The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 2
Something of an Anti-Climax ^ A Hermit Wanders Down from the Hills ^ The Absolute Rock Bottom ^ The Descent into Hell
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.
Chapter 1 is here.
AFTER IT AIRED (2017-18)
David Lynch waggling his fingers. Photo by Aaron.
Something of an Anti-Climax
REMEMBER ELLA AND ME going out as Laura Palmer and Mr Lynch and returning home for Lynchian wrestling, the anticipated-fun to actual-fun ratio that was waiting for us? Now imagine that feeling of anti-climax stretched out over five months. Season 3 turned out to be the most wretched work of art, the worst flop, ever made by man or woman or demon.
This isn’t some casual exaggeration. I am serious when I say it is the worst artistic project there has ever been.
We didn’t always believe this, true, as during our first few watches it only seemed like the worst TV show in history or the worst artwork of our lifetimes. But as Ella, Trinna, Les and me came to comprehend the series’ singular nature, it became clear how inadequate such descriptions were. It is the worst work of our lifetimes, of course it is, but it’s the worst of all time too, of any time since humans started making art. No joke, no messing, this is how bad it is.
Think of the billions of attempts at art humans have made, from The Virgin on the Rocks to infants’ stick drawings. Out of those tens of thousands of years’ worth of efforts, Twin Peaks: The Return is the worst of the lot, meaning we have here an event as unusual and historically significant as the invention of language. You feel like you’ve discovered some impossible new continent or planet. This is how extraordinary the series is.
I know you’ll doubt such statements (who wouldn’t?) but you won’t doubt them by the time we’re finished, I promise you, especially if you make the leap and try to watch clips of the show yourself. Get through these pages and those clips and if you still believe an artist managed to produce a worse artwork, I promise to hear you out with an open mind. I will read your book, listen to your podcasts, watch YouTube presentations of your case, whatever you wish. If you’ve discovered a work even more extraordinary than The Return, that makes its artist look a bigger diddy—not more vicious but a bigger diddy—than this series makes David Lynch out to be, then I want to know about it, both because it must be unmissable and because, to say the least, I don’t like the idea that my higher power made the worst artwork of all time.
The Return’s awfulness game is deep and broad, ambitious and exploratory, and seeks out and infects areas of life that should be unreachable by any telly drama. I’m trying to think of synonyms for awful as it’s nowhere near strong enough in this context, but none of its synonyms do the job either. Ghastly… dreadful… The Return isn’t dreadful. Or it is dreadful but is so much more than that, so far beyond dreadful you feel embarrassed for your mind for even suggesting the word. Rank, gruesome, mince, bogging, bowfing, minging, honking, hoaching aren’t quite strong enough either.
But disaster might be getting closer. Also catastrophe, trainwreck, fiasco, travesty, monstrosity, carnage, abomination, atrocity, crime against humanity, holocaust…
No, with holocaust we might finally have found a word too strong for a TV drama. Likewise bloodbath. But a disaster is roughly what we’re dealing with.
Ask supercomputers to theorise a worse show and I doubt they’d manage it. That isn’t hyperbole. I haven’t lost my mind here. I was able to pull back from holocaust, wasn’t I? It’s important to be precise regarding what we’re dealing with here, neither too generous nor too harsh. I’m comfortable calling the abomination our world’s worst-ever endeavour judged in artistic terms, but not the worst thing of any kind we’ve ever produced or will ever produce, or the work with the most serious political ramifications. Only those severely damaged in the head by the series would claim it’s worse than ICBMs or that its reverberations may exceed those of Triumph of the Will. Nobody can see humanity’s entire future, can they, so assertions like this are just silly.
As she recovered in hospital after another booze and wrestling relapse brought on by the series, Trinna announced that if a Milky Way-wide contest for the worst art fiascos in the galaxy came to Earth looking for contenders, then they’d obviously pick Season 3, which would go on to blow away the galactic competition. But that’s daft talk from a woman with serious hormonal issues and who when she made the comment was also high on morphine. The Milky Way is bloody gigantic, Trinna.
Season 3 is so bad, however, that it was played in common rooms in Spain’s most punitive prisons. It is the only TV series in history so bad it was investigated by the FBI. It is so bad it made people run naked in the streets, made them banshee-wail and actually tear out their hair as they demanded to know of the heavens and passing strangers: Why? It is so bad that watching it becomes a weird form of religious experience. Its honkingness actually makes your body hum. You’re not going to end up concluding it’s bad but not historically bad, and that I’ve overpromised on its vileness. This will be a different kind of ride altogether.
