[page 145] Abstract: This essay builds on classical screen theory, particularly as conceived of and advanced by Christian Metz, to examine how Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) encourages viewers to respond to projections and screens. In The Return, David Lynch and Mark Frost create a screen story world in which submitting to projections and screens (and sometimes associated sounds) creates a more coherent meaning and development than attempting to shape that content. Contemporary versions of existing Twin Peaks characters, such as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), illustrate divergent perspectives and positions on responding to the substance of the screen, which provides contrasting pathways for the viewers (also as subjects) to follow. I conclude with references to other television series that similarly treat the screen within the frame as having the power to envelop the spectator and efface and reconstitute material reality.
Keywords: television studies, screen theory, Agent Dale Cooper, spectatorship, The Wizard of Oz
Fifteen years ago, filmmaker Edgar Wright presented a screening of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, California. New Beverly regular David Crennen recalls of the screening that David Lynch appeared from behind the cinema’s red curtain, unannounced and unbeknownst even to host Wright. Crennen says Lynch’s appearance was straight out of Twin Peaks, “just emerging from some sort of nether verse. I did not know there were doors behind that red curtain. Either he had been there the entire time, or he was able to teleport” (Marchese). Wright concurs, recalling of his starstruck encounter with Lynch, “It’s literally like he . . . came from the red curtain, and he went back through the red curtain and I’ve never seen him since” (Marchese).
This anecdote from Out of Print, Julia Marchese’s 2014 documentary about the New Beverly Cinema, is noteworthy not only for its links to Twin Peaks, but for its evocation of [page 146] Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939),1 a film that Wild at Heart reimagines. Though no one in the documentary makes the connection, the description of Lynch appearing from behind the curtain resembles the revelation of the “man behind the curtain” associated with the phrase “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” which in The Wizard of Oz is an attempt by The (purportedly) Great and Powerful Oz to avoid being revealed as a charlatan.
Beyond further binding Lynch with The Wizard of Oz, a frequent source of inspiration for the filmmaker, these anecdotes and the repeated redolent phrase are also useful in demonstrating aspects of screen theory. Leslie Kan summarizes Jean-Louis Baudry’s film apparatus theory as “a spectatorship that falsely identifies with the onscreen subject.” Though the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz was released several decades before Baudry’s theories were developed, protagonist Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her new friends are an effective illustration of cinema’s spectator, absorbed by the spectacle in front of them but unaware of the mechanisms that produce that spectacle. Only when the curtain parts do they begin to work out the relationship between the projections and sounds in front of them and the hidden processes that result in those projections and sounds.
Dorothy and her friends seek to attain knowledge, heart, courage, and direction home, interestingly all goals shared by several characters within the story world of Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991). These characters must ask, as screen theorist Stephen Heath proposes, of screen story substance, “‘how does this function?’ and ‘where is the reality in that?’” (5). To an even greater degree than the original two seasons of Twin Peaks, though, Lynch and Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is concerned with working out what is on the screen, literally and metaphorically. The aim of this essay is to show that the revived series includes both prescriptive and proscriptive approaches to being a spectator, as well as being a spectator as a subject. [page 147]
A central screen theory context that underpins this examination is Christian Metz’s concept of the spectator as the “all-perceiving” subject (Imaginary 48), which refers critically to the way in which a cinema spectator thinks or feels that they are creating the content on the screen within the experience of watching it. In The Return, Lynch and Frost seem to advocate for a quite different sort of perceiving position, one that views screens and projections as guides for being-in-the-world, to which the spectator should submit rather than attempt to be beyond the world of the text or rearrange it.
My analysis situates FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as Dougie Jones (also MacLachlan) as a spectator who perseveres, respecting the fixedness and authority of images that he sees as projections, thus keeping the text intact. Sheriff’s deputies Andy (Harry Goaz) and Hawk (Michael Horse) are similar spectators, whereas the more conventional Cooper, galvanized and awakened from a coma, is a spectator who errs by not submitting to the fixedness of the text he exists within. His evil doppelgänger (also played by MacLachlan) is similarly flawed, convinced that he controls the frame, until he succumbs to forces beyond the waking world. Finally, The Fireman—or merely a series of question marks, as he is credited in The Return (Carel Struycken)—and Phillip Gerard (Al Strobel), also known as Mike, are sources outside of the material world who are able to intervene in the story through the membrane of the screen.
