‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 12: On The Ridiculous, Sublime, and Inscrutable Nature of Duration in ‘Twin Peaks’

Time is a rubber band to David Lynch. He stretches it, expands it past the point of sustainability, until it snaps back in sudden, violent recoil. His unique ability to play with duration at both extremes is what drives so much of the unsettling, discomforting nature of his art.
Lynch doesn’t just stretch and shrink scenes for horror, though. He can also use it for laughs, as he did with Wally Brando back in “Part 4” of Twin Peaks: The Return. He will also use duration to perplex, confound, and obfuscate. He even expands time to play in a more contemplative, wistful register. He does all three of these things at various points in “Part 12.” I want to try and untangle how, and why, he employs expanded time to elicit all three of these emotional reactions.
“Part 12” is structurally analogous to many of the earlier episodes in the series, but that structure feels heightened here. The episode contains approximately 51 ½ minutes of narrative screen time. Nearly half of that time is taken up by only three scenes. Meanwhile, Lynch’s trope of using extremely brief, punctuational scenes is pushed to the extreme. Nine of the episode’s 15 scenes last three minutes or less, and four of them last for less than 40 seconds! The punctuations, in other words, are more forceful when juxtaposed with the more extended sequences.

The first such extended passage marks the mournful tone Lynch can strike. Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) is visited in his office by Frank Truman (Robert Forster), who came to deliver the news that Ben’s grandson, Richard (Eamon Farren) indeed killed the boy in the street in “Part 6,” and then tried to murder Miriam (Sarah Jean Long) in “Part 10.” Ben then shares the news of Cooper’s old key arriving at the Great Northern, and upon Truman’s departure, asks for Beverly (Ashley Judd) to ensure that Miriam’s expenses will be covered.
The whole scene clocks in at seven minutes and fourteen seconds. There are long pauses between lines, reaction shots of still faces, pleasantries exchanged, fraught with deeper meaning. Lynch uses these same tools to invoke dread at various points across his oeuvre; here, those silences are filled with a gentler edge, the past casting its heavy, sad spell on those trying to live in the present.
How does Lynch manage to evoke pathos, rather than horror? For one, the performances of Forster and Beymer do much of the heavy lifting. They carry the burdens of both Frank and Ben in the subtle ways their faces communicate without words. Beymer moves back in his chair, and then forward, as he contemplates the sins not only of his grandson, but also of himself, and how that could have been passed on. Their connection over the key, and Ben’s touching gesture to offer it as a memento for Frank’s sick brother, Harry, reminds us of the history Harry holds with him. Once again in the series, an absent character conjures up deep feeling in those who care for them.
Lynch plays the scene without any non-diagetic sound. We are conditioned to hear Angelo Badalamenti music, or a sickening drone, or crackling electricity in the air, when we watch a Lynch scene. The dead silence apart from voices focuses our attention.

The coup-de-grâce comes when Richard remembers his father buying and painting a bicycle for him. It’s a simple memory, but Beymer and Lynch imbue the moment with a rich tenderness of loss, knowing that Richard never had a father who could make such a gesture the way Ben’s father did to him. Even Beverly sheds a tear.
If Lynch had compressed this scene by even a couple of minutes, it wouldn’t carry the same power. We need those silences, those still, composed reaction shots of Ben’s steady movements, in order to let this eulogy truly sink in. Ben is mourning the death of his family, in spirit if not in body.
People can sometimes accuse Lynch of self-seriousness, of pretentiousness, or tedium. Anyone paying attention knows just how funny he can be. So it is when Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) goes to Gordon Cole’s (Lynch) hotel room to find him wining and wooing a becoming young French woman. Albert asks Gordon to send the young woman downstairs so that they might speak in private. A normal TV show would dispense with the woman in about 10 seconds; it takes more than 2 ½ minutes for Gordon to get rid of her.

Why, you may ask? She proceeds to engage in a full come-hither pantomime that could have been ripped from an early 1960s French sex farce. She grins while she throws on her sweater. She grins while she slips on and flashes her pumps. She grins while she touches up her lipstick. She hasn’t left the sofa yet. She couldn’t possibly get up until she takes a long draught of that fine Bordeaux Gordon has poured, could she? She straightens her skirt, walks to the door, leans against the jamb, gives Gordon the most tender of finger kisses, strikes one final pose, and waves goodbye.
This whole scene is absolutely hysterical, not only because of the delightfully exaggerated, exquisitely choreographed performance of actress Bérénice Marlohe, but because Lynch has the audacity to let the thing play out in real time. Once again, there’s no non-diagetic sound; we only get to luxuriate in the awkward silence of this woman doing yet another unnecessary thing before she sashays out the door. Ferrer’s reaction shots are the Kuleshov experiment brought to life: The same blank expression, reading as different emotional reactions based on whatever shots precede and succeed it. He can barely contain his annoyance.
The scene’s comedy—and its complexity—don’t end there. Cole relates both a bad joke and a mundane fact to Albert, but allows for each of their silent reaction shots to fill the space around the words. Gordon wants to get back to his date, and Albert…well, Albert seems to be holding some kind of emotions back. These are two old friends, neck-deep in something they still don’t understand, while they are attempting to contain a potential Judas in Diane (Laura Dern). Those long, epic silences convey more concern for each other than words ever could. That concern seems to get triggered when Albert won’t bite on Gordon’s “I’ll pretend not to hear you and give you a malaprop response” gag. “Albert, sometimes I really worry about you,” he says. Because of those silences, we believe him.

Lynch uses silence before a conversation to withhold meaning, too. We have waited nearly 12 episodes to finally see Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) again, and when we do, she does not get a grand entrance the way that Bobby Briggs did. We hard cut from a Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) rant to a panning shot of Audrey standing in a room, staring forward. We come to discover that she’s staring at her husband, Charlie (Clark Middleton). She demands to know why Charlie refuses to help find her lover, Billy, who has gone missing. We glean from their conversation that Charlie married Audrey to help her, that Billy was the man whose truck was stolen by Richard and used to kill the boy in “Part 6,” and that something awful may have happened to him.
That’s all we know. Over the course of the 10-minute, 41-second scene, the only tangible emotions we can grab ahold of his Audrey’s perplexing anger at her husband, and is equally perplexing calm toward her. The scene is bookended by Audrey and Charlie merely staring at each other. In between, Audrey attempts to emasculate Charlie, while Charlie hides behind his work. They talk in circles, bringing up names and events whose significance we can only begin to guess. When Charlie tells Audrey that Billy didn’t press charges when his truck was stolen, she seems to rethink her position.
When Charlie discovers something about Billy over the phone, it takes him as long to get off the phone as it does for Gordon’s date to get out of the hotel room. Only this time, it isn’t funny. Audrey becomes as confused as the audience about what has transpired, because Charlie won’t tell her what he’s found out. The silence becomes inscrutable, all the more so because we have no music or sound cues to guide our emotional response.

If Lynch trimmed the fat and punched up the exposition, would the scene be so simulataneously alluring and unsettling? I would think not. That Lynch can accomplish all of this with only four setups and hardly any in-shot movement speaks volumes to the precise focus he can establish by keeping us sitting in the scene for such a long time.
Time is David Lynch’s greatest weapon. He considers it narratively, stylistically, structurally, and thematically, until all four combine to give us the three scenes that we’ve examined here. Twin Peaks: The Return is his valedictory statement, and he is giving us every last second to contemplate, mourn, laugh, and scratch our chins at it.

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

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime