There’s a bittersweet feeling that comes when watching Twin Peaks: The Return. Much of that is due to the presence in the series of several actors who died before the 18 episodes aired in 2017, including Miguel Ferrer and Catherine E. Coulson. That bittersweet tendency was magnified even more with Thursday’s news that David Lynch, the project’s co-creator and director, has died at the age of 78. His family announced his death in a post on Facebook.
The news wasn’t necessarily surprising, as Lynch had shared an emphysema diagnosis last year, the result of decades of smoking. But it does answer the question of how Lynch might continue the Twin Peaks saga in the most heartbreaking way possible: he won’t. There will be no encore, at least not on the scale of a feature film or television series. Twin Peaks: The Return wasn’t Lynch’s final creative work as such; since its release, Lynch directed a short film, released a collaborative album with Chrystabell and played director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans.
As many artists age, it’s easy to see them fall into one of two categories. For some, the vagaries of the film industry lead them into unlikely projects that feel ill-considered and ill-fitting, bringing notable careers to an unsatisfying conclusion. (The current season of the podcast You Must Remember This, “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” touches upon this very subject.) For others, there’s a temptation to go big and valedictory, reckoning with themes and images they’ve previously covered in the hopes of making a definitive statement.
David Lynch opted for neither path. Instead, he got weird. There are very few artists about which one can say their final project arguably reshaped how we discuss their entire body of work. When it comes to The Return — and especially its eighth episode, which writer Emily St. James called “more or less Lynch in his purest form” — you have a case of a filmmaker both revisiting their older work and pushing their medium into new and unexpected places.
In that sense, Twin Peaks: The Return is not unlike the final work of one of Lynch’s old collaborators: the death-haunted album Blackstar from David Bowie. (This is not to minimize co-creator Mark Frost’s contributions to The Return; one of the reasons I think the two worked so well together is that Frost’s more traditional storytelling chops mesh seamlessly with Lynch’s more experimental ones.) While The Return is something of an encapsulation of what came before, there’s also a desire to deviate, and a hint of countless new artistic directions well worth exploring.
All of David Lynch’s Films, Ranked by the Curator Behind the Giant Retrospective at the Texas Theatre
Daniel Knox talks through his current hierarchy ahead of the 12-day festival kicking off on May 24While there are certainly single works of Lynch’s that will be discussed for years to come — both Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet placed in the top 100 of the latest Sight and Sound critics poll, for instance — the broader arc of Lynch’s career may well be its greatest accomplishment. Lynch was capable of biting satire, striking experimentation and even — as The Straight Story demonstrates — a more straightforward approach. But there’s a restlessness to his career that binds it all together.
Lynch’s final feature film (Inland Empire) and final extended work for television are also his most formally inventive productions in either medium. Besides the quality of work throughout his career, there’s the sense of someone constantly pushing themselves to new and unexpected places. It’s a welcome reminder that getting older doesn’t have to mean getting set in one’s ways — and in the case of Lynch’s body of work, it also led to some astonishing works of art.
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