Back to Black Lodge: The Return of Twin Peaks

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Twin Peaks is back and it is bolder and stranger than ever. Stewart Gardiner digs into the beautiful Lynchian madness of the premiere.

By Stewart Gardiner //  I stole two hours of sleep on Sunday night then got up before 2:00 am to watch the simulcast of the return of Twin Peaks. At 6.30 am I left the Black Lodge, having mainlined the first four hours. I possibly looked like Henry from Eraserhead. I certainly felt like him. All harried eyes and haunted hair. I slept again.

Watching new Twin Peaks in the middle of the night sure was appropriate. I had television instead of dreams. But what was I watching except my dreams realized?

Twin Peaks: The Return doesn’t so much eschew cozy nostalgia as throw it under a train barrelling through industrial wastelands. David Lynch and Mark Frost tapped into the true legacy of Twin Peaks: it blazed a trail of its own strange choosing and is doing so again. Frost brings deliciously cryptic conspiracies to the table while Lynch is at his most all-out, unapologetically Lynchian. The premiere delivered a nightmarish experience that is too beautiful for words.

Black Lodge in Black and White

The re-entry point into the world of Twin Peaks is of course the Black Lodge. Lynch effectively course corrected the television show with the season 2 finale and Fire Walk With Me. The cosmic staging area of the Black Lodge features prominently in both.

The opening scene sees the Red Room rendered in black and white. Cooper is sitting in one of the armchairs. Across from him sits the Giant who, like Cooper, also looks older. It is 25 years later in story terms. At least it may be assumed it is the Giant. I’ll call him the Giant, but let’s leave his identity open to interpretation.

The Giant tells Cooper to “Listen to the sounds.” The whooping/electrical hum of previous iterations is absent. Instead there is an ominous scratching sound. The dying twitter of birds perhaps; if by birds one means the rupturing cracks between time and space. The sound design harks back to Lynch’s short films and Eraserhead.

Shadow

There are a number of cryptic exchanges between the two characters:

“It is in our house now,” says the Giant.

“It is?” asks Cooper.

“It all cannot be said aloud now.”

I’m noting these down now as they will surely be important later.

“Remember… 430. Richard and… Linda. Two birds… with one stone.”

“I understand,” says Cooper.

He does? The Man From Another Place gave Cooper cryptic clues to decode when he dreamed the Red Room of the Black Lodge in season 1. “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air,” went one. He is not here now and the birds aren’t singing so prettily anymore. What else is different? Back then Cooper didn’t understand – he had to crack the code in the real world. After 25 years in the Black Lodge he understands. At least in there.

“You… are far away,” the Giant tells him.

Cooper statics out of sight.

This is Not My Hat

There are cuts to scenes which would appear at first glance to serve little narrative purpose within the premiere. Catching glimpses of Jacoby (taking a delivery of shovels) or the brothers Horne (Jerry possibly wearing their mother’s hat) provides some continuity to the world of Twin Peaks as established in the show. These scenes breathe in interesting ways. The story structure is that of a painting.

Mulholland Drive’s origins as an intended television show are evident in how Lynch builds the narrative from not only the main thread but with seemingly disparate scenes. Some of these never serve a clear narrative purpose, but just feel right. So too here.

Many recent shows have discarded the idea of an episode as an entity in itself. Instead each episode becomes merely a chapter of the greater whole. Although Lynch and Frost conceived of the new season as an 18 hour movie broken down into parts, they are taking a richer, more complex approach. Having seen the first four hours, these are distinct episodes that nevertheless service the overarching narrative. The disparate scenes will be better understood at a distance, as if certain narratives are progressing at different speeds.

City of Glass Boxes

A young man Sam sits in a New York building watching a glass box. Cameras watch the box constantly. Sam must attend the room alone. Tracey shows up with coffees, but the security guard cannot let her in (“That’s right,” he interjects, recalling Henry Rollins’s prison officer in Lost Highway). The dialogue is classic Lynch. All slowed down cadences and separated words. The use of space and the subdued pacing is perfectly Lynchian too.

“Top secret,” Sam says. Charged words indeed. There’s clearly something going on between these two or at least they each want there to be. It’s Jeffrey and Sandy from Blue Velvet all over again.

“Ooh,” says Tracey. “Now I’m so curious you’re driving me crazy.”

Tracey returns the next night. The security guard is not there. “Let’s not overthink this opportunity,” she tells Sam. So they go into the room together, stare at the glass box a little then start making out. Things escalate. As they are having sex something starts happening in the glass box. Is this the intercourse between two worlds as mentioned in The Missing Pieces? The box fills with black – somewhere between ink and smoke – before an indistinct humanoid figure manifests within. It flickers through states of reality. They turn and watch in horror as the creature slams itself against the glass. The glass breaks and the creature surges over to them, flickering above, within and through their faces. They die horribly.

Do You Remember Your Doppelganger?

