Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8

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What to expect

A minute-by-minute analysis of one episode (Part 8) of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).

Much has been written about the work of David Lynch and existential fear in relation to Americana and the American Dream-as-American Nightmare in terms that are circular and artistically self-referential—or Lynchian. But with Part 8 of his most recent work, the 2017 series Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch locates his singular and unsettling visual vocabulary within an epic historical context: the world’s first atomic explosion, the Trinity Test. With reference to the 1983 television phenomenon The Day After, Lynch’s work is newly situated in a resurgence of works reassessing the legacy of Trinity. Among them: HBO’s Chernobyl, Trevor Paglen’s Trinity Cube, Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. With David Lynch’s Part 8, a cultural circuit is completed, from the idiosyncratic and personal—or Lynchian—to the shared space of what theorist Paul Virilio describes as “cosmic fear”—or an emergency of social media.

After placing the work in this specific context, this book examines every minute of Lynch’s Part 8 from Twin Peaks: The Return, minute by minute—a thrilling endeavor due to the radical landscape that Lynch sets forth: a landscape of astonishing cinematic extremities, from the maddeningly abstract, absurd, and meticulous, to the lush, and terrifying. The director presents an uncanny intimacy that is an achievement even among the most critically lauded works in Lynch’s catalog.

Critics Review

From the eerie “Hell Is Real” billboard to the world-historic Trinity Test, Jeff Wood gives us a brilliant minute-by-minute reading of one of television’s most radical episodes. Unpacking the mysteries of Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8 with poetic insight and intellectual rigor, Wood blends cultural analysis, film history, and philosophical reflection, providing essential reading for cinephiles, scholars, and Lynch fans alike—a visionary guide to a landmark in modern storytelling.
Trevor Paglen, Artist, MacArthur Fellow, USA
The silver screen and the black screen of the TV are the Heaven slash Hell that plague us with a pandemonium of meaning (in this respect Heaven is just Hell for nice people). When a hero or villain emerges from the atomic explosion of the screens, Hell is unleashed. As a superfan who has watched countless, countless times, I’m here to tell all that Wood’s book astoundingly captures every mesmerizing step in this pull-out-all-the-stops episode of the pivotal work, Twin Peaks: the one Slavoj Zižek never writes about. Wood is a guide to Hell, just as Lynch’s episode is (a guide to) Hell. We need a guide: we live here.
Timothy Morton, Author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) and Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (2024), USA
Writing at the threshold of the post-Lynch era, Jeff Wood employs a wild array of approaches—wrangled, crucially, by the minute-by-minute framework. Here, he submits this incisive reading of “Part 8” and the larger meaning of Twin Peaks and Lynch’s oeuvre—a body of work doubling as America’s toxicology report. That this report takes us from the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio to Nine Inch Nails to Trinity and a “frog-moth” is fittingly Lynchian and a testament to Wood’s ambition and skill.
Grace Krilanovich, Author of The Orange Eats Creeps (2010), USA

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