One need only look at the first part of The Return to find evidence that film apparatus theory is an overt component of the series’ concern for being-in-the-world. Apparatus theory holds that the physical arrangement of a theater enables the false identification of the “all perceiving” subject (Metz, Imaginary 48). That is to say, the film camera is behind the spectator and projects the images to a space in front of the spectator, causing the spectator to remain ignorant of the source of the images.
Part 1 of The Return includes a faithful scenario of the film apparatus arrangement, with Sam Colby (Benjamin Rosen-[page 148]field) sitting in a large room in New York City with a camera behind him and a source of spectacle in front of him. The site of the spectacle is a glass box, rather than a screen, and the camera is there to record, rather than project, yet the configuration of Sam’s seating position, the primary camera behind him, and the box in front of him precisely illustrate the layout found in apparatus theory. This scene also evokes Metz’s contention that, on the subject of film being like a mirror, “although . . . everything may come to be projected, there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body. In a certain emplacement, the mirror suddenly becomes clear glass” (Imaginary 45). Such an understanding of the mirror is further developed in Part 2, when the Arm’s (unknown voice performer) expression “Non-Exist-Ent” launches Cooper into the clear glass box that Sam is supposed to be watching. Lynch creates a complex internal montage in this scene, as the viewer shares Cooper’s perspective from inside the box, seeing his reflection in the glass, and also seeing the camera that is documenting the box. In this moment, both Cooper and the viewer of The Return are situated explicitly as the subject before Cooper is transported elsewhere.
This scene is pivotal in establishing the approach to perceiving that the divergent Coopers will embody, because it provides a doubled character with whom the audience can identify and who is also engaging in the process of working out the difference between being a spectator and being a subject lured by what Metz calls “affective participation” (“Fiction” 75). In fact, Metz opens the article “The Fiction Film and its Spectator” with the sentence, “the dreamer does not know that he is dreaming” (75), distinguishing the illusion of the dream world from the “impression of reality” (75) that takes place at a cinema. Of course, this sounds much like the dialogue concerning dreams and dreamers spoken by Monica Bellucci (appearing as a version of herself) and FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) in Part 14 of The Return.
The first Cooper to emerge again in the reality of the story world is the one mistaken for Dougie Jones. Though this ver-[page 149]sion of Cooper was not popular with viewers who grew impatient with the proportion of the series that featured him rather than the conventional Cooper, it is the Cooper mistaken for Dougie who most successfully navigates the reality of being-in-the world. He does so by following reflections, screens, and projections as guideposts. As a subject, this version of Cooper is arguably the series’ most potent test of the committed viewer’s fidelity discourse. The test for fidelity is itself a process through which the viewer falsely attempts to assert control over the screen image, as in concluding that this is not the Cooper whom they implicitly claim to possess or remember. This attitude holds that something in the adaptation has gone wrong, relative to the standard that they have created in their imaginations and memories.
In truth, the Cooper who has been known to audiences for decades is very much present in The Return but also missing, illustrating another key theme of the series. The images of this body on screen, played by Kyle MacLachlan, have a representational past as Agent Cooper. He is being slowly reconstituted so that he has a future as the Cooper who once lived on the screen, but his present tense is intentionally hollowed out, a tabula rasa, a condition that Cooper discusses in the original series. The particular type of tabula rasa embodied by this Cooper is not the popular conception of the “blank slate” but rather the sort that Robbie Duschinsky has defined and translated as “a slate that has been blanked,” meaning “the effect of the erasure of text” (510).
