‘Make sense of it’: Cult and complex TV fandoms,post-Truth discourse and an excess of meaning in Twin Peaks: Season 3

Abstract

The excess of mystery and ‘meaning’ in Twin Peaks: Season 3 (2017) reflects the post-truth ontological dissonance of information overload, tantalising the thirst for answers that dominates digital communication. Combining its clues and codes with payoffs for ‘long-term fan investments’ (Hills, 2020: 197) situates the series between two modes of fan participation: the curative puzzle-solving of complex ‘Quality TV’, and cult television’s ‘hyperdiegesis’. Season 3 is complex cult television, encouraging forensic and creative engagement. Replicating the polarisation of contemporary discourse while simultaneously promoting algorithmic literacy informs Mark Frost’s politicised vision for Twin Peaks, and David Lynch’s aesthetic experiments amplify this.

Much has been made of the slowness of David Lynch’s storytelling in Twin Peaks: Season 3 (2017): its lengthy silences, extensive non-sequiturs and that sweeping scene. David McAvoy (2019:92) has suggested that the relaxed pace of the season provides an aesthetically immersive experience that actively ‘works against’ the quick cuts and expository sequences of narrative-oriented televisual texts preoccupied with ‘online fan engagement’. This perspective, however, fails to address the show’s overwhelming avalanche of information and meaning, not to mention that contained within the literary epitexts produced by co-creator Mark Frost: a tide of numerological teases, seen and unseen characters (and their constant doubling/tripling), subplots, cryptic clues, bizarre technological devices and Easter eggs. That these are accompanied by frequent payoffs for ‘long-term fan investments’ (Hills, 2020: 197) would seem to counter McAvoy’s observation that the ‘complacent habits’ of forensic fan interaction do not offer ‘an appropriate methodology for reading and interpreting a show like Twin Peaks’ (McAvoy, 2019: 92). Instead, though the season’s structure and aesthetic are certainly atypical, Lynch and Frost nonetheless buy into two dominant modes of Web 2.0 television fan participation: the curative puzzle-solving of complex ‘Quality TV’ and the ‘hyperdiegesis’ and ‘perpetuated hermeneutic’ of cult series (Hills, 2002: 101–104). In this respect, Twin Peaks: Season 3 may be categorised as complex cult television, in that it animates both forensic and creative participation on the part of its viewers.

I do not dispute McAvoy’s assertion that the leisureliness of many sequences in Twin Peaks: Season 3 offers respite from the intensity of contemporary life, the elongated silences and repetitive motifs contrasting with the rapid shifts of digital networks, but rather argue that the show also revels in the condition of hypermediation. Few (if any) television shows have so acutely embodied the uncertain narratives and diversity of meaning that defined the 2010s and beyond. Frost and Lynch pepper their script with a relentless mass of often unintelligible phenomena, crafting a work that appears ripe for analysis but whose multiplicity of meaning renders it impossible to fully grasp. ‘There’s no stable baseline of agreed reality’ (Poniewozik, 2017): its convoluted mysteries, impenetrable clues and variability of interpretation evoke a post-truth ontological dissonance of information glut and hyperlinked rhizomania. The moment apparent understanding is reached, realisation of contradictory evidence within the text dawns, allowing for entirely disparate readings in a manner that mirrors the polarised discourses populating social media. McAvoy concludes that the slow pace of Season 3 operates as a deliberate critique of the ‘paranoid conspiracy logic […] inherent to even discerning puzzle-solving fandoms desiring “layers”, “depth”, and the visible marker of a hand moving all of the pieces carefully into place’ (2019: 98). Yet by embedding so many secrets, keys and prompts in the show, the majority of which are irreconcilable without considerable fan conjecture, Frost and Lynch actively tantalise the thirst for answers and conspiracy that dominates digital communication. As Franck Boulègue attests, after establishing both creators’ sympathies for conspiracy theories, the season ‘is so layered with meanings [that it is] possible to propose multiple interpretations of nearly everything. […] Meaning abounds, right under reality as we know it, and nothing is the result of pure chance. Viewers need [to] decipher the hidden messages laid out in plain sight’ (2020). This complex cult series encourages unending speculation, examination and disagreement, its polyvalence reflecting the disruptions of objectivity and subjectivity of its context. However, in doing so, it contradictorily may be said to actively promote a ‘media [and] algorithmic literacy’ in its analytical viewers (Bruns, 2019: 112–113). Twin Peaks: Season 3 replicates the polarised and conspiratorial mindsets of post-truth discourse and offers a potential retaliation to the increasing mainstreamification of ‘partisan content’ (Bruns, 2019: 108). This article contends that these goals are intrinsic to Frost’s politicised vision for the show and its epitexts, and that the aesthetic experiments of Lynch’s direction serve to amplify these themes (intentionally or otherwise).