It can’t be emphasised enough, though, that at least in the usual sense Mr Lynch is a separate being from the ten-dimensional demon that possessed his mind and body, and he therefore wasn’t responsible for the carnage of The Return. It was this entity, which came to be known, a little inaccurately, as the Demonic Twin of David Lynch, that passed itself off as the great man and used his industry reputation and contacts to write, film and air the worst-ever work of art.
As a result the great man couldn’t proclaim his innocence over the carnage, because he was no longer in charge of his own mouth, or of any part of his body, so he couldn’t even proclaim his innocence using mime or sign language. He was completely impotent.
But as with Mr Trump, Mr Putin, Santiago Abascal’s Vox, etc., it isn’t only The Return or the Twin that’s the issue but also their brainwashed followers. Without his champions in the media and elsewhere Mr Trump would have continued to assault women, claim certain women are too unappealing to assault, and all the rest, but he could not have potentially destroyed life on this planet forever. And without the cult devoted to David Lynch, the Twin would have continued to supervise everything across nine or ten dimensions but the catastrophe would never have got made or found an audience.
The Twin and the nine non-demonic entities involved knew there would be no other cult anywhere so vulnerable to pretentious mince, so cowed by cult dogma, that they wouldn’t still watch and spread the word about even a historically bogging show. Plus exactly like followers of Mr Trump and of at least one other boomer whose hair has a compelling history, this cult had long since abandoned reason in its defences and celebrations of the great man’s works. You can’t explain them, fella, because they’re not meant to make sense as such. They’re kind of joking but kind of not. They’re 5D chess. I just know they’re amazing and that’s that. Some can just see it and others can’t. This sort of woolliness is ideal if you want a cult following to feel comfortable promoting and defending the indefensible.
Providing yet more cover for the disaster was the fact that Lynch hadn’t worked in TV drama for many years. People simply wouldn’t have accepted that Hiro Murai or Steve McQueen or Andrea Arnold was responsible for a series as godawful as The Return. But a seventy-something hermit notorious for waggling fingers beside his head for no good reason, and for his ambition, transgression, tonal games and other risks that require peak form to pull off without shaming yourself—this was ideal cover for what the entities had planned.
When transgressive art works the rewards can be considerable, but when it honks you can end up with some of the very worst trash like Frédéric Beigbeder’s 6.99, or anything by Lucifer Valentine. Honking transgressive art is worse than virtually anything in our culture, worse than superhero films, reality TV, worse even than much of porn, which meant Mr Lynch’s reputation for risky transgression and audience-goading was perfect for the entities’ project.
It helped too that his music was increasingly unimpressive, and that the final six minutes of his last film before his possession, Inland Empire, featured actresses from his previous works appearing out of nowhere for a mortifying song and dance glorification of his career. In the build-up to The Return’s premiere many fans worried that it might prove a solipsistic mess, even if nobody, exactly nobody, anticipated the worst mess since the birth of our species.
But none of the above would have ensured US cable channel Showtime would fund and broadcast the mess. For that its bosses would need to have known beforehand that critical gatekeepers would either praise the series or if they disliked it keep this to themselves. In 1992 Fire Walk with Me got a real critical hammering, but then as the years went on the critics saw how wrong they’d been and every new Lynch film got obsequious reviews. The Twin therefore knew it could hit them with the worst thing they’d ever seen and like the rest of the cult they’d still sing out the praise.
Photo by Urbankayaker
A Hermit Wanders Down from the Hills
Once you know the full story of what happened here, including the depths the series reached, you’d have to be deep into the insanity of denial to believe it was made by Mr Lynch. It’s hardly surprising to stand by my higher power on this issue, but it’s also just objectively the case that bigheaded as he is, the man is still on a completely different artistic and spiritual plane to The Return, which in time became one of the biggest clues that someone, or something, other than Mr Lynch was behind the production.
As for the Demonic Twin, when you consider how low it had to sink to make this disaster, low even by the standards of hyperdimensional demons playing the heel, you almost feel sorry for the creature. But you don’t actually feel sorry for it, because the creature so overplayed the role of heel, sank so far below what the entities’ script called for, that it rendered itself beneath our pity.
Mr Lynch himself I have so much pity for. Picture it: there you are, minding your own business, maybe a quick watch of a Chrysta Bell promo and then with a burst of the old Transcendental Meditation quelling your impatience with the sycophancy of your actually or metaphorically manbunned colleagues. That’s better now, they aren’t that bad really, just folks experimenting with carefully considered hair-structures while trying to get on in the industry like you yourself once did on both fronts, and now look at you, a magnificent career and hairstyle-history behind you, respect from anyone who knows their cinema and TV drama and hair, a veritable Master of filmed drama and the noteworthy quiff—when out of Dark Matter a demon arrives to possess your three-dimensional presence and film the most bowfing pile of junk in history.
