Twin Peaks: The Return

I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return, perhaps David Lynch’s most unfiltered vision, upped the ante on that amazement considerably, even in the streaming age of pricey prestige dramas. Has there ever been a creative work this vast and this weird with a production budget this big? Whatever you think of Lynch’s work, you have to admire his ability to carve out the unorthodox career he did. Dude got paid to manifest his most impenetrable nightmares. How he got so many people, including me, to come along for the ride is something I don’t pretend to understand; indeed, my main takeaway is that his work highlights just how overrated understanding can be. People who lament the characteristic absence of rational resolution in the sprawling 18-hour return to Twin Peaks miss the point, to the extent that a dream can be said to have a point. What makes Lynch’s oblique dreams compelling enough to be broadcast on ABC and Showtime? I don’t really understand that either, but he and co-creator Mark Frost certainly have a knack for memorable characters, and you can’t ask for a more charismatic guide to a cryptic milieu than Special Agent Dale Cooper. I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.

As part of a Lynch retrospective organized after his passing this year, the Philadelphia Film Society presented the entirety of the 2017 Twin Peaks across three days of long-ass screenings, and if I didn’t have schedule conflicts and hadn’t already worked my way through most of the series in the two months prior, I think that would have been my preferred way to see it.