[page 289] Abstract: Critics have described David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return as the boldest, most experimental work ever screened on television. In this essay, I examine how The Return is characterized by its explicit intertwining of this-worldly and otherworldly features and how Lynch’s experimental aesthetic articulates a tension between these contrary dimensions of American culture. I describe this ambiguous Lynchian universe via the concept of ‘uncanny secularity,’ a term that aims to capture Lynch’s peculiar combination of secular and non-secular elements. The uncanny secularity characterizing the Twin Peaks universe reflects Franz Kafka’s fascination with the allegorical and theological dimensions of modern social institutions. Examining Part 8, I consider how the ecumenical pluralism of these religious, mythological, and esoteric threads finds expression in the strikingly dualist nature of the Lynchian Twin Peaks universe, exemplified in the dual nature of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and his evil doppelgänger.
Keywords: theology, mythology, esotericism, religion, dualism
Critics have described David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return as the boldest, most experimental work ever screened on television. In this essay, I examine how The Return is characterized by its explicit intertwining of worldly and other-worldly, or materialist and spiritualist perspectives, and how Lynch’s experimental aesthetic articulates a tension between these contrary dimensions of American culture. The Return is characterized by a rich skein of metaphysical/mythological themes drawing on an eclectic range of sources (Vedic and Hindu mythology, Jungian archetypes, transcendental meditation, Greek mythology, esoteric and occult traditions, theosophy, and so on). I describe this ambiguous Lynchian universe via the concept of ‘uncanny secularity,’ a term that aims to capture Lynch’s peculiar combination of secular and non-secular elements—secular ordinariness coupled with metaphysical speculation, crime detection with conspiracy the-[page 290]ories, socio-psychological and contextualist accounts of violence with moral and spiritualist conceptions of evil—which together express the cultural-aesthetic sensibility that is so characteristic of his work. The Return’s unstable combination of secular ordinariness and supernatural or metaphysical concerns—exemplified in the dualistic aspects of Dale Cooper and Mr. C as an intuitive, upstanding detective and an evil bearer of demonic possession—allow for a fascinating exploration of contemporary post-war anxieties and concerns in the American cultural-historical context.
Examining Part 8, I consider how these religious and spiritualist threads are framed by a secular ideological perspective. The latter manifests in the strange or uncanny secularity characterising the Twin Peaks universe, which reflects or doubles Franz Kafka’s fascination with the allegorical and theological dimensions of modern social institutions (here the police/FBI, government and the military, media communications technology, organized crime and the criminal underworld, conspiracy theories, and so on). The Return focuses on contrasting secular institutional and post-secularist spiritualist dimensions that structure both the experimental narrative and the aesthetic qualities of the series—its uncanny combination of contemporary urban/small-town realism, surrealistic visionary experimentation, and speculative supernaturalism. The ecumenical pluralism of these religious, mythological, and esoteric threads, I suggest, finds expression in the strikingly dualist nature of the Lynchian Twin Peaks universe exemplified in the dual nature of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and his doppelgänger, ‘Bad Cooper’ or Mr. C (also MacLachlan).
Twin Peaks: The Return
Critics have commented on how The Return offers an aesthetically daring and ethically complex meditation on contemporary American culture and society (Totaro). The small-town focus of the earlier two seasons has been expanded beyond the Pacific Northwest of the United States to incorporate the Ame-[page 291]rican Southwest, Midwest, and East Coast (New York) as well as other cities and countries around the globe (Argentina and Paris) (King; Martin). It also places a strong emphasis, as ever in Lynch’s work, on electronic media, audio, and digital telecommunication technologies, which not only link different locations, times, and events, but also serve as portals between the secular materialist world and a supernatural/metaphysical realm.1 Even in the earlier two seasons, it was clear that the Twin Peaks universe,2 as a number of critics have noted, comprised a dualistic or two-world metaphysics reminiscent of Gnostic traditions such as Manicheanism.3 This dualistic metaphysics linked the secular world of Twin Peaks as an idealized version of small-town America with the dualistic otherworldly metaphysical-spiritual realm of the (demonic) Black Lodge and the (angelic) White Lodge. The latter, although opposed, are defined by syncretic theological/spiritualist features derived from various traditions and are inhabited by quasi-mythological denizens (The Arm, The Experiment, The Fireman, Señorita Dido, Naido, Laura Palmer, and Agent Cooper and his avatars) who communicate with and have access to the mundane world of secular social reality. We could call this dualistic metaphysics structuring the Twin Peaks universe a Manichean Gnosticism defined by the coexistence of a good, spiritual world of light and an evil, material world of darkness as metaphysical (rather than psychological or moral) domains that remain in perpetual struggle with each other in ways that affect secular, yet metaphysically ordered, reality. There is also Twin Peaks’ emphasis on and valorizing of personal spiritual or metaphysically esoteric secret knowledge as a means of traversing these dualistic realms and overcoming the dualism between light and darkness, spiritual and matter, good and evil, this-worldly and otherworldly existence. This dualistic metaphysical framework provides the foundational structure for Twin Peaks’ uncanny combination of soap opera, crime drama, speculative fiction, surrealist sensibility, theological-spiritual themes, and metaphysical reflection. The Return expands and intertwines these dualistic elements and [page 292] metaphysical themes, reflecting not only Lynch and Frost’s trajectories as a collaborative artistic writing/directing team, but the emergence of cinematic television as an artistic medium, for which their original series was pivotal.
