Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 16

One hundred percent.

[Note: This post contains spoilers.}

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 16 // Original Air Date August 27, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

It was a long time coming. The Lodge entity MIKE (Al Strobel) gives distorted, matter-of-fact expression to the thrill that Twin Peaks devotees likely feel when Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan) eyes snap open in Part 16 of The Return, “You are awake. Finally.” Significantly, it isn’t Cooper-as-Dougie that sits up in a Las Vegas hospital bed, but the genuine article, the earnest FBI agent who immediately begins rattling off commands to everyone around him, albeit in that agreeably decisive way that compels listeners to leap to their feet and follow his directions. Dale Cooper is back, after 25 years in Black Lodge purgatory and some 13 episodes of exile in the metaphorical wilderness of suburban banality and gangland peril. Even Mark Frost and David Lynch, despite all their artistic nerve, can’t resist the hokey fanservice twinkle of Cooper announcing, as though directly to the audience, “I am the FBI.” Hell yes.

The old Dale Cooper’s return is a sequence of unabashed elation, but also one that feels wholly earned. At times, it’s been admittedly frustrating that the Coop viewers knew and loved has effectively been absent for the first 15 episodes of The Return. However, as his awakening in Part 16 illustrates, sometimes absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder. The long slog back to full cognizance makes the sudden return that much sweeter, and the attendant sense of a looming Cooper vs. Mr. C face-off that much more exhilarating. The viewer is no longer anxious for Cooper’s safety as they were when he was fumbling about in his Dougie haze, perilously vulnerable to manipulators and murderers. The FBI agent’s spry self-assurance hasn’t faded in the least, and seeing it in action once again gives one hope that the stony, ruthless Mr. C might have a worthy opponent at last. (Now it’s a boxing match!)

If there’s an immediate bittersweet element to Cooper’s awakening, it’s the unfortunate implications for Janey-E (Naomi Watts) and Sonny-Jim Jones (Pierce Gagnon), who are suddenly without a husband and father. The real Dougie Jones is, of course, long dead—or, a bit more accurately, recycled. However, as expressed through the muffled personality of Dale Cooper, “Dougie” changed the lives of the Joneses for the better, and not just with the jackpot-winning assistance of the Lodge. Indeed, while shuffling his way through Dougie’s life, Cooper has improbably acted as a spiritual good luck charm, giving second chances and opportunities for nobility to everyone he touches, from the endlessly appreciative Mitchum brothers (Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper) to the newly remorseful Anthony Sinclair. (Everyone except Ike the Spike, perhaps, but Las Vegas is certainly better off without him.)

When Cooper earnestly confides to his alter ego’s family that, “You have made my hearts so full,” he’s not humoring them in the least. He recognizes that, though “manufactured,” Dougie Jones was granted a little slice of everyday heaven (a home, family, and steady job), only to squander it by being a dishonest, good-for-nothing creep. Coop has spent enough time with Janey-E and Sonny-Jim to discern that they deserved better than a cheating, dissolute tulpa. Perhaps not all is lost, however. Cooper’s gift of a tuft of his own hair and his directive to MIKE to “make another one,” could be part of his endgame with Mr. C, but they alternatively could be his final gift to the Joneses, in the form of yet another Dougie.

Part 16’s other major story turn occurs when Diane (Laura Dern) finally reveals her true allegiances to her erstwhile FBI allies. This double-cross is not as central to the plot as Cooper’s return to consciousness, and it hasn’t been simmering for nearly as long, but it’s nonetheless a development that astute viewers likely saw coming. When Diane receives an opaque, weirdly menacing text from Mr. C, ":-) ALL," it seems to trigger a Manchurian Candidate-style programming, compelling her to text back the coordinates she’s memorized and to then put a permanent end to the meddling of Gordon (David Lynch), Albert (Miguel Ferrer), and Tammy (Chrysta Bell) with the snub-nosed revolver in her purse. (Just in case there were any lingering question as to where her loyalty lies, Lynch reprises the freakishly slowed-down “American Woman” from Part 1 while Diane nervously approaches Gordon’s hotel room.)

Naturally, Diane fails to get the drop on the FBI agents, because they have been onto her from the beginning, but the key revelation that emerges from her betrayal is that she isn’t Diane at all, but another tulpa. Although, in fine Diane fashion, once she is returned to the Lodge, she does spit a final “fuck you” at MIKE before disintegrating into black smoke. Her artificial nature does raise an obvious question: Where is the real Diane? The tulpa offers a hint before she draws her revolver and vanishes, repeating dreamily, “I’m in the sheriff’s station.” (As shrewd viewers have pointed out, only one letter distinguishes “Naido” from “Diane.”)

Given the gob-smacking drama of "Diane's" treachery and corporeal dissolution (!), it’s all too easy to overlook what is perhaps the most meaningful detail in her final confrontation with the FBI agents. Her flustered, shuddering description of her traumatic encounter with Mr. C many years ago is colored by the same sense of panicked de-realization that characterizes Audrey Horne’s plight. “I’m not me!” Diane cries over and over, creating a feedback loop of overwhelming dread. This sort of dissociative confusion is a recurring (and escalating) motif in The Return. In fact, one might assert that the dominant mood of the new series is an awareness that something is not quite right (or downright horribly wrong) about otherwise familiar people, places, and situations. Like one’s own home as experienced in a nightmare, it is recognizable yet noticeably, disturbingly “off.” (Gordon himself has an earlier moment like this, wherein he stands in bewilderment in his room full of blinking, humming Bureau computers, as if seeing them for the first time and finding them vaguely alien and repellent.) It’s a sensation that hearkens back to Phillip Jeffries’ terrified pronouncement in Fire Walk With Me, “We live inside a dream!” This in turn elicits Monica Belucci’s kōan-like query from Part 14, “But who is the dreamer?”

Most viewers have been fervidly longing for Cooper’s return since the new series’ beginning, and many have suspected Diane’s betrayal for some time, but Part 16 is otherwise an episode characterized by upended expectations. This serves as a warning to the viewer, that not all their wishes will be fulfilled exactly as anticipated, and that some plot turns will zig when the viewer is presuming a zag. The abrupt, ignominious demise of the odious Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) is a conspicuous example of this contravention of assumptions. Despite setting him up as one of the main players in the Twin Peaks subplots, the show unceremoniously disposes of Audrey Horne’s vile spawn in a shower of electrical sparks. After Richard is disintegrated by some sort of Lodge booby trap, Mr. C’s only reaction is a detached “Oh. Goodbye, my son.”

As the show’s various factions converge at the Jones home—assassins Chantel (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Hutch (Tim Roth); the Las Vegas FBI; and the Mitchum brothers' entourage—the viewer senses an overdue confrontation brewing. However, the clash that unfolds is unconnected to Dougie; it's an essentially random explosion of flared tempers and over-the-top violence. It’s not the FBI or the Mitchums who ultimately take down Chantel and Hutch, but a neighbor (Jonny Coyne) who objects to their van's blocking of his driveway. The argument escalates with perplexing speed into a full-on automatic weapons shootout in the middle of the subdivision, while the hapless Agent Wilson (Owain Rhys Davies) looks on. It’s a gratuitously violent and blackly comical scene, more akin to Breaking Bad in its setting and tone than anything else going on in Part 15. Bradley Mitchum wonders aloud while hunkering out of sight, “What the fuck kind of neighborhood is this?” but he might as well be asking, “What the fuck kind of show is this?” Wasn’t this a Twin Peaks revival at one point?

