[page 123] If one follows Marshall McLuhan’s theory summarized in the assertion that “the medium is the message” (13), it can be argued that, much more so than its complex and cryptic story, the real impact of Twin Peaks: The Return concerns the ways in which it redefined our certainties concerning various cinematographic categories. For instance, David Lynch has described The Return as an eighteen-hour-long film, but it was produced and distributed by Showtime, a television network, in one-hour “parts,” or episodes. Did the content influence the container, or vice versa? Can this third season really be understood as one indivisible unit or as composite parts? And how do screens and superimpositions impact our understanding of what takes place in the diegesis?
In his essay “Between Two Worlds: Twin Peaks: The Return and the Undefinable Assemblage,” Kyle Barrett draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “assemblage”—a combination of numerous multiplicities, a “body without organs”—to describe The Return as “an interstitial text that cements the filmmaker’s audiovisual aspirations.” The patchwork, rhizomatic nature of the season, “linked not by continuous, vertical progression, but through leaps of association and the relation of seemingly unconnected ideas,” destabilized many viewers, who found it difficult to make sense of such storytelling. While this might sound surprising for a show in which trees play such a central role, from the opening credits of Season 1 to the omnipresence of the Ghostwood Forest throughout the series, describing The Return as rhizomatic is extremely useful and echoes the way that the series glides through categories, interstitially, between the worlds of television and film. Lynch and Frost’s transmedia text deterritorializes traditional television in order to produce something new, almost impossible to label. In Stephen Volk’s Coffinmaker’s Blues, one interview subject asserts, “Kids don’t care if it’s on TV, cable, Netflix or a phone: ‘It’s all story’” (185). [page 124]
These stories, of course, need screens to be watched, and screens of all sorts are omnipresent in The Return, from computer monitors to smartphones, television sets, and a cinema screen, alongside various superimpositions. How does one negotiate such an environment and how much control does one have over the content of the screens? Thomas Britt’s “Twenty-Five Year Shrine: The Screen in Twin Peaks: The Return” opposes Christian Metz’s theory of the spectator as the “all-perceiving” subject “convinced that they are creating the content on the screen within the experience of watching it,” with Lynch and Frost’s description of “screens and projections as guides for being-in-the-world.” While Dougie Jones, acting as a spectator according to that second definition, “affects the causality of the plot through his passivity,” Mr. C seems convinced that he controls the frame, while the version of Dale Cooper restored to his true self in Part 16 also acts according to that belief. The latter two both fail, while Dougie Jones “most successfully navigates the reality of being-in-the world.” In fact, only forces beyond the material world (The Fireman, MIKE) appear to be “able to intervene in the story through the membrane of the screen.”
In The Return, such forces are often depicted doing this via the use of superimpositions. In “Between Two Superimposed Worlds: André Bazin, Spatial (Dis)unity, and the Otherworldly ‘Screens’ of Twin Peaks: The Return,” Garrett Strpko argues that Bazin’s essay “The Life and Death of Superimposition” is helpful in considering how superimpositions may be used to integrate entities into the diegetic world of a film and/or propose a simultaneous montage. Strpko states that The Return “uses superimposition to intentionally create a sense of spatial and hermeneutic ambiguity . . . opening up new hermeneutic possibilities for superimposition and its relation to the supernatural on film.” Indeed, contrary to the way that the ghost in Sam Wood’s Our Town (1940) is integrated into the space of the film, respecting its unity and strengthening the diegesis, The Return layers its “ghosts” over the shot as opposed to within it, not necessarily depicting their [page 125] size in a consistent fashion, but making use of a disunified form of editing, defamiliarizing one’s sense of cinematic space. Just as its action is spread over the map of the United States (Las Vegas, South Dakota, New Mexico, Odessa, etc.), the cinematic space itself is not “one” in The Return. The supernatural intrudes thus unnaturally into the world, “beyond our grasp and control.”
Works Cited
MacLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ginko Press, 1964.
Volk, Stephen. Coffinmaker’s Blues. Electric Dreamhouse, 2019.
MLA citation (print):
Boulègue, Franck. "Cinema, Television, and Screens." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 123-125.