This is one of my ten short essays about Twin Peaks Season 3. Click this link to read my introduction to this series.
Disorientation sets in almost immediately. A glistening helicopter shot of the New York skyline wrenches us from the clearly circumscribed, immaculately dressed set of our Twin Peaks reboot fantasies, before it has even had the chance to materialise. This recurring, HD flight over New York, along with similarly pristine shots of Las Vegas, threatens to usurp the sea of shaking pines and slow-motion waterfalls as a representation of the trademark Lynchian ‘sublime’.
Twin Peaks 3 begins with a cut of 25 years: Cooper in the Red Room, sitting, waiting patiently, and then 25 years older, still waiting. Already, with this cut and the future shock that it elicits, we have a valuable key to appreciating everything that follows. Twin Peaks 3 is about the passing of time, seen not as continuous change but as a disjunction between two temporal points. A whole world is interrupted, frozen, shelved, and then reanimated with a jolt, 25 years later. Rather than glossing over this temporal lacuna, David Lynch and Mark Frost have made a whole show about it. ‘Is it past or is it future?’, we’re asked. And then, much later: ‘What year is it?’
