The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 9
The Summit ^ Manage Mother's Poison ^ Get This Man Some Help ^ The Demon Inside David Lynch ^ The 2nd-Worst Thing in the History of Art ^ Bisociation ^ Oo-oh ^ Top Trumps ^ Somewhere Over the Rainbow
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 Summit
THE ABSOLUTE ROCK BOTTOM was our secret for now. Nobody was to say a word about it on el zumbido, we all agreed, until we’d reached consensus about David Lynch. That rock bottom was so calamitous that it forced us to face once more the question at the heart of this mystery. What had befallen my former higher power that he’d make something so hoaching?
Throughout the seven-year war the cultists had told us how blind we were, and in a sense they were right. Though I’d never admitted this to anyone else, even to Ella or Les, there had long been a niggling sense that just as I’d been blinded by kayfabe for years with drink and wrestling, when it came to The One I was missing some vital fact. Maybe I’d been too distracted by problems with Ella and then losing her to properly understand what Lynch was up to. So what was it?
The first step was to get my Qustodio password from Les, which after being hospitalised by the series and its auteur he was glad to give me. Then surrounded by posters of Lynch and his works, figurines from his works, sat on stools covered in chevrons, around a kitchen table covered in chevrons, lit by The One’s lettering blazing down greenly through the window from the sky, with no gut-churning hairstyles or facial hair or bangles on display, the six of us and Stanley gathered whenever possible in Mateo’s Chueca flat, the very place where Ella had made her momentous breakthrough, which being on the ground floor was easiest for her, Mateo, César and Les as they waited for their knees to fully heal.
Here we’d meet to look at the show from every angle we could think of in the hope of finding some explanation for its awfulness other than a total collapse in skill and care and basic humanity on the part of the hermit we still thought was responsible. As in recovery meetings, we served strong coffee and had cards on the table that said THINK THINK THINK; THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I; and MORE WILL BE REVEALED. There were plenty of nods at what others shared and we frowned upon any kind of cross-sharing, i.e. pointing out flaws in what anybody else proposed. No idea would be too ridiculous to share.
Word got out about what was happening in that kitchen and others began to turn up. The AntiRe warrior-twins Veronica and Beatriz in tee shirts that featured the hermit French-kissing Franco. The Strobes + Robes DJ team who were no help at all and frankly seemed intellectually out of their depth. Trinna’s Nazi Satanist crew were quickly banned because they were just as unpleasant as you’d expect, especially when drunk, two of them refusing to wash or dry their coffee mugs, and one to put on shoes to cover up his foetid hairy Nazi Hobbit feet. And Ella’s fellow witches were quickly banned because they were just as transfixing as you’d expect, and some of us couldn’t focus on Lynch as they whirled round the table hand in hand casting spells to inspire us.
After getting nowhere for a fortnight in late May, we decided that we should try to find some common ground with Lynch and work from there. Where if anywhere did we accept what he was saying in The One? Trinna shared that she didn’t accept most women over forty are whiny hags. Les shared that he didn’t accept seventeen hours of cheese are funny or genius. Veronica shared that she didn’t accept no homosexuals in the US speak. Ten minutes later we were still sharing this kind of stuff.
Ella lit some candles and called for a minute’s silent meditation or prayer. After that silent minute she proposed that we make our starting point the bit at the end of Part 7 where for two and a half minutes all we get is a barman sweeping the floor of the Roadhouse (Franck Boulègue: ‘One of the most interesting dance sequences in The Return… a long and complex choreography for a man and a broom that creates a suspense of its own, based solely on the movements and choices of the cleaner’).
‘The scene is terrible and deliberately so, clearly,’ Ella shared. ‘So let us see if we can view the entire series the same way, people, as deliberate 1960s filmschool rubbish, and try to figure out why David Lynch would produce such a thing fifty years too late.’
Nods went round the table. Yes, we agreed, good starting point, Ella. The possibilities suggested were as follows.
>> Lynch had crossed the Line and gone off his rocker, simple as that, and become lost in Neil Breenish so-bad-it’s-good to the extent that he now believed black equals white and good equals shite.
He wanted folks to think through the potential repercussions, dammit, the next time a frickin teapot rolled up offering in a poor imitation of a dead guy’s voice to send them back in time. He wanted to provide practical advice to folks hesitant about sexual congress with their rapist, wanted to put a reclusive madman’s arm round the hesitator’s shoulder and counsel them that Yip, yip, they should proceed if this would invite a rumoured nasty creature to a new dimensional plane, arguably. Blinkered shows such as Baby Reindeer were in denial that the inviting-a-rumoured-creature quandary even existed.
>> The voices in his mad loner’s skull told him to structure the entirety of Twin Peaks like two adjacent mountains and their valleys.
With the Season 1 premiere, because we know nothing about the series yet, we start off on the left in the valley at ground level. Next for fourteen episodes we go up till we reach the pinnacle of Episode 14 and the revelation that Leland murdered Laura. Next we go back down for fourteen episodes of trash and end up in a second valley. With Episode 29 we start to climb the next mountain and continue up to the second pinnacle Fire Walk with Me. Then we get the severely but not yet apocalyptically minging first few episodes of The One and sharply descend this second mountain, before hurtling down, down into the third valley and then with the final two hours deep under it all the way to the planet’s molten core.
>> He made the series only for his Manbam audience which often watches on drugs.
Good drugs significantly improve the experience of watching The One, since good drugs improve many things. Give me some 4-HO-MiPT, I thought but didn’t say in front of Les, and I’d enjoy the company of Gove, or at least find it bearable, at least for a while. In both cases the drugs would fill in the witters, longueurs and dead air with coherence, meaning, and simple human interest and so help to view these respective national embarrassments as flukes thrown up by some glitch in the Ultraverse, absurd but not completely unfunny, rather than insanely ambitious but befuddled, reactionary and sadistic travesties given platforms beyond what they deserve.
>> Accelerationism is the view that things won’t get any better until they’ve got far worse, so let’s make them hellish. In the context of addiction to booze accelerationism can be responsible for some of the drunk’s worst benders and behaviour, a subliminal attempt to experience rock bottom in order to hurt so bad you’re forced to finally clean up your act and sober up in kayfabe 4, while in the context of the addiction that underlies all the rest, accelerationism might involve gorging on our thoughts so excessively and sickeningly it helps break us out of our imprisonment in language. For similar accelerationist reasons some people are fine with the likes of Mr Trump and Vox, and environmental armageddon.
So perhaps the hermit made The One and the imminent and horrendous-sounding Season 4 so hoaching with the barely conscious aim of shocking and shaming himself and the wider culture into sorting themselves out.
>> A related possibility was that he’d made them so hoaching that their traumatised viewers would never want to watch TV again. Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead? as the BBC kids’ TV show said for twenty years to little apparent effect.
Mark Fisher’s view was that retro mainstream culture, the death of what he called popular modernism, was so important because of the message this sent politically, that the era of progress, cultural and political, is over for you chattel. Rehashes and Total Capitalism are now all you’re going to get. Drop any hopes of removing that proboscis from your neck. Know your place, eat your cereal, and wait for the apocalypse. But there is another way to view popular culture, which is that it isn’t actually very important and the delusion that it is keeps politically and environmentally frustrated people sat on couches entranced by screens rather than doing something less boring and passively defeatist instead. Therefore maybe The One and The Extinction-Level Event were Lynch’s equivalents of that kids’ programme, the TV shows, he hoped, to end all TV shows.
