“What year is this?”: Time, the Nuclear, and Trauma in Twin Peaks: The Return

[page 212] Abstract: Twin Peaks: The Return dramatically introduces the nuclear into the narrative of Twin Peaks and specifically ties it to a depiction of linear time being disrupted. This article explores how The Return makes the image of nuclear destruction central to Twin Peaks’ representation of trauma by reading The Return through the work of Hayashi Kyōko and Karen Barad to highlight the prevalent cultural association between the nuclear and disruptions to the flow of time and to show how this association parallels the way that personal and cultural trauma disrupts the victims’ sense of linear time.

Keywords: Hayashi Kyōko, nuclear power, time, trauma

In Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) the Trinity nuclear detonation explodes on screen (see Figure 1). Following a scene where “The” Nine Inch Nails perform at the Roadhouse and Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger, Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan), wakes up after being shot, the show suddenly cuts to White Sands, New Mexico, and shifts the show’s timeframe back 70 years to 16 July 1945, when the United States Army detonated the first atomic bomb as part of the nuclear test code-named Trinity.

[page 213] The cut from 2016 to 1945 is the largest rupture in linear time in the wider Twin Peaks on-screen narrative up to that point. 1 This distortion of time deeply impacts the narrative up to The Return’s final scene and draws on a prevalent cultural association between the nuclear and non-linear time to represent how a person’s experience of time is impacted by personal trauma and how traumatic experiences can produce a disrupted sense of non-homogenous time.

In this article, I explore how Part 8’s image of nuclear destruction is core to Twin Peaks’ representation of the trauma of sexual abuse and gendered violence through the character of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). I start by discussing how Part 8 ties its depiction of the nuclear to iconography of frozen time before going on to sketch a brief genealogy of American cultural works which associate nuclear power with disruptions to linear time whether through time travel or through analogy. I then read the end of The Return through the work of Hayashi Kyōko (林 京子), a writer whose fiction and non-fiction explored her traumatic experiences as a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing in 1945, ultimately arguing that Mark Frost and David Lynch employ similar manoeuvres to depict the cultural and personal traumas caused by nuclear force tearing apart what philosopher and physicist Karen Barad refers to as “spacetimemattering” and the non-homogenous sense of disrupted time that this kind of psychological trauma produces (“No Small Matter” G109).

Frozen Time

Since the creation of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, frozen clock faces have been associated with the destructiveness of nuclear weaponry. Barad writes about how clocks and clockfaces are associated in Japanese public consciousness with atomic bombs (“No Small Matter” G105), and in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (広島平和記念資料館) in Japan, there are watches and clocks with their hands frozen at 08:15 (see Figure 2 and Figure 3), the precise moment when the United States’ atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, at 08:15 JST [page 214] on 6 August 1945. Barad writes about Hiroshima’s “[c]lock mechanisms melted by the heat of the blast”:

Two hands etched into eternity — a larger one pointed due east and a smaller one pointing a bit south from west. Two hands seared into the face of time. Time is arrested; ghosts roam the streets. Although time is off its hinges, frozen and disengaged for all time, moments continue to pour down like black rain and settle on charred bodies and buildings; sticking to the air, they are breathed in, ingested, and come to rest in the marrow of bones, lying dormant like little time bombs ticking inside hibakushas (atomic bomb victim survivors, literally explosion-affected people). (“Troubling” 59)

In this way, clock faces with their hands frozen stand as potent symbols of nuclear destruction representing the disruption of time at the very moment of a nuclear detonation: 08:15 for Hiroshima; 11:02 for Nagasaki; 05:29 for the Trinity test. Barad describes these frozen clock-faces as “reverberations of time being stopped, coming in waves” (“No Small Matter” G105).

The image of the frozen clock-face is also intertwined with the nuclear in the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Doomsday Clock is a metaphorical device used since 1947 to symbolize a group of scientists’ estimation of our proximity to global catastrophe. The metaphor is the form of a [page 215] clock-face with the hour and minute hands frozen at a point that represents how close the clock is to midnight with ‘midnight’ standing in for the point of global catastrophe. Every year, Earth’s global situation is assessed and the hands moved forwards (or, less frequently, backwards) to symbolize how close we are to destroying human civilization. The Doomsday Clock was originally synchronized to the prospect of nuclear annihilation with regular fluctuations throughout the Cold War and whenever political tensions between countries holding nuclear weapons have been fraught. The Clock was recently recalibrated to include the possibility of human extinction from human-caused climate change and, as of 2024, stands at 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest that the clock has ever been to midnight in its 70-year history.