It is worth sketching a basic outline of The Return so that we can explore these intertwining secular and post-secular dimensions in more depth. At the end of Season 2, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper remained trapped in the otherworldly realm of the Black Lodge while his evil doppelgänger, possessed by BOB (Frank Silva), wreaked havoc back on Earth. This scenario provides an entry point for The Return, which commences with a prophetic pronouncement by an uncanny, supernatural Giant, familiar from the earlier series, who is later dubbed The Fireman (Carel Struycken).4 In a striking black and white sequence, peering directly into the camera, he tells us (and Cooper) to “Listen to the sounds” because “[i]t is happening again,” to remember “430” and “Richard and Linda,” and, pointedly, to mark that, “[i]t is in our House now.” Precisely what is “happening again,” what these sounds mean, what, exactly, is in our House now, and what this implies, we assume, for Cooper (not to mention all of the other characters whom we recall from Seasons 1 and 2), all remain to be seen. As becomes clearer later, The Fireman appears to be referring to the recrudescence of a dangerous form of evil generated by a powerful force of negativity originally known as Jowday or Joudy (later nicknamed ‘Judy’) and now personified by BOB.5 The latter has the dual character of being (as we learn later) a powerful spirit engendered by supernatural means, but also, in more secular terms, a personification of the “evil that men do” (as Albert Rosenfeld [Miguel Ferrer] remarks in Season 1). We therefore have two ways of understanding what the character of BOB represents, a supernatural demonic power and a human manifestation of evil that feeds on pain and sorrow (“garmonbozia” in the Twin Peaks universe). This evil force is manifesting itself again on Earth—across various locations in the United States—personified as the unleashing of BOB on the world, harboured by Cooper’s evil doppelgänger, Mr C, who [page 293] has been enjoying a crime spree during the intervening twenty-five years. For as-yet unclear reasons, Cooper himself remains trapped in the Black Lodge and can only return to Earth once his doppelgänger is made to return to the Black Lodge. Cooper’s task is thus to orchestrate the elimination of BOB/Mr. C from the Earth, which will allow the case of Laura Palmer’s death to be closed. This outcome would also open the possibility of rewriting history and conjuring an alternative past/future/present in which Laura was never killed—a clear violation of fate and necessity with potentially disastrous consequences.
More broadly, Cooper’s return and Laura Palmer’s transfiguration will also be, in effect, a redemption of the corrupted principle of goodness and light (personified by Laura) in its perpetual struggle with evil and darkness (personified by BOB). These two metaphysical principles or cosmic forces, intensifying their conflict, were unleashed on Earth in a powerful and toxic material form thanks to the world-disrupting 1945 Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico—an event that appears to have profoundly disturbed the cosmic order. The cosmic themes and metaphysical-spiritual dimensions of the series are, however, cinematically expressed in secular and materialist terms: via electronic networks and cryptic underground relations linking the law, the FBI, the criminal underworld, telecommunications networks, and geographical nodal points, as well as wormhole-like temporal portals to alternative dimensions that remain causally connected with our secular materialist world. Together these intertwining secular and metaphysical elements make The Return, as many critics have noted, the most experimental and challenging work in television history (Collins).
