The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 10
Cult Criticism ^ On the Rocks ^ Why It’s Okay to Pick on This Man a Bit ^ T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Another Jawbone ^ Nirvana ^ The Definition of a Disaster ^The Rock Bottom of the Rock Bottom
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. Obviously, this is fiction, satire.
Chapter 1 is here.
AFTER IT WAS GONE
Cult Criticism
IF THE AUTEUR SELF-CAST as two supreme divinities isn’t enough for Franck Boulègue and his cult readership to find it questionable, how many supreme divinities would it take? Five supreme divinities? A hundred?
And of course we’ve no idea what the actual total is. You get the sense that casting yourself as divinities in a TV drama with ego-deflation as a central theme must be like committing murders—the first time is by far the hardest. Once you’ve crossed that first Line, though, it becomes much easier to cross the second, and even easier with the third, and so on.
But casting yourself as only two divinities seems implausibly untidy, doesn’t it? Serial killers seldom quit after a mere two victims, I imagine, because you’re only getting started at that point, aren’t you, and it must be the same with Gordon Cole. I just can’t see him channelling fewer than three gods, a Bible John of divinity-channellers, and he may even be up there in Dennis Nilsen figures. And as the monstrosity was made by a hyperdimensional being and its boggingness may be infinite, it’s not impossible that we’re dealing with a Vlad the Impaler or a Ghenghis Khan of divinity-channellers, that the FBI Deputy Director played by the auteur is channelling hundreds of thousands of gods, supreme and not quite so supreme. In which case over to you, Boulègue and co. Would you find this questionable?
But let’s be generous and imagine that the series wasn’t made by the Demonic Twin but by the Grand Maître, as Boulègue calls David Lynch, and that when it came to the Tree of Life Boulègue was right about everything except Gordon Cole and Gevurah—that is, the Grand Maître did link ten episodes to the Sephiroth but didn’t actually cast himself as Gevurah the manly core of everything. In that case the most important thing for the Grand Maître, you’ll agree, was to ensure that nobody could think he had cast himself as Gevurah. This should have been his top priority when making the series, not to look like some guy on a date who describes the celestial Sephiroth and winks at you till you get it: I’m one of them, baby.
But the fact is, such a volume of other narcissism surrounds the character played by the auteur^^, we can confidently say that making him Gevurah was intentional, and that this made the self-casting as Thoth much more likely. And as we now know from my experience on Tsarbomba, the Twin possessed Mr Lynch and was the true auteur behind the series, and therefore we can infer that just as Cole’s erection chat satirises Mr Lynch’s volitional impotence, so the equation of Cole with supernatural beings wryly hints at the entity actually playing the role.
We can only marvel again at the cruelty and just plain 10D oddness of entity wit, which forced Mr Lynch to look on impotently through his own eyes as dozens of times in a single work he was made to look either this megalomaniacal or this shoddy. The challenge from the Twin almost seemed to be: How vain do I have to make the man I’m possessing appear before you lot finally call us on the possession? Yet the only one of us that sensed something was off, I’m afraid, was big Stanley.
Like most of Boulègue’s claims his Sephiroth talk has been ridiculed by some haters of The Return, people so damaged by it they instinctively lash out at anything claimed by its admirers. But it becomes less ridiculous once you understand the series was made not by Mr Lynch but by his Twin. Those ten Sephiroth do look like a reference to the ten Dark Matter entities behind the Lynch project, as surely are the nods to Thoth, to Kalki the tenth avatar of Vishnu, and also Cooper’s statement in Part 17 that ten is ‘the number of completion’.
It becomes even less ridiculous when you appreciate that juxtaposition of mingers with philosophical depth and richness was fundamental to the Twin’s strategy of making the series the most godawful ever aired.
On the Rocks
HERE ARE more of Boulègue’s paragraphs on The Return, which I recited with Ella too many times to be healthy. If you ever descend into the hell of the show’s cult criticism you’ll read plenty of stuff like this.
The fact that we have arrived at the end of a cycle (TEOTWASKI: The End Of The World As We Know It) is exemplified by the clock in the Sheriff’s office, oscillating between 2:52 and 2:53. Cooper explains that ‘it is 2:53 in Las Vegas, and that adds up to a ten, the number of completion’. One should also note that in Hinduism, the four Yugas (eras) of the universe are composed of 4, 3, 2 and 1 charanas (periods), which also add up to a 10 when the world reaches the end of its final age. But since there are several ways to get a 10 with a clock, this precise choice should be linked to the Fireman’s clue from episode 1: ‘Remember 430’. If one splits the portions of the clock as indicated below, it becomes clear that 2:53 separates two sections worth 430 (4 hours and 3 minutes).
The clock is of course highly reminiscent of a doomsday clock, pointing at the small amount of minutes that separate us from the midnight of the end of the world—the middle of the night symbolised by Carrie [Paige]’s shriek. On a more positive note, it is also possible to read the design on the clock as a peace sign, pointing towards the solution to end this dark age. In fact, David Lynch himself regularly advocates for world peace through his Transcendental Meditation foundation: The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.
Boulègue was among the critics most celebrated by the show’s admirers, and like many of these his approach frequently appeared infected by the show itself, replicating its blend of fixation on ultra-obscurities with failure when it came to the basics. You might want to read out the following Boulègue paragraphs with a loved one.
