The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 8

The Man in the Baggy Lime-Green Suit ^ Set-Piece with the Insurance Forms ^ Vertical Insertion ^ Another Rapist Causes Chuckles and Arousal ^ Fork/Electricity Magick! ^ The Rock Bottom Revealed

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.

THE RETURN (2024)

Janey-E lays into Dougie Jones

The Man in the Baggy Lime-Green Suit

ONE OF THE MOST PUTRID ELEMENTS of this smallpox-ridden turkey is its central characters, and the arc that drew the most ridicule was Dale Cooper’s banishment inside the body of manbaby Dougie Jones. Cooper featured prominently in all marketing for The Return and many fans had been looking forward to seeing him again.

Parts 1 and 2, it goes without saying, killed our premiere party. Sighs, groans, rubbed eyes, fanning of throbbing temples with abanicos, at least one trip to the bathroom to TRE®. Those red drapes, chevrons, owls, and puddles of oil especially embarrassing. Especially those puddles. Ella’s pats of my head and shoulder, slightly condescending. Friends hesitant about leaving early, but then leaving early. Only six of us soldiered on through both those episodes.

They’re worse than most of the world’s art, obviously, but compared to what was to follow they’re Roeg, Denis, Bresson, and early on Part 3 has that cosmic ocean and other decent moments, so despite our groans and throbs at no point did we yet find ourselves thinking this was the worst TV drama ever made.

That thought didn’t start to itch away until the second half of Part 3 once Cooper’s transplanted inside the body of Dougie, who then totters around a Las Vegas casino for eight minutes as chevrons mysteriously appear above slot machines that transdimensional entities want him to play. The chevrons are central to Twin Peaks’ mystical iconography, because they’re the pattern across the floors of the Red Room—you’ve likely seen Michael J. Anderson’s backwards-talking dwarf shuffle across a chevron-patterned floor to Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Dance of the Dream Man’. So to see them feature in the prodigiously trivial and tiresome context of Dougie slowly winning jackpot after jackpot and celebrating each with a long ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’ reinforced the sense that The Return had set out to destroy the mystique of the original series and of Fire Walk with Me.

This scene isn’t so rotten it might send you to hospital. It isn’t rock-bottom rotten. But it is pulverisingly tedious and irritating in a way that might necessitate some TRE® or acupuncture, and it’s also when it becomes clear how hostile the series is to Twin Peaks nostalgia.^^

And it follows a five-minute sequence in which Deputy Hawk, Deputy Andy, and Lucy Brennan trade inanities and dead air about a box of chocolate bunnies, a sequence that makes them look stupider than virtually any non-Return characters in TV or cinema history. Also clear now was the series’ disdain for the ordinary people/Unterentwickelt Menschen among its cast. This sequence is then followed by two minutes of shovels getting painted.

But all this still didn’t clinch that this was the worst TV drama ever made. The clincher was the way the Dougie plotline continues in the fourth part released at the same time as the third.

First we get another two minutes of Dougie’s prolonged jackpot wins and cries of ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’. Then four and a half minutes of tedious and irritating mutual bafflement between Dougie and a work colleague and then some casino staff, throughout which Dougie repeats the last thing the others say, the way your friends did because they thought it was funny, when they were seven. Dougie will repeat back what people say to him in every scene he’s in over the following twelve episodes, i.e. this is close to the entirety of the main character’s dialogue throughout the series, an artistic choice that in practically any other work would easily be the poorest thing in it but that wouldn’t make The Return’s top thirty.

For the next three minutes we get the first of its uneventful car journeys, just a limo driver’s occasional inquiries as to which of these suburban Vegas front doors is Dougie’s, then in response Dougie’s confused blinks. Finally we get Dougie and the driver’s narrative apogee as they stand quietly outside Dougie’s house. Just stare into space, shift their feet, occasionally glance around.

Some form of masochism now creeps over us as we find ourselves relieved that these sequences aren’t even longer. ‘Why does the slot machines bit end after only ten minutes?’ Les grabs Trinna’s shoulder and asks. ‘Why not twenty minutes? Why doesn’t every second of The One consist of Dougie fucking Jones wobbling and blinking about the place and playing them slot machines and yelling out “Helloo-oo-oo!”? Why are eleven minutes of Dougie Jones playing slot machines too much, nine too little, but ten just right?’

This kind of repetitive, so-bad-it-becomes-good material has been nailed by artists like James Acaster, Stewart Lee and Andy Kaufman, but they have something The Return signally lacks, and that’s charm. They aren’t repulsive. They aren’t angels either, but they’re on the side of the angels. You give them the benefit of the doubt, therefore, as they deliver the same material over and over until it becomes funny.

