The Uncanny Box: Nostalgia and TV Culture in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

Abstract

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) may be read as an extended meditation on the universal desire to return – to a putative golden age or lost paradise – and the eerie effects that are produced when this desire is realized. More specifically, the show explores the prevalent desire amongst TV audiences to continually “return” to beloved fictional spaces and characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the uncanny, as well as film and media studies, the article explores the theme of returning within the show’s fictional and meta-fictional cosmos (the characters’ and viewers’ dream of going back) in relation to Lynch’s highly critical portrayal of the medium of television. In Lynch’s cinematic aesthetics of the uncanny, television (associated with consumerism, the nuclear family, and mindless repetition) is portrayed as a malign influence, providing faux nostalgia devoid of meaning or experiential value. Given that most of the returns in Twin Peaks: The Return always turn out to be unhomely, I suggest that Lynch’s take on TV culture may be read as a general commentary on the social and political nightmares created by a fetishization of the (real or fictional) past.