Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
To be a David Lynch fan is to have patience. His more abstract films treat narrative like a piece of Play-Doh, twisting it around into different shapes while tearing off little bits that, at one point, seemed integral to the overall structure. Last summer’s Twin Peaks: The Return—which premiered a year ago today—was…
Matthew Lillard’s performance as the accused murderer Bill Hastings was a welcome addition to Twin Peaks: The Return, but according to Lillard, filming his part was extremely challenging. At the Sundance premiere of his latest project, Halfway There, we talked to Lillard about his experience being a part of Twin Peaks…
2017 is a weird time to be a brand. Where once the marketing arms of major fast food conglomerates were just expected to find inventive ways to say “Our square hamburgers will briefly stave off your body’s endless need for sustenance,” the fast food social media ecosystem has now become a much wilder place. Today’s…
Presumably after awakening in the woods in the middle of the night, head filled with strange images of red curtains and talking trees, an unassuming man named Kurt Quinn has learned to speak any phrase backwards.
While we’re big fans of Twin Peaks here at The A.V. Club, not everyone was sold on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mind-bending magnum opus. Some say it was too abstract, others criticize its unresolved subplots, and others still thought it lacked the original’s “chutzpah” (which is legit insane, by the way). But maybe…
The following contains real, canonical spoilers for Twin Peaks: The Return and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both in the sense that it describes what happened in the revival and in the sense that it will also explain what happened. Like, for real. If you’d rather be Dougie Jones and remain blissfully…
Clayton Purdom: Mindhunter was just compulsively watchable, at least for me. It hit the perfect mid-October note of derangement and morbidity while still being funny, quick, and tightly produced. I loved it. But it was an odd show, wasn’t it? The show shirks a traditional antagonist in favor of raw, procedural action…
Halloween draws nigh, and with it the annual parade of ghosts and goblins, trolls and Trumps, pumpkins and David S. Pumpkins, and other, equally obvious guises drawn from the well of contemporary pop culture. But you read The A.V. Club (or, at least, you scroll past it on the way to the comments). Your refined tastes…
In Twin Peaks: The Return’s final scene—spoilers ensue—an Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer out of time (and, perhaps, one version of reality), return to the latter’s childhood home. A woman who is notably not Laura’s mother answers the door and provides an apparently pedestrian rundown of its previous owners, none of…
You can’t go home again. The final scene of Twin Peaks: The Return offers the most literal interpretation possible of this old idiom, couched in a typically Lynchian abstraction, when Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) attempts to bring Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) back to her mother’s house—the quixotic righting of a…
Do you ever finish a book, only to flip back to the last page to scan the final lines for additional understanding and/or closure? Against my better judgement, and against everything I know about Twin Peaks and the David Lynch oeuvre, I did something similar with “Part 18,” the finale of what some call season three,…
Twin Peaks’ two-part finale was a dizzying, mystifying loop-de-loop, with individual scenes of almost indescribable cinematic richness: Cooper’s face superimposed over minutes of denouement, or the unfathomable strangeness of his sex scene with Diane. But all of that was preamble to the shattering impact of the…
“Once we cross, it could all be different.”
“I am the FBI.”
The first line of Twin Peaks: The Return, after a quarter-century hiatus and endless speculation and several minutes of dreamlike preamble, is this: “Listen to the sounds.” It’s The Giant speaking, or at least the huge guy we used to call The Giant, sitting in a grayscale corner of The Black Lodge with a docile Agent…
In “The Return, Part 12,” Sarah Palmer warns her young cashier, and us, “Things can happen! Something happened to me.” In “The Return, Part 15,” something is happening, and as entertaining as the show’s winding, ominous roads have been, it’s energizing to see the show reach a crossroads, even if it’s not clear what…
