TWIN PEAKS: THE LIMITED EVENT SERIES

Universal Pictures, £34.99 (Bluray), (£24.99 DVD)

When the second season of Twin Peaks ended in 1991 with a disturbing cliff-hanger and the words “How’s Annie?” viewers, myself included, could not have suspected that we’d wait 25 years to see a follow-up to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s game-changing TV series. Declining ratings had done for the show; it was obvious that a third season was never going to materialise and fans had to content themselves with Lynch’s pitch-black prequel Fire Walk with Me and then… nothing. To everyone’s surprise, Twin Peaks returned in 2017 on the US Showtime network. I hadn’t taken the dead Laura Palmer’s “I’ll see you again in 25 years” as anything more than another Lynchian tease: but, give or take a year of network wrangling, she wasn’t wrong.

Twin Peaks: The Return (or the ‘Limited Event Series’ as it’s billed for this release) may or may not have been what people were expecting – confounding expectations was Twin Peaks’s MO – but, like the original (while being quite unlike the original), the new Peaks is a captivating, funny and disturbing experience. It brings back most of the characters from the original series, and allows us to piece together (to a certain extent) what’s happened to them in the intervening quarter of a century, but it does so in ways that some viewers may find frustrating; it introduces so many new characters (sometimes for single scenes) that it’s hard to keep up; it picks up long-abandoned plot threads and interweaves them with dizzying new ones; it leans heavily at times on Angelo Badalamenti’s brilliant score, but opts for an unsettlingly musicfree approach for long stretches; it continues, and indeed doubles down on, the disturbing, dreamlike doublings and oneiric patternings to be found in all Lynch’s work; it seems at times to be in dialogue with his earlier films – from Eraserhead to Inland Empire – acting as a kind of 18-hour summation of his entire career. Unlike the more collaborative original, this is Lynch uncut, full of temporal dislocations, surreal non sequiturs and brutal violence alongside the warmth and humour.

One thing the new series doesn’t do is nostalgia; there are no cosy reunions (although there is clearly considerable warmth between director and cast), and no attempts to pick up where we left off; the passage of time is crucial, impossible to ignore and central to the story Lynch and Frost want to tell. Geographically too, the show opens out to a surprising, disorienting extent; we are no longer happily/uneasily trapped in the familiar locations and spooky woods of one small town in the Pacific Northwest, but transported back and forth from New York City to New Mexico, from Las Vegas to South Dakota, as the ramifications of some primal cosmic evil seem to spread across the vastness of America; empty landscapes, endless roads and cheap motels familiar from other films (not just Lynch’s) become waypoints on a nightmare road trip or nodes of power on an occult map we can’t quite decipher.

I realise I’ve said nothing about what actually happens over this sprawling movie in 18 parts, and that’s because – oddly perhaps in a piece that eschews narrative convention to such a startling degree – spoilers really would ruin the experience. Television and films, even at their best, rely on readily available tropes and familiar structures of feeling, and Twin Peaks simply doesn’t. Best to discover it for yourself. But be warned: for a while, at least, everything else you watch will seem oddly shallow, predictable and lacking both ‘the glow’ and the deep, deep darkness to be found in this bizarrely compelling masterpiece.

Extras include a five-and-a-half-hour marathon following Lynch at work. This, although narrated by a gnomic Werner Herzog soundalike (an extended joke? I’m not sure) is actually riveting. Watching the director at work, it’s clear how heavily invested he is in Twin Peaks, and it’s an eye-opener to see what a hands-on, passionate and practical man Lynch is: of course, while he is very clear about how things should be done, he’s pretty reticent about why.