While this side of the blog is temporarily(?) paused, I just wanted to link this: https://bluerosearchive.com/
And thankfully I searched my own website, because I already wrote in my mind half this blog post and was going to write ONCE AGAIN the same introductory things I wrote already. How I encountered the thing the first time, and so on…
As with all large and ambitious works, they all inspire going back a second time, maybe a third. But this is something I rarely do, even if I feel the lure. The reason is a certain amount of frustration. I know that I’d go back to see certain things with more clarity, but I always fear I won’t be able to see anything more. That I’d feel stuck and even more annoyed by the fact that the insight eludes me, just experiencing my own incompetence. That I don’t have any path to anywhere. I would be stuck, and it would suck.
Oh, and at the end of that post I wrote, I mentioned I’d eventually write also about my interpretation of the third season, wrapping up the whole thing. It looks like I never wrote any of that (I don’t know even if I have some notes somewhere), but what’s worse is that I don’t even remember the explanation I supposedly had. I remember some vague notions, like how the atomic bomb reference and the emphasis on electricity I interpreted as a co-evolution between human science and whatever “mythical” power. A bit like how in Sandman (comics, maybe even in American Gods? I haven’t read that) the divinities are “redressed” by the human culture and its period in time. So even these hidden divinities would be directly bound to human culture and the physical world. Some external presence got in during the atomic explosion, and then transformed and lingered, within the electrical system (since it’s still power, energy, the same principle that takes different forms). I remember I had an explanation of the finale, like a struggle that never quite ends, but also never surrenders. There was more that was meaningful, but I can’t remember (there was something about how can you defeat the “outside”, when you’re trapped “inside”).
All this stacked against the frustration, not just of “not remembering”, but also not being able to hold enough to make something out of it. Twin Peaks is great because its metaphysics aren’t hubris. It’s not just rhetorical make believe and sleight of hands, to suggest more even if it’s not actually there. But it also evades me. I know enough to see there’s something true and solid there, but not enough to be able to fully work with it. So it is frustrating because I know I’m not “tall enough” to reach the top.
And there’s nothing you/I can do. I just accept that the stuff that interests me the most evades me, and nothing I can do about it. Even in the case I decide to revisit the whole thing, and dedicate it a whole lot more time, I’m not sure I would get out of the process anything more, other than more actual frustration.
This time I’m writing this because there seems to be more, offered. Available.
That website I linked above. I was familiar with some wiki, but, at the time, browsing through it didn’t really help. I don’t know how/when this other thing came into existence, or who wrote it. Just saw it randomly mentioned, reposted by Mark Frost on Bluesky, and followed it thinking it was some alias of the same wiki/website I already knew. So I was doubtful it was “a thing.”
I mention it here because it is so much more than I expected. The methodology isn’t simply good, but it does precisely the same I try to do on my own, in that exact same way: stay on the “text”, draw a line between what it is suggested, but avoiding speculation. Or engage with speculation but clearly defining what the “text” actively supports, or ignores. And not only the analysis is high level, and way, WAY above my grade, but it’s the writing quality that surprised me. These aren’t just pieces of information, this is a text with its own exceptional quality. It’s almost mandatory reading, for Twin Peaks, as it ENHANCES what you watch, and pushes it further.
Now, also consider that what I’m saying and the praise merely comes from reading a few entries. It’s not like I spent hours reading it and doing a review. But it was enough. I read the full entry for the first episode of the third series. This stuff is a pure gold mine.
And so, I shall also quote. The stuff that pushed my buttons just right (or just wrong enough to feel right).
—
“The ending of The Return attracts confident explanations. This file records what is staged, marks every inference as inference, and does not name a force, a timeline or an outcome that the screen leaves unnamed.”
“ending on a question nobody answers”
“What returns is a function, not a personality.” “He is the method with the warmth removed.”
“and it is a trap: the room she has spent four Parts trying to leave opens onto a smaller one.