In East Coker, the second poem of Four Quartets, [T.S.] Eliot returns to his ancestral home in England. He wrote the poem during a ‘truly dark age’, to quote Janey-E, in England during World War II. According to [Kenneth Paul] Kramer, whereas Burnt Norton focused on ‘the simultaneity of timelessness and the flux of time, here the poet turns his attention to the seemingly purposeless, repetitive cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction. Nothing endures; everything changes’. Part 6 of The Return certainly focuses on death, as it is the moment when Richard runs over a young boy at a crosswalk while Carl Rodd relaxes on a nearby park bench…
It almost goes without saying [!] that the apocalyptic visions of part 8 resonate powerfully with the beginning of the poem’s third movement:
O dark dark dark.
They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant…
When the quartet continues in its second movement with the following strophe
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Washes over it, fogs conceal it
it is echoed by Diane’s statement that she likes her drink ‘on the rocks’, in part 12.
This ‘on the rocks’ find is a real Boulègue gem. In nearly any other work this allusion would be among its lowest moments. Diana: The Musical; a Marillion tribute band’s secret self-compositions; The Poetical Works of Charlie Sheen: if any of these tried to refer to these Eliot lines with a drink on the rocks this would be close to its low point. It is so bad it makes you regret even thinking about questioning those works, which start to look by comparison like some of humanity’s most precious attempts at communication.
Even List of the Lost might contain nothing worse. You could picture Mr Morrissey considering putting in a reference to these lines that involved someone’s drink on the rocks, perhaps belonging to the character he’s named after Ezra Pound, as the allusion’s in the same miserable punning spirit as ‘Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral’. When all is said and done, though, that novella does not make reference to these lines with a drink on the rocks, or make a reference anywhere near as bad. Who knows, perhaps Mr Morrissey inserted something similar and an editor had to step in because this time the author really had crossed a Line.
How could any allusion to this part of Four Quartets be worse than this? You could of course just go wild and use the number of forms examined by Dougie’s boss, or the total number of divinities played by the auteur, but if you did so not even Boulègue, I assume, would see the reference to Eliot’s lines. No, what you need is the microscopic demonic sweet spot where there’s just enough of a whiff of correspondence that an obsessive such as Boulègue will see the reference and announce it to the world, but not so much that it won’t make the toes of non-cultists curl. And for the Twin to find equivalent microscopic spots repeatedly throughout an eighteen-hour drama is, you have to admit, supernatural artistry.
For the sake of Boulègue’s mental health we can only hope that when he read these Eliot lines he immediately thought of the drink on the rocks, and didn’t have to rewatch every last moment of the series, possibly several times, before he landed on this epiphany. And it almost goes without saying that he was incapable of spotting this allusion’s mingingness. There was no awareness whatsoever that he’d again dug up a creative choice that made his treasured Grand Maître seem the William McGonagall or Amanda McKittrick Ros of filmed drama.
If a researcher discovers something new in a work it’s good news for the treasured artist concerned. This is the unacknowledged because unexamined assumption of plenty of research in academia. But the truth is it’s only good news if what’s discovered is also good. As with Nochimson and others, Boulègue assumed that practically anything the Grand Maître did was by definition excellent, and so on this poor soul went day after day with his investigations, rewatches, broodings, energy drinks surely consumed by the litre, all to dig up appalling artistic choices, yet never once seeing that he was landing his Grand Maître deeper and deeper in trouble, like some fan of Dennis Nilsen who investigated, burrowed, researched beneath his hero’s floorboards and punched the air each time he discovered a human jawbone or spleen because it confirmed the great man’s genius.
Nearly every half-baked literary or spiritual allusion we’ve mentioned—the Finnegans Wake and Ulysses stuff, the Hindu and Greek mythology, and the like—was dug up by doughty Franck Boulègue. In its own depressing way, what he did to his hero was plecto and vicious, almost libellously damaging, yet he’s been published in Cahiers du cinéma, the Lynch worshippers’ house mag and supposedly our culture’s finest film and TV publication. This is where we are. This is the state of criticism of our most influential artforms.
The Eliot allusion was yet another case where I didn’t immediately recognise how bad it was. I could sense it was awful, obviously, but off the top of my head I’d have put it at roughly 0.01% of the pie. But when you get more serious, put your unshod feet up and properly mull it over, you see how wide of the mark that is. It seems I may have underestimated the piechart percentage here by a factor of ten or more.
Am I losing my touch? My mind again? How can you be so affected by how bad The Return was that you lose the woman you love, numerous nonwrestling streaks, your sanity—including your resistance to poodle-rocker’s hair, building dioramas in your forties, and involving the police in your TV opinions—and eventually your entire identity over it, yet still underestimate by a factor of ten an allusion this toe-curling?
So maybe I should have more sympathy for Boulègue’s failure to realise the show’s true rankness. I don’t know. I don’t know much about anything any more, it sometimes feels when immersing yourself in memories of this thing. You drift off to some very strange dimension with expanses and levels you’ll never fathom, way out of your depth, and constantly underestimate how bad it actually was. I’ve been there, Franck. I can identify.
Might future generations even mock me for vastly overrating it, the way I’ve been mocking Boulègue? Might they think I was a fan?
Why It’s Okay to Pick on This Man a Bit
IT’S HARD TO READ Boulègue’s delvings into The Return and Eliot’s poem and not think of the plectoid annotator Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Before our first breakup Ella commented more than once that I was not without my own Kinbote inclinations, which seems fair enough. And maybe this is one reason why I’ve picked on Boulègue.
Others:
>> Because in his way he’s as bad as the likes of Abascal, Johnson, Gove, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Like them and most of the series’ conned marks, he’s away off in the wilds of post-truth. And so despite the discrepancy in our career trajectories, I strongly identify with his problems, specifically his denial which looks as extreme as that of César, Mateo, Trinna, Les, the droppings collector or me ever was.
