In Dreams: The Atomic Reveries of The Return

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” I woke up with the first words of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) on my mind. I had been mulling over David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) as a dreamscape, and how it differs from most narrative films that depict dreams as clues to a character’s desires or confusions—or, in the case of Rebecca, that employ a dream to suggest a secret that won’t be revealed until the end. Classical surrealist that he was, Hitchcock held fast to a dialectical relationship between dreams and waking life, confounding the two only in Vertigo (1958), which the cultural critic and filmmaker Peter Wollen once described as “the kind of waking dream that someone would spin for a stranger sitting at a bar in the late afternoon.” The narrative device to which Wollen alluded is only possible when a single character’s subjectivity controls the storyline. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a reverse-gendered Vertigo, also issues from the depths of a single character’s disordered psyche. 

But Twin Peaks, in its fragmented entirety, weaves its story through a crazy quilt of characters. FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is distinctive among them, but not a governing subjectivity as was Jeffrey, the character that the actor played in Lynch’s first masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986). We should not forget that in the second episode of the first season of Twin Peaks, Cooper was introduced hanging upside down from an improvised exercise bar in his Twin Peaks hotel room. Lynch never intended that we should trust this topsy-turvy detective as our guide. No: the only constant in the series is the title sequence, which shows us an unchanging image of the natural world, somewhere on the outskirts of the town. Water rushes below a cliff with Douglas firs to the side. Above, clouds float across a sunless sky. My association with the opening of Rebecca is not only based in dreamscapes, but in the way that a place can be the foundation of a narrative even more than the characters that occupy it. 

Thus the first thing we might notice in The Return is that this title sequence is altered by a superimposed transparent bubble in which we can see a shadowy face—different faces in different episodes. With this simple superimposition, Lynch announces that the place we thought we could return to has been transformed by the introduction of the digital image and new sound editing tools. In addition to directing all eighteen episodes of The Return and cowriting them with Mark Frost, his partner on the first series, Lynch is also credited as sound designer and as one of a team of five picture editors. Unlike the first two seasons, he was hands-on with this series all the way. No longer constrained by the limits that network television places on content, he went against broadcast rules for compressing the video and audio signals into an expressively narrow midrange. Lynch’s radical exploration of digital tools is of a piece with the work of those filmmakers—for whom we have no more precise term than avant-garde—who used 16mm film and magnetic recording tape to radically transform our concept of time and space, creating a world we could not see with our naked eyes. 

In the second half of the 1960s, I volunteered at the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which rented avant-garde films worldwide, but primarily to US art colleges and museums. Among our regular clients was the Pennsylvania College of Art in Philadelphia, which Lynch attended from 1965 to 1969, and where, in his senior year, he changed his focus from painting to the moving image. Lynch has never been quick to cite influences. When I interviewed him in 1990 for a Village Voice cover story on the first season of Twin Peaks, he clammed up only when I asked him about his TV viewing memories. First, he claimed that he never watched television. Then he remembered that when his parents got a TV in 1954 he saw Perry Mason (1957–66) and liked the music from The Jackie Gleason Show (1952–70). (That some dates don’t match up here is curious: Did Lynch have no memory for dates, or was this time blurred, like a dream?) After an agonizing pause, he said that he liked “reruns,” and after another long silence, he said that when he lived in Philadelphia he got hooked on watching soap operas with Flash, the woman who plays the title role in his early short film, The Grandmother (1970).

Not a word about movies, mainstream or avant-garde. And yet, when I saw Blue Velvet in 1986, the title immediately evoked Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), in which Bobby Vinton’s hit record, ‘Blue Velvet’, is played over a beefcake image of a bare-chested biker, strutting his stuff in a corridor that looks a lot like the side exit from The Return’s Red Room. I suspect that Anger’s prefiguring of music videos was not the only avant-garde innovation that Lynch absorbed into his inner moviescape. The first shot of the rosebush-covered picket fence at the beginning of Blue Velvet calls up Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966), and the spouting garden hose dropped by Jeffrey’s father a minute or so later evokes a similar image in Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste (1978). Perhaps Lynch's affinity to Anger’s, Baillie’s, and Conner’s films is that they are more like dreams than waking life, and not bound by linear narrative time. But more than anything else in the American avant-garde, it is the documentary footage of the first nuclear bomb tests in multiple Conner films—from A Movie (1959) to Crossroads (1976)—that Lynch must have imbibed.

Death is afoot in Twin Peaks, overwhelming pleasure and desire with cruelty and fear. In the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, Eros is losing badly, and in the eighth episode of The Return, Lynch shows us why. It’s simple. It's the bomb that did all of us in—not in a flash, as it did the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by becoming the horizon of our future. Lynch was born a year after the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs that resulted in those radioactive twin peaks; for him, planetary obliteration has always loomed large. A photograph of a mushroom cloud adorns the hovel in Eraserhead (1977), hanging at the foot of the bed where the poor, deformed baby endlessly mewls—his tiny head and long twisted neck calling up the shape of the mushroom cloud as it dissipates. (It will be replicated in many grotesque sculptures in supernatural spaces, such as the Red Room in The Return.) The same photograph decorates a wall in the office of FBI director Gordon Cole, deafer than ever, and played by Lynch himself.  

“Gotta light?” demands the Woodsman—crusher of skulls and the seat of reason, sensorial annihilator of the site of vision and hearing, of tasting and sucking and kissing and speaking. There are flashes of light from matches, electronics short-circuiting, and one big flashback to the big bang. In a show with such a disordered sense of time and space, there are also two classically coded flashbacks, with superimposed titles telling us exactly where we are. The first, printed over an image of a vast desert, reads “July 16, 1945, White Sands, New Mexico, 5:29 AM (MWT).” As we hear a countdown, we are pushed—as were viewers of Michael Snow’s tragicomedy of mortality, Wavelength (1967)—toward something in the far distance. It is an image of the Trinity test nuclear explosion, the now-familiar mushroom cloud revealing a fireball that gradually fills the entire screen. There follows a passage of abstract surges of color and flickering light, occasionally resolving into a representational image—as when inhabitants of Twin Peaks skitter in stop-motion around the gas station, recalling the workers’ failing bodies in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), after their ruler, the computer Alpha60, malfunctions. (I am not the only critic to read a decade or two of experimental film into episode eight of The Return. After it streamed on Showtime in 2017, Jake Perlin and Aliza Ma quickly assembled a series at New York’s Metrograph, titled “Gotta Light?” It included some of the films I’ve mentioned and more.)

The second title, also printed over White Sands, is “1956.” From an egg in the otherwise barren desert crawls a creature of Biblical hideousness. Half frog, half winged beetle, it heads for Twin Peaks, arriving at roughly the same time as the Woodsman, who crushes the life out of the forerunner characters we know: a secretary, a waitress, and a DJ who is closing his radio show with The Platters’ hit single, “My Prayer.” The Woodsman seizes the microphone from the DJ’s dead hands to intone an enigmatic but clearly diabolical instruction: “This is the water. And this is the well. Drink deep and fall inside.” A teenage girl, younger than Laura Palmer when she was murdered but with a hairdo that nearly replicates Laura’s in that now-fabled photograph, has just received her first kiss—no more than a quick touching of lips with an equally innocent boy. She lies down and falls asleep to the Woodsman’s voice on her radio. When the beetle-frog crawls through her window and onto her bed, she accommodatingly opens her mouth and swallows the creature whole. This sleeping girl is the last image in “Gotta Light?”—and this is how the original sin of nuclear fission came to Twin Peaks: as a dream.