Literary fiction: September's best-written recent release ^ Plus the final parts of The Demon Inside David Lynch
Read the opening pages of our pick below
Orpheus looks back and condemns his love Eurydice to hell. Painting by Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein.
In today’s issue:
—’You might think that if you want to put together a fiasco the best approach is uninterrupted muck, but that’s because you aren’t a demon and are, no offence, hardly an expert on making fiascos’: the final two parts of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The rest of the series begins here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
— ‘not in red, in white today, samite and mystic, across the dark and open ground they ran, on pitch of soil, of grass and paint, to set about their art’: our first pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. Our nonfiction picks are here, here, and here.
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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. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
The Definition of a Disaster
Artistic disasters aren’t that easy to produce. Simple incompetence and chaos by themselves don’t do the job. Telenovelas, for instance, will never aim anywhere near high enough to experience an actual disaster’s long fall and street-clearing splat. Nor is cruelty or misanthropy or sordidness enough. The Jeremy Kyle Show may have been a personal disaster for those who made it or appeared on it but not an aesthetic one, at least partly because it didn’t try to yoke itself to Ulysses or the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, as far as I can tell.
Thousands of productions have been incompetent, cruel or sordid, but to gain admission to the lowest pits of artistic hell requires much more. So if I heard someone call a TV drama a trainwreck that bad every copy had to be erased by hyperdimensional entities and some furious security guard, I’d assume this was hyperbolic.
But in the case of The Return it really wasn’t. Calling it worse than Putin’s tastes in porn, which Les sometimes did, this might be hyperbolic, but terms such as trainwreck, fiasco, disaster and catastrophe carefully separate The Return from mere stinkers like True Detective 2 or The Romanoffs or The Rings of Power. As you can see by now, it wasn’t just disappointing.
An odd feature of disasters is that they can look more impressive, in a sense, for a while at least, than mere stinkers do. Nobody would ever say of the disaster in question that it wholly lacked originality, would they? Parts of it were as original as a right good streak at a cotdeath’s funeral. Few people would be able to conceive of such an endeavour never mind carry it out, so in the way that the cultists seemed to understand the term this performance would be genius.
And in a similar way The Return could appear closer at times to certain masterpieces than to most stinkers. The acting only made you groan in a way an amateur production’s would not, to take one example, due to the talent and track record of much of the cast. But rather than improve the overall impression, that talent actually helped damage it by way of contrast. And the same was true of delicate moments such as Ed Hurley’s silence at the end of Part 13, and the use of Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’, and other decent touches in Part 15.
You might think that if you want to put together a fiasco the best approach is uninterrupted muck, but that’s because you aren’t a demon and are, no offence, hardly an expert on making fiascos. Instead an actual fiasco benefits significantly from regular moments of brilliance to raise the viewer’s hopes before they’re brought crashing down again, so they experience each crash all the more powerfully.
The effect is as though the celebrated river sequence from The Night of the Hunter was dropped into an episode of Ex on the Beach. In time you get over your shock and can enjoy and admire the artistry of the sequence, but then you’re abruptly back on the beach as a young man explains the various stages involved in removing every last trace of his nipple hairs, which now feels a fair bit more disturbing than if it hadn’t been preceded by lavish beauty.
I admit to a kind of wonder at the way the Twin pulled off this singular effect to perfection with dozens of such crashes, and especially how it teased us with the excellence of Part 8 that the nightmare might finally be over, before hitting us with eighty minutes of unrelieved boredom that make the how-to on nipple-hair removal look like that river scene. E.g. the long stretch of quintessential Return humour consisting of a smirking (and smirking) Cole taking just the one puff of a cigarette, the thinking behind which seemed to be: the whole world knows that I, David Lynch, just love a damn good cigarette; therefore it will be poignant yet side-splitting if I broadcast worldwide well over a hundred seconds of nothing happening but a knowing, twinkly-eyed solitary cigarette-puff on the part of David Lynch.