When giving interviews and lectures he appears to be a genuinely lovely person, as he holds forth and wows everyone in his beautiful accent, berserkly. Chomps at his conger-eel-in-peat baguette and tries to convince himself and others that it isn’t just delicious but the tastiest baguette of all time. Never mind the black stains and splashes of eel eye on his teeth and lips and chin, and his violent retches, the baguette’s unheard-of taste and texture come from basing its recipe on the snake’s slithers across the Garden’s soil in Paradise Lost and are therefore genius.
I want to gently massage his Season 3 subspaced head and tell him that everything will be okay. I do. As with Charles Kinbote he is almost adorably away with the fairies. Do you feel that same bond with almost adorably berserk Franck Boulègue? Here on the sidelines most of us are Boulègues and Kinbotes, aren’t we, fretting or blithering compulsively about other people’s work, trapped in the hell of our own thoughts, as Boulègue said of Audrey Horne.
>> Because he illustrates so well the self-destructive tendency of the apparently well-intentioned left to focus on trivialities and obscurities that blind them to the basics. That is, their lack of perspective, their failure or refusal to see the bigger picture, so much learning put to such daft use. E.g. the fact that Boulègue thought The Return was the greatest television series ever while he also believed this:
My main problem with the new series is found in its depiction of women. The original series was already a bit vain from this point of view, with (male heterosexual) fans debating endlessly about who might be the prettiest girl in Twin Peaks, as if they were in a candy store. One is totally free to have personal preferences, but this market of women approach has always seemed a bit objectifying to me. This time around, after four episodes, I have to say that I find the new series a bit disappointing from this point of view, especially after our TV screens have been graced with strong female characters such as Buffy, Carrie Mathison, Sarah Lund and countless others. I expect better of a 21st century series: not one single female character after four hours of viewing who contains much substance or embodies any central role, but several prostitutes of course and gratuitous stripping down (for women only).
Consider how poor the portrayal of women had to be for even a fanatic such as Boulègue to question it this way. Now consider how unlikely it was that a series that depicts around half our population this poorly was anything like the greatest ever.
>> The tendency of too many of the bohemian left to value transgression just for the sake of it, the types who cheer on paedophilic photographs in galleries, that lot, as skewered by Angela Nagle. Or as we’ve said, to not even mention or see such misjudgement when it’s butting them and everybody else in the face.
>> Intellectuals in recovery fellowships who ignore everybody else and address only other intellectuals in the room, who make eye contact with them alone and use jargon only intellectuals understand, have a bad time of it. This refusal to speak to the room is met with an atmosphere that isn’t easy to describe, not resentment but, and this feels even worse, something like pity that this guy’s so frightened he has to protect himself with jargon only understood by his perceived peers. And when he gets none of the nods or other affirmations granted to previous speakers, he becomes yet more jittery and bitter and focuses more exclusively on his fellow intellectuals, but now even his supposed peers are looking down at their toe-bulged shoes, quelling embarrassed sighs.
>> Concern that Boulègue might not know when to stop rubbing his buttocks in growlers’ faces.
The conga
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Another Jawbone
Krishna’s teachings about liberation in and from time follows [sic] in the third movement of the poem, and are mirrored in the 13th part of The Return when the Mitchum Brothers enter the Lucky 7 Insurance office mimicking a train, a scene corresponding to the following statement:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you
Boulègue’s description here was a little off again, as the Mitchum brothers plus Dougie Jones and the fembots Mandie, Sandie and Candie actually enter the scene doing a conga, and only as they leave does Robert Knepper as Rodney Mitchum tootle out a brief ‘Choo-choo’. But as the conga probably does mirror this bit of Four Quartets, the only proper response is that as with the drink on the rocks this is a pretty honking mirroring.
Say you’re back teaching those same teens how to get your ideas across in narrative and you provide this as your latest example. On the left-hand side of your whiteboard you write
You are not the same people who left the station
Or will arrive at any terminus
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you
Then you write
WAY TO COMMUNICATE THIS: Six halfwits in a conga line
How would you get the students to quit laughing and saying Ew, Yikes, Blech, Oh dear God, and Just kill me now?
You might consider giving an explanation of the term pretentious. It really is okay to use that word here. Seriously. It’s fine.
No? Okay, maybe you should show them a clip of the conga from Part 13, so they can see these blonde millennials presented as stupider than any other characters in screen history, plus three old white galoots with not a grey hair between them but plenty of faintly yellow fake tan made blatant by the series’ capricious lighting. Behold the jolly, interestingly complexioned, éminence grise sons of the Greatest Generation, you might tell the class, the generation that landed at Normandy and helped defeat Hitler in their teens and twenties.
But now what do you do? How can you persuasively bisociate the lines on the left with a conga? How can you make these teens see enough correspondence? Scoot around the classroom as though on railways tracks, past row after row of frowning students, warbling ‘Choo-choo’? I doubt that’ll win them over. More Ews and Yikes, not to mention T.S. Eliot’s whirls in his grave.
Eliot argued that new classics retrospectively rearrange the canon, with older classics having to ‘accommodate’ the new work and being altered in the process, an idea that was claimed by Manbams for Season 3, which travelled back in time and altered not only the canons of TV drama and cinema but of literature as well. Which leaves us with the tantalising possibility that in his Four Quartets Eliot was somehow made to write ‘You are not the same people who left the station/ Or will arrive at any terminus/ While the narrowing rails slide together behind you’ to subtly, very subtly, blink and you might miss it, communicate the notion of elderly men from the future wearing something called ‘faintly yellow fake tan’ as they do something called a ‘conga’ with three ‘fembots’. Try explaining that one to the class.
