Twin Peaks: The Return of Darkness and Evil.

Twin Peaks: The Return I’m probably going to start watching again. I remember watching it when it came out, and it was one of the most exciting weekly events of my entire life. Imagine David Lynch releasing half a movie every weekend for like . . . oh, man, it must have been pretty much the whole summer. Eighteen, nineteen episodes, and the avant-garde factor was not only at a Twin Peaks high, which is what I was really hoping for, but it got almost to a David Lynch peak (lol) every single week. The episode where they show the atomic bomb, which I heard from a conspiracy-adjacent YouTube interview might have had something to do with the bomb actually destroying everything that many years ago, and this all just being an echo in time through that, being perhaps the most abstract and surreal episode of anything, ever. And it just kept going, and each scene was darker than almost anything you’ve ever seen, too, with the most horrific, twisted contemporary characters from this universe, and introduced into it, that you’ve ever seen, as well, all of them seemingly edging off of drug highs and furious and twisted with trauma and anxiety.

It’s probably the most unpleasant mainstream “prestige drama series” of all time. The humor is mired in horror, so that probably the lightest-hearted and funniest character and scene setting of the show, the functionally molasses return of super spy Agent Cooper as a half-awake aging man being led around by his wife and son to his job and other places as if he’s a tall two-year-old who has the best attitude but just can’t be expected to understand anything, almost literally, that whole segment of the series is just totally compromised by how sad and grotesque it is while also being genuinely hilarious and warm. But there is just no section of the show where things are positive that is not in some way fundamentally tied down to some cosmic floorboard.

The thing is, David Lynch has given us what is still the most and the only representative experience of the modern world in cinema or on screen. I say cinema partly because this is so close to being a movie with its production values, and it is cohesive like a movie. And the way the world has decayed in the last five or ten years, before the fake pandemic but really coming into full focus with it, I mean . . . this series came out in 2017. And yet, it is only just now becoming revealed exactly how close the tone of this show is to the Modern world.