It’s the episode’s closing scene that deepens the atmosphere of unpredictability into the downright bizarre, mingling it with Diane’s existential freak-out. At the roadhouse, Eddie Vedder—drolly introduced by his given name, “Edward Louis Severson”—performs a song on acoustic guitar in his Into the Wild folk mode. During the performance, Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) and her husband Charlie (Clark Middleton) enter and take up positions at the bar. Their presence in the “real world” of the road house momentarily dashes suspicions that their interminable quarrel was unfolding in some surreal alternate reality. Then the emcee (J.R. Starr) gleefully announces “Audrey’s Dance,” the crowd wordlessly parts, and those synthesized vibraphone notes kick in. Just like that, middle-aged Audrey is 17 again, drawn onto the dance floor by the irresistible jazzy waves of Angelo Badalamenti’s “too dreamy” score.

It’s a moment of nostalgic ecstasy for long-time Twin Peaks aficionados, but also one of unnerving confusion. Why is the crowd quietly watching and swaying in harmony as Audrey writhes alone on the dance floor? Why would the emcee announce Audrey and why would the band play her iconic theme music? What the hell is happening? Suddenly, an accusation of infidelity among the onlookers erupts into a bar fight, seemingly a routine occurrence at the roadhouse during this season. Visibly frightened, Audrey begs Charlie to take her away. Then, with a jolt, she is abruptly in an abstracted space illuminated with hideously stark white light, staring at her worn-down reflection in a mirror. “What?,” she gasps, “WH-WHAT?”

Audrey is not where, when, or who she thought she was. He briefly-glimpsed surroundings offer virtually no context, but it is so aesthetically distinct from anything else in Twin Peaks—either in the real world or in the realm of the supernatural—that it feels utterly jarring. Is she still in a coma brought on by the bank vault explosion from the Season 2 finale? (Janey-E’s observation earlier in the episode potentially foreshadows as much: “When people go into a coma, they can stay there for years.”) Is Audrey institutionalized? Is she trapped in some Lodge-directed dream or purgatory? What relevance does this baffling revelation have for Cooper’s story and for those of the show's countless other characters? What does it mean for the roadhouse scenes previously presented on The Return? Nothing is certain, but Monica Bellucci’s words echo again: We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. What little assurance the viewer might still possess that any given thing on Twin Peaks is “real” has begun to dissolve and run through their fingers.

Fetal Infraction: Prevenge

Pregnancy has been a vital plot element in horror cinema for decades—at least going back to Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned in 1960—but there are precious few horror films that are specifically concerned with the anxieties that attend the nine months of human gestation. The ur-text for this rare species of picture is inarguably Rosemary’s Baby, which rather ingeniously mingles two nominally contradictory fears. On one hand is Rosemary's anxiety that motherhood will mutate her formerly vibrant life into one of drudgery and insipidness. On the other is her uneasiness about her child’s well-being, which she comes to jealously regard as her exclusive purview, the doting of Satanic cultists notwithstanding.

Other horror features have occasionally exploited adjacent emotional territory with mixed results, although a few relatively recent films such as Inside and Proxy have discovered novel and harrowing natal angles to explore. What most decisively distinguishes Alice Lowe’s new entry in this narrow subgenre is that, like Roman Polanski’s demonic 1968 thriller, the deliciously-titled Prevenge is the rare film that addresses the experience of pregnancy with genuine depth and shrewdness. Indeed, it might be the first horror feature to explicitly tackle gestation as a psychological, emotional, and hormonal phenomenon. The director’s gender is not incidental to this, for while A-list male filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott have burrowed into the body horror potential of reproduction, Lowe comprehends that the mental mutations unleashed by pregnancy are just as fucked up.

Prevenge’s fascinating anti-heroine is Ruth (Lowe), a Welsh woman who is in the third trimester with her first child, a girl. Ruth is also a recent widow, her husband Matt (Marc Bessant) having perished in a gruesome rock climbing accident shortly after she learned of her pregnancy. This tragedy has left Ruth in an understandable morass of grief and rage; reluctant to carry on with her life and ambivalent about bringing a child into the world, even if that baby is the last physical remnant of her late husband.

Whatever resolve Ruth has retained is devoted entirely to cold-blooded murder. The film’s opening scene follows her as she talks her way into the back room of an exotic pet store and then slits the throat of shop’s manager with a handy boning knife. The film coyly and rather needlessly withholds the full story behind Ruth’s kill list until the final stretch, but as the title clearly signals, her murderous spree is not some random, deranged act of bloodletting. Ruth has a plan; her intended targets are inscribed in a notebook and embellished with the angry doodles of a goth teen’s poetry journal.

This might have been the stuff of a faux-feminist vigilante thriller (Mommy’s Death Wish?) but Prevenge’s maybe-supernatural hook is what elevates the film into sharply-observed psychological horror. It turns out that Ruth’s unborn child is goading her into the murders, and while the baby girl-to-be doesn’t seem to be outright directing or masterminding its mother’s crimes, it is playing the part of the devil on her shoulder (or in her womb, in this case). Plot-wise, Prevenge resembles any number of dubiously righteous R-rated revenge stories, but the relentless telepathic encouragement from the baby is the irresistible perversity that powers the film.

Lowe herself voices the fetus, delivering her lines in a squeaky, breathy coo that renders its misanthropic, profanity-laden incitements even more disturbing. There’s something uniquely unsettling about hearing the mutant spawn of Joanna Newsom and Moaning Myrtle seethe, Kill Bill-style, about the cunts and dicks it believes are responsible for the death of its father. “You see?,” the child sneers as an especially obnoxious victim obligingly reveals his boundless selfishness, “These are the sort of people we’re dealing with.”

Of course, only Ruth can hear her baby’s provocations, which—along with the fact that Lowe is essentially talking to herself—firmly sets Prevenge in the realm of the unreliable protagonist. Like Curtis in Jeff Nichols’ masterwork Take Shelter, Ruth is acutely aware that she may be losing her mind, but that cognizance only amplifies the horror of her situation. The decision to follow Ruth’s viewpoint exclusively, and with an almost claustrophobic intensity, augments the oppressive sensation that the viewer is trapped along with her, unable to shut out the bloodthirsty pestering of the thing growing in her womb. This, ultimately, is the dominant fear that pulses icily through the film: The fear of mental invasion, of not knowing if one’s thoughts are one’s own. For any woman who has experienced pregnancy-related bouts of cravings, sensitivities, distraction, forgetfulness, anxiety, depression, and more severe mental health symptoms, such fears are likely all too familiar.

Prevenge reveals little about Ruth’s pre-widowed career or living situation; her killing spree is pointedly planned and carried out from the anonymity of a Cardiff hotel room. The only remnants of her old life are the baby and her untrammeled rage towards the people she blames for her spouse’s demise—although she admittedly also seems to despise humanity in general. What value Ruth ascribes to her child is tainted by maternal fears. Instead of focusing on the joys that life with her new daughter will bring her after her bloody work is done, Ruth can only fume with panic at the thought of losing her child to vague malefactors.

When her midwife (Jo Hartley) suggests bringing in a social services worker to help Ruth address the strain of grieving while preparing for motherhood, she regards this as the first step towards a bureaucrat snatching her baby from her breast. The remarkable sophistication of Lowe’s screenplay and performance is revealed in this sort of complex emotional gesture. In a single passage Lowe succeeds in eliciting diverse and distinct responses from the viewer: pity at Ruth’s losses and her escalating mental breakdown; concern for a child about to arrive into the arms of a violent, unbalanced parent; and sympathy for Ruth’s plight as a solitary woman navigating a dehumanizing modern world still beholden to patriarchy. The latter is embodied in the film’s steady sensitivity to the countless little assumptions, hostilities, and humiliations that mothers-to-be are forced to endure, down to the uninvited hand of another person on Ruth’s swollen abdomen.