But this all-time abomination is not on the side of the angels, or not in the usual sense. Picture the rest of Club Gevurah attempting the same kind of repetition. Everyone’s favourite stand-up comedian in a too-long red tie as he delivers a line like ‘You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever’, then waits through thirty seconds of dead air before he delivers it again. Following thirty more seconds of dead air he delivers it again, then again and again and again, for ten minutes. Or picture Mr Gove as he’s told ‘Not tonight, mate’ outside Club Gevurah’s Comedy Nite and then attempts to land a tryout slot by clatting black shoe polish over his face and for six hundred seconds repeatedly quoting his notorious tweet ‘I set trends dem man copy.’ That’s what this series feels like, not for minutes but for many hours, and the laughs never come.

Next in Part 4 we get a two-minute spotlight on Dougie’s wife Janey-E, played by Naomi Watts, as she slaps him and bawls him out—in contrast to its largely pleasant older men, many of the greatest series of the decade’s women over forty are portrayed as shrewish whiners, especially to the men in their lives. After her scold, though, Janey-E discovers Dougie’s slot-machine winnings and acts much nicer to him. The one thing that will shut up a shrew over forty, apparently, is lots of cash. Helloo-oo-oo!

Plus we’re still getting plenty of Dougie’s blank stares, Dougie’s waddles, close-ups of Dougie’s conspicuously dyed hair and his stage makeup, yellow-tinged and also oddly conspicuous. Les in particular despised Dougie and his blinks and totters and baggy lime-green suit, though none of us could watch him without swearing or shuddering, not just because this was what we’d been landed with instead of the return of Dale Cooper but because Dougie Jones is by far the least engaging person ever put on a screen, JarJar Binks but considerably less charismatic. The acclaim for Part 8 was due in part to his blessed absence from it. For an entire hour of your life, doddery Dougie and his gibbers and wobbles are nowhere to be seen.

Discussion of the series that ignores its tediousness is on a par with discussion of Atlanta that ignores race, and I personally don’t find it tedious the equivalent of I’m white so race doesn’t matter. The tediousness just isn’t up for debate. Along with the poor acting it’s the first thing every non-Manbam notices. Season 3 may have more deliberately uninteresting sequences than every other TV production combined.

With the shovel-painting and Sam/Tracey/glass-box scenes even the show itself acknowledges its many longueurs, and the above twenty-seven minutes from Part 3 into Part 4 have to be the second-most tedious sequence in all of filmed drama. First prize goes to dreamy dancer Audrey Horne’s humiliation for nineteen minutes in Part 12 of the henpecked cuckold Charlie, played by Clark Middleton who since childhood has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, while third prize goes to the whole of Part 9 and much of Part 10, a stretch that until ending with the repugnant but not boring degradation of Johnny Horne contains not a single engaging moment throughout its eighty minutes, yet somehow still isn’t as aggressively, call-your-sponsor-before-you-relapse boring as the top two.

This is one reason hardly anybody knew how bad The Return was, as most people couldn’t stand it for long because it’s so boring. The pity being that when you realise you’re watching a genuinely world-historic event, it becomes compulsive viewing in the classic trainwreck sense.

And so it was during those twenty-seven minutes in Parts 3 and 4 that we began to understand the true nature of what we were facing. This series wasn’t just a stinker. This was making Heil Honey I’m Home! look like The Corner. This was television history.

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Set-Piece with the Insurance Forms

IN PART 6 we get a real low of Dougie lows. After Janey-E scolds him for a boring three and a half minutes, he spends the next minute and a half slowly drawing a ladder on an insurance-claim form. Not the most TRE®-provoking moment in TV drama, though it is quite dismaying when you learn that this ladder’s meant to represent both the one on which Osiris climbs to heaven in Egyptian mythology and the one from which Tim Finnegan falls at the start of Finnegans Wake.

But now gather round the set and prepare to shudder, people, because Dougie’s picked up another insurance form. He now spends more than a minute slowly drawing on it another ladder. He then draws some stairs that could also be chevrons or someone’s EEG.

‘Thank fuck that’s over,’ says shuddering Les.

But the claim-form ordeal isn’t over, Les, nowhere near over, because later in the episode a couple of these forms are examined by Dougie’s boss Bushnell Mullins. He asks Dougie about the scribbles. Dougie gibbers. By this point our toes are in a pretty bad way. But at last this spectacularly dull sequence ends and we can relax.

Except we can’t relax at all, can we, because Mullins now examines yet another form with a doodled ladder and set of stairs/chevrons/EEG blips. Dougie blinks and struggles to drink his coffee. Mullins examines another form. Dougie gazes uncomprehendingly at a poster. Mullins examines yet another insurance-claim form on which Dougie’s depicted a ladder and some stairs/chevrons/blips. Les downs Methotrexate for his arthritis. Mullins examines another form, and another, and another, and another. Nine forms in total he examines, not in some kind of sped-up montage of insurance-form examinations but one slow examination after another, after another. Then he goes back and re-checks the eighth, just to be sure. He re-checks the ninth. He switches back and forth for a bit between the eighth and ninth.