Frost and Lynch tie The Return’s depiction of nuclear force to the imagery of frozen time from the opening moments of the scene which introduces the Trinity nuclear detonation into the narrative. The scene starts with a title card specifying the precise moment of the detonation we are about to witness: 05:29 Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945 (see Figure 4).

The title card disappears, and a voiceover gives a real-time countdown. At the end of the countdown, the nuclear explosion detonates across the screen and time slows to a crawl as the camera moves towards and into the mushroom cloud while Krzysztof Penderecki’s haunting “Threnody to the Victims of [page 216] Hiroshima (Tren Ofiarom Hiroszimy)” (1960) plays in the background as another link to the history of nuclear weaponry. The scene is an extraordinary visual depiction of what Barad writes of the detonation of Hiroshima: “[t]ime [is] frozen with a heat as intense as the sun” as if “[t]ime died in a flash” (“No Small Matter” G103). The Trinity nuclear detonation disrupts the linear flow of time and director David Lynch’s camera shows us every event within that frozen cloud of destruction.

While frozen clocks represent time stopped at the moment of nuclear detonation, there are further distortions of linear time associated with nuclear force in popular consciousness. Barad discusses how nuclear force rewrites our everyday understanding of space, time, and physical matter (“No Small Matter” G108). When something as infinitesimally small as an atom can be split to produce massive amounts of force and material destruction, we need to rethink our everyday ideas of scale. Barad uses the term “spacetimemattering” to think about the entanglement of space, time, and physical matter implied by quantum physics and how nuclear force disrupts spacetimemattering as a whole. With regards to time, they write:

What happens to time when nuclear forces are harnessed and unleashed? Is (space)time(mattering) not shattered, torn, broken into dis/connected pieces? Vaporized, dispersed, made particulate, whisked away on the breeze? . . . Time is/had been crossed out. Time drawn out like taffy, twisted like hot metal, cooled, hardened, and splintered. In the twentieth century, time is given a finite lifetime, a decay time. Moments live and die. Time, like space, is subject to diffraction, splitting, dispersal, entanglement. Each moment is a multiplicity within a given singularity. Time will never be the same—at least for the time-being. (“No Small Matter” G105–G106)

In this passage, Barad dramatically emphasizes how time is violently disrupted by the unleashing of nuclear force. The force of nuclear power shatters spacetimemattering, blowing [page 217] apart the physical fabric of the world and all our preconceived ideas about the flow of linear time. Our everyday conception of time proceeding in an unerring straight line is warped by atomic force and the splitting of the atom that ushers in quantum physics.

The idea of nuclear power shattering spacetimemattering also appears in occult and esoteric areas of culture. Andy Sharp writes about the reclusive occultist Kenneth Grant:

For Grant, the atomic detonation [at Hiroshima] caused a rent in the space-time continuum, allowing in all the hideous monsters of Lovecraft’s mythos. But post-1945 they camouflaged their ingress as alien landings, lenticular UFOs, and all the colours out of space. (126)

Like Barad, Grant saw nuclear power as shattering space and time. But whereas Barad writes about the trauma of the nuclear particularly for Japanese people and several Indigenous peoples, Grant’s conception of traumatizing evil was rendered in occult and science-fiction terms. Mark Frost taps into the same occult register as Grant in his novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), which traces a fictionalized history of United States esoterica such as alien landings and UFO sightings (125). As I’ll discuss later, Frost, along with co-writer David Lynch, in The Return also explores the idea of the Trinity nuclear test as a sort of origin of evil allowing “hideous monsters” into the world through the sheer force of its destructive capability. Generally, however, Frost and Lynch’s writing on the TV show veers much more towards Barad and Hayashi’s conception of trauma as personal and cultural rather than occult and esoteric.