>> And maybe he also wished to give his audience endurance tests so far-out in their frustration, barrenness and ugliness that nothing in our lives would ever again seem to have those qualities to any significant degree.
Even as the climate apocalypse arrived, compared to the horrors of The Return every moment of life would feel smooth and easy, beautiful, Edenic. As in the previous proposal, The One was a Christ-like act of divine and therefore easily misunderstood generosity from the artist to his apostles, through which he nailed his hard-won reputation to the Cross so that hell on earth might feel like heaven. You can probably guess the two contributors who shared or sang these proposals.
>> Or possibly the show wasn’t quite as bad as we thought. It was terrible, despicable, but maybe not to the extremes that we believed.
Mr Trump was despicable as well, nobody but throbbers would deny this, but he was a proxy too for folk’s resentment of the parasite class in general—This is who rules the world?—as well as a beneficiary of that resentment. And in a similar way The Return might have attracted people so tired of insipid TV drama made by millionaires funded by billionaires that they’d swing all the way in the opposite direction, they believed, and vastly overrate a show such as this because, like jazz-scatting at a raped child’s deathbed, it wasn’t just more genteel blandness, because as their Grand Maître enthused about a certain president, it disrupted the thing so much. (Though there was of course an alternative solution, which was to stop watching bad TV. For example, if reviewing it’s your job then perhaps find another one. If you’ve been brutalised by the monotony of reviewing mainstream TV or of factory or security work, the remedy isn’t to applaud that bedside scat).
Meanwhile many of the rest of us so disliked that same culture and the plaudits sent its way by gatekeepers paid by the same billionaires, and resented too the many treacheries of the boomers, that we were no longer able to keep kayfabe 2, and therefore may have lost our equanimity a little and slightly over-criticised the pile of dung—dung with yellow worms wriggling in it, worms with rows of needle-like teeth, also pincers covered in poison that gives you a leprosy-like disease there’s no name for yet—that those same gatekeepers claimed was a masterwork. If we couldn’t take a swing at the parasites and boomer generation themselves then perhaps we could make do with the next best thing, the boomer multimillionaire responsible for the most lauded recent example of the parasites’ most influential artform.
Egged on by several Monster Ultras, I wondered if Mr Lynch and Mr Morrissey had also acted as proxies for my dislike for Mr Trump. Maybe something had snapped inside me, possibly due to years of bitterness about boomers and to consequent headwreck compounded in recent times by too many drugs, and at some level I’d got these three boomer reactionaries jumbled in my mind. And perhaps my dislike for Mr Trump and Mr Morrissey was intensified because their gaudy grotesqueness, tediousness, chauvinism, self-veneration, confusion, pretentiousness, characterological chaos, characterological implausibility, ridiculous dialogue, and so on meant they were like creatures spawned by The One.
None of these possibilities could be discounted. Nevertheless they were so uncomfortable to consider as explanations for the show’s perceived rottenness that an awkward tension began to circulate, not good for César and our host Mateo’s healing bottoms. We called it a night, therefore, and agreed to team up in groups of two or three and meditate or pray some more to spark off less troubling ideas.
Photo of Prince Andrew by Thorne1983
Manage Mother’s Poison
AT WORK THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, César’s first shift back since his knees went, we didn’t meditate or pray but we did play crazy golf and drop some ALD-52.
An early suggestion brought on by the drug and the starlit and One-lit golf was to stop using words such as garbage and trash and to think instead in terms of ‘shoddiness’, with quotemarks to indicate that the series’ shoddiness is deliberate. It was less of a value judgement, we agreed, and so might allow us to better enter Lynch’s headspace as he wrote and filmed The One. ‘I hate slick and pretty things,’ he’d once admitted. ‘I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises—they’re like little flowers.’
And César asked me not to disrespect my former higher power as Dr Evil or a grotesque wanky hatred-filled boomer hermit and to call him Mr Lynch instead, to call the series The Return rather than The One, and to please take him soon to his first AA, GA and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. After running a few GA Steps through my head, I agreed to these requests.
I shared that some commentators had claimed the series was determined to make the cultists feel they were re-experiencing the range of what they might go through on an average day, states like boredom, confusion, despair, incoherence, hatred of old hags, hatred of standoffish young bitches, respect for the bravery of rapists because they disrupted the thing so much, the sense that you’re a divinity amidst degenerates, pondering if chevrons floating above slot machines are trustworthy, and so on.
People who argued Mr Lynch no longer cared about audience reception were dead wrong, these commentators said, as the show badly wants to troll its core audience, to sucker them into defending the relevance of the above kind of 4channishness, into numerous other defences of the clearly indefensible, and into providing entertainment for everybody else with desperate overthinkings of stuff like the sweeping of floors. The show was uniquely tedious onscreen, but not so the offscreen action from Mr Lynch’s cult, and the show’s relationship to its audience, if highly antagonistic, at times seemed so fundamental to its overall project that it might be necessary to define that project as the onscreen action plus the audience response.
It wasn’t easy for César to concede these points, I could tell, but he did so after I got confused about which of these ten balls before me were hallucinations or real, and sclaffed my third-hole tap-in.
Following on from these points was the part Mr Lynch’s interest in Eastern practice and philosophy may have played in The Return’s ‘shoddiness’, specifically their focus on escaping personal narrative, the stories we tell ourselves to maintain the illusion of individuality (what was the Transcendental Meditation Mr Lynch so valued but the ending of personal narrative?), and with wakening from the dream of narrative and time into the actuality of the eternal present. If it turned out that Mr Lynch had attempted a project that audacious, a full-on attack on narrative and the illusions it creates, then he certainly deserved credit for his bravery. The ALD-52 was now working its magic.
So Mr Lynch’s cult, I shared as César putted, weren’t meant to respond to the show with appreciation and gratitude. These implied a handing over of some kind, a gift from the artist to the audience, and The Return was never any kind of gift. Instead it was all about stripping everything away.
I now shared more speculations, with no idea that a couple of nights later they would prove oddly prescient.
Ella’s Advaita Vedanta has a term neti neti, I shared, the nearest translation of which is not this, not that. It’s one of the primary tools employed in this school of Hinduism to help people strip away denial and other illusions and attain a nirvana that makes the world’s ups and downs irrelevant. And nirvana means snuffed out, annihilation, terminal desolation, in the best possible sense. Lights snuffed out, darkness, no-world, void, like the final moments of The Return after Carrie/Laura’s scream. Hence the need for neti neti to strip everything away, the illusions of purpose, coherence, resolution, beauty, significance, decency, basic interest and engagement, love, good versus bad, value in general, separation, time, space, any and all concepts and categories, language itself, the world itself, existence itself, the lot. For some people, this process could be nearly as harrowing, Ella told me, as hour after hour of Season 3.
So in Mr Lynch’s eyes, I shared, the series may have been an attempt to strip everything from the viewer, the viewer’s illusions, as he saw them, to slap them into the terminal desolation so valued in Eastern practice, that blastedness, bereftness, nothingness, no-thing-ness, silence, void that might be our only true refuge, our only home, as the world we know comes to an end.
