A minute-by-minute analysis of one episode (Part 8) of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return
(2017). Much has been written about the work of David Lynch and existential fear in relation
to Americana and the American Dream-as-American Nightmare in terms that are circular and
artistically self-referential-or Lynchian. But with Part 8 of his most recent work the 2017
series Twin Peaks: The Return Lynch locates his singular and unsettling visual vocabulary
within an epic historical context: the world's first atomic explosion the Trinity Test. With
reference to the 1983 television phenomenon The Day After Lynch's work is newly situated in a
resurgence of works reassessing the legacy of Trinity. Among them: HBO's Chernobyl Trevor
Paglen's Trinity Cube Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris and Christopher
Nolan's Oppenheimer. With David Lynch's Part 8 a cultural circuit is completed from the
idiosyncratic and personal-or Lynchian-to the shared space of what theorist Paul Virilio
describes as "cosmic fear"-or an emergency of social media. After placing the work in this
specific context this book examines every minute of Lynch's Part 8 from Twin Peaks: The Return
minute by minute-a thrilling endeavor due to the radical landscape that Lynch sets forth: a
landscape of astonishing cinematic extremities from the maddeningly abstract absurd and
meticulous to the lush and terrifying. The director presents an uncanny intimacy that is an
achievement even among the most critically lauded works in Lynch's catalog.