Time and the Nuclear in American Popular Culture

The diffraction, splitting, dispersal, and entanglement of time that Barad discusses in relation to nuclear power is represented in a number of different ways in American popular culture, perhaps most notably through time travel narratives.2 In 1951, soon after the unveiling of nuclear weaponry, Edmond [page 218] Hamilton’s novel, City at World’s End, told the story of a small American city called Middletown which is targeted by an atomic bomb and blown into the far distant future. In the same year, Twentieth Century Fox released The House in the Square (1951) directed by Roy Ward Baker.3 The film follows Peter Standish (Tyrone Power), an American atomic scientist who is transported by a lightning strike back in time to 1784. Although nuclear power does not straightforwardly cause the time travel in the film, the main character’s role as an atomic scientist—a deviation from the source material, John L. Balderston’s 1926 play Berkeley Square—nonetheless serves to associate time travel with nuclear power.

Even into the twentieth century, as cultural understanding of nuclear forces grew, the association between temporal distortion and the nuclear persisted, often with nuclear power serving in a scientifically unspecified way as a power source for time machines. Robert Zemeckis’ blockbuster Back to the Future (1985) features a time-travelling DMC DeLorean car fitted with a “flux capacitor” powered by a nuclear reactor fuelled with radioactive plutonium (see Figure 5). This nuclear power source appears again in Back to the Future Part II (1989), in which “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has fitted the car with a “Mr. Fusion”-brand portable nuclear fusion reactor which can convert household waste into the 1.21 gigawatts of power required for time travel using controlled nuclear fusion.

[page 219] The Netflix series Dark (2017–2020) also uses the nuclear as a vaguely defined power source for time travel (see Figure 6). Dark is a complex time travel narrative spanning from 1888 to 2053 across two parallel universes using multiple actors to portray the same characters at different points in their timelines. The show is set in the fictional German town of Winden, where individuals and families are linked through a web of secrets not unlike the setting of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (1990–1991). Time travel in Dark is enabled by a wormhole in the caves beneath the town and through other technologies that allow travel across a breach in spacetime linked to the nuclear power plant that looms ominously over the town. The plant’s unsafe disposal of nuclear waste may have caused or is at least linked with the rupture in linear time that disrupts the town.

Other non-cinematic media also represent this association between non-linear time travel and the nuclear. Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins’ Watchmen comic series (1986–1987) includes the god-like character Dr. Manhattan, who exists unmoored from time and is able to transport himself instantaneously to any point in time and space. Dr. Manhattan is named after the Manhattan Project, the United States’ research project which developed the first nuclear weapons and culminated in the Trinity test. In Watchmen’s alternate history of the 20th century, Dr. Manhattan essentially [page 220] becomes a sapient weapon replacing the atomic bomb as the United States’ major deterrent in the Cold War. As well as his instantaneous time travel abilities, Dr. Manhattan is further tied to time through his pre-superpowered life as the son of a watchmaker who pushed him into nuclear physics after the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. As his father tells him, “Professor Einstein says that time differs from place to place. Can you imagine? If time is not true, what purpose have watchmakers, hein?” (Moore and Gibbons, number 4, 3).

Where the above cultural examples intertwine time and the nuclear by having nuclear force act as a power source for time travel, other cultural works associate the nuclear with disruptions to the linear flow of time through analogy. Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023) depicts the development of the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project and indeed even shows the Trinity test also depicted in The Return, Part 8. Like many of Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer has a non-linear narrative, presenting the life of its title character, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), out of order, as if his experiences have been fragmented and blown apart by the nuclear explosion that defined his life and career.

The indie video game Braid (2008) also draws on the Manhattan Project to associate time and the nuclear through analogy. Braid is a platforming puzzle game structured around manipulating time and solving puzzles by reversing time, advancing time, or pausing time. The game’s narration contains multiple oblique allusions to the Manhattan Project. The epilogue, World 0-8, contains the narration:

After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder's glass up to his eyes and waited.

On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World.

Someone near him said: “It worked.”

Someone else said: “Now we are all sons of bitches.” [page 221]

This passage seems to describe someone watching the Trinity test and directly quotes William L. Laurence and Kenneth Bainbridge, who were both in-person witnesses to the test. Like Barad’s writing on the moment of the Hiroshima detonation, the passage talks about frozen time in how “[t]ime stood still” and “[s]pace contracted to a pinpoint.” Furthermore, in a secret ending unlocked by collecting seven hidden stars, the main character is able to reach The Princess whom he has been pursuing throughout the game, at which point she detonates in a flash like an atomic bomb.