And there was something nicely ambitious and maverick about providing global end-times salvation within a protective bubble of nothingness mystically formed by the ultra-mince of a telly drama. It had been the least enjoyable watch of my life, there was no denying that, but if some guru told you to meditate for eighteen hours in a cave populated by rats and bats, and snakes and scorpions and tarantulas, plus maybe Abascal, Gove, Ron Jeremy and Prince Andrew circling you as a naked Morris dancing team, you might not find that too enjoyable either. The guru may still prove to be on the side of the angels, though, if—big if—you come out of the dancers’ cave with all your denials stripped away and ready as you’ll ever be to face armageddon.
But considering the cost in audience enjoyment, was The Return’s ‘shoddiness’ worth it? If so many people found the series so minging, could even the best explanations justify this? Which was to say nothing of the possibility that Mr Lynch might also have lost his artistic touch and the show is full of not ‘shoddiness’ or just plain shoddiness, i.e. just plain garbage, but both. That was always the danger with ‘shoddiness’. To make it work in any honourable way you really needed to be at peak form, whereas charlatans who knew they’d made garbage could always claim it was deliberate.
‘As in Tommy Wiseau and The Room,’ César shared.
I smiled at our restored psychic bond.
Although the judgement was made well before The Return aired, The Room is famously ‘The Citizen Kane of bad movies’. The two works are curiously similar in a number of ways, if not in their scale. Notoriously poor acting, ridiculous amounts of dead air, awful dialogue, an edit that accentuates all of this, plotlines that lead nowhere, prolonged sex scenes, a risible ageing male lead with long dyed-black hair who implausibly attracts young women, other narcissism on the part of the writer-director-producer-star, and the cults devoted to their ridicule. So similar, in fact, that along with the works of Hieronymous Bosch, Jean Cocteau, Neil Breen, No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Donnie Darko, Swan Lake, The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, the Arthurian legend of Sir Perceval, and many more, an additional source text for The Return may be the Citizen Kane of bad movies, although because it’s much shorter and isn’t sick or vicious or so unfunny you want to die, this text doesn’t have a honkingness pie you can see from space.
The honk did grow considerably, however, when its writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau claimed he’d made The Room as a so-bad-it’s-good sendup. It was this thought that led to the night’s final and most radical explanation for The Return’s boggingness.
A seemingly clever aspect of The Blair Witch Project is the ‘shoddy’ use of bad acting to augment the story. The performances are so amateurish they call into question the sincerity of the characters being played, which in turn drives the suspicion that they’re driving one another mad with headgames. It was as though the filmmakers realised beforehand that the acting would be shoddy and asked themselves how this might be used to advance the narrative.
And who knows, I shared, gesturing up at The One’s lettering with my putter, perhaps an equivalent decision was reached with this production. Mr Lynch and Mark Frost get fifty pages into writing the script together and find that it just isn’t happening. The story, characters and dialogue are pitiful and they know it.
We aren’t the craftsmen we used to be, they conclude. We’re both old men, after all, and half of our partnership keeps doing things with his fingers that make him look not just zany but sectionable. We haven’t worked together or had a TV drama aired in decades. This script sucking is hardly a shock. But we do want to get a series made, so might there be a way for the story to make use of our decline?
Taking The Blair Witch Project’s approach, then, they come up with the Experiment/Jowday/Mother as a transdimensional Big Bad so negative she infects everything.
The world of the series is presented as a place where everything appears somehow infected, the town of Twin Peaks, personal relationships, how ugly the US often looks, entire scenes tinted/tainted weird colours, eerie silences, and the like. Even among the series’ admirers there was agreement that the world of The Return as a whole and the Twin Peaks where Jowday lives in particular seem not just damaged but infected. Mr Lynch and Frost’s ploy is this: Yes, Jowday has tainted everything, not only the world and town of the series but the series itself. She taints the very portrayal of that world and town. The showrunners will manage mother’s poison.
In The Return misjudgement, incompetence and confusion are widespread, among the series’ characters and also its creative team. Rampant bumbling about on both sides of the camera. Almost everything is off in some way, not only in terms of content but also of technique. Cinematography, edits, and the music are poor, both deliberately and otherwise, the acting’s generally poor, deliberately and otherwise (Chrysta Bell is now perfectly cast), most aesthetic rules are broken or ignored since everything is tainted, including the actors, crew, the creators’ previous works, and sacred Twin Peaks moments such as Laura’s death. One of Mr Lynch’s central projects had long been Eastern-style non-duality and other erasure of boundaries, especially between content and technique.
‘And there does appear to be something totalising about the show,’ César shared on the final green. ‘It does feel like it coheres in content and technique, in its very taintedness.’ He knew we’d cracked the case.
I sank a long putt complicated by ALD-52 hallucinations, which were making the course extra-‘crazy’.
César squatted on the green, lifted his healed legs into the air and to my surprise began to do his upside-down dervish-whirl. Just on his scarred head this time, as he no longer had a bun. I watched him whoop there in his untilted cap, his Bottom Bag centrifuging away from his torso as he celebrated the discovery of the rationale behind his former Master’s dud.
‘We’ve come a long way, you and I,’ I shared, ‘since Wock‘n’ wewl.’
Even Mr Lynch himself is tainted, I continued as César whirled on. Allowing himself to be seen as an egomaniacal lech because this badly taints him—here Lynch has really taken one for the team. Jowday has tainted everything, even the men who dreamt her up, but in the process they may additionally have got a reprieve for their limitations as ageing craftsmen.
There was an impressive cleverness and elegance about this solution, a high-stakes gambit that was also pioneering. This explanation therefore accounted more persuasively than any other for The Return’s deliberate ‘shoddiness’, those defects so blatant and central they had to be part of the overall conception. The disappointment of so much of the audience, we agreed, was intentional. Jowday was allowed to taint not just the world and town of the series but their portrayal too, not just Twin Peaks but Twin Peaks.
The Return Part 8: in the form of an insect, the Big Bad crawls into the mouth of the young Sarah Palmer
Get This Man Some Help
We woke up hours later on the final green, still tripping beneath the stars and lettering. I remembered our brainstorm and contentment went through me, and long-sought calm. Then I remembered the rock bottom.
One by one our meticulously assembled explanations crumbled and collapsed, and we were faced yet again with the catastrophe’s world-historic boggingness, which made all those explanations impossible. None of them, not even the final one, could be reconciled with a decision as shameful and out-there as that rock bottom. The only fact left standing from the brainstorm was that the series was a hoaching pile of garbage and there had to be some reason for this and for whatever had happened to Mr Lynch, to the hermit.
Just old age, maybe, I told myself as César went off groggily to open up the carpark gates, and the resulting laziness and loss or dismissal of quality control. Too many years in the industry working with people who viewed him as a deity. The sets featured on behind-the-scenes clips looked at times fairly uncomfortable for him, the forced laughter of the on-set Mike Pences over some innocent remark he’d made, followed by the worry in his eyes as to why everybody’s laughing, then finally the realisation Oh yeah, to these folks I’m a god and everything I say is a genius zinger. If that was your experience of other people, who among us wouldn’t lose our way? Who wouldn’t feel the urge to scurry back up into the hills asap and live once more as a recluse?
