrong in prose, it looks more like a dropped plot line rather than an example that there are stories taking place all throughout the setting, and the main focus just isn’t on these.

I love the Camera Experiment in Twin Peaks: The Return. In the beginning of the series, there’s this apartment with a strange glass box and a number of cameras pointed at it from different angles, programmed to snap photos if there’s any movement. I like this idea of a means of observing something from a different or parallel world entering our own… this is great inspiration for the book series I am planning.

It seems like it will be difficult to put into prose, easier perhaps to express visually, but I love all the means Lynch uses to show things taking place in multiple worlds. I’ve long had an obsession with abandoned buildings on the side of the highway, imagining what rites might take place in them. I love Twin Peaks: The Return’s use of an abandoned gas station leading through to a motel that doesn’t really exist in our world, or going through an abandoned yard and sort of phasing through to a shadow world. This all right up the strange alley for my planned series.

Of course I remembered that episode 8 was great, it is one of the most impactful hours of art that ever has or likely ever will appear on television. Episode 16 is also particularly great. It’s not as unique as episode 8 of course, but it is a brilliant mix of scary, sad, and funny, and a fantastic payoff to many of the storylines. One thing I think I’ve noticed, Lynch is great at doing the quirky, but he and Frost are particularly great when these things get explained. Having all of the factors of the main Twin Peaks storyline brought together and more or less tied up is great: learning about the Blue Rose Cases, the Lodges, the multiple worlds in play, it was all fantastic.

I usually think of Twin Peaks as weird or scary, but there were some hysterically funny moments in The Return. Jerry Horne stoned out of his gourd and his foot talking to him, after a man sprays a van with a submachine gun outside Dougie’s home Jim Belushi’s character says “what kind of neighborhood is this?” Or Albert, probably the funniest character from the original series, stepping out into pouring rain and shouting, “Fuck you, Gene Kelly!”

What I’ve learned from the rewatch as a whole:

Weirdness and quirkiness can be used not just to increase the sense of mystery, it can also be used to convey something that is otherwise difficult to impossible to convey. In prose this might be more difficult, but the Point-of-View Character’s inability to wrap their head around what has happened may well convey the oddness of it all to the reader.

It’s important to have tonal counterpoints. A story can’t just be scary or sad all the time. There should be moments where the characters and by extension the readers should experience mirth or joy. The funny and terrifying, the sad and joyous, can all exist in the same story and each emotion is felt stronger for having the other.

It’s okay to explain things. Just don’t do it too early or so often that you ruin the mystery.

I’m still not sure how I came to care so much about the characters in Twin Peaks, but I think I’m getting closer to figuring it out. It has something to do with the mix of quirkiness, earnestness, humor, and passion.

A few more inspiring things on the list to watch and to read, and then I think I’m ready to start writing my next story.