‘Twin Peaks’ Part 8 is David Lynch at His Most Abrasively Avant-Garde Best

David Lynch is an experimental filmmaker. That sentence is obvious to the point of banality. Anyone who has seen Eraserhead knows that Lynch traffics in the avant-garde, and his particular brand of surrealist horror found in his post-Twin Peaks feature films is no less brazen.
So we find Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return leaning into those experimental impulses without any concern for immediate narrative satisfaction. But unlike earlier parts who paid lip service to the likes of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s aesthetic choices are more reminiscent of his more recent short films, and even the work of others.
First, Lynch’s representation of the Trinity test draws heavily, at least in its first portion, upon his own short, Industrial Soundscape (2007). Lynch animates the rhythms of one of his trademark sound designs, involving low drones and rhythmic, metallic pounding. The sounds are set against a black-and-white, animated wasteland that could be found on the moon or in the New Mexico desert on that fateful July morning in 1945.

It’s no accident that Lynch retained the services of French visual effects house BUF to create the computer generated imagery in Twin Peaks: The Return. Their style is very much in keeping with Lynch’s own, openly flaunting realism in favor of graphics found on CD-ROMs in the 1990s. While such effects in Parts 1 through 3 looked patently ridiculous—and deliberately so—Lynch and BUF take the framework of Industrial Soundscape and make a nuclear explosion look more haunting than it perhaps has ever looked.

Upon entry into the mushroom cloud itself, Lynch renders the primordial fire wrought by the forced separation of protons and electrons with rapid-fire editing and swirling, violent colors. I was immediately reminded of the optically printed films Stan Brakhage made in the 1990s with the assistance of Sam Bush. Here is an excerpt from one of those films, Black Ice (1994).

Brakhage and Bush overlay multiple images of varying colors and designs to create a lush, hallucinatory visual field that appears to constantly push further and further inward. It’s one of my favorite movies. Then again, I’m weird.
Robert Oppenheimer claimed that he thought of a passage from Bhagavad Gita upon Trinity’s explosion: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” In order to find a visual language that could represent such awesome and terrifying power, it makes sense to overload one’s senses with a dizzying array of color and movement.
Of course, Lynch doesn’t stop with just nods to Brakhage and Bush. Fast-moving flecks of white darting across a black field recalls early video art in the 1970s and ’80s, not to mention Pong. The very fabric of reality is ripped away in a nuclear explosion. So too our sense of raw visual material, boiled down to its very basic elements of light and dark.
Lynch plumbs his own history once again for the strange insect that hatches and proceeds to crawl across the New Mexico desert, to eventually fly into a house and slide into the mouth of a sleeping teenage girl. Bug Crawls (2007) only carries with it the basic sketch of those narrative events, but even so, it demonstrates that Lynch continues to find inspiration in the most abstract corners of his oeuvre.

Now, I will admit that this final example bears only a tangential relationship with the scene in question. But my god, what a scene! We are taken to the same room where the Giant (Carel Struycken) and Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) discuss “4-3-0,” “Richard and Linda,” and “two birds, one stone.” Although this time, the Giant makes his way into a classic movie palace and watches the Trinity explosion and its aftermath on a movie screen. This leads to Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) taking golden energy from the head of the floating Giant and shaping it into a golden ball with the photo of Laura Palmer contained within, released via a musical horn into the screen, and back to Washington state. The mind boggles at the implication.
Lynch loves movies, and loves movie history. Max Von’s bar, Diane’s preferred watering hole, is a reference to Erich Von Stroheim’s character in Sunset Boulevard. So too his own character in the show, Gordon Cole. Lynch loves movie theaters and the theatrical experience, but of course, upon commission by the Cannes Film Festival to make a short film about movie theaters, he made this little horror gem, Absurda (2007).

There’s nothing overtly thematic to connect Absurda with the Giant and Señorita Dido’s machinations in that movie palace, but it does share the porous boundary between the nominal action of the scene and the events depicted on the screen within. The Giant witnesses events that we had just seen ourselves, and then the golden ball with Laura’s photo crosses the boundary into the screen, much like the teenagers watching the dance, and murder, that they themselves are about to participate in.
I and many others have remarked that Twin Peaks: The Return has been, in many ways, Lynch reckoning not only with the legacy of Twin Peaks, but also his legacy as a whole. Part 8 veered into the most intensely avant-garde corners of that legacy. What these spirits wrought from Trinity may imply for Cooper, his doppelganger, the Black Lodge, and possibly even for Laura Palmer, remains to be seen. What is certain is that Lynch will not leave any aesthetic stone unturned.

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

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime