[page 126] Abstract: David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return has baffled, enthralled and mystified viewers since its release in 2017. After 25 years, the cult television phenomenon Twin Peaks (1990-1991) returned with most of the main cast in an epic narrative that depicts FBI Agent Dale Cooper’s odyssey back to the titular town. One central debate in scholarship that has yet to be resolved is how to categorize the text: is it film or television? It reached numerous Top Ten film and television lists that year, perplexing audiences and further mystifying what Lynch had created. This essay will discuss The Return as a Deleuzian/Guattarian assemblage rife with interconnected elements that present a unique and distinctive audiovisual experience.
Keywords: Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage, rhizomes, politics of editing
“The artist’s first task is to scrape away all the accumulated layers of cliché so that something new can be created.”
- Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
“There’s something about stopping something before it’s finished that leaves you wanting it, and Twin Peaks wasn’t finished.”
- David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, A Room to Dream
“Want . . . not need. I don’t need anything, Ray.”
- Mr. C, Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 2
During the interim between David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire (2006), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the artist/musician/filmmaker/actor produced short films and animations for his website davidlynch.com; wrote Catching the Big Fish (2006), a book about his experiences of transcendental meditation, and toured worldwide to promote the practice; provided the voice for recurring character Gus in the animated TV series The Cleveland Show (2009-2013); and released two studio albums, Crazy Clown Time (2011) and The Big Dream (2013). [page 127] Not only was the announcement that Lynch was returning to the world of Twin Peaks a shock, but his return to filmmaking was worthy of celebration.
Since its release, The Return has prompted several scholarly studies, predominantly focusing on themes of nostalgia.1 While nostalgia is an intrinsic element, what Lynch and co-writer/co-creator Mark Frost delivered was an audiovisual work that transcended television and cinema. Granted, The Return was distributed by U.S. cable network Showtime, yet the text’s thematic complexities, experimental audiovisuals, and its “Lynchian” nature perplexed our understanding of what contemporary film/television can be. So beguiling was The Return that it caused international debates as to which medium it should be categorized within: it appeared as number one on Cahiers du Cinéma’s greatest movies of the decade list (“Top”), and number two on Sight and Sound’s best films of 2017 poll (Ewins 33); contrastingly, it was number three on The Guardian’s “50 Best TV Shows of 2017” and number one for Rolling Stone (Sheffield). Even the manner in which it was filmed and distributed raises questions. While this is not a conundrum exclusive to Lynch and Frost’s work, it is worth highlighting that the “vast majority of films are shot without film, using digital video cameras, television is increasingly viewed online on demand rather than broadcast, and the divisions between these media become blurred” (Boulègue 25). The Return is perhaps the most important contemporary audio-visual artefact and will usher in a new era of artworks that will expand our understanding of what is possible when combining several genres, mediums, and distribution methods.
This essay will discuss The Return as a culmination of Lynch’s film and television work and, rather than categorizing The Return in binary terms—as film or television—will argue that it is neither one medium nor the other; it instead establishes a new form of audiovisual creativity from Lynch. More specifically, the argument will contextualize The Return within Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of an “assemblage,” where “multiplicities of multiplicities form a single [page 128] assemblage” (39). Not only is this evident in the cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound design; Lynch uses frequent collaborator Kyle MacLachlan as the avatar for these allusions. MacLachlan returns as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper but also portrays other characters, and here, the Deleuzian/Guattarian notions of “assemblage” also apply. In addition to Cooper, MacLachlan portrays Dougie Jones, a corrupt insurance salesperson whom Cooper “replaces,” becoming a confused, bumbling, infant-like man. More horrifying is the incarnation of Cooper as his evil doppelganger, Mr. C, fused with the murderous rapist demonic spirit of BOB (Frank Silva, who died in 1995 and here is “reincarnated” through archive footage and digital imaging). Finally, there is Richard, a character introduced in the finale who appears to be an amalgam of these characters.
