So, I watched the finale of Twin Peaks: The Return and was, justifiably, confused. Then I went online and became, again justifiably, infuriated. I’m going to talk about the show but first I want to address the backlash.

I’m not going to sit here and claim to not understand where the backlash against this finale is coming from, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. I can only assume that after last week’s episode hopes were high that Lynch might, for once, deliver a straightforward, cathartic and resolute ending to one of his films/TV-shows. While admirable in its earnestness, the assumption that an ending in any way conventional was going to cap off this season was naive innocence. I genuinely think people forgot that they were watching something made by David Lynch (I really don’t mean this as an insult, but instead as an observation of a strange phenomenon). Yes, the flourishes were there the whole time: his moments of whimsy; the touching, tender emotional moments; the surreal horror scenes; and the perplexing narrative structure; but I think that the audience forgot that these are just textural details – albeit crucial textural details – of Lynch’s work. They missed the forest for the trees.

There is a common, and mistaken, line of thought as to what exactly Twin Peaks is about. It is common to be told, when asking about the show, that Twin Peaks is a show about the murder of Laura Palmer, and the way that that murder subsequently uncovers dark secrets in a seemingly normal and picturesque North West town. This kind of thinking is easily applied to other Lynch works, most notably being Blue Velvet, and it, unfortunately, is missing the point. Lynch has always said that he loves mysteries, that mysteries are all around us, but he also points out that mysteries are a golden egg; once you hatch them, or solve them, they lose all their value. I think this is the point where the crucial misunderstanding starts: it is a perfectly reasonable assumption that when presented a mystery in a limited runtime movie or season of television, that by the final episode there will be resolution w/r/t the mystery. While this may work for other films and TV-shows whose points are the mystery itself, it doesn’t hold true with Lynch. The mystery has never been the point of a David Lynch movie. They’re the plots of them, sure, but the point has always been the way a mystery framework offers the freedom to plumb the depths of the human subconscious; the mystery is just there to facilitate the psychological, sociological, and philosophical discussion at work. And this, again reasonably, pisses people right the fuck off. When you watch a show like Twin Peaks: The Return, and mistakenly assume that the point of the show is the resolution and cathartic ending of the original – with a nicely packaged, easily parse-able finale – you are going to be reasonably irate when you realize this isn’t the case. This isn’t even necessarily the fault of the viewers. The fact that this season of Twin Peaks offered so many straight up answers to things – we learned what Blue Rose was, who the Giant/Fireman is, how Bob was born, who Diane was, saw Ed and Norma get together – is partly to blame for the misunderstanding. It lulled the viewer – and myself, admittedly – into a false assumption that this season was about those resolutions, that that was the point. But it wasn’t, and it never has been with Lynch, nor with Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway (and Wild at Heart, kind of) have always been about the very nature of Evil itself. When you strip away the traditional plot, and the artifice, and the whimsy, and all that stuff we naively assume is what the show is about, we’re left with an uncomfortable answer: Twin Peaks, and all of David Lynch’s work, is about the omnipresence of both Evil and Good, Dark and Light in the world and the people that inhabit it; how Dark and Light are present in the entire world, in the people, in the towns, in our dreams, and how there really is no separation, no Them and Us, no Good and Evil, there is just, at the end of it all, scared people trying to navigate an absurd world. And that’s fucking terrifying.

When presented with that stark of a world-view, it is a natural response to try and cope in one of two ways: you either outright hate what you just saw and rail against it (this one seems to be the MO this time around), or you reevaluate what you saw, and sacrifice your understanding of what it is trying to say in order to fit what you saw into a set of parameters that do not challenge the view of the world that you already hold (this is the one people resort to when they say Twin Peaks is a show about a small town and its dark secrets.) Again, it’s not that I don’t understand the reaction to the ending – I do– it’s that I think that the reaction is missing what the show was saying all along. These are safe ways of thinking about the show: they don’t shake your understanding of the world, they don’t make you reevaluate who you are as a person, and they fit into a narrative that appears to be insightful but really is just insipid and banal and boring. So, let’s talk about the ways that this season of Twin Peaks, and its finale, are really the ultimate summation and distillation of what exactly David Lynch has always been concerned with.