Lowe keeps any compassion the viewer might develop for her anti-heroine from growing too substantial through liberal use of black humor. She portrays Ruth as a woman with the dry, indiscriminate contempt of a weary stand-up comedian, just unpleasant enough that, even apart from mass murder, she seems like something of a tactless asshole. She has a compulsion for baldly disrespecting people in an off-handed way, such that it often takes the listener a few beats to realize that they should be insulted. The film’s dirty secret is that Ruth’s fetus doesn’t have to push all that hard to get her to lash out at the world. Her self-consciousness of her victim status combined with a lifetime of enculturation in the sanctity of motherhood burnishes her sense of self-righteous wrath. When a frightened victim attempts to stall her by gently observing, “You’re grieving,” she becomes piqued, enunciating mockingly, “I’m not greev-ing. I’m ges-tayt-ing!”

Visually and aurally, the film is more workmanlike than striking, befitting a lowish-budget indie shot on video in a matter of weeks. There are flashes of sensory richness in the film’s moody color correction and in the urgent, slightly threatening electronic score by Pablo Clements and James Griffith. Just as often, however, the film fumbles aesthetically, such as with cinematographer Ryan Eddleston’s dependence on handheld shots with sloppy framing and erratic focus.

That said, the film’s appeal lies in Lowe’s overall direction, writing, and performance, and those are sufficiently imposing that concerns about Prevenge’s formal sturdiness fall away. Along with the film’s general sensitivity to the psychological and societal nuances of expectant mothers’ experiences, what most impresses is Lowe’s facility for keeping the film dangerously off-kilter in terms of its sympathies. Given that she was in fact pregnant when she made Prevenge, these achievements are hardly surprising. While there are perils in asserting that “a man could not have made this film,” it’s undeniable that a male-directed Prevenge wouldn’t have turned out to be such a wicked, multi-faceted pleasure. Arguably, an auteur who hasn’t experienced a hostile takeover of their mind and body by a little parasitic pseudo-person would have delivered a far less stimulating horror picture.

You Don’t Know Why, But You’re Dying to Try: The Lure

Simply being a flashy, splashy novelty that defies categorization won’t carry a film to greatness all on its own, but as Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s stupefying feature debut The Lure illustrates, it can still take a film damn far. At the most reductive level, The Lure is a Mermaid Movie, but even that characterization is misleading, as it inevitably invites comparisons to Splash and The Little Mermaid (but hopefully not Aquamarine). Granted, the plot of Smoczynska’s film borrows from the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale only slightly less freely than did Disney’s 1989 animated feature. Furthermore, The Lure unmistakably alludes to Ron Howard’s 1984 fantasy romcom in certain shots. Substantively, however, Smoczynska’s film is not merely a different creature than its mermaid movie antecedents, but a wholly unique specimen.

The surest sign that The Lure is something bracingly imaginative is that it’s exceedingly challenging to describe exactly what the hell kind of film it is. Many of its vividly realized elements are taken directly from horror cinema, but the film is not scary in the least. It is only a romance in the loosest sense, given how disinterested it is in the emotional contours of its central romantic relationship. What little comedy exists in the film is distinctly dry and eccentric, less a product of the writing or performances than of some modestly amusing choices in visual composition and production design. The most accurate genre descriptor might be musical, as The Lure includes both Chicago-style diegetic performances—much of the film takes place in a Warsaw burlesque club in the 1980s—as well as more fantastical, non-diegetic numbers. Unquestionably, the tone of the film is damn slippery. Its closest cinematic kin might be the more demented yet po-faced subspecies of rock operas like Phantom of the Paradise, The Apple, and Repo! The Genetic Opera, although there’s also unmistakably some Cabaret in Robert Bolesto’s screenplay.

The story concerns two curious mermaid chanteuses, Golden (Michalina Olszcanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who venture onto land to immerse themselves in Warsaw’s decadent nightlife in the final, chaotic decade of the Polish People’s Republic. Their entry point into this world is the Fig-n’-Dates, the house musical act at a popular and slightly shady burlesque club. The band includes singer and keyboardist Wokalistka (Kinga Preis), drummer Perkusista (Andrzej Knopka), and bassist Mietek (Jakub Gierszal). It is Mietek’s acoustic guitar noodling while on a moonlit beach that initially draws Golden and Silver into this glittery, unsavory world. It’s also the young and handsome bassist that unsurprisingly upsets the bond between the two mermaids—the film is unclear on whether Golden and Silver are biological sisters—and threatens to derail their vague plans to travel to America.

Distilled down to its raw elements, The Lure’s plot is a standard-issue fairy tale in the romantic tragedy vein, although Bolesto and Smoczynska are to be commended for privileging the Grimmer aspects of such stories. The mermaids’ tails are unexpectedly grotesque appendages: enormous masses of muscle covered in grayish-brown scales and spines, more befitting a mudskipper than a tropical, coral-dwelling fish. Golden and Silver can assume a bipedal form—which disconcertingly lacks both vagina and anus—but a sprinkle of water will revert them to their true form. Most ghoulishly, the mermaids have a taste for human flesh, and while it is not portrayed as a necessity for their survival, this hunger for fresh prey proves to be a vexing distraction. (This, combined with the mermaids’ frequent nudity, unavoidably recalls the late Tobe Hooper’s “naked space vampire” spectacle Lifeforce.)

The Lure’s most conspicuous weakness is its narrative, in part due to Smoczynska’s refusal to settle on a single character for the film’s point-of-view. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if The Lure were merely switching back and forth between the perspectives of Golden and Silver, treating them as dual protagonists who experience the human world in subtly yet meaningfully different ways. However, Smoczynska seems to believe that the film’s secondary and tertiary characters, particularly the other members of the Fig-n’-Dates, also warrant a generous helping of screen time. While these characters might be compelling or at least modestly entertaining, the film doesn’t provide much in the way of story-based or thematic rationale for its digressions to check in on them. It’s most noticeable in the case of Wokalistka, whose cluster of middle-age anxieties regarding her looks, livelihood, and latent maternal urges is a source of fascination for Smoczynska, even though it does little to enrich the film’s story.

A related issue is the preponderance of extraneous subplots. One of these involves another dilettante mythical sea creature, Tryton (Marcin Kowalczyk), who is posing as the lead vocalist in a heavy metal band. (Not incidentally,  the scars from his amputated horns are less noticeable in that music scene.) He seems to be taken with Golden, and invites her to sing at one of his group’s performances, but thereafter his storyline just peters out. Ditto Golden’s cat-and-mouse games with the police detective investigating the recent spate of riverside murders. This rivalry abruptly twists into a heated mutual sexual infatuation, and is then abandoned by the film just as quickly.

In one seemingly pivotal passage, the human members of the nightclub's band come to blows over what appears to be a romantic rivalry, but is mainly attributable to some sort of lethal poisoning. They are saved from this toxin by one of the club’s burlesque singers, who administers an intravenous antidote while crooning them back to consciousness. Or something. Between the confusing editing and Smoczynska’s generally sloppy storytelling, it’s unclear what the hell is going on and what this scene’s relevance is to the rest of the plot. It’s tempting to hand-wave away this sort of apparent clumsiness as an expression of The Lure’s more surrealist inclinations. However, such excuses disregard how expertly attuned the film's surrealism is to the distinctive vibe of an acid rock opera. It’s kitschy, fanciful, and charmingly weird rather than outright absurdist, which just makes the fatally muddled passages even more frustrating.

Fortunately, The Lure is such a bottomless source of dazzling style, it ultimately doesn’t matter that the plot is hazy and careless, or that Golden and Silver are portrayed without much psychological complexity. (In the film’s favor, they are cold-blooded creatures of legend, and therefore it seems appropriate that they are depicted as simultaneously unworldly and unfathomable.) The Lure is a story of simple-minded longings complicated by disobliging reality. However, the sort of unabashed pathos that invigorates most musicals isn’t a part of the film’s arsenal. Smoczynska is more attentive to style than to substance, but unlike, say, Moulin Rouge!, her film doesn’t compensate for its garish shallowness by diving headfirst into gooey, soaring emotion. Instead, the director maintains a bit of distance from her characters, preferring to allow the story’s mythical resonance, redolent design, and funky energy to do the heavy lifting. In short, the film might be light on genuine heart, but it boasts oodles of personality.

