‘On a surface level Twin Peaks: The Return is the world’s worst-ever TV drama, but when you explore it in some depth, see what its showrunner was really up to, that’s when it gets supernaturally bad.’ So argues nightguard and wrestler Andy Uath, who’s had troubles in his time with bitterness, research chemicals, and the hyperdimensional entities he believes shaped the world and, worse, Twin Peaks: The Return.
In the genre-blurring tradition of Maggie Nelson, Geoff Dyer, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, The Demon Inside David Lynch is a critical novel of verve and urgency about fanaticism, generational hatred, rampant cheesiness, and our post-truth state, whoever’s responsible for it.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. You won’t be surprised to hear this is fiction, satire. So too are the events in this story involving other public figures such as Michael Gove, Ron Jeremy, Damon Lindelof, Morrissey, Martha P. Nochimson and Slavoj Žižek. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
To M. Boulègue and the rest of the Lynch cult, not least Mr Lynch himself: The Demon Inside David Lynch is no more demonic than the series it’s about. You don’t get to air a work that incendiary and have nobody react the way Andy Uath and others do here. The Demonic Twin of Mr Lynch would be disappointed had nobody done so.
And thanks for the good times, which really were something.
FIRE WALK WITH ME (2016-17)
Laura Palmer
Ella-Laura
‘Sort of a Conor McGregor, aren’t you? Or a pale ginger Sergio fackeen Ramos.’
That was the first thing Ella Ospíndola ever said to me offline. As with many Madrid women who know they’re attractive, her voice was deep, almost guttural. There she stood in Atocha station peering up at me with that smile of hers, innocent enough at its centre but at the corners something else.
An okay beginning to our date, then. Or it should have been okay. But the blood in my head was whomping so loud I couldn’t think how to answer her. She hadn’t looked like this on Bumble. Not this, not a Spanish Laura Palmer. The hair was her own, or Spain’s own, this post-windtunnel style plenty of women here go for. But Ella’s blonde, eyes, lips and poise were all Laura Palmer’s.
It was twenty-six years after Laura’s murder in the original run of Twin Peaks, and fifteen months before the show’s third season The Return aired. David Bowie had just died. Donald Trump would assume control of a nuclear arsenal in just under a year but he already controlled the spirit of the time.
‘I wanna cocktail,’ Ella said, still in English.
‘I don’t drink.’
‘Well, how about a drive then?’
A few seconds of dead air till I said, ‘Pastrana.’
‘What is in Pastrana?’
‘There’s a place,’ I said.
‘And does anybody make cocktails in this place?’
‘Unlikely.’
As we reached my shameful Fiat Multipla and drove off, my head replayed this exchange, editing it first in my favour and then so I sounded even dafter, tenser, creepier.
‘Are you fine with your job?’ I asked. Ella did PR for the city’s only organic house night, Strobes + Robes. ‘Happy with it. Your job.’
She crinkled her nose and said, ‘Yes I am fine with my job, Andy. Happy with it. My job.’
Sweat ran down my back. Raindrops meandered down the windscreen.
I searched my whomping head for another question to ask her. ‘Ever thought that we live inside a dream?’
‘Qué?’
‘That we live inside a dream.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Right. Me too.’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
My curling toes rose off the pedals and the pitiful car slowed down and jolted.
We continued on and Ella told me about Strobes + Robes, denying, falsely as it turned out, that any clubbers there wore robes. She’d been studying for almost a decade at Complutense University, and spoke about her thesis on overcoming the pain of breast cancer and chemotherapy with the help of various spiritual tools and research chemicals and ‘ten-dimensional entities from the Dark Matter which makes up 90% of our universe’. It sounded pretty woo, though I liked the confidence it took to talk this way minutes into a first date. But the blood in my head was so loud I hardly took in the details.
‘Could I interest you in some drugs, Andy?’