And again relief and gratitude course through you when he decides to stop at only nine insurance forms.

‘Why not ten insurance forms?’ Les asks the ceiling or maybe, unknowingly, the entities.

‘Why not far more than this?’ Trinna replies. ‘Why not ten thousand?’

‘And why is The One only eighteen hours long? Which philistine Showtime suit person placed any time limits of any kind on this sublime insurance-form set-piece?’

‘And why is The One not running until the end of time on every television set in the world, featuring only these examinations of the sublime scribbles of this Dougie?’

‘And why would anybody in the world ever consider doing anything else with their time but watching it?’

Picture unyoung mondains in their trousers, cropped, low-bummed, tight, dreams-contaminatingly tight—picture these exquisites in their trousers gathered in the Institución Nacional Lynch or MoMA or a treehut to watch The Return, each of them grooving along to Dougie and Mullins and the forms. They’re having a rare old time, they’re telling themselves.

But if you get up close, e.g. if a certain Satanist rostered one weekend at the Institución lets you zoom in its cameras on a certain minstrel, you can see in his expression more, much more, than just enjoyment. There’s a twitch at the corners of the eyes and lips and beard, a struggle of some kind with the wry amusement he’s managed to plaster across his mouth if not his eyes. There’s a resemblance as well to the slippages and warpings that can beset the face of an addict full of self-hatred because they can’t lay off the booze or meth. Different parts of his face sag for a bit, his cheeks, his jowls, the skin around his eyes, before he winces and cringes like he’s smelt or remembered something terrible. But then it registers with him that he’s shaming himself, so the face tries to return to what passes for normal for this minstrel, or even poignantly to suggest it’s having fun. Except the self-hatred is still ingrained in his face, with the result that a battle develops between the self-disgusted sags, winces and cringes and the attempts to deny or rectify them, with advances and retreats in every direction from both warring sides. It’s horrible to watch, horribly fascinating. It’s also the face of lots more Institución, MoMA and treehut connoisseurs of this unforgettable scene.

Nothing will ever persuade most of them that they’re the victim of a demonic joke, because they’ve crossed the Line. They faked it till they made it and now they’ve lost their moorings in the real, similar to the Line people cross when they switch from heavy drinker to alcoholic or social tooter to outright addict. And this is why such people often go plecto when anyone suggests they’re no longer in control of what they say or do, because even though it doesn’t feel as though they’ve lost their mind, at some level they kind of know they have. It’s the frenzy of kayfabe 3 cognitive dissonance rather than the relatively calm total denial of the mark in kayfabe 1.

Tell an early-stage alcoholic that’s what they are and they might be annoyed but not so they obsess over the comment and cook up revenge fantasies. Very different with many late-stage alcoholics in kayfabe 3. Tell somebody who watches a telenovela that it’s junk and they’ll shrug the comment off. Follow a greying mondain in an infinity scarf from the Institución then keep muttering on his Metro that ‘The forms set-piece is junk, the forms set-piece is junk,’ and you’ll wish to step out of range of his scarf-swinging and attempted hair-pulling. He’ll still be looping your mutters through his mind long after you’ve fled, because at some level he vaguely knows they were accurate and he’s been lost in the cluelessness of the mark and is no longer capable of independent thought.

Like the neo-Nazi militiaman whose worldview has been shaped by the Daily Caller and Fox News, or the apostle who believes Mr Morrissey’s novella and ‘Asian Rut’ should have won him the Nobel instead of Bob Dylan, this Manbam’s been sissy hypno’d into a different dimension from yours and mine, practically, and that isn’t easy to hear on the Metro let alone admit to yourself, especially the sissy-hypno part, and so all those looped thoughts mean he projects his fury not at himself, the mark suckered by the series, but (the usual consequence of denial being projection) at anybody who dares point this out on public transport.

Take it from someone who has more experience in this area than he’d like. As the boulevardiers grooved along to the forms, did you see the cocaine on their nostril hairs? Did you catch the overripe-fruit smell of psychosis that was disgusting the Institución’s guards and cleaners? This is what we’re up against.

None of which is to say that denial is always a bad thing. Life can be so horrific that were you to fully appreciate its horrors, your mind could possibly shatter. One way to get through coaltong sessions is to pretend they’re just a dream or film you can observe as an outsider if you want, or if that doesn’t work then pretend it’s strangers doing all this to you, that’s if you don’t just send your mind off to Buckie Thistle beating Elgin City, or to family car journeys and picnics before Maddy and Demmy and Suds crossed the Line. And of course some leaps of faith can be crucial in recovery, such as fake it till you make it or handing decisions over to an imaginary higher power, while suspension of disbelief is essential to our enjoyment of storytelling, and may even be a fundamental part of what makes us human.

