The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 3

Comic-Turn Green Glove Versus Pantomime-Pinballing-Blob BOB ^ The One ^ The Erasures ^ The Prank

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picking the best-written books

Apr 21, 2024

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.

Killer BOB as a pinballing blob

Comic-Turn Green Glove Versus Pantomime-Pinballing-Blob BOB

IN 1991 IN THE WOODS outside Buckie in Morayshire, Maddy and Demmy threw a Twin Peaks-themed fancy-dress party for my eleventh birthday. Killer BOBs in denim, Special Agent Dale Coopers in FBI raincoats, Laura Palmer and other schoolgirls in uniform, beatniks in caps and leather jackets, red-suited children as backwards-talking dwarfs. Torches and strobelights flashed in the dark, red drapes hung from the trees, speakers played the Twin Peaks soundtrack album Dougal had just given me for Christmas.

As we watched Demmy crack himself up doing Leland’s bereavement dance, Dougal handed me my birthday presents, a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky, and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer. I read it hungover the next day and by the end believed I was the only person who knew who’d killed Laura Palmer: Laura Palmer had.

In Twin Peaks Sheryl Lee plays both blonde Laura and her mousy brunette cousin Maddy Ferguson. So what if, said my insight, the Laura found dead wrapped in plastic by the lakeside wasn’t in fact Laura but Maddy with her hair dyed blonde? What if Laura faked her own death in this way, dyed her own hair brown and returned home to… well, here the theory fizzled out. But not a single person in school had claimed Laura had killed herself, and now the diary’s scenes with BOB invading her thoughts had helped me solve the mystery fascinating lots of people I knew.

I was of course wrong. While BOB could access Laura’s mind, it turned out he didn’t live there. In Season 2 we discover that he lives within her father Leland.

In the diary she says this about her times with BOB in early childhood:

Sometimes he would cut me between my legs, and other times he would cut me inside my mouth. Always tiny little cuts, hundreds of tiny little cuts. I had to use a flashlight in the bathroom or else my parents might wake up and see the light, and I’d be in worse trouble then.
Some nights he would make me sticky. Rub himself very fast, and he would say that I had to hold the sticky in my hands, close my eyes, and recite this little poem while I licked my hands clean. I only remember a little. This hasn’t happened for a long time, the sticky. He made me say:
The little bitch
Is awfully sorry
The little bitch
Drinks you up
(I can’t remember more, except the last line.)
In this seed is death indeed.

A question for you about the demon responsible for this debasement and torture of an infant. How would you feel about this character’s storyline culminating in pantomime giggles?

How would you have felt if near the climax of Red Riding or True Detective 1 or The Stranger some peripheral Mockney comic turn called Green Glove (played by Jake Wardle) appeared onscreen and kerpowwwed and thwaakked the child-torturer, who’s now in the form of a pinballing blob, with a magical gardening glove until they exploded, and that was the end of both them and the central storyline that revolved around them? Because in The Return’s two-hour finale this is how the BOB who sliced the infant Laura’s vagina hundreds of times is defeated.

Freddie Sykes AKA Green Glove

After this child-rape and -torture plotline featured in the original Twin Peaks and in Fire Walk with Me, many real-life victims of such acts expressed gratitude that at last the subject had been treated in mainstream filmed drama with the seriousness and sensitivity it deserved. Now picture us watching the 2017 climax of this vagina-slicer’s storyline played like the Penguin’s defeat in the camp ‘60s TV Batman. Kerplopp! Zwaapp!

The comic Mockney’s glove that performs this zwaapp on the vagina-slicer and molester, by the way, refers in the show’s usual pretentious way to a glove in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. Are you getting a sense of what we’re dealing with? And this is just one scene. The 1000 minutes in total have so much material like this that in all seriousness it suggests demonic possession of the writer-director-producer-star responsible. Their artistic and ethical judgement can’t be trusted. Nor can their motives.

