Between Two Superimposed Worlds: André Bazin, Spatial (Dis)unity, and the Otherworldly ‘Screens’ of Twin Peaks: The Return

[page 158] Abstract: In this essay, I draw on French film theorist André Bazin’s “The Life and Death of Superimposition” to analyze the different uses of superimposition in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Whereas the technique was formerly used to create the illusion of ghosts or phantoms or to create abstract meaning from the juxtaposition of images, The Return instead subverts both of these typical uses of superimposition. First, rather than merely depicting actors or objects as spectral entities within a given frame, The Return consistently superimposes entire frames of action over a given shot in a way that implies that frame—or ‘screen,’ as I refer to it—exists within the space of action itself. Second, those frame-over-frame superimpositions that do not appear to inhabit the same physical space of the film world upset the characteristics of simultaneous juxtaposition that would usually render them meaningful. Therefore, The Return defies both Bazin’s call for spatial unity and the methods of montage which he criticizes.

Keywords: superimposition, classical film theory, realism, special effects, montage, cinematic space

Post-war French film theorist and critic André Bazin is sometimes understood as a naïve medium essentialist whose strict conception of realism, including his famous emphasis on long takes, wide depth of field, and lack of montage, upholds cinema as a mere reproduction of ordinary reality. Such an interpretation, however, obscures the variety of Bazin’s thought and his many conceptions of what realism is or can be. As a result, a recent trend in film studies has scholars turning back to Bazin to deepen the field’s understanding of his work against the backdrop of his influences in continental philosophy, as well as to understand his insights on ontology, style, and medium within the context of a digital media landscape. One touchstone of this reappraisal has been Bazin’s often overlooked essay “The Life and Death of Superimposition” (1946). [page 159]

The essay on superimposition is naturally of great interest to those reappraising Bazin because it contradicts the limited understanding of him as interested only in depictions of everyday life above the fantastic or supernatural. Bazin analyzes the development of the technique of superimposition, in which one film shot is ‘layered’ over another, appearing transparent. Bazin declares the technique officially ‘dead,’ having been supplanted by newer technologies that better manipulate the illusion of space. A leading scholar in the ongoing reappraisal of Bazin, Daniel Morgan has used Bazin’s insights on the technique to assess whether it may have an “afterlife” by analyzing Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998). Bazin’s essay is mostly concerned with using superimposition to depict ghosts or fantastic realities. Godard’s documentary series, however, uses superimposition to juxtapose sequences from film and other visual arts to comment on the history of cinema. Rather than being used to depict a fantastic entity within the world-space of a narrative film, superimposition lives on, according to Morgan, in the form of “simultaneous, disjunctive montage” within Godard’s series (“Afterlife” 138).

Although Morgan determines that the technique’s afterlife takes place outside of a film’s narrative world-space, it stands to reason that superimposition could in fact have an afterlife within that former usage, while still taking up the terms of Bazin’s critique. That is, superimposition may have a potential afterlife as a tool for integrating entities into the diegetic world of a film, perhaps because of its limitations. It may even do so in a way which integrates the montage-type usage which Morgan describes. The afterlife of superimposition may, in a sense, have an afterlife all its own.

In this essay, I closely analyze this afterlife of superimposition in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). I will discuss how the series’ unique use of the technique both subverts and integrates the uses described by Bazin (placing a spectral or imaginary entity in the diegetic world-space) and Morgan (simultaneous montage). Namely, the idiosyncratic use of superimposition in The Return defamiliarizes [page 160] one’s sense of superimposition itself, but also, and perhaps more importantly, one’s sense of diegetic world-space. I will first elaborate on Bazin’s thoughts about superimposition in relation to his wider concerns about cinematic realism, particularly as it has to do with unity of space within the diegetic world. I will then show how superimposition in The Return subverts traditional uses of the technique and specifically address how the series uses superimposition to intentionally create a sense of spatial and hermeneutic ambiguity. I conclude by discussing how this use of the technique draws us back from the mutually exclusive options of spatial realism or simultaneous montage, opening up new possibilities for superimposition and its relation to the supernatural on film. 