This understanding, a slate that has been blanked, contrasts nicely with the substance of the real Dougie Jones, a figure who was manufactured for a purpose. Cooper, mistaken for Dougie, does a number of things that correlate to theories of the screen. One example, which does not involve visible surrogates for screens, is his tendency to mimic physical gestures. Cooper, the slate that has been blanked, learns to signal a thumbs-up, to shake hands, and to nod his head, among other traditional signs of human interaction. His identification with the subjects (in these instances, the other characters) who are [page 150] unknowingly teaching him these behaviors often includes repositioning his body to appear as a projection of them, rather than a mirrored reflection. The effect is much like that of René Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced (1937), a painting concerning facial erasure and dissociation, among other themes. Lynch the visual artist is no doubt well acquainted with Magritte’s work, and the visual phenomenon of Not to Be Reproduced in its own way prefigures screen theory of the 1970s, which developed at the same time that Lynch was studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and creating Eraserhead (1977).
There are several instances in which surrogates for film screens do appear within the material world of The Return. These are visions experienced only by a privileged group consisting of Cooper—the slate who has been blanked—and the viewing audience of The Return and include the superimpositions of Gerard, guiding Cooper towards waking up and attempting to preserve him so he does not die. Gerard appears here in a strange diegetic state: he is apparently not visible to the other characters in Cooper’s surroundings. The pairing of visibility and cognition is often part of the mystery of The Return, as in the scene at Carrie Page’s (Sheryl Lee) house in Odessa, Texas; it is unclear whether the dead body on the couch that the audience sees is visible to and perceived by both Carrie and Cooper. The audience remains in a state of uncertainty regarding such instances of varied perception.
Gerard’s function in these superimpositions is to penetrate the membrane of the screen and affect the behavior of Cooper, which he is arguably successful in doing. Also worth noting is the development of Gerard’s appearances, from superimpositions to occupying a state more accurately understood as a frame within a frame, or a screen within a screen. In Part 11, Phillip appears this way while guiding Dougie-Cooper into Szymon’s Famous Coffees. Cooper gets absorbed into the bakery, helping to reconstitute a part of his personality (the penchant for coffee and cherry pie) and also saving his life through the intervention of the pie that later marks him as a cosmic ally to a gangster otherwise sworn to kill him. [page 151]
These variations on projected and composited images include smaller visual signposts that Cooper experiences at the casino, guiding him to jackpots, or when reviewing case files at home, guiding him to draw mysterious ladders and stairs, (a humorously structuralist approach to paperwork). Each signpost is a projection of images or lights, conspicuous to Cooper, the properly perceiving spectator, as well as to the viewer of the show but otherwise hidden within the general perception of other characters in the series’ reality.
In contrast to the function of projected and composited images as helpful guides for Cooper-as-Dougie, Cooper’s doppelgänger, “Mr. C,” also encounters such images, but his reaction corresponds to the false identification of the self-appointed “all-perceiving subject” (Metz, Imaginary 48), and thus the images are more often like traps. One relevant occasion is during the doppelgänger’s attempt to avoid being drawn back into the Red Room or the Lodge. Driving in his car, knowing that the predetermined time has come for someone to go back in, he experiences disorientation that leads to a car crash, all linked to the electricity of the car’s cigarette lighter. Eventually, he and the viewer share a perspective of the red drapes superimposed against the scene of the car accident. The doppelgänger successfully resists going back into the Red Room or Lodge, but he ends up in prison after the highway patrol finds him passed out in his car.
The causality in this sequence of events involves the doppelgänger’s short-term advances that in the end don’t add up to a successful mission, the same of which could be said of the revived Cooper’s final position in the series. In prison, there is a moment in which the doppelgänger looks at himself in the mirror, recognizing through a superimposed vision of BOB’s (Frank Silva) face against his own, that BOB is still with him. This too is an example of the doppelgänger’s skewed perspective of being in the world as a spectator and subject. He believes that he possesses BOB, but in reality, BOB possesses him. Furthermore, the doppelgänger’s position as a subject [page 152] and spectator also involves a narrative and visual development that directly address the materiality of the screen.
Part 5 juxtaposes Cooper, the slate that has been blanked, and Cooper’s doppelgänger as images on screens within the narrative. At the Silver Mustang Casino, where Cooper wins several consecutive jackpots by following the projections that he sees, he becomes the subject of intense interest to Rodney (Robert Knepper) and Bradley (Jim Belushi) Mitchum, whose financial situation Cooper threatens to considerably upend. While viewing surveillance footage of Cooper, casino owner Rodney asks his associate, “How much did that man there on the television win?” In this scene, Cooper is the unaware subject, the spectacle to which the men in the surveillance room are reacting. As befits so many of the scenes involving Cooper-as-Dougie, he controls the narrative without trying to at all. This is one of many moments in The Return in which Cooper affects the causality of the plot through his passivity. It should also be noted that Mitchum’s dialogue and vocal delivery concerning “that man” is an echo of The Wizard of Oz phrase about “that man” behind the curtain.
