What year is it?
Twin Peaks: The Return, is over.
A show I never thought I’d get to see ran for 18 episodes, and as part of his deal, David Lynch demanded no interference from the network and got it. The first episode drew around 300,000 viewers when it aired, but Showtime stated that it was viewed over two million times on various platforms, and had a huge jump in their subscription service. Lynch himself said to watch it like an 18 hour movie, and while I didn’t do that, I did do a few binges and liked it much better that way that watching an hour a week.
It was confounding, vague, impressionistic, weird, funny, goofy, horrifying and in some scenes, the darkest and most disturbing thing I have ever seen.
It was exactly what I needed without knowing it was what I wanted.
AND I am not going to get all snobby about it and say “You didn’t understand it” in a snide, condescending tone. It was not meant to be easily understood, challenged the viewer and made no apologies about that. You bought in and decided to play in Lynch and Mark Frost’s nightmare or didn’t. It wasn’t weird for weirdness’s sake, it was how David Lynch tells a story now. Dreamlike, without answers and leaving much of the connective tissue up to you to put it together.
One of the great things about the series is that I have read multiple summations of the last episode. They all have very different interpretations of the ending, and, in my mind, they are all correct. It was a sad ending. It was a terrifying ending. It was a satisfying ending. It left a huge cliffhanger. It wrapped everything up.
Every one of those observations is valid. I have my own interpretation, but think about it: What was the last piece of mainstream entertainment that allowed for ambiguity? Where everything wasn’t tied up, explained and given to the audience prepackaged and easily summarized for Wikipedia?
If there is only the book in October and then Twin Peaks goes away forever, I am fine with that. If Lynch and Frost revisit that world, I am fine with that too. In a time of Tentpoles instead of movies, I like that there are still people out there exploring how to tell a story and being afraid to make the audience work.
