TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE MOVIE
TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE SERIAL
TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE SERIES

This isn’t so different from the original’s repeated pillow shot-esque cuts to, i.e., B-roll of a waterfall held for a long, dronily hypnotic length, but this is right up top while you wait for the familiar music to kick in. A helicopter shot of the forest is arrested, frame-left, by an intense halo of sun trying to punch through fog, a view held for, by television standards, a dangerously long time no narrative info is being conveyed, it’s just an image you’re invited to contemplate. Lynch almost immediately severs aesthetic continuity with the 35mm-originated original series: the theme is back, but it’s not deployed immediately as the credits start. (I wish interviewers would stop their inevitably futile attempts to get Lynch to say something about his Meaning or Creative Process and simply lob tech queries at him in his own obdurate, camera/medium-specific way, I suspect Lynch is as technologically conversant as David Fincher.

TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE SERIES

The series is 18 hours long, working from a script that was 400 pages long doing the standard “1 page = 1 minute” math suggested long non-verbal stretches, which is precisely the case even as episodes three/four get, in relative terms, more “accessible.” Having to answer to no one, Lynch drags TV away from dialogue and into gallery-land: each room and space has been exquisitely color-graded, each signature ominous room tone/bass rumble personally sound-designed by Lynch himself. Confounding doesn’t necessarily mean patience-testing or boring, a conflation made even in many sympathetic reviews: it’s a different kind of pleasure - scanning the frame, appreciating the tonalities, listening closely - than TV viewers have been trained to accept or process.

TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE SERIAL

Putatively ambitious Quality TV still exists within the fairly narrow matrix of possibilities offered by serial narrative television, which leaves no room for formally abstract/non-narrative modes of pleasure. The first two episodes (spliced together into one two-hour unit for broadcast) are, from the get-go, emotionally severe and narratively oblique, akin to if Berlin Alexanderplatz had put its fever-dream epilogue right up front there’s a strong sense that Lynch is weeding out the weaklings, but he’s not just being capriciously difficult.

TWIN PEAKS SEASON 4 EPISODE MOVIE

In interviews, Lynch has said that he thinks of this new “season” as an 18-hour movie “ shown not in a big theater, but it’s shown as cinema on television.” Having slammed through four episodes in one night, I’d take him at his word: the tonal transition he accomplishes in that time is amplified when absorbed as one unit, and I suspect the final unveiled product will benefit from being viewed in as close to one single dose as practicality and comfort permits. (Spoilers follow.) It’s not surprising that David Lynch has a lot to get out of his artistic system after, effectively, 11 years of dormancy on the moving-image front. David Lynch, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return

Twin peaks season 4 episode