There is a line in the finale of Twin Peaks that I think is key to understanding what it’s commenting on. The Arm, while talking to Agent Cooper in a scene that looks, up until this point, absolutely identical to their meeting way back in episode 2, asks Cooper, “Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane? Is it?” This wasn’t the first time we’ve heard this question, it got brought up back in episode 13 when Charlie and Audrey were arguing about Billy (no we still don’t know who Billy is, and to be honest I just don’t care), but in the context of the finale, I think that it’s the most important question of all. We get in episode 17 a totally unexpected, fantasy-fulfilling journey-back-in-time to the night of Laura’s death, and we think, for a moment, that Cooper has done it; that he’s saved Laura and that everything will go back to normal. Except it doesn’t. Cooper and Laura walk through the woods – the same woods that we are frequently told is the home of evil spirits – and just when it looks like all’s well that ends well, Laura vanishes with that same horrifying scream we’ve heard again and again. Her body might have disappeared from the beach where it was found, and she might not have been killed in the traditional sense, but the universe has still plucked her out of the world; it has ripped a person right out of their own life (a moment that functions as a statement on death itself; it rips us out of our lives – as if the universe itself is conspiring against us – and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.) And I think this moment, even before the kicker of a final episode that comes next, is the first harbinger of what’s to come; it answers the question put forth by the arm before the question is even asked. No, this is not the story of the girl who lives down the lane. It never has been. The show might function because of the interest that a story about a girl like Laura – seemingly good on the surface but corrupted underneath (note that while this is the normal reading of her character, it’s not the correct one) – inspires in viewers, but it’s not the point. It never was. The point is the very nature of Good and Evil as inseparable forces at work in every one of us. This has always been the territory that Lynch is interested in, and the final episode only pounds the thematic-nail in further.

After the world-shifting motel-sex, Cooper – or maybe Richard – heads out in search of Laura Palmer, following the last will-and-testament of Red Room imprisoned Leland Palmer. But there is something wrong with this Cooper. It is immediately noticeable that his affectation is eerily like that of Mr. C (or Bad Coop or Bob-Dale or Booper or whatever you want to call him), and yet he isn’t Mr. C, but he’s also not Cooper. He goes to a diner called Judy’s, shoots a cowboy in the foot, kicks another one in the testicles, and then very dangerously and without much foresight, disposes of guns in a friar while warning the cook that they could go off at any minute. He looks for Laura but instead finds Carrie Page, played by Sheryl Lee, and they set off on a journey from Odessa to Twin Peaks (notably, this is a 25-hour car-ride), but not without Coop/Richard first seeing, in Carrie’s house, some guys dead body sitting in a chair – a sequence that is eerily reminiscent of the death of the Yellow Man in Blue Velvet. They head to Twin Peaks, arriving at night – note that they do not go the picturesque-way that leads past the iconic sign – and they show up at the door of Laura’s house; or do they. Turns out the house is owned by someone named Mrs. Tremond, who bought it from a Mrs. Chalfont – the attentive viewer will remember that the elderly-lady with her grandson has been called both names – and Carrie/Laura doesn’t recognize it at all. Just when it all seems to be wrapping in a Mulholland Drive, it-was-a-dream-all-along way, we hear the disembodied sound of Sara Palmer’s voice calling for Laura, and Cooper/Richard asks, “what year is it,” which is answered with one final shrill, blood-freezing scream by Carrie as the house in front of them is sucked up into nothingness, and we smash-cut to black.

This might be the most powerful ending to anything that David Lynch has ever done. I genuinely mean that. There is a false assumption that Lynch just does things to do them, that he is just weird to be weird; this couldn’t be further from the truth. Lynch can absolutely give you a straight answer, but most often he just doesn’t want to because that kind of narrative cohesion – fitting all the little blocks together – doesn’t ring true to the way that the world is around us. Like Albert said in episode 3 (and it’s no mistake that this is said to Gordon Cole, played by Lynch), they are investigating “the [key word here:] absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence.” Lynch has never been one to waste dialogue; he doesn’t have room for that kind of frivolity. Absurd, in the philosophical sense, is the innately-human need for order in an orderless world. There was never going to be a straight answer of an ending; Albert said as much with this one line. The mystery itself is absurd, just like real life. I’m sure this doesn’t help much with the resounding effects of the gut-punch of a final scene, but I think it is important nonetheless. Instead of focusing on the narrative elements, I’m going to now talk about exactly how Twin Peaks explores the nature of Evil, and its ever-present and always necessary counterpart, Good.