Bazin, Superimposition, and Spatial Unity

Bazin’s essay opens with a striking claim about the relationship between fantasy and reality in cinema—a claim that almost immediately refutes the reductive readings of his work. He writes, “the opposition that some like to see between a cinema inclined toward the almost documentary representation of reality and a cinema inclined . . . toward escape from reality into fantasy and the world of dreams, is essentially forced” (“Life”). Here, Bazin opens up an interpretation of realism which has less to do with the naturalistic quality of what is photographed but is, rather, an inherent quality of cinematic experience as such. The fantastic is only interesting or achievable in cinema, Bazin argues, because of the apparent reality or objectivity of what is depicted in the moving photographic image. Repeating a similar claim made in his essay “Painting and Cinema,” Bazin writes: “To imagine, for example, The Invisible Man as an animated film is to understand immediately that it would lose all interest” (“Life”). It is precisely because the fantastic appears under the guise of “the irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image” that it is at all compelling (“Life”). Of course, depicting the fantastic does not guarantee that it will be compelling, and this is exactly Bazin’s concern with superimposition. [page 161]

From its earliest uses in still photography, superimposition became the preferred form of depicting the supernatural. According to Simone Natale’s “A Short History of Superimposition,” starting in the 1860s, ‘spirit photography’ drew on the medium’s purported ability to capture supernatural beings inaccessible to the human eye (126). Though this interpretation of the superimposition effect eventually died off, the technique and convention remained (130-131): the preferred method of analog superimposition is known as ‘double exposure’ or ‘multiple exposure,’ which creates the effect by exposing the same strip of film multiple times, resulting in transparent ‘layers.’ This method found its mature expression in Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921), which made heavy use of double exposure to depict ghostly spirits. According to Casper Tybjerg’s article on the film, these superimpositions “were felt to have achieved a degree of perfection not seen before . . . [and] were completely integrated with the plot” (119).

Although he acknowledges that The Phantom Carriage was innovative for its time, Bazin concludes that the “superimpositions [of Swedish cinema] wouldn’t convince anybody anymore” (“Life”). The reason lies in the way that traditionally superimposed objects fail to fully inhabit the space of the diegesis. The crux of this observation is the 1940 American film Our Town, which features a scene where a woman dreams herself as a ghost visiting her childhood. Unlike the ghosts in The Phantom Carriage, the ghost in Our Town possesses the peculiar quality of being obscured by objects in front of her. With this slight detail—one which traditional superimposition can only imply—Bazin notes that “this strange ghost [is] for the first time behaving like a real ghost—one that is true to itself” (“Life”). In a traditional superimposition, objects cannot occlude a ghost because the two shots are mutually transparent. The ghost in the case of Our Town, because it is obscured by objects in the foreground, is therefore integrated into the space of the film more fully. As Bazin puts it, “there is no reason why a ghost should not occupy an exact place in space, nor why it should blend mindlessly into its surroundings” (“Life”). Placing [page 162] the ghost within the shot in this particular way, rather than over it, unifies the space of the scene. Rather than layering one reality over another, the two realities become integrated.

This spatial unity is a cornerstone of what Morgan has called the “perceptual” or “psychological” aspect of Bazin’s realism (“Rethinking” 456). Following Kant, Bazin describes the experience of space as a fundamental condition not only for cinematic experience, but for experience in general. “Our experience of space,” as he puts it, “is the structural basis of our concept of the universe” (“Theater” 108). This basis in unified space is what allows for a film to become “the Universe, the world, or if you like, Nature” when it is being viewed (109). Likewise, this spatial unity is the basis for why the fantastic, supernatural, or artificial can be compellingly depicted. The measure of ‘success’ to which a film is able to present such a world lies in how it therefore respects the unity of space; the more the unity of space is respected, the more impressive and engaging the effect.1 