It is worth briefly summarising some of the elements of Season 3 and its paratexts that have invited such obsessive speculation, as well as outlining the creative/production conditions that fostered such textual emphasis on mystery and meaning. I have already mentioned the excess of codes, names (including of many absent characters) and supernaturally charged technological devices, and the endless doubling, tripling and echoing of characters, colours, themes and events. These features rarely seem arbitrary, and ‘there’s this feeling that the numbers represent a hidden order, underpinning the storyworld, and yet we can never quite grasp it’ (Stewart, in Stamhuis, 2018). Dialogue, comprising opaque turns-of-phrase, pregnant pauses and narratively redundant repetition, feels comparably loaded: characters parrot weighty phrases back at one another and superfluously vocalise events that viewers have already witnessed. Multiple clues and storylines are never resolved, leaving textual lacunas that are exacerbated by whispers of veiled backstories that are never elaborated. Diegetic inconsistencies abound across both Season 3 and Frost’s novels, troubling the notion of an established ‘canon’, while frequent temporal and spatial ‘continuity errors’ frustrate plot linearity. This simultaneously chimes and clashes with the series’ thematic preoccupation with memory, nostalgia and ageing, as the show constantly flirts with self-referentiality while consciously undercutting its own history. There is an incessant troubling of boundaries between reality and fantasy, epitomised in the significance of dreams, the devastating potential of nuclear fission, a wealth of intertextual and historical citations, metatextual winks to fan speculation and self-referential nods to Lynch’s other artworks. Lynch’s sonic design and visual effects further the ‘sense of uncanniness and uncertainty’ generated by these diegesis-disrupting aspects (Halskov, 2021: 217). The tension throughout the season is thus situated in a balance between extraneity and insufficiency, whereby viewers are given a surplus of seemingly relevant information but are not provided with adequate context or connective tissue for the unassembled pieces.

Before analysing the implications of these textual elements, it is necessary to consider the tension between the distinct authorial aims and storytelling techniques of creators Frost and Lynch. Much response to the season has attributed its ‘artistic vision’ to Lynch, and Matt Hills notes that ‘with Lynch asserting [that] he viewed the production as one lengthy “film”, [and] directing every one of the 18 “Parts”, it was perhaps inevitable that [it] would be viewed as a strong re-assertion of Lynchian ownership and auteurism’ (2020: 191). Lynch carries the reputation of the painterly, the impulsive, the improvisational. He intrigues critics and audiences because of his abstract and impressionistic take on storytelling, one informed by his directorial preference for doing ‘what feels right’ in the moment, rather than scripting (and then realising) an obsessively intricate and lucid narrative. This artistic identity, or ‘Brand Lynch’, connotes ‘uncertainty’ (Hills, 2018: 24), and it is therefore unsurprising that Season 3’s impenetrability has been heavily credited to its director. The perception of a typical fan, that Lynch ‘mock[s] the kind of rationality that assumes that one air-tight explanation will account for all details’ (Jenkins, 1995: 62) exemplifies this ‘brand’. During the 1990s, his

authorial identity emerged [as] both that of a wizard programmer who has tapped into the network of previously circulating cultural materials and jerry-rigged them into a more sophisticated narrative system and that of a trickster who consistently anticipates and undermines audience expectations. […] Lynch’s predilection for casting roles with actors already familiar from other contexts [and] his allusions to other texts [gave] credence to the fans’ efforts to find the solution by looking beyond textual boundaries. [Some] sought the answers in Lynch’s own films, tracing repeated motifs and character names (Jenkins, 1995: 61)