But I think I’ve seen enough of denial, both in myself and others, to be comfortable saying that the refusal to accept an important truth is nearly always a bad thing, and to be sure it is in the case of the rottenness of the forms set-piece. I’ll be straight with you. Denial’s the only state of mind that worries me any more, that it might somehow creep back in and without me noticing warp how everything looks, like the funhouse mirrors gazed at by Santa Rita’s anorexics. Or worse, that I never got shot of the denial in the first place.

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Vertical Insertion [Ella]

MATEO STOOD UNDER a blue spotlight in his Frank Booth leather blousson and loudly snorted two lines of cocaine. He ran fingers over his hips and thighs, over his mic, over the twin pronging parts of his beard, then to the tune of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ he sang about his work, some more about his work, how he got taken on at El Mundo, how he mastered criticism while editing the arts magazine at Universidad Carlos III, some more about his career, his favourites among his song lyrics and among articles he had published, on and on as tiny 4-AcO-MET/AL-LAD Mateo-Franks in miniature bloussons swirled around him bowing to every lyric, every reminiscence^^.

This had happened before, of course. I had heard this number many times before. So it would always seem curious that it took until tonight for the bolt of thunder to strike.

My arms dropped to my sides, my beer fell from my hand and rolled away. Pain got hold of my chest and legs. I was struggling to breathe. I fell onto the beery floor. More pain seized my legs. A haze of some kind floated above me and I told it to phone an ambulance. There was some melancholic smell in his flat, like very old pan de frutas.

What happened after that I did not know, but when I opened my eyes I saw a paramedic frowning at my legs. I tried to straighten something alien and cut and bruised. My own toes, I realised, which had come bursting right up through my Laura Palmer schoolgirl pumps. I remembered not to claim the pain as mine, as Ella’s hurting, but just to see it as it was, pain only.

The paramedic said, ‘Breathe slowly. Try to bend those knees in the other direction.’

Pain only. It helped, or it did for a time at least. But next a demon came at my face and I knew exactly who it belonged to, it was mine and mine only as it bit and slashed my face off, and now it was no longer a demon but instead a vain recluse with nostalgia in his eyes, jiggling his fingers beside my face and ignoring me when I begged for no more pain. My legs were winched again where they wanted not to go, as though pulled by cranes of a building site.

It hurt, then it did not hurt, like my life with Mateo was draining from my body, and in that draining was the defeat I had perhaps been seeking for six years. I shouted out very loudly and deeply, the shout which made known to the world the most horrible thing in the history of art: The Return’s absolute rock bottom.

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Dougie gets right into the rape

In the Greatest Cinematic Work of the Decade Another Rapist Causes Chuckles and Arousal

MANBABY DOUGIE GETS RAPED in Part 10 and it’s played for laughs. Janey-E concludes that this gibbering mess with the toilet problems is sexy and asks if he finds her attractive. He doesn’t answer, and instead stuffs his face with cake. The whole point of the Dougie character is that he has a baby’s mind, so as with every adult question he’s asked he can’t understand this one, meaning that sexual consent is impossible. At no point in the series has he given any indication that he desires sex or even understands what it is, and not once do we see him consent to sex with Janey-E.

Next thing you know she’s riding him cowgirl style as his arms flap as if he’s drowning, though you can tell this is supposed to be 4channishly funny—plus like Janey-E’s half-sister Diane with Mr C, he gets really into this cowgirl session with his rapist.

We shouldn’t have to make this explicit, but as no Manbam ever mentions it it seems we do: if you force sex upon someone unequipped not just for informed consent but for discerning the come-on in the first place, then it’s rape and not to be played as comedy.

This sequence is sickeningly Returnian, and as with the series’ other twisted takes on rape, high-profile gatekeepers such as Franck Boulègue, Matt Zoller Seitz and Martha P. Nochimson waved it through without comment. Which means criticism of our most popular artform is in the hands of people who apparently see little or nothing wrong with something you’d only witness in the darkest porn: playing for chuckles nonconsensual sex with a person with the cognitive abilities of an infant and showing him freaked out by it but then really turned-on.

TV drama is one of the few influential artforms still in good health, relatively speaking, and for people like those I work with, along with power-fantasy films and sport it pretty much is our culture. We’ve a shared locker at the hospital for videos to watch on-duty and apart from wrestling or football compilations or films about some unappreciated loner saving their country or the world, everything added over the years has been a TV drama. The point is that this artform matters, and consequently its gatekeepers matter too.