In this, The Lure is a somewhat startling success. Even though it has hardly any likable characters—Silver comes closest, but her girlish naiveté is more pitiable than charming—it’s nonetheless a preposterously fun film, drunk on both the dissolute glitziness of its setting and the broad potential of color, motion, and music. The Polish lyrics might sound a little awkward to American ears at first, but halfway through the first big musical number, the viewer will likely find themselves grooving on the distinctive Slavic rhythms and rhymes. This, ultimately, is what powers The Lure, in terms of both narrative and theme: the potent black magic of song. Perhaps it’s a bit on the nose for a film about supernatural sirens to revel in the contagious power of pop tunes, but no one ever has accused musicals of being a subtle genre. Smoczynska often uses a whale-like tone to indicate that the mermaids are working their mind-control mojo on a human. However, she pointedly leaves it ambiguous whether any literal magic is involved when, say, Golden and Silver’s Blade Runner-themed synth-pop number coerces everyone in the club, wait staff included, to unite in a gyrating throng on the dance floor.

Visually speaking, The Lure is a marvelously vibrant film, without descending into the kind of mannered sterility that sometimes characterizes self-conscious European art-horror fare. Smoczynska and her cinematographer Jakub Kijowski at times flirt with overly familiar aesthetic modes—late 90s nu metal music video here, faux-De Palma erotic thriller there—but they flit so weightlessly from one stylistic approach to the next that it feels more like exuberant sampling than triteness. Fittingly for a film that centers on the fleshy yet otherworldly sensuality of a pair of aquatic demon-nymphs, The Lure is visually balanced at the intersection of dingy urban verisimilitude and dreamy, bubbly illusion. The film’s production design possesses an appealing lived-in grubbiness that feels exactly right for its setting, while also lacking the historical self-consciousness that could have made it distracting. Strictly speaking, it’s not realistic, but unlike, say the over-elaborate East Berlin chic of the recent Atomic Blonde, it feels unforced. The burlesque club is a singular wonder of understated design, glittery and modern but revealing its late-period Eastern Bloc provenance in the slightly chintzy materials and haphazardly planned spaces. The flamboyant music fashion is likewise evocative, from the Fig-n’-Dates’ white-on-white suits and skinny ties to the black leather, chrome spikes, and ragged fishnets at Tryton’s punk-tinged metal show. (Nothing, however, tops Wokalistka’s curly, strawberry blonde Donna Summers wig.)

Meanwhile, Smoczynska often juxtaposes the neon glam and Communist gloom with a perverse sensibility drawn from the film’s horror pedigree. There’s more than a little David Cronenberg in the mermaids’ repulsive, amphibious morphology, but the film’s dominant mode is a mélange of the gothic and the gorehound. This is hardly surprising when the film’s monsters blend the characteristics of cinematic vampires and werewolves, but what makes The Lure’s imagery linger is the unpredictable ways that it expresses its weird gestalt of genre tropes.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than when Silver visits a black-market surgeon to have her fish tail amputated and replaced with a human donor’s legs. The scenario is a ludicrous, even by the standards of the film’s fantasy logic, but Smoczynska discerns its potent cinematic potential. And so, she delivers: Silver lies on a bed of chipped ice like a tuna steak, her body bisected horizontally just above the navel, her intestines spilling from her torso, surgeons milling around her, as she sings softly and longingly about the land-bound life that she imagines will bring her love and happiness. Brothers Grimm eat your hearts out.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 15

I want you to think real hard about what you’re saying, because you’re not making any sense.

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 8/30/17.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 15 // Original Air Date August 20, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

Part 15 of Twin Peaks: The Return feels unmistakably like a turning point for both versions of Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). The real Cooper, still mentally hobbled and still ensnared in the suddenly charmed life of Dougie Jones, attains what appears to be a long-awaited moment of clarity. Despite all the signifiers of his old life that have previously nudged Coop’s subconscious—coffee, pie, an American flag, a policeman's badge—he’s never made the leap to a true awakening. The cue that finally unleashes a thunderbolt of recognition and urgency for Cooper is not one of these tangible talismans, but the name “Gordon Cole.” Those words are uttered by director Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard, but they naturally catch Cooper’s attention on account of his former superior at the FBI. (This constitutes a Möbius strip of a meta-reference, given that Lynch originally named the FBI director after the little-seen Paramount executive in Wilder’s film.)

For a moment, it appears that Cooper might be dislodged from his Dougie fugue by the mere mention of this name, but Coop's reverie is shortly derailed by the electrical crackling that he perceives to be emanating from a wall outlet. Drawn by perhaps both the unnatural sound and memories of his exit from the Black Lodge, Cooper approaches the outlet and probes at it with a fork, with predictable results. It remains to be seen whether this literal shock will either jolt Cooper back to his old self or forestall the awakening that seemed imminent moments earlier, but it’s notable that electricity (the otherworldly fire of Twin Peaks’ mythology) is once again presented as the medium for a potentially profound transformation.

The nefarious Mr. C, meanwhile, has an overdue meeting with the mysterious Phillip Jeffries, who has evidently undergone a striking transformation of his own. Arriving at the hellish convenience store that serves as a lair and/or rendezvous point for the entities of the Black Lodge, Mr. C demands to see the former FBI agent, and is dutifully escorted through decrepit hallways, ethereal forests, and a fleabag motel by a sooty Woodsman. He then comes face-to-face with an entity that claims to be Jeffries, although the federal lawman now inhabits the form of an electric, bell-like contraption. Broadly reminiscent of devices previously seen in the White Lodge, this machine emits buzzes and clanks, spews silvery vapors from a spout, and speaks like David Bowie with a hambone accent. (The role of Jeffries is credited to the late Bowie based on Fire Walk With Me footage, but the “teakettle's" lines are voiced by Nathan Frizzell.)

Mr. C and Jeffries have a rather murky exchange about a woman named “Judy,” previously mentioned by the teleporting, time-traveling Jeffries when he briefly appeared at the Philadelphia FBI office in Fire Walk with Me. Not only does this inanimate Jeffries seem unaware of the assassination plot against Mr. C, but he also somewhat bewilderingly reminds Cooper’s evil double that “you’ve already met Judy.” The primary takeaways from this conversation are that Mr. C may have misconstrued some of the events that have occurred in recent days, and that Jeffries may be mistaking Mr. C for the real Dale Cooper. ("You are Cooper," the teakettle intones with relieved finality.) Jeffries “writes” some geographic coordinates via puffs of steam, and these numbers appear to match up with those previously seen scrawled on the arm of Ruth Davenport’s corpse.

As Mr. C departs, another curve ball is delivered: Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) appears and aims a gun at the doppelganger, evidently having followed him from the Farm in Montana. Richard has just enough time to confirm what viewers have long suspected—Audrey Horne is his mother—before Mr. C disarms him, gives him a swift ass-kicking, and forces the younger man into his truck. “We’ll talk on the way,” is the only explanation Mr. C is willing to give to his putative spawn for the moment.

The anti-climactic nature of this belated face-to-face encounter between the show’s father-and-son villains is emblematic of The Return’s methods. The new series is built around a sense of escalating momentum towards a destination—it’s right there in the title, after all—but Mark Frost and David Lynch have made a habit of mutinously delaying and subverting almost every anticipated incident. For Richard, his confrontation with the man he has seen only in photographs is a sobering and potentially revelatory moment, concluding a week when he’s otherwise careened from one violent outburst to the next. To Mr. C, however, Richard is merely a mild annoyance who is quickly dispatched and then dragged along on the off chance he might be useful.  Similarly, Mr. C finally squares off with the enigmatic Jeffries, who has harried the doppelganger's steps from afar, only to discover that the former FBI agent is no longer a man, but a riddle-spouting contraption squatting within the Black Lodge.

Dale Cooper’s maybe-awakening is likewise consistent with the series' treatment of crucial events that have been long-awaited (or at least long-telegraphed). Cooper has spent 13 episodes of the new series in a shuffling daze, shaking the cobwebs loose from his old self with agonizing slowness. While this episode suggests that Gordon Cole’s name has at least roused Dale Cooper’s consciousness into wakefulness, the outcome of Cooper’s subsequent electrocution is left blatantly ambiguous. Is the old, earnest FBI agent of the original series finally back, or has have those 120 volts smacked him down into yet more gormless Dougie Jones lethargy? Is Cooper even alive after such a potentially fatal shock?

Viewers have been waiting for this moment, but consistent with the approach in evidence throughout the season, the show’s creators couch such scenes in uncertainty, uncanniness, and the unforeseen. This phenomenon is signaled in small, subtle ways throughout Part 15. The haziness of Cooper’s fate is mirrored in that of a barely coherent, drug-addled Stephen (Caleb Landry Jones), who appears to kill himself off screen in a fit of existential panic. Exacerbating the mystery, Stephen’s distraught girlfriend Gersten (Alicia Witt) is too disoriented by the narcotic spectacle of her woodland surroundings to check on him, notwithstanding her cloying concern for him.

James’ (James Marshall) attempt to greet his married crush Renee (Jessica Szohr) as politely and innocuously as possible almost instantly escalates into an all-out barroom brawl—albeit one that the iron-fisted Freddie (Jake Wardle) ends just as swiftly by unintentionally one-shotting their assailants into critical condition at the ICU. Later in Part 15, road house patron Ruby (Charlyne Yi), slouching harmlessly in a booth as she waits for her companions, is aggressively relocated by a pair of bikers, leaving her confounded to the point of terror. (As with the hysterical driver in Part 11, Ruby's pitiful crawling and horrifying shrieks give expression to the viewer’s dread that the old Cooper might never return.)

Crucially, Part 15 also offers a balm that mitigates these passages of dismay and confusion, although it counter-intuitively presents it at the episode’s beginning. After being denied a happy ending for decades, high school sweethearts Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) and Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) are at last given a chance to be together. Inexplicably awakened to a newfound self-awareness and positivity by Dr. Jacoby’s paranoiac ravings, Ed’s wife Nadine (Wendy Robie) apologizes for her lifetime of erratic, unpleasant behavior and releases him from any obligations to her, sending him into Norma’s arms with her blessing.

Ed arrives at the Double R to share the good news with Norma, but is crushed when she abruptly puts him off to confer with her partner Walter (Grant Goodeve). Ed is momentarily despondent—His order to Shelly (Mädchen Amick): “Coffee… and a cyanide pill”—but Norma is merely meeting with Walter to permanently divest herself of the Double R franchise locations. Ed closes his eyes in an almost meditative attitude as Norma disposes of Walter and the potential distractions of a tri-state pie empire. While Ottis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” croons from the diner’s jukebox, Norma’s hand appears on Ed’s shoulder and he opens his eyes. At long last, all is right with the world for Twin Peaks’ most star-crossed of lovers. It's a hint that not everything will end in tears as The Return nears its conclusion.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• The award for best deadpan line reading of the episode goes to Clark Middleton, who responds to Audrey’s (Sherilyn Fenn) provoking jab, “I like Billy better,” with a dry sigh: “Sensational.”
   
• Over the course of recent episodes, Audrey’s seeming inability to walk out her front door to look for her missing lover has increasingly recalled the plight of the aristocratic party guests in Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. Abruptly and inexplicably incapable of leaving their host’s home, the party-goers descend into hysterics and treachery as their captivity stretches into untold days and weeks. Buñuel famously refused to explain his allegorical intentions, but the film functions so effectively due to the sheer, unexpected intensity of its absurdly nightmarish scenario, any potential metaphorical reading is almost beside the point.
   
• Janey-E’s (Naomi Watts) shrieks of alarm when “Dougie” shocks himself and shorts out the house is eerily reminiscent of Watts’ screams in the final, bloodcurdling minutes of Mulholland Drive, complete with similar strobe light effects. Watts’ chilling outburst is likewise echoed in Ruby’s strange fit of terror on the Bang Bang Bar's dance floor.
   
• Stephen's nearly incoherent ramblings prior to his apparent suicide attempt suggest a dadaist riff on the renowned "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy from Act III, Scene I of Hamlet. Notwithstanding its bizarre imagery of a rhinoceros, bottled lightning, and the color turquoise, Stephen's ravings indicate a hesitation as he weighs the release of oblivion against the possibility of an ambiguous afterlife (or other lingering quasi-existence).
   
• Hutch’s (Tim Roth) self-serving characterization of the United States as “a nation of killers” hearkens back to Buella’s observations from Part 1: “It’s a world of truck drivers.”
   
• The lines spoken by Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard have a distinct resonance now that series’ characters and factions are finally converging—geographically and psychologically—on the town of Twin Peaks: “I’m not worried. Everything will be fine. The old team together again. Nothing can stop us.”
   
• The encounters that Mr. C has above the convenience store plainly occur outside the normal bounds of time and space. This is only confirmed by the fact that said store flickers and vanishes from the wooded clearing after he and Richard depart the area. However, not only does Mr. C reach this supernatural locale via truck, but Richard manages to surreptitiously follow him there in his own car. The notion that Lodge-associated locales can be both spiritual and physical places (at least for a time) is not new, but there’s something confoundingly odd about characters literally driving to a demonic, trans-dimensional hideout.

I Grab My Pen and I Write Out a List: Death Note

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers. Updated 8/28/17.]

One of the criticisms that has been directed at Netflix’s numerous original series is that they sometimes feel needlessly drawn out to a dozen or more episodes, when roughly half of that number would have sufficed to tell the same story. This results in lots of sluggish mid-season wheel-spinning and aimless wandering through fruitless subplots, all with the evident goal of getting binge-watchers psychologically invested for the long haul. It’s the sunk cost fallacy as applied to pop culture consumption: A viewer who has devoted 12 hours to Season 1 is more likely to feel obligated to stick around for Season 2.

Netflix’s original horror feature Death Note—adapted from the manga series of the same name by writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata—has the opposite problem. It’s at least 12 hours of story crammed into 100 disjointed minutes that never allow a single plot beat to steep or simmer for even a moment. It charges through its story with the vaguely annoyed, half-assed attitude of an 7th-grade English student rushing through a presentation that they already know they’re going to fail. Much of the film has the unmistakable air of a slapdash assignment, where reductive boxes are dutifully checked to attest that, yes, this is a Death Note film, but without any regard for whether the assembled result makes a lick of sense.

It didn’t have to be that way, had Netflix at given Death Note the running time it needed to properly thrive. Obliged to not only Americanize Ohba’s epic-length comic series but also distill it down to less than two hours, the screenwriters—Jeremey Slater and brothers Charley and Vlas Parlapanides—were essentially set up to fail. It’s plausible that no one could have turned a Death Note adaptation with those parameters into a success, but the involvement of Slater, who scratched out the dog-awful The Lazarus Effect, certainly didn’t help.

The Death Note manga and its anime adaptation are deeply embedded in Japanese folk and religious traditions, but an American version of the story wasn’t necessarily a non-starter. No one ever lobbed credible whitewashing accusations at The Ring or The Departed, after all, and they actually managed to outshine their Japanese and Hong Kong antecedents, respectively. Picking up a story and moving it whole cloth to a different time, place, or cultural context is standard high-concept gimmicky. Shakespeare companies are the undisputed masters of this sort of milieu swapping, but Japanese director Akira Kurosawa might be cinema’s most famous practitioner. (He’s even been on both ends of this phenomenon, adapting Western stories and then being adapted in the West himself.) Still, any adaptation or remake needs to bring something original to the table: an approach or perspective that enriches the source material, or at least takes it in a heretofore unexplored direction. This is especially the case when it comes to non-white source material that is adapted into a white context, given the colonial-adjacent history of white culture swiping any exploitable non-white bauble that catches its eye.

