The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch, with Mark Frost · one work in three parts · the series, 1990 to 1991 · Fire Walk with Me, 1992 · The Return, 2017 · about 45 hours
Mode
Mystery serial, soap, procedural and horror in one work; a television series, a feature film and a revival made as one cycle
Mythos
The murdered girl on whom a town lives; the Lodge as an underworld with its own law; the knight defeated by his double; a cosmogony in 1945; Orpheus, who goes back for the dead and loses her
Phase
A girl’s death and the town she leaves; her life before it, seen from inside; then twenty-five years, and a return that cannot find the year
Presentation
Thirty episodes for ABC, 1990 to 1991; a feature film, 1992, about 134 minutes; eighteen parts for Showtime, 2017; about 45 hours in all; music by Angelo Badalamenti
Register
From coffee, pie and a comic romance at the sheriff’s station to the Pink Room’s strobe and the atomic cloud; the corny never far from the terrible
Scale
One town and its houses, a lodge beneath it, and at the last the country at large, from 1945 to 2017
Governing Proposition
A girl is found dead on a shore, wrapped in plastic, and the town that lives on her death is opened house by house until the killer is found in her own home; a film then shows her last week from inside, and a return made twenty-six years later goes back for her and cannot bring her out. The wager of the work is that innocence and horror are one surface and what lies under it, and that a serial, a film and a revival, held as one work, can show the same evil from above, from beneath and from a distance of twenty-five years.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Pete Martell finds the body on the shore and telephones: “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” The dead girl is Laura Palmer, and the pilot follows the news of her through the town. At the school a desk stands empty, and a girl screams across the quad. Cooper, an agent of the FBI played by Kyle MacLachlan, arrives to investigate, and the town opens to him house by house: the Palmers, the Haywards, the Hornes, the mill, and One Eyed Jacks, the brothel across the border. Every strand, the coffee and the pie included, feeds one question, who killed her.
Twin Peaks was created by Mark Frost and David Lynch and broadcast by ABC from 8 April 1990 to 10 June 1991: thirty episodes in two seasons, a pilot and seven episodes, then twenty-two opening with a premiere of feature length. Lynch directed six of them, the pilot, episode 2, the second season’s premiere and the episode after it, episode 14 and the finale. The rest were directed by others under Frost and Lynch, among them Tim Hunter, Lesli Linka Glatter and Diane Keaton, and they belong to the work as fully as his. Angelo Badalamenti wrote the score; the songs, by Badalamenti and Lynch, are sung by Julee Cruise.
The town is played as a continuing soap, and has a soap of its own, Invitation to Love, on its television sets. Under it the truth is deferred week after week, and the delays of the serial are the town’s own: it would rather wait than look. In episode 2 Cooper dreams the Red Room. An older Cooper sits in it, a small man dances, the speech runs backward, and Laura whispers the name.
Movement II
The answer comes in episode 14, broadcast in November 1990, about a third of the way through the original run. In the Roadhouse Julee Cruise is singing, and the Giant appears on the stage to Cooper and says: “It is happening again.” Against it the episode cuts to the Palmer house, where Leland, Laura’s father, seen in the mirror as BOB, kills Maddy. Two episodes later Leland is dead.
What the question has hidden is now in the open: a daughter abused and killed by her father, inside a family and a town that preferred an evil from outside to the one in the house. BOB is both at once, the work’s cosmology and the family’s evasion, and neither reading is allowed to cancel the other. Ray Wise carries the whole of it in one face, from a father’s grief to something monstrous.
Then the work idles. After Leland’s death come Ben Horne’s Civil War delusion, James Hurley’s interlude with Evelyn Marsh, Nadine’s strength and her return to school, Little Nicky and Dick Tremayne, and a lore of the White Lodge and of Windom Earle. The finale, episode 29, which Lynch directed, returns to the Red Room. Cooper enters the Lodge, is met by his own double and defeated by it. Laura has told him there: “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”
Movement III
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me followed in 1992, directed by Lynch from a screenplay written with Robert Engels and photographed by Ron Garcia, and premiered in competition at Cannes in May. The work is its theatrical cut, about 134 minutes; the deleted scenes later assembled as The Missing Pieces stand outside it. It opens with a prologue on Teresa Banks, which plants the ring and the logic of the doubles.