To think of Mr Lynch impotently trapped inside his human form, freaked-out inside that pitch-blackness, desperate for help that never comes, enduring the production in his name of the worst atrocity ever given the name of art… I’m not ashamed to say I have knelt beside my bed at night to pray long and hard on his behalf, and on behalf of the artform his Twin desecrated using his name. What it did to both was awful sad.
Before we look at The Return, I should explain why I’ll seldom be mentioning the series’ ostensible co-showrunner Mark Frost. The reason is there’s no indication I know of that he was possessed by a hyperdimensional demon planning to produce art’s ultimate shambles. None at all.
The Twin made it clear in the lead-up to its premiere that Frost was little more on the show than co-scriptwriter, an ugly moment and the first red eye-gleam of the demonic machinations soon confirmed by The Return. And because those machinations are so closely tied to the show’s demonic hoachingness, it would be irresponsible of me, low and dirty, the sort of thing that lands you in court, to claim that Frost was in on the machinations when he was merely the Twin’s oblivious script elf.
When I began to write this story down, Trinna asked me why I was bothering. Emmanuel Carrère, Maggie Nelson, Teofil Pančić, Louis Theroux, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek had published their books on Season 3’s controversies and mysteries to great success, Trinna pointed out, so was it not time to let these events go, live and let live as the GA/AA slogan had it, make my peace with it all, not risk another crackup over the series and simply move on?
Firstly, those books are nothing like comprehensive in their coverage of these events and are frequently just plain wrong, especially when it comes to the roles played by the entities and by me. So somebody who was there at the eye of the storm needs to put the record straight.
And anyway, I did let the events go, at one point. Due to psychic developments we’ll get to later, on the urging, the strong urging, of Les, Trinna, other GA/AA sponsees and friends, Jorge, doctors, nurses and patients at Santa Rita’s, Dougal and others, I used the Qustodio app to block access on my devices to any site or app with the words return, Lynch, kayfabe, cheesiness, so bad it’s good, if you can’t beat them join them, Franck Boulègue, Ella, Morrissey, Michael Gove, or skinny jeans on them, and asked Les to choose the Qustodio password and never reveal it to me. And it worked. Months and then years passed without me cornering Les before GA/AA meetings, sometimes with threats to wrestle him, to demand that password.
But then along came Covid-19 and the lockdowns and so much time drumming my fingers beside my mouse or phone. And that pressure-cooker feeling building in Madrid and my flat and skull, the lockdowns going on and on, all recovery meetings shut down, my somebody-please-infect-him neighbour roaring out ‘I Will Survive’ through a thin wall as I tried to sleep. On my most bewildered, broken days I even imagined the national 8pm applause for medical staff was actually for The Return, because it was originally shown here at that time. It was in fact 9pm.
But even more important was the way the virus forced everyone to consider their mortality and what genuinely mattered to them, big-picture stuff, and what genuinely mattered, I realised, was The Return’s monumental boggingness. For many of us those lockdowns were a chance to live at a slower pace and reflect on what sort of life we’d led and on the world we’d all created, what twelve thousand years of civilisation had led to: TV channels worldwide airing this vicious honkathon to whoops from the corporate culture’s gatekeepers.
Then in May 2024 the show hospitalised Ella, César Grez, Les, and others. Actually sent them off to San Rafael and de la Princesa hospitals in ambulances.
One time after she sobered and lightened up Trinna stood outside her latest rehab and asked the deepest part of herself what it was that she truly wanted to do in life now that she was free, she believed, of drink and grappling. And what she truly wanted to do in life, it turned out, was to become a more devout Nazi and Satanist.
Wearing goat horns on her nightguard cap she soon drunkenly charged and grappled Jorge with such force and heft it toppled his Ecologistas Insurreccionales HQ security hut, yet another relapse due to her lacking any kind of higher power, having tried and found insufficiently helpful Satan and various malign Thrones, Principalities and Archdemons with Latin names, the Serbian warlord Arkan, Tex-Mex ring legend One Tough Young Hombre, then her hatred of Season 3.
When after all this wasted time and effort I saw the obvious solution and proposed Adolf Hitler as a compassionate higher power to lend assistance in steering clear of drink and wrestling, Trinna glanced warily around the Parque del Oeste as though the Gestapo had disguised themselves as the park’s trans hookers and confessed that just between the two of us, when it came to the personality of Adolf Hitler she had certain reservations. At which point I had an out-of-body experience and looked down on my once again shortcircuiting brain and wondered how my life had led to this new WTF tableau, this former Revolutionary Communist nightguard and Grapplers Anonymous/Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor from Buckie suggesting that his giantess Satanist colleague from Serbia covered in master-race whiteheads adopt the Führer as her nurturing higher power and being turned down because the Führer was too weird.