From Blue Velvet onwards Mr Lynch has often been labelled a corrupting force who’s got away with it due to the critics bowing at his feet. I still don’t believe that was fair comment on the man who made the original Twin Peaks or The Straight Story but it undoubtedly fits the Demonic Twin of David Lynch that in The Return gave us the scene in Part 10, which you’re meant to find so-bad-it’s-good funny, where the mentally disabled Johnny Horne, played by Eric Rondell, topples over tied to a chair and for three screened minutes twists around bewildered and terrorised on the floor as Mantovani’s muzak standard ‘Charmaine’ plays and a toy teddy bear repeats over fifty times in an English accent ‘Hello, Johnny. How are you today?’.

The showrunner that wrote and directed segments like this appears at best highly irresponsible, the sort of balloon who trolls on 4chan about rape, disability, and girls and women they find unworthy of their sexual favours. You could see 4channers playing a vagina-cutter’s comeuppance and a disabled man’s terror for pantomime titters, couldn’t you? In fact, for those who’ve never seen it, that might be a way to start getting a sense of this disaster, to picture it as some antisocial, porn-addicted, rape-entertained, rape-curious 4channer’s Twin Peaks sequel, with himself cast as the only clearly admirable central character in a world of people he fears and therefore scorns. 4chan Does Twin Peaks.

Johnny Horne in terror

It’s okay to call out Green Glove versus BOB, I take it. Things surely haven’t gone so far that we can’t object to a child-torturer’s storyline being played for laughs. Of the other adults I know who were abused as children a fair number have a dark sense of humour, and we fire off the occasional joke among ourselves to relieve the heaviness of talk about abuse. But none of us would consider resolving an abuser’s TV storyline with any kind of pantomime, and nor would you, I expect, especially if you or anyone close to you’s e.g. had their genitals sliced or been forced to lick up an abuser’s semen. There’s a Line you don’t cross and resolving BOB’s storyline like that is way beyond it.

And it isn’t just the comic-turn and pantomime-pinballing-blob business, it’s the fact that in the overall Twin Peaks story this comic turn is a complete nobody, just some security guard plucked from nowhere to see off this character the whole story’s revolved around. It’s as though in The Sopranos that unfortunate gardener Sal Vitro ran into Holsten’s, tickled Tony’s ribs and threw onion rings at Carmela and A.J., and then killed the three of them with a slap from his gammy arm, followed by that final cut to black. That kind of denouement really would deserve years of controversy.

Except for this comparison to work these three Sopranos should now be in the form of blobs and have sliced Meadow for years before bludgeoning her to death, with her murder the central act of the series. Years of careful cuts in Meadow’s genitals, years of her licking up her father and brother’s semen, then Tony, Carmela and A.J. pulverise her skull until she dies, then into Holsten’s runs Sal the gardener… and on his head he’s got toy antlers. I’m seeing antlers with little Christmas bells. Plus Green Glove has a comedy accent that’s flagrantly irrelevant in the context, so how about we have the gardener-assassin in his antlers deliver a denunciation of the child-torturers in a stock Chinese accent, as he slaps these Meadow-slicers in the form of pinballing blobs till they explode, here in Holsten’s, in The Sopranos’ finale scripted by David Chase and aired by HBO?

Does that comparison work? If that was The Sopranos’ finale would it be okay to call it out as off-colour, twisted, not really what we hoped for when we started out eighty-six episodes ago?

No, it still doesn’t work. That denunciation of the Sopranos’ depravity implies some link between the comic-turn Chinese gardener-assassin and Meadow, whereas Green Glove and Laura Palmer have no link of any kind.

Also, for this final attempt at a Sopranos comparison to work no corporate reviewer, not one of them, would mention the antlers or the fact that this comic turn wasn’t exactly an appropriate choice as the Meadow-cutting-Sopranos’ assassin who brought this main storyline to an end in the finale. And that never would have happened, that conspiracy of silence, so we’re in the realms of the impossible. Plus David Chase wasn’t inhabited by a hyperdimensional demon, was he?