Then it goes back to Laura alive and shows from inside what the series made a mystery. The comedy and the charm of the town are gone. The homecoming queen’s double life is seen without them, and Sheryl Lee’s Laura is terror lived from within: the ceiling fan turning at the top of the stairs, the father across the dinner table, the noise and the strobe of the Pink Room.
It ends in the train car, and then in the Red Room, where Laura sees her angel. The serial deferred the truth; the feature puts the viewer inside it, and changes the town into one girl. Made after the series, the film reaches beneath its beginning, to before the body is found, and brings the work’s centre to the victim.
Movement IV
Twin Peaks: The Return was broadcast by Showtime in eighteen parts from 21 May to 3 September 2017, all directed by Lynch, written by Lynch and Frost, and photographed by Peter Deming. Laura’s promise is kept by a revival made twenty-six years after the finale with the same cast, aged. Twenty-five years are on the actors’ faces, and Catherine Coulson’s Log Lady speaks from her own dying.
The return withholds its hero. From Part 3 to Part 15 MacLachlan plays a near-catatonic double, Dougie Jones, and a malign doppelganger; the Cooper of the series does not come back until Part 16. The town is dispersed into Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York and Philadelphia, among insurance, casinos and the drug trade. Much of the duration is sweeping, waiting and slowness, and the time is the subject: whether the past can be returned to.
Part 8 gives an hour to a genesis. It goes to the Trinity test of 1945 and descends into the cloud to Penderecki’s Threnody, and evil is born from the first atomic bomb, BOB among it; Laura is sent into the world as its answer. A Woodsman’s voice comes over the radio: “This is the water, and this is the well.” There is a girl, and an insect. The series’ cosmology is rewritten backward.
Movement V
In Parts 17 and 18 Cooper goes back to lead Laura out of death. He finds her in the woods, holds her hand and leads her. Then she is taken from his hand, and he has lost her. The structure is Orpheus’s, built exactly.
Part 18 moves to a diner in Odessa, Texas, and then to the Palmer house, where another family lives. In the street Cooper asks: “What year is this?” A name is heard from the house, there is a scream, and the lights go out. Whether Cooper has failed, crossed into another world or woken the dreamer is left open.
The two ends of the work are far apart: Lucy and Andy’s comic romance at the sheriff’s station, and BOB born from the atomic cloud. One law runs through both. Innocence and horror are one surface and what lies under it, and the corny is never far from the terrible. The pilot states it, the film shows the same world from underneath, and The Return widens it to the country, and ends at the Palmer house, with a scream.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the whole, and the subtractive test bites hard in places. The pilot and the first season are tight: every strand, the Hornes, the mill, One Eyed Jacks, the Haywards, Cooper’s dream, feeds the question of Laura. The film is close to necessary throughout; its Teresa Banks prologue, the one stretch that might be cut, plants the ring and the logic of the doubles. Most of The Return’s duration is willed: the sweeping, the waiting and Dougie’s slowness are what it is about. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the second season after Leland’s death: Ben Horne’s Civil War delusion, James Hurley’s interlude with Evelyn Marsh, Nadine’s return to school, Little Nicky, Dick Tremayne. Several hours could go without loss, and The Return’s Las Vegas brothers and Roadhouse booths add slack of their own.