Most of the time, though, they don’t even claim they see nothing wrong with the show’s most disturbing lows. They just don’t acknowledge them. Which is yet another way these people resemble the world’s most dangerous cult, many of whom don’t publicly approve of comments such as calling neo-Nazis very fine people. Much of the time they just say nothing, pretend it never happened. When their hero called in to Fox and Friends and let loose his worst plecto, from the presenters there was no real response. Obviously no ‘Excuse me, Mr President with the nuclear codes, but have you lost your mind?’—‘Well Ainsley, it doesn’t feel like I have’—but with his most unhinged chatter there was no endorsement either. They just sat there rigidly saying hee-haw, eyes glazed over, grins fixed on in the manner of Mike Pence, or those living statues in the street.

And when it came to The Return’s sickest moments that was the response of our gatekeepers. And in both cases this is even worse than endorsement since at least such endorsement would be honest. But the fact that these people say nothing at all gives them away as not only reprehensible but dishonestly so. We’re in the company of the seriously screwed-up here, real twenty-first-century-throbber territory, corporate opinion-formers who know perfectly well that to call neo-Nazis very fine people or play the violation of someone with an infant’s mind for giggles is out of order but who won’t use their platform to say so, because the cult propaganda’s been so successful or because they can’t displease their boss, but still appear to regard themselves as right nice people.

The only difference between the two cults here is that execrable as they are, neo-Nazi or Nazi marches aren’t as bad as the rape of someone with the mental abilities of a two-year-old, never mind playing the scene as comedy. If forced to choose, you’d rather march with Trinna and her camaradas than broadcast even a fictional rape such as that.

But at the same time, although there are many similarities between these cults, they would undoubtedly see each other as enemies. Manbun versus Redcap, MoMA versus MAGA. And high-profile gatekeepers in supposedly left-leaning publications smilingly waving through the Dougie rape scene and the rest of the series’ transgressions is the sort of depravity that’s long disturbed many on the right and old people generally, and they’re correct to be disturbed. People who hate this series are disturbed by it too.

Modern rightwingers are wrong about so much, clearly, but not this. If a series like The Return doesn’t just get a pass from left-leaning culture but is celebrated as our most popular artform’s pinnacle, then on our depravity at least, rightwing boomers aren’t wrong. And this isn’t only a question of not handing them ammo for the culture war. It’s that on this issue they are right.

Jeffrey Epstein’s black books list as many liberal tastemakers as they do hard-right industrialists and financiers. Every night, as many liberal men as blatantly women-hating neo-fascists, 10,000,000s of them, masturbate away to porn that features rape of women or girls. The tactics of transgression began with the left and have only gradually been co-opted by hard-rightists like the Breitbart crew. Total Capitalist liberal culture is beyond-Weimar depraved and its response to The Return confirms it. The punchline being that these rightwingers so scared by liberal culture’s depravity worship at the shrine of—because if you can’t beat them join them?—one of the most depraved presidents in US history.

It feels at times as though everybody from Manbams to far-right transgressives, Morrissey to Lynch, Trump and Pence to Gove and Johnson and Abascal, Ella and me to Trinna and César and Mateo, Maddy and Demmy and Suds to rapist priests, DJs, musicians, actors, directors, producers, politicians, academics, industrialists and financiers, various kinds of relapsers, to every last bit of the cheesy kayfabed porn-drenched West, has crossed a Line over to the dark side, playing the heel, and now can’t find their way back.

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Dougie jabs a fork into a socket

Fork/Electricity Magick!

HAVING HIDDEN TWIN PEAKS’ LEAD inside the most pestilentially annoying figure in the history of any and all artforms, for over twelve hours the series teases and teases and teases the audience with Dale Cooper’s return. More than seven hundred minutes of Season 3 honkery pass before Dougie sticks a fork in an electric socket which somehow transforms him into Cooper, who after decades away from our screens can now make his grand return.

You may be wondering why it takes so long for this to happen. One answer is that this wages more of Season 3’s attack on nostalgia, in this case regarding the original Twin Peaks’ central character.^^ But are you ready for the other answer?

The other answer is that the structure of this eighteen-part work is modelled on The Odyssey and Ulysses. This televisual equivalent of the 1985 Swedish Metal Aid atrocity ‘Give a Helpin Hand’, of The Moors Murderers, the Comic Opera! composed in blackout by Liam Gallagher—this fucker is not only modelled on ‘The Metamorphosis’, Egyptian, Norse and Greek mythology, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Major Arcana of the Tarot, and many more, but also on perhaps the greatest poem and greatest novel in the Western canon. So Cooper’s return to his home dimension is timed to match the respective returns home of Odysseus and Bloom.

