Twin Peaks: The Return
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Mulholland Drive Magician Richard Green on Catherine Coulson, The Log Lady
Catherine Coulson gathered her closest family and friends to help her survive her terminal illness just long enough to play the Log Lady on Twin Peaks: The Return, a character she had created decades ago with her lifelong friend, David Lynch. Why? Why must the show go on? What drives us as artists to overcome the obstacles, both real and within our heads, to finish the work? Lynch did seven years of newspaper routes delivering the Wall Street Journal till dawn to buy film to shoot Eraserhead, while Catherine took waitress jobs to feed him and everyone else on the crew. Why? I […]
by Richard Green on May 31, 2018 -
Is Twin Peaks Season Three a Movie or a TV Show? Well…
I’m always up for an endless debate that paralyzes my Twitter feed into repetitive stasis for 12+ hours at a time, and accordingly braced for one last night upon seeing that Twin Peaks: The Return had landed at number two on Sight & Sound‘s annual year-end poll. (Minutes after I published this, it popped up at number one on Cahiers du Cinema‘s list as well.) Pedantic disputes about Category Fraud — i.e., if a performance is lead or supporting for awards purposes — have never been my favorite, and I can’t imagine a topic to get less exercised about than whether a TV […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 5, 2017 -
David Lynch and the Nightmarish Meanings of his Hollywood Star Casting
In episode four of Twin Peaks: The Return, an older gentleman has an obscure conversation with Gordon Cole (David Lynch) as he escorts him to the office of FBI Chief of Staff, Denise Bryson (David Duchovny). Their scene together is short but just by his brief appearance Richard Chamberlain evokes a mass of associations in the viewers who recognizes him, maybe as Cannon Films’ Allen Quartermain, maybe as the ambitious priest with impure thoughts of Rachel Ward in The Thornbirds, or maybe as Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia. An icon of classic television thanks to his performance in the prime-time […]
by Gillian Wallace Horvat on Aug 31, 2017 -
Twin Peaks: The Return: Last Looks Before the End
I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2017 -
Kafka, Renoir and the 99 Percent: Ten Thoughts about Twin Peaks: The Return
“…there would remain the terrified feeling of the return.” — Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond. 1. Whatever else you say about Twin Peaks: The Return, it seems that to talk about it, if you are in good faith, you must begin by talking about the difficulty of talking about it. 2. Twin Peaks: The Return issues some fairly unique challenges to summary or description. It is difficult to describe what is happening in the story, if there truly is a story, if one of its many threads has some kind of priority over the rest. The original series had, […]
by Larry Gross on Aug 7, 2017 -
Watch: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return Comic-Con Message
David Lynch delivers a message to Comic-Con attending fans of Twin Peaks: The Return in the only way we could expect.
by Cliff Benfield on Aug 2, 2017 -
Twin Peaks: The Return: “Something is Missing”
To a generation viewers groomed by two and a half decades of “outside the box” television ranging from X-Files, Northern Exposure, and Six Feet Under to the arabesque mysteries of Lost, Broadchurch, The Killing, True Detective, and Westworld (to name but a few), the hype over Twin Peaks must have always felt overblown. Those of us who lived it the first time around can only say, “Trust us, you had to be there.” Played straight (maybe even a little corny), but with a twist, Twin Peaks captured the American imagination and became the must-watch event of 1990. Simultaneously nostalgic and […]
by Gabriel Wardell on Jul 31, 2017 -
Sharon Van Etten and Katherine Dieckmann on Scoring Strange Weather
In 2015, the year this story begins, Sharon Van Etten had never scored a film. She’d also never heard the name Katherine Dieckmann. Van Etten had just released I Don’t Want to Let You Down, the follow-up EP to her exquisite 2014 album Are We There. Van Etten’s music does things to people, and it did a number on Dieckmann, a former music video director for Aimee Mann, R.E.M., and Wilco. Enchanted by her songs of muted melancholy, Dieckmann became convinced that Van Etten had to score her latest feature, a road movie set in the American South. The two […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jul 25, 2017 -
Twin Peaks: The Return: The Cult of Faith
The original Twin Peaks was some kind of scary dream woven from the psychic residue after a binge of soap operas and donuts. The new episodes are the scary dream after you watch Twin Peaks. I know this because on several occasions during the last quarter century I experienced quite vivid dreams in which I was watching (or inside of) a third season of Twin Peaks, and it always felt pretty remarkably like this new Return does. (I cannot predict what recursive night terrors might follow from these episodes.) But, perhaps because it seems already vetted by my subconscious, I say […]
by Andrew Bujalski on Jul 17, 2017 -
Like Sand Through the Hourglass: Twin Peaks: The Return
In the 1970s, the experimental filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos wrote a piece called “Towards a Complete Order of the Temenos.” In the years that followed, he began to take all of his previously made films and tear them apart frame by frame, taking the pieces and parts — along with newly shot footage and black and white leader — to create what would be his final project, ENIAIOS. The career-spanning contents of the film were combined and alternated to form an epic flicker film encompassing a lifetime of materials and ideas. The project, an 80-hour cycle of films, was completed but not […]
by Gina Telaroli on Jul 14, 2017