To keep producing distinguished work artists needed to believe both that they still had what it takes but also that they had to keep proving they hadn’t lost their touch. It was this latter belief many of them dropped as the acclaim piled up, and partly explained why so few made anything decent in old age, because at their best they lacked full artistic confidence and therefore still felt they’d something to prove. When they made the commitment that they’d speak to the room and love the room, there was often an additional factor at work, a healthy fear of the room’s rejection, of the love not being returned. This love and fear then led to fanatical attention to detail, craftsmanship being honed and honed, and the refusal to rub their buttocks in the audience’s faces, which in turn gave us works that glowed with communication. In the David Lynch of The Return there was none of that fear or love but no shortage of confidence or lively buttocks.
You’re familiar I’m sure with the term enabler for those who refuse to confront an addict with the unacceptability of their behaviour and therefore enable the addiction and behaviour to keep worsening. An unusual feature of AA and GA is the way they view addiction-caused hell with respect-going-on-reverence, as its very horror can make the addict experience the desperation and humility necessary to try to get some help. This is why the seemingly least serious addictions can in the long run be the most harmful. Someone hooked on weed, TV, porn, screens in general, may find it harder to end their addiction than a junkie would, because it won’t quickly destroy them and consequently won’t bring them to rock bottom and submission to total defeat, meaning that they go on suffering, but not suffering enough, for decades. It’s also why the toughest people can have the most nightmarish lives of anyone, because their very toughness means they never crack.
And so those who’re tough, rich, famous, physically attractive, talented, charismatic, hip, or who have patient and generous parents, rather than admired are sometimes pitied in recovery, as they can find it harder than others to get over their addiction(s), because their supposed blessings mean the consequences of their relapses often aren’t as ruinous as those of other relapsers, which means it’s harder to reach the transformative low and humility of rock bottom. These types often attract people to bail them out after relapses—that is, they attract enablers. And since they’ve usually had an easier and therefore more infantilised time of it than others, they can be under-equipped to cope when, as it tends to for alcoholics and other addicts, life becomes a dismal slog.
Likewise countries and generations. The US was the belle of the ball for so long that it was utterly unprepared for 9/11 and so lost its mind militarily and ended up causing over a million deaths. And having had a more financially comfortable and more infantilised lot than any previous generations, the boomers and gen x were underprepared, to say the least, for the hardships of middle- and old-age and the challenges of the banking, climate and Covid emergencies, and so in their panicked tantrums and denials they poisoned the world forever and became easy marks for denialist fascists.
His Manbam critics and fans were the hermit’s enablers. They thought they were supporting him but in reality they’d destroyed him. The beauty of his mid-career works had blinded them to the fact that he’d become the equivalent of a turps drinker slumped in an alley muttering at imaginary nagging exes. The last thing that mutterer needed was a bunch of enablers who applauded everything that left his mouth and called it genius. Keep telling him he’s the greatest and he’ll never try to escape that alley. (Hence the supreme Big Bad in The Return inhabits the body of Sarah Palmer, an enabler—perhaps the darkest of all the Twin’s jokes at Mr Lynch’s expense).
The same applied to states. ‘The United Kingdom is the greatest polity in the history of the world. This is as good as it gets. Eat your cereal.’ ‘The United States is a shining city on a hill. Everyone in the world looks up to us. What more do you want?’ It’s hard to escape from a prison you can barely see.
Another way of putting this is that like addicts, and perhaps like the boomers and gen x and the US too, the hermit hadn’t responded well to being given plenty of freedom, comparatively speaking, in his case artistic freedom. Like them he was at his best when he’d others around who wouldn’t take any of his nonsense, e.g. cutting Blue Velvet down from his intended three and a half hours to the fighting-weight masterpiece that was released. But freedom is a blessing, we’re often told, the more of it the better, supposedly, and Lynch’s interviews made it clear that since he’d failed to secure final cut on Dune he’d been determined on his projects to obtain maximum artistic freedom.
The equivalent of that Dune experience for an alcoholic or drug addict might be all those years they spent in school craving the freedom to do whatever they wanted with their days, not to mention what waited for some of them at home. But nearly every person in recovery will eventually confess that too much freedom’s damaged them.
At the turn of the century me and most of my friends in Dublin ended up on the dole, having a ball, we told ourselves. The Irish dole was relatively generous at the time and with Rent Allowance on top we’d all the cash and time we needed to drug and drink whenever we were in the mood. And it can’t be denied that in your early twenties the freedom to kick off a pill and booze session at 10am on a Tuesday feels as though it’s a gift. This is the life, you agree when you find yourselves high and drunk and watching WrestleMania on TV in a glamorously desolate bowling alley on a glamorously desolate industrial estate.
When you’re still unemployed and high and drunk three years later, and several of you are now on the antidepressants Seroxat or Prothiaden, the desolation and bowling alley don’t seem quite as glamorous as they once did, but you continue to be freer than those drones on this industrial estate who aren’t watching WrestleMania, you tell yourself to keep kayfabes 2 and 3.
And though the hangovers have become worse you’ve discovered—because like the boulevardiers and Club Gevurah you’re special and the normal rules don’t apply to you—that ten Prothiaden at bedtime instead of one help you rise and shine the next morning/afternoon.
Plus you don’t even spend that much money on booze these days since you’ve discovered—because you’re special and the normal rules etc.—how easy it is to steal other people’s drinks in bars and clubs and bowling alleys, and how good you are at grappling your way out of trouble when threatened by the newly drinkless with knives or cut-throat razors. And though you’ve caught several diseases from those stolen drinks, this only lasts until your immune system gets wise to what’s happening and you become healthier and even more special, in certain ways, than you’ve ever been before.
Anyway, you’re still in control of the whole adventure, aren’t you, you just enjoy testing boundaries and experimentally playing the heel, and like an audience chucklingly kayfabeing the whole performance. You could escape this apparent chaos and darkness and get a job anytime you want, it’s just that you don’t yet want to, at least partly due to roleplaying a version of yourself that appears fairly confident. You have woken up in strangers’ beds after taking pills and powders and stolen drinks but no Prothiaden the night before, and though you’ve seldom felt so desolate and nothing’s glamorous any more, you go ahead and robotically wrestle this nice girl with her shit together and perhaps even move in with her. Which means you never quite find that you’re completely deserted and homeless at rock bottom, so shocked by what’s happened and where you’ve ended up that you might consider seeking help to turn your life around.
Finally many years of experimentation and kayfabe later, although you do now have a job, your boss is demanding to know if you’ve lost your mind, and because it’s a long time since you had much input into scripting this experiment/bout, the only answer you can think of is that it doesn’t feel like you have. Does it?
Another recovery adage is that life gets everybody in the end. It doesn’t matter how special you are, or think you are, because eventually you’ll get nailed. And when you do, those people who support or even worship you may be worse than useless.
So perhaps The One was some kind of cry for help from David Lynch of the type Bret Easton Ellis admitted lay behind American Psycho. The two works portray breakdown, but whose breakdown? When art reeking of contempt appeared we often speculated about the state of mind of the artist, before being informed by the Manbams that this was naive and philistine, but then when the biographies were published we frequently learned that the work coincided with some sort of personal disintegration. It was unusual for contemptuous work to be produced by artists in a healthy state. It was more often the work of actual misanthropists, and misanthropists tended to be in emotional trouble.