It is of little surprise, then, that Morgan locates the afterlife of superimposition in a form of traditional montage rather than diegetic special effects. Though representations of transparent spirits obviously continue throughout the history of cinema, new methods and techniques which more greatly respect the unity of space take the place of superimposition by obscuring such beings with objects in the foreground.2 By weakening the unity of space, superimpositions likewise weaken the unity of the diegesis. They can “only suggest the fantastic in a conventional way,” Bazin writes (“Life”). As a result of convention, “superimposition on the screen signals: ‘Attention: unreal world, imaginary characters,’” rather than evoking a sense of the fantastic (“Life”). Morgan concludes that this break in the diegesis is precisely what makes superimposition a useful tool for juxtaposition in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. It is also what makes it a useful tool for representing the supernatural in The Return. [page 163]

Defamiliarizing Superimposition, Defamiliarizing Space

The Return generally defamiliarizes superimposition by defying the conventions of both the diegetic usage (i.e. double exposure to depict a ghost) and the montage usage (the simultaneous juxtaposition of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema). Specifically, the uses of superimposition discussed in this section exploit those conventions and their perceived strengths and weaknesses toward unique cinematic expression. In this way, The Return’s use of superimposition, as Morgan says of Histoire(s) du cinema, could also be said to “[take] up the terms of Bazin’s criticism while reversing the judgment” (“Afterlife” 138). Not unlike Bazin’s famous observation that photography liberated painting from its need for realistic representation, the death of superimposition liberated it from the constraints of spatial unity. The Return calls attention to the spatial disunity which Bazin observed in superimposition through the insertion of spatially (and temporally) ambiguous entities I refer to as ‘screens.’ To defamiliarize superimposition in this way, therefore, also means to defamiliarize one’s sense of cinematic space.

We get one of our first glimpses of this defamiliarization in Part 3. In this sequence, the evil doppelgänger of series hero FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), known as Mr. C (also MacLachlan), is about to be drawn back into his birthplace, the hellish Black Lodge. Under the trance of the Lodge, he crashes his car in the desert, where the Lodge’s influence is represented by its iconic red curtains, transparently superimposed. According to convention, the supposed point-of-view shot of Mr. C looking out his windshield to see the transparent curtains initially indicates a clear sense of space because it is occluded by the front of the car (see Figure 1); however, the quick reverse shot of Mr. C in the car, nauseated and disoriented as he is drawn by the Lodge’s pull, peculiarly disrupts that unity. In the first shot, the curtains were shown to be a certain distance away from the car. The reverse shot, though it appears to be positioned right behind—if not in front [page 164] of—where the curtains were, shows them in approximately the same dimensions as the previous shot (see Figure 2). According to the established space of the scene, the curtains, as viewed from looking at Mr. C, should be seen in close-up, if at all.

Rather than maintaining a realistic unity of space, the unity is deliberately defied. The curtains, rather than remaining a consistently sized object, even if a ghostly one, are depicted in a spatially ambiguous manner. The result is disorienting, if only briefly. It also raises some concerns regarding the relationship between unity of space and editing.

Bazin was keenly aware of the role that editing plays in maintaining a sense of spatial unity, including how that rela-[page 165]tionship could be maximized for dramatic effect. He writes, in “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” echoing his superimposition essay, that “what is imaginary on the screen must have the spatial density of something real” (48). This is what makes wide shots so important. They can reaffirm the spatial unity of what is depicted and thus increase its perceptual realism. Bazin is particularly troubled by editing that ‘tricks’ the audience by separating the subjects of the scene through montage. For example, Bazin contrasts the seal hunting scene in Nanook of the North (1922), which is able to depict the “hunter, hole, and seal all in the same shot,” with one of an alligator getting hooked on a fishing line in Louisiana Story (1948), which resorts to cutting back and forth between the fisher and the alligator in a rather obvious case of montage (50-51). Whereas the former is “one of the loveliest in all cinema,” the latter “is weak” (51). In Louisiana Story, spatial unity is only implied by the editing, rather than showing the full event. A wide shot, however, can bring everything back together. “To restore reality,” writes Bazin, “it is sufficient if one of the shots, suitably chosen, brings together those elements previously separated off by montage” ( 51).