In the years following the original Twin Peaks, Lynch’s work grew more abstract and aligned with spiritual and metaphysical concerns (cf. Nochimson, 2014). The assumption, one that circulated in recaps of Season 3, became that his ‘experimental vision […] seems more significant than coherent world-building’ (Hills, 2018: 314). Yet the insinuation that Lynch is wholly concerned with formalism and experientiality and therefore uninterested in forensic fandom ignores key features of his own role in the conception of Twin Peaks and in his oeuvre historically. Setting aside examples of Lynch encouraging the solving of mysteries surrounding his previous films, he is known to have personally incorporated many clues (and possible red herrings) into the plot of Season 3 after the conclusion of his and Frost’s collaborative writing process, not least The Fireman’s (Carel Struycken) allusions to ‘Richard and Linda’ in ‘Part 1’ and their re-emergence in ‘Part 18’ (Frost, in Bushman, 2020: 268). It follows that Lynch was probably responsible for The Fireman’s other mysterious utterances: ‘two birds with one stone’; ‘430’; the ‘sounds’ that must be listened to. Given that these bookend the season and are central to many fans’ overarching interpretations, it seems that Lynch enjoys providing content that engrosses participatory fans.

Nevertheless, it remains tempting to attribute the frequency of tantalising codes, numbers and rabbit holes of mystery to Frost rather than Lynch. Season 3 was the result of an intensive collaborative relationship between the two artists, who wrote it over at least five years (Bushman, 2020), so it is problematic that Frost’s input has been downplayed. Boulègue (2020) attests to Frost’s attraction to conspiratorial and pseudo-historical phenomena, while the writer’s interests (intertextual facts and factoids appear throughout Frost’s fictional and non-fictional works, especially the Twin Peaks epitexts The Secret History of Twin Peaks, 2016, and The Final Dossier, 2017) signal that he has been profoundly responsible for integrating plot-driven logic, puzzle-solving and mythos into Twin Peaks. Frost, even more than his co-writer, relishes giving his audiences clues. While their situation within the abstractions of Lynch’s direction means they do not offer ‘the reassuring prediction of solution and conclusion of the conventional Sherlockian clue’ (Nochimson, 2019: 243–244), fans are nonetheless set up to try to parse meaning from the outset. Frost’s Season 2 transformation of the vague phrases that Lynch wrote for Dale Cooper’s (Kyle MacLachlan) Season 1 dream sequence into hyper-literal clues that led to the revelation of Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson’s (both Sheryl Lee) killer is a prime illustration of the perceived creative relationship that the artists maintained during the show’s original incarnation. Either Frost would write a ‘complex’ narrative framework within which Lynch would improvise, or Lynch would generate otherworldly phenomena ‘off-the-cuff’, with Frost retroactively integrating it into the series’ existing canon. The contrasts between the two figureheads can be said to have had more impact on the incongruences of Season 3 than those of the first two seasons, however, given its unique production schedule. With Lynch directing the entirety of Season 3 as one extended ‘film’ prior to its air date, Frost had no scope to respond to Lynch’s inventions in ‘real-time’ over the course of the series. One can assume that Frost’s intricately woven plot, written alongside Lynch and designed to ‘fold [in] mythology [and] reverse-engineer [a] unified theory’ (Frost, in Bushman, 2020: 261), did not always manifest in the final work as he had anticipated, with many expository threads being snapped in Lynch’s translation from page to screen.