Eventually Trinna got over her reservations, though, and gave the man a spin as her higher power. When tempted to drink or physically or mentally grapple, she admitted that due to years of relapses, she herself could no longer be trusted with this latest relapse decision, so she gave it over to this imaginary Hitler. As he wouldn’t wish Trinna to relapse and be an unproductive Nazi, he gave the relapse the thumbs-down. Therefore Trinna didn’t relapse.
This is a simplified and obviously absurdly Nazified summary of one way higher powers can function in recovery, and if you’re scoffing then great, that means you’ve never been so low and desperate you’d consider handing a pivotal life-decision over to an imaginary genocidal carpet-chewer. But the absurdity illustrates an important point, which is that you can choose whatever higher power you want so long as it’s not what goes on in your own head, i.e. your God’s not the very addict’s thoughts that have wrecked your life with relapses. Many transformative moments have this idea at their core, don’t they: Not me, not mine.
If there really is nothing in the entire universe superior to what goes on in your head, congratulations because you’re God/Allah/Yahweh/the Ultraverse/the Diamond and you can obviously handle not just booze and wrestling but a supercluster-sized cocktail of meth, fentanyl and datura.
I’d like to submit a complaint, however, regarding me and Dougal’s childhood, and also the opaque way you go about your business—for instance why would the Ultraverse choose you in particular as its earthly manifestation? Also regarding children’s access to porn, the existence of Mr Gove, plus this whole Lynch headwreck and one consequence in particular, and plenty of other stuff, actually.
Trinna’s now been sober and nongrappling for five months, really happy with her lovely girlfriend Claudia. ‘And even when she is not so lovely,’ Trinna told me, ‘you soon forget about this when you lose yourself Heiling with your camaradas in the dark woods,’ a line if not a specific sentiment I find curiously appealing.
She also told me there’s such a group as el Club de costura nacionalsocialista, the National Socialist Sewing Club, in those woods as well, where these bams gather to play Nazi death metal and sew swastikas and demons onto one another’s leathers. On Trinna’s recommendation a few of these growlers asked me for help with similar drink problems and consequent Nazism and Satanism problems, but when I handed the decision over to my own higher power, this imaginary Mr Lynch’s verdict was ‘No freakin way.’
But big Trinna there outside her rehab: the following year that was me. Shit had now got real with those hospitalisations and revealed my life’s mission, which was to get my Qustodio password from Les, research the subject in detail and depth once again, and solve the mystery of why, as we all believed at the time, Mr Lynch had made something as awful as Season 3.
A notable aspect of its first run from May to September 2017 was the way the media ignored this glaring metaphor for certain political developments, in the US and elsewhere too, not least the showy obscurantist eejitry within liberal culture that’s been so successfully exploited by the hard-right.
Notable as well is the way a series that topped so many best-of lists has been paid little attention generally. Women and young people showed hardly any interest in the thing, and the women who did watch it make up a substantial portion of its haters. Trinna ridiculed it just as much as I did, with Ella not far behind us, while her coven battled the spread of its malice with (frankly useless) hexes on its corporate-media champions. The book Laura’s Ghost on the subject of Twin Peaks’ female characters and fans, meanwhile, is highly complimentary about most of Twin Peaks, especially the humane treatment of victims of abuse, but much less so about The Return, no surprise considering its attitude to rape, which at times is worse than you’d see in hardcore porn (see the following section), and its portrayal of older women compared to older men.
And with many other Twin Peaks fans what happened was they quickly realised they were watching one of the most audience-unfriendly works ever made, and then switched it off and did something else with their precious free time and never returned to the mess.
If a hermit wanders down from the hills then streaks along the road yelling out contemptuous glossolalia at strangers, it’s natural to ignore him rather than engage with the finer details of his argument. But what if the corporate media’s ageing cultists are right behind him warbling with joy at every glossolalic syllable and proclaiming him the Master and Genius Auteur, and the hermit and his warblers bear strong resemblances to other boomer reactionaries with famous hair and their own berserk cults? And what if trapped inside the hermit’s body is the true Master and Genius Auteur?
The expression ‘It’s in our house now’ is used in the series to refer to the evil unleashed by the first atomic-bomb test, but it can be applied to the series itself. The gatekeepers didn’t do their job and it got into our house. All this deserves attention. There’s a story here. The Return really was Event Television.
The Absolute Rock Bottom
IT HAS MANY ASPECTS that by themselves would turn any work into a disaster, but it also has a rock bottom that’s far worse than anything else in the series and therefore in art generally.