There is an insatiable need for things to be separated. We need – really, it’s just a want – for Good to be different/separate/above Evil. We need for there to be a police station full of good people looking out for the rest of society; Good people who get the drop on one of their own simply because that’s what they do. We need for Evil to be monstrous/demonic/other-natured; we need for it to be a force, a thing, but also for it to be a person that can be pointed-at and fought. We need for there to be things like dirty-bearded-men, and atomic bomb frog-bugs that climb inside the innocent members of society and corrupt them. We need White Lodge’s and Black Lodge’s and Good Coopers and Bad Coopers, and we need for there to be an ideological confrontation between these two sides, and for Good to prevail at the end; or if Evil prevails, it needs to be packaged in a digestible way that says, “Evil wins when Good stops fighting,” or “this was preventable, but the good-guys just missed the mark this time.” This is all understandable: isn’t it easier to think that the atomic bomb is the original-sin of modern day America – that it’s the birthing ground for the evil that has pervaded our world, infested our good members, and taken residence in our previously sacred iconography – than to accept that, at the end of the day, America has always been residence to both? Isn’t it easier to believe that there are doppelgangers of absolutely Good people (Cooper) and that these doppelgangers are the driving forces behind entire criminal empires than to accept the fact that sometimes the FBI agent who is supposed to help people and solve mysteries is just as lost as the rest of us? Isn’t it easier to believe that there are forces of Good and Evil – and that they are in a long-waged, ever-stalemated war with one another, and that this war is fought through the bodies of human beings – than to accept that people are not just Good or just Evil, that they’re both? Don’t we want to believe that the seemingly innocent homecoming-queen turned down a road of depravity, and drugs, and Darkness because she was a victim of the external forces of Evil, rather than accept that she was both Good and Evil, she was both Homecoming Queen and drug addict; that she was infinitely complicated – human – and that she can’t be easily defined by the comfortable way we like to think about the world? I’ll be the first to admit it, it certainly is easier for me to accept all the insane spiritual-nonsense of Twin Peaks at face-value because it’s what I so desperately want to be true. I want there to be Agent Cooper-s and Hawk-s and Harry-s and Andy-s and Major Brigs-s in the world, guided by all-knowing spirits and forces of Good, and I want them to be in an ever-shifting holy-war against the inclement tide of Evil that threatens to swallow us all if Good ever stops fighting for even one second. It really is easier. But it’s wrong. It is not true, and we all know that it isn’t true. Morality is not two sides; it’s not us versus them. There is no “other,” there are only other people – infinitely-complicated, irreducible people. People that can’t be divided into sides; people that can’t just be labeled and put in boxes; people that are all real, and present; people that are all valid. Twin Peaks: The Return is a painting, and there is no one part without the other; there is no separation of Good and Evil, they are mixed messily and unevenly together; they are parts of the whole. This is what the finale leaves us with. It leaves us with a man named Richard; a man that is both Bob-Dale and our hero, Agent Cooper. He is doing his best, and he’s not always doing it well, but he is trying; painfully so. Laura is not a trope, she is not a cliché or a set of character traits; she is a woman named Carrie who has an entire history of her own, is complicated and messy, and is just trying to make it through. The promise of their journey is the promise that all people get up every day for: that maybe, at the end of this dark, confusing, terrifying road that we are all travelers on, that maybe, just maybe, there will be an answer/reason/conclusion for it all, even though we all know that this is fairy-tale logic; it’s what we want, but it’s not the truth. The truth is that life is absurd, and human beings have been cursed with a tormenting need to find order and patterns and reasons for things that, at the end of the day, just are the way they are because that’s kind of how it all works.

This isn’t a comfortable conclusion, this isn’t the one you wanted, but I think that this is absolutely the most empathetically true ending to Twin Peaks – and the entirety of Lynch’s oeuvre – and that any other possible ending would have just been placation to what the audience wants, and not what they need. Twin Peaks might all be the dream of a man named Richard – I don’t know how I feel in this regard yet – or it might be that this ending is a new beginning, or possibly the past and that this entire show is a recursive-loop that spins off into infinity (this might have some hold, especially when considering the infinity-sign in episode 17), supported by the power of the universe; I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t particularly care. That isn’t the point of it at all. It’s just what we want. Albert – once again, good ol’ Albert – says it all back in episode 9 of season 2, during the round-table discussion, following Leland’s death, between Cooper, Harry, Major Brigs, and Hawk about what exactly they all just witnessed: Albert says, “maybe Bob is just the evil that men do.” That has always been my favorite line in the entirety of Twin Peaks, and it really is the ultimate distillation of what it’s all been about the whole time. Evil was never separate; it was always part of the whole. We digest Evil, and make it handle-able, through the lens of ideas like Bob, but really, all along, the Bobs of the world are just the Evil that men and women do; the unexplainable acts of horror that we want so desperately to explain. There is no comfortable message at the end of Twin Peaks, but there is a true one. I for one am incredibly grateful to have been able to witness this show unfold over the course of these months. It has been an experience that I will never forget for the rest of my life. David Lynch has inspired me – throughout his entire filmography – to think hard thoughts, and to reflect on life in ways that I never would have without him; ways that have opened doors I never knew existed. So, at the end of it all, there’s only is one thing to say:

Goodnight, Twin Peaks.

Goodbye, Twin Peaks.