And perhaps you might try to link ‘Krishna’s teachings about liberation in and from time’ to new words you’ve written on the board:
Just for Men and faintly yellow fake tan
Because possibly this is the subtle bisociation here, the message the long-term-homebody white boomer auteur wants to communicate, that white boomer men have liberated themselves in and from time, the same time that presumably restricted the Greatest Generation from conga-ing up Omaha Beach wearing yellowish fake tan. Try explaining this to the class, and then to T.S. Eliot.
It’s not going down very well with any of them, is it? So what do you say to them? And who do these little clowns and scumbags think they are anyway, with their Ews and Blechs, and their lives and sexual adventures ahead of them? Who are they to judge your teaching abilities and Twin Peaks: The Return, to look down their cocaine-free noses lesson after lesson at the best television series ever and at their well-meaning Zaddy teacher and his dank neckerchief and general edge-snatchin lewk?
So you remind them that the conga line doesn’t merely refer to Eliot’s poem. Like everything else in the show it also communicates some offscreen guy’s guilt over some misdeed or whatever, and never happened anyway because all three seasons of Twin Peaks are in fact this guy’s dream.
That’s shut them up, hasn’t it? Not so full of themselves now, these unappreciative runts. On a roll, you dish out a few tasty morsels you’ve saved for a day like this: the allusions to Finnegans Wake and to Osiris climbing to heaven on Dougie’s nine insurance forms; all the best-of polls the show topped; the Big Bad superstud’s seductive use of ‘Oo-oh’; why TV dramas about rape mustn’t ignore its upside. That’s when the runts begin to scream.
You ignore them and dish out ad hominems for doubting the best television series ever, followed by death threats, followed by a hail of droppings from the collection in your desk drawer. It’s Gucci, Gucci, GUCCI, you tell the runts as they duck, that your generation’s left them to cope with a midden of a world, insects and birds dying off in mass extinctions, easy access to rape porn, plus men like Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Modi and a cricketer in control of nukes and the response to a pandemic and the climate going to shit.
Colleagues run into the room but you keep them at bay with more ad hominems and droppings and share more morsels from the G.O.A.T. tour de force, then paeans to the joys of subspace. It doesn’t feel like you’ve… how does it go again? Helloo-oo-oo! Helloo-oo-oo!
Next thing you know you’re being walked out through the front doors by the police and past the entire school body, another shower of clowns and scumbags. Fuck it, you think, I’m sacked anyway so why not really let them have it. You break free from the police, draw yellow highlighter all over your face, and tell everyone the rock bottom.
The moustachio’d PE teacher, the pervert, breaks down in tears. Ballbusting old dinner ladies and aloof fembot sixth-years crumple to the ground as their knees give way.
Wake up, you vermin! your froth-coated lips shout as you conga solo in a figure of eight, an infinity symbol, a puff of steam from the teapot that enables voyages through time and helps save abused kids, your trousers’ bum ripping wider open every time you conga-kick. Fix your heart or die!
The following section contains material that may disturb some readers.
Nirvana
THE POND UNBLURRED INTO BEING. The One shimmered on the water’s surface. I threw a pebble at its green reflection and watched its fragments explode out across the dark surface until they reached the pond’s rim and disappeared. Reflected in the water I saw my years of submitting, drinking, drugging, wrestling, compulsive thinking, kept hard at it by some terror or thrill or other, the odd moment of satisfaction but soon back again to cave in or to crave with my nose to the latest scent.
Here in my head Maddy’s tumour was spreading. Here in my veins Demmy’s blood slowed as fellow inmates kept his head down in the toiletbowl. He filled with one last ache for the woman he brought over to the sexual dark side, the bride without whose co-operation and inventiveness he might never have known those final years of liberation, the telepathic teamwork that kept the boys’ mouths shut, kept that Uath kayfabe.
Reflected in the ripples was a galaxy-sized infant Laura Palmer. Dripping off her chin were mascara and her father’s sperm. Blood ran from her groin. She ran but did not move. She looked classically beautiful, painted by an Old Master. Her mouth cried but no cry came. There was a moan or hum everywhere, plus a stink of coaltongs. The stink wasn’t coaltongs. The stink was Laura’s blood as it ran down her thighs, as she ran cut and facialised through my brain, her muted cry sucked off into the caverns of space.
I was being sucked towards a place or condition where human-scale terror barely registered as a blip or flicker. I fell into the pond and ran while being held in place within my brain. I was Laura Palmer’s run to nowhere in the sky. The primal horror of the ravaged animal out alone in the night, the source-home of every horror, it was in every branch of memory telling us that we might become that ravaged thing.
Then the galactic infant was garlanded by blue roses bigger than star systems. Again the style was classical, defined precisely, crisply. The roses became orgasmic faces: Saviles, Glitters, Jacksons, Harrises, Wests, Bradys, Epsteins, Andrews. Platinum blonde Myra Hindley hairs shot blood out of themselves. Grinning monks circled terrorised young paraplegics. A boar’s tusk penetrated an infant Granny Uath as her own granny roared the animal on. Farmhands roared on other farmhands inside eleven-year-old Trinna.
There was no denying any of it. I was seeing what the entities see when humans think no one’s watching. What we’ll spread across the galaxy if nobody stops us.