There’s no inconsistency when we say this drama featured some of the best touches in contemporary TV while still being the artistic disaster of disasters. The Titanic’s fate isn’t viewed as a real-life supreme disaster because the most people died, or in the most painful way, but because we’re still intrigued that the ship’s designers paid so much attention to details such as the entablature fringing the wrought-iron and glass dome that let natural daylight fall on the two-storey Grand Staircase, and nowhere near enough attention to keeping the ship afloat. The Twin’s placement of similar domes in The Return’s Fireman’s Palace was one of many private jokes about the disaster it had made.
In films and TV dramas the overall cinematic look is the equivalent of voice in music or written fiction. It organises the entire work and helps it cohere, provides much of its atmosphere, and is central to how the audience responds. Mr Lynch’s use of cinematic look has been masterly throughout most of his career, the equivalent of the richness and beauty of somebody like Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. The Return also looked impressive enough now and then, sequences that added up to maybe two hours in total. But the rest was equivalent to listening to the voices of at best John Major and at worst Michael Gove.
To have to listen to John and Michael for eighteen hours would become unbearable. We can agree on that. And you might reckon that interrupting them with the odd Ella Fitzgerald number, or even full albums, would make those hours slightly more bearable. Not so. I haven’t actually experienced this myself—I’m not that obsessed by The Return—but going by what we’ve learned from the series, if given the choice I’d take the uninterrupted John and Michael anyday. Because the alternative would be:
Two hours of John and Michael. Just John and Michael as they shoot the breeze, tell it how it is. Sometimes they yell at your face one after the other, sometimes they take one ear each, stereo John and Michael, and blow in warm breath and whisper.
Then they shut up and you find you’re listening to Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife. What a pleasant relief from the John and Michael.
But then the hifi stops and they’re yelling at your face again. Feel that devastation coursing through you. John Major and Michael Gove keep on at you for another four and a half hours.
Then The Greatest Hits of Ella Fitzgerald starts up and you, John, Michael and the white-coated psychologist conducting this experiment listen together, tap your feet and hum along to classic after classic as they echo off the clean white tiles that are probably lining the walls. You lose yourself in Ella’s voice and eventually forget about this being some strange experiment, forget that John and Michael have ever spoken a word to you.
But then they’re back yacking in your face. Ella’s gone now, gone for good. You’ve to listen to the Prince of Greyness and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for the next ten hours.
Their choice of topics too, which they make the most of since you’re a captive audience. John gives descriptions for five, thirty, fifty minutes of the toughest ragweeds he’s pulled from his garden. Michael complains at length, serious length, about his exclusion from Club Gevurah, and from the tiny Club Doric for celebrities from north-east Scotland, Denis Law and Annie Lennox joined inside not by Michael but by Dennis Nilsen. Then Michael MCs for nineteen minutes that ‘In this fallen world, I suspect we will never achieve perfection. But that won’t stop me trying.’
You keep glancing at the hifi desperate for Ella to come and save you, but the only sound that comes is the occasional snatch of her voice, before it’s gone again, and the whole experience feels far more disturbing, doesn’t it, than if no Ella was ever played.
For the experiment’s finale John and Michael nuzzle at your ears and mutter ‘We set trends dem man copy.’ Fifty John clones and fifty Michael clones enter the white cube you’re trapped in and begin to yack, yack that they too set trends dem man copy. The walls dissolve and you see beyond the fifty-one yacking Johns and fifty-one yacking Michaels thousands more of them, giant concentric circles of John Majors and Michael Goves who face in at you and yack that they set trends dem man copy, while beyond them lie immense torture chambers with thousands more. Beyond them are the fiery pits. The psychologist takes off its human mask to reveal red glowing eyes.
To pull off these kinds of carefully engineered letdowns over and over again in The Return was, in its own dismaying way, a form of otherworldly genius.