Hours later we were driving through central Madrid high on her research chemicals. We were agreed on all matters, from the absolute nature of love’s cosmic victory to the miraculous way her MDMA-like 3-FEA combined with her mushrooms-like 4-AcO-MET and LSD-like AL-LAD, to the underappreciated-because-understated charisma of the Multipla, to the miraculous nature of the tiny drug-generated quintessential gods, goddesses and god/desses that every time we moved or spoke came shedding off us. Quintessential beyond quintessential, but they weren’t just clichés, weren’t just archetypes, but actual miniature goddess-Ella-Lauras and god-Andy-Conor-Sergios and god/dess-Ella-Laura-Andy-Conor-Sergios gyrating around us. Which meant that although the goddesses were more monstrously seductive than any pornstar, they were as far from porn as it was possible to get, whole dimensions away from porn. Our dimension’s most beautiful women were mere shadows of these beings, and I was on a druggy first date with them and the Spanish Laura Palmer shedding them.
‘And Twin Peaks and the Twin Peaks film Fire Walk with Me,’ I said. ‘And David Lynch. They’re miraculous as well.’
‘Here is to Twin Peaks and the Twin Peaks film Fire Walk with Me,’ Ella said. ‘And David Lynch.’ She snorted the last of the 3-FEA.
‘David Lynch is my AA and GA higher power.’
‘What is GA, then?’
‘Grapplers Anonymous,’ I said.
‘I see,’ she said, drawing the letters AA in the windscreen’s grime so they formed twin snowcapped mountainpeaks. ‘Will you be grappling me?’
‘You know you look like—’
‘So I have been told. And told.’
‘And Twin Peaks is coming back next year.’
‘Groovy.’
‘I hope so.’
We drove along Velázquez past bars and clubs manky with money and the dirt of trade, then stopped outside the Okka Hotel. Once we’d navigated the revolving door we made our way to a table in the bar, where I asked the waiter to bring Ella a bottle of champagne and me a chorizo bocadillo.
When the champagne and sandwich arrived Ella-Laura applauded and the waiter drew the cork and filled her flute. Ella-Laura and the gyrating goddesses and god/desses raised their flutes and said, ‘Here is to the recovering alcoholic and wrestler Andy Uath and the little gods sharing his bocadillo.’
We lifted our sandwich in salute and answered, ‘And to the drug addict Ella Ospíndola and her monstrously seductive little friends.’
Time passed. The champagne bottle emptied. Guests and staff tried not to stare at Ella.
‘Rude, is it not?’ I said. ‘They’re leering at you but not your monstrously seductive little friends.’
‘Oh sí, Andy Uath. The leering is just not evenly distributed, is it?’
We chatted about the Satanic nature of table-service nightclubs, then the kind of sex we liked. It was now nearly midnight and we agreed we’d had a special time of it. The world was whirring.
‘Infuckingseparable,’ I said. ‘Andy and Ella and their god and goddess and god-slash-dess friends.’
‘Infackeenseparable,’ Ella answered. ‘EllaanAndyantheirgoddessngodngodslashdessfriends.’
Then we were on the Parantine Hotel’s deserted roof terrace. She had a new glass of champagne and a lit Fortuna, and her Laura Palmer figure was bent over a turret wall.
Far below us moonlight flowed through alleyways, a cool reflection painted on the dark. You could hear a faint echo dirl below the city’s traffic and nighttime chatter, barely an echo refracted from the skies’ crystal, some kind of warning dropped down to Madrid, to this terrace, from the night’s moon-soaked dome above. I was very high.
That dome was just enormous. Constellations blinked down their uncrackable codes, stars rose like champagne bubbles. I felt myself float high above Ella and travelled inside those heaps of stars, gliding along the sandbanks of the Milky Way. From tonight the stars might feature a brand new formation, the zodiac’s latest sign: The No Longer Boozing or Wrestling Nightguard.
Ella floated up to join me. Past my shoulder flew her cigarette. Her voice fell low and sank into her chest: ‘I should maybe have put this on my Bumble profile.’
She slapped my face hard, tiny goddesses and god/desses spraying away from it with gleaming eyes.
Grinding her teeth as her breasts brushed my chest, her face seemed to recede as her pupils widened. She leaned her head left and right with that smile of hers and tried to catch my reaction to her slap and post-mastectomy fake left breast. There she waited in my hold with the stars and little deities reflected in her expanded pupils.
She ran fingers over the scars across my backside and thighs, slid down her knickers and kicked them off all the way down to the terrace.
I squinted and unsquinted at this Laura lookalike, revival, remix, saw her blur and sharpen, shrink off among the galaxies then loom towards me again as both a supernova and a black hole.
