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In short, I find the warm reception to Twin Perfect's four and a half hour long explanation video rather depressing.

It's a didactic and silly theory. Yes, there is a strain of meta-commentary throughout Twin Peaks, but to view it entirely as a piece of media criticism is such a banal take. This isn't quite as terrible as the Twelve Rainbow Trout video, but it's perhaps even more irritating.

David Lynch does not hate modern TV. Yes, he has criticized aspects of it over the years, but he has also praised Mad Men, Breaking Bad and True Detective, and frequently calls cable television the "new art house". Aside from this, he says he does not watch much TV, so the idea that he undertake such a mammoth project just to critique the medium in such a shallow way seems suspect. For all the apparent research on display, the theory totally ignores context when it isn't helpful to the case. Twin Perfect casually incorporates episodes which weren't written or directed by Lynch into his argument, and he doesn't even speculate as to Mark Frost's creative intentions - this is despite the fact that Frost was effectively captain of the ship throughout season 1 and especially 2. Is it really plausible that throughout this period Lynch kept on sticking his head through the door, insisting that everything be kept on track to fulfil some clumsy, overstretched metaphor he apparently had in mind?

The idea that everything in the show must be filtered through a single governing idea is also flawed. If you look at a work of art and consider what it seems to be evoking, the ways in which it resonates, you can have an interesting and substantial discussion. When you settle on a "theory" and watch every scene thinking about how to crowbar your predetermined interpretation into it then you're just succumbing to confirmation bias and fundamentally misunderstanding art. By the time the video gets into discussing Ed and Norma it's so far gone into cloud-cuckoo land I'm not sure how anyone can take it seriously. It can't just be that Lynch and Frost are communicating something about art and commerce through the story of the Double R franchising, everything has to be a one to one metaphor. Ed must be Lynch, Norma must be Twin Peaks etc. It's the most simplistic possible understanding of symbolism, and it does a disservice to a thematically rich piece of work.

Every time this guy approaches a valid idea he ruins it by squeezing it into his argument. There are cycles of violence which we are all to keen to leave unexamined.... in TV storytelling. The fantasy of retaining one's youth and naive perspective is unsustainable... if you are a character from a cancelled TV show. There are forces of positivity and negativity which can be thrown out of balance... in poorly handled TV plotlines. Why be so reductive about ideas which are far more pertinent and powerful when applied to life and spirituality?

I would argue that the more self-referential moments of Twin Peaks actually operate in the opposite way to the one the video suggests. Lynch and Frost use our relationship with the show as a way of getting us to think about the passage of time, and the way in which people change or choose not to. Yes, James miming to a 25 year old recording of 'Just You' is a brazenly meta moment, but the effect of seeing a character we recognize from long ago, now grayer but still beset by hopeless infatuations and literally performing the same song is far more potent than Twin Perfect's interpretation could ever allow. Audrey's Dance and the withholding of Cooper operate in a similar way. We have a preexisting relationship to Twin Peaks and its characters, and the revival exploits that fact masterfully as a means of communicating how we relate to earlier moments of our lives.

In addition to all this, the guy's tone is so condescending and self-important. I particularly dislike the built-in defense that anyone who dislikes his video is just upset about how it destroys the show's sense of mystery, that he's just too damn correct about everything. But the truth is that he's not the first person to view aspects of the show in this way at all, he is just the first to ignore all other aspects of the show and turn a meditation on violence, trauma and consciousness into some nebulous diatribe about bad TV. The fact he keeps going with his Lynch impression despite how self evidently fucking terrible it is serves as the ultimate testament to his utterly unearned confidence.

I have since found out that Twin Perfect has a history of this kind of narcissism, having made a bunch of equally "definitive" videos about the Silent Hill series and lashed out at any criticism. For anyone looking for genuinely insightful and relatively humble Twin Peaks commentary I would recommend Corn Pone Flicks, Lost in the Movies, and the podcast Diane.

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