The popularly adopted subtitle of the series—The Return—suggests not only a return season of Twin Peaks or a return to Twin Peaks (town and world) with its beloved cast of characters but also more philosophical, mythological, and metaphysical senses of return (Ellis and Theus). These include Freud’s idea of trauma and the return of the repressed, Nietzsche’s [page 294] eternal return of the same as an ethical test, and the Vedic/Hindu idea of reincarnation as the restoration of karmic balance in the perennial cycle of birth, death and rebirth. As Franck Boulègue points out, we can also regard The Return as a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, with Agent Dale Cooper playing the role of Odysseus, fated to return to Ithaca/Twin Peaks and to his Penelope after the trials of the Trojan War. There are further literary references (for example, Kafka, T. S. Eliot, Dante Alighieri) and other textual and cinematic layers woven together, spanning speculative fiction (H. P. Lovecraft), movie genres like the Western, cinematic references (Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage), esoteric literature and theosophy, the Book of Revelations, Vedic and Mesopotamian cosmologies, and religious poetry such as Valmiki’s Hindu epic, Ramayana.
For my purposes, the most significant and suggestive reference point is the work of Franz Kafka, whose portrait appears twice in the series: “once in William Hastings’ home, and once in Gordon Cole’s office, facing his poster of a nuclear mushroom cloud” (Boulègue; also Lončar). Like Kafka’s works, The Return explores the contemporary sense of crisis concerning social institutions and personal morality. It goes on to link this with political upheavals, skepticism towards secular institutions (the law, the FBI, government agencies, scientific inquiry, and political structures), and the combination of ambivalence and skepticism towards prevailing forms of secular morality (exploring the metaphysical question of evil in the modern world). Again, as in Kafka, we find the secular world linked with the metaphysical world, social institutions linked with their social underbelly (the criminal underworld) as well as with the broader cosmic metaphysical background to these social phenomena that also intrudes upon and shapes our modern world (the Black Lodge, The Fireman, tulpas, doppelgängers, and so forth). As remarked, this engagement with the secular world is framed by a Gnostic/Manichean dualism combining syncretic elements adapted from many religious and spiritualist traditions (Hinduism, theosophy, and so on). This [page 295] metaphysical dualism bears on Twin Peak’s diagnosis of the nihilism of modern American society, locating the source of moral decay, evil/negativity, and pervasive disconnection or dehumanization in the simultaneous social/political and metaphysical/cosmic rupture introduced by the unleashing of the destructive power of the atomic bomb. We can add to this the disenchantment of nature, which retains an aspect of sublime mystery and metaphysical resonance in the Twin Peaks universe, and by the alienation, fragmentation, and anomie characteristic of the modern world reflecting deeper sources of violence and negativity. This mythological struggle between good and evil, endemic to humanity but made acute in modernity, pervades social institutions and modern communities and would require metaphysical/messianic intervention for societal and cosmic balance to be restored—which is a fair summary of what transpires in The Return. There are Christological and other religious/theological resonances in the narrative framing of Cooper’s mission to ‘return’ from his exile in the Black Lodge. His task takes on similarly messianic overtones: to redeem the death of Laura Palmer and thereby restore the disturbed cosmic balance that would combat the extreme negativity of the evil force deriving from Jowday/Joudy/Judy but embodied by BOB/Mr. C and other malevolent forces and characters within the Twin Peaks universe. At the same time, The Return explicitly signals the simultaneously metaphysical-cosmic and social-technological dimensions of this force of negativity, presenting its own postsecular origin myth concerning the sources of our contemporary sense of disenchantment, moral corruption, social disintegration, and irrational violence.
Uncanny Secularity in Part 8: “Gotta Light?”
Described as one of the most extraordinary television episodes ever aired, Part 8 of The Return brings together the secular and post-secular elements of the television series—or episodic long-form cinematic feature film—in a surreal and challenging manner (Sanna; McTaggart). The work falls into three main [page 296] sequences: the shooting of Mr C. by his criminal accomplice, Ray, and Mr. C’s subsequent resurrection with the help of the supernatural and earthy figures known as The Woodsmen; the detonating of the first atomic bomb in White Sands, New Mexico, in 1945, rendered in an extraordinary black-and-white experimental sequence during which we see the simultaneous birth of BOB, spewed forth by a disturbing humanoid-alien figure in an ectoplasmic steam; and finally, the arrival of The Woodsmen in the New Mexico desert in 1956, along with the hatching of a bizarre creature that Lynch identifies as a “frog-moth” and the havoc that The Woodsmen cause in the community including one of The Woodsmen breaking into a local radio station and broadcasting an unnerving poem while the insect creature enters the mouth of a sleeping girl. I will consider each part in turn and reflect upon how Lynch weaves together these dimensions in Twin Peaks as an expression of uncanny secularity.