Laura and Leland Palmer in Fire Walk with Me
Juegos Sexuales
When I was twelve I was coached in sexual wrestling. Which girls got really into, said my seventeen-year-old brother Dougal, who’d escaped being tortured and raped by Maddy and Demmy and Suds by toughening up at the local wrestling club and had encouraged me to do the same.
It had been one of the prides of Dougal’s life that he’d already initiated a number of girls into the sophistication of wrestling-inspired bedroom activity. These sessions with sexualised grips, throws, and cries of ‘Submit!’ etc., he advised in Buckie, Moray, Scotland in 1992, should mean your girlfriends never grew bored of you. Himself, he could take or leave the grappling stuff. He did it for the girls’ sake. The truth was he liked a bit of tenderness.
‘And you do it so you dinna get dumped,’ I said.
‘That I do, Tits. And if you dinna get dumped you can be around when they need you.’
‘A different sort of tenderness.’
‘But not so they notice it. Not so they think you’re tender. Trust me, boyo, the day you get dumped for being too tender you’ll start grappling them about the place.’
‘Why wait for that?’
He held up his beercan for me to clink with mine. ‘Baby,’ he said in the voice of Blue Velvet’s headcase Frank Booth, ‘wants to fuck.’
When gone on mushrooms or cheap lager of the kind Frank Booth drank, Dougal sometimes pretended he was Frank or Twin Peaks’ headcase Leland Palmer. This mainly involved wearing a leather jacket like Frank’s or a cardigan like Leland’s, huffing gas from an imaginary canister or shining an imaginary torch in your face, using Frank’s designation Tits, saying Leland’s line Are you hungry?, or the expressions Baby wants to fuck or Fire walk with me.
It was awkward to watch this in the same way it would later be awkward to see friends wear striped jumpers and inject heroin because Rents does so in Trainspotting, which meant that when he acted up this way I tended to avoid eye-contact. But for better or worse, throughout the ‘90s variations on this persona would draw to him funny, smart girls and women with certain inclinations and apparently keep them keen.
And a factor in this, he maintained, was surprising numbers of Scottish girls and women deciding that decade to wear microskirts, high heels, fake eyelashes and fingernails, heavy make-up and fake tan, hair extensions, to get boob jobs and bleach their teeth disturbingly white, and it suddenly becoming easier, as he put it, to get girls and women to go along with less lovey-dovey sex.
Partly a David Lynch effect, he believed, which I now agree with, but also a widespread pre-millennial sense of culturally exhausted, jaded surrender to Total Capitalism. The first encroachments of internet porn’s dead-eyed mindlessness and sociopathy, Loaded magazine, ladettes, Wonderbra ads everywhere, Trainspotting and ‘The truth is that I’m a bad person’, kitsch YBAs, a shift from soul-sister freaky MDMA dances in dungarees and no makeup in warehouses to faux-ditzy coked poses in fluffy bras and microshorts in soulless table-service hellholes, Lost Highway, a pervasive air of hungover lowest-common-denominator defeat that English brainiac Mark Fisher labelled capitalist realism, the surrender to Total Capitalism no matter what, all of which will matter for what follows due to the resulting sense of if you can’t beat them join them, which then became the air everybody breathed (or nearly everybody), an acquiescence that then made other escapes and spine-straightenings feel unlikely if not impossible.
It matters too for what follows that Ella and me weren’t easily shocked or offended when it came to sexual aggression, risky dark games, close to the bone humour, or much else. Neither of us was a princess/pea type on the lookout for things to find offensive. After all, we were both fans of David Lynch.
‘Like Lynch himself,’ Dougal told me, ‘it maybe didna do any of us any good in the long run. But it had become much easier to play the heel and bring your girl along with you.’
I couldn’t really judge the truth of this because I started sleeping with girls in 1994 when that zeitgeist was already here. But it was possibly a factor when Dougal’s quiet younger brother moved down to Glasgow and heeded the rest of his romantic advice and occasionally found it worked.
A woman who slapped your face to communicate her inclinations was probably always going to respond well to Dougal’s approach, though at times I was hesitant about charging in with the grips and throws, truth be told, because they felt a bit too close to grappling relapses (I never told my GA sponsor Les I wrestled Ella, or that I took her drugs). It’s not easy to accept this, but it’s possible this whole Lynch story and therefore what happened with Ella would have taken a different course if we never wrestled.