Season 2 ended with Agent Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge. His doppelganger escaped into the real world, playing host to Bob. Cooper’s doppelganger was no unwilling vessel for Bob. It was natural to assume that they had a mutually beneficial relationship rather than a parasitical one.

Cooper’s doppelganger goes by the name of Mr C. His leather jacket, long hair and worn face make him the embodiment of two fractured personalities who have fused together (two birds, one stone). Frank Silva who portrayed Bob died in 1995, so there was obviously no question of bringing him back. But what of Bob as an entity? There are no shots of Bob’s face staring back at Mr C in mirrors. There would not be, for there is no internal battleground as there was with Leland Palmer.

I Had a Dream That Night

One wonders if Bob can leave Mr C and inhabit others. William Hastings in Buckham, South Dakota is a case in point. The local police arrest Hastings on suspicion of murder. It turns out he was having an affair with the victim, a local librarian. The crime scene at her apartment is awful. Her severed head is next to an unidentified headless body. His fingerprints are all over the apartment. Hastings vehemently protests his innocence. Although is clearly lying about their relationship.

“I have to tell you something,” he says to his completely unsympathetic wife. “I wasn’t there. But I had a dream that night that I was in her apartment.” It’s beginning to add up to a case of possession. Bob is the obvious candidate, but maybe not.

Hastings’s wife appears to be in league with Cooper’s bad self, but he shoots her dead. Mr C wants (not needs, he doesn’t need anything) information from Hastings’s secretary. Geographical co-ordinates; numbers and letters. But you would think that Bob could get those through Hastings. So if a parasite has infected Hastings and it isn’t Bob, then who is it?

A Monster in Back of This Place

Two cells along from Hastings there is a dark man. He is terrifyingly still, as if a lingering echo. His appearance is that of a vagrant or woodsman, yet made up of filthy blackness. There is no movement and then his body vanishes. The head floats up and away, echoing both the murder scene and Eraserhead. Disturbing, tantalizing and more nightmarish than a thousand horror movies.

The dark man also brings to mind the hobo in Mulholland Drive. Is there a connection between him and the glass box entity?

This is What I Want

Mr C asks associate Darya about Hastings’s secretary. He brings out an utterly wrong-looking playing card.

“Anybody ever show this to you before?”

Darya hasn’t seen it. “This is what I want,” Mr C tells her. The word choice is crucial here. He wants.

The corners show the ace of spades (Jacoby takes a delivery of spades), but the image in the center is a distorted monstrosity. It is suggestive of cosmic horror, a powerful symbol beyond the ken of mankind. More importantly it is a distorted, bulbous version of the owl symbol that adorns the talismanic Owl Cave ring and is an emblem of the Black Lodge. The owls are indeed not what they seem. Again, one cannot help but consider whether this represents some aspect of the manifestation in the glass box and the dark man in the cell.

The Rules of Leaving

Cooper can leave the Black Lodge now. There is of course a caveat. Mike the One-Armed Man explains: “He… must come… back… in… before… you… can… go… out.” Cooper’s evil other must return to the Lodge tomorrow. But he has a plan.

Mr C opens a line of communication using a black box device. The person on the other line is supposedly Phillip Jeffries, that most enigmatic of missing FBI agents from Fire Walk With Me.

“Actually I just called to say goodbye,” says the man.

“This is Phillip Jeffries, right?”

“You are going back in tomorrow and I will be with Bob again.”

“Who is this?”

Wow. I get shivers just thinking about that.

Find Laura / Something’s Wrong

Cooper and Laura Palmer talk in the Black Lodge. An unseen force lifts Laura up and rips her away. Drapes flap and flow like water (reflecting the new title sequence). Where does she go? Is Laura’s disappearance linked to the manifestation in the box? Laura pulls her face away so reveal a white light energy. Darkness consumes the box before the entity appears. Opposites abound in Twin Peaks.

The Man From Another Place was a representation of the arm that Mike removed. Mike introduces Cooper to the Evolution of the Arm. No longer a dancing dwarf, the Evolution of the Arm is a tree crackling with electricity. Its faceless face is a bulbous fleshy mass. The design harks all the way back to Eraserhead and Lynch’s art, such as his cover for Julee Cruise’s The Voice of Love album.

The Evolution of the Arm doppelganger chases Cooper out of the Lodge. Cooper materializes above and then moves into the glass box while Sam and Tracey are outside the room wondering where the guard is. Cooper is in a box within a box where the space alters sickeningly before he falls through Eraserhead space.

It’s All Right

The return of Twin Peaks is David Lynch at the top of his game. Uncompromisingly dark and strange, he dares to go places where television fears to tread. Lynch has taken an existing property and forged ahead with something thrillingly new, yet he’s also tapping into his entire body of work. The continuation of Twin Peaks is shaping up to be his magnum opus. I never dreamed it could be like this. We must indeed live inside a dream.