To give you an idea of how bad it is let’s look at the series’ honkingness piechart and Diane Evans’ consensual Sex Magick! (César Grez’s punctuation and spelling) with a crime boss, serial killer and serial rapist who previously raped her, an attack we aren’t shown but that was so horrific it transformed her whole outlook on life.
Throughout the Sex Magick! scene Diane the former FBI secretary, played by Mr Lynch’s friend Laura Dern, has to gaze down upon the face of her Kyle MacLachlan-played violator Mr C as she has intercourse with him cowgirl style, sometimes twisting her face in distress. This experience in an alternate dimension is worth it, though, the tight-trousered, greying-manbunned Lynch cultists say, because by having sex with this man whose forced penetration of her was so appalling it transformed her personality for decades, she is somehow in a way never made clear—it’s Magick!—arguably helping summon across dimensional planes the rumoured ultrahorror Jowday, who will then arguably be destroyed in a way never made clear by a woman’s unexplained scream arguably doing funny things in a way never made clear to the electricity in the house where the rumoured ultrahorror arguably lives, though not a single bit of this gets portrayed onscreen.
Diane Evans provokes Sex Magick!
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You might think if you’re going to have a character voluntarily go the bed with someone who raped them, it’s a moment to be treated with delicacy and can only be justified in the most serious of contexts. All I’ve given so far is an outline of the Sex Magick! + Scream/Electricity Magick!’s rankness, which we’ll look at in more detail later on, but I hope we can agree that this outline is nothing like a serious enough context for this scene. We can agree too that especially in the absence of such a context the scene is artistically vile.
And when it was first broadcast nobody was even aware of this context involving arguably beckoning a rumoured entity, so there was no context at all, which makes the viewer wonder why a woman might hop into bed with a man who attacked her in this way. We hardly need to spell out the implication here, especially as when Diane covers up her rapist’s face she is extremely turned-on. And we get a full four minutes, among the longest sex scenes in TV history, to let this implication sink in. With this part of The Return, and the equally vile scenes before and after it, we’re close to the essence of why the series isn’t just a letdown but a moral and artistic stinker and why some of us don’t just dislike it but despise it.
But it gets worse. With this series it always gets worse. When you focus on any element of it, even something you’re already blinking your eyes at in disbelief, you find sooner or later you’ve missed something honking. It’s uncanny. It’s like its honkingness is somehow fractal, except that instead of smaller the deeper you go the show just gets more and more honking, yet another quality unique to it and that must surely be down to demonic manipulation of the laws of physics or the laws of honkingness, and so eventually helped uncover the demonic secret at the heart of this mystery.
This sex scene, critic Franck Boulègue enthuses, is a nod to the intercourse Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle have near the end of Finnegans Wake. That’s right, one of the lowest moments in screen history tries to yoke itself to the work of perhaps the West’s greatest novelist.
You may be aware that despite being a famously expansive, imaginative portrayal of humanity, Joyce’s novel features no scene in which someone has sex with their rapist to somehow beckon a rumoured evil entity across dimensions to her offpage doom, arguably, or anything remotely like that. And Anna Livia Plurabelle doesn’t strike you as the type to go in for rumoured-entity-beckoning sex with her rapist, because nobody strikes you as that type.
Notice the lack of correspondence between this moment in the trainwreck and the celebrated work it’s so desperate to allude to, how poorly thought-out and pretentious the allusion is. From start to finish the series keeps including this kind of thing, and it’s toe-curling.
Notice too the failure of the series’ critical admirer, hardly Boulègue’s only failure in this regard, to see that the detail he’s discovered is awful. This failure is standard for the critical wing of The Return’s cult, for whom anything discovered about the series, however minging it is to the rest of us, must by definition be admirable because of the quiffed showrunner’s name.
For practically any other work, this Sex Magick! + the stretched Finnegans Wake reference would constitute its low point. But not for this dud, not even close. Ella said it makes up only about 0.5% of the dud’s honkingness piechart, while Trinna put it at roughly 1%, estimates that are emphatically not to downplay its repugnance but instead give a sense of the scale of the dud’s repugnance in total. It means that at most this twisted debacle of a sequence makes up a mere hundredth of this drama’s honkingness.
You could say the same of no other work of our era, or any era. If Morrissey’s novella List of the Lost contained this debacle it would constitute over half of the book’s honkingness—call it 60%—meaning that The Return might be more than a hundred times worse than one of the worst anglophone publications of my lifetime, which seems about right. A thousand times worse would be too much, I think, while ten times would be nowhere near enough.