Netflix’s Death Note is a big fat failure in this respect, as it awkwardly attempts to chart a middle way that comes off as lazy rather than sensitive. Ironically, the film ultimately doesn’t go far enough in its Americanization efforts, inexplicably retaining the manga’s Japanese death spirit (shinigami) villain and then re-embellishing the transplanted story with Japanese trimmings. Conversely, the Seattle setting just feels like a hideously generic “American city,” lacking any sense of regional character, economic history, or demographic identity. Death Note is accordingly the worst of all possible worlds: a white film that distractingly reminds the viewer of its non-white origins at every turn, while also refusing to take advantage of its cosmopolitan American setting to do something original with Ohba’s story.

In its favor, Death Note doesn’t dick around with unnecessary narrative ballast: A few minutes into the film, emo-bookish high school student Light (Matt Wolff) has come into possession of the titular artifact, an ancient journal inscribed with dozens of rules and a long list of names. (The book literally falls out of the sky, a cheeky, parsimonious gesture that puts the relic in Light’s hands without the need for a convoluted backstory.) After a few minutes more, the death demon Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe and physically performed by Jason Liles) appears and explains to how the Death Note works. If Light writes a person’s name in the book while visualizing their face, that individual will die. What’s more, if Light specifies the manner of their death, it will be fulfilled to the letter. He tests out this power by ordering the decapitation of a bully, and in short order a Rube Goldberg chain of freak occurrences separates said bully’s head from his body, Final Destination-style.

Superficially, Death Note’s premise is the stuff of innumerable fantasy-horror tales about Mephistophelean compacts and the tragic hubris of humanity. What’s distinctive about the story's approach to these tropes is that it enthusiastically embraces its ludicrous high concept and quickly expands its scale beyond mere acts of petty adolescent revenge. After snuffing out the mobster who killed his mother in a hit-and-run, Light turns his attention from the personal to the societal. Rather naively letting his cheerleader crush Mia (Margaret Qualley) in on his secret, the pair scour the Internet for information on fugitive murderers, untouchable war criminals, and other assorted global nasties to add to the Death Note. Ryuk—who lurks about, invisible to everyone but Light—seems mildly taken aback by this do-gooder ambition, but also wickedly pleased at the obvious potential for a long, hard fall once Light’s self-righteous methods inevitably implode.

Rather than simply allowing the epidemic of accidents and suicides afflicting the world’s Bad Guys to remain a mystery, Light and Mia somewhat questionably devise a mythology for their vigilantism. The Death Note, they eventually discover, isn’t just a means to perform push-button murder, but a tool for straight-up mind control. By writing elaborate instructions into the book, they can dictate a victim’s behavior in minute detail up to the moment of their death. This includes, for example, forcing victims to write Japanese messages on the wall in their own blood, crediting their deaths to an entity named “Kira”. (The in-universe arbitrariness of this scheme, allegedly devised by Light to throw authorities off the scent, has an unpleasant whiff of retro white privilege about it. Need a scapegoat? Why not the devious Japanese?) In what seems like a matter of months—the film is weirdly ambiguous on this score, but it plainly takes place over less than a single school year—Kira-worshiping cults spring up around the world as violent crime plummets and evildoers adjust to the reality that they could drop dead at any moment.

At this point the film swerves into a X-Files-tinged duel of wits between Light and an eccentric government agent known simply as “L” (Lakeith Stanfield). A twitchy, quasi-psychic investigator who never appears to sleep and sustains himself solely on candy, L seems to have nigh-unlimited authority to direct the FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, and other agencies. He’s convinced that Kira is an ordinary person, and through Sherlockian deduction, he narrows the assassin’s location to Seattle. There his inter-agency task force absorbs the quixotic Kira investigation of local police detective James Turner (Shea Whigham), who just happens to be Light’s father. This connection might be laughably contrived—The man hunting for Kira is unwittingly investigating his own son!—but preposterous writing is the least of Death Note’s problems.

Even this Cliff Notes version of the original manga’s plot has a substantial number of moving parts, but Death Note is so ruthlessly flattened into a feature-length story that it feels ruinously rushed and jerry-rigged. The film is not especially hard to follow, but that’s because it speeds right past momentous plot points and papers over complex mythology with a kind of contemptuous inattentiveness. The viewer is hard-pressed to care because Wingard plainly doesn’t care. Incredibly, the film makes these dubious choices so that it can spend more precious screen time on, say, the unconvincing relationship drama between Light and Mia, or on what feels like a five-minute foot chase through Seattle’s back alleys. Long after Death Note ends, one is left wanting more details about, say, the sinister book’s previous owners through the centuries, or about L’s X-Men-ish origin as a government-created intellectual super-weapon. In the moment, however, the viewer is simply too shell-shocked by the heedless pace of Death Note’s plot to ruminate on its more compelling suggestions of a deeper mythos.

Not one story element in Death Note is given the space it needs to emerge and evolve organically. The film simply barrels forward from one incident to the next, never stopping for anything so trivial as constructing drama or establishing mood. In particular, Light’s change from an ordinary petulant teenager into a global vigilante with a god complex happens so fast, it barely feels like a transition at all. This sort of severe narrative compression isn’t just artless, but also frustrating, as it’s painfully apparent how dramatically intriguing this arc could be if it played out over three or four hour-long episodes, rather than a three-minute montage.

Interesting characters probably couldn’t save such a dashed-off muddle, but it surely doesn’t help matters that Death Note is saddled with a pair of uncharismatic leads. Wolff conveys a snotty, smarter-than-thou resentfulness from his first appearance on screen, which disastrously undercuts the ostensible tragedy of a cringing nerd’s transformation into a sanctimonious Grim Reaper. What’s more, Wolff has zero chemistry with Qualley. She portrays Mia as a prickly, manipulative bitch who turns into an outright sociopath once she gets a taste for blood. The blame for this falls primarily on the screenwriters, however, and it’s difficult to envision how Qualley could have salvaged such an unpleasant, emasculating cliché.

It falls on the supporting characters to lend Death Note some marginal color and pathos, and the performers succeed well enough in this respect. Whigham is in typically fine form in a role that plays to his strengths as a character actor; his widowed police detective is all aggrieved exhaustion with an undercurrent of righteous indignation. Stanfield is blessed with the most intriguing character in L, but the film’s pace and indifference mean that the actor is obliged to reduce him to a shallow collection of pseudo-autistic tics. Appropriately enough for his demonic character, Dafoe is the only performer who walks away totally unscathed from Death Note. This is partly because his presence is limited to his purring voice and devilish facial expressions, but it’s also because the casting is damn-near perfect. Sensibly eschewing any clumsy Japanese gestures in his performance, Dafoe portrays Ryuk as one-half the delighted, goading toadie to Light’s schoolyard bully, and one-half Faustian puppet-master who’s so assured in his absolute power that he never needs to proclaim it.

Dafoe’s total ownership of the performance raises the question of why a Japanese demon has been retained as the antagonist, as opposed to some region-appropriate substitute: Duwamish Native American spirit, Volga Germano-Russian trickster god, or even a skeletal, scythe-wielding Death straight out of a black metal album cover. Death Note just plops the source material’s original villain into an urban Pacific Northwest setting without any visible effort to explain or justify it. (Seattle’s not-insignificant Japanese-American population was interned in WWII, as they were everywhere; why not use that angle somehow?) This, as much as anything, gives the film a negligent dimension, as though Wingard and the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to finish translating the story into an American context. If Death Note is a genuine example of whitewashing—and it’s not clear that it is—it’s a depressingly lax sort whitewashing that draws attention to its own vacuousness and limited imagination.