Score: 7.3 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: a daughter is abused and killed by her father inside a family and a town that would rather believe in an outside evil than see what is in the house. BOB is both the work’s cosmology and the family’s evasion, and the work keeps both readings open. Fire Walk with Me carries that disclosure through the whole, and gives it through image and sound as fully as through words: Laura’s terror from inside, the ceiling fan, the father at the dinner table. The Return adds a second, almost wholly in image and sound: the past cannot be recovered, and trauma does not stay in its year. What holds it from the top is the share of the whole that renders mood rather than meaning.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The work rises to the top often, in terror and in beauty, and in all three parts. In the series: the Red Room dream of episode 2, its backward speech and dancing; the Giant in the Roadhouse over Julee Cruise while Leland kills Maddy; Cooper in the Lodge in the finale. In the film: the Pink Room’s noise and strobe, and the last scene, Laura in the Red Room seeing her angel. In The Return: Part 8, the descent into the atomic cloud to Penderecki’s Threnody and the Woodsman on the radio; and the last minutes of Part 18, the house, the name, the scream. Badalamenti’s themes carry elevation through weaker hours. Held below the top by frequency over forty-five hours: the second season’s middle is flat for long stretches, and the Las Vegas parts rise seldom.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built here and carries the plot. The murdered girl is a sacrificial figure in structure, not by allusion: her death is what the town lives on, and the film ends with her received by an angel. The Black Lodge is an underworld with its own law, the doubles, the backward speech, the creamed corn as pain and sorrow, and the knight who enters it is defeated by his own double, a doppelganger myth that The Return pays out over eighteen hours. Part 8 is a cosmogony: evil born from the first atomic bomb, and Laura sent into the world as its answer. Parts 17 and 18 build the Orpheus structure exactly. Held short of the top by its edges: the owls, the lore given to Hawk, the White Lodge and Windom Earle are evoked or pulp, not built.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Three turns, each with a stake. The series put an art-cinema method, dream, dread, slow tempo and a cosmology never explained, into American network prime time inside a soap and a procedural, and the network’s audience left during the second season. The film turned against the series: it dropped the comedy and the town’s charm and centred the victim. The Return turned against the revival itself, withholding its hero for fifteen parts, giving an hour to an abstract genesis and refusing the nostalgia it was commissioned on, a departure television had not attempted. Held below the top because the first swerve was prepared: Lynch’s own Blue Velvet (1986) had found the small town’s underside, Peyton Place supplied the frame, and Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) had already brought an auteur’s means to the serial.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. The weekly serial is the instrument of its subject: a town’s surface of coffee, pie and intrigue played as soap, while the truth is deferred beneath it, and the form’s delays are the town’s denial. The film changes the form on purpose, from serial to feature and from the town to Laura, and the change is the knowledge: what the series made a mystery, the film makes an experience. The Return makes elapsed time its material: twenty-five years are on the actors’ faces, and its question, whether the past can be returned to, is put by the form of a revival. Held below the top by the second season’s middle, a container filled to order, and by Return threads that are pause rather than knowledge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over three and a half decades for the founding parts, and The Return reopened all of it. The questions stay open: what the Lodge is and what governs it; whether BOB excuses Leland or names him; who Judy is; what the last scene of Part 18 means, whether Cooper has failed, crossed into another world or woken the dreamer. The film is the clearest evidence of yield: it has been read again and again until it stands at the centre of the work. Formal depth yields too: the doubles and mirrors, the electricity and the numbers, Part 8 rewriting the cosmology backward. Held below the top because part of the return is puzzle-solving rather than depth, the hunt for a key the makers withhold, and The Return’s yield is nine years old, part shown and part forecast.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released from 1990 to 2017, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the series showed American network drama that a serial could carry an auteur’s style, a novelistic town and an unexplained cosmology, and The Return that a series could contain an hour of experimental cinema and a narrative that refuses its audience’s wish. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and direct on television. The X-Files (1993) drew on it openly and cast from it; Northern Exposure and Picket Fences followed its tone; the murdered-girl serial, The Killing in Denmark and America, Top of the Lake, True Detective, is its genre; Riverdale is built on it. Held below the top because the serious American serial owed as much to cable economics and The Sopranos, and the film’s own reach on cinema is narrower.