Even more importantly, this dialogue and its significance strongly parallel Phillip Jeffries’ (David Bowie) “Who do you think this is there?” scene from Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), in which Jeffries raises suspicions about Cooper’s identity in a sequence that likewise involves a complex use of surveillance cameras and monitors. Further, when a different take of that scene repeats in The Return’s fourteenth episode, the dialogue is changed slightly to “Who you do think that is there?” after which Gordon Cole, narrating the remembrance, calls attention to the importance of the question, saying, “I hadn’t remembered that. Now this is really something interesting to think about.” As Gordon Cole is played by Lynch, who so rarely identifies what is an important clue within his films or assents to such speculations, all viewers should note the significance of this complex instance of expertly designed total confusion of spectator and subject within the narrative. [page 153]
The doppelgänger also appears on a monitor while in prison in a later scene. The premise of the scene is the one phone call that the incarcerated doppelgänger is entitled to make. In a surveillance room, there are multiple angles of the doppelgänger as he sits to make his call. He looks directly into the camera, which frames him in a medium shot, addressing both the characters watching him and, by virtue of the perspective, the audience: “Now that everyone is here, I will make my phone call.” The remainder of the scene, in which he provokes the Warden (James Morrison) and guards watching him, alternates between this medium shot and a long shot, both of which feature the doppelgänger looking directly into the surveillance camera and displayed by the monitors. These, too, are nested images, as the monitors are frames within the screen on which one watches The Return.
One could conclude from these events and representations that the two versions of Cooper, neither one the version that was present in the original series, offer the viewer a way to compare approaches to being-in-the-world using foundational concepts from screen theory. It is another screen within the narrative that begins to transform Cooper, the slate that has been blanked, into the revived Cooper: while Cooper as Dougie is watching Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) on a television, the dialogue “get Gordon Cole” triggers Cooper’s journey back towards what is supposed to be his authentic self.
To understand the link between being-in-the-world and authenticity, it is useful to consult Roy Hornsby’s interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. Hornsby points out that “there must be ‘inauthenticity’ . . . for [the human being] to become aware of its loss of self and strive for its return to authentic Being.” One could read the entirety of The Return as such a journey, a show that has been missing for 25 years and which must first pass through the crucible of critical viewers’ projection of inauthenticity in order to return to authentic Being.
Reason would dictate that getting the authentic Agent Cooper back in his formerly established position and condition [page 154] is a necessary process to achieve the greater series’ return. However, as much as Cooper seems to retain the emotional connection to the family he shared while being mistaken for Dougie Jones, he loses the blanked Cooper’s contentedness with being a spectator. Cooper, reinstated to his previous position and condition, is assertive in a way that ignores the story world’s warnings, and he too becomes trapped.
There is not sufficient space in this essay to fully address The Fireman’s activity in Part 8, in which he alters the universe by sending the Laura Palmer orb to Earth through the membrane of what looks like a cinema screen. What is clear from that episode is that it takes a force outside of the text, outside of the material world of the story and the flawed reasoning of its non-supernatural characters, to intervene in the battle of good and evil with discernment and wisdom. Cooper does seem to take some guidance from The Fireman in Part 1, when The Fireman gives him clues such as “430” and “Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone.” However, The Fireman exists outside of conventional temporality. Thus, while this conversation with Cooper takes place in the first episode of the series, its substance might follow the events of the final episode of the series, a theory that there is evidence to support. Regardless of the chronology, the revived Agent Cooper is too eager to become the subject and insert himself into the fixed text of the past. In Part 17, his encounters with Phillip Gerard and Phillip Jeffries lead to his desired position in the narrative, which is to reenter a previous screen, that of Fire Walk with Me. The effect of projecting himself into that previous screen is to enter what Jeffries acknowledges is a slippery area. Another effect is blatant self-contradiction. Minutes after confidently stating that the past dictates the future, Cooper is attempting to rewrite the past. These developments, along with Phillip Gerard’s repeated question, “Is it future, or is it past?” vary The Return’s commentary on the role of time in screen-based narratives.