I looked up Lynch’s interviews on YouTube and watched again the gesture this long-term recluse sometimes made as he spoke, that bizarre thing with his fingers, and not a single interviewer ever asking, ‘Excuse me, but what’s this strange business with these waggles?’ As I watched him blatantly bluff his way through many of the clips I wondered if he believed the interviewers and watching fans were too daft or brainwashed to notice the bluffing.
If he’d never adopted his golly-jeepers bumpkin front, he’d have had less leeway from the fans and press, that’s for sure. If he’d made The One but came across the way Lars von Trier does, the critical response would likely have been quite different. So if he had any genius remaining maybe it was in his ability to keep suckering commentators into granting leeway they’d give nobody else. But wait, he speaks and gawps kind of innocently and meditates fourteen times a week, so he can’t be just another boomer chauvinist and reactionary.
Somebody needed to get the old man off the stage. He, not Jowday, had tainted everything, and it was horrible to witness, like some formerly loved AA-head hogging the mic drunk at a World Convention to share the wisdom of the fairies whirling about his head. A commenter on reddit claimed that a producer had begged Lynch to have another unequivocally admirable central character in The Return, somebody other than the character played by him, by the auteur, and that he’d stared at them till his eyes glowed red. David Lynch, once famous as Hollywood’s nicest hermit. Red glowing eyes.
The Demon Inside David Lynch
ON MY NEXT NIGHT OFF WORK I took 4-AcO-MET, 4-HO-MiPT and AL-LAD and roleplayed Sergio Ramos with Ella, who was in Laura’s schoolgirl gear.
Across the Casa de Campo park diamonds of space split off from other diamonds. Light from green lettering shone down across our bodies. As she ground away on top telling me to submit, Ella-Laura’s eyes were cubes, spheres and pyramids made of light and crystal. She rose from where we joined and went on upwards, spread out like a tree as beyond her branching hair lettering kept gliding round the sky. Green rays crosshatched one another. The park swayed light and then dark, grew and shrank as both dusk and dawn.
Cushioning her knees I pulled Ella-Laura down to my level and wrote round her bud one letter at a time with Sergio’s t-o-n-g-u-e. Each roll of her hips scattered goddess Ella-Lauras and god/dess Ella-Laura-Andy-Sergios.
I wrote Lynch??? then fractal honkingness and demonic cruelty.
‘Be here with me,’ Ella-Laura said, grabbing my cropped hair. ‘Please.’ She lifted my chin to make me look up at her face. Which featured a greying waxed handlebar moustache.
She slid herself down my tongue and birthed quintessential goddess and god/dess versions of that slide, the essence of what the slide was and what it said.
I met each with a tongued letter that formed the words Gevurah, ten Sephiroth, ten entities.
Ella-Laura rubbed herself against my tongue and beard, each motion releasing goddess and god/dess versions of itself that felt even more essential than the original, more the real thing, what every such motion had always aimed for but never quite achieved. Her bud pulsated right to the heart of our dimensional realm, which in turn pulsated in perfect sync with every other realm. One common pulse, the pact between mortals and immortals that pulsed within each human, the pact that the immortals have kept no matter what but that we decided in our plectology to betray.
But the offer of the pact remained, was there in the call of certain chemicals within each human body. In that pact good and evil might still be reconciled and purified, the impasse ended, the distance crossed, and mortals and immortals joined together in a double resurrection at the Promised End.
My tongue wrote BOB-in-Leland, Jowday eats faces, Jowday taints everything, Stanley’s barks, RED GLOWING EYES.
Ella grabbed my head and again tried to force me to look at her, to see this fluke nexus of every lovable quality I’d ever imagined possible in a woman, to actually see this gift from the Ultraverse. But instead I saw dozens of tiny manbabies in baggy green suits, flapping arms like they were drowning. Above Madrid there was hung a huge-starred vision of the night. Galaxies kept on flowing by.
Mad cries erupted. While I wondered whose cries they were I heard more mad cries.
Someone’s voice asked who’d brought everything to this point. My own voice gave an answer. Someone else’s gave an answer I couldn’t quite understand.
Things became inseparable. Grunts and demon-goddess sighs, traces of animal moans, hoots of owls, leaves that skittered in the wind. A gorgeous equality came from each sound with both softness and demonic power.
The two very different answers drilled into me, grew on me like a second head. Two beings strobed inside my skull: my former higher power David Lynch; and possessing him, some kind of demonic entity.
Demonically fuckable Ella-Lauras arched their backs as the night arched around us all. Their gleam was balanced in strict harmony with mine and then scattered as more demon-goddess beauty. Again the night arched around us and within us as an Ella-Laura climax shuddered out and merged with the night. The universe climaxed back inside them, inside Ella, inside Laura, each climax returning shudders through each part of their body and bringing on their next climax.
The two very different beings swelled my head to bursting point. There was only room for one answer. Twin Peaks, my higher power, my girlfriend for a time, my mind: the demon possessing David Lynch had robbed me of the lot, and it wasn’t finished with me yet.
Ella-Laura and I shed dozens of spiralling versions of ourselves that hooped round us greenly then shed many more in a hall of mirrors multiplication seeming not to distort but to undistort us, so that by the time there were 1124000727777607680000 of us we were closer to the reality of what we truly are.
This caress and grapple and whatever else it was was sent up to The One swimming above us in its holy light, while also being projected back down from it as rays that directed our every movement. Smiles streamed back and forth between our eyes and The One, shone off our eyes, shone off The One and each ray it sent streaming back to us.
The One was The One was The One.
The Ella-Lauras were not Ella OspÃndola. None of them were real.
The real Ella was gone. I was alone with my cock clasped in my fist, gazing up into blurring rays The One was sending down to me. Warmth shot along my spine. My head turned to vapour.
The One blazed its blurry light everywhere. One thing and not any other, incomparable, all-conquering, miraculous, cosmic, it was everything now and everything was it. On and on it blazed, its rays tugging away at its earthbound puppets, its Nazis and Manbams and other cultists. Those rays infected all things the way Jowday did, determined every last bit of the Ultraverse.
I writhed on the ground and prayed to my higher power. Pineal Tsarbomba flooded through my brain. It didn’t feel like I’d lost my mind.
The One peered down at my jerks and twists. Its blurry wet rays clung to my pineal gland and erupting molecules of Tsarbomba, clung to anything around me too. Like taut puppet strings those rays worked every bit of it, every inch and mile, backwards and forwards through the years, little tugs that puppeteered all the moments of my life.
My thoughts had separated from me. My eighteen Parts had scattered. There was maybe some link between the scattered Parts, some continuity, or maybe not. Faint green blurry rays had tugged apart their bonds.
Mr C
The Second-Worst Thing in the History of Art
MY BIRTHDAY PRESENT IN 1993 from Dougal was a VHS tape that featured an orgy involving pornstar biker chicks and the bikers who bossed them around.
Problem was, the original video was Swedish and the dialogue was dubbed by one Englishwoman and one Englishman whose voice was effete. Which meant that although it was a biker’s sweaty bearded face that snarled ‘Move your fuckin arse’, the dubbed voice sounded like Joan Collins’. When one of his biker friends snarled ‘Lovin my girth, this chick is’, the voice you heard sounded like Margaret Thatcher’s. When the gang leader bellowed ‘Meet the boss cock’ it was in the voice of Princess Di.