What is curious about the above-mentioned instance from The Return, as well as several other instances which I will address below, is that editing is deliberately not used to bring back together that which has been separated off, to use Bazin’s terms, at least not in the traditional sense of cutting to a wide shot which shows all the elements together.3 Because there are no wide shots to firmly establish spatial relationships in these instances, we might attribute such deliberate disruption to a ‘mindscreen,’ a formal cinematic expression of the beholding character’s psychological state or experience.4 Especially given the apparent point-of-view structure of Mr. C’s encounter with the Black Lodge, one could understand any perceived spatial ambiguity to be the ‘inner’ psychological experience of a supernatural phenomenon rather than the depiction of an ‘external’ supernatural entity within the world-space as such. Superimposition is also, after all, a conventional mode of depicting [page 166] dreams and dream states (“Life”). However, when montage does occasionally ‘reunify’ these spatially muddled sequences, a psychological interpretation of what is being depicted becomes problematized. This is because many screen-wide superimpositions, despite their spatial disunity, are nevertheless indicated to be inhabitants of the space themselves, outside the perceptual purview of the characters’ vision. Two examples from subsequent episodes reveal this unique phenomenon.

In the following episode, Part 4, the shell of Agent Cooper, as Dougie Jones, encounters spirit guide MIKE/Phillip Gerard (Al Strobel), who tries to coax him out of his fugue state. Again, a point-of-view structure is utilized—as well as altered dimensions. Rather than having MIKE and the Lodge appear in a spatially unified way—that is, as a superimposed extension of or addition to the space of the room—he and the background of the Lodge appear over what seems at first to be a point-of-view shot from Cooper looking down at the furniture (see Figure 3). MIKE likewise appears looking upwards at Cooper

from below. The interaction between Cooper, depicted from a slightly profiled low angle, and this ghostly ‘screen’ initially gives the impression of a point-of-view style vision, as if the ghostly view of MIKE in the Lodge were quite literally superimposing itself over Cooper’s field of view. This is ruined when Cooper distractedly turns his body and vision away from the [page 167] corner of the room. Although Cooper’s point-of-view is clearly in an entirely different direction, we cut back to the shot of MIKE and the Lodge against the furniture, unchanged. The superimposition then fades away. Because this ‘vision’ is depicted independently of Cooper’s field of vision, one must presume that what was depicted was actually occurring within the space of the room itself, albeit in a clearly ambiguous and disunified way. Superimposing the entirety of the frame, rather than just a character, would seem to imply a psychological vision. Nevertheless, this otherwise less-than-significant cut suggests the frame may exist within the world-space of the scene itself as a superimposed ‘screen.’

A short sequence from Part 5 bears similar qualities resulting in a superimposed and spatially disunified screen-entity-within-space. In this scene, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) responds to a knock on his hotel room door and is greeted by a vision of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), weeping, from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), cropped and reversed. Unlike the above examples, this shot, although still using the point-of-view, shot-reverse-shot structure, is not superimposed as an entire frame. Rather, it is obscured by the doorframe on the right side of the shot (see Figure 4).5