Each character employs elements, call-backs, and visual cues to Lynch’s previous work. For instance, Mr. C’s evil, brutal nature recalls Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet (1986), while his snakeskin jacket nods to Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) in Wild at Heart (1990); his enigmatic and cryptic dialogue gestures to the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) in Lost Highway (1997). Though Lynch’s narratives have been accused of failing to “offer unequivocal closure” (Jarvis 785), The Return is the summation of and most “complete” of Lynch’s audiovisual work. Comprehending this artwork requires an understanding of Lynch and Frost’s “politics of editing,” a notion associated with the specific ways that a text has been assembled and presented to an audience. Effectively, it is the “expression in the editing and exacerbated fragmentation of images and perspectives that trumps its meaning” (Smadja 10). This, of course, refers to singular creative visions, but here the final output is an undefinable assemblage.
Deleuzian Lynch: Defining the Undefinable
It is fitting to reflect upon The Return and Lynch himself through several concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In the first section of the book, the [page 129] authors discuss and establish parameters of their thinking. Not wanting to reiterate what had come before—their previous collaboration being Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)—philosopher and psychoanalyst wanted to create something original and formulate innovative practices of thought. Delving into this complex tome, its multi-faceted approach combining philosophy, psychoanalysis and mathematics, one can feel perplexed and isolated as each chapter unfolds. However, Deleuze and Guattari are presenting ideas and original ways of thinking, tools for readers to reinterpret, utilize, and expand their own thoughts. Indeed, the book in its own way is an “assemblage,” a combination of numerous multiplicities. In its earliest pages, the authors discuss clichés of knowledge, noting that the first type of book
is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. . . . Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, than a dichotomous one. (3)
Rather than rely on the traditional or conventional approaches of producing the book, Deleuze and Guattari present A Thousand Plateaus as a “rhizome,” the first plateau that they explore (more on this below). In essence, it is a text that should be read more like a “patchwork quilt than a piece of fabric” (Holland 16), a description that can equally be applied to The Return. Lynch’s father, Donald, was a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and it is worth noting that the filmmaker’s “childhood memories are a mixture of darkness and light. Perhaps his father’s work dealing with diseased trees imbued him with a heightened awareness of what he has described as ‘the wild pain and decay’ that lurk beneath the surface of things” (Lynch and McKenna 10). The associations [page 130] with trees are interesting to highlight, not only the direct connotations to Deleuze and Guattari’s arborescent discourses, but also that within Lynch’s work is a penetrating of the surface to delve underneath and explore the various connections (light and dark) that are overlooked in the everyday. Indeed, Blue Velvet’s opening sequence illustrates as much: when a man has a stroke while watering his lawn, Lynch cuts to the grass, the camera penetrating the leaves, unfolding an unseen world that we overlook (right on our doorstep), populated by rumbling beetles. This is a stark contrast to preceding images of a humble North American town, with its sickly-sweet colors and white picket fences. Additionally, penetrating the surface features heavily in Lynch’s infamous flop Dune (1984), in which large extraterrestrial worms emerge from the desert sands of Arrakis and disrupt, destroy and reorient the landscape. Essentially, like Deleuze and Guattari, Lynch is reorganizing our thinking, highlighting the unknown and the constant contrasts in our world. Perhaps, then, the first step is to consider The Return as a “rhizomatic” text.
For Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizome “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (6). Brent Adkins understands this to mean that rhizomes
do not propagate by way of clearly delineated hierarchies but by underground stems in which any part may send additional shoots upward, downward, or laterally. There is no hierarchy. There are no clear lines of descent. A rhizome has no beginning or end. It is always in the middle. (23)
Lynch’s work consistently illustrates “underground stems” in both literal and abstract means that have no clear lines of trajectory. Effectively, the rhizome is crucial for Lynch’s narrative approaches, where “stems” or scenes are “linked not by continuous, vertical progression, but through leaps of association and the relation of seemingly unconnected ideas” (Cazeaux 178). For instance, a severed ear in Blue Velvet brings a young man [page 131] into conflict with a sadistic gangster; the murder of teenage prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Twin Peaks will unearth a small town’s dark secrets (and reveal different planes of existence that can corrupt a person’s soul); Lost Highway has no beginning or end (therefore a constant middle) as the characters are in a continuous loop of violence, betrayal, and murder, changing personalities and personas as the narrative unfolds. In this manner, perhaps Inland Empire is crucial to our understanding of The Return: it features an actor, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), who descends into a rabbit hole of fractured realities, portraying several different characters that are seemingly unrelated, drifting between multiple plots, subplots, and narrative vignettes that create yet another patchwork quilt that transcends the boundaries of cinematic storytelling.
