The summer of Twin Peaks: The Return — the greatest collective pop-cultural event of my lifetime, which I remain so grateful to have experienced in real time with my friends — was spent realizing that the title was a lie. While Dale Cooper, who had been initiated into the mysteries of Twin Peaks alongside all of us who had treasured him and the original show, was trapped in the Black Lodge, Kyle MacLachlan revisited the mannerisms of a character he had last played a quarter-century ago, and distributed them to his uncanny, imperfect doubles: to the dopey Douglas Jones, amnesiac despite the talismans — an American flag, a cowboy pointing the way — that promised to stir his dimly recalled sense of purpose; to the malevolent Mr. C, the skeeviest figure in a show whose bad vibes (“People are under a lot of stress, Bradley”) mingled with those of the first year of the first Trump administration, a time likewise defined by a nostalgia that was either vague or curdled. (Make Dougie Coop Again!)
When our Special Agent finally returned to us, in the final hours of the show, his impulse was also to go back, to resurrect Laura Palmer and restore her to Twin Peaks, righting the wrongs that had been done to her, like Orpheus or Vertigo’s Scotty Ferguson. Perhaps, too, he wanted to return to the time before someone with his face had emerged from the Black Lodge and done all that he had done.
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Throughout the series, GPS coordinates were strewn across the narrative, tantalizing clues for searching characters, and puzzled viewers, who spent the summer of 2017 feeling homesick as Dorothy. The road that Coop and Laura follow in the finale of The Return is dark, the white lines of the freeway flickering by under the headlights that provide the only illumination, brooding and ill-omened and leading back to the site of Laura’s primal trauma.
David Lynch was born January 20, 1946, making him one of the very first Baby Boomers; his pregnant mother would have been a couple months along on July 16, 1945, the day of the Trinity Test. He grew up within the rising standards of living bestowed postwar consumer society, and as nascent mass media disseminated images of the white suburban good life that remain our nation’s iconographic heritage — though the saddle shoes and letterman jackets of the Twin Peaks pilot were already a pointedly retro touch there at the end of the Morning in America 80s.
So much of Twin Peaks, so much of Lynch in general, folds time over itself like origami. When Coop, after knocking on the door of the Palmer house, discovers that there’s no place like home — not anymore, and not ever again — his question is a defining one for a culture struggling to shake free of the Boomers’ gerontocratic hold on our institutions, as well as for deeper, more fundamental and mysterious reasons. “What year is this?” The unease, the dawning awareness that the past that called him home is either forgotten or worse than he remembered, is answered with a scream, and a final cut to black. This is how Lynch left us, with the yawning abyss of Laura Palmer’s howl, a reminder of her pain, uneradicated, and the knowledge that comes with it; of Coop’s failure and fear; of our collective guilt and spiritual homelessness, because it’s been seven and a half years now and we live inside the echo.
To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.
