Twin Peaks: The Return ‘Part 8’ Is Horrifyingly Beautiful

"The eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the greatest hours of television I’ve ever seen: horrifying, horrifyingly beautiful, thought-provoking and thought-annihilating; a work that owes as much to expressionistic and surreal painting, musical performance, and installation art as it does to narrative and experimental cinema. Though it initially appears to be uncoupled from the show’s main story line, on second viewing, it plays more like an extended parenthetical or interlude, almost like a live storyteller’s fourth-wall-breaking aside to the audience.

Throughout the late 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, the United States was presented in popular culture and by much of the mainstream press as a placid, even plasticized surface, even though its depths roiled with discontent, discrimination, institutionalized violence, and an insidiously bland sort of greed. Lynch is not normally thought of as a political filmmaker, and he might yawn in the face of any interviewer who dared suggest such a thing, but his entire career has been filled with signature images that feel like distilled, iconic statements about modern life in general, American life specifically."

read review by Matt Zoller Seitz​

Twin Peaks: The Return ‘Part 8’ Is Horrifyingly Beautiful