In time it all receded into a hum scattered through the noise-vision in my mind. The hum said the human event was just a creature lost in a maze it couldn’t remember making, lost in the need for the oblivion of degradation. It said that everybody knows this in their blood. Trinna and César’s voices yelled out that somewhere in the maze there existed a figure powerful enough to rescue them, some Master to cling to so that in his reflected fury they might lose themselves among the mass and burn a path right through the maze.
And my own event as Andy denied the bitterness gripping it, and its own hope for a Master, hid them within the hope that this nobody druggy alcoholic raving security guard might one day be the only voice people wanted. Like the two of them I was compelled to run off towards the stark black void. Their lot was my lot, the slide into the ferocity that failed to abolish the horror, because it was itself that horror.
We snuffled and grunted through the maze. We renounced certain paths but knew we’d be back there within the hour. Our lassitude meant we could hardly remember our latest thoughts, or any thoughts really. Foggy gloopy numbness, porny forlorn druggy boozy brainfog. Dozy forgetfulness, mindnumbing, timenumbing, faded by drowsiness on the hazy fields of memory. What’s my name again?
The portal of true fear opened up. Something attacked Laura and me from both outside and inside, ripped this human body open with convulsive force, drove down and up within us and blocked our throat. Memories flashed of Dougal’s sucks on a Spar cucumber to train himself out of his gag reflex.
In the pond mothers and fathers welcomed the universal library of porn unfiltered onto their kids’ devices, yet another form of revenge by our century’s adults upon the young, and the kids watched the porn in awe and learned to masturbate to facials while they did their homework or brushed their teeth, some so compulsively they bled.
With alien detachment I observed our new law of physics, that the only valid route for cum was more or less elegant parabolas that ended on people’s faces. Onto open eyes until they pinkened, onto the faces of rapists driven out of their minds by porn, the faces of disabled men tied to chairs, FBI agents and secretaries, manbabies, sissy hypno’d Manbams and cowboy-booted neo-Nazis, of people who’d slashed their wrists in the bathtub, of weeping relapsing members of Sex Addicts Anonymous who themselves masturbated to clips of relapses, sexual warfare, all against all, divide and rule forever. Maddy, Demmy, Suds, Granny Uath, Dougal, Jorge, César, me, Trinna, Ella, Les—but never Stanley— at one time or another each of us had to give or get or masturbate to facials. A face it had to be, a consensual facial but not too consensual. Sometimes the face appeared to welcome the semen, sometimes it only accepted it. Kayfabe 1 or 3, or kayfabe 2.
The spirit of the age either exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, this has saturated ours: on our knees with our tongues out, metaphorical mascara down our cheeks, spattered with the permanent species defeat of the money shot.
Every minute for twenty years 100,000s of well-loved persons across five continents have settled down to bring themselves off to these spattered faces of their fellow women and men, girls and boys, by now 1,000,000,000,000s of orgasms to the sight of porn’s semen-clatted faces. Not to mention all the meatspace faces clatted as a result, all these supposedly private black masses that have released Christ knows what forces into the psychosphere, and welcomed to this plane the type of spirits that themselves get off on, feast on, and make a sacrament out of the acceptance/welcome of planet-wide submission and degradation.
For twenty years the world’s children and teens have been brainwashed down onto their knees to stick their tongues way out and submit to the arrival of that creamy goo and its slow drips off their chins. Then these children and teens have become adults who welcome in the universal library to teach the art of facials to their own children, who will later teach their own the same kneeling and tongue-out procedure, and so onwards till the end of human time, because does anybody see an end to global facials anytime before a mass extinction? If you want a vision of the future, imagine semen landing on a human face—forever.
You do see why your sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, nephews, nieces, students are being trained through porn to see the world this way, accept it or welcome it as simply how the world is, and if you can’t beat them join them. This goes beyond sex. You can see that too.
A number of beings in Dark Matter took note of these developments and wondered how they’d let things come this far and what it could achieve in the long run, kids in their 100,000,000s watching seas of sperm aimed where no other species on this or any other planet or plane ever dreamt they might aim it, and how this could possibly hurry along the all-singing, all-dancing Promised End.
In the pond the reflected lettering dissolved into something depraved, contemptuous, cheesy, egomaniacal verging on sociopathic, gaudy, fake, forlorn, dehumanised, repetitive, flat, dead-eyed, sadistic; populated by the antisocial fetishistic centre of the universe, plus a cast of plectoids, perverts, ciphers, slobs, psychopaths, vermin, fembots, assertive women degraded or ridiculed, submissive pretty women bedded, battered and murdered at will by unconvincingly domineering men; also farcical implausibility, half-bakedness, dead air, no suspension of disbelief, moral squalor from the performers and production team, at best a flippant attitude to sexual abuse and the debasement of people with disabilities and at worst cheering them on, stilted dialogue, infantilism, awful acting, Oo-oh… YOU’RE nice and wet, and the rest of it, a laughably unsubtle mirror designed to reflect back to us what we’ve become and come to value, to show in gaudy neon that the nudges of the prologue were finally over and that the wait for the evolutionary leap from our sty was at an end.
And our corporate gatekeepers waved it through with grins and cheers and gave it a standing ovation at our most influential festival. Hardly anybody else blinked an eye, and many of those who even noticed stuck their tongues out and begged for more.
A kind of misty fever filled the air entering my throat, Laura’s throat. It thickened to a transparent jelly. It was impossible to breathe but still it poured into us. What was breathable was separated from what wasn’t, ruthlessly, unarguably, one thing and not another. Into us came little jelly orbs similar to snowglobes but featuring tiny degraded Lauras wearing lingerie, fake eyelashes and clown makeup, and no snow for them to play in.