In this vein, The Return is an interesting and confusing encounter (to say the least), not only in terms of its content, images, narrative, etc., but also in terms of the experience that it presents. As mentioned above, it screened in festivals and cinemas (therefore do we call it a film?) as well as episodic television installments (is it a series?). However, the first four hours were screened in two two-hour segments before reverting to weekly “episodes” identified as Parts. This is not a new phenomenon in television—indeed, the original ABC series screened the series pilot and last two episodes as “television movies”—but here, The Return does have a specific structure. The editing of each part is specifically designed and executed, not in the convention of cliffhanger, but as an ellipsis that may or may not be resolved or concluded in the next installment. Additionally, for viewers hoping to reunite with original cast members, Lynch and Frost delay these encounters. Instead, they introduce new locations, places, and spaces that are seemingly unconnected: New York, Las Vegas, South Dakota, New Mexico. These new locations have no clear connecting line or correlation to Twin Peaks but, as The Return unfolds, they all become sites of discovery that will once again connect Cooper to the titular Pacific Northwest small town. [page 132]
In essence, Lynch and Frost create new assemblages and multiplicities by expanding the geographical scope through which Cooper/Mr. C travels toward Twin Peaks. Furthermore, the interstitial dimensions, including the Black Lodge where Cooper has been trapped for 25 years, add additional layers to the complex assemblage of several worlds intertwining at once, producing specific (disorientating) effects. Each new interdimensional plane has unique aesthetic qualities. As Cooper is “ejected” from the Black Lodge, he first lands, briefly, in New York before arriving at a building surrounded by a purple sea. He is then led to outer space to escape an unseen threat before descending back inside to find a doppelgänger of Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe August) advising him to leave. These snippets and expansions of the Twin Peaks mythology (and worlds) illustrate, further, the rhizomatic approach to The Return, where strands and “weeds” connect, intertwining (between several worlds) to create a new assemblage.
Television’s Doppelgänger
When we consider “quality television” we might immediately think of series such as The Sopranos (1999-2006), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), and The Wire (2002-2008), all from HBO. Other networks have tried to replicate this model, producing, for example, AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013) and Better Call Saul (2015-2023). Jason Mittell notes that “quality television” is a term that depends on
implied resemblances, contrasting quality with its presumed opposite and used to elevate certain series over others. Such programs are united less by a clear set of formal or thematic elements than by cultural markers of prestige linked to “serious” content, cinematic style, and convention-breaking innovations that reflect well on viewers who embrace such programming as a distinctive (and oft-repeated) exception to their standard antitelevision tastes—“that’s the only program that I watch.” (211) [page 133]
The aforementioned examples are clearly distinctive from free-to-air or commercial television. The subscription-based model of HBO, for instance, produces shows that offer a degree of “prestige,” with The Sopranos setting the standard and foundations for what has followed. Intriguingly, Sopranos creator David Chase was heavily influenced by the original Twin Peaks series, particularly when writing the dream sequences experienced by protagonist Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) throughout its six seasons (Seitz).