Bill Nighy in The Boat That Rocked

The One

IT ISN’T EASY to find comparisons to The Return that work. It’s so extreme, so out-there, that beyond the Twin’s unreleased Season 4 it doesn’t resemble anything else. Based on the information you have so far, what would you say it resembles?

We can’t even say other artistic disasters, or I can’t. Think of the mingingest works you’ve come across, the ones where your toes curl so hard and often they nearly puncture your shoes. Anything that threatens your shoes like that must be pretty bad. But this ultraminger leaves none of your shoes intact. If all you did was watch or think about it there is no theoretical limit to the number of shoes it could wreck.

And thinking about it poses a worse threat to your shoes than mere watching does. On a surface level Twin Peaks: The Return is the world’s worst-ever TV drama, but when you explore it in some depth, see what its showrunner was really up to, that’s when it gets supernaturally bad. Many of its most excruciating elements don’t hit you right away. You need to step back and study the canvas in its totality, or as much of it as you can, to even start to perceive what the Twin saw fit to produce here. And if you do, you better not be wearing shoes. Doesn’t matter whether they’re steelcapped or titanium-capped, your big toes will shoot right up through them, and that can be quite dangerous. In fact with these worst elements, as well as your toes curling up and back your ankles do too. These elements aren’t just toe-curling but ankle-curling.

And the series’ rock bottom can go one step further and have your lower legs trying to curl upwards at the knee-joints. This is why it’s best to watch or think about The Return at home. You don’t want to remember that rock bottom while you’re in the cinema, or a dentist’s chair. You don’t want to be Les at a GA meeting as the bohemian across the table complains that he wasn’t breast-fed as a baby, and your mind drifts off to the rock bottom… then the elaborate multiple curl begins, you can’t help it, cogs turn within cogs, then the whole table’s risen and you’ve an oddly angled and hard to explain Reebok at the bitter bohemian’s throat.

Artistic Disaster used to be a category for me containing roughly a dozen items. Now it just contains The One, with a capital T and O. What might previously have seemed like Chernobyls or great oil spills can no longer get anywhere near artistic-disaster status because the entire category has been occupied and filled to bursting point by The One, so they either fade from your memory or suddenly gleam with non-ultimate-vileness and rise in your estimation to assume their place in the Noble Failure category, or Maybe I Missed the True Intent There, or simply Richard Curtis or Morrissey.

E.g. The Boat That Rocked, a bizarrely acidic Curtis comedy about 1960s pirate radio, featuring some of the greatest pop ever recorded, a strong if unexpectedly hoary cast, a preponderance of genteel Home Counties types who keep the dreams of rock‘n’roll afloat, oddly desolate repartee passed off as knowingness and hip, and clangers so frequent and troubling they guaranteed it disaster status, at least until Season 3 came along. When at the film’s climax the sextagenarian Bill Nighy proclaims ‘Wock‘n’wewl!’ into the camera, you could feel reality warp around you as it tried to cope with what was spawning on the screen. (He doesn’t actually pronounce the r’s in Rock‘n’roll as w’s, but you can’t help feeling he should).

My friendship with César Grez was originally shaped years ago by joint admiration for Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me and dislike for The Boat That Rocked. We’d try to speak about other subjects but usually drifted back to that show and those films and then the conversation would take off in quality and intensity. An odd guy, César. He has a real liking for lettuces and eats them in one go, not removing the leaves or anything but instead just crunching his way through like it’s a giant apple.

We found work together as bouncers at a nightclub just off Sol, then after we were sacked for thieving crates of Guinness got jobs in a hostel in las Letras as nightporters. One night an orgy took place across the ground floor, and as César and I were on MDMA we accepted the invitation to join in. Since everyone else was on MDMA as well it was better than expected, gentler and less pornographic, although still pornographic enough with young women bent over the toilet sinks and guys behind them.