These are all guesses, obviously, and due to the fractal nature of the show’s honkingness likely to be revised downwards, always downwards, because no matter how bad you think a particular element is you later see there are new levels of junk to discover beneath it, then new levels beneath them, and on and on downwards. Humans will never get their heads around the vastness of this pie.
So what percentage does the rock bottom make up? Say the figure was 10%. This would mean the rock bottom is between ten and twenty times worse than the Sex Magick! + the stretched Finnegans Wake reference. That’s pretty grim.
But the rock bottom is far grimmer. That sex scene is repellent but it doesn’t induce Rock Bottom Lock, in which not only do your toes curl backwards but your entire lower legs also want to. According to Ella and Les, Rock Bottom Lock curls your knees not downwards but upwards, and you have to face the ultrahorror of that rock bottom with your thighs horizontal but your shins pointed up above you. Ella found herself on the floor with her legs lifted involuntarily and her ankles curled so far back her toes were pointed at her face, and she remained stuck like that for four days in San Rafael hospital.
I’m convinced no other artistic effort in history could induce such urges in your legs, and that no archaeologist has ever discovered a human corpse with Rock Bottom Lock, or such a posture daubed in prehistoric times on a cave wall. It’s not impossible that were it able to perceive The Return’s rock bottom on Planet Earth, the Milky Way would curl in upon itself a little more.
And it was the knowledge their hero Mr Lynch was responsible for the worst artistic choice in history that caused Rock Bottom Lock in so many. As you can imagine, that was a really horrible time. Lots of folk couldn’t deal with it. Bodies locked and hyperventilated. Molars were ground to dust. Anuses clamped so hard and long their owners had to get colostomy bags, or as people labelled the things, Bottom Bags.
Many cultists have of course gone into denial about the rock bottom, and who can blame them? If it’s a choice between teeth ground to dust, and denial that your hero made a surpassingly humiliating decision, who can blame you if you choose denial? Although as you’ll see, thankfully a third option came along when the showrunner was revealed to be not Mr Lynch but his Demonic Twin.
I’ll only give a rough estimate here, because the human mind just isn’t equipped to accurately map these levels of honkingness: the fact is that of The Return’s enormous pie, the rock bottom makes up between 30% and 40%. Les says this is too low, but if the rock bottom’s sent you to A&E then you’re likely biased. Call it 33% for now, a third of that colossal honking pie. It’s that bad, up to sixty-six times more awful than the Sex Magick! etc. It isn’t as sick, or its sickness isn’t as unsubtle, but because its repercussions permeate every scene and are so artistically cataclysmic, it is many times worse.
It is the series’ masterstroke, its honkingness Ragnarök. If the rest of it feels like having hook after hook tear and tug at your skin, as in Hellraiser but over nearly twenty hours and with not dozens of hooks but thousands, then the rock bottom is that climactic explosion that splatters every part of you throughout the room: Jesus wept. List of the Lost’s pie wouldn’t have enough space to fit it in. You’d need nineteen more pies.
Honkingness piechart with Sex Magick! and the Rock Bottom
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If you haven’t already heard about it, I challenge you to guess what this rock bottom is. No prizes or anything, but if you can guess it you’re probably a genius. A frightening genius, but a genius nonetheless. So unlikely is it that any merely three-dimensional being can guess this rock bottom, though, that you’ll need some clues. One is The Return making Mr Lynch look a supreme diddy.
The fact is that with this production, I’m sorry to say, the entities decided for some murky 10D reason to make David Lynch look the biggest human diddy who’s ever lived. Not among the biggest, but the biggest, and by quite a distance. All four of us—Ella, Les, Trinna and I—agreed on this. Unbelievable cruelty, and I said so when I eventually merged minds with the Twin.
No other project has made its artist seem a more egomaniacal diddy than does this farce. It’s not the pure heroin vision of David Lynch but the pure cocaine vision. Certain projects have made their artist look more vicious and have been more harmful politically, but none has made them look a bigger diddy, throbber, eejit, balloon, galoot. The show makes Mr Lynch look vicious as well, but its speciality, its obsessive focus is on making this folksy grandpa who meditates twice every day seem an even bigger diddy than the second-biggest diddy of all time, who is of course Mr Trump. I’m not saying Mr Lynch is a bigger diddy than Mr Trump, never mind more vicious, certainly not, but what the Twin did in this show makes him look it.
As Les pointed out when we played noncompetitive table tennis after discussing my deteriorating state of mind at the time, and agreeing a plan to stave off complete collapse: ‘Trump’s strengths, in this match-off anyhow, are in the volume and breadth of his arseholery. Or in its relative volume and breadth, the incredible relentlessness of it and the incredible range of areas of life where he’s been a dick. But in The Return the strength of the unhinged hermit,’ as he now called Mr Lynch, ‘is in just how low he sinks.
