Dear readers, the first half of this post is all normal, typical stuff. The second half is part love-letter to Twin Peaks, and part reveal of that damn thesis you heard so much about. If you’re here for the blogski, feel free to dip out at that point. Or if you wanna nerd out a little bit over Twin Peaks or see what 60+ pages of academic writing from yours truly looks like, you are of course welcome to stick around. Let it ride.
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Well, here we are again. October has been certifiably insane so far. But I can’t just skip to the beginning of the craziness. I need every day accounted for in this thing! Whether I actually summarize each day is neither here nor there.
The end of September wasn’t so eventless. Went on a bunch of walks, baked a blueberry pie for the first time, watched that Dahmer show and will not be sharing opinions, and took some photos.
But in the end, I wanna use this post as a mini memorial and glass case and podium for my thesis about Twin Peaks, since I am only now feeling fully recovered from its completion, and I like the idea of having it online somewhere. But published as its own post? That’s a little much. Let’s bury it, but bury it prominently. Who am I kidding it’s gonna get its own post too, whatever.
My Favorite Show and the Thesis I wrote
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not typically a fanboy. Mostly I have some kind of reserved disdain and repugnance toward people who are too ‘fanny’ about anything. My one exception of course, being for Twin Peaks. I am not being hyperbolic when I say this one show legitimately reshaped my entire perception of what television, film, or art in general can or should be. I remember snuggling up across from my roomie/homie from college (luv u Scott) and watching the first two seasons on my crappy HP laptop that sounded like an Oldsmobile with no exhaust pipe when I ran more than two chrome tabs. The campiness, the strange soap opera moments and incessant/borderline intrusive soundtrack, mingled with the absolutely insane deconstruction of the very world it established… Something about this show started poking around in my mind. It was apparent that the story was somehow in dialogue with the very medium through which it was being told. In a strange way, it seemed to move.
When I eventually watched the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, I was shot through a wormhole time loop and realized I had seen clips of the film when I was child, watching late night TV when I wasn’t supposed to. To this day, I think it may be the most disturbing yet wonderful film I’ve ever seen.
By the time a third season was released in 2017, I remember nobody was quite sure what to expect. The movie was so raw and strange and disturbing, but this was an 18 hour season of TV coming. Would it be a return of campiness from the first two seasons, a new mystery? Silly, silly us. We should’ve known that a man whose last released project was Inland Empire, shot on a sony DV tape camera from 2005, wouldn’t launch back into any kind of comfortable preconceived notion of television. The Return is prequel, sequel, explainer, puzzle, and modifier all in one. Everything from the first iterations of the show makes more and less sense because of it. The way it simultaneously builds upon yet negates its foundations that came before, forces you to look at every event in a new light, while still remembering the old light. The show breathes.
If you can’t tell by now, this stuff excites me. So, if anyone is interested in David Lynch, and a strange twisted logic of literality and abstraction, maybe you’ll get something from the thesis I’m including in this post. A good teaser, and what I think is the most interesting aspect of the project for me, is the discovery that there is absolutely no symbology or metaphor in the entirety of the series. Not one symbol or allegory. Everything is literal.
How did I BS my way into writing 60 pages with that? Well, now you can see for yourself. In any case, I would also like to say as one last preamble, that the whole thing is more of a collection of interweaving ideas, with none having any chronological priority over the others. So if you actually are interested, feel free to pick a section (any section!) and you will get a smaller fractal of the whole. Yes, I’m aware I’m basically speaking to myself right now. But hey, you never know. Here it is, for whatever it’s worth.
And if this did sound interesting but you see academia as the gatekept, jargonized scam that it is, I’ve been looking for ways to turn this thing into some kind of psychopathic video essay that proves nothing means anything other than what it is, but what it is is infinitely more complex and impossible to grasp than we ever imagined. Mainly, I wanna clap back at that Twin Perfect guy on Youtube who claims he ‘solved’ Twin Peaks. His was an interesting video for fans, but saying you found the hidden meaning of a Lynch project is like saying you found a Gordon Ramsay recipe for a deep fried, pizza-wrapped cheeseburger. Oh, I definitely wanna see what you’re talking about. But also, no you didn’t.
It’s antithetical to the man’s whole existence in his field!
I’ve rambled enough, and I know what you degenerates really wanna see. My boy Rut aka Dutch aka Dutch Rutter aka Yung Ferris Wheel aka Josh, landed on the 29th of September. And on the 30th, it began.
Nick Denardi 