Across all these cultural examples, time and the nuclear are intertwined. In some cases, nuclear force acts as a power source for time travel; in others, disruptions to the linear flow of time are associated by analogy with nuclear power. Frost and Lynch use the latter in The Return, conceptually tying the nuclear with disruptions to time through association. Though the show does not involve time travel in the quasi-scientific paradigm of City at World’s End, Back to the Future, or Dark, it does involve distortions to the linear flow of time in a different register as well as disruptions to the flow of time in how the story is told—in other words, in both the fabula and the syuzhet of the story.

Disrupting Homogenous Time

The extended Trinity scene in The Return, Part 8 acts as both a disruption to the fabula and the syuzhet of Twin Peaks’ narrative. The terms fabula and syuzhet emerged from the Russian formalism school of literary criticism and refer to narrative construction and the flow of time within and outwith a story (Yastremski 620). The fabula refers to the chronological flow of the story: the flow of time within the story that the characters follow. The syuzhet refers to the way that the story itself is organized: how the audience sees the story’s events. A flashback, for example, is a narrative device that disrupts the syuzhet, as it changes how the story is told to the audience, but doesn’t disrupt the fabula, as characters within the story do not experience the flashback as a disruption to time’s flow. [page 222] Time travel, on the other hand, disrupts time in the fabula, as it materially impacts how characters and events in the story experience the flow of time.4

By taking the narrative suddenly from 2016 to 1945, the syuzhet of Part 8 moves backwards by the largest and most jarring amount of time in the on-screen Twin Peaks narrative. The scene also goes on to introduce significant disruptions to the temporal order in the narrative’s fabula. After the nuclear explosion follows a scene of The Fireman (Carel Struycken) and Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) in a mysterious otherworld watching the detonation and the symbolic release of evil into the world (see Figure 7).

[page 223] The scene creates a sense of temporal distortion in the fabula of the show as elements from the narrative’s present appear further back in the past than had previously been indicated. Laura’s face appearing in an orb concurrently with events happening in 1945 is a jarring disruption as the audience has the knowledge that Laura will not be born for another 26 years. This scene in Part 8 and by extension the nuclear detonation itself open the door for the more dramatic disruptions to Twin Peaks’ fabula which appear in the closing episodes of The Return and which I will interpret through the work of Karen Barad and Hayashi Kyōko on trauma.

The temporal distortions of trauma and atomic violence are not situated in what Barad refers to as “clock-time” (“Troubling” 60) and Walter Benjamin refers to as “homogenous, empty time” (261) but within the personal time of individuals, specifically traumatized individuals and cultures. Barad uses the work of Daniel R. Wildcat and Indigenous philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. to remind us that time is not the cultural universal that we think of it as (“Troubling” 60). Wildcat writes about how different cultures express and experience time differently in that “some cultures express history as primarily temporal and others express history as fundamentally spatial in character” (Wildcat 433). Drawing specifically on the traditions of Indigenous Americans, he writes that:

American Indian or indigenous traditions resist ideas of universal homogenous world history; there is no single road per se to human improvement. There are many paths, each situated in the actual places, such as prairies, forests, deserts, and so forth, and environments where our tribal societies and cultures emerged. The experiences of time and history are shaped by places. . . . Unlike the Western linear view of history, the experiential continuum of history upon which indigenous people rely has spatial boundaries with time understood as space mediated. (433–434)

Indigenous Americans’ traditional conceptions of time are rooted in their idea of place rather than the clock-time of [page 224] Western colonial cultures. Given this emphasis on place and spatial boundaries, it’s clear how this sense of time becomes distorted by traumatic events related to place. The United States’ pursuit of settler colonialism displaced Indigenous Americans from their ancestral territories and used this displacement as part of its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples.