Same with all the show’s literary and spiritual allusions. That sort of filigree in a horrorwork such as this felt as mystifying and cruel as specks of gold dust floating by as you’re drowning in a slurrypit. A series dominated by each combination within the Returnian enhancing the grimness of so many of the rest, that played various sick moments for 4channish shits and giggles, may have communicated nothing more throughout than some offscreen guy’s guilt about who knows what, and contained the knee-wrecker of the rock bottom that you’ll soon be countenancing in all its majesty… structuring a series like this around the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and many more of the world’s spiritual frameworks and artistic masterpieces was a Satanically clever way to desolate your audience. If I wanted to make a disaster I could plug away for years without hitting upon a strategy that demonically ingenious.
The turkey’s knack for awful combinations and juxtapositions was nothing short of transcendental. It was. That it appeared to believe it constituted a spiritual wake-up call, to take just one from so many options—this was far more minging when juxtaposed with a self-casting beyond the most bigheaded fantasies of Mourinho, and with the Sex Magick! and the comedy rape of a manbaby, while the vanity of the rock bottom, which itself rested on the most egomaniacal juxtaposition ever seen, was all the more Jesus wept in a catastrophe that prattled on about Eastern philosophy and the questionable nature of the self, and other ego-deflation, and that believed it was a guide to better living, and so on and so forth, on and on and on, rankness after rankness, so many, many ranknesses firing about within the series and within your skull, bouncing around and crisscrossing as though they were laser beams shot from a demon’s eyes, each bisociation making the thing worse, always worse, every single time more minging, to infinite, Ultraverse-expanding levels of mingingness, it sometimes felt like.
And as in all relationships with the demonic, you couldn’t even enjoy the better moments either, because you knew the depravity would soon be kicking off again. You could occasionally see that what was happening was objectively good (a birthday party in the woods where you didn’t get facialised, say, or a telly show linked to the Tree of Life) but you got little enjoyment from it because you’d been brutalised to expect any second now yet another session with the coaltongs or some new 4channish take on rape. In fact you might even learn to resent the goodness for reminding you that goodness is still possible. As with true maniacs and works of genius, artistic disasters are rare, mysterious beasts that obey their own weird laws. They deserve close study, and by giving us a crash course in precisely how not to do it, may be more educational and even inspirational than all but the greatest of their betters.
The Return should have filmschool and university courses dedicated to exploring the depths it reached, or at least people’s memories of these, in the kind of detail that I hadn’t the space for here. Ella, Trinna, Les and I are not professional film researchers, after all, and at no point did we set out in any rigorous manner to discover the series’ debacles. What we’ve looked at in these pages was found through little more than casual watching and reading and discussing. Fairly obsessive watching and reading and discussing at times, yes, but it wasn’t organised in any way. And how I discovered Kreider’s piece and Ella discovered the rock bottom might just as easily have never happened.
Which leaves open the possibility that were the series investigated by people with sufficient time and training, what we’ve called the three worst barbarities might even get bumped from the top ten. It’s clearly impossible for us to imagine the sort of things that might top that trinity, but then prior to The Return we wouldn’t have imagined those three were possible.
With Season 4 even the 10D Twin failed to outdo them. I don’t know about you, but for me the totality of a universe set up to hymn the golden phallus of the-showrunner-as-Cole-as-Osiris would not in the end be worse than the Returnian’s twenty-two factors combining with one another. You could take some drugs and laugh away at galactic starfleets that shoot off laser cannons to salute the auteur-played FBI Deputy Director’s mighty phallus, in a spirit of so-excruciating-it’s-good, maybe even throw a party where everyone has to bring a laser or wear a phallus. Nobody but suicide cults, however, would throw a party for the Returnian’s 1124000727777607680000.
