‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ and accepting things suck
In the summer of 2017, during one of the deepest depressive states of my entire life, I began the massive test of patience of diving into David Lynch’s labyrinthine classic TV series, “Twin Peaks.”
There, I found — as has frequently been the case — comfort in the unyielding unpredictability of Laura Palmer’s phantasmagorical life and death and after-death. Over that summer, I found a sense of normalcy in returning home from work and losing myself as Julee Cruise’s “Falling” began playing over the opening credits.
“What the deal with all the horror movies?” someone asked me around that time.
Scary movies have been a frequent companion through most of my teenage years and young adulthood. Whenever life has become too much, it’s been a frequent source of comfort to see how much worse things could be — all from the safety of my own bed.
It’s no mistake that during the pandemic I’ve found myself re-entering Twin Peaks, Washington, after years of putting off the follow-up limited series “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Once again, David Lynch managed to suck me back into a dark forest and spit me out of a light socket (this analogy makes more sense if you’ve watched the show).
The new series is more hellish and unmerciful than the original. Here, evil isn’t merely bubbling beneath the surface of a quaint All-American town. In Twin Peaks (and Las Vegas) in 2017, evil is free — and it’s been thriving.
All eighteen episodes of “TP: The Return” lead ultimately to a slight (and slightly more hopeful) erasure of the series’ main catalyst, the brutal murder of Laura Palmer. The series’ seventeenth episode wraps with its Big Bad BOB defeated and Laura Palmer escorted away from her own murder.
But there’s still one more episode.
In some of the final episodes, we hear of something or someone called “Judy,” which, as it turns out is yet another beacon of evil in the universe. Judy’s still out there. What’s more — Judy has her own version of Laura Palmer. In this universe/timeline, Laura is alive — not well, but alive — and unaware of who she is.
Until the very last few seconds of the series, when Laura, now called “Carrie Page,” realizes either who she is or who she was and/or what happened to her. Or maybe even something worse yet to come.
Laura/Carrie delivers a blood-chilling scream as the screen turns to black.
The End.
The darkness was defeated. But there’s still more darkness.
This ending is polarizing, as you may know. As a mostly casual fan of “Twin Peaks,” I found it satisfying. As me, myself, I also found it satisfying in this exact moment. I found comfort in there being no comfort. In a story about bad things just happening. There’s no happy ending slapped on top. There will be happiness, there will be beauty, but for now, things just suck.
And that’s okay.
Acceptance is something I’m working on both on my own and with my therapist. I’m learning, or trying to learn, to appreciate things for how they are, instead of how I think they should be. “Sometimes things just suck” is a lesson I’ve learned in therapy. I’ve been loathe to accept feeling bad for fear of making things worse, of feeling worse. One thing I’ve learned in therapy is how much not allowing myself to admit things suck makes the suckiness persist.
“If I acknowledge it, it’s a thing,” I’ve told my therapist.
“It’s a thing no matter what. The emotion is there, the thought is there. If you don’t touch it, it just sits,” he’s said.
This week, “TP: The Return” reminded me that I don’t need to find lessons in bad times. They can be there, sure. But taking a note from so many of the horror movies I love, I can, for now, release a breath and be glad I made it another day — even if the darkness is still out there.