Significantly, the cultural trauma of Indigenous Americans is also tied to the United States’ development of nuclear weapons. The Japanese are not the only cultural victims of nuclear attack: Masahide Kato points out that nuclear testing has “invariably [taken place in] the sovereign nations of Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples,” including the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation), Hawaiʻi, and many other Indigenous nations (348). In the United States, the Trinity test fictionalized in The Return was detonated within range of an estimated 19,000 Indigenous people who lived in a 50-mile radius of the explosion (Lee). Tanya H. Lee reports on how the United States’ National Cancer Institute has only now, 70 years later, started studying how much radiation the Apache and Navajo (Diné) people in New Mexico were exposed to on the day of the Trinity detonation without even being told that the test was being conducted in their vicinity and on their ancestral land.

In this way, the physical and mental trauma of Indigenous Americans and other Indigenous peoples are tied to nuclear power in a way that informs their sense of time. Homogenous time is a construction of Western colonial cultures that is deeply tied to violence and trauma inflicted on sovereign Indigenous people. Kato writes that Western culture’s “so-called ‘real time’ is . . . the very temporality of the strategic gaze, that is, the absolute temporality that presides over other forms of constructing time (i.e., chronolocality)” (342) and ties this colonization of Western conceptions of “real time” to the development of capitalism, tracing this back to Karl Marx pointing out [page 225] capitalism’s displacement of spatial distance onto temporal distance in Capital (Das Kapital, 1867/1885/1894) (252–264).

Barad focuses on how the nuclear disrupts non-homogenous time by reading Hayashi Kyōko’s depiction of temporal disjunction in From Trinity to Trinity (Torinichi kara Torinichi e, 2010) and thinking through the psychological trauma and distorted time of a hibakusha, a Japanese survivor of the 1945 atomic bombings. In the rest of this article, I look at how Frost and Lynch’s depiction of fabula time distortion in The Return is linked to Laura Palmer’s trauma and parallels Hayashi’s depiction of trauma distorting linear time and how these are linked through the trauma of nuclear destruction.

Hayashi Kyōko and Trauma in The Return

From Trinity to Trinity recounts Hayashi’s journey to the Trinity Site where we see the first atomic bomb being detonated in Part 8 of The Return. Hayashi was a hibakusha, specifically a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing on 9 August 1945, which she experienced at 14 years old (Otake ix) (see Figure 9). She travelled to the Trinity Site to understand her trauma by visiting the true source of it: the location where nuclear weaponry first entered the world. Hayashi wrote that “Trinity is the starting point of my August 9. It is also the final destination of hibakusha” (11).

Hayashi’s narrative of her journey takes in her life as a hibakusha and how the impact of the Nagasaki nuclear bombing warped her sense of time. Barad identifies how Hayashi writes as if she experiences “multiple temporalities present[ing] themselves without any one of them being present” (“Troubling” 74). Hayashi’s translator Eiko Otake similarly says:

In an attempt to reflect both the continuity and the unevenness of time, Hayashi’s narration does not maintain a linear structure. In her stories, past and present are not only related, they are intricately united. The lives of both the dead and the living interact [page 226]

Memories and premonitions are just vessels that travel between past, present, and future. (xx–xxi )

Otake points to how Hayashi’s psychological trauma distorted her experience of time and how she expresses this through her writing. Hayashi’s narration of her journey to the Trinity Site jumps through time from past to present and back again in a disjointed way that reflects Hayashi’s lived experience of a life [page 227] rendered non-linear by trauma. In the following passage, for example, Hayashi visits the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico5 and her experience flitting between the present and the past contrasts starkly with the ‘official’ historical chronology presented on the panel she is looking at:

Soon my eyes caught some big letters on a panel: “Count Down to Nagasaki.” [...]

I felt time stop in front of the panel.

“Count Down to Nagasaki.” While the time toward death in Nagasaki was ticking, what were Kana and I doing in the Ohashi Arms Factory?

Standing in front of a garbage can and being bitten by fleas as usual, I was separating paper trash collected from the factory for recycling. . . . In my factory, there was no longer much paper trash to recycle, so at the very moment the bomb left the plane, I was trying to locate the sound of a small roar the factory chief told us he had just heard.

I closed my eyes and bowed my head to the photograph. (16–17)

Hayashi’s past and present blur into one another: the sanitized American clock-time rendition of the event pulls her memory back to the event as she experienced it. She experiences the Nagasaki bombing as a traumatic event so significant that it draws everything else in her life towards it: for Hayashi, time cannot escape its event horizon. Everything in her life after Nagasaki keeps coming round to that singular frozen point in time when her life changed.