Now into our throat in gushes came the sex sounds. Slurps, grunts, groans, shrieks, wheezes, zips unzipped on denim worn by BOB-Demmy-Suds. Sticky-sucky choking sounds. Effete dubbed voices. Tiny drenched Lauras, Ellas, Trinnas, Dougals, Andys, Demmys, Granny Uaths squealed what a BIG load that is.
Next came the smells. Juices, semen, fresh sweat, stale sweat, mascara, coaltong, menthol, denim, bloodsoaked magazine paper, Tia Maria breath, saliva, urine, faeces, discharged gonorrhea. Our mouth could taste them as the air they filled went down. Capillaries transferred them to every organ. Sex stinks were in each particle of air and each particle of our being.
The ground was gone. Opening up was a giant abyss. The bottom had dropped out of the world. Mascara kept running down our cheeks. The lump swelled in our throat till no breath passed either way. We’d lost our gag reflex. Our whole species had. We’d opened ourselves up to magnitudes of numbness, denial and shame that few species in any realm were ready for. Chuckles at that from the surrounding night, giggly denial of our guilt-shamed conscience.
Our fingers clung to the soil around us. The abyss was gaping. Then the fingers slipped and the fall began, down towards a loneliness beyond loneliness, deserted not just by everything human but everything substantial. Here the desolation of existence was laid bare, and the night dissolved into a nowhere and nowhen so chaotic that even denial was useless, pointless. And so denial ended.
Identity as well, then, scattered by absolute randomness. Inescapable, this chaos. My form and Laura’s form were burned away and absorbed into the nothingness of the pre-natal. Lights snuffed out, darkness, no-world, void. The end of the fall, the true end of the Line, el fundamento, the chaos and nameless estrangement at the core of non-existence.
Welcome home.
…
The Definition of a Disaster
ARTISTIC DISASTERS AREN’T THAT EASY TO PRODUCE. Simple incompetence and chaos by themselves don’t do the job. Telenovelas, for instance, will never aim anywhere near high enough to experience an actual disaster’s long fall and street-clearing splat. Nor is cruelty or misanthropy or sordidness enough. The Jeremy Kyle Show may have been a personal disaster for those who made it or appeared on it but not an aesthetic one, at least partly because it didn’t try to yoke itself to Ulysses or the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, as far as I can tell.
Thousands of productions have been incompetent, cruel or sordid, but to gain admission to the lowest pits of artistic hell requires much more. So if I heard someone call a TV drama a trainwreck that bad every copy had to be erased by hyperdimensional entities and some furious security guard, I’d assume this was hyperbolic.
But in the case of The Return it really wasn’t. Calling it worse than Putin’s tastes in porn, which Les sometimes did, this might be hyperbolic, but terms such as trainwreck, fiasco, disaster and catastrophe carefully separate The Return from mere stinkers like True Detective 2 or The Romanoffs or The Rings of Power. As you can see by now, it wasn’t just disappointing.
An odd feature of disasters is that they can look more impressive, in a sense, for a while at least, than mere stinkers do. Nobody would ever say of the disaster in question that it wholly lacked originality, would they? Parts of it were as original as a right good streak at a cotdeath’s funeral. Few people would be able to conceive of such an endeavour never mind carry it out, so in the way that the cultists seemed to understand the term this performance would be genius.
And in a similar way The Return could appear closer at times to certain masterpieces than to most stinkers. The acting only made you groan in a way an amateur production’s would not, to take one example, due to the talent and track record of much of the cast. But rather than improve the overall impression, that talent actually helped damage it by way of contrast. And the same was true of delicate moments such as Ed Hurley’s silence at the end of Part 13, and the use of Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’, and other decent touches in Part 15.
You might think that if you want to put together a fiasco the best approach is uninterrupted muck, but that’s because you aren’t a demon and are, no offence, hardly an expert on making fiascos. Instead an actual fiasco benefits significantly from regular moments of brilliance to raise the viewer’s hopes before they’re brought crashing down again, so they experience each crash all the more powerfully.
The effect is as though the celebrated river sequence from The Night of the Hunter was dropped into an episode of Ex on the Beach. In time you get over your shock and can enjoy and admire the artistry of the sequence, but then you’re abruptly back on the beach as a young man explains the various stages involved in removing every last trace of his nipple hairs, which now feels a fair bit more disturbing than if it hadn’t been preceded by lavish beauty.
I admit to a kind of wonder at the way the Twin pulled off this singular effect to perfection with dozens of such crashes, and especially how it teased us with the excellence of Part 8 that the nightmare might finally be over, before hitting us with eighty minutes of unrelieved boredom that make the how-to on nipple-hair removal look like that river scene. E.g. the long stretch of quintessential Return humour consisting of a smirking (and smirking) Cole taking just the one puff of a cigarette, the thinking behind which seemed to be: the whole world knows that I, David Lynch, just love a damn good cigarette; therefore it will be poignant yet side-splitting if I broadcast worldwide well over a hundred seconds of nothing happening but a knowing, twinkly-eyed solitary cigarette-puff on the part of David Lynch.
There’s no inconsistency when we say this drama featured some of the best touches in contemporary TV while still being the artistic disaster of disasters. The Titanic’s fate isn’t viewed as a real-life supreme disaster because the most people died, or in the most painful way, but because we’re still intrigued that the ship’s designers paid so much attention to details such as the entablature fringing the wrought-iron and glass dome that let natural daylight fall on the two-storey Grand Staircase, and nowhere near enough attention to keeping the ship afloat. The Twin’s placement of similar domes in The Return’s Fireman’s Palace was one of many private jokes about the disaster it had made.
