WHY TWIN PEAKS ISNT THE SERIES YOU'RE CONVINCED IT WAS

"Twin Peaks is often described as a mystery or a soap opera, and it was definitely both of those things. But it was also the story of a small town reeling in shock after a random act of violence, acting out in strange and terrifying ways, and purposefully and accidentally disclosing not just their naughty secrets (an element common to the soaps that Lynch and Frost emulated, as well as films like In the Heat of the Night and Anatomy of a Murder), but the persistent sadness, desperation, and dread that lurks under the surface of mundane reality. The deeper FBI agent Dale Cooper and his fellow investigators dug into the soil beneath those magnificent Douglas firs, the more ugliness they unearthed. There was incest, sexual exploitation, drug abuse, drug trafficking, domestic violence, smuggling, murder, and corporate crime happening in those cottages and hotel rooms and in the gloom of the woods.

Fire Walk With Me is nearly as rhythmically odd and boldly fragmented a story as Mulholland Drive, which came out nine years later. The second half is a descent into hell that climaxes with a heavenly vision that includes proudly fake-looking angel wings. Except for The Straight Story, which feels like Lynch’s farewell to conventional storytelling as time wears on, each successive Lynch project post-1992 has been more formally radical than the last. Lost Highway is a narrative Mobius strip with an unexpected and unexplained identity transference in the middle. Mullholland Drive might or might not be a marriage of realism and surrealism, reality and dream, but because everyone who sees it has a different interpretation of its structure, its ending, and its interest in role-playing and identity, it’s impossible to say for sure. And Inland Empire is pure dark sorcery, a psychic hostage video that could’ve been pirated from Robert Blake’s Lost Highway demon-voyeur.

We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that the new Twin Peaks will, from time to time, be even more abrasively strange than Inland Empire, because Inland Empire came out 11 years ago, and Lynch has only gotten crankier and more mystical with age."
more in the article by MATT ZOELLER SEITZ