Additionally, this initial shot is not fully transparent. The center of the frame is completely opaque; only the left side appears to be at all transparent, indicated by the faint corner [page 168] of a wall which is soon revealed to be behind Laura.6 Cutting to Cole’s reaction, however, the vision becomes a transparent superimposition. Furthermore, the image is again reversed, taking up the whole screen, re-cropped and enlarged. These slight details of editing indicate once again that what we’re seeing is an object in space and not a purely psychological vision, since we now see it from behind, just as one might see a

reversed image from behind a projector screen (see Figure 5). Nonetheless, this spatial entity is still disunified with its environment. Like the above example of the curtains from Part 3, the dimensions of the superimposed shot do not match up with its position in the point-of-view. In the initial shot, it appears somewhat lower to the ground, and the reverse shot seems close enough to Cole that the superimposition should be more close up if visible at all. The direction of Cole’s gaze does not seem to match up with Laura’s placement in either shot.7 The result, as with the previous examples, is an impression of a spatially disunified, transparent, screen-like entity.

Of course, some superimpositions in The Return find themselves more along the lines of the simultaneous juxtaposition in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. Usually, rather than placing an entity within the space of the narrative’s world, these kinds of superimpositions take on a rhetorical or symbolic function derived from the possible affinities between [page 169] two simultaneous images. For instance, in Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard juxtaposes a reading of Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage” (1861) with J. M. W. Turner’s painting Burial at Sea (1842) and then with footage from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter, creating a symbolic connection between cinema, painting, and travel (Morgan, “Afterlife” 139). Simultaneous juxtaposition can also be integrated as a narrative device, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), where a long dissolve reveals the identity of the true criminal against the face of the eponymous wrong man, Manny (Henry Fonda), who has been wrongfully accused (Morgan, “Afterlife” 137). In both of these symbolic and narrativized strains, simultaneous juxtaposition takes on a rhetorical, symbolic function which, although open to varying degrees of interpretation, is nonetheless guided by a certain readability. In The Return, however, such montage-based uses of superimposition defy the characteristic queues of meaning-making they are typically afforded, placing it unexpectedly within the same conversation about world-space, diegesis, and the frame. Nowhere is this more readily observable than the most infamous of The Return’s superimpositions.

In the climax of the series, Mr. C and a fully rehabilitated Agent Cooper, with his FBI comrades, converge on the sheriff’s department in Twin Peaks. After defeating Mr. C and the demon who inhabits him, an extreme close-up of Cooper is superimposed on the screen. As the scene plays out in typical Lynchian fashion—grotesque transformations, awkward lines of dialogue, and a touching reunion of the series’ key players—Cooper’s face remains staring, unblinking, with an enigmatic expression, transitioning through various levels of transparency. His face remains so still that it would be easy to mistake the overlay for a photograph rather than a moving image. Yet there are no ready-fashioned symbolic queues. Apart from some compelling, even humorous shots where Cooper’s face is layered over a medium close-up of him in the sheriff’s station, there are no clear affinities nor decipherable compositions. Rather than serving as a readable image like Godard’s juxta-[page 170]positions, the superimposed close-up of Agent Cooper seems to defy any attempt at deriving abstract meaning.

As juxtapositional montage seems to be caving in on itself, the overlay unexpectedly becomes its own site of action; in the deep tone of slow-motion, Cooper utters a phrase familiar to the series and the prequel film: “We live inside a dream.” The underlying layer goes on as normal (or, at least, as normally as it can go for a Lynch work). Here the interpretive floodgates for the superimposition are opened, as it were. Though the scene has opened up its fair share of questions, superimposition aside, the viewer is now given more direction in their line of questioning when it comes to the overlay of Cooper’s face. The search for meaning becomes less imagistic and more diegetic. That is, the hermeneutic focus is shifted from the possible symbolic meanings of two simultaneously juxtaposed images to that of two simultaneous clearings of cinematic world-space, or, rather, two screens. By giving an action to the overlay frame which seems spatially and causally unrelated to that underneath it, the overlay itself becomes its own subject of narrative inquiry—and frustratingly so. The close-up limits any knowledge of where Cooper is in the overlay, and, similarly, its faded transparency makes it hard to make out the details of what we are being shown. Where is Cooper? When is he? What is he looking at which causes him to exclaim the so-called “ancient phrase?”8 The viewer is essentially watching the action of two simultaneous world-spaces unfold, though their relationship is deliberately foggy—a superimposition-induced negotiation between two worlds.