‘The only time Trump’s dickishness has been well and truly Returnian, in public anyhow, was when he came close to surprising them bereaved parents of that runover teenager with a meeting with the woman who killed him. Near sprang a surprise face-off between them. Remember that? A meeting like that would have made a classic scene in The Return, wouldn’t it, lapped up by the fans and chortled away at by them tools recapping the thing in the papers.
‘But a compilation lasting eighteen hours of even Trump’s utmost dickish public moments couldn’t compete with what the series done to how we see the hermit, because it wouldn’t be supernatural enough. A bit supernatural, no doubt, but nothing compared to the demonic demolishing of the hermit’s reputation by eighteen hours of previously unimaginable shit like the Sex Magick!’, to say nothing of the erasure of the erasure of the erasure, and other abhorrent elements we’ll cover soon that accompany this. ‘Compared to all this,’ Les said, ‘Trump calling women pigs and dogs isn’t just not too bad behaviour, but gentlemanly class and charm.’
This is one of several facts about the series that it took me longer than Les to realise, that it makes Mr Lynch, the higher power I chose to help me stop physically and mentally wrestling people outside the bedroom and stop boozing, look the most farcical person who’s ever existed. Which will sound like hyperbole, I’m sure, but it won’t for long.
I have got hysterical on this subject. Red-faced, wide-eyed, squeaky-voiced. All four of us have. Our tone when discussing it was sometimes panic-stricken or worse. None of us has experience with anything as historically unusual as this, anything this abnormal, let alone how you’re supposed to talk about it. Even so, we still weren’t too panicked for the subject matter. I insist on that. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and just because you’re panicked doesn’t mean this atrocity doesn’t deserve it.
Nonetheless it took much watching, rewatching, palpitating, and squeaking for us to understand that The Return is not merely the worst-ever TV drama but the worst artistic endeavour of any kind. What finally swung it was wondering if we’d seen stuff as bad as the Sex Magick! and the like elsewhere, in any medium, from any era, or even heard of anything that bad, and the answer being Never, nowhere near so often that eventually it became clear no other work in history could possibly have been this rank.
That’s a question you might ask yourself, therefore, as we look at aspects of The Return: When have I ever come across anything as bad as this elsewhere, that makes the artist look this bad, or even heard of anything as bad?
There may come a point where you’ve been brutalised by so many Return horrors that they no longer seem horrific. This is the point where that Sex Magick! sequence gets little more than a shrug. So what, you think, I’ve seen worse. And it’s true, you will have seen worse in this abomination, far worse. Nonetheless, to shrug off that sequence as no big deal means you’re on the brink of derangement.
Thankfully there’s a solution, however, a way to bring you back to your senses, and that’s to imagine it was you yourself who inserted into a long-awaited TV revival a scene where a woman played by your friend becomes fiercely aroused getting it on with her rapist to arguably summon a rumoured ultrahorror across dimensions so she can be foiled offscreen by a scream/electrics miracle, arguably, and that this sex is a stretched allusion to Finnegans Wake. Yes, you. You did this.
See? Now your bottom’s healthily clamping away again, isn’t it? No more shrugging off the Sex Magick! now, is there? You’ve pulled back from the brink and are once more comfortably among the sane.
You may doubt too for a while that The Return’s as historically notable as the invention of language. You’re going to see much sooner, though, that performances of Shakespeare’s plays at the original Globe, Europe’s discovery of the Americas, the Crucifixion of Christ, or the Buddha’s enlightenment beneath his tree are perfectly reasonable comparisons, if anything somewhat underegged. Because the fact is that something took place in recent years whose historic nature is easily on a par with those events, and you can watch clips of it anytime you want.
Think of it. You were around when the two biggest diddies of the last three thousand centuries were alive and kicking and diddying about the place, two white male septuagenarian US reactionaries with attention-grabbing hair and the most galootish megalomania ever witnessed, and also when the most grotesque art catastrophe of all those centuries occurred. And one was lauded as the greatest exponent of our most influential artform, one as the greatest example of that artform, and one was handed the nuclear firepower to destroy life on earth forever. What a time to be alive!
Like the very Dark Matter that spawned it, The Return was all around us yet hardly anyone knew it was there. This is why at times you feel like an apostle as you collar people at recovery meetings or Atlético games or Santa Rita’s, corner them in the carpark with Trinna and actually grab one collar each and insist this visitor hears out what we’ve witnessed and what we know. Please don’t ever mistake these pages for mere whines about a disappointing telly series. They are instead the equivalent of acolytes’ stunned and therefore sometimes gibbering recitals of everything we just learned from Christ himself, albeit in reverse. Our Good News is Very Bad News. Our Tidings are by no means Glad.