We were behind two Norwegian sisters when César and I began to do Bill Nighy’s dancing from The Boat That Rocked, unpleasantly posh sextagenarian dancing, angular, chaotic, uptight yet supercilious. The sisters had no problem with it, though, because if anything this added a certain funkiness to everybody’s rhythm, plus nightporters doing a posh actor’s angular sextagenarian dancing from a Richard Curtis turkey during an orgy were probably not the worst holiday anecdote to take home. In our canon of lows from The Boat That Rocked, the only moment rated lower than Nighy’s dancing was his Wock‘n’wewl, so that was next at the sinks, to smoulder at our angular dancing and then Wock‘n’wewl at each other and the sisters, who fled the toilets.

In the morning our boss Cruz came in and went spare at the mess: a diaphragm on the pool table, different liquids across the floors, bare footprints on the marble reception counter. When I couldn’t explain the footprints, managing instead just MDMA-comedown mumbles, Cruz asked if I’d lost my mind.

I tried that trick that usually gets management off your case, which is to gaze past them with a slackjawed look suggesting you’re too dim to waste time on. This had worked on Cruz several times previously when he’d inquired about my mental state, but that day he asked the question again, a question I carefully thought about and then as though in someone else’s voice answered, ‘It doesn’t feel like I’ve lost my mind’ (No se siente como si estuviera loco). Which isn’t really the answer your boss wants to that question, so he fired me on the spot.

Over the next few days I had some form of breakdown due to that answer surprising me as much as it had Cruz, leading to weeks of fairly serious mental collapse and delusion—combusting furniture, tiny soldiers in my food—my own rock bottom till the Lynch-related crisis in 2024, and to the eventual understanding that I basically had lost my mind to booze and pills. At which point Intimidante Security took me on and I was rostered, funnily enough, at Santa Rita’s.

César was also fired and I never saw him again until weeks before our premiere party for The Return. The series then revealed him to be a brainwashed Lynch cultist, sadly, which made me hate it all the more, and made him rip me off as well. For a long time he owed me €400 for my half of the domain thereturn.es that we bought ahead of the show’s premiere and that he soon banned me from, this the same César who I’d got taken on as a guard at Santa Rita’s when Har quit to become a shaman. But I suppose, I used to tell myself, we’ll always have The Boat That Rocked and Wock‘n’ wewl.

Nowadays, though, I can’t see what all the fuss was about. The Boat That Rocked is one of the worst English films ever made, and you’re seldom more than thirty seconds from a wince or shudder, and it might infiltrate your drug trips for years, and a five-month The Boat That Rocked really would constitute a historic low, but as it stands: big deal. Nobody’s going to struggle to understand how bad it is, and it’s hardly the kind of thing a transdimensional demon would bother possessing Curtis to make.

The novella List of the Lost was published in September 2015, the exact time filming began on the abomination, and was written by another white male boomer with illustrious hair who peaked decades ago and then fell into reactionary bowfingness that wrecked his legacy, but who still has a cohort of followers who get angry at anyone who criticises him. Mr Morrissey’s book contains so many similarities to The Return that you have to wonder if it was some sort of demonic rehearsal. It too is a pretentious, incoherent, boring, misanthropic work about American culture, child abuse, murder, unnerving woodland, bleak sex, disillusion, contempt, old age, demonic entities, and aversion to human physicality, especially female physicality. It appears to have had no editor, so what we get is the unfiltered, uncut figurative cocaine vision of Mr Morrissey. It too is full of obscure digressions and the writer’s self-overestimation. It too is supposed to be a work of fiction but is instead little more than a platform for the opinions, fetishes and speculations of the writer, e.g. 1975 Bostoners surely weren’t as fussed as this when it came to the mooted secret homosexuality of Winston Churchill.

It is full of implausible dialogue like ‘ “I have erotic curiosities,” topspins Ezra’. The writer doesn’t seem to respect women that much: ‘the lust of the woman is at first childlike and desperate—as if they know there is something about which they know nothing, and this itch takes on the aggressive’. Old people repeatedly and implausibly bed the attractive young. The sex scenes generally aren’t the best.

