[page 271] The following pieces of scholarship from Michail Zontos and Robert Sinnerbrink provide compelling arguments for how Twin Peaks: The Return transfigures anxieties from the real-world emergence of nuclear technology into broader manifestations of the supernatural or ‘cosmic forces’ that haunt not only the town of Twin Peaks, but also contemporary American society. Each author deftly positions the new series as a progression in Lynch and Frost’s exploration of the American mythos, making complementary arguments that can deepen our appreciation of the scope and complexity of The Return.
In “Paradise Lost: Incinerating the American Myth in Twin Peaks: The Return,” Michail Zontos explores how, despite the titular subtitle, the most recent series dismantles the romantic evocation of a ‘return to a lost paradise’ in the form of a nostalgic and faithful revisit to the town portrayed in the original series. Instead, the show provides a persuasive argument that, “by playing with cosmic forces beyond its comprehension, the United States lost part of its soul,” and that this is evidenced through the way in which the foundational myths of America have been dismantled by the long echoing aftereffects of the Trinity Atomic Bomb test portrayed in Part 8.
Zontos draws fascinating parallels between The Return and noted historical artworks that have interrogated the complex relationship between technology, progress, and civilization, arguing that the series shows a world in which “the machine destroyed the garden to such an extent that the country has gone directly from the pastoral stage to that of desolation.” He concludes his contribution with an explicit rumination on the possible negation of the “evil caused by the machine” through Cooper’s final desperate (albeit failed) attempt to save Laura Palmer, arguing that it is the endeavour itself which may provide hope.
In “‘There's a sort of evil out there’: Uncanny Secularity in Twin Peaks: The Return,” Robert Sinnerbrink continues this [page 272] exploration of the show’s complicated reckoning with progress and technology through his cogent and convincing characterization of The Return as a work of “uncanny secularity.” Arguing that the series is underpinned by the tensions between the secularist and post-secularist dimensions of post-war American culture, Sinnerbrink identifies in Part 8 several exemplars which demonstrate the “explicit intertwining of [the] worldly and other worldly, or materialist and ‘spiritualist’ perspectives.”
This intertwinement often manifests in the way the meta-physical-spiritual dimensions of the series are cinematically and aesthetically expressed in secular and materialist terms; Sinnerbrink presents the entanglement of the crime story elements of Mr. C’s narrative with the supernatural emergence of The Woodsmen and his resurrection in the opening to Part 8 as but one example of how the series handles the juxtaposition and synthesis of the mundane and the metaphysical.
Sinnerbrink’s identification of this uncanny secularity throughout the series is authoritative and persuasive, yet it is his observation of a pattern across Lynch’s works of a “‘dualistic’ structured historical-cultural world defined by prosperity and optimism but also spiritual devastation and moral confusion” that may expand our conception of how The Return most powerfully grapples with the disintegration of the American mythos of technological progress as a unilateral force for good. For as he observes, the potentially devastating consequences of the creation and use of a force capable of destroying humanity in the form of the Trinity Atomic Bomb test requires “a combined cultural-artistic and mythological-spiritualist response.” That response, in the form of Twin Peaks: The Return, is thankfully one which we can continue to revisit in our own continued explorations of the layered and intricate insights offered by the authors here.
MLA citation (print):
Daniel, Adam. "How the West Was Lost." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 271-272.