https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/arts/television/twin-peaks-season-3-episode-8-recap.html‘Twin Peaks’ Season 3, Episode 8: White Light White Heat
Twin Peaks
By NOEL MURRAY JUNE 26, 2017
Photo
From left, Carel Struycken and Joy Nash in “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Credit Suzanne Tenner/Showtime
Season 3, Episode 8
There’s nothing to point to in the history of television that helps describe exactly what this episode attempts. Not even the jarring nightmare sequences from the original series were anything like this hour, which jumps around in time and space in ways that at times seem almost like free association.
An extended stretch of this week’s episode takes place in the wake of a 1945 atomic bomb test in White Sands, N.M., and thrusts the audience deep into the physical, emotional and metaphorical space of a mushroom cloud.
Photo
A screenshot from Episode 8 of “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Credit Showtime
As the smoke billows and the frame fills with one unexplained abstraction after another, classic movie buffs might spot some visual echoes of the mesmerizing, disorienting “Star Gate” sequences from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Or fans of more modern cinema might think of Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” which similarly uses dissonant sound design and “What the hell am I looking at?” imagery to present the world from the perspective of an alien.
The "Star Gate" sequence from "2001: A Space Odyssey" Video by ziggyvs
The opening sequence of "Under the Skin" Video by miontorus
Mostly though, this episode is just director David Lynch — one of cinema’s true adventurers — emptying out his subconscious, unabated.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
At the start of the hour, before the journey into the past, I jotted down in my notes that the shot of stark headlights on a pitch-dark American roadway in the middle of nowhere was a classic Lynch image, at once familiar and terrifying. But that was a good 10 minutes before Lynch went full “Eraserhead,” transporting us to an otherworldly dimension wherein a humanoid figure belches out a viscous stream of ominous ovoid shapes.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
I’ll try as best as I can to describe what I think literally happens in this week’s episode. There are, essentially, five segments:
1. After being set free from a Black Hills jail, the Bob-possessed evil Dale Cooper doppelgänger known as “Mr. C.” tries to get his confederate Ray to pass along some information that he needs. Instead, Ray shoots him, in a seemingly vacant wilderness. Almost as soon as Mr. C. falls to the ground, a gaggle of soot-covered shadow-men — like the ones we’ve seen haunting the police station in Buckhorn, S.D. — surround the evil Cooper and revive him by touching his body all over and smearing themselves with his blood. The shooter peels off in the car, screaming.
2. Nine Inch Nails reunites for a gig at the Twin Peaks roadhouse, where they play “She’s Gone Away” for about five minutes.
3. In the flashback to White Sands, we see the explosion, and during the multiple surreal scenes that follow, we see what appears to be the face of Bob escaping from that aforementioned humanoid creature (which may dwell within the atomic blast itself). We also see the shadow-men scurrying around a nearby gas station.
Looking for Something to Watch Tonight?
There are more than 1000 suggestions for what to stream over on Watching, The New York Times’s TV and movie recommendation site. »
4. In another “Twin Peaks” netherworld, a woman listens to distorted passages of old-timey jazz on a loop until an alarming sound summons the Lodge’s Giant, who then ambles into a screening room to watch the White Sands test. When he gets to the part with the face of evil, he pauses the film and floats up to the ceiling, where a golden glow begins emanating from his head. The woman wanders in and watches that glow form into a ball, which contains the face of Laura Palmer. She kisses it and sends in through a tube, before it drifts to Earth.
Photo
Robert Broski in “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Credit Suzanne Tenner/Showtime
5. In the longest and most densely packed sequence, set in 1956, one of the shadow-men from White Sands — listed in the credits as the “Woodsman” — terrorizes a small town in the New Mexico desert, first by scaring passing motorists, asking, “Got a light?” in a gruff, inhuman voice. He then makes his way to a local radio station, where he crushes the heads of a receptionist and a D.J. with his bare hands and then delivers a repetitive monologue into an open microphone that begins, “This is the water, and this is the well.” Meanwhile, a sweet-looking teenage couple finishes up a date with a pleasant walk home, during which they awkwardly confess their feelings for each other and share a chaste kiss. When the girl crawls into bed, a strange insect creature — which we previously saw hatch from an egg that looked like one of the ovoids vomited up by the mushroom cloud — crawls into her mouth. And the closing credits roll.
Maybe I’ve been too immersed in all things Lynch over the past several months, but I didn’t think that any of the above was as opaque as it seemed. If I had to interpret what it means, I’d say that we just witnessed something like the origin story for the modern saga of good versus evil that “Twin Peaks” has been telling since 1990.
I think we saw mankind setting loose forces beyond its control with the introduction of potentially civilization-destroying weapons in 1945. That test blast may have been what brought Bob into the world, and thus re-engaged our celestial overseers. But as is often the case with the way the universe works in “Twin Peaks,” nothing happened instantaneously. The darker elements took root gradually, while the warriors meant to combat them — like the spirit of Laura Palmer, or the various non-malevolent forms of Agent Dale Cooper — slipped into the world in ways both clumsy and imprecise.
This is one of the most provocative ideas from the original series that these new episodes have been carrying forward: this sense that even the most well-intentioned humans are incapable of interpreting and acting on the messages coming from the gods, who neither think nor communicate as we do. That’s why the dark side keeps winning out — except on rare occasions when someone as completely unselfconscious as “Dougie Jones” just blindly follows the directions from above, winning slot-machine jackpots and brilliantly analyzing insurance documents along the way.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
It’s because of this disconnect between what the immortals are saying and how the humans are responding that it seems inadequate to reduce this hour to a simple explanation. Some things may make more literal sense before the series is over. (For example: Was the bug that crawled into the teenage girl’s mouth the Bob egg, or the Laura egg?) But for the most part, Lynch would probably rather we not engage with this episode with our conscious, puzzle-solving mind. It’s better to take it in as an experience: to be awed by the beauty of the pictures and stunned by the inventiveness and passion with which Lynch distorts and destroys them.
Considered that way — as something to see and hear, and to react to on a primal level — this hour was phenomenal. “Twin Peaks” is off next Sunday, which is a shame in a way, because this episode probably didn’t do a lot to keep people invested in the show’s various mystery plots for the next two weeks. But for those who are enjoying being fully immersed in Lynch’s head space, this week was a wonder. Just think: At any given time in the days ahead, we could flip past Showtime and this episode could be airing. That’s like a miracle.
Extra Doughnuts:
• Beyond Nine Inch Nails (who performed easily the most violent song yet among this season’s typically more dreamy roadhouse numbers), this episode features two key pieces of music: Krzysztof Penderecki’s elegiac “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” and the Platters’ “My Prayer.” The latter is, in its own way, a solemn remembrance of human loss. (And here’s an odd coincidence: One of the original and longest-running vocalists in the Platters is named ... David Lynch.)
• If you were excited by the avant-garde visions of this week’s “Twin Peaks” and want more experiences like it, there’s a whole world of experimental cinema out there to explore, from underground pioneers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage to more modern practitioners like Martin Arnold and Janie Geiser. I recommend trying Peter Tscherkassky, whose films “Outer Space” and “Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine” turn found footage into an assault on the senses.
"Outer Space" Video by noisewarfare
Continue reading the main story
We’re interested in your feedback on this page. Tell us what you think.
Twin Peaks
Weekly recaps of the macabre Showtime melodrama.