The book refuses to cohere into any kind of overall meaning, or often even temporary meaning: ‘Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral’; ‘Easy victories don’t await, but just rewards seem like a tasty cakewalk, a wrapped-up walkover, so neat and ready to breast the tape’; ‘In your face, in your face, in your face, lover do I never need as long as I have these that send me like the wind... the bullet of Justy as a hell-driver flyer with a disciplined land into Dibbs’ dry hand, and the new corner man faced the home straight with power-hitter grunts and Bunkie pluck as the bilge-free body speedballed with stirred stumps to beat the devil with scorch and sizzle and unfortunate dribble and snappy like crazy he somersaulted with pitching motion into a ferocious belly-flop tumble of a sprawled pratfall—face to the gravel, each limb slithered like snowslide subsidence.’

Publishing this book with Mr Morrissey’s name on the cover was just as cruel, led to the same kind of humiliation for the artist, as the casting of singer-songwriter Chrysta Bell as Tammy Preston in the abomination, which we’ll cover soon. And just like the abomination, List of the Lost is made even worse by the apparent belief of the artist that what he stands for is kindness and civility and his work is some kind of guide to better living for a populace a fair amount of which he appears to disdain, and by the fact that buried deep within this sloppy misanthropic mince is the odd flash of the brilliance he was once renowned for.

But if it was indeed a rehearsal, then a rehearsal is all it was, at most the equivalent of an afternoon’s Wehrmacht wargaming before the abomination’s Operation Barbarossa launched thousands of Panzers and Stukas and millions of troops along a two-thousand-mile front, followed by Einsatzgruppen and sadistic doctors.

Except for this comparison to really work brainwashed César-like Russians would need to have Sieg Heiled as they were bombed to pieces, starved to death, hanged by Einsatzgruppen, wouldn’t they? The point being, once more, that it’s hard to find comparisons to the abomination that work. List of the Lost is among the worst English-language books of the century, but with The Return we’re talking about the whole planet and the worst project since art was first invented. It isn’t ‘one of’ anything. The Return is The Return. It is The One.

We could say it resembles a mashup of elements of The Boat That Rocked, List of the Lost, 4chan, Operation Barbarossa, pro-wrestling, a Vox rally, a documentary on post-rape trauma, a pubescent Goth recluse’s own confusion and miffedness projected out onto the world, a boxset of Paris Hilton reggaetón covers of the works of Shostakovich, discovering unfriendly commandos in your Rice Krispies, The Room, Double Down, Fateful Findings, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, hate-filled junk like rape porn featuring psychiatric patients, coming down off bad pills while being savaged by stray pitbulls in a wasteland puddle in the most dispiriting housing scheme in Buckie, and a webcammed masturbation spree for five months to photos of the masturbator’s own life and works^^.

Also a Children in Need telethon hosted by a Michael Gove who kicks off the night with a speech about the children eventually turning into morons and swine, so forget about them and instead let’s all spend the evening watching an epic tribute to the career, opinions, fetishes and speculations of Michael Gove^^, who sniggers at the adoring studio audience and ridicules anything aired that doesn’t centre on his own career, opinions, fetishes and speculations. Then he’s joined in the studio by the ghosts of William McGonagall and Amanda McKittrick Ros, and by Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen, Ron Jeremy, and the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth and the divinity Gevurah from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the gang of them whirl around the place giving one another hugs and backslaps.

But there’s something even worse taking place here, because Mr Gove was so sure the Cult of Michael Gove would adore his transgressive telethon that it led him to feel contempt not only for the general Children in Need audience but for the Cult of Michael Gove in particular, for being so craven they’d lap up any old garbage he throws their way. Picture his smirks and sneers, then, as he drops into his telethon stand-up routines that mock his cult members for their veneration of this farce, including for these routines.