Her thing was sexual roleplay, a leaning that was due, she lied, to the times she’d inhabited hyperdimensional entities in Dark Matter, i.e. lived within their dumpy bodies and experienced everything in 10D while she tripped on the heaviest of all research chemicals Tsarbomba AKA 8-BOM-DMT (she stayed in bed for days after these trips, just peering into space, so I promised myself I’d avoid that drug).
But we didn’t use the word roleplay. When we wrestled we had to be her suggestions: Lana Del Rey versus Conor McGregor, ETA terrorist versus Francoist captor, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey versus Javier Bardem, Silvia Perez Cruz versus The Night of the Hunter’s Harry Powell, and almost too good to be true, Lynch’s Wild at Heart’s Lula versus Sailor from the same film, Dorothy Vallens from Blue Velvet versus Frank Booth, Laura Palmer versus Ben Horne, Dr Jacoby, James Hurley, Bobby Briggs, Harold Smith, or random truckers from Twin Peaks. Ella’s other favourite roles:
>>Nada, nothing.
With this one I had to call her Nada, a void. This role had its source in her Advaita Vedanta tenet that she didn’t actually exist, because the self is illusory. When she learned a Scottish way to say nada was hee-haw she told me to use that too. It feels quite odd to grip a woman you love and tell her she’s Nada and Hee-haw.
>>She owned a ridiculously expensive, ridiculously proportioned yet otherwise highly realistic sexdoll that joined us for three-way bouts, a doll designed by someone with a serious knack for shaping thermoplastic elastomer bodies that make you climax shamefully fast. (As you’ll see, it’s now hard not to view our relationship to this doll, which Ella had named Chica, as similar to the one the 10D entities have with humans).
Another of Ella’s favourites was therefore when a younger Ella as played by Chica joined me for a bout in which I grappled her until the real Ella ventriloquised her shouting out ‘Submit!’ and admitting that she didn’t exist.
>>A singer-songwriter named Dotty whose music Frank Booth despised.
In this scenario I had to grapple Dotty into calling out ‘Submit!’ and giving up her musical vocation. We might hire one of Montera’s hookers to play a rival singer-songwriter, and hand Chica a cardboard guitar, two or three of us now grappling each musician into jacking in her budding career. As time went on, Ella got carried away and started throwing with a ferocity that became too unpleasant for everyone’s tastes. The issue, I later discovered, was that when it came to singer-songwriters she was heavily conflicted.
From then onwards we played it safe and stuck to the classics already mentioned, plus Laura Palmer versus Mark Fisher, Laura Palmer versus an even dirtier-playing Sergio Ramos, Laura Palmer versus Keanu Reeves’ evil doppelganger, Laura Palmer versus anyone she wanted, living, dead or imaginary. She knew her Laura looks were a big part of the attraction for me and as long as I played Keanu and the like, she didn’t seem to care.
It has to be said, mind you, that the first time she did herself up in Laura’s schoolgirl gear, I froze in my role as a wrestling Harry Powell and instead of a macho maniac sermonising on the eternal battle between good and evil, all she got was a shaky mess who dried on his lines.
But our least successful bout was when we tried out Laura Palmer versus David Lynch. Our night out was fine, especially when our 3-FEA kicked in and my nasal Lynch accent flowed more naturally as we discussed potential Lynchian grips and throws. But when we got back to my flat the night became less fine. My discomfort months later over Lynch’s boast in The Return’s finale that he’s ‘not soft where it counts’ was surely not unconnected to this flop.
Ella was her usual loving self, of course, and informed her boyfriend with hair quiffed for the night how much Laura loved David’s penis regardless of its fackeen state, then delivered a poker-faced talk on the aesthetic and even the spiritual appeal of David’s current state of wrestling-readiness, and warned him not to forget the core truth of Eastern philosophy, that while that state was real (all too real), the person, the ‘David Lynch’, apparently attached to it certainly wasn’t, was in fact a concept only. Which did the trick and snapped me out of my self-consciousness and therefore my embarrassment, so I was able to successfully grapple with Ella-Laura as Andy Uath.
I can only assume that some kind of mystical link, some form of anti-Sex Magick, was established that night between me and my Lynchian hair and clothes and, even though no one knew about it at the time, Mr Lynch’s impotence inside his own body.