In accordance with Mittel, Mario Albrecht also notes that “quality television” exists in opposition to “other generic conventions, specifically episodic (rather than serial) dramas and comedies, multicamera comedies, melodramas and soap operas, and reality television” (28). Here, Albrecht tries to consider the attributes of “quality” which, fundamentally, may be too subjective to distill. But for the sake of this argument, let’s define the term “quality television” to mean a long, serialized narrative form that has complex, contradictory characters (often played by movie stars), depicts risqué subject matter, and explores in great detail the key themes of the series, the actions of the characters, and subsequent consequences. Often, series of this nature are compared to novels, their structures unfolding like chapters, where episodes build on one another to, by a season’s conclusion, become a rich tapestry that may require repeat viewing. The Wire, for example, relies heavily on this narrative strategy as it builds each season on a new facet of the city of Baltimore. However, films are no stranger to similar approaches.
One of the greatest examples, especially when comparing the narrative structure of The Return, is Jacques Rivette’s masterpiece Out 1 (1971). Like The Return, Out 1 has an extensive running time, thirteen hours to The Return’s eighteen, and multiple plots—stories—that drift in and out of one another and lack any conventional resolution. Again, considering such a structure is comparable to a rhizome that
no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space. It [page 134] draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore, the multiplicity it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency of its own. (Deleuze and Guattari 588)
It is therefore inaccurate to categorize The Return strictly in the “quality television” category. While it does share many of the attributes noted by Mittell and Albrecht, Lynch and Frost borrow film conventions and structures (as well as other artforms) but recalibrate them in a fashion that is distinctive and difficult to distill.
The Return as a Body without Organs: Organizing the Interstitial Artwork
In addition to its rhizomatic structure, we can consider The Return as an interstitial text—between film and television, between two worlds—a space that correlates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “Body without Organs” (BwO), an organism that can be organized in a specific way by multiplicities. More specifically, the BwO is “opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of organs insofar as it composes and organism. The [BwO] is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization” (Deleuze and Guattari 34). Applying this notion to The Return reveals paradoxes and complexities with regard to its structure and final outcome. If it cannot be defined and operates interstitially, Lynch and Frost organize the text in specific ways, using a range of media—film, tv, music video, media installation, and, to an extent, literature through Frost’s novels The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017)—which, in part, resemble “transmedia” storytelling. Transmedia storytelling effectively builds a fictional world whereby
consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that [page 135] everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience. (Jenkins 21)
While examining the Twin Peaks franchise as a whole does demonstrate a transmedia enterprise—the original series spawned numerous spin-off books, coffee commercials, and even a board game—here, it is posited that the combination of the aforementioned mediums produces a far more distinctive audiovisual text. Indeed, Showtime’s president and CEO branded The Return “pure heroin David Lynch” (Foutch) as the only means of description from a producing standpoint. Again, the end of Lynch’s extended time away from our screens big and small was cause for celebration—the return taking on an additional meaning.
As it is such a complex, multifaceted audiovisual artefact, Showtime advertised The Return as a “Limited Event Series.” The crucial word here is “event” which is “neither something that simply happens, such as an organized social occasion or a concert [but rather] unexpected, anomalous, seemingly impossible from the current state of affairs” (Linstead and Thanem 1493). When The Return was cryptically announced via Lynch on Twitter—simply stating “Dear Twitter Friends: That gum you like is going to come back in style! #damngoodcoffee” (@DAVID_LYNCH)—it was unexpected, anomalous, and seemingly impossible. Not only were Lynch and Frost reviving a groundbreaking television series after twenty-five years, the fact it would feature much of the original cast and crew was unprecedented. Therefore, the question of what “form” The Return would eventually take, or rather how it would be “assembled,” only created further anticipation.
Assembling a BwO: The Return and its Multiplicities
This “in-between” space that The Return inhabits is a BwO and requires a degree of organization for an audience to engage with. When we break the text into its various narrative and audiovisual components, we see that there are several multiplicities occurring at the same time, both on- and off-screen in terms of creative practices. For instance, the editing serves [page 136] several purposes: so that we can a) see the images produced during principal photography; b) see them organized to make visual sense (continuity edit); and c) reflect on the “politics of editing.” This final point is the assemblage, i.e., what Lynch and Frost are articulating with these “multiple” scenes and how the characters are “organized” within them. The politics of editing is therefore how viewers will read and interpret the final text.