The Shooting of Mr. C and His Resurrection
Mr. C and Ray Monroe (George Griffith) are driving on the highway at night after executing their escape from prison. Ray has memorized some vital information (numbers, co-ordinates) that Mr. C needs but is reluctant to convey anything without payment. Ray pulls over “for a leak;” Mr. C takes his gun out of the glove compartment. After a tense exchange, in which Mr. C demands the information that he is seeking, he shoots at Ray, but the gun fails to fire. Ray laughs and shoots Mr. C twice at close range. What has been a dark noirish crime story then takes on a disturbing supernatural character: dark spectral figures, The Woodsmen, emerge from the forest. They start tending to Mr. C, treating his wounds and performing a bizarre form of psychic surgery on his wounded chest—the figures superimposed on his injured body—while others perform a ritual dance around him, smearing him with blood. Ray is on the ground, yelling in disbelief, unable to make sense of what he is seeing. The soundtrack is muffled and slowed down, intensifying the disturbing and disorienting spectacle. As Ray [page 297] groans in horror, The Woodsmen remove a dark orb with BOB’s face visible within it from Mr. C’s bleeding chest. Ray runs back to car and speeds away. He calls an unknown superior (Phillip Jeffries?) saying that he thinks he killed Cooper but is not sure and that what he just witnessed may be “the key to it all.” The Woodsmen continue dancing around Mr. C, striving to revive him from the dead. We hear electrical flashes, muffled groans, and snatches of strange musical and industrial sounds, followed by darkness. There is a cut to the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, where industrial electro-rock band Nine Inch Nails (deliberately identified as The Nine Inch Nails) perform a menacing version of their song “She’s Gone Away” live on stage. Their performance and the song resonate powerfully in lyrics and mood with the sequence we have witnessed. At the conclusion of the performance, we cut back to the scene of the carnage, where Mr. C, bloodied but alive, wakes up in the darkened forest.
Most striking in this sequence is the contrast between the thoroughly secular crime story and supernaturalist dimension represented by The Woodsmen. They combine a familiar Depression-to-midcentury era worker/hobo/miner appearance with a spectral, ghostly presentation, and their disturbing demeanor combines earthy, bearded physicality with shamanic dance, unnatural physical strength, and supernatural powers of intervention. The intersection of crime drama, horror, and supernatural resurrection offers a clear example of the intertwining of naturalist and supernaturalist, secular and postsecularist dimensions.
The Trinity Atomic Bomb Test and the Birth of BOB
The second sequence is introduced by an intertitle reading “July 16, 1945 / White Sands, New Mexico / 5:29am (MWT)” against a stunning black-and-white image of the Trinity Atomic Bomb Test accompanied by Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” It commences with a high angle long shot, the camera zooming towards the toxic mushroom cloud from above as the screen dissolves into disin-[page 298]tegrative molecular images.6 What follows is a cacophonous stream of images: pulsating energy and light, molecular power, explosive fire, fragmented matter disintegrating, the uncanny primal origin of matter/energy revealed in the cataclysmic explosion. This extraordinary sequence locates, as Monique Rooney remarks, “the 1945 atomic explosion and air-contamination as a creation myth for the toxicity that pervades the entire Twin Peaks narrative and attributing to the testing of the atomic bomb a centrifugal disturbance of planetary-level scale and impact” (145). Moreover, as Donato Totaro observes, critics who have written on Part 8 “have noted how the bomb is both a literal and figurative birthing of the ultimate evil, how the floating image of BOB sprouts from the bomb (and also its antithesis Laura Palmer).” Other scholars, like Joel Bocko, point to what I have called the Gnostic Manichean dimensions of this sequence; the image of the bomb, he remarks, “magnifies this dualistic opposition between man’s inherent goodness and evil to cosmic proportions, staging it as a fundamental struggle between light and dark on a mythic scale.” Matt Zoller Seitz notes the cinematic predecessors of this sequence, observing that Part 8 alludes “to a rich tradition of post-World War II science-fiction cinema in which monsters birthed by atom bomb tests (and other scientific or military experiments that were essentially stand-ins for atom bomb tests) menaced teenagers and their adult guardians in Norman Rockwellian small towns and suburbs.” Lynch gives surreal cinematic expression to what Seitz describes as the “hideous evil unearthed by the bomb” in what follows.
