“Existentialism 101”: The Circular Stasis of ‘Twin Peaks’ Part 13

“I’m not sure who I am, but I’m not me.”
Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) utters these words in a fit of panic to her eerily calm husband, Charlie (Clark Middleton), in Part 13 of Twin Peaks: The Return. It’s a feeling that could describe many of the characters featured in the hour. While its first half was devoted to the nominal primary narratives, the second took a long, hard look at the show’s legacy characters, to see how much time has changed them, and how they also seem to be trapped in the same loop, forever. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus might have a few things to say about Big Ed Hurley at the end of the day.

I’ve written previously in this column about the effects of time, both in how we experience it and how the characters experience it on the show. It’s remarkable to see the change that has taken place in characters like Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), and Nadine Hurley (Wendy Robie), while so little has changed in others. David Lynch and Mark Frost see the town of Twin Peaks as practically eternal, existing in the same place while the sands constantly shift under its feet.
That was the primary thrust of the first series, as well. High school sweethearts grow up, marry other people, but still love each other; teenagers embody archetypes that bend and twist but never break; the past intermingles freely with the present, sometimes violently so. In that framework, characters constantly had to question their identities. One, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), came to discover that he potentially wasn’t himself at all when he raped and murdered his own daughter—but then again, perhaps he was more that man than he could ever truly admit.
We’re seeing some of these patterns re-emerge in Twin Peaks: The Return. While Lynch and Frost have interrogated those patterns in earlier episodes, “Part 13” concentrated a series of them in its concluding 20 minutes that demonstrated some of the sweet warmth of the earlier series, while also lamenting the sadness of the trap of identity in which these people find themselves.

Bobby is a cop, and has found himself as a man. Yet, here he is at the Double-R, ordering “the usual” and on the lookout for Shelly (Mädchen Amick). Shelly isn’t there—is she with Red, her new bad boy flame that could stand in for what Bobby was all those years ago? Is this new, more mature Bobby the real Bobby, or is he just a placeholder?
Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) finally makes his debut, and we find him in a familiar place next to Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) in a Double-R booth. Only this time, it’s strictly platonic—or so it seems. Norma is once again with somebody else, but she and Ed keep locking eyes, as if they are stuck in a star-crossed loop forever. Is it future, or is it past?
Even Norma, now the successful owner of a chain of Double-R restaurants, seems eternally drawn to be where she is. It wasn’t often that we ever saw Norma step outside of the Double-R. When her new beau/business partner, Walter (Grant Goodeve), tells her that she needs to cut corners to turn a profit on her pies, she balks. The allure of late capitalism is being dangled in front of her face, and while it’s easy to see the positives of resisting it, one can’t help but also wonder if Norma is trapped in her own loop, making the same incredible pies for the same people for eternity.
Nadine is also a successful businesswoman now, having taken her silent drape runner idea and built a bustling store out of it. Dr. Jacoby has shed all pretense of his life as a psychiatrist in favor of becoming an isolated, Alex Jones-style conspiracy vlogger. Yet, when they cross paths, Jacoby is taken to remembering a moment in a grocery store when Nadine bent down to pick up a dropped potato. It is an incidental memory, but it carries with it the reminder of how far these two have come, and not always for the better. Jacoby implores his viewers to shovel themselves “out of the shit,” which may be a salve for Nadine, but it also serves to demonstrate how nobody has been able to really do that in the 25 years since Laura Palmer died.

Laura’s mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), is literally stuck in her own loop. Her identity has been utterly subsumed to the grief and trauma of violently losing her daughter and husband in the span of a couple weeks. She drinks the same booze and smokes the same cigarettes, watching the bottles empty and the ashtrays overflow. Lynch even emphasizes this eternal loop by playing the same few seconds of an old boxing match over and over again on Sarah’s television.
Audrey is perhaps the most complex one of all in this collection, simply for the way that Lynch has chosen to approach her. We know that she survived a bombing of the town bank back when she was a teenager; we’re fairly certain that Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger (Kyle MacLachlan) raped her when she was in a coma afterward, which led to the birth of Richard Horne (Eamon Farren). In other words, she has survived the most extraordinary of traumas. She is now married to a man out of convenience, is having an affair with another, and is shaken to the core by her lover’s disappearance and the dream she had about it.

These things upset her so deeply that her identity seems to be splintering. Charlie won’t tell her what Tina told him about Billy (don’t worry, that’s all we know about those characters). She can’t remember that she wants to go to the Roadhouse. Charlie appears to be either gaslighting her, or at the very least obfuscating the truth. “Are you going to stop playing games, or am I going to have to end your story, too?” he threatens. What could that possibly mean? How does Audrey define who she is? What story does she tell about herself?
The episode’s show-stopper is none other than James Hurley (James Marshall) at the roadhouse. He’s not hanging out, but on stage performing the song “Just You,” which he wrote and sang with Donna Hayward and Maddie Ferguson way back when. We don’t know what has happened to James, other than that he was in a motorcycle accident. But this moment is chock full of history, as James is inhabiting his past self. It’s so powerful that a young woman, Renee (Jessica Szhor)—who he admired way back in “Part 2”—bursts into tears. The past is the future, and the future is the past.

The cliché is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Lynch is finding new and intense ways of illustrating such a banality. Whether they know it or not, the residents of Twin Peaks are barreling forward through time, re-living the same moments over. They may believe that they have a grasp on their identities, but they are the same people they have always been. They push the rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down again. They don’t know who they are, but they are themselves.

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

Stream Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime