Housekeeping
Things have been busy but boring for the most part for the past month or so as we struggle and juggle our way through the end of summer and into the fall, trying to balance a heavier workload with the oppressive late summer heatwave that just makes you want to do nothing more strenuous than take a cold shower and lie down in front of the air conditioner all afternoon. No apartment I've rented in the past two decades has had central air, a fact that is probably at least partly responsible for our decision to move to Long Beach when we started looking for new digs in August of 2018. This will seem insane to people who are younger than me or live in parts of LA that don't get much cross-breeze, but historically it's been mostly possible to live with multiple fans set up in series to funnel fresh air through the space without wanting to die, at least about 98 percent of the time. The period a week or two ago where temps topped 100 degrees here in Long Beach definitely fell into that latter two percent, and precipitated us upgrading from a portable AC unit to a window-based one (which we have yet to install since the mercury has dropped).
Additionally, we've been trying to make small improvements around the house, including painting the bedroom in preparation for installing a full wall of wallpaper printed with a gorgeous oil painted forest scene. The three painted walls are now a light green that has brightened the room considerably, especially when compared to our previous respite, which had dark green walls and a painted ceiling that all but disappeared when you turned out the overhead light. I enjoyed its tenebrous coziness, but there's something to be said for being able to see the room around you when you get out of bed in the morning.
I've also been upgrading some lacking parts of my winter wardrobe, picking up a windbreaker and wax cotton hat for the impending deluge of a record-setting El Niño that is likely to cause wild weather this winter, along with purchasing a bunch of home and personal care products, the most exciting of which is the limited edtion Dr. Bronner's Sandalwood Jasmine soap that I have become obsessed with. If you are a Dr. Bronner's weirdo like me, do not sleep on this one; it smells amazing.
Last night I finished watching Twin Peaks: The Return at The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, which I managed to make it to for the past nine Sundays, doling out a little weekly weirdness two episodes at a time. I drove home from the theater in silence, just turning everything over in my head for the 30 minutes it took me to get back to Long Beach, meditating on what a remarkable achievement it was for David Lynch to put out 18 episodes of the most unpredictable storytelling to ever grace a screen of any size in the golden era of streaming and rewatch podcasts and YouTube analysis. Watching recaps that aired weekly following episodes in 2017 now, it's exciting to see critics get excited about how much the show defies convention and expectation, and getting to re-experience that stomach-dropping thrill of not knowing where things are going next has been a real treat.
I also had my annual birthday drinks soirée on Friday at the revolving cocktail lounge atop the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA, during which a friend brought up how all the postmodernists love LA because it's such a rich case study for their ideas, which is funny and accurate. I've always been partial to pomo for a lot of reasons, primarily because it's the most explicitly playful philosophy, and the one that not only acknowledges its viewpoint and limitations, but makes them integral to understanding anything and everything. This is also probably why Twin Peaks hits so hard for me: it's both playfully antagonistic towards its audience, but also genuinely interested in creating a meaningful longform work that offers entertainment and enjoyment while making you deeply uncomfortable about the world and everything in it.
Twin Peaks is usually described as a mystery, and a soap opera, and the original series is both of those things, but The Return is a mystery in a much more evocative form; one that is more interested in the questions the events it depicts raise than in ever offering concrete answers to those questions. In that way it's a mystery in the religious sense, and the antithesis of something like Lost, which offers conundrums that invite speculation, but only resolve in ways that are fantastical, but somehow mundane (e.g. there are polar bears on the island because there was a research station; there's a four-toed statue because some Ancient Egyptians carved it, I guess).
The phrase "mystery box" gets thrown around a lot, especially regarding J.J. Abrams shows because it's a great hook to get people to keep watching, at least for a while. This is one of the reasons the original Twin Peaks got cancelled: they had to keep up a traditional network serial drama narrative that just wasn't sustainable, especially in an era before home video releases of TV seasons. Almost all serial dramas before the 2000s were light on continuity because you couldn't be sure everyone was watching every week. Revisiting any show from the era reminds you that 22 episodes a season was the norm in part because you only had a few episodes a year—usually during sweeps—that could be primarily devoted to longer plot arcs. That way if someone skips an episode because they happen to not be at home the one and only time it airs, they don't give up on watching because they've missed critical information. The other way serialized shows used to handle this is to repeat information to a point that binge watching these shows from the 20th century is often agonizing because they have to reiterate everything ad nauseam to make it comprehensible to the casual viewer. It's not that noticeable when you're spreading out the episodes over a calendar year, but when you've just heard the same context for a thing six times in six episodes back-to-back, it starts to wear. Ironically, this is similar to the place we find ourselves now, where viewers are assumed to be so constantly distracted that closed captioning and characters narrating what's happening onscreen remove ambiguity from a lot of new shows.
The Return understands the possibilities and limitations of its medium historically and contemporaneously and uses them in exactly the way it wants to. It doesn't deny you answers, but it also refuses to make them the point. The mystery is the point, and the answer is just some additional information to help you contemplate the mystery. It remains the best thing that has ever been on TV.