The sequence dissolves into another scene, an abandoned convenience store in the New Mexico desert. We now see black-and-white, fast stop-motion animation of The Woodsmen appearing and disappearing at random, moving in abrupt staccato motions across the front of the store. Mysterious gas or smoke emanates from the door while lights flash erratically within the building. The Woodsmen mill around outside, with jarring, intermittent, scratchy, crackling electrical sounds creating a menacing background. The convenience store remains [page 299] illuminated in lightning flashes, The Woodsmen now visible inside, which creates a disorienting effect of striking visual images accompanied by unearthly disturbing sounds, a nightmarish vision of mid-century desolation, primal electrical disturbance, a simultaneously technological and supernaturalistic disruption of ordinary life.
An unearthly female figure (identified in the credits as “The Experiment” [Erica Eynon]) now appears suspended in the darkness, projecting an ectoplasmic cloud from its mouth in a vaporized, displaced act of giving birth. A dark orb within the mass comes slowly into view with BOB’s maniacal face visible inside. We cut back to the atomic explosion, the camera penetrating to the heart of the elemental flux. Molecular images of golden globules, pulsing light/energy, a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style sequence of space-time/matter distortions, appear in a mesmerising sequence that is both perceptually dazzling and metaphysically illuminating.7
This strange molecular vision of primal energy and vibrant matter gives way to an oneiric, otherworldly image of a vast purple sea. After the chaotic energy of the atomic blast, it appears as though we are now moving through another dimension of reality, possibly the unified field of consciousness that Lynch repeatedly references in his discussions of transcendental meditation, consciousness, and the creative source of ideas for art.8 The camera zooms across the purplish waves towards an island looming in the distance, climbs up the sheer cliffs, where we see a pale building perched atop a rocky crag, white and modernist in design, suggesting a Giorgio de Chirico painting. The camera focuses on a single rectangular window opening in concrete wall and then enters the building as the image fades to blackness. As though we have moved back in time or entered an alternative dimension of reality, we now emerge in a black-and-white room, adorned with antique-looking furniture, and hear music playing on an old phonograph, a mellow, circular, melancholy melody (Lynch and Dean Hurley’s “Slow 30’s Room”). An elegant woman, identified in the credits as Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) and dressed in [page 300] 1920s/30s attire, is seated on a sofa, listening to the phonograph in the surreal-retro room.9 It is clearly pre-WWII, pre-atomic bomb and nuclear age, which seems significant in temporal-historical terms given what has transpired earlier in the episode. The music is interrupted by a harsh sound or alarm ringing from a large bell-like machine placed in the center of the room. The tall figure of The Firemen appears and takes note of the warning sound, looking over to Señorita Dido. He checks the bell, presses a button to turn off the alarm, then leaves the room to enter an empty theater featuring a movie screen, which appears to be a kind of cinematic crystal ball depicting the future.
The Fireman switches on a projector and watches the footage that we have just seen of the atomic blast, looking shocked and concerned. The screen shows the images of the mushroom cloud and disintegrating matter followed by shots of The Woodsmen outside of the desert convenience store. He watches images on screen of The Experiment’s ectoplasmic cloud with the orb revealing the birth of BOB, then freezes the images to focus on BOB’s face. The Fireman then begins to levitate, climbing to a point many meters off the ground, as a golden light emanates from his head. Señorita Dido, now in the room, gazes with amazement at the golden light, which forms a scintillating cloud of particles above him out of which a golden orb is released and descends towards her. She catches the orb and kisses it tenderly, the face of Laura Palmer visible within it. She releases the orb, and it floats up into a tube-like instrument, a cross between a curved metal flute and a fallopian tube. The orb emerges from the tube, enters the movie screen, and approaches a black-and-white image of the Earth that is reminiscent of 1950s alien invasion science-fiction movies.10 Once injected into the screen, like a fertilized egg on its way to a womb, the orb makes its way toward the United States.11 This strange mythological sequence, featuring the reaction of two godlike figures to the atomic blast and the simultaneous birth of an evil force of negativity (BOB), and the subsequent conception and birth of an incarnation of good [page 301] (Laura Palmer), provides a metaphysical/occult background myth to the secular narrative of Twin Peaks.
Arrival of The Woodsmen and the Hatching of the “Frog-Moth”
The third sequence commences with a black-and-white shot accompanied by another intertitle: “1956 / August 5 / New Mexico Desert.” We have now entered the space and time observed by Señorita Dido and The Fireman on the screen in the room above the purple sea. On the desert sand at night, we see a resting egg that begins to hatch; out comes a creature that scuttles away across the rippled ground. The sequence cuts to the convenience store, and we see a teenaged couple walking together. The Trinity Test/birth of BOB sequence that we have just seen stands in stark contrast with this idyllic, romantic scene, the recognizably 1950s innocence of which is shattered by the uncanny arrival of The Woodsmen. What follows the aftermath of the atomic bomb test is the social and cultural effects of the disturbance to the historical fabric of reality that it has wrought. The Woodsmen, dark shadowy figures, suddenly materialize in the desert and torment local passersby with their menacingly gruff demand, “gotta light?”