The season does not argue that the past cannot be revisited. It shows the revisiting happening and then shows what is on the other side of it.”
(this infuriated me the right way, what trap? what’s the smaller one? what does it mean? what’s on the other side of the past? This is supposed to be analysis and explanation, but I don’t understand it. It’s not dry, it’s not a checklist of answers given for free, this lights the tree up so it’s even MORE meaningful after you read it, so that it delivers more beyond)
“We’re going home is the whole of the rescue. Not the Lodge, not the Bureau, not a case – home, which is the one place in this story that was never safe.”
“The mechanism stays OPEN”
“Note what the geography is doing.”
“The rescue is designed to fail, and not because the universe is cruel for its own sake. It fails because of what it is trying to undo.”
“the horror in Twin Peaks is domestic, cumulative and institutional.”
“a young man paid to sit in a chair and look at nothing in case something appears”
“it is not a murder to solve but an absence to locate”
“Something limits what can be spoken”
“Part 1 still hands the audience the ending’s scaffolding in the first four minutes, in a form that is useless until it is over.”
“Mechanism OPEN.”
“Twin Peaks has reproduced its own premise in a location with none of the compensations. This is the season’s method for handling nostalgia: it gives the audience the thing it asked for, stripped of everything that made it bearable.”
“There is a gap, and an instruction to find it.”
“the thing that was lost is not recoverable by going back to the place”
“Scenes run past the point where television would cut. Sam Colby watches the box for a long time and nothing happens; the Fireman’s pauses are long enough to become uncomfortable; the police move through the Buckhorn hallway at the speed of actual police. This is the season establishing a different contract with attention”
“sound design carries information the image withholds”
“Part 1, in summary, is not a pilot and does not behave like one. It is the opening movement of an eighteen-hour work by authors who have decided that the correct way to honour a thing people loved is to show them precisely what it costs to go looking for it. The glass box states the thesis, the Log Lady states the quest, Buckhorn states the method, and the town gets six minutes.”
“Ambiguity is preserved where the record does not decide.”
“She does not dominate the mystery or translate it into a system; she carries partial knowledge without pretending it is complete.”
“Calling organic matter a literal memory-storage technology would turn a poetic pattern into an unsupported mechanism.”
“Margaret’s language is elliptical, but not uniformly obscure.”
“What BOB adds to that is not exculpation but appetite – a reason for the violence to continue past any individual motive, and a mechanism by which a man can commit it and not remember.”
“BOB is what the series produced when it needed a supernatural object capable of carrying an unsupernatural subject. Twin Peaks is about a father who raped and murdered his daughter and a town that did not look. That is not material a 1990 network drama could hold at the centre of a prime-time hour for two years. BOB is the form the material took in order to be broadcast – and the show’s own greatness is that it never lets the form fully absorb the content.”
“Phillip Jeffries went further than any Blue Rose investigator before him and came back wrong – not because the investigation broke him, but because he found something real and it changed the conditions of his existence.”
“He is the warning that arrives too late.”
“He is distressed, physically unstable and unable to make his experience fit ordinary chronology.”
“reacting to a timeline unavailable to everyone else in the room.”
“Jeffries speaks like an investigator whose evidence has exceeded the reporting form. Names, dates and locations remain, but sequence fails.”
“The production statement identifies the object; it does not solve Jeffries’s ontology.”
“These actions show memory, recognition and temporal access, but not an all-knowing command of the timeline.”
“a Blue Rose investigator follows anomalous evidence until ordinary location, body and chronology no longer hold.”
“The warning in Jeffries’s arc is therefore epistemic. Contact yields real evidence, but it also changes the observer and damages the categories needed to report that evidence. Blue Rose work does not merely uncover a hidden world; it exposes the investigator to a world in which identity, memory and time can no longer be assumed.”
“contact does not merely inform the investigator, it degrades the instrument doing the reporting.”
