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 upped the ante on that amazement considerably, even in the streaming age of pricey prestige dramas. Has there ever been a creative work this big and this weird with a production budget this high? Whatever you think of David Lynch’s work (I think it’s all a great gift, even the stuff I don’t really connect with), you have to admire his ability to carve out the unorthodox career he did. Dude got paid to manifest his most impenetrable nightmares. I don’t pretend to understand how or why he got so many people, including me, to come along for the ride; my main takeaway from his work is that it highlights just how overrated understanding can be. This sprawling, 18-hour return to Twin Peaks is perhaps his most unfiltered vision, and people who lament its characteristic absence of rational resolution 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 know 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.