Why Twin Peaks Transcends Time and Space
It’s Meslow’s coverage of The Return, however, that may be of most interest to fans. Through conversations with Frost, producer Sabrina Sutherland and editor Duwayne Dunham, as well as cast members Sherilyn Fenn, Michael Horse, James Marshall and others, Meslow reconstructs how Lynch’s 18-hour Showtime opus came to exist, radically transforming the televisual medium for a second time, 25 years after its original debut. An entire chapter details the making of “Part 8,” AKA “Gotta Light?”, which began as a 12-page section of The Return’s hulking 334-page script and became one of the most celebrated hours of television history and of Lynch’s career.
That Twin Peaks continues to be an object of obsession across generations—you’ll find a plethora of edits on TikTok dedicated to Dale and Laura, presumably made by young fans newly discovering the show—is a testament to its stylistic mastery, but also to its thematic clairvoyance. For all its vaunted surrealism, many of the horrors Twin Peaks depicts are grounded in reality, the work of ordinary human beings committing sex trafficking, rape, incest, and murder—which may be part of the reason the show’s never seemed more relevant. Just this week, the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails has exposed horrific exploitation and abuse committed by an apparent network of high-powered global elites against children and teenagers; my social media feeds are plastered with photographs of teenage girls who look just like Laura Palmer.
Twin Peaks is, at its core, a meditation on the nature of evil: how it is born, how it proliferates, and what shapes it can take—supernatural or otherwise. After Season 2, the line between cosmic and corporeal only grows more indistinct; The Return makes plain that cosmic evil is engineered by man, not the other way around. But the belief in a supernatural evil is—as it was for Cooper after solving Laura’s murder—easier to reckon with than the reality of sheer human depravity. The Return is the last project Lynch completed before his passing (incidentally, his daughter Jennifer Lynch recently announced plans to publish the unrealized script for Unrecorded Night), but as Meslow’s book shows, the gift of Twin Peaks is one that keeps on giving.
Meslow’s book is both comprehensive and accessible, making it an essential read for longtime obsessives and new fans alike. GQ chatted with Meslow about what drove him to write it, why people are still so enchanted by Twin Peaks, and whether The Return is Lynch’s masterpiece.
GQ: How did your obsession with Twin Peaks begin?
Scott Meslow: I’m what I would call a second-wave Twin Peaks fan. I was born in 1988, so I was too young to watch it live. In middle school, I would bike down to the video store [and] I’d always rent interesting-looking horror movies. [I found] a VHS of the pilot [with] the European ending. At that point, I did not know Twin Peaks was a TV show. I thought I was watching this really weird and interesting horror movie, which I guess I kind of was.
I loved it, but I was like, “What was that?” I’d never seen anything like it. I was able to go online and figure out, like, “Oh, shit. There are like 29 more episodes of this thing,” but they were so hard to get [at the time]. Certainly, the video store I went to didn’t have them… I was eventually able to get a VHS box set on eBay. From then on, it’s been my favorite show.
At what point did you decide to write a book about it?
It was probably two years and change ago. It had just been enough time where The Return had really settled with me, because that was my real goal for the book. There have been great books about Twin Peaks, so I’m adding to what I think of as an already very rich canon, but a book didn’t exist until now that looks at everything on the same level playing field: the original show, Fire Walk With Me, The Return, and the spinoff books, including the ones that Mark Frost wrote to bookend The Return.