Except insufficient correspondence is an issue yet again, because Odysseus and Bloom don’t actually make their first extended appearances 90% of the way through their texts, do they? Imagine the first seven hundred pages of Ulysses centred on an infant Citizen as he wobbles about Dublin repeating people’s words back to them, draws on insurance forms, rams forks into sockets, and is comedy-raped because he’s defenceless, while Joyce keeps telling you the young Citizen’s really a galactic consciousness called Leopold Bloom who you’ll get to know any moment now, any moment now… That’s how this fiasco tries to barnacle itself onto Ulysses.

The Return is boring in an impressive number of ways, one of which is to do with the old rule that anybody or anything constantly shocking and weird ceases to be shocking and weird and becomes predictable and dull. So the truth is that although in retrospect it seems yet another howler, on initial viewing Cooper’s return for no meaningful reason as late as Part 16 caused not howls but shrugs. Obviously this crucial turning point would come with only 10% of the series left and have little to do with character development. Instead let’s gratify our inner 4chan teen and just have the main character’s fate transformed by a fork and plug wheeze.

That it’s followed by the Log Lady saying to camera ‘I’m dying’, with the Catherine E. Coulson who plays her then actually dying days afterwards, and this moving scene is followed by yet more wacky taunting sadism inflicted by Audrey Horne on the disabled cuckold Charlie… well, juxtapositions don’t get much more Returnian than that. Honestly, there are times you have to stop shuddering and eye-rolling and (if you can’t beat them join them) instead just despairingly applaud the auteur’s imagination and audacity. I know it has the advantages of existing in ten dimensions, but still, the plums on the guy. On the demon, I should say.

Let’s imagine you somehow manage to travel back to 2016 to tell César and Mateo that Richard Curtis had been brought in as showrunner for The Return and their adored Dale Cooper’s storyline will be thirteen episodes of the Dougie endurance test outlined above, including regular teases that this will soon end, then with only 10% of the show left, out from Dougie comes Cooper, simply because the manbaby jabs a fork in a socket. When told this César and Mateo curl up on the ground and cry, surely, and threaten to skin alive Curtis and his family and pets.

But when the series appeared with the name David Lynch attached, there were no outpourings of misery or deranged threats. Instead they greeted all this with ecstatic praise, e.g. the husky minstrel on reddit: ‘This is literally the most heavenly thing which has ever happened in my life. I’m soaked with tears of bliss here.’ And I suppose if you’ve crossed the Line into cult post-truth and little of life makes sense any more, then why wouldn’t your existence climax in your late forties as you watch a fictional gibbering manbaby’s fate transformed when he attacks a socket with a fork?

There are three ways to describe fans like this. One of them is diddy, another is away with the fairies, another is victim of indoctrination. The fact is that just as there’s no such person as an admirer of Michael Gove who isn’t a diddy, insane or brainwashed, so too with this show’s admirers.

I’m not trying to be offensive. Something else Les taught me is the maxim live and let live. Another is that when someone is agitated, the source of the agitation usually lies not within whatever external source they blame but within themselves. These are classy guidelines, useful in practically every context, so bearing them in mind Les, Trinna and I used to try bloody hard to imagine a Return fan who was likeable and sane. I tried it when on an imaginative roll while wrestling Ella. I took hallucinogens and tried vision quests.

Try it, please. Try to stretch your mind far enough to picture a person who responds to all the Dougie idiocy outlined above, teases over twelve hours that it will soon end, then its eventual end due to the fork and plug stunt with ‘This is literally the most heavenly thing which has ever happened in my life. I’m soaked with tears of bliss here’, and that person not being some mix of repellent, damaged and brainwashed.

Impossible, isn’t it? And that’s why after hundreds of occasions when he might have seen himself in a mirror and vowed Never again, at triple the age of those they look best on, that person has again crammed himself into trousers so constricting you feel on first-name terms with his squelched droopy testicles.

If you’re such a person, you may have concluded that it’s time to send me that murder threat or burn an effigy made from those rat droppings you’ve stored beneath your bed in giant jars. But there’s another part of you, isn’t there, a quiet voice saying It’s true, something’s gone horribly wrong with me. I’ve turned into a clown or I’m no longer quite there in the head, or both. Children laugh at my skinnies, my treehut, and my forages for droppings. Somebody please help me.

Listen to that voice. It’s the healthiest part of you, the part that genuinely cares for you. Take it from Les, Trinna and me. The most important step in overcoming any serious problem is to admit that the problem exists.

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The Rock Bottom Revealed

MID-MAY, MID-AFTERNOON in a hovel of a bar that kept fading in and out of my vision. It was striped with green light beaming down through the windows from The One’s title lettering in the sky, rays that gave the place an unearthly shimmer, a nearly sacred glow.

‘The mature sophistication of what?’

‘Of wrestling your woman till she calls out Submit!, Trinna. Almost a kind of meditation for you both.’