In The Return, Frost and Lynch depict the kind of association between the trauma of nuclear force and the non-homogenous temporal distortion that Hayashi experiences by conceptually linking the Trinity nuclear detonation to Laura Palmer’s assault and murder and then depicting how time distorts around that singular traumatic event. As discussed above, in the story of Twin Peaks, the detonation of the first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Site somehow releases BOB—a major catalyst for Laura’s years of sexual assault and eventual [page 228] murder—into the world, and as a response, The Fireman releases Laura’s spirit in the form of the golden orb.

The Return’s closing episodes go on to show a distortion of time around Laura’s traumatic death similar to that described by Hayashi. In Part 17, Dale Cooper travels back to the night of Laura’s murder in an attempt to prevent it. The fabula of Twin Peaks bends back on itself by returning to the date and time at which the story began. In the same way Hayashi writes of her journey to the Trinity site, “[i]f I make that journey, I can hold August 9 within my life circle. If I can never be free of the event, I should end my relationship by swallowing it” (11). Barad recognizes this as perhaps an evocation of the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail (“Troubling” 82). Hayashi journeys to the Trinity Site to attempt to consume the traumatic event in her life that was born there.

Like Hayashi’s ouroboros, Cooper travels back to the night of Laura’s murder to end his relationship to that event by swallowing it. Phillip Jeffries (Nathan Frizzell) transports Cooper back to the night of 23 February 1989, and Cooper intercepts Laura in the woods after she runs away from James Hurley (James Marshall). Instead of meeting the men who would take her to the train car where she is assaulted and murdered, Laura goes with Cooper and we see shots of her body, wrapped in plastic, disappearing from the lakeside where she was found in the first episode of Twin Peaks. The disappearance of her lifeless body implies that her murder has been cosmically undone.

Cooper seeks to conclude his investigation into Laura’s murder by unmaking the murder itself: by, as Barad describes Hayashi, “metabolising the trauma, transforming the self from victim to survivor” (“Troubling” 82). But, as Barad further discusses, this attempt to swallow the traumatic event becomes a way of “un/doing the self” (82), and Cooper’s self dissolves following his attempt to rewrite time and set the world on a new path. The cost of traversing the disintegration of time is the loss of self that we see in Part 18 of The Return. After ‘saving’ Laura, Cooper wanders across spacetime some more, eventu-[page 229]ally waking up in an unfamiliar motel room with a note addressed to Richard. He seems a different figure than the Cooper with whom we are familiar: his Richard is violent and haunted, more like Mr. C than Dale Cooper. Cooper loses his sense of self, his personality and memories, and becomes someone else entirely. Worse yet, he undoes the self of Laura Palmer and potentially undoes the ultimately triumphant heavenly state of Laura that we saw at the end of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Richard instead finds Carrie Page, a morose doppelgänger of Laura eager to escape her dire living situation, whom he takes to the town of Twin Peaks to try to remember herself as Laura.

Cooper’s attempt to swallow the trauma of Laura’s sexual assault and murder does not set the world aright but further disrupts and disintegrates time around that traumatic event. As Barad describes in their reading of Hayashi:

what is at stake is not setting aright (as if that were possible), but rather the undoing of time, of universal time, of the notion that moments exist one at a time, everywhere the same, and replace one another in succession . . .; it is also a story of time-being that undoes modernity’s unified notion of self and what it means to be human. The travel hopper must risk her sense of self, which never will have been one, or itself. (“Troubling” 70)

By exploiting the temporal disintegration ushered in by the nuclear bomb and its birthing of BOB, Laura, and the trauma that BOB inflicts, Cooper not only undoes his unified notion of self but undoes time. In the final moments of The Return, Cooper (now Richard) realizes the magnitude of time’s disintegration around him (see Figure 10). Standing with Carrie outside the house in Twin Peaks that he knew as occupied by the Palmer family, he has a realization and asks, “What year is this?” highlighting the disruption of time’s linear flow that he is beginning to perceive. In this instant, Carrie screams, a flash occurs like the detonation of a nuclear bomb, the Palmer house disappears from the screen, and the world of Twin Peaks definitively ends. [page 230]