It is probable, though, that Frost anticipated Lynch’s diversions from the initial script. On a literal level, this is illustrated by the fact that he bookended the series’ release with two expository novels, both of which propose his ‘take’ on the Twin Peaks mythos. More speculatively, Frost’s awareness of the ambiguity and mystery surrounding Lynch’s storytelling style may have enabled him to predict the possibility for his thematic goals to be magnified by the aesthetic decisions of his co-creator. Frost has categorically confirmed the significance of disrupted ontology to his vision of Season 3 and its epitexts, explaining that he sees the ‘historical myth’ they fabricate as inhabiting a tradition of ‘magical realism’ (in Halskov, 2021: 172–173). His manifesto for the return of Twin Peaks (he approached Lynch with the proposal to revive the series; O’Falt, 2017) can be summarised in this quote from an interview with Andreas Halskov:

What we assume to be history […] may be more elastic than we care to believe. […] While we can and must distinguish between fact and fiction, everyone’s got a point of view and everyone has their own subjective experience. […] Life itself is a subjective experience. […] We’re rarely told to doubt the veracity of what we see and hear, but maybe that’s not the whole story. […] There may be no one thoroughly objective story. But the notion that it’s open-ended enough for people to draw their own conclusions is what fascinated me (2021: 173–174)

There are two standout issues raised in this statement, which could be said to delineate Frost’s (if not Lynch’s) dual aims in reviving Twin Peaks. The first is the need ‘for people to draw their own conclusions’ and ‘doubt the veracity of what [they] see and hear’. This is central to Frost’s determination to create art that engages its audience and challenges them to dig deeper and research further, to remember that historical ‘documents are always contradictory and difficult to reconcile’ (Bocko, 2017). This ideological position evokes the media/algorithmic literacy and fact-checking that Axel Bruns (2019) deems critical to reversing the mainstreamification of hyperpartisan ideologies/materials. We will return to Bruns’ research shortly.

The second principle is Frost’s reference to the confusion of subjectivity and objectivity that is a symptom of post-truth discourse. The importance of this theme is underlined when overtly introduced at the end of The Final Dossier (Frost’s final word on Twin Peaks at the time of writing) by Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell) as the impact of the changing timelines of Twin Peaks catches up to her. This ‘liminal character sees “her memories” of concrete events “erased” as her “consciousness is fully assimilated into the new reality”’ (Sweeney, 2019: 90). Everything becomes fluid and unmoored: there is no objective way of understanding the Twin Peaks story even within the diegesis of the show and its paratexts, epitomised in Season 3’s widely discussed focus on nostalgia and memory (cf. Hills, 2018; Fradley and Riley, 2021). As I unpack below, Frost’s political concerns regarding post-truth distortions and the conflation of ‘history’ and ‘myth’ are actively assisted by Lynch’s direction. The two combatting authorial voices synchronise remarkably well in this respect, as the quest to find meaning in Lynch’s abstractions inspires viewers ‘to draw their own conclusions’ by studying (Twin Peaks’) narratives more critically and imaginatively.

The longstanding relationship between Twin Peaks, transmedia storytelling and participatory fandoms, a precedent established with the 1990s series, contributed to Frost’s belief that a third season would present the ideal space for these thematic interests to percolate (see Dibdin, 2017). Fans engage with their favourite cult television shows more creatively than ever before via a multitude of platforms, and this is consequently informing the production of content by networks and streaming services. This content no longer exists in the form of a singular televisual text but is instead ‘dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience’, a development Henry Jenkins dubs ‘transmedia storytelling’ (Jenkins, 2007). Jenkins has written extensively on the transmedial spreadability and drillability of the original seasons of Twin Peaks (1990–1991), whose mythology – developed across tie-in books and 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – was trailblazing in its formulation of

a world where almost anything can count as a clue, including both material explicitly presented within the aired episodes and information from one of the many ancillary texts. [Fans were expected to] draw not only on the material explicitly presented but also on ancillary texts, extratextual commentary, and fan speculations as a way of building an increasingly complex map of the program universe (1995: 57–60)