One of The Woodsmen emerges out of the darkness and approaches a radio studio. The poignant “My Prayer” by the Platters starts suddenly, a diegetic song played by a DJ on a turntable in the studio. A man working on truck, a woman working in an empty diner, and a young girl in her bedroom, are all shown listening to the Platters song on the radio—an expression of the 1950s dreamlike fantasy of love, hope, and community. Entering the radio station and repeating the phrase “gotta light?,” The Woodsman brutally kills the receptionist in her office.12 He then attacks the DJ, clamping his skull with his hand. The record suddenly cuts out, destroying the dreamlike mood; the people whom we have seen listening to the music are disturbed, now in the grip of The Woodsman’s message. He takes over the microphone, reciting a poem in a dark voice: “This is the water/ and this is the well/ Drink full [page 302] and descend/ The horse is the white of the eyes/ and dark within.” As The Woodsman violently grasps the DJ’s skull, we see both the woman working in the diner and the man in the garage immediately collapse after hearing the poem. The “frog-moth” crawls slowly over the sand, approaching a building, which turns out to be the girl’s house. The girl too is disturbed by the poem recited on the radio, but she, unlike the others, does not collapse. She lays down on her bed, facing us and listening, and then falls asleep. The “frog-moth” flies up to her window and enters her room. We see the girl in a mid-close-up, asleep on her bed as the “frog-moth” approaches her face, enters her mouth and disappears down her throat. The Woodsman keeps reciting the poem as he slowly crushes the DJ’s skull. His task complete, he leaves the building and walks slowly into the darkness. This graphic yet oneiric allegorical sequence, both material and metaphysical, powerfully portrays the violent shattering the 1950s dream of American innocence, from the earth-shattering Trinity Test, the subversive undermining of collective consciousness, to the collapse of community in the face of nihilistic violence and despair.
The Lynchian Universe: Uncanny Secularity and Post-Secular Myth
In each of these three sequences, mundane and metaphysical, secular and spiritualist, social-historical and supernaturalistic elements are juxtaposed and synthesized in disturbing and uncanny ways, drawing links between the present and the past, violence and sublimity, elemental atomic energy and surreal oneiric imagery. In the third sequence, this amalgam of secular and post-secular elements is particularly striking: the Trinity test is linked with a nihilistic materialization of evil in the post-war American context. An American gothic horror style expresses a traumatic historical and cultural haunting figured via parasitic bodily infection, inscrutable violence, and demonic possession (Dumas). Mass media vectors (radio), music, and mesmerizing language (poetry) are used to lull, beguile, infect, and mesmerize the population; these various media boost the [page 303] technological spread of the nihilistic moral and cultural malaise that was to become pervasive in the post-war period. The latter is depicted in The Return (as throughout Lynch’s filmography) as a dualistic structured historical-cultural world defined by prosperity and optimism but also by spiritual devastation and moral confusion following the unleashing of a power capable of destroying humanity, one requiring a combined cultural-artistic and mythological-spiritualist response.
The Return offers the lineaments of post-secular eschatological myth that narrates the origins of a technologically mediated rupture that ushers in an age of chaos, violence, and uncertainty. It depicts the emergence of redemptive figures locked in a Manichean struggle with forces of evil or metaphysical negativity unleashed by human disruption of the cosmic as well as mundane order. As ever in Lynch’s work, secular (psychological, materialist, sociological) accounts of evil contrast and combine with non-secular (metaphysical, transcendental, spiritualist/immaterialist) accounts.13 The callous and egoistic evil of, for example, minor new-to-the-series character Richard Horne (Eamon Farren)—whose cruelty and indifference towards others is exemplified in his shocking hit-and-run killing of young boy while on a drug-fuelled rampage—is contrasted with the seemingly motiveless, relentless, impersonal malevolence of Mr. C, whose evil manifests a pure force of negativity, whether construed as desire, will, or violence (as Mr. C says, “I don’t need anything, Ray, I want.”). It is the inadequacy of the former to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of arbitrary malevolent violence that motivates the Lynchian turn to a metaphysical power of negativity: one that shapes and grounds, but also distorts and destroys, subjecttivity and community.