For nearly three decades Dougal and I have imitated this dubber’s lines as we drank, awoke with hangovers, came up, came down, watched royal weddings, cheered each other on in the ring, visited each other in ICUs, and were chased by knife-waving Rangers fans we’d taunted about their club going bust. We recited them in our heads when in bed with women we loved, or got these women to do the same imitations, which were more pleasing to us than our own imitations were to them. A classy woman imitating an Englishman whose voice resembles Princess Di’s imitating a Swedish Hell’s Angel telling a biker chick to ‘Meet the boss cock’ can be intimate and arousing, I swear, and tells you this woman is a keeper.
Picture President Trump as he flubbed his way through his Covid-19 media briefings and became frustrated at his inability to read out simple strings of words or understand what they signify. Picture the sneer he adopted to cover his embarrassment, he thought, and the patronising tone he took with any reporter who dared question the manner in which he was leading a third of a billion people through a pandemic. These were also the sneer and tone adopted by a porn-addicted fellow bouncer from my bi-experiment years who was impotent but believed this sneer and tone plus pointless thrusts into my buttocks created a smokescreen that somehow negated his limpness.
Plus note that for many Scottish, English and Welsh viewers, who along with the Irish make up a large proportion of those who dislike and ridicule The Return, the name Mr C connotes the man who fronted the Shamen’s ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ and other tracks and who seemed to think he was a bit dangerous.
The point of all this being that the show’s supposed Big Bad Mr C as written and directed by the Twin and performed by Kyle MacLachlan brings to mind a Hell’s Angel who sounds like Princess Di, a sneering, patronising, barely literate halfwit, the futile thrusts of a sneery bouncer, and the original Mr C, and can be taken about as seriously as they can. It is hard for me to watch Mr C in any context and not picture a beefy biker channelling his inner Di.
And Mr C is channelling BOB, who in the original series and in Fire Walk with Me is one of the greatest Big Bads in US screen history, yet another instance of the collapse in standards in The Return, and yet another sortie of its carpet-bombing of nostalgia for that original series and film.^^
And here we have yet another aspect ruined by its rampant cheesiness. Just as comprehensive and unyielding cheese, artistic kayfabe 2 taken to its limits, combined with extremely serious subject matter will always be a trainwreck, so too when it’s combined with one of your intended Big Bads.
And here we have yet another aspect ruined by the refusal of suspension of disbelief, which is having Kyle MacLachlan play so many different parts. If there’s no suspension of disbelief in the characters, we aren’t seeing Dale Cooper then Dougie Jones then Mr C then Richard. What we keep seeing is Kyle MacLachlan, the same Kyle MacLachlan most people know as Sex and the City’s poor Trey MacDougal who suffers from impotence. Therefore if there’s no suspension of disbelief, and so you already have MacLachlan’s sufferings in mind and you’ve just seen his toilet problems as manbaby Dougie, it becomes even harder to take him seriously when he next glowers as supposedly frightening stud but actually pantomime-cheesy Big Bad Mr C.
And of course another way the show’s unique is the way its flaws are demonically designed to accentuate one another. Throwing out so many rulebooks will lead to chaos in any production, and all the more so if those rulebooks are closely related, in that throwing out each then has knock-on effects on many others. And chucking together the wildly different styles of your numerous philosophical and creative influences, piling spiritual system upon system and classic text upon text, risks similar chaos if you can’t be bothered to discern which work well together and which do not. Like an actual trainwreck that mangles carriages into those in front, The Return mangles together elements that even inexperienced artists could see need kept apart.
As the three of us danced to ‘Greased Lightnin’ at a GA disco, Les once told a flamboyantly funky Trinna and me of novelist Arthur Koestler’s belief that the essence of creativity lies in the perception of a single thing in two or more seemingly incompatible ways, perception that Koestler called ‘bisociation’. But not every bisociation ends up with something worthwhile, far from it, and many of The Return’s bisociations and juxtapositions aren’t just Lynchianly strange but inhumanly so.
One of these is the combination of rampant cheesiness with rampant contempt. I enjoy strangeness in films and TV shows, probably too much, but the joining of cheesiness to misanthropy can be hard for me to handle. It reminds you a little of childhood journeys when your dad’s driving under the influence and there are lots of adults crammed in the Fiat Uno, and it nearly crashes and Suds yells to slow down, and your dad yells at him to shut up and that he’s never had time for any of them. Then everybody titters and gets more Tia Maria or Advocaat into them and your dad puts his foot down, and you tell yourself these grown-ups must know what they’re doing, but you know they’ve really lost their minds, and all bets are off and all boundaries down and the world’s a shimmery plecto place.
The Return sneers at humans, at times relentlessly, but it often combines this simultaneously with the flippancy of deliberate cheese and the mix is unsettling. The Eurovision Song Contest would be unsettling too if as well as tittering at its silliness, commentators earnestly called many people present vermin. But then tittered more titters. Then earnestly called more people vermin. Except even that doesn’t capture what The Return manages, because the show doesn’t switch between contempt and so-bad-it’s-good titters but instead manages both at once.
The four of us used to try this, try to address one another frivolously with camp body language and also communicate genuine dislike, to give one another the finger in a way that was contemptuous but also cheesily humorous. But we just couldn’t manage it. The closest Ella and I ever got was when we grappled but even then the antagonism never seemed authentic since it was a mutually agreed game and was also more than balanced out by its opposite. The Return, however, can pull off simultaneous cheese and contempt repeatedly. This sacred artefact manages it at will.
But there are of course more phenomena that manage this combination. One of them is porn, and another’s the way you can view yourself after a relapse. Another’s the cheesy touches within some sexual degradation, for example wearing Buckie Thistle tops. In fact sexual degradation’s essence is contempt plus so-bad-it’s-good, which may help explain The Return’s curiously rapey feel, not only explicitly on occasion but also deftly at its core.
Another such phenomenon is the MAGA cult. Its leader despises human beings, not excluding those he wants to vote for him or to grope, and this Macho Man has to be among the cheesiest specimens who’ve ever lived, while there can’t be many mass organisations cheesier than the hate-filled cult that worships him, including all those macho men dressed like the Village People. Their rallies and relatively naff little insurrection were and are carnivals of cheese and hatred, equivalent to WWE or Chippendales crowds itching for revenge upon those with no time for WWE or the Chippendales. They’re malevolent and dangerous while appearing to be smirkingly unserious, and that’s one difference between last century’s fascism and ours, which wears a so-bad-it’s-good smirk and is therefore taken less seriously than it deserves.
But as usual with The Return it gets worse, much worse. Rampant cheesiness plus rampant contempt is a strange combination and it is minging. But now watch those strangeness and ming levels crank right up when the series mixes rampant cheesiness and contempt with a writer-director-producer-hermit self-cast as the epicentre of the universe with a nice hard penis. Now your dad in the skidding car full of yells, glowers and titters has grown long hermit’s hair, eyebrows and fingernails, and during a sermon on how Christlike he is compared to anybody else present, whipped out his not-soft-where-it-counts.^^
And much of the time you don’t just have these three factors phantasmagorically accentuating one another but also many more of the Returnian’s twenty-two, and of their 1124000727777607680000 potential combinations. So now you’re in an Uno that’s skidding, full of yells, glowers, titters, faces clatted with spilled or spluttered Tia Maria or Advocaat, and gazillions of laser beams that pinball about and crisscross and bisociate, and everything including your oddly fingernailed dad’s flashing and sermon on the topic of his divinity appears to take place in slow motion, the sermon and the rest of the drunken talk’s as stilted as a bad school play’s, and everybody’s making jokes that crack up no one but themselves and saying they don’t know what’s happening or what our destination is.
Next there’s a long tense stretch when they all go quiet and somehow both grimace and simper through 1124000727777607680000 laser beams, the car radio hisses in and out of stations where people speak Bulgarian, backwards or in tongues, followed by your mum insisting the car’s jumped back in time to erase your entire lifestory since you were five, which means she never laid a hand on you.
‘Dinna listen to your mother,’ your dad says as the Uno speeds towards a clifftop. ‘That journey back through time and each minute of your little bitch’s body getting raped, tortured and facialised, it’s all just been the dream of some mannie in a motel. So we’re doubly innocent!’
‘Dinna listen to your father, bitch,’ Suds counters. ‘Aye, it’s all been thon mannie’s dream, including the words I’m saying now, but the mannie hisself never existed because him and the hundreds of forced but welcomed sodomies and whatnot have just been the dream of some other chap. Triply innocent, us, M’Lud!’
In the supreme lifetransforming disaster called Twin Peaks: The Return these elements play off and accentuate one another and the rest of the honkers so severely that going through it can feel like the DTs or falling out of love, the forlornness of it, the ugliness, the desperation for this to end, and at times the hum emanating from our necks and ears and scalps was that loud the ‘I Will Survive’ guy next door knocked the wall to complain.
And this is why the special hell of the Returnian’s twenty-two working on one another, each of them multiplying the others in ways too complex and toxic for the human mind to perceive let alone comprehend, but not for us to feel, to be revolted by—this hell deserves the accolade as the second-worst thing in The Return and therefore in our species’ art.
So there they are, hiding in plain sight all along. The combinations between the Returnian’s twenty-two aren’t as bad as the rock bottom, no. Nothing is, in my opinion. Even if we leave aside the rock bottom, though, and the rest of the honkers we’ve covered to this point, by themselves these always-worsening combinations within the Returnian would make this crime against humanity the most pathetic art project there’s ever been.
But we don’t have the option to leave aside those honkers, do we, because the Returnian only makes up 12% of the pie. So along with the second-worst thing in artistic history we get every last one of the other honkers, and probably loads more yet to be discovered.
Bisociation
WHEN I FADE BACK INTO BEING I’m blasting through the radiant emptiness of the Tsarbomba tunnel. All things fade, zoom, murmur out of nowhere, a limbo of blinding magic. On I scud among galaxies that wheel and gyrate and shrink till they seem to force me through an infinitely microscopic hole, squeezing my head as I pass through till it feels fit to burst.
The pressure eases and the hole widens. I fade from the tunnel into the multicoloured waves that lap the shores of each world worked by the entities.
On I fly as though blown by storms in a nullity that looks impossibly defined against the stars and worlds, an escape from all those human faces and places, including the Casa de Campo fading within the whiteness behind me. The borders of time are now wide open on every side. Differences and nouns collapse into cancellation, simple breathing, watching, the pure verbing of the boundless space. With an almost imperceptible glide I continue on towards the vessel at the heart of this mystery.
After hours or years or none of these a dream-realm begins to form, a meeting-point of absurd numbers and scales of dimensional planes. And there they are for the first time, or at least the first time I can see them, nine entities as they fade into this junction zone where all identities are yoked together again before being scattered to destinations of our choice.
Within the dream a second dream manifests, of a pond within a park. Above the pond at the heart of the dream appears David Lynch.
Wide-eyed and wide-mouthed my old higher power is suspended above the pond, his arms and legs spread out as an X that rotates a few degrees clockwise then the same anti-clockwise, then back again.
Now the park’s soil is driven upwards by manic growth of plants jumping up to a crazy height, away up through the planet’s atmosphere. Copies of the stars and The One tumble to the ground and form a second night sky. Everything’s becoming everything else. Andy, David, the demonic entity that’s possessed him, the other nine entities, Ella-Laura, Maddy-Demmy-Suds, Trinna, Les, César, Mateo, Donald, Michael, Franck, the collector of rat droppings, and anyone else caught up in this story: all of us constitute a single plane of being.
The plants fade to a green glow so dim it’s near transparent. Their roots begin to glow as well and soon their green is interlaced as a network of glows that extends throughout both the high sky and the low sky, scattering and interlacing in all directions a networked brain that floats within itself and The One and networked stars it wants to copy.
We extend throughout the universe stretched unimaginably thin, while we’re also firmly grounded in the park’s soil, our roots stretching off beneath us as an incandescent network that tingles in our toes. Our green faces gaze around at the two skies, at their innermost axes and the doubled cosmos caught in the outflow of their branches. Here we hang in the blackness as a shimmering universal brain.
I am completely fused with the demon inside David Lynch.
Oo-oh
IN PART 2 58-year-old Mr C tells a young woman called Chantal to approach him, then sticks a hand between her legs and says
Oo-oh... YOU’RE nice and wet.
Let’s think about that line, savour it, let it roll round our tastebuds. Appreciate it just for itself, if only for a few seconds.
This is a bad line. It will always be a bad line. One time we watched it, as Ella and me squirmed beside her on the couch Chica’s head seemed to lean towards the TV and gawp in disbelief, before dropping into her lap as though she couldn’t face any more of this muck.
But the line is even worse if Mr C’s meant to be a crime boss and life-destroying serial rapist and serial killer—he’s just murdered a woman called Darya who like Chantal and the rest of the beautiful young women he meets, or every woman he’s raped, apparently can’t resist his charm. Crime bosses don’t say ‘Oo-oh’. There are a few floating around in recovery and they just don’t say ‘Oo-oh’ ever (My name is Miguel el manÃaco and I’m a grappling addict… Oo-oh!). And Mr C isn’t saying it to indicate he’s less than macho or anything, not deliberately at least, because from what follows it’s clear that this character’s a he-man sexually as in every other way, supposedly. But it’s an even worse line as delivered by Kyle MacLachlan because he emphasises that ‘YOU’RE’ to give the line its sing-song lullabied quality, as in a semen-covered porn submissive’s ‘Oo-oh… that’s a BIG load.’
But the Twin’s written these words and MacLachlan’s made his attempt at them and they’re staying in the final edit. The scene’s defects are already magnifying one another, but watch what happens when the Twin decides to follow this ludicrous delivery of a ludicrous line by a ludicrous character with yet more slow pacing and thirteen seconds with no dialogue.
The Twin doesn’t have another character talk as soon as possible, saying anything at all to replace the line in the viewer’s mind. Instead it allows the different kinds of ludicrousness to linger there in their quiet aftermath, multiplying one another. And then more quiet. Lingering there in yet more quiet and in the viewer’s mind. The line isn’t echoing but it feels like it is.
More seconds pass. Still nobody else is talking, which means you’ve plenty of time to ask yourself if you really saw and heard what you think you did. You certainly did, is the answer suggested by Ella’s nausea and by Chica’s face there in her lap.