Due to wordcount limits and also limits of memory, we’ve only made a start here on the show’s hoachingness, and it’s now time for the pros to go in, to explore that hoachingness in as much breadth and depth as they can without jeopardising their mental health, and to explore as well the show’s cult critics and their blather. Franck Boulègue is far from the only such burrower worth investigating, to say nothing of the ones I’ve never read. Of particular psychiatric concern is the denial of those who stubbornly maintain that their Master, this poor innocent, twinkly-eyed, twice-daily meditator, made the vicious atrocity and not his Demonic Twin, despite my restored higher power’s enigmatic but still moving testaments after his possession, communicated via finger waggles, to the frustration and despair of those years of impotence.
The clips of the series remaining on YouTube and elsewhere should be required viewing for any artist in any field, and any arts industry types too, and so should the Cannes ovation, from start to finish. Showtime and the other channels that aired the series need to take a good look at themselves, as do the publications and sites that put it on their best-of lists. Hairdressers need to wreck certain styles on certain withering mondains, gen z retail staff need to let the laughter out when the same mondains browse for trousers—or if that doesn’t work just refuse to sell to them, accept the sacking if necessary, you fought the Gucci fight—while historians need to establish The Return’s place in the annals of atrocities beyond the mere aesthetic.
In mid-May 2024 Ella made this comment on Instagram.
If there are among you any makers of films or writers that have not yet watched this series, I would like to suggest that you do so.
Immediately after you do so you will be wishing you had never read these words. That is a certainty. Like anybody not too damaged in their head and in their heart, you are going to feel dirtied a lot from viewing it. However, someday you may find that you are considering inserting some exploration of your own bum into your work, but then you will remember that time you put yourself through The Return, the Chernobyl of storytelling which stops you playing with fire.
Do not deny yourself this opportunity. Please let the ultimate yuck of this television series wash over you and try to absorb the many lessons which are on offer here. Sometimes it is necessary to suffer for your art.
Then go and produce something which is as far from this series as you can possibly make it. Adopt it as a form of higher power in reverse. Keep asking ‘What would The Return do?’ and then do the polar opposite.
Like the show it describes, of course, and the love affair infected by the show, that comment’s now been deleted. Yet as long as humans walk the earth nothing may ever surpass the wretchedness of that show, or provide a better example of how not to tell a story. It is, and will always remain, in our memories at least, The One.
The Rock Bottom of the Rock Bottom
As you’ve possibly guessed or heard by now, The Return gave more nostalgic nods and bows to its auteur’s career than any other work’s ever given its artist.
It may have contained more fond, consecrating allusions to its auteur’s previous works than equivalents in the rest of the planet’s TV dramas combined. When it comes to an artist paying homage to himself, it was the most nostalgic project of the last 300,000 years, and it has competition from no era for that status. And this in a project that was otherwise, and by a distance, the most ferocious attack on nostalgia of all time, dominated and desecrated throughout by anti-retro, don’t look back.
Worse may yet be found in The Return, but as things stand this dissonance was more shameful than anything else in the series, or in any other trainwreck. It was uncanny, unearthly, the worst artistic choice there has ever been.
Everybody’s a detective and whatever they come up with is valid in my mind.
David Lynch
LITERARY FICTION TITLES CONSIDERED
And So I Roar by Abi Daré
Yr Dead by Sam Sax
Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr.
Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick
The Seventh Veil of Salomé by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane
Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Reuben Woolley)
Nok Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Overstaying by Ariane Koch (translated by Damion Searls)
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Munichs by David Peace
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
The Impossible Life by Matt Haig
Ravelling by Estelle Birdy
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
Our first pick from these is
A Premonition
They came out of the tunnel like a ghost train, all in white, into the Highbury afternoon gloom, first Byrne, next Gregg, then Foulkes and Jones, Colman and Edwards, Charlton and Morgans, Taylor, Viollet and Scanlon, with black armbands for the dead, the already dead, on the sleeves of their shirts and off they set, across the field, under the heavy skies and watchful eyes of gods and men, sixty-four thousand men or more, filling the stadium, up to where it touched the sky, that menace of a winter sky that threatened more than rain, more than snow, these men and boys, from all points north and south, east and west, in their Saturday-afternoon best, from West Ham, Chelsea and even Spurs, reluctant fathers with their eager sons who’d said all week, had nagged then pleaded, Dad, Dad, can we go, can we go, please, Dad, please? To see football taught by Matt Busby, his bunch of bouncing Busby Babes, the famous Manchester, Manchester United, those Red Devils at last, in the flesh at last –
Saturday, February 1, 1958:
But not in red, in white today, samite and mystic, across the dark and open ground they ran, on pitch of soil, of grass and paint, to set about their art –
From the start, Tommy Taylor was the mobile hub and Eddie Colman the link. Albert Scanlon, Dennis Viollet, Bobby Charlton and Kenny Morgans flew down the lines of longitude, switching the ball with a swift, flowing precision that left the Arsenal spinning.