In films and TV dramas the overall cinematic look is the equivalent of voice in music or written fiction. It organises the entire work and helps it cohere, provides much of its atmosphere, and is central to how the audience responds. Mr Lynch’s use of cinematic look has been masterly throughout most of his career, the equivalent of the richness and beauty of somebody like Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. The Return also looked impressive enough now and then, sequences that added up to maybe two hours in total. But the rest was equivalent to listening to the voices of at best John Major and at worst Michael Gove.
To have to listen to John and Michael for eighteen hours would become unbearable. We can agree on that. And you might reckon that interrupting them with the odd Ella Fitzgerald number, or even full albums, would make those hours slightly more bearable. Not so. I haven’t actually experienced this myself—I’m not that obsessed by The Return—but going by what we’ve learned from the series, if given the choice I’d take the uninterrupted John and Michael anyday. Because the alternative would be:
Two hours of John and Michael. Just John and Michael as they shoot the breeze, tell it how it is. Sometimes they yell at your face one after the other, sometimes they take one ear each, stereo John and Michael, and blow in warm breath and whisper.
Then they shut up and you find you’re listening to Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife. What a pleasant relief from the John and Michael.
But then the hifi stops and they’re yelling at your face again. Feel that devastation coursing through you. John Major and Michael Gove keep on at you for another four and a half hours.
Then The Greatest Hits of Ella Fitzgerald starts up and you, John, Michael and the white-coated psychologist conducting this experiment listen together, tap your feet and hum along to classic after classic as they echo off the clean white tiles that are probably lining the walls. You lose yourself in Ella’s voice and eventually forget about this being some strange experiment, forget that John and Michael have ever spoken a word to you.
But then they’re back yacking in your face. Ella’s gone now, gone for good. You’ve to listen to the Prince of Greyness and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for the next ten hours.
Their choice of topics too, which they make the most of since you’re a captive audience. John gives descriptions for five, thirty, fifty minutes of the toughest ragweeds he’s pulled from his garden. Michael complains at length, serious length, about his exclusion from Club Gevurah, and from the tiny Club Doric for celebrities from north-east Scotland, Denis Law and Annie Lennox joined inside not by Michael but by Dennis Nilsen. Then Michael MCs for nineteen minutes that ‘In this fallen world, I suspect we will never achieve perfection. But that won’t stop me trying.’
You keep glancing at the hifi desperate for Ella to come and save you, but the only sound that comes is the occasional snatch of her voice, before it’s gone again, and the whole experience feels far more disturbing, doesn’t it, than if no Ella was ever played.
For the experiment’s finale John and Michael nuzzle at your ears and mutter ‘We set trends dem man copy.’ Fifty John clones and fifty Michael clones enter the white cube you’re trapped in and begin to yack, yack that they too set trends dem man copy. The walls dissolve and you see beyond the fifty-one yacking Johns and fifty-one yacking Michaels thousands more of them, giant concentric circles of John Majors and Michael Goves who face in at you and yack that they set trends dem man copy, while beyond them lie immense torture chambers with thousands more. Beyond them are the fiery pits. The psychologist takes off its human mask to reveal red glowing eyes.
To pull off these kinds of carefully engineered letdowns over and over again in The Return was, in its own dismaying way, a form of otherworldly genius.
Same with all the show’s literary and spiritual allusions. That sort of filigree in a horrorwork such as this felt as mystifying and cruel as specks of gold dust floating by as you’re drowning in a slurrypit. A series dominated by each combination within the Returnian enhancing the grimness of so many of the rest, that played various sick moments for 4channish shits and giggles, may have communicated nothing more throughout than some offscreen guy’s guilt about who knows what, and contained the knee-wrecker of the rock bottom that you’ll soon be countenancing in all its majesty… structuring a series like this around the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and many more of the world’s spiritual frameworks and artistic masterpieces was a Satanically clever way to desolate your audience. If I wanted to make a disaster I could plug away for years without hitting upon a strategy that demonically ingenious.
The turkey’s knack for awful combinations and juxtapositions was nothing short of transcendental. It was. That it appeared to believe it constituted a spiritual wake-up call, to take just one from so many options—this was far more minging when juxtaposed with a self-casting beyond the most bigheaded fantasies of Mourinho, and with the Sex Magick! and the comedy rape of a manbaby, while the vanity of the rock bottom, which itself rested on the most egomaniacal juxtaposition ever seen, was all the more Jesus wept in a catastrophe that prattled on about Eastern philosophy and the questionable nature of the self, and other ego-deflation, and that believed it was a guide to better living, and so on and so forth, on and on and on, rankness after rankness, so many, many ranknesses firing about within the series and within your skull, bouncing around and crisscrossing as though they were laser beams shot from a demon’s eyes, each bisociation making the thing worse, always worse, every single time more minging, to infinite, Ultraverse-expanding levels of mingingness, it sometimes felt like.
And as in all relationships with the demonic, you couldn’t even enjoy the better moments either, because you knew the depravity would soon be kicking off again. You could occasionally see that what was happening was objectively good (a birthday party in the woods where you didn’t get facialised, say, or a telly show linked to the Tree of Life) but you got little enjoyment from it because you’d been brutalised to expect any second now yet another session with the coaltongs or some new 4channish take on rape. In fact you might even learn to resent the goodness for reminding you that goodness is still possible. As with true maniacs and works of genius, artistic disasters are rare, mysterious beasts that obey their own weird laws. They deserve close study, and by giving us a crash course in precisely how not to do it, may be more educational and even inspirational than all but the greatest of their betters.
