‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 5 Looks At The Dazzling Decay Of America

Upon the conclusion of Part 5 of Twin Peaks: The Return, my eminently perspicacious editor, Meghan O’Keefe, observed to me that David Lynch “has put together one of the most honest portraits of the hidden decay of America.” Hidden decay is Lynch’s stock-in-trade, and while his earlier work plunged head first into the rot, there’s been something bracingly raw about its appearance in this go-round of Twin Peaks.

Part 5 expanded the potentially global implications of Evil Cooper’s presence in our world, linking Buckhorn, Las Vegas, and even the Pentagon and Argentina together. The show is getting bigger and bigger.

I want to examine something smaller: a few scenes that illustrate this “hidden decay.” They manage to do what Lynch loves to do, namely, give us tenderness and darkness in the same breath.

We return to the Double-R Diner for the first time in more than 25 years. Norma Jennings (a warmly radiant Peggy Lipton) is still running the place. Shelly (Madchen Amick) is still behind the counter. Lynch uses Peggy’s point-of-view shot to introduce Shelly’s daughter, Becky (Amanda Seyfried) in extra-long shot. Lynch keeps the sound perspective intact, making Shelly and Becky’s conversation barely audible. Lynch loves playing with sound this way, forcing the viewer to strain to hear those who are too far away. It generates ambience and texture that may not otherwise be there.

What we can discern is that Becky needs money to cover for her boyfriend, Steven (Caleb Landry Jones). Steven was mentioned at the end of Part 2, when Shelly complained about him to her friends. When the camera cuts closer to look out the window as Becky leaves the diner, we see that Steven is the same man from an earlier scene with none other than Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger), ex-boyfriend to Donna Hayward and Nadine Hurley. It turns out that Mike is some kind of middle manager who tells Steven that he wrote a terrible resume.

Becky gets into Steven’s hot rod and the scene takes on an eerie parallel, one that Shelly alludes to when Norma chastises her for enabling Becky’s behavior. “We both know that tune, don’t we?” Shelly sighs. Indeed, the scene carries echoes of Shelly hopping into Bobby Briggs’s car outside the Double-R 25 years earlier, the morning Laura Palmer died.

There are some serious differences, however. Yes, Shelly was having an affair with Bobby, who was secretly involved in running drugs from Canada, but Lynch and his team gave the affair the soap opera sheen with which so much of Twin Peaks’s subplots were imbued. Becky and Steven are not Shelly and Bobby, and that’s scary.

Steven is a burnout because he’s a heroin addict. Becky is hooked on the stuff, too. There’s nothing alluring about their lives. Jones carries with him none of the elegant beauty or swagger that Dana Ashbrook brough to Bobby. He is just a junkie barely hanging on. Lynch depicts their desperation with a blunt frankness that doesn’t disguise the predicament they are both in, and can’t help but draw parallels to the real-life opioid epidemic currently wrecking whole swaths of rural America.

It is deeply, intensely sad. There is only one way this ends: In pain. Lynch contrasts Becky and Steven’s relationship by giving us brief notes of tenderness between Becky and Shelly. Whether it’s sincere tones of shame in her voice when she asks for money, or the way Shelly gently strokes Becky’s hair, it feels starkly apparent that Becky is trapped in Steven’s cycle of misery.

Lynch turns the tables on us to show us why Becky would be with Steven. Lynch enjoys distantiation. Long shots, long scenes, and raw sound serve to disorient the viewer. When he uses close-ups, they carry with them greater emotional power. And so it is with Becky, when Steven charms her into laughing at a dumb pun, and the smack hits, and The Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” comes on the radio. Lynch cuts to an overhead close-up of Becky looking up and out of Steven’s convertible, the wind blowing across her beatified visage. She grins from ear to ear.

The shot is inherently beautiful, but it is also deeply unsettling. We haven’t seen many close-ups in these five episodes yet, and certainly no close-up quite like this. Lynch holds the shot for 50 seconds, so that we can drink in Becky’s glazed-over, smacked-out euphoria. He overexposes the shot, making it resemble some close-ups from Inland Empire. There is such darkness in that beauty.

That darkness expands ten-fold, because it carries with it the same beauty of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lynch captures the same measure of euphoric grace in Laura when she ascends to the White Lodge. But of course the transcendence of that moment is buoyed by the gruesome, savage murder that got her to the Red Room in the first place. We are left to wonder if Becky is destined for a similar fate.

Echoes upon echoes, circles meeting themselves, the future becoming past. Lynch has made us feel the weight of the passage of time in Twin Peaks, but he is also making a strong case that perhaps what has already happened is happening again. Becky may be Twin Peaks’ next victim, even if she never meets BOB.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

Stream Twin Peaks (2017), Part 5 on Showtime