But that comparison doesn’t help much because no such thing will ever be made, surely, apart from The Return.

A jumbo teapot that releases puffs of steam containing the voice of a poorly imitated David Bowie

The Erasure

[Trinna/Andy]

…

‘… NOW WHAT IF WE WERE TO TELL YOU you that in the finale of The Return we find out not a single one of the main Twin Peaks events which we have described to you so far really happened?’

‘Because that’s what we’re now telling you. In the finale’s notorious retcon, Dale Cooper travels back to 1989 and prevents Laura being killed by Leland/BOB, which means every event that follows from that murder’s been erased.’

‘This time travelling occurs with the help of a jumbo teapot.’

‘A jumbo teapot that releases puffs of steam containing the voice of a poorly imitated David Bowie.’

‘This is not the rock bottom, by the way. Oh no, señora. Nowhere near! The rock bottom is worse than this by many multiples.’

‘This erasure has provoked anger and ridicule but not the full bodylock that afflicts so many once they see the rock bottom. The retcon may hint at the nature of that rock bottom, may provide an important clue since its deletion of almost the entire preceding Twin Peaks narrative is part of Season 3’s war on nostalgia and retro^^. But that bottom itself is on a completely different plane from this. This? This is just world-class garbage, señora. So we can get over this element of the series, no matter how toe-curling it is.’

‘No, we can. We can. We can move on from it, in new boots if necessary. We can recover from it.’

‘In a sense.’

Richard wakes from his dream

The Erasure of the Erasure

‘NOW WHAT IF WE WERE TO TELL YOU that we then find out in the finale that this journey back in time did not actually happen either? What then, señora?’

‘Please bear with us here. Please. We’re not having you on. Fire Walk with Me, the original Twin Peaks, the seventeen previous episodes of The Return, and Cooper’s erasure of nearly all of this when he whooshes back in time and stops Laura being murdered—later on in the series finale we discover that every bit of it was the dream of a guy in a motel who we’ve never met before called Richard.’

‘When you get home and watch the series as you promised and experience its many lows, therefore, you should always remember that they were not only wiped out by the time travelling of Dale Cooper but that they also never even happened to begin with because they were just the fragments of some man named Richard’s dreaming.’

‘And because it erases even more of the Twin Peaks narrative and so contributes further to the war on nostalgia and retro, this erasure of the erasure anticipates the rock bottom too.’^^

The superimposed face is that of the unknown dreamer

The Erasure of the Erasure of the Erasure

‘THE MOST IMPRESSIVE ESSAY ABOUT THE SERIES, Tim Kreider’s justly celebrated ‘But Who Is the Dreamer?’, argues that the erasure of most of Twin Peaks by the retcon and this then turning out to be Richard’s dream are themselves just dreamt or hallucinated by yet another unknown man, and thus confronts us with the not just world-class but world-historic garbage of the erasure of the erasure of the erasure. If you want a bleakly illuminating time—’

‘Buy some muscle relaxant and rub some on your bottom. Not on your buttocks, no. On your bottom, sí?’

‘Read Kreider’s essay—’

‘Rub it on to stop your bottom clamping dangerously hard and long and then read Señor Kreider’s essay.’

‘At quarterly.politicsslashletters.org/dreamer-twin-peaks-return.’

‘And then let what he is saying sink into your mind.’

‘Unlike the series’ absolute rock bottom, which causes immediate wails and clutched skulls, this one’s a grower.’

‘But when it does sink in, we promise your skull will be getting clutched!’

Photo by David Todd McCarthy

Back to the Future

ARE YOU BEGINNING TO SEE WHY why we couldn’t believe how rank this series is, and the likes of Vulture rating it above Mad Men?

And I’ve only given a summary of the finale, a brief recap. None of this can give a proper sense yet of the ugliness and chaos and cack-handedness with which this trainwreck unfolds, or un-unfolds, or un-un-unfolds, or un-un-un-unfolds, or the tediousness, incoherence, wooden performances, and just the general air of contempt that are the most notorious things about the series.