The Return should have filmschool and university courses dedicated to exploring the depths it reached, or at least people’s memories of these, in the kind of detail that I hadn’t the space for here. Ella, Trinna, Les and I are not professional film researchers, after all, and at no point did we set out in any rigorous manner to discover the series’ debacles. What we’ve looked at in these pages was found through little more than casual watching and reading and discussing. Fairly obsessive watching and reading and discussing at times, yes, but it wasn’t organised in any way. And how I discovered Kreider’s piece and Ella discovered the rock bottom might just as easily have never happened.
Which leaves open the possibility that were the series investigated by people with sufficient time and training, what we’ve called the three worst barbarities might even get bumped from the top ten. It’s clearly impossible for us to imagine the sort of things that might top that trinity, but then prior to The Return we wouldn’t have imagined those three were possible.
With Season 4 even the 10D Twin failed to outdo them. I don’t know about you, but for me the totality of a universe set up to hymn the golden phallus of the-showrunner-as-Cole-as-Osiris would not in the end be worse than the Returnian’s twenty-two factors combining with one another. You could take some drugs and laugh away at galactic starfleets that shoot off laser cannons to salute the auteur-played FBI Deputy Director’s mighty phallus, in a spirit of so-excruciating-it’s-good, maybe even throw a party where everyone has to bring a laser or wear a phallus. Nobody but suicide cults, however, would throw a party for the Returnian’s 1124000727777607680000.
Due to wordcount limits and also limits of memory, we’ve only made a start here on the show’s hoachingness, and it’s now time for the pros to go in, to explore that hoachingness in as much breadth and depth as they can without jeopardising their mental health, and to explore as well the show’s cult critics and their blather. Franck Boulègue is far from the only such burrower worth investigating, to say nothing of the ones I’ve never read. Of particular psychiatric concern is the denial of those who stubbornly maintain that their Master, this poor innocent, twinkly-eyed, twice-daily meditator, made the vicious atrocity and not his Demonic Twin, despite my restored higher power’s enigmatic but still moving testaments after his possession, communicated via finger waggles, to the frustration and despair of those years of impotence.
The clips of the series remaining on YouTube and elsewhere should be required viewing for any artist in any field, and any arts industry types too, and so should the Cannes ovation, from start to finish. Showtime and the other channels that aired the series need to take a good look at themselves, as do the publications and sites that put it on their best-of lists. Hairdressers need to wreck certain styles on certain withering mondains, gen z retail staff need to let the laughter out when the same mondains browse for trousers—or if that doesn’t work just refuse to sell to them, accept the sacking if necessary, you fought the Gucci fight—while historians need to establish The Return’s place in the annals of atrocities beyond the mere aesthetic.
In mid-May 2024 Ella made this comment on Instagram.
If there are among you any makers of films or writers that have not yet watched this series, I would like to suggest that you do so.
Immediately after you do so you will be wishing you had never read these words. That is a certainty. Like anybody not too damaged in their head and in their heart, you are going to feel dirtied a lot from viewing it. However, someday you may find that you are considering inserting some exploration of your own bum into your work, but then you will remember that time you put yourself through The Return, the Chernobyl of storytelling which stops you playing with fire.
Do not deny yourself this opportunity. Please let the ultimate yuck of this television series wash over you and try to absorb the many lessons which are on offer here. Sometimes it is necessary to suffer for your art.
Then go and produce something which is as far from this series as you can possibly make it. Adopt it as a form of higher power in reverse. Keep asking ‘What would The Return do?’ and then do the polar opposite.
Like the show it describes, of course, and the love affair infected by the show, that comment’s now been deleted. Yet as long as humans walk the earth nothing may ever surpass the wretchedness of that show, or provide a better example of how not to tell a story. It is, and will always remain, in our memories at least, The One.
Orpheus looks back and condemns his love Eurydice to hell. Painting by Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein.
The Rock Bottom of the Rock Bottom
AS YOU’VE POSSIBLY GUESSED OR HEARD BY NOW, The Return gave more nostalgic nods and bows to its auteur’s career than any other work’s ever given its artist.
It may have contained more fond, consecrating allusions to its auteur’s previous works than equivalents in the rest of the planet’s TV dramas combined. When it comes to an artist paying homage to himself, it was the most nostalgic project of the last 300,000 years, and it has competition from no era for that status. And this in a project that was otherwise, and by a distance, the most ferocious attack on nostalgia of all time, dominated and desecrated throughout by anti-retro, don’t look back.
Worse may yet be found in The Return, but as things stand this dissonance was more shameful than anything else in the series, or in any other trainwreck. It was uncanny, unearthly, the worst artistic choice there has ever been.
Reworks passages from Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.
The above photo of David Lynch is by Megamoney monster.
As of 2024 there has been no Season 4 of Twin Peaks, and Emmanuel Carrère and co. have written no books on Season 3. Andy and hyperdimensional entities did not destroy the series. It’s still out there.
The Demon Inside David Lynch was Brian Eno’d by Lola Hourihane and Peter Murphy, and also, I suppose, accidentally by Mr Lynch.
It is dedicated to John Clode, Gema Parra, and not least for not being Uaths, to my family.
A free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
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Sean McNulty grew up in Moray, Scotland, and then worked as a nightguard in a Dublin psychiatric hospital and the National Library of Ireland. He now lives in Madrid and edits the Auraist substack, which selects the best-written books from major reviews and prizelists and interviews their authors on prose style. This is his first work of fiction.