An endless summer with Twin Peaks: The Return | Little White Lies

In Heaven Everything Is Fine

An end­less sum­mer with Twin Peaks: The Return

10 Feb 2025

Words by Mark Asch

Graphic comic-style image depicting an angry, screaming woman with wild hair in a red and black palette, surrounded by smaller images including an explosion and another woman.
Graphic comic-style image depicting an angry, screaming woman with wild hair in a red and black palette, surrounded by smaller images including an explosion and another woman.
Mark Asch recalls the sul­try sum­mer of 2017, when Dale Coop­er returned to tele­vi­sion and the world was for­ev­er changed.

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.

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. 

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