This tension between secular and post-secular evil is both exacerbated and rearticulated in the contemporary world. Lynch and Frost present post-war America as a test case in their simultaneously surreal and psychological, occult and historical, post-secular mythology. The latter provides the mythological and metaphysical story behind Laura Palmer’s murder, [page 304] the appearance of BOB, and the unleashing of evil as the threat of post-war Armageddon. The Return thereby gives expression to a televisual post-secular mythology, an oneiric exploration of uncanny secularity as a way of transfiguring the nihilism of our age.
Notes
This is a shortened and revised version of my chapter, “‘There’s a sort of evil out there’: Uncanny Secularity in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return,” which appeared in Cinema and Secularism, edited by Mark Cauchi (Bloomsbury, 2024, pp. 242-264).
1. As Michael Goddard (see “Telephones, Voice Recorders, Microphones, Phonographs: A Media Archaeology of Sonic Technologies in Twin Peaks.” Senses of Cinema, vol. 79, no. 4, 2016, www.sensesofcinema.com/2016/twin-peaks/sonic-technologies-in-twin-peaks/) and Andrew T. Burt (see “Is It the Wind in the Tall Trees or Just the Distant Buzz of Electricity?: Sound and Electricity as Portent in Twin Peaks’ Season 3.” Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, edited by Antonio Sanna, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 253-268) point out, the role of sound, audioscaping, and music, along with the technological mediation of reality more generally, creating a rich sense of world via mood and atmosphere relevant to the creation and transmission meaning within the Twin Peaks universe.
2. I use the term ‘Twin Peaks universe’ to encompass all three seasons of Twin Peaks and the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) as well as the related paratexts, including Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017) and Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990).
3. See Zachary Sheldon, “The Artistic Evangelism of David Lynch: Transcendental Meditation, World Peace, and Laura Palmer” (Twin Peaks: The Return, special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, no. 15, 2020, nanocrit.com/issues/issue15/The-Artistic-Evangelism-of-David-Lynch-Transcendental-Meditation-World-Peace-and-Laura-Palmer):
Many critics have attached significance to the moral and religious aspects of Lynch’s filmography in a way that ties a pervasive American identity and culture to [page 305] Eastern religious influences. Jeff Johnson, for instance, argues that Lynch “follows an intrinsically American moralistic obsession with the ideas of innate depravity, a Zoroastrian notion of goodness and evil, and the schizophrenic concept of innocence as both an ideal state and a treacherous, ultimately corrupting vice of the wickedly naïve” (3). Johnson ties this Zoroastrian conception of evil to the American national identity (3). Likewise, John Alexander has characterized Lynch’s moral messaging as emerging from the tradition of the American Gothic, even as the nostalgic elements of Lynch’s work—the deceptive 1950s-esque tranquillity of the town of Twin Peaks, for example—evoke a kind of Manichean belief system rolled into the postmodern sentimentality of contemporary American culture (8-13). Similarly, John Carroll sees Lynch’s work as exemplifying “the most fundamental myths of American culture” as interpreted through “the Manichean strain of Christianity” (291, 294).
4. In the credits for Part 1, he is identified as ??????? and only later named as The Fireman.
5. According to Agent Tammy Preston’s entry on Judy:
Joudy, it turns out, is also the name of an ancient entity in Sumerian mythology (This dates back to at least 3000BC). The name was used to describe a species of wandering demon—also generically known as an utukku—that had “escaped from the underworld” and roamed freely throughout the earth, where they feasted on human flesh and, allegedly, ripped the souls from their victims, which provided even more meaningful nourishment. They particularly thrived while feeding—and I quote—"on human suffering.” These beings were said to appear in both male and female forms—“Joudy” indicated the female, and the male was known as “Ba’al”–and, while they were considered beyond dangerous individually, if a male and a female were ever united while on the earth, the ancient texts claimed, their resulting “marriage” would create something far more perilous. As in: the end of the world as we know it. (Frost 121-122)
6. These images recall the disturbing void of non-existence—“In-exist-ent!” as The Arm proclaims—into which Cooper [page 306] falls before materializing in the black box experiment set up on the New York City site that we see in Part 2.
7. Totaro notes the allusions here to the Stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
8. The Twin Peaks Wiki notes that this space is also called The Mauve Zone and could have been inspired by the writings of Kenneth Grant, “the first person to associate Western Occultism/Magick with the alien abduction phenomena and to emphasize the role of Jack Parsons in the history of occultism.” As the entry further explains, Grant described the Mauve Zone “as a self-contained world at the very edge of reality between what human beings can experience and ‘non-existence’” (“Purple”). These descripttions of the blending of material and metaphysical dimensions fit with what we see subsequently in this sequence.