Throughout The Return are digressions and tangents that introduce characters for brief scenes, particularly at the Roadhouse. These are characters who do not interact with the main cast. For example, in Part 9, two women, Ella (Sky Ferreira) and Chloe (Karolina Wydra), sit and discuss the former losing her job for being high on drugs. She progressively scratches away at the needle marks on her arm as they drink beer. In the realm of conventional narrative, this serves no function to progress the “plot,” but these mini-scenes are rhizomes, connecting to the decay of the modern world (and Twin Peaks). In terms of the “politics of editing,” it serves to suggest that these digressions are central to the story; in order to understand The Return, it must be accepted as a whole, including these minor characters and scenes. It is also suggestive of what is edited and left on the cutting room floor (although, given its eighteen-hour run time, multiple characters, plots, and subplots, it may appear that nothing was excised in the editing process). Some of these elements are expanded in Frost’s novels, such as providing more detail as to what the characters of Twin Peaks have been doing in the interim.
Emily L. Stephens of The AV Club notes that The Return is, at times, a “story about telling a story: what to include, what to leave out, and what gets covered over and over, by intent or accident. It’s also about how easy it is to get sidetracked by an attractive distraction.” Lynch, as the director, made conscious decisions in the editing process as to what will be included/excluded for a purpose. The themes that both Lynch and Frost wish to explore—identity (and its multiplicities), aging, memory, good and evil, the mundanity of everyday life, and so on—[page 137] are present throughout The Return. Therefore, various means of maintaining key elements are included in every scene. Part 7 and Part 12, for example, feature what appear to be a series of vignettes that interrupt the primary narrative (Cooper’s return to Twin Peaks and Mr. C’s quest for geographical coordinates) to focus on mundane activities: an unbroken three minute take of someone sweeping the floor at the Roadhouse in Part 7; Gordon Cole (Lynch) romancing a French woman (Bérénice Marlohe) in his hotel room over wine before asking her to leave, which takes four minutes of screen time in Part 12; or the long-awaited return of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) in the same episode having a ten minute long argument with her husband Charlie (Clark Middleton). These are only a few examples of narrative tangents and digressions, which are crucial to the complete experience. To reiterate, The Return is an assemblage formed of multiplicities of multiplicities. The narrative tangents form parts of the final assemblage for a specific purpose, to reinforce Lynch and Frost’s primary thematic concerns. The key argument here is the decisions made by Lynch as to what is maintained in the final edit. No matter how abstract or avant-garde a text may be, it requires organization.
Lynch’s methods of organization are telling. In an interview with fellow filmmaker Mark Cousins, Lynch describes his approach to structure as an “eye of the duck”:
Well, nature can teach us a lot of things and there’s something about . . . in painting, you’re working within a certain shaped canvas and there are many things that one does instinctively to move the eye. There’s repetition of shape, colour. But when you look at a duck, you see your eye is moving in a certain way. You see textures, colours and shapes and you start wondering about a duck, what it can teach us about, you know, any kind of abstract painting or proportions or even sequences and scenes. It is always interesting that the eye is in the perfect place. If you move it to the body, it would get lost. If you move it to the leg or beak, it’s [page 138] two fast areas competing, even though the eye is the fastest, it’s the little jewel. (154)
This reveals Lynch’s thoughts on structure and composition. If one part, sequence, or scene is moved elsewhere, it affects the organization of the text as a whole; the anatomy of The Return in its final assemblage is how it is meant to be experienced. In an effort to understand the text, the viewer must locate the “eye of the duck.” This, arguably, is in Part 8, where many answers to crucial mysteries spanning the Twin Peaks franchise come to light. Suddenly, the narrative flashes back to New Mexico, 1945. We witness the Trinity nuclear test and from that, a new era has commenced: the atomic age. Lynch stretches time and ventures into the mushroom cloud of destruction. Within the cloud is the birth of BOB from an androgynous entity (potentially “Judy,” a higher power of evil).