The retcon, it’s true, was so ridiculed when it first aired that cultists scrambled about to find some angle from which to deny it really was a retcon, to insist Laura had definitely died even though every viewer saw her lakeside corpse fade and disappear. Then Mark Frost’s book The Final Dossier confirmed that she never died (‘Laura Palmer did not die’, italicised in the book), and therefore that the entire Twin Peaks narrative was built on a now-void event. End of story, literally, at which point the Césars switched to yet more doublethink. Laura never died after all, eh? Cool. Lynch is a geeenius.

Picture The Sopranos’ finale and FBI agent Dwight Harris travelling back to the late 1960s to persuade Tony not to join the Mafia. This is followed by a shot of Big Pussy’s corpse as it jumps backwards out of the sea into what is now Silvio’s boat. We are to understand that every other event in the whole story didn’t actually happen either and are given a sequence showing the Soprano family living a Mafia-free life with Tony as a bland Kevin Finnerty type.

Maybe you feel that comparing The Return to one of the US’s most accomplished TV dramas is unfair. If so, all I can say in response is that the Césars compare them too and conclude that The Sopranos is by far the lesser work. Same with The Wire, Vertigo, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Many of them claim the show is better than anything else ever made. Cahiers du cinéma called it the best film of the decade, while Manhattan’s MoMA screened the full series.

Wait a minute, you’re possibly thinking, Cahiers du cinéma and MoMA? That’s impressive. Why should you trust over Cahiers and MoMA some nobody security guard, an alkie who struggles with physical and mental grappling and who eventually involved the Policía Nacional in his thoughts on TV drama, and who got a little too keen on research chemicals and a sexdoll?

And all I can say is please don’t take my word for any of this. Please go and watch YouTube clips of the fiasco yourself, as many as you can get through. But be warned. Cahiers and MoMA are unlikely to change your view of The Return, but The Return may well change your view of Cahiers and MoMA. As with the second-biggest diddy this world has seen, every single thing it touches is damaged by association.

Alternate plotline for Hiroshima Mon Amour: Elle and Lui travel back in time to assassinate Einstein in childhood so splitting the atom and making A-bombs can be delayed long enough to screw up the film we’re watching. St. Elsewhere: the whole series turns out to be the invention of an autistic child; Dallas: an entire season turns out to be Pam Ewing’s dream. These last two examples really happened, of course, and are cited to justify Cooper’s journey back in time and everything being Richard’s dream because, you see, the Césars respond, The Return is a pastiche of soap operas like St. Elsewhere and Dallas.

Here we’ve arrived at a core reason why the series is so wretched, which is how undisciplined and lazy it is, and therefore how sloppy and irresponsible. It takes discipline and care to maintain a balance, and when necessary a strict division, between pastiche, cheesiness, and zaniness on the one hand, and on the other plotlines involving a girl forcibly lapping up her father’s semen, life-destroying adult-rape, the torment of a disabled character, and many more storylines and events just as weighty. The manner in which the original Twin Peaks maintained equivalent balances and divisions was among its most impressive achievements but in the Return the seriousness, care and discipline to preserve these are all missing.

Dozens of mainstream publications have praised the trainwreck and its showrunner, and a few filmmakers have done the same, but we can be sure that no mainstream publication will praise a retcon resembling the trainwreck’s, should such a stunt ever appear onscreen, and no human filmmaker will include such a stunt in their own work. None will ever turn to their co-creators or producers and suggest they delete their work’s central event and everything that follows from it over many years, or suggest anything that rotten. You know they won’t and so do they.

They’re fine with Season 3’s retcon not because they’re genuinely fine with it but because the Master’s name is stamped on it, just as Trump cultists like Trinna are only okay with the theft of nuclear secrets because it was the great man who stole them. Picture Trinna’s head erupting and sending her security cap flying if George Soros refused to hand over stolen nuclear documents. Now picture the equivalent arc of César’s cap and severed manbun if Richard Curtis had been brought in as showrunner for The Return and he’d sent Cooper back in time to prevent Laura’s murder. In both cases the cap’s trajectory gives an exact measure of the indoctrination.

