“There's a sort of evil out there”: uncanny secularity in Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return

Critics have described David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return as the boldest, most experimental work ever screened on television. In this chapter, I consider Lynch’s Third Series as an (unorthodox) contribution to contemporary secular/post-secular cinematic television, exploring the tension between secularist and post-secularist dimensions of post-war American culture. I examine, in particular, how The Return is characterized by its explicit intertwining of this worldly and otherworldly, or materialist and “spiritualist” perspectives, and how Lynch’s experimental aesthetic articulates a tension between these contrary yet intertwined dimensions of American culture. In addition to Lynch’s aesthetic fascination with mystery, film and television genres, and surrealist/absurdist drama, The Return is characterized by a rich cluster of metaphysical/mythological themes drawing on an eclectic range of sources (Vedic and Hindu mythology, Jungian archetypes, transcendental meditation, Greek mythology, esoteric and occult traditions, theosophy, etc.). We can view the entire Twin Peaks universe, I suggest, as a post-secular Manichean mythological allegory of societal corruption and a social-cultural as well as metaphysical struggle between good and evil in the postwar world.