Lynch takes the glamorized version of youth (even some of the glamor from his very own ’90s series) often presented on-screen and renders it unrecognizable. Dramatized teenhood usually tries to capture some kind of nostalgia, a longing or a solidarity that can only be seen in the aimless, languid days before an adult sense of reason or accountability sets in. In The Return, that aimlessness gets notched up to a bajillion, to the point that it’s scary.
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When I tell people that I love films and write film criticism, the question I immediately get asked – in almost every situation – is, “So what’s your favorite movie?” After rewatching David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, I’ve decided once and for all that it answers that question. The original series run back in the ’90s was as if you took the traditional schema of sitcoms/soap operas and injected just a little bit of ayahuasca. The Return is as if you took the original ’90s run, placed it in a poorly constructed SpaceX vessel, and that vessel made it far enough into space to come somewhat close to a black hole before disintegrating into hundreds of pieces, those pieces continuing to split and splinter and collide and thrash as the impending event horizon envelops them. Those pieces in the throes of entropy, as well as whatever awaits them beyond the event horizon, are 2017’s Twin Peaks.
The teenage characters in the original series are key to this description. The murder of one, Laura Palmer, is what sets off the events of its entire plot – if you can call it that. These teenage characters possess the impulsiveness, emotional polarity, and counterintuitive action that the awkward stage between adolescence and adulthood often brings. But in Lynchland their clothing is of multiple eras, their eyes a bit too heavy and world-weary behind the manicured facade, their language anachronistic or unnatural for their age (let alone any age), their gait more like that of a calculating showbiz actor than a shambling young adult.
Their posture and communication are, like the antagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’s famous short story (or its cinematic companion Smooth Talk), “simple, lilting … [as if] reciting the words to a song.” Lynchian teens embody cross-generational archetypes of coolness and beauty, the kind that always hinge on danger or absurdity without fully tipping into it. Chain-smoking abounds, leather jackets are commonplace, motorcycles are here to stay, retro diners are the place to hang out, piercingly blue-eyed blondes and smoldering brunettes demand the camera’s attention, guitar strings are strummed.
But there’s also the interdimensional stuff, which is very much there, yet, compared to the 2017 return, incredibly restrained. The original two seasons are tinged with just enough supernatural presence to justify the strange, incongruous behavior of its characters – they are both lovable and beyond human capacity for love. Whereas the third season ushers in a new beast of a teenager, perhaps the most baffling, divisive, and unwelcome additions to the Twin Peaks universe. Caleb Landry Jones is one; he’s a frothing drug addict who can’t keep a job, nor does he seem to have any desire to find one. Amanda Seyfried plays his girlfriend who descends into drug addiction with him, and faces really upsetting abuse in the trenches of his withdrawal-induced rage. Eamon Farren plays a younger member of the Horne family who assaults his own grandmother in front of his incapacitated uncle. This scene in particular answers its own question “Hello Johnny, how are you today?” with startling bluntness: not too great!
These newer characters subvert not just the idealized archetypes of youth that have been established through decades of pop culture, but also the more believably rocky ebbs and flows of most teenager experience. In The Return, evil is everywhere. The highs are scant and the lows omnipresent. The teenager(ish) characters no longer glisten with mystery and attractiveness. The romance has vanished; even Amanda Seyfried, whose character thinks she’s in love, is in fact just in a drug stupor for most of her very little screen time wherein her boyfriend viciously threatens her, cheats on her, and uses her to finance his addiction. Eamon Farren’s character has that same chiseled but world-weary look as some of the teen cast from the original, but his eyes and his movements are deeply unsettling, charged with aggression, and the mystery is all but subtle. He is dangerous, and he proves that immediately.
Lynch takes the glamorized version of youth (even some of the glamor from his very own ’90s series) often presented on-screen and renders it unrecognizable. Dramatized teenhood usually tries to capture some kind of nostalgia, a longing or a solidarity that can only be seen in the aimless, languid days before an adult sense of reason or accountability sets in. In The Return, that aimlessness gets notched up to a bajillion, to the point that it’s scary. Amanda Seyfried takes some angel dust and fixes her glazed-over eyes on the sky, with a smile so unnaturally joyous that it seems to express nothing but deep, dark fear. Eamon Farren hops from one fucked-up vignette to another, from hit-and-running a child to choking his own grandmother.
The solidarity is gone, too; these characters die or suffer alone. They are subjected to unfathomable phenomena, entities so evil and relentless and impermeable that all you can do is watch their fates play out in total astonishment. A one-off character from the notorious Episode 8, a relatively sweet, unassuming teenage girl in a 1950s setting, says goodnight to her crush and soon becomes host to an extradimensional frog-roach hybrid that spawned from a nuclear testing site. It crawls into her mouth, violating her innocence in the most literal sense, while she’s sleeping.
But there’s one more thing that rings a bell. Let’s go back to the Oates short story, where a menacing smooth talker of a man pulls up to a teen girl’s house while she’s home alone one afternoon. He’s dressed youthfully, almost like a greaser, and yet the girl can tell there’s something off, like he’s not comfortably fitting into those clothes, and has an unnerving stiltedness to his movements. He’s more sinister than a supposedly cool teenager. In The Return, these younger characters do not look young; they’re youthful in vibe, I suppose, because they’re actors often cast to play younger than they really are, but their appearances are primarily weathered, tired, violently angry, constantly on the verge of (if not actually) lashing out. They behave more like adults who have seen some shit. Their clothes aren’t really in vogue for their generation – not in the cool, hipster sense but in a head-scratching way.
Whether Lynch intended this or not, The Return’s newest teen characters are a distorted version of teen cinema past. So many ’90s and early-2000s films cast high-schooler roles with actors sometimes a decade or older in age, like a memorable scene with this clearly grown-adult-man bully in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I believed it the first time I saw it because I was young, too young to know the difference, but as I grew up I rewatched and experienced a feeling adjacent to the uncanny valley; this guy is built like a 30-something and is supposed to be playing a high-school bully who’s lusting after girls and getting into fights. It’s a bit creepy when you view it in hindsight with a far more developed, analytical mind.
I’ll return (don’t even dare) to the SpaceX analogy. Those hundreds of pieces of spacecraft shrapnel plummeting toward the black hole’s event horizon: that’s what Lynch does to not just pop cultural iconography but also pop cultural iconography that he himself created, in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. It’s an 18-hour experimental film that, while featuring several moments of genuine poignancy, is mostly one massive send-up of established tropes. One of the most evident being the teenager and its various archetypes in the cultural imagination. These archetypes are still toyed with here, but they’re never even close to seeing the light of day since they’re fastly approaching, if not already past, the event horizon. In fact, they’re less toyed with than beaten, sodomized, and left out in the freezing rain – or they’re the ones doing the sodomizing.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