In this moment, like at the Trinity Site, “time-being [is] shaken to its core: matter . . . split off from itself—traumatised. Violence tears holes in the very fabric of the world in its sedimenting iterative intra-activity. Woundedness is not reserved for human beings alone” (Barad, “Troubling” 83). Spacetimemattering is ruptured by trauma—the trauma of Laura Palmer conceptually linked to the trauma of nuclear weaponry—and the world, indeed all of time, is fractured. Barad writes in their reading of Hayashi that:

while the past is never finished and the future is not what will unfold, the world holds the memories of its iterative reconfiguring. All reconfigurings, including atomic blasts, violent ruptures, and tears in the fabric of being—of spacetimemattering—are sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming and must be taken into account. (“Troubling” 73)

All violent trauma—from trauma as massive as that inflicted by nuclear destruction on the Japanese people and on Indigenous cultures across the Americas and the Pacific to the psychological trauma of one sexually assaulted 17-year-old girl—ruptures time in some way and all must be taken into account. Time cannot be linear and ordered when sexual violence, colonial violence, and atomic violence tear spacetimemattering asunder with the force of their trauma. [page 231]

In The Return, Frost and Lynch draw on the established cultural associations between the nuclear and disruptions in time and use it for their depiction of how Laura Palmer’s trauma has torn apart linear time. As in Hayashi’s description of her life as a hibakusha, trauma warps time around it and sucks all of a person’s life into a black hole formed around a traumatic event. In its final episode, The Return shows how the trauma of Laura Palmer reconfigures the spacetimemattering of the world itself, leaving only blackness and the lingering scream of the traumatized.

Notes

1. Although this is the largest on-screen time jump in the Twin Peaks narrative flow, there is a larger time jump offscreen in Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which traces the history of the (fictional) town of Twin Peaks back to 1805 and even further when taking into account the (real) history of the forcibly removed Niimíipuu people (named the Nez Percé people by French Canadians and in the novel) that Frost incorporates.

2. Though the following examples largely come from American culture, it’s worth noting that the disruptive force of atomic violence has been and continues to be a prominent visual component in Japanese culture representing how the country was fundamentally changed through its people being victims of atomic bombing. The force of the nuclear has greatly influenced Japanese cultural works from Toho Co., Ltd.’s kaiju Godzilla (ゴジラ), a monster awakened by the radioactive power of nuclear weapons and embodying nuclear destruction through its deadly atomic breath, to manga like Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン) which directly dramatizes the stories of survivors of the atomic bombings or Akira (アキラ) and Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲ リオン) which, though not dealing with the history of Japanese nuclear destruction directly, both use the iconography of atomic bombings in their depictions of post-apocalyptic versions of Japan devastated by cataclysmic explosions.

3. Released as The House in the Square in the UK and as I’ll Never Forget You in the US with a number of other potential titles considered for the US market, including Man of Two Worlds and No. 9 Berkeley Square. [page 232]

4. As an example of how fabula and syuzhet function in Twin Peaks prior to The Return, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) is an extended flashback to events before and leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder. Before this film, the story proceeded in line with linear time moving from the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body at the start of Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 1, to Special Agent Dale Cooper emerging from the Black Lodge in Season 2, Episode 22. Fire Walk with Me therefore represents a move backwards in time in the syuzhet as it flashes back to prior events in the narrative. However, it also contains some disruptions to the fabula in which linear time is disrupted in the story itself, notably Phillip Jeffries’ (David Bowie) premonition about Special Agent Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer’s vision of a bloody Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), who tells her that “the good Dale” is in the Black Lodge.

5. The National Atomic Museum in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has since been renamed the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History.

Works Cited

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---. “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable.” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, no. 92, 2017, pp. 56–86, doi:10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968/2007.

Braid. Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3, Microsoft Game Studios, 2008.

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Simon Bowie is an Open Source Software Developer at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK, where he works on the Open Book Futures project helping to build community-owned and scholar-led open infrastructures for open access book publishing. His work in cultural studies has covered TV shows such as Twin Peaks, Yellowjackets, and Watchmen and video games such as Outer Wilds and Kentucky Route Zero. More information on his work and full lists of publications can be found at https://simonxix.com.

MLA citation (print):

Bowie, Simon. "'What year is this?': Time, the Nuclear, and Trauma in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 212-234.