Additionally, this part extends what The Return is composed of in terms of mediums. In effect, the stretching of time, abstract visuals, “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” by Krzysztof Penderecki (1960) blasting on the soundtrack, the entire sequence is a “stem” inserted at this point in the narrative for a specific purpose. The mechanics of the sequence recall a multimedia art installation, furthering the argument for viewing the text as an undefinable assemblage, film + television + media installation). No matter how baffling this sequence is to viewers, it is a crucial moment. It feeds into the wider themes of the text where violence and trauma are continually perpetuated, and this significant moment in history—perhaps the most traumatic historical event—illustrates that we are the designers of our own destruction. Indeed, since The Return’s release, Christopher Nolan has presented the nuclear bomb’s architect, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in the biopic Oppenheimer (2023) to further exemplify the impact and devastation of this moment in history. For Lynch, if this part were earlier or later in the narrative, it would disrupt the anatomy and organization of the whole. Therefore, it is in the right place: it is the “eye of the duck” for The Return. [page 139]
Break the Code, Solve the Crime: Clues and In-Text BwOs
Within the text itself are numerous BwO and assemblages. For instance, MacLachlan serves multiple functions through the various characters whom he portrays. However, the primary character is not the heroic Dale Cooper, whom fans were desperate to see return, but the antagonist Mr. C. This character can be considered a “deterritorialization” of both MacLachlan himself and Cooper, a “‘line of flight’, [a] movement that causes a temporary break in . . . structure” (Pesses 48). MacLachlan’s performance as Mr. C is against type. Following the original series, MacLachlan was primarily cast in “quirky” roles in shows like Sex and the City (1998-2004) and Desperate Housewives (2004-2012). Here, Lynch deconstructs this typecasting—deterritorializes the familiar terrain of MacLachlan’s performances—and reterritorializes the image; MacLachlan breaks with his loveable, goofy image from Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and, most importantly, Twin Peaks. The actor is stripped down to a core, an empty vessel that, as with a BwO, is organized as an agent of evil, assembled with the spirit of BOB, the antagonist from the original series and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He looks like Cooper and retains his memories, but he is a serial sex offender, murderer, gangster, and, most hideously, a wealthy capitalist!
Mr. C’s objective is never made explicitly clear beyond his pursuit of specific geographical coordinates. In essence, the goal of Mr. C is, perhaps, to become a BwO himself: to be reorganized and assembled by “Judy.” Mr. C’s ambitions are, arguably, unattainable, as you “never reach the [BwO], you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 174). Therefore, Lynch and Frost’s choices showcase MacLachlan’s range throughout the text where the multiplicities of Cooper mutate and reterritorialize into the final form: Richard. This last persona is an amalgam, an assemblage, of all the Coopers and appears in the finale, Part 18. Richard has the cold detachment and violent vigor of Mr. C (as seen when he disarms and shoots rednecks in a diner called [page 140] “Judy’s”) and the inquisitive and caring nature of Cooper, while in Part 18, he staggers outside the Tremond house, disoriented and reminiscent of Dougie. The final image of Cooper is haunting: once again in the Black Lodge, Laura Palmer continues to whisper in his ear—a scene that featured in Part 2. It appears that Cooper is forever stuck in the interstices of the two worlds.