In my glass of ginger ale there were two green men and a green woman wearing boar masks. They were circling a green kneeling boy. The men and the woman wore green-hooped Buckie Thistle football tops but nothing below. They faced in towards the boy and spat at him through their snouts. Spittle mixed with his mascara to trickle down his cheeks. The three adults waded in circles through the ginger ale, inches from my eyes. I could swallow them if I wanted, send these little people down to my belly.

‘ “And notice the parallel between that submission,” Ella used to tell me,’ I said, ‘ “and the relationship between our world with its three dimensions and Dark Matter with its infinite numbers of dimensions. Although in each case the second one may seem the less noisy and controlling half of the relationship, in fact it is much more sophisticated and undoubtedly in charge.” ’

‘And this helps me stay sober and not wrestling how?’

‘I love the fact that you’re going off the rails as well. We can both go plecto together.’

‘You need help.’

‘I know, I know. We have so much in common, don’t we? When did yours pick up momentum, then?’

‘When did what pick up what?’

‘Your plummet, your mental collapse. When did it pick up speed?’

‘I know for a fact that I am not… plummeting. I have been sober and not wrestling for eleven weeks.’

A tattered poster behind Trinna showed a boy with his tongue stuck out, to lick an ice-cream. ‘Or maybe we’re going to pull back from the brink together,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s it.’

‘What is this brink?’

‘The brink everybody’s at the edge of. If we fall off we’ll be smashed to bits like Humpty Dumpty.’

Trinna picked up her phone. On the edge of my seat she plonked a sandal. ‘What are you talking of like Humpty Dumpty?’

I peered across the green-tinted table as if over spectacles. ‘Trinna. Aren’t you forgetting the appalling state of your hormones?’

‘Somebody needs to tell you this,’ she said, pressing the Send arrow on a Whatsapp message. ‘You have shit of a bird on your neck.’

‘Possibly. I slept rough last…’ The rest I garbled till it was pure vowel and let it drift into the bar’s reggaetón. ‘I went to the Policía Nacional about The One and asked them to investigate what had happened to David Lynch. They laughed me out of the building.’

‘Now there is a shock.’

‘Laughed me out of the building but then watched it like I asked and rang me to apologise.’ I sneaked a hand up to my neck. The crust split open and released the stink of birdshit. ‘Ever think The One’s puppeteering everything, this chat included? Have you seen its lettering in the sky?’

‘I believe I have been washing my hair,’ Trinna said wafting the stink away. ‘You need to speak to Les.’

‘Why would I do that? I haven’t thought about drinking or wrestling once. Never once been on my radar.’

‘What are we doing in this dump?’

‘It just feels right somehow. For our state of mind.’

‘When was your last GA meeting?’

‘I’m a male witch, by the way. Let’s start a coven. Let’s buy peat to chew so we can blacken these.’ I tapped my teeth. ‘Hey, what do you think hell’s like?’

‘This?’

‘I’m starting to think all that burnt-by-flames talk’s a load of rubbish. No, I think in hell you are the flames. What do you think? Am I warm? That was a little pun, Trinna.’

‘This forever?’

‘You still burn, though. You burn yourself. Are you with me?’ I smiled. ‘Hey, you know when you’re at an especially low ebb? I’ve a good comparison for those shooting pains you keep getting across the surface of your brain.’

Trinna faded from the bar. When she faded back in she was following a green fly round the rim of my green glass. But not, apparently, the foursome in my ginger ale. Peering in the bar’s window to watch proceedings was a gigantic green craggy Gordon Cole waggling fingers the size of zeppelins.

I said, ‘Jet fighters flying very low from RAF Lossiemouth.’

Trinna’s foot dropped to the floor. She finished off her Coke and said, ‘A bird shat on you and you did not notice. You are sleeping rough for some reason. There is always crusty stuff around your eyes. You are hanging about a bar which plays reggaetón mixes of Paris Hilton songs. You tried to sell your Multipla to the Prado. Your latest hairstyle, you say, alludes to a 1985 Swedish heavy-metal charity single. You have pages from a book by Morrissey all over your flat as wallpaper. You have a diorama taking up most of your front room of the town of Twin Peaks blending into some town in Scotland, featuring a tiny Green Glove and BOB’s punchup in the office of the sheriff and a tiny you getting covered with Tippex by a postman. And you have if you can’t beat them join them Tippexed several times on a mirror. But still you feel qualified to look down on my religion and my politics. Do you see anything not right with this picture, Andy?’

Laura Palmer walked in and waved at Trinna. A meek Ella-Laura Ospíndola on crutches. On both legs she had a cast. I wiped the birdshit from my neck, and the crusts from beneath my eyes. The One’s rays shimmered through my brain.

