The Unimaginable Emotion in Twin Peaks: The Return
A couple of months back, I finished watching season 3 of Twin Peaks with my girlfriend. I would personally consider this to be the most truly intense and emotive season of any show I’ve ever seen. I don’t believe any show has played with my emotions as much as Twin Peaks: The Return.
So I wanted to highlight my favourite moments from this season, and briefly delve into why they left such a mark on me. Here are twelve scenes that I believe exemplify what Twin Peaks: The Return is all about, and highlight what makes it so special.
[For those who follow me for either blockchain stuff or for philosophy stuff, I can assure you that I have more articles planned. But I wanted to just get this onto virtual paper beforehand because it’s been playing on my mind].
Obviously, huge spoilers throughout this piece.
1. Sarah Palmer watching a violent nature show whilst getting drunk, sitting alone in the same family home.
Sarah Palmer is possibly the most tragic figure in Twin Peaks. Her portrayal of long-term trauma felt really nuanced yet sharp. She has lived in hell for 25 years and it shows. She is decaying throughout the show, and she has clearly been decaying for a very long time. No show has depicted the way trauma haunts us over time as well as this. Some wounds heal, but some wounds just rot.
2. Dougie and his son playing with the lights by clapping to turn them on and off.
it’s really cool that this acts as the “flicking lights” theme in Twin Peaks but it’s being controlled by these two characters. Usually flicking lights happens by forces who we don’t follow so closely on the show (such as Bob or the woodsmen). It felt like Dougie ironically had some agency by doing so, despite barely being lucid.
3. Big Ed staring off at his gas station at night, quietly thinking about his life as the credits roll.
One thing I love about The Return is that it adds a level of seriousness to characters who perhaps didn’t get this type of attention during the original series. This, in and of itself, might be an act of surrealism. When we watch tv shows we are implicitly taught to not take certain characters too seriously. This is especially true in shows that have B and C plots, and shows that have a comedy element. The original Twin Peaks definitely had characters like this. But by giving Ed a real moment of reflection, they add so much to his character. And it feels like mental whiplash.
4. The woman with no eyes trying to guide Cooper while the shot constantly glitches.
This scene really creeped me out and made me feel dread. The fact that the shot kept repeating and reversing added tension in a really creative way, it made time feel claustrophobic. It reminded me of certain psychedelic and dissociative trips where time would skip beats and start repeating– where time got knocked out of linearity.
5. Bob (in the form of a frogmoth) crawls into the girl’s mouth.
Yet another creative way of adding dread. The whole of episode 8 is a masterpiece and despite this episode having at least three crescendo moments (Mr C getting shot, the atomic bomb, and the musical crescendo in My Prayer), this quiet moment that happens as the credits roll feels the most emotive. We know it is deeply important and worrisome, but we do not know for sure why it is so worrisome. It is one of those moments where Twin Peaks crosses over into a traditional horror.
6. Cooper kneeling down with Janey-E and Sunny Jim and hugging them.
It really hammers home that Cooper was there with us all along. Around this point, I believe he says that this family filled him with happiness and wholeness (paraphrase). In the original series, he spoke before about how empty his life had been. Considering the hell that the red room must have been for Cooper, perhaps he needed to be doing nothing with this family for a little while before he could actually spring to action. Nobody who watches The Return for the first time gets excited about seeing Dougie– we all want Cooper. But scenes like this add a real beauty to Dougie, as it makes it abundantly clear that Cooper has always been there in the background, and that everything that happens to Dougie happens to Cooper, too. It is also a reminder that Dougie’s scenes, while sometimes boring or frustrating, offered a lot of the kinder and milder scenes in the entire show. The way people would take care of Dougie, and the happiness he brought people around him, are huge signs that the Twin Peaks universe can be tremendously nice. Those scenes also act as an antidote against the darkness of other moments plastered throughout the show.
7. Diane covering Cooper (?)’s face during sex as My Prayer plays (same song played in episode 8).
Such a haunting sex scene, and I love the idea that she covers his face because he resembles the person who once assaulted her (at least this is how I processed the scene). It is dark and passionless and it sets the tone for the sombre final episode.
8. Audrey running up to the camera asking to leave the Roadhouse, directly facing the camera, and we then see her in an all-white room.
Never do you see such a stark white room in any other part of the Twin Peaks universe. It felt unreal even by this show’s standards. I love how The Return produces scenes that play on the expectations of the original series and use them as a way of expanding and subverting the universe. With so many years between the original run and The Return, Lynch is able to use of our conception of the Twin Peaks space to create images that go starkly against those conceptions. That is not usually possible to do in a show because there is rarely such a huge gap between seasons. It is a great way of using time and ageing to an advantage.
9. The Log Lady’s final phone call.
It brought me to tears and it still does just typing this out. The fact that the actor died days after this scene adds to how visceral this moment felt on the show. Through moments like this, the show reaches beyond fiction and becomes a depiction of the actor’s final moments and thoughts. It truly hurt to hear her say the words “I’m dying”. It still hurts now…
10. Sherif Truman’s hat bounces slightly when Mr C tries to shoot him.
A weirdly funny scene that does a great job of diffusing the tension that comes just before the climax of Cooper and Mr C both returning to Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks has always been a comedy of sorts.
11. The son who gets run over by Richard Horne in the truck.
The mother’s reaction is so sad and haunting, and something about how real her response was compared to the dreamlike atmosphere of the scene itself added so much. The actor who played the mother had only a few words written on her script, it was to produce “a scream that affects the whole world”.
12. Jerry watching Richard Horne get electrocuted to death through the wrong end of the binoculars.
At first, this felt kinda funny, but then it dawned on me that he’s seeing his great-nephew’s death. I’m unsure if he knew what he was watching but it’s still so tragic regardless. Perhaps it is even more tragic if he does not know. Jerry is another character who was rarely given a serious moment in the original run, and so his side-plot in the Return felt like it would be disconnected and inconsistent. And in some ways it was. But for this reason, it felt genuinely shocking to see him within the same radius as Mr. C and Richard Horne. And while he did not do anything in this scene beyond viewing the death, his presence still felt deeply unusual, and acted as a shocking reminder that nobody is safe in The Return.
Final Words
The Return had a way of making emotion feel unimaginably raw and visceral to me. The mix of surrealist storytelling with hyper-real human consequences and reactions had a way of leaving a lasting mark on me. I believe it is a fantastic lesson in using unconventional methods to deliver necessary messages. At its core, Twin Peaks is about trauma, anger, human decency, kindness, impatience, and loss. These are not surreal concepts. But through its surreal delivery, these concepts gain an extra dimension that simply cannot be achieved through conventional narratives.