And of course as those same mainstream publications were re-anointing the quiffed showrunner with the 4channish take on sexual abuse as a genius, often on the same day they were cheering on #MeToo and castigating showbiz abusers they’d fawned over just days or weeks before, and castigating another boomer with flamboyant hair as a rapey buffoon.

The retcon is also mince because Green Glove versus BOB and everything being Richard’s dream and even this itself maybe being a dream, plus so many more artistic choices throughout the series are mince as well. When you get to the finale of a drama that’s this mince this often, you aren’t inclined to give the artist responsible any benefit of the doubt. This is one of the ways in which The Return is the opposite of a masterpiece.

How masterpieces work on me is similar to falling in love, in that to the extent that I understand the process at all it doesn’t seem additive but multiplicative. You’re captivated by A then B then C then D and so on, and each is then multiplied by some combination of the others in ways too complex and mysterious to understand till you cross a Line and you find you’ve suspended your disbelief and you’re in love, with e.g. the drug-sharing Laura Palmer lookalike, or sometimes with the masterpiece too if it’s special enough, as in the case of Fire Walk with Me. From that point onwards, because they’ve proved worthy of this so often you do give the benefit of the doubt to the people or things you love.

And the opposite happens with The Return, which is why watching it can feel so like the death of love, because its every display of contempt is multiplied by all the rest and you find that you now despise what you once loved.

Buer by Astarte23

The Prank

[Ella]

THERE HAVE BEEN INCREASING HINTS this past decade of the wish of the entities to reveal just what exactly they are up to in Dark Matter, and to subtly prank and shock and perhaps even to entertain all of humanity into making the leap behind the scenes into hyperdimensional space.

Then with the events recounted in this narrative they stopped messing around and made it very clear that other planes connect with this dimension of ours, levels of being where live puppeteers with fancy ideas and quite an odd sense of humour. They made it clear that the winks and the nudges of their elbows and the long wait for our evolutionary leap were over, that the long prologue was now over. They made it clear they existed and they were going to show us what was what. So to try to bitchslap us all out of the sty we live in they put together this David Lynch mystery with the Demonic Twin in the role of Big Bad or heel.

Without these entities you would not be reading this or have done many other things in your life. Every act of yours is what we could call a building-block in the spacetime architecture of the entities which props up what they call their Argument leading to what they call their Absolute Reconciled Vision, also known as the Promised End, which really just means everything being perfect everywhere and for always.

They are not what we would call nice, however, because without the actions of the Twin and other demons, they believe, the Argument will lead to no such perfection everywhere. These actions are the blinks necessary for sight and without which we’d go plecto—try to stare with eyes open forever and see how sane you feel. These actions are the rock bottom, plague, collapse of ecologies, humiliation in the wrestling ring, broken heart, artistic cataclismo, or maniac in control of nuclear weapons which is necessary to make us so desperate for change, any kind of change, that we shall open up to what is needed to risk the next jump in evolution, individually or all together.

You could think of the entities as prankster Brian Enos which fade into different parts of the Ultraverse to twiddle away at trillions of knobs from the quantum level all the way up to the galactic level, every single twiddle to help bring about that Promised End, is what they believe. This will hopefully all make more sense to you once poor Andy has his shattered freaking out and as a result merges with an entity.

As he has said, ten entities have been involved in what happened to Mr Lynch, nine that mainly fiddled with knobs in the background, and the Twin which played the leading role. And as everyone now knows, that Twin was of the sub-type the other entities call demon (or in the language of wrestling it played the heel), meaning there are lots more entities of that sub-type and so lots more entities generally. Note this number ten, please. The fact that the entities operate in groups of ten was eventually to prove crucial to finding out what had happened to dear old David Lynch.

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