As cinema, Wingard’s film is competent enough, and even formally sumptuous at times with respect to design, lighting, and composition. The colors pop in the film's more evocative locations: a winter high school dance; a neon-drenched Tokyo BDSM club; a decrepit, abandoned orphanage. Ryuk’s creature design is marvelously unnerving stuff, a canny blend of costuming, CGI, and old-school camera trickery. Wingard evades potentially phony effects shots through judicious use of blocking, shadow, and shallow focus, rendering Ryuk more menacing, given that the viewer can never quite get a clear look at him. In short, Death Note isn’t an amateurish train wreck; it's made by people who know how to make movies. However, like Wingard’s recent misconceived Blair Witch sequel, it face plants embarrassingly. The filmmakers reveal a poor understanding of the source material, or least an unwillingness to commit to the time, expense, and effort it would take to relocate and adapt Ohba’s comic effectively. This is doubly frustrating, given that Wingard has demonstrated he is capable of more: His 2011 feature You’re Next was an acidic satire of bourgeois overconfidence and sexist assumptions, and a damn fun survival horror film to boot.

Given the film’s myriad other problems, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Death Note never gets around to engaging with the original story’s nuanced themes of morality, power, and punishment, let alone its political implications in a contemporary world of extrajudicial drone strikes. The film’s limited interest in such matters is expressed through sparse world-building like messianic pro-Kira graffiti, or through petty teen melodrama that has all the philosophical sobriety of a slogan on a MMA T-shirt. It's the sort of film that signals the righteousness of Light’s moral reservations in the second act by having Mia repeatedly call him a pussy with unconcealed contemptuousness. Wingard’s film is more inept than outright stupid, but it sure thinks its audience is dumb.

Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 14

Sure is a mystery, huh?

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Twin Peaks: The Return // Part 14 // Original Air Date August 13, 2017 // Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch // Directed by David Lynch

An “eventful” episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is admittedly a relative thing, but by this series’ skewed standard, Part 14 feels like a particularly dense chapter. In part, this impression may exist because the previous three episodes made such a show of withholding dramatic satisfaction and challenging the viewer’s patience. However, it’s also indisputable that there’s a lot to chew on in Part 14—and not just the necks of sleazy truckers, either. Not all this narrative red meat is “action” in the conventional sense. Indeed, some of Part 14’s most stimulating passages involve characters telling stories to other characters, whether literally or through images. However, virtually every scene in this episode features some notable incident: confirmation of (or elaboration on) pre-existing suspicions; genuine left-field revelations that re-contextualize events up to this point; and even some honest-to-god forward motion with respect to the plot. There are also relatively opaque conversations between new characters, because this is Twin Peaks: The Return, after all.

Mr. C and “Dougie Jones” do not make appearances in Part 14, which allows the episode to spend more time in Twin Peaks itself. In the wake of the natural pivot point in Part 8, the show seems to have turned its attention increasingly towards the titular town, and Part 14 in particular seems to bestow Twin Peaks’ citizens with a goodly chunk of screen time. This further enhances the steadily mounting impression that the show’s events are converging on the town, and that the inevitable confrontation between Dale Cooper and his malevolent double will unfold there.

Certainly, Part 14 depicts instances where the supernatural entities of the White and Black Lodge intrude into the physical reality of the town in the most vivid manner imaginable. Granted, Twin Peaks has been the setting for some unsettling, even downright inexplicable moments, from a vomiting zombie-girl to Carl Rodd’s vision of a departing soul. Yet nothing shocking and otherworldly has yet occurred in Twin Peaks on the level of the murderous glass box wraith, or Mr. C’s Woodsmen-mediated resurrection, or Bill Hastings’ imploding skull. That changes in Part 14, which not only serves up the surprise of a demonic Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) ripping open a man’s jugular with her teeth, but also the sheriff department’s long-awaited appointment with the White Lodge portal, an encounter that leaves blind and mute Lodge denizen Naido (Nae Yuuki) in their care.

Sarah’s gruesome attack on the trucker (John Paulsen) is obviously the more shocking of these two scenes, albeit one that has been subtly foreshadowed over the past two episodes. The revelation that Sarah is host to a malicious Black Lodge entity is admittedly alarming, and the jump scare when she lunges at the harassing creep’s throat is gratifying in a slasher movie way. However, it’s Zabriskie’s performance that makes this sequence truly creepy, from the quietly desperate way she appends a “please” to each deflection of the trucker’s advances, to the languid challenge in her acidic remark to the bartender (Eric Ray Anderson): “Sure is a mystery, huh?” Moreover, there’s something indefinably unnerving about this attack occurring in a public place where bystanders are lingering only a few feet away. Did no one notice Sarah removing her face? Or is this just another example of the subjectivity that seems to be at work in any brush with the Black Lodge?

Still, notwithstanding the shock of Sarah Palmer’s bloody feast, the sheriff and deputies’ encounter with the White Lodge gateway is arguably the more significant development where the series’ plot is concerned. Of all the people to be transported bodily to the Lodge and presented with a kind of visual Cliff Notes on the show’s mythos, Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) was not high on the list of potential candidates. (Not the least because the new series has tended to portray Andy and wife Lucy as even more absurd space cadets than the original series ever did.) Certainly, among the four men who trek through the forest to Jack Rabbit’s Palace—the other three being Sheriff Truman (Robert Forster), Deputy Hawk (Michale Horse), and Deputy Briggs (Dana Ashbrook)—Andy seemed the least likely to be the designated envoy to the Lodge.

In Twin Peaks, however, the supernatural world is nothing if not inscrutable. The Giant (Carl Struycken), who at long last properly identifies himself as “the Fireman,” shows Andy a conspicuously cinematic montage of scenes from the past and future. When he emerges from the White Lodge, Andy is uncharacteristically focused and decisive, carrying the weakened Naido back to the sheriff’s truck and indicating they must keep her presence at the station a secret. How he gleaned this information from the Fireman’s cryptic highlight reel is unclear, but this again points to the idiosyncratic nature of the paranormal in the world of Twin Peaks. Gordon’s encounter with the Black Lodge vortex in Part 11 illustrated that different individuals can all perceive the same phenomenon differently. This emphasizes the slippery nature of the Lodges and their associated phenomena, but it also notably reflects the myriad reactions to Twin Peaks itself, which different viewers might regard as a work of genius, inscrutable garbage, or anything in between.

Later in the station’s holding cells, Andy and Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) give Naido clothes and attempt to reassure her, although the woman persists in her fearful, unintelligible chattering. The sheer uncanniness of the situation—an unearthly Lodge entity sitting in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s station, swaddled in a fuzzy pink bathrobe—is only heightened by what follows. Deputy Chad (John Pirruccello), newly arrested for his corrupt dealings, screams in annoyance at a bloody-faced drunk (Jay Aaseng) who sluggishly mimics both Chad's words and Naido’s primate-like whimpering. This scene carries a disorienting and distressing air, evoking a similar sequence from the original series, wherein a jailed Bobby and Mike Nelson inexplicably barked and brayed at James Hurley like ravening dogs.

The notion that visitors do not necessarily experience the Lodge exactly as the show portrays it seems to be confirmed in a later scene featuring James (James Marshall), who is revealed to now work as a security guard at the Great Northern Hotel. By way of explaining the green rubber glove her always wears on his right hand, fellow guard Freddie (Jake Wardle) recounts his own mysterious encounter with the Fireman. As Freddie tells it, the otherworldly giant provided him with absurd yet very explicit instructions to follow, resulting in the permanent attachment of the glove to his hand and the gift of superhuman strength. (James’ sober, respectful attentiveness during this story, never once interjecting with skepticism or prodding questions, is one of the nicer touches in this episode’s script.) Besides setting up the possibility of an arm-wrestling match with Mr. C—one can dream!—Freddie’s story underlines the subjective nature of the Lodge, and the extent to which the spiritual receptiveness of the individual visitor seems to play a role in their experience.