Twin Peaks coincided with the early days of widely accessible internet access, airing alongside emergent digitised communication platforms such as message boards. Viewers would gather on these message boards after each episode (and long after the show’s cancellation) in an ‘ongoing [effort] to master a series that they feel uniquely realised the potentials of network television and […] computer communication’ (1995: 67). Stressing the centrality of fan engagement to its initial popularity and success, Jenkins defines 1990s Twin Peaks as an emblematic cult television series. Cult texts are marked by ‘narratives that afford fans enormous scope for further interpretation, speculation, and invention, [and] fantastical worlds where philosophical and ethical issues can be explored’ (Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson, 2004: xvi). The ‘cryptic and idiosyncratic’ Twin Peaks typified this, ‘invit[ing] the close scrutiny and intense speculation enabled by the fans’ access to [then-novel] technological resources. [Its] syntagmatic complexity continually open[ed] up new enigmas while closing down others’ (Jenkins, 1995: 54).

Halskov (2021) argues that the intensively interactive milieu of Web 2.0 meant 2017’s Season 3 needed to be a more ‘complex’ text than its earlier (Web 1.0) cult seasons. This is due to the amplified potential – even necessity – for ‘a more strategic form [of] storytelling that involves different media, engages the fanbase and taps into the fans’ nostalgic yearning for familiar diegetic worlds’ (Halskov, 2021: 154). Fannish activity in the era of so-called ‘Quality TV’ became much more immediate and collaborative than when the initial seasons of Twin Peaks aired, extending across a wealth of disparate algorithm-based communicative platforms (message boards being joined by social media, instant messaging apps, YouTube and so on). This was furthered by the explosion of ‘recap’ culture in television-adjacent journalism and blogging (Hills, 2018). A multi-platform communication matrix necessarily engendered more ‘complex’ television shows, and the density of these texts demanded ‘drillable engagement and forensic fandom’, with viewers encouraged ‘to pay attention and connect the narrative dots’ (Mittell, 2015: 289). Twin Peaks: Season 3 emerged within this ‘Quality TV’ context, and I argue that it inhabits an ambiguous hinterland between the ‘hyperdiegesis’ and ‘perpetuated hermeneutic’ of the cult text that informed its previous incarnation and the intricate ‘puzzle-box’ narratives that surround it. This latter trend, an extreme symptom of the shift toward ‘complex television’ and recap culture, found its zenith in the convoluted timelines of shows such as True Detective (2014-), Dark (2017–2020) and Westworld (2016-). ‘Puzzle-box’ plotting treats ‘narrative like a giant puzzle, where clues are doled out carefully and audiences are often left to figure things out on their own. [It is] constructed in a way that’s constantly demanding focus’ (Hardawar, 2018). Dark is an exemplar of this style, as its ‘labyrinthine narratives and captivating puzzle plots [mean that] the amount of reconstructive work that is needed far exceeds a traditional TV series’ (Halskov, 2021: 148–149). There is a requirement for ‘focused attention and collective dissection’ to parse what is happening (Hardawar, 2018), facilitated by both the ability to ‘bing[e] and re-wat[ch] [on] streaming services’ (Halskov, 2021: 150) and the interactivity of social media, forums, podcasts and YouTube. Fans must cross-reference every scene, clue and hint provided by the shows and their transmedial epitexts. Media outlets such as Vulture, The A.V. Club and IGN reworked their approach to televisual criticism to match this trend, with their ‘commonification’ of ‘recap culture’ (Hills, 2018: 317) comprising ‘episode-by-episode recaps [with] a much tighter focus on individual elements of the show’ (Crampton, 2016).

This context unquestionably contributed to the reception of Twin Peaks: Season 3, a text that shares many tropes of puzzle-box television. The innumerable codes and mysteries throughout the season render it ripe for interpretation. As if to underline the fact that its clues are there to be solved, it repeatedly prompts its viewers to ‘watch and listen’, to ‘understand’, to ‘lay everything out’, to ‘make sense of it’, while its protagonists struggle to do the same with the bewildering phenomena confronting them: Gordon Cole’s (David Lynch) ‘Congressman’s dilemma’, Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) at The Fireman’s Palace, Bushnell Mