Andy Hageman
Jeff Wood’s recently-released Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8 is far and away the most intriguing and intellectually rigorous book on the David Lynch-Mark Frost series in a long time. Stylistically, Wood has created a truly exhilarating read that makes your eyes and mind speed along like you’ve had just the right amount of wonderful coffee. You need that energy and agility because the ideas develop quickly and with frequent toggling across scales of scrutiny–from acute formal analysis of cinema techniques to vast connections to geopolitics and geological time. Juxtapositions of Twin Peaks: The Return with literary works by Cormac McCarthy and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) spark important insights into how Lynch’s 18-hour wonderfilm cohabits American cultural landscapes. Throughout the text, Wood infuses his analysis with critical theory frameworks and tools from philosophers like Timothy Morton and Paul Virilio, which he presents in accessible yet undiminished ways for readers who are keen and curious thinkers without attachments to particular academic fields or niches.
Wood’s approach to critical analysis offers a welcome complement to the current field of Twin Peaks books that features powerful interviews and superfan theories about narrative mysteries.
This book embraces the inherent strangeness of Twin Peaks: The Return and of David Lynch’s cinema more broadly without treating its intricacies as a complete puzzle to be solved or code to be cracked.
Part of what facilitates this book’s particular power is the precise format of the Time/Codes series published by Bloomsbury of which it’s a part. Nicholas Rombes and Nadine Boljkovac are the series editors behind this new line of books with separate chapters for each minute of the film under analysis. Lynch aficionados will be interested to learn, if they’re not already aware, that this “Movies Minute by Minute” approach emerged through Rombes’s experimental writing, The Blue Velvet Project: Blue Velvet 47 seconds at a time, published at Filmmaker magazine online, 2011-2012. The high volume of chapters enables writers to be hyper-detailed at times while also threading ideas that recur in multiple minutes of the movie. The concept of pausing a film every sixty seconds is a weirdly unnatural way to screen cinema, yet breaking the flow appears to produce insights that otherwise slip past.
The format creates a unique flavor of philosophical prose. Not everyone will find it piquant. For those who do, Jeff Wood’s and the other books in the Time/Codes series are an innovative delight.
On to the book at hand, the Introduction situates readers in the cultural milieu of the 1980s, in particular the cinematic socially-shared anxieties about nuclear annihilation during that phase of the Cold War. At the same time, Wood shares an anecdote about a rural billboard displaying “HELL IS REAL” that he saw on family drives as a child. Wood manages to make these contextual elements particular enough to open himself to us as the thinker taking us on this journey and universal enough to invoke a GenX identification and invite still others to pull up their own generational markers. Crucially, Wood sutures the anecdotal to the theoretical, as when he articulates a “kind of taxonomy of cinematic terror”: Narrative terror, Aesthetic terror, Ontological terror, and Cosmic terror (8-9). He presents a definition and examples for each category as well as the caveat that these are “categories of convenience.” The framework is intended to aid us in making meaning of our encounters with art rather than as a means to solve or master it.
The “Minute 1” chapter is a metonymy of the entire book as it eloquently reframes the opening credits materials, from the Rancho Rosa Partnership Production logo to the new visuals that accompany the familiar Angelo Badalamenti music. Wood attends to the aerial view of the White Tail Falls waterfall outside of the Great Northern Hotel (the Snoqualmie Falls outside of the Salish Lodge). The initial camera motion followed by its stationary hovering speaks “Drone” to viewers, emphasizing the strange perception position and media technology that have entered the familiar town of Twin Peaks.
Weird media tech is a theme that continues throughout Wood’s book. In a passage on Mr. C and Ray Monroe driving together away from prison, Wood writes, “The design effect of Mr. C’s app icons is of coded-codes: a symbol system parallel and covert to our own lexicon of touchscreen symbols, shortcuts, emojis, emoticons, and the pantheon of branded and self-referential iconography at the fingertips of our shared visual cortex–familiar, yet indecipherable but to the agents of the ecosystem within which they have been transmitted. It’s the briefest visual detail but results in the disorienting transformation of a universally recognized object (the cell phone) in an equally pedestrian and universal scene (the car ride), rendering what is so very familiar, contemporary, ubiquitous, and personal as being adjacent to our own recognition of it–suddenly conspiratorial, uncanny, and out-of-time. Everything we recognize is also estranged and rogue. The world we have designed has overtaken us, in the image of its collective engineer, a stranger” (19). Unlike other writings on Twin Peaks that attempt to decode the specific icons on Mr. C’s phone, this book sets its sights on social structures, technocultures, and aesthetics that meet the world we inhabit. Furthermore, Wood shows readers the path and helps us start down it without dictating a necessary destination, or even what we ourselves will notice as we proceed. The writing is at once compelling and generative.
A book that analyzes Part 8 of The Return will of course delve deeply into the Trinity Test at the core of the episode and ultimately of Twin Peaks. Wood leads us to ask questions about this narrative element from different angles, including form and genre. At one point, he writes, “What kind of media is this Trinity? Found footage, archival documentation, educational video, documentary reenactment, stop-motion animation, AI-generation, or nuclear holocaust at the playground-proof frame-rate of Pixar? Science fiction, horror, video art, fetish film, or bomb porn. It is all of these things and a genre-defying singularity greater than its compound categories” (56). This list mode passage put into words the unfolding reaction that I had experienced when originally screening Part 8 but had never taken the time to break down into its components. Suddenly, the mind-melting barrage of associations and feelings that I had lived through when watching the Trinity sequence became available to me, thanks to Wood, and he achieves this many times throughout the book.
One last aspect of the book to share as you consider whether or not you’d like to revisit Twin Peaks with Jeff Wood is its (fever) dreamy descriptiveness. The “Minute 28” chapter opens: “The luminous citadel of the poesies. Brutalist–yet glowing, milky, rounded, and smoothed as an architect’s foam board model, but for the fine mortared seams of skim-coated cinderblock, gleaming in cold moonlight–and integrating two architectural modes of a formal, bureaucratic mysticism. A bureau of mysticism” (78). Lucid poetry, as referential as a bit of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Reading this book conjures the Twin Peaks sequences in your mind’s eye and ear, accompanied by literary, architectural, historical, political and other disciplinary annotations and provocations.
To stay crisp, this review focused on a select set of ideas in the book. I want to note, however, that Wood’s book is equally fascinating when it investigates the Nine Inch Nails performance at the Roadhouse, the woodsmen, the Fireman and Sẽnorita Dido, and the frogmoth.
If you’re looking for a truly surprising way to explore Twin Peaks: The Return, Jeff Wood’s new book will deliver in spades, and not the kind that Mr. C shows to Darya in Part 2.
Book Details:
Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8. By Jeff Wood. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. $24.95