Elsewhere, Part 14 provides validation of some long-standing Twin Peaks theories. It is revealed that FBI agents Gordon Cole (David Lynch) and Phillip Jeffries (the late David Bowie, seen in footage from Fire Walk with Me) were once partners, and it was the pair of them that originated the X-File-like Blue Rose classification for certain exceptional cases. As Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) explains to newly anointed task force member Tamara Ferguson (Chrysta Bell), the first Blue Rose involved a woman who appeared to murder her own doppelgänger, which has obvious relevance to the Dale Cooper / Buckhorn investigation. Tammy astutely describes the double as a tulpa, a term that originated with Tibetan Buddhism—Tibet again!—and is often conceptualized as a mystical emanation or being created from psychic energy. This intriguingly recalls the gold cloud of motes that emerged from the Fireman's head and coalesced into the Laura Palmer orb in Part 8.

Gordon later recounts a puzzling dream to his agents, one in which the Italian actress Monica Bellucci (playing herself) delivers a message and reminds him of the day an incoherent Jeffries briefly appeared at the Philadelphia FBI office. The accusing exclamation Jeffies directed at Dale Cooper (“Who do you think that is there?!”) now seems much more relevant, although like Annie Blackburn’s message to Laura just before her murder, is suggests a muddling of timelines. The real bombshell drops after Diane Evans (Laura Dern) joins the group and learns of the wedding ring recovered from Garland Briggs’ stomach. Diane reveals that she has a half-sister named Janey-E who is married to a Dougie, which matches the ring's inscription and at long last connects the FBI investigation with the show’s events in Las Vegas. At first, this out-of-nowhere revelation seems somewhat contrived—even a little precious, at least for Lynch—but once the implications are permitted to simmer for a bit with Diane’s skulduggery for Mr. C, the Diane / Janey-E link ultimately provides more questions than answers.

Late in the episode, yet another pair of heretofore unseen roadhouse patrons, Megan (Shane Lynch) and Sophie (Emily Stofle), discuss the former woman’s distressing encounter with “Billy,” who seems to be the same man that Audrey Horne previously identified as her missing lover. Megan’s description of Billy’s appearance—blood gushing “like a waterfall” from his nose and mouth—echoes Audrey’s dream, while also suggesting the battered drunk previously glimpsed in the sheriff’s holding cell. (The excessively gravid, mannered way that Sophie asks, “What’s your mom’s name?,” feels purely like an instance of Frost and Lynch needling their viewers.) While this scene seems to tamp down fan speculation that Audrey’s storyline from Parts 12 and 13 is a dream or delusion, it doesn’t really clarify the essential question: What happened to Billy?

This is consistent with Part 14’s overall preoccupation with vivid stories that reveal information but don’t actually provide clear answers: Albert’s summary of the first Blue Rose case; Gordon’s description of his dream and Jeffries' appearance; the “Black Lodge’s Greatest Hits” film that the Fireman shows Andy; and Freddie’s eager account of his magic glove’s origin. (Bobby’s reference to the “tall tales” that he and his father once shared at Jack Rabbit’s Palace also alludes to this theme.) These stories expand The Return’s universe, flesh out existing mysteries, and establish connections between the show’s numerous subplots, but they don’t explain anything.

Freddie’s tale is emblematic of the storytelling approach that Frost and Lynch favor in this episode—and throughout the new series, for that matter. While the green glove anecdote carries additional meaning for the viewer, it’s just an amazing story to James. Its value is not primarily derived from the answers it reveals, but from the emotions it evokes; partly due to the extraordinary nature of the events Freddie describes and partly due to the colloquial, enthusiastic way that Freddie describes them. The uncharacteristic clarity of the Fireman’s instructions, at least as Freddie understood them, is no accident. It’s a case study in the limitations of lucid storytelling. While Freddie’s path was laid out with precision, his destination and what it all means remain obscure. Echoing the way that Gordon unabashedly drank up his “friend’s” ostentatiously sensual exit from his room in Part 11, this episode urges the viewer to follow James' example, to savor the experience of a good story rather than demanding immediate, straightforward answers (which may not be forthcoming anyway).

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Supernatural surrealism notwithstanding, this episode’s most random moment of Lynchian oddness is surely Special Agent Headley (Jay R. Ferguson) inexplicably losing his shit and pounding his fist on his desk: “Wilson, how many times have I told you? This is what we do in the FBI!” Speaking of which, wouldn’t the FBI’s search for Dougie Jones have been almost immediately resolved if Gordon had just given the Las Vegas office Janey-E’s name as well?
   
• Monica Bellucci’s dream message to Gordon Cole—“We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream”—is a line that Lynch purportedly quoted when introducing screenings of Inland Empire. The phrase is a stylized version of the Mundaka Upanishad 1:1:7, as rather freely translated by Thomas Egenes and Kumuda Reddy in Eternal Stories from the Upanishads. The original, as translated in Max Müller’s seminal 1897 first volume of Sacred Books of the East:

As the spider sends forth and draws in its thread, as plants grow on the earth, as from every man hairs spring forth on the head and the body, thus does everything arise here from the Indestructible.

• Consistent with the Arthurian allusions that have previously cropped up in The Return, Andy has some parallels to the legendary hero Percival, a Knight of the Round Table who first appears in Chreiten de Troyes’ 12th century French romance Conte du Graal. The character also shows up in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Wolframm von Eschenbach’s Pazival, the latter of which was adapted into Richard Wagner’s celebrated 19th century opera. The perception of Andy as naïve and dim-witted yet virtuous mirror’s Percival’s persona as it is typically portrayed. Shielded from the evils of the world by his mother, a young Percival one day sees three of Arthur’s knights and immediately resolves to join their ranks. His mother dresses him as a fool so that he will be rebuffed at Camelot, but to the amazement of the court, Percival slays a malevolent red knight and earns his place at the Round Table. (This echoes Andy’s shooting of Jacques Renault in the original series.)
  
  Late in von Eschenbach’s version, Percival meets holy man in the wilderness and learns from him the meaning of the Grail mystery, which has obvious similarities with Andy’s visit to the White Lodge in Part 14. The most widely-known story involving the knight, however, is that of the Fisher King, a magically wounded monarch whose realm lies in ruin. Percival is initially unable to lift the king’s curse because he does not understand the riddles hidden in a series of objects, which points to Twin Peaks’ long-running interest in codes, clues, and obscure meanings. The Fisher King tale foreshadows Andy’s potential role in returning Dale Cooper to his old self. Notably, similar Arthurian motifs are central to Terry Gilliam’s 1991 feature The Fisher King, which also centers on a man whose mind needs healing. Gilliam’s film is deliberately ambiguous as to which of its two lead characters is the metaphorical king and which is the knight, although it is Robin Williams’ homeless, traumatized Parry (Parcival?) who suffers visions of a marauding Red Knight.
   
• Sightings: Monica Bellucci is best known for portraying Bond girl Lucia in the 007 picture Spectre, Persephone in the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix series, and Alex in Gaspar Noé’s arthouse provocation Irreversible. Shane Lynch, who plays roadhouse patron Megan (daughter of Tina) is best known for her guest appearances on the 90210 revival and for Jason Reitman’s notoriously insufferable film Men, Women & Children. Megan’s friend, Sophie, is portrayed by David Lynch’s wife Emily Stofle, who also appeared in Inland Empire and alongside Marion Cotillard in the director’s short film Lady Blue Shanghai.