First, Morgans cut inside and passed to Duncan Edwards, the man-boy all the London boys had come to see. Duncan cruised forward, with strength and with poise, and from twenty-five yards out – CRACK! – he shot under Jack Kelsey, the Highbury legend, and all those London boys, they turned to their dads and said, Did you see that, Dad? Did you see what he just did?
That was after ten minutes. Twenty minutes later, from a quick clearance by Harry Gregg, Scanlon showed a clean pair of heels to everyone in sight and sprinted seventy yards down the left. Over flashed the centre and tubby Bobby Charlton, his shinpads already pitched away, stockings around his ankles, breath coming in great gasps, somehow crashed the ball home.
But United were not finished. Just on half-time, Scanlon crossed from one wing, Morgans returned the ball from the other and Taylor nipped in to tuck the ball home after the luckless Kelsey could only parry away his first effort. Three–nil.
But no lead is ever big enough, no victory ever certain, and with sixty minutes gone, in three blinks of an eye, Arsenal had wiped out the lead of a coasting, dozing Manchester United with one goal from Herd, then two from Bloomfield to make it three-all.
The wall of noise that now thundered over the stadium summoned up the Arsenal atmosphere of old, when Jack, Hulme, Bastin, James and Lambert were sweeping all before them. But rudely awakened from their European dreams, this young United team did not wilt where others surely would, but showed their mettle and simply said, All right. If you score three, four or five, then we will score four, five or six. And so they set about their work anew.
First Charlton fed Scanlon, who raced away again to cross for Viollet to head United back into the lead again. Next, another quick clearance from Gregg found Colman, who then sent Morgans away. He beat his man, then switched the ball to Taylor. He took the last pass and beat Jack Kelsey from an acute angle. Five–three.
To their credit, Arsenal did not surrender yet. Bowen and Groves continued to push United. They opened the way for Herd, and away went Tapscott to steer a shot inside the far post. But that was the finish.
Breathless in the lengthening shadows, the encroaching night, arm in arm the victors and the vanquished left the field of play. Each knew he had helped to fashion a thing of which to be proud, a match that would live forever, in memory
and imagination.
'Munichs is a masterpiece.'
IRISH TIMES
From the author of The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, an extraordinary novel about Britain, sport and our collective past.
February 6, 1958, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off at Munich Airport. On board were the young Manchester United team, 'the Busby Babes', and the journalists who followed them. Twenty-one of the passengers died instantly, four were left fighting for their lives while six more were critically injured. Twenty-four hours later, Jimmy Murphy, the assistant manager of Manchester United, faced the press at the Rechts der Isar Hospital:
'What of the future, you ask? It will be a long, hard struggle. It took Matt Busby, Bert Whalley and myself twelve years to produce the 1958 Red Devils. It was long, hard, tiring work, but we succeeded. At the moment, I am so confused, so tired and so sad, I cannot think clearly, but what I do know is that the Red Devils will rise again.'
Munichs is the story of how Manchester United rose again, of the crash and its aftermath, of those who survived and those who did not, of how Britain and football changed, and how it did not; a novel of tragedy, but also of hope.