9. Her name suggests the episode from Virgil’s Aeneid concerning the tragic relationship between Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the hero Aeneas.
10. See Totaro for a discussion of the relationship between Part 8 of The Return and 1950s science-fiction alien invasion movies.
11. Boulègue links this image—the orb containing Laura Palmer as “cosmic seed” but also BOB and the “frog-moth” creature that “parasites the girl”—as linked to occult and religious mythological accounts of “the fertilization of an otherworldly embryo” as connected with a messianic return of the gods in times of great evil and discord.
12. The shot where The Woodsmen confronts the receptionist in the studio office is an homage to Edward Hopper’s painting Office at Night (1940).
13. Cf. Agent Tammy Preston’s philosophical “Final Thoughts” in her FBI report to Special Agent Gordon Cole:
Is the evil in us real? Is it an intrinsic part of us, a force outside us, or nothing more than a reflection of the void? How do we hold both fear and wonder in the mind at once? Does staring into this darkness offer up an answer, or resolution? What does it give us to hold on to? Does it reveal anything at all? Or can the simple, impossible act of persisting to look at what’s in front of us finally pierce the blackness and reward us with a glimpse of something eternal beyond? (Frost 143-144) [page 307]
Works Cited
Bocko, Joel. “Secret Histories Return to Twin Peaks.” Offscreen, vol. 21, no. 11-12, 2017, offscreen.com/view/secret-histories-return-to-twin-peaks.
Boulègue, Franck. The Return of Twin Peaks: Squaring the Circle. Intellect Books, 2021.
Collins, Sean T. “Why ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ Was the Most Groundbreaking TV Series Ever.” Rolling Stone, 4 Sept. 2017, www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/why-twin-peaks-the-return-was-the-most-groundbreaking-tv-series-ever-115665/.
Dumas, Raechel. “‘It Is Happening Again’: Traumatic Memory, Affective Renewal, and Deferred Resolution in Twin Peaks: The Return.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 36, no. 4, 2019, pp. 327-343.
Ellis, Matthew, and Tyler Theus. “Is It Happening Again? Twin Peaks and ‘The Return’ of History.’” Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, edited by Antonio Sanna, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 23-36.
Frost, Mark. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. Macmillan, 2017.
King, Rob E. “The Horse Is the White of the Eye: Pioneering and the American Southwest in Twin Peaks.” Twin Peaks: The Return, special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, no. 15, 2020, nanocrit.com/issues/issue15/The-Horse-is-the-White-of-the-Eye-Pioneering-and-the-American-Southwest-in-Twin-Peaks.
Lončar, Karla. “Kafka, Lynch, and Frost: The Trial and Tribulations in Twin Peaks: The Return.” Twin Peaks: The Return, special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online.
Martin, Richard. “David Lynch Sprawls.” Twin Peaks: The Return, special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, no. 15, 2020.
McTaggart, Allister. “‘I am dead yet I live’: Revealing the Enigma of Art in Twin Peaks: The Return.” Twin Peaks: The Return, special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, no. 15, 2020.
“Purple sea.” Twin Peaks Wiki, twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Purple_sea.
Rooney, Monique. “Air-object: On Air Media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017).” New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2018, pp. 123-143.
Sanna, Antonio. “Entering the World of Twin Peaks.” Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, edited by Antonio Sanna, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 3-22. [page 308]
Seitz, Matt Zoller. “The Eighth Episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is Horrifyingly Beautiful.” Vulture, 26 June 2017, www.vulture.com/2017/06/twin-peaks-the-return-part-8-atom-bomb-flashback.html.
Totaro, Donato. “Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8: The Western, Science Fiction, and the Big BOmB.” Offscreen vol. 21, nos. 11-12, 2017, offscreen.com/view/twin-peaks-the-return-part-8-the-western-science-fiction-and-big-bomb.
Robert Sinnerbrink is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking (second edition, Bloomsbury, 2022), Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, 2016), and New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum/ Bloomsbury, 2011). He is also the editor of Emotion, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience: New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives (Berghahn, 2021) and, with Lucy Bolton and David Martin-Jones, of Contemporary Screen Ethics: Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
MLA citation (print):
Sinnerbrink, Robert. "'There's a sort of evil out there': Uncanny Secularity in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 289-308.