Returning briefly to Christian Metz, Paula Murphy has observed that, for Metz, the “distinguishing factor” of “cinema is [page 155] that the cinema is a signifier whose presence is absence . . . the act of perception takes place in real time, but the spectator is viewing an object which is pre-recorded and thus already absent.” Cooper’s failed attempt to rescue Laura Palmer involves a similar presence of absence, a direct contravention of intention. When Cooper re-enters Fire Walk With Me to save Laura, the foundational missing figure of Twin Peaks, she goes away. When he drives 430 miles to restore her, she goes away. Laura Palmer’s presence is absence. The more Cooper asserts himself as a subject in her screen narrative, the more distant she becomes.
I will conclude with additional context for The Return as it exists within a small group of television series or episodes that situate the screen as a place where the “impression of reality,” and especially the manner of the spectator, has the potential to distort the material world. A 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” heavily influenced by Sunset Boulevard, features an aging movie star who finds a way to physically reenter the screen of her past glory, leaving waking life behind. The closing narration observes that she “changed the blank tomb of an empty projection screen into a private world.” More recently, the overarching plot of Alex Garland’s Devs (2020) involves a computer that projects onto a screen representations of any momentous or mundane subject from the past or future. The present story world is approaching a point at which only static appears on screen, plunging everyone into the unknown. The characters of Devs, like Cooper, risk permanent dislocation as a result of traversing time and space. Like The Return, these narratives position the screen as a place of non-return, of non-existence, another part of the dream of time and space that no spectator truly controls.
Notes
1. At the time of this essay’s writing, Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz (2022), a feature-length documentary film about the relationship between Lynch and The Wizard of Oz, had not been released. [page 156]
Works Cited
Duschinsky, Robert. “Tabula Rasa and Human Nature.” Philosophy, vol. 87, no. 4, 2012, pp. 509–529., doi:10.1017/S0031819112000393.
Fleming, Victor, director. The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Indiana UP, 1981.
Hornsby, Roy. “What Heidegger Means by Being-In-The-World.” Royby.com, royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html.
Kan, Leslie. “Spectacle, Spectator.” The Chicago School of Media Theory, csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/spectacle.htm. Accessed 12 June 2024.
Metz, Christian. “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study.” Translated by Alfred Guzzetti, New Literary History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1976, pp. 75–105. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/468615.
—. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Indiana UP, 1982.
Murphy, Paula. “Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 1: ‘A New Kind of Mirror.’” Kritikos, vol. 2, 2005, Intertheory.org, intertheory.org/psychoanalysis.htm. Accessed on 16 June 2024.
Out of Print. Directed by Julia Marchese, Level 33 Entertainment, 2014.
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.” The Twilight Zone. CBS, 23 Oct. 1959.
Sunset Boulevard. Directed by Billy Wilder, Paramount Pictures, 1950.
Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, CBS Media Ventures, 1990–1991.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch, New Line Cinema, 1992.
Twin Peaks: The Return. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Showtime, 2017.
Thomas Britt is Professor and founding member of the Film and Video Studies program at George Mason University. He is head of the Film program’s screenwriting concentration and the recipient of the University’s Teaching Excellence Award. He recently completed his PhD., “Death in Post-Classical Screen Storytelling,” at the University of Brighton’s School of Art and Media. His previously published writing on Twin Peaks includes “‘Between Two Mysteries’: Intermediacy in [page 157] Twin Peaks: The Return” (Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, 2019); “‘On the Way to Perfection’: Red Passages in Twin Peaks: The Return” (PopMeC, 2021); “David Lynch’s Desert Frontier” (David Lynch and the American West, 2023); and “What is Television?” (Adapting Television and Literature, 2024).
MLA citation (print):
Britt, Thomas. "Twenty-Five Year Shrine: The Screen in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 145-157.