There will be more clues to the rock bottom as we go along, which we’ll mark like this: ^^. An important clue is that this artistic rock bottom was caused by the same factors, precisely the same, as cause the rock bottoms of alcoholics and those addicted to drugs or sex or grappling or similar. You have a better chance of guessing The Return’s rock bottom, therefore, if you’ve experienced your own and understood what lay behind it.
In a sense this challenge isn’t fair, because what the Twin did in this instance is unprecedented. No other TV series, or any film, novel or play’s come close to doing it. No human’s managed it in its entirety in any context and never will, not even any addict (though, and here’s your next clue ^^, one part of it’s been managed by pharaohs who thought they were gods). So you won’t only have to think outside the box but outside the human. You’ll have to think like a seriously sadistic demon.
Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey
The Descent into Hell
THE ROAD AHEAD REMAINS DIFFICULT. Showtime and dozens more channels worldwide may still sue me, in gentrified parts of Madrid I still get gobbed at by strangers wearing jumpers with asymmetric sleeves, and I’m still emailed promises to drown Ella, Trinna, Les, his dog Stanley and me in a bath of rat droppings and dress our corpses in too-tight jeans. But such practical challenges can be overcome with the appropriate countersuits and, if only as a last resort, my most painful and humiliating throws.
The real challenge, and I’m uncertain if I’m up to it, is to get across using human language the true magnitude of The Return’s rottenness. Short of describing it in demonic tongues, which I’m not yet prepared to risk, communicating this will probably be beyond me.
Les has even claimed the show’s worse than the worst pornography, because at least porn’s upfront when it comes to its depravity. It doesn’t aim for or elicit accolades from the cultural elite. Have a think about this. Whether it’s worse or not, what kind of TV drama could be so depraved a seen-it-all type like Les would even consider comparing it to porn featuring rape or torture? That’s what this series does to you. It is cosmically bad. It is inconceivably bad.
I mean that. We need to accept that an all-time catastrophe made by a ten-dimensional demon will reach depths impossible for any three-dimensional being, me certainly included, to get their head around. We therefore need to accept as well that not only will courage be required on this journey but humility too. However far our jaws drop or however wide our minds are stretched—picture Bowman juddering through the vortex in 2001: A Space Odyssey—we must never let arrogance convince us we’ve a true sense of the scale of this abomination.
It’s probable that three-dimensional beings aren’t even supposed to try to comprehend that scale. It isn’t too late to stop reading. The Return’s destroyed marriages, engagements, sex lives, friendships, security teams, hairstyles, shoes, toes, ankles, knees, bottoms, minds, entire identities, sobrieties, nonwrestling streaks, reputations, made people apathetic or in one case pleased about some of these destructions, made people authentically despairing about modern corporate culture, turned tranquil Rottweilers into furious maniacs, induced uncanny out-of-body subspace experiences, and as we’ll see reduced people to babbling wrecks, made them build dioramas of the town of Twin Peaks in their flat, wallpaper their flat with pages from Mr Morrissey’s novella, and believe the series’ title lettering was beaming down at them from the sky, that its green rays had infected and puppeteered the whole of the Ultraverse.
And even if you make it through more or less unscathed and inside your own skin and not puppeteered by imaginary lettering, you might still find yourself shouting on street corners to alert your fellow citizens to the fact that this show ever existed.
Dante gets thrown into the conversation sometimes by its fans, and I suppose you can only nod along. It has made Twin Peaks as a whole a kind of Divine Comedy in reverse, which kicked off in the first fourteen episodes with a kind of TV heaven, which was followed by an annoying but not yet horrific purgatory with the next fourteen, and then a headlong plummet with Season 3 all the way down to actual TV hell. But I have been in hell many times before. I know the footholds, secret paths, dead ends, deceptive signposts (Shambolic Means Authentic; Not Quite So Abominable on a Fourth or Fifth Watch; Hours of Dead Air on TV Are a Handy Shortcut to the Transcendental Void).
If you feel up to it, then, let’s commence on this journey through hell and try to get some sense of its barbarities. And as you’ll see, like attempts to comprehend a black hole with a tape measure, normal states of mind are unequal to this task. Nothing about The Return is normal, and that includes what’s required to start comprehending it. To provide even a glimmer of its real nature, we’ll need to employ unusual measures and tools.
I suppose I have to say it: there will be plenty of spoilers. But I also have to say that whenever anyone uses the word spoiler in relation to this series, implying that it could possibly be spoiled for your average viewer, somehow made less enjoyable, that’s when I feel the approach in my brain of full-blown psychosis.
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