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across the whole. Every part survives whole and as released; restoration for home video is repair, weighed here and nowhere else. Presence is continuous and wide for the founding parts, in rerun, home video, streaming, quotation and parody over thirty-five years, and the revival is itself evidence of it. But survival is demonstrated only on the series and the film, about 61 per cent of the running time, and forecast on The Return, which is nine years old. Weighed by running time, that is what holds the axis here, a little above the weighted figure for the reach of the founding parts’ presence. The surface charge is small and real: the network look of 1990, and the second season’s broad comedy, which has dated where the Lodge scenes have not.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. At its best the making bears weight as fully as any on the desk. The sound, Badalamenti’s synthesiser beds, the hum of lights, the Lodge’s reversed voices, carries meaning the dialogue does not. Sheryl Lee’s Laura in the film is one of the great screen performances of terror; Ray Wise’s Leland moves from grief to monstrousness in one face; Kyle MacLachlan plays three men in The Return, one of them almost without speech. Part 8 is controlled at every frame, and Frost’s plotting of the first season interlocks a large cast without strain. The costs are many hours: the second season’s middle is routine network making, with broad performances and loose plotting; some playing is stiff beyond the deliberate stiffness; The Return’s crude effects sometimes work and sometimes only look cheap.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lucy and Andy’s comic romance, and BOB born from the atomic cloud in Part 8. One law covers them at the work’s best: innocence and horror are not opposites but one surface and what lies under it. The law is stated in the pilot, holds through the film, which shows the same world from underneath, and extends in The Return to the country at large. The range is enormous, and range is what the axis rewards. The breaches are real. The second season’s middle obeys no law but expedience: Little Nicky and the Civil War delusion are not the surface over the horror but filler beside it. The cosmology changes its rules between parts, the White Lodge and Windom Earle against the Fireman and Judy, and the film and the series strain in places.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Many orders are held, and the town holds most of them in one structure. Consciousness: Laura’s interior in the film, Cooper’s dreams and his dissolution in The Return. The family, at the centre: the Palmers, the Haywards and the Hornes, each house with its secret. Labour and money: the Packard mill, Ben Horne’s Ghostwood scheme, the brothel across the border; in The Return, insurance, casinos and the drug trade. The state: the FBI, the military of Major Briggs, the police. History: 1945 and the bomb, and twenty-five years of a cast’s ageing. The sacred and the cosmic: the Lodges, the angel, the Fireman. The natural order: the woods, fire, owls, electricity. Held at its figure because The Return disperses the town into Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York and Philadelphia, and several orders there are present more than held.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, with The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.8. A myth built and load-bearing, from the sacrificial girl and the knight defeated by his double to a cosmogony in 1945 and an Orpheus who loses Laura in the woods; three departures, each with a stake, against network drama, against the series itself and against the revival; a reach that made the murdered-girl serial a genre; heights in all three parts; and questions that thirty-five years have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.3: the first season, the film and most of The Return are required, but hours of the second season after Leland’s death could go without loss, and the work says nothing through them. Above it, The Inner Law at 8.3, where that middle is filler beside the horror rather than surface over it and the cosmology changes its rules between parts, and The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 8.4.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.3, below 7.5; no other axis it covers falls below 8.3. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires, by the Necessity Cap and the Universal Minimum on The Inevitable, and by the Epochal Gate on The Imperishable.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Twin Peaks as one work in three parts: the series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch for ABC, thirty episodes broadcast from 8 April 1990 to 10 June 1991, in the American broadcast cut, the pilot in its broadcast form; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), directed by Lynch and written by Lynch and Robert Engels, in its theatrical cut of about 134 minutes; and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), eighteen parts for Showtime written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch, as broadcast. The episodes directed by others are part of the work, credited or charged to it and never to a named maker. Outside the unit: the closed ending made for the pilot in Europe, as a separate cut; the deleted scenes of the film assembled as The Missing Pieces (2014); and the books, Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) and The Final Dossier (2017) and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), with the other tie-ins. No print, broadcast copy or script was consulted. Running times are approximate, about 45 hours in all. Dialogue is quoted only where it is certain, and briefly. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact timing of each episode, the broadcast ratings beyond the general fall of the second season, the reasons for the timing of the solution, the reception of the film in 1992, the dates of restoration and the production details beyond those given, are not stated.