Like dozens more lines in the series almost or just as bad
Oo-oh... YOU’RE nice and wet
is classically Returnian. It doesn’t have over-complexity or over-ambition, so it doesn’t confuse the audience, but it does have most of the rest of the twenty-two, including the characterological improbability of this beauty getting aroused here. Chantal’s undeniably aroused by this porn-submissive homicidal Princess Di with grungey hair as obviously dyed as Tommy Wiseau’s in the Citizen Kane of bad movies. She’s nice and wet.
It’s nearly impossible for your toes not to curl as you watch
Oo-oh... YOU’RE nice and wet.
Almost every toe curled on the few guests who stuck around our premiere party. Madrid in late May, sandals on every human foot, sixty-eight out of seventy-eight exposed human and Rottweiler toes curling in unison in a kind of anti-standing-ovation.
And defending the line as part of the show’s deliberate cheese, as did César the owner of the ten uncurled toes, will convince nobody but fellow cultists. Rampant cheesiness might be compatible with a Small Bad, more or less, because that wouldn’t necessarily wreck the narrative as a whole. But unless you’ve set out to make a disaster, it’s incompatible with a Big Bad we’re meant to take seriously as a killer and life-devastating violator.
I’ve ridiculed and imitated and frankly been a bit too fascinated by
Oo-oh... YOU’RE nice and wet
but before our first split it was Ella who turned it into a religion, into what she called the Iglesia de la Ruina, the Church of Ruin. To begin with, she’d point at rainpuddles and say the line, etc., but as time went on it became that ‘Oo-oh’ from this superstud that got to her the most, cut her the deepest. She watched it over and over, paused the scene right after ‘Oo-oh’ then watched that ‘Oo-oh’ again, no smiles or laughs but instead deadly serious, chin resting on her knuckles, eyes blinking or squinting as she studied this terrible, terrible moment in screen history, absorbed its reverberations, its implications.
She tried out her own variants, tones, lengths, pitches that rose and fell through the scales, before settling on an offended-court-fop’s OOewOOeww. Then when we were out she’d let this sound rip if, for example, someone at a nearby restaurant table proposed marriage to their partner. An awful way to behave, I know, to sully this special moment by fixing her eyes on the nervously but bravely revealed ring, followed by an innocent smile and an ugly Mr C-like OOewOOeww.
And the thing was, it could be used in pretty much any situation. Any event with some kind of build-up could be ruined by that sound. Food arriving at a nearby table. Good news from her cancer consultant. Punchlines. Moments of triumph, revenge, fear or poignancy in the wrestling ring or at the cinema or opera. One release that echoed round the acoustics after Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’—every eye on the culprit in taffeta—got us banned from the Teatro Real.
Anything at all notable. We see a tramp wearing the Aro trainers Les had binned, his tramp toes poked up through them the way Les’s toes were. I blame my parents for my behaviour even though I haven’t seen them in decades. North Korea’s threatened with ‘fire and fury like the world has never seen’. At night Ella would sometimes pretend to drift into sleep and troubling dreams and then released the sound as the exhaled half of fake snores. When I told her I was in love with her, not least because of what she’d done with ‘Oo-oh’: OOewOOeww.
Jesse Armstrong
Top Trumps
SO NOW YOU’VE GOT TO KNOW the series’ two main characters, Dougie Jones and Mr C. Other than the Gordon Cole played by the auteur they’re the only rounded roles. And post-Dune characters played by Kyle MacLachlan have been understood in works with Mr Lynch’s name attached to be surrogates for the auteur. Which means the only rounded characters out of the 238 speaking parts are either played by the auteur, the hermit as we thought, or are his surrogates.
And those surrogates are Dougie Jones and Mr C, who according to Martha P. Nochimson join together near the end inside Dale Cooper. This combination, she asserts, is a ‘much more daring creation’ than Leopold Bloom. Righto, Martha.
And the auteur plays the one unequivocally admirable main character, who Nochimson presumably believes is a much more daring creation than Melville’s Captain Ahab: Gordon Cole, an Übermensch and two divinities minimum whose supposed creator believes he has the right to dole out life-saving spiritual guidance via his telly monstrosity.
Picture any other producer or showrunner pulling a stunt like that. Tommy Wiseau or Jane Campion. Picture the groans throughout the cinema when Tom Cruise declares in a Mission: Impossible film featuring numerous Unterentwickelt Menschen that he’s an aspect of Almighty God and the audience need to follow his life tips or die.
Or Jesse Armstrong self-cast as the divine essence of wisdom, magick and, yes, judgement—even Cristiano Ronaldo wincing at the vanity—in a drama that routinely scorns human beings but also feels free to keep chucking Armstrong’s religious inclinations at them, and the critical furore that would result. Then Armstrong boasts his penis has no problems getting hard and cuts to a pouty affirmative reaction shot from a school-play-reject half his age.
His friends would be remiss if they didn’t have a quiet word, wouldn’t they? Jesse, this pyramid-sized throne you’re considering, this Celestial Coronation arc... I mean, come on, man. A Thus Spoke Jesse lecture series, a Heart of Jesse Sutra, the audience at the Grammys genuflecting before the bulge in Saint Jesse’s trousers…
These aren’t the kinds of scenarios you imagine when watching a mere stinker. You don’t picture friends having to intervene with Louis C.K. about the Heart of Louis Sutra teachings of Horace and Pete. No tough love was needed, at least not about Horace and Pete. The only works that go this low are full-blown disasters^^.
Pretend we’re playing Top Trumps to establish the bowfingest artistic project since before language was invented. My candidate is The One, obviously, but you still believe your candidate, whatever it is, might somehow beat it. We’re competing over Impossibly Rank Main Characters. With Dougie Jones and Mr C and Gordon Cole/Gevurah/Thoth I’ve played my cards.
Now let’s see yours.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
WITH THE DEMON I see the fusion of everything elemental, layer upon layer, the unity of the primal stuff that supports and constitutes us all. Despite appearing to sprout from separate roots and dimensions, one thing and not another, always everything comes together as the handiwork of the maintainers of balance across these dimensions, the entity I inhabit and the nine that approach us from bisecting paths.
Surrounded by mirrors, mirrored in ourselves, we lie down wrapped around one another and hum a half-remembered tune. The dreams that come link again the story of the demon inside David Lynch to the endless chain of past incarnations and planes and levels, and the endless number yet to be. Then our dreams form a single dream: rid Earth of The Return and bring this project to an end.
Together we shrink down to manifest within every copy of the series in existence, including every master. And we erase it all. Every bit of it is wiped away forever, every last second of the ultrahorror gone and replaced with nada, hee-haw, void.
We sleep and hum on within the refuge of this void, a silence that isn’t silence and an emptiness that’s always here. We’re identified with each beam of this trillion-faceted invisibility as a tremble goes through it all, a smiling co-hum from everything around us at the voiding of The Return, it feels like, humming to us along cascading Lines of light before raying off throughout the Ultraverse.
The hum becomes lost within a quiet that waits for the ten dreamers to leave behind their dream of The Return, of good and bad, form and time. It waits till the dreamers make the attempt to break through the dream’s bounds and shatter any memories of it. The quiet and the dream expand to match their effort and the dreamers grow to match the new scale of the dream.
The dream becomes a greater immensity, and as the humming dreamers make another effort a greater dream again, in which the concepts good and bad, hope and disappointment, yes and no, fail to ever register.
This heaven… in the law of its shepherd this heaven is our homecoming and the homecoming of our dream. What’s there I have no words for.
Reworks material from Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil
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