David Lynch’s films have long been labeled “mind-bending” by cinephiles. Many novice film buffs can’t tell Lynch apart from directors like David Fincher or Christopher Nolan. But unlike Nolan, Lynch has never shied away from defying logic in his work. His characters often inexplicably split into multiple selves, his timelines contradict themselves, and his spatial designs transcend the laws of physical reality.
If you approach Season 3 of Twin Peaks (aka Twin Peaks: the Return) as a conventional mystery and expect Lynch to wrap everything up with a rational explanation, you’re bound to be disappointed. That said, I also understand why many viewers felt let down: Lynch, ever the cunning showman, is incredibly adept at planting enticing narrative hooks. In Season 3, he spent 14 out of 18 episodes teasing the audience with the question of when protagonist Dale Cooper would recover from his semi-catatonic state.
He also posed a slew of new mysteries: How was the demon Bob born? What’s the connection between the vagrants haunting a New Mexico town and Bob? Who did the grotesque “frog-moth” crawl into in Episode 8? And perhaps most tantalizingly, what happened to Audrey Horne, the seductive beauty of the first two seasons?
But by the end of the season, Lynch either provided vague answers or none at all. On top of that, he dropped a major bombshell in the final two episodes. Agent Cooper, now back to his old self, destroys his evil doppelgänger and travels back to 1989 to rescue Laura Palmer, the murdered girl from Season 1. However, upon returning to the “real world” with a now-middle-aged Laura (or rather, Carrie), he finds that Twin Peaks no longer exists—and he’s not even sure if he himself still exists.
To the average viewer, this ending is a massive question mark. But for Lynch, it might be crystal clear. A long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, Lynch has been profoundly influenced by Indian Brahmanic and Eastern philosophies, which often view the material world—what Immanuel Kant called the "phenomenal world"—as illusory.
With this context, many of Lynch’s narrative absurdities start to make sense: he doesn’t believe in rationality as a universal principle. In Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks Season 3, characters’ identities constantly morph, because Lynch doesn’t see “identity” as bound by the physical or material world. He also rejects the linearity of time and the continuity of space. That’s why Lost Highway features Möbius strip-like storytelling, and Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks show protagonists confronting their own corpses.
Western scholars often try to interpret Lynch’s work through Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, splitting everything into “reality” versus “fantasy.” While such analysis sometimes holds water, it falls apart in the face of Lynchian scenes that defy space-time logic. Lynch's narratives often don’t comply with these theories—not because they’re incoherent, but because they follow the internal logic of his own metaphysical universe.
Take, for instance, one of the most haunting scenes from Season 3’s finale: Cooper and his secretary Diane have sex in a roadside motel after crossing into another world. Before entering the motel, Diane sees another version of herself standing at the door. Played by longtime Lynch collaborator Laura Dern, this moment recalls her dual roles in Inland Empire.
The sex scene itself is deeply unsettling. Backed by a chilling 1950s ballad, Cooper and Diane’s union feels less romantic and more like a dark ritual. Fans of Lost Highway will immediately think of the similarly eerie sex scene between Pete and Alice: the same music, same fast-motion cinematography, same ominous vibe.
And the aftermath is eerily similar, too. In Lost Highway, Pete is abandoned by Alice and morphs into Fred, the protagonist from the film’s first half. In Twin Peaks, Cooper wakes up to find Diane gone, replaced by a note referring to him as “Richard.” His mission to save Laura ultimately fails.
Fred and Pete, Cooper and Richard, and even “Dougie” from earlier in the season—all these doppelgängers raise the question: who is the real self? In Lynch’s universe, which disregards materialist logic, they may all be the “real” self. But no matter what form they take, they are all destined for the same tragic outcome.
In Lost Highway, Fred (as Pete) falls for Alice, who looks just like his wife Renee, only to be betrayed and driven to rage and violence. In Twin Peaks, Cooper becomes Richard, and Laura becomes Carrie, a housewife in Texas. He loses everything; she can’t find her way home.
Though inspired by Indian philosophy, Lynch offers a vision closer to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence than the serene union of Atman and Brahman. That is the essence of Lynch’s cinema: not reincarnation as liberation, but rebirth as an endless loop of confusion and isolation.
Lynch’s visuals may be seductive, but at heart, his films are nightmares. In today’s commercially driven media landscape, it’s nothing short of a miracle that such an intricately crafted, nightmare-inducing epic could be aired on a mainstream network.
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