Conclusion: Spatial (Dis)unity and the Cinematic Supernatural

In his article on The Phantom Carriage, Casper Tybjerg suggests that superimposition formed cinema’s response to a question posed by film theorist Tom Gunning: What does a ghost look like (114)? Bazin’s essay on superimposition takes this question further: how can cinema compellingly portray the fantastic or supernatural? His answer is that, in order to be [page 171] captivating, the supernatural must fall within the confines of perceptual—and thus spatial—realism. That is, it must more closely and accurately represent cinema’s original answer to Gunning’s question: the transparent spatially unified phantom. Even though it lacked the effects resources of Our Town, The Phantom Carriage nevertheless attempts occlusion and other techniques to give the illusion of an exact place in space for its ghosts (131, 136-137). When Bazin claims that “there is no reason why a ghost should not occupy an exact place in space, nor why it should blend mindlessly into its surroundings,” he apparently fails to realize that his ideas about the supernatural are already implicitly reinforced by cinema itself (“Life”).

Here, then, we arrive at precisely how, like Histoire(s) du cinema, The Return takes up the terms of Bazin’s criticism of superimposition while reversing the judgment. The series implicitly agrees with Bazin’s claim that “it is the image that can bring us face to face with the unreal, that can introduce the unreal into the world of the visible” (“Life”). It modifies this idea, however, by exploiting the viewer’s assumption that the supernatural would be integrated into the world in a perceptually and spatially unified way. The Return presents an idea of cinema where the ‘realism’ of the depicted supernatural event is denoted not by adhering to the rules of natural perception (i.e., that a transparent object would be occluded by objects in front of it and maintain an exact and constant place in space) but by its unnatural intrusion into the world. Should the supernatural, as such, really adhere to the laws of physics and perception to such a degree? Should not the otherworldly perhaps intrude on the most everyday assumptions of our perception and cognition? The turn towards an obsolete special effect, then, is perfect for such an idea of cinema, one which brings the viewer face to face with the fantastic by integrating it into the world in the film unnaturally and unnervingly rather than ‘realistically.’ Likewise, this profound break in the diegetic world speaks to The Return’s theme of humankind’s often overconfident yet tenuous and mystifying relationship to [page 172] both the natural and the supernatural worlds. The cinematically reinforced idea of a ghost as a transparent spatially-unified phantom comes to represent a limiting of the supernatural to the realm of the comprehensible. The use of traditional superimposition to render the supernatural spatially and interpretively ambiguous thus restores a grand sense of mystery to the world beyond our own (“Life”). The Return commits to the proposition that the supernatural as such must always be beyond our grasp and control, no matter how comprehensible and controllable we may desire our world to be.

By exploiting the inherent spatial disunity of the technique, the superimpositions of The Return eschew ready interpretation in favor of a profound ambiguity of both the symbolic juxtaposition of images and the diegesis. The result is a new sort of openness for the technique beyond both its first life and its afterlife. Superimposition becomes neither an outdated convention for depicting ghosts nor simultaneous montage, but the site of many different kinds of interpretations. Some viewers of the series, for instance, have found in it evidence for parallel dimensions in the Twin Peaks universe (Daniel 67-70). Others have understood it as indicating that the series itself perhaps takes place in a single moment (Lash 12). In any case, such analyses represent the vast ambiguity at the heart of The Return’s superimpositions. Beyond the binary opposition of diegetic ghosts or dreams and a form of simultaneous montage, they therefore exhibit a new afterlife for superimposition.