Ella was far more cultured than me, and would go straight from my flat to see her cancer doctor in whatever Felliniesque outfit she’d worn the night before and send me opera recommendations from the waiting room. She was delicate when it came to my childhood and scars and occasional lows due to them, so bighearted she was cherished by pretty much everyone who knew her, and she understood that what happened in the bedroom had little relevance to how we were outside it. I didn’t surprise her with grips and throws in parks, cinemas, clubs, restaurants or theatres. In those situations I was reasonably civilised, as I just wasn’t the type to grapple with my girlfriend in public. It would have felt wrong somehow.
GA/AA-style real equality, fellowship, democracy was in fact possible in a romantic relationship, I was learning, at least if you’re fortunate enough to meet someone like Ella, a woman so comfortable and centred in her love that it kills the self-worth worries that breed all status fears.
Plus it must be hard to take those kinds of fears seriously when you regularly trip on Tsarbomba and roleplay entities as they zip around in their squads of ten supervising ten dimensions (or maybe it’s nine dimensions; on this question they’ve never given me a straight answer). And her Advaita Vedanta teaching that the self was illusory told Ella she was those entities, as well as everybody else, something I found difficult to get a handle on at first, and even then it took the events that follow to smash my denials and everything else away and leave me wide open to this possibility. Every aspect of life was roleplay to her, she claimed, including our adopted roles as ‘Ella’ and ‘Andy’, a faux-naive game of hide and seek with yourself in which you deny who or what you really are. Advaita means non-duality, by the way, a subject at the heart of each iteration of Twin Peaks.
Things between us were also kept healthy by AA and GA, and not only due to the fact they helped stop me relapsing. All recovery fellowships identify isolation as a key component of addiction—‘Addicts are people who think isolation’s a cure for loneliness’—and most groups try to be as friendly as possible (or good groups do; hip groups can be as pursed-lips cliquey as hip gatherings anywhere). They offer themselves as loneliness-killers, these groups, and if you get over your snobbery and shyness—‘Addicts are egomaniacs with low self-esteem’—and make an effort to get close to people, get into the middle of the bed, as they say, it should mean an end to your days or decades of loneliness, because friendships in recovery tend to be close and lasting. If you’ve seen your friend on an ICU drip after a booze or grappling relapse, or talked them down off a hotel roof, or they’ve talked you down, that bonds the two of you fast.
These friendships can go as honest and intimate and deep as you like, as recovery types are more comfortable with talk about lingering self-hatreds, external hatreds, plus actual and metaphorical scars, personal transgressions, extreme personal failures generally, metaphysics, all-defences-down panic about e.g. the climate or Covid or Putin’s nukes, whatever you want, than other crowds I’ve known, as long as the talk’s focused on practical results like remaining sober, conciliatory, sane, productive and useful, and doesn’t turn into intellectual one-upmanship or tragedy-porn grandstanding.
The friendships tend to cross the age and demographic spectra too, so you might go to watch Atlético with a formerly all-day-tippling primary-school teacher, a girl just out of school and a boy just off the streets who’re hooked on synthetic cannabinoids and whose tickets everyone else chips in for, a model who’s also a distributor of illegal substances yet always skint due to gambling, and whose ticket we chip in for but grudgingly, someone who hands out shoes in a ten-pin alley and has to restrain himself from wrestling lippy bowlers, a Scouse dosser who does little but help fellow addicts, a Nazi Satanist Serbian giantess who when drunk wrestles fellow nightguards, and a Monahan bloke who footering with Semtex under the influence blew six of his fingers off. To be honest, if you hang out often with these kinds of groups then more homogenised gatherings can feel boring.
And these recovery relationships are good news for your romantic ones because now you aren’t someone who has to be involved romantically to overcome their loneliness or even just to find some affection, which means your partner is less inclined to take you for granted, which destroys more relationships, you’ll agree, than anything else.
So Ella Ospíndola was in every sense The One. She didn’t only meet every hope I had about what a woman might be, but showed me, or even invented on the spot, entirely new categories of behaviour and charisma I could love.
She was also a witch—of the white variety, she insisted—which felt as though the universe was overdoing this gift. A sexual and spiritual one-off who looks like Laura Palmer and shares some of the world’s best drugs, who also sends me pics of naked dances with her coven?