Behind Ella came Les, Stanley, César and Mateo Rodríguez, all but Stanley on crutches, and with their legs in casts. Beneath their tee shirts César and Mateo had a bump protruding from their torsos. Not a bun, waxed moustache, or forked beard in sight.

Ella stood beside me, then looked down into my eyes. She buried her forehead among my poodle-rocker’s hair. Mascara trickled down my cheek.

‘Sorry, Andy,’ Mateo said. ‘We are so, so sorry.’ There was something the matter with his teeth.

‘Sincere apologies for doubting you, amigo,’ César said.

‘Brace yourselves,’ Les said. ‘You’ll both get through this.’

I will always be grateful for the delicacy with which Ella told us about the worst thing in the history of art, a decision by David Lynch that they were calling the rock bottom. Before she filled us in the others handed out muscle relaxant for us to rub on ourselves in the toilets, to make sure we wouldn’t need colostomy bags like César’s and Mateo’s, Bottom Bags as the Twin Peaks fan community would soon be calling them. Next they gave us fish-oil and collagen capsules for our joints to help prevent what they’d named Rock Bottom Lock, which had sent the four of them to A&E, and some paramedics too. Once our capsules were swallowed and digested they gave us Orbit to chew to stop our molars grinding away to dust like César and Mateo’s had done.

Then using information from six years of my Whatsapps she’d never answered, Ella prepared us to hear the most shameful artistic choice there’s ever been, but in stages, with pauses for deep breaths and stretches of our legs and feet.

Yes, our toes and ankles curled and our bottoms clamped and our molars bit through the gum—whose wouldn’t during such an ordeal? But César and Mateo suffered more than we did, with each stage of Ella’s build-up provoking in them winces, blushes, shaking casts, shaking buttocks, and ground phantom molars, because of course when it came to the show’s rankness these two were still virgins, relatively speaking, compared to the four brutalised pornstars present.

Ella eased us in gently with a reminder of some parts of The One—she used our old name for it—that while pretty hideous were still nowhere near the worst things in it, such as the treatment of older women. She asked the two rock-bottom newbies how we were coping so far. Nodding at each other we agreed that we were fine, no bother.

Then she began to prime us with a reminder that The One makes David Lynch look the most risible human being who’s ever lived. When she’d listed some of the series’ lows in this regard, blushing Mateo cried out as his toes tried to curl inside his casts. Ella’s hand went to reassure him but when she caught my eye she stopped and instead told us of the membership, membership rules and basic ethos of what she’d decided to call Club Gevurah.

My lip trembled and I had to go and calm myself in the toilet cubicle, where she joined me for some kissing and playful grappling and a hair suggestion/ultimatum.

When we returned to the table hand in hand Les, Trinna and César applauded. With a defeated look Mateo muttered, ‘So be it, brother.’

Now Ella really primed us for the rock bottom.

Despite all its extreme formal zaniness and insincere game-playing, she said, the series is one of the most theme-heavy ever made. And a central theme is anti-retro, anti-nostalgia. Ella summarised everything The One sacrifices at the altar of this theme, then everything it desecrates at that same altar, which took her quite a while.

‘Are we clear on this?’ she asked. ‘It is very important to understand the number and the seriousness of the things which are desecrated by The One’s war on retro and that it is with no doubts the most anti-nostalgic work of art anyone has ever made. More than anything it was this which led to us needing ambulances when we understood the rock bottom.’ Mateo, César and Les nodded. ‘It means the contempt for the audience revealed by the rock bottom is like nothing seen before on this world.’

She was right about this. Nothing else on our world’s come close, not in art, not in any field. We’re in the realm of the cosmically minging. This is a Big Big Bad.

Trinna offered Ella and me her massive hands. César and Mateo joined hands with Les and Stanley. We closed our eyes and breathed in deep. I prayed for strength from my higher power, which was still my hatred of the abomination.

Then Ella let us have it. The most shattering element of the abomination’s megalomania, the Ragnarök, the most sadistic thing ever inflicted on Mr Lynch by his Demonic Twin. The impossible thing that had brought the finest woman I’ve known back to me at last, the shock of which had ECT’d my old friend back to his senses, and had even brought the director and minstrel of the Institución Nacional Lynch, and Ella’s boyfriend, now the former director and minstrel, and due to this rock bottom her former boyfriend once again, into this green hovel with his tail between his wrecked legs, with a Bottom Bag hanging off him.

Skulls were clutched. Wails were wailed. Stanley howled. Trinna had to be talked out of drinking. But such a good job had been done on preparing us, so considerate, so well thought-out, that neither of us newbies suffered Rock Bottom Lock, thankfully, or clamps so grave we had to call an ambulance. Please be as considerate when you tell people about the rock bottom.

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