Another aspect of the final assemblage is to view it within the context of Lynch’s other audiovisual work. The Return assembles the best attributes of television and film, the continuous story of the former and the aesthetics of the latter. Lynch, in essence, creates a treatise of his career. Lynch as a painter, a filmmaker, an actor, a sound designer, and a writer are assembled, where each creative practice or component “may be detached . . . and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different” (DeLanda 13), though, throughout his career, this combination of mediums and artistic pursuits has been continuous (Mactaggart 12). While the original Twin Peaks was a successful crossover for Lynch into the mainstream (though Blue Velvet had previously brought him critical and commercial clout), his remaining films have been perhaps too daring and complex for most audiences. Indeed, Fire Walk with Me was a critical and commercial failure in North America. Its dark, despairing tone was in stark contrast to the “quirky” soap opera elements that mainstream audiences adored in the original series (despite it being a tale of a teenager brutally raped and murdered by her own father); The Return has more in common with Fire Walk with Me than with the original series, and scattered throughout are extreme graphic violence, sickly sweet romance, sentimental longing, and childlike humor. At eighteen hours, this can be an endurance test for more conventionally minded audiences, yet this is the “pure heroin” Lynch that the Showtime executives promised, and some (if not all) of this content therefore should not come as a surprise.
What does this all mean in terms of thematic concerns? Tyler S. Rife and Ashley N. Wheeler recognize that The Return [page 141] “is narratively organized around its temporal distance to the past and its markings as a cult classic series overflowing with iconography, catchphrases, and nostalgic attachment, and directs these attributes back to the viewer to both satisfy and challenge its audience’s memories” (428). It defies our expectations, and the delays in reintroducing beloved characters from the original series illustrate as much. It is not giving the audience what “they want,” it is forcing the viewer to reflect upon aging and memory of what came before and who we are now.
Conclusion: The Gum Came Back in Unexpected Ways
The Return appears to be a summation of Lynch’s career, a “greatest hits.” There are visual cues and clues referencing his work beyond the world of Twin Peaks, specifically through the visualization and mannerisms of Mr. C, the latest in a long line of Lynchian monsters. The complexity of The Return’s themes, visuals, and narrative are assembled in a specific manner that resembles a rhizome, a “mechanism of continuous connection and transformation” (Cazeaux 179). Lynch never clarifies the meanings of his work and, like Deleuze and Guattari, he wants us to create our own thoughts or new ways of thinking. The absurdity of the everyday has been a recurring thematic concern across multiple audiovisual projects, and never more so than in The Return.
This essay has hopefully offered a different perspective on how we read, examine, and define The Return. Perhaps it remains undefinable, but reflecting upon the text as a BwO, it is organized in a specific way “populated by multiplicities” (Adkins 101), occupying the interstices of film and television. This is without commentary on Lynch’s artwork, animation, music, and so on, all of which are present throughout The Return and this notion of a culmination of Lynch’s audiovisual career. It is clear that its “Limited Event” status is an assemblage and arguably the best way to interpret the text that has “deterritorialized” film and television. The Return is not what it seems. [page 142]
Notes
1. See, for example, Amanda DiPaolo, “Is it Future or is it Past? The Politics and use of Nostalgia in Twin Peaks” (The Politics of Twin Peaks, edited by DiPaolo and James Gillies, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 35-54); David Sweeney, “‘I’ll Point You to a Better Time/A Safer Place to Be’: Music, Nostalgia and Estrangement in Twin Peaks: The Return” (Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, edited by Antonio Sanna, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 281-296); Rife and Wheeler, “‘I’ll see you again in 25 years’: Doppelganging Nostalgia and Twin Peaks: The Return”; and Oliver Moisich and Markus Wierschem, “‘It is in Our House Now’: Twin Peaks, Nostalgia, and David Lynch’s Weird Spaces” (The American Weird: Concept and Medium, edited by Julius Greve and Florian Zappe, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 154-172).
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Kyle Barrett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and an award-winning filmmaker. His research focuses on gender and class representations, global low-budget production cultures and cinemas, and creative practice. He has been published in Directory of World Cinema: Scotland, European Journal of Communication, Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, MeCCSA: Special Edition Journal on Screenwriting and Gender, Iperstoria: Journal of American and English Studies, AMES: Media Education Journal, and Journal of Media Practice and Education. He edited ReFocus: The Films of Mary Harron for Edinburgh University Press and has directed several documentaries that have been screened internationally.
MLA citation (print):
Barrett, Kyle. "Between Two Worlds: Twin Peaks: The Return and the Undefinable Assemblage." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 126-144.