Notes

1. This is why Bazin does not oppose, as some have held, montage. It is not montage in general which Bazin is critical of, but uses of montage which attempt to circumvent preserving the spatial unity of the diegesis. Such uses of montage fail to locate what Bazin considers one of the most fundamental appeals of the cinematographic image. The dramatic and psychological potential of cinema is undermined in favor of unambiguous and highly readable series of images. However, montage, whether ‘internal’ (such as the matting and compositing of Citizen Kane’s [page 173] deep focus shots) or ‘external’ (traditional cutting from one shot to another in time) can very well be used in the service of reality.

2. Bazin refers to the process used in Our Town as “dunning,” erroneously referring to the Dunning–Pomeroy Process, developed in 1927 by C. Dodge Dunning, was used to composite background and foreground images through colored lighting and dyed bipack film (Tybjerg 131). Interviews with the filmmakers indicate that the process used to create the effects in Our Town was likely not the Dunning process but a modification of the traveling matte process, which utilizes an optical printer (133).

3. It is also worth noting that Bazin writes, “a director is not allowed to dodge the difficulty of showing two simultaneous aspects of an action by simply using shot-and-reverse-shot” (“Virtues” 48). This is exactly what Lynch has done in the aforementioned scene. Not only are the spatial dimensions of the curtains intentionally made unclear, but in both the shot and its reverse, they are shown materializing out of thin air, perhaps indicating a simultaneity.

4. See Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Dalkey Archive Press, 2006).

5. The left side of the image features an inexplicable yellow pillar that at first appears to be part of the wall, cutting off the rest of the shot of Laura. This pillar disappears with the rest of the vision and does not appear to be obscuring anything, nor is it part of the original shot from Fire Walk with Me.

6. When the vision fades, Special Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) is revealed to be behind it, apparently the original caller at the door. He curiously glances behind him to see what Cole is looking at.

7. Also like the curtains sequence from Part 3, the vision disappears in both the point-of-view shot and its reverse, indicating an imprecise simultaneity. The time of the shot is also disjointed, with each cut featuring a different bit of the original shot, starting at different points.

8. Though the phrase was first spoken by Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) in Fire Walk with Me, in The Return it is mentioned in Part 14, when Gordon Cole recounts a dream he had featuring actress Monica Bellucci. In the dream, she recounts to him what he calls the “ancient phrase”: “We [page 174] are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream. But, who is the dreamer?”

Works Cited

Bazin, André. “The Life and Death of Superimposition.” Translated by Bert Cardullo. Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 2002, www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/film.2002.0001.

---. “Theater and Cinema.” What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, U of California P, 1967, pp. 76-124.

---. “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.” What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, U of California P, 1967, pp. 41-53.

Daniel, Adam. “Under the Skin of the World: The Multiversal Spaces of Twin Peaks.” Supernatural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2019, pp. 49-72, www.supernaturalstudies.com/previous-journal-issues/vol-5-issue-2/Daniel.

Lash, Dominic. “The Dangers of Getting What You Asked For: Double Time in Twin Peaks: The Return.” Open Screens, vol. 3, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-26, doi:10.16995/os.21.

Morgan, Daniel. “The Afterlife of Superimposition.” Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, edited by Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 127-141.

---.  “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 3, 2006, pp. 443-481, doi:10.1086/505375.

Natale, Simone. “A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema.” Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 2012, pp. 125-145, doi:10.1080/17460654.2012.664745.

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.

Tybjerg, Casper. “Seeing Through Spirits: Superimposition, Cognition, and The Phantom Carriage.” Film History, vol. 28, no. 2, 2016, pp. 114-141, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.28.2.05.

Garrett Strpko is a graduate student in Communication Arts (Film) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His primary areas of interest lie in film and media theory and philosophy, [page 175] ranging from film phenomenology to postwar American cinema and video game studies. His current research focuses on how presentations of history in different media situate the spectator’s relationship with the past.

MLA citation (print):

Strpko, Garrett. "Between Two Superimposed Worlds: André Bazin, Spatial (Dis)unity, and the Otherworldly 'Screens' of Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 158-175.