What Really Defined David Lynch

Laura Palmer, the immortal heroine (played by Sheryl Lee) of Twin Peaks, appears to me all the time. It could be because I’m watching a horror movie and someone’s let out the kind of pulse-stopping scream that could knock a planet out of orbit. Or because a new true-crime series has offered up precisely the style of ideal victim that Laura Palmer embodied—young, white, and archetypally American; a life conveniently summed up by a beaming senior-year school photo—and that Twin Peaks teased apart over dozens of hours of disorienting storytelling. By the time this picture of prom-queen Laura reappeared in 2017’s The Return, the show’s third-season revival, decades had passed since her murder, and the image of her face had become one of the most familiar in American pop culture. The Return would work, in part, to rectify this ubiquity—for Laura’s sake, and also ours.

After David Lynch’s death last month, as I revisited his work, one thing became clear to me: The Return (made in collaboration with Mark Frost, Twin Peaks’ co-creator) was not only his final major project but also a culmination of his style, obsessions, ideas, and feelings. The title referred most literally to the attempted reemergence of the federal agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the real world, after he’d become trapped in an ominous parallel reality, as well as the return of the show to our televisions after 25 years. It was, too, a restoration of Laura Palmer’s image to its rightful, most alienating place: pulled back from the memes and returned to the realm of the horrific and unfamiliar. I’ve always seen the Twin Peaks universe as an extraordinary act of sympathy—for Laura, first and foremost, but also for the lives and places she left behind. In that regard, The Return was curious—but also crucial—for appearing to barely involve Laura at all. That was very much the point: Moving away from Laura enabled the series to help us find her again.

In the show’s first two seasons, Laura’s murder broke open a placid American town—much as a severed ear, in Lynch’s 1986 film, Blue Velvet, famously undermined middle America’s saintly image of itself. Fire Walk With Me, the 1992 theatrical prequel dedicated to tracking Laura’s last days, laid out all the terrors—abuse, drugs—leading up to her death. But with The Return, Lynch ventured even further. The 18-episode season made Laura’s death feel almost world-historic, peeling back the layers to reveal a grand, mythological evil manipulating events into shape. Shows such as Stranger Things and Buffy the Vampire Slayer settled on the trope of a hellish world reachable only through science-fiction portals. Twin Peaks certainly had its share of fantastical images, but while The Return forced viewers to contend with the horrors that had crawled through that opening, it also showed how these horrors had forced their way into hearts and minds across America—how the concept of “hell on Earth” had become nearly indistinguishable from conventional reality.

Like Twin Peaks, The Return opened with two murders, when a kissing couple were mauled by a mysterious monster who emerges from a glass box, and a body without a head and a head without a body were found rotting in a faraway room. From there, the show spun outward, presenting a whole cast of shadowy doubles and mysteriously cosmic back doors—during which distance grew between us, the confused audience, and Laura’s death, which had kicked off the entire franchise. All of this slyly obscured the show’s real beating-heart concern: the question of whether Agent Cooper and Laura would find their way back to who they once were.

[Read: David Lynch, my neighbor]

Lynchian, the oft-used adjective inspired by the director’s work, typically means a clash between the surreal and the mundane, the innocent and the macabre—a dreaminess whose narrative logic can only be intuited. Rarely is the term used to describe the qualities that can make Lynch’s work so emotionally overwhelming. Yet all the eerie soundscapes and rabbit-hole mysteries and exposed underbellies wouldn’t amount to a Lynchian text without the surplus of feeling that characterizes, say, Laura’s heartbreaking recognition of her abuser, in Fire Walk With Me. Burrowing into these sensations is, I think, the real responsibility of the Lynch viewer—not just dutifully trying to put the narrative and symbolic pieces together, but also taking seriously what make Lynch’s tragedies so powerful.

If you experience a complex work like Mulholland Drive as a breakup movie, for example, what you get in the end is not the resolution of a dream, but an extraordinary catharsis—the feeling of a devastating emotional reality coming, finally, into clear view. Maybe you’ve watched Lynch’s deeply strange psychological thriller Inland Empire—the Finnegans Wake to Mulholland’s Ulysses—and found that it made absolutely no sense. But at least one thing is beyond dispute, and hard to ignore: Laura Dern’s terror, as the actress she plays begins to merge identities with her role in a cursed film production. This straightforward description hardly captures what it’s like to descend into madness alongside this woman—but our proximity to that descent becomes almost too much to bear.

In The Return, part of what moves me is the simple fact of Lynch getting the gang back together. The majority of the original cast reappears, and besides them, Dern and Naomi Watts—two of Lynch’s other great heroines—are folded into the story. Much of The Return is spent sorting through the detritus of Laura’s case: a resolute look backwards that ultimately points the series toward some uncertain future. Laura is there, but not there. She’s in their files—and their dreams. When Laura’s ex-boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), who’s now a cop, sees Laura’s prom picture for the first time in years, he’s immediately moved to tears—a flash of that distinctly Lynchian soaring sentimentality, the kind that can feel unnerving to watch.

Lynch tends to be discussed as the consummate surrealist, a dream-smith who was remarkable for managing to meld his unique flavors of avant-gardism with the the mainstream. Audiences have often struggled with his oddball and laconic tendencies, and The Return only gave people more to complain about, what with its dense mysteries that veered far from the coffee-and-donuts shenanigans of its network-TV run. But the brief moments in which Laura reemerges centers the show, along with Lynch and Frost’s enduring affection for her hometown. The Return provided a world big enough to encompass both the lo-fi hijinks of the Twin Peaks sheriff’s department and the utter darkness of hell on Earth. Laura’s death unified these worlds, and held them together.

In another artist’s hands, The Return might have become a straightforward show about the corrosion of small-town America, or the incursion of extraordinary violence into polite society—something of that order. Behind the closed doors of a southwestern tract house, on the streets of a Pacific Northwest mountain town, and in the anonymous quarters of some sparkling city lurk neglected children, drug-addled parents, gambling debts, and bloodshed. Heads without bodies, bodies without heads.

Certainly, Twin Peaks is about all of this. But look at where its last season lands: with a Laura who does not realize who she is, 25 years after she has died. It concludes with a snap of recognition, as Laura is confronted with the past that proved to be her unmaking—and with her screams. A lesson of Twin Peaks, of Lynch’s work broadly, is that that other, chaotic world already exists around us. Through Laura, we also learned that the world could exist within us. It’s enough to drive some people crazy, which she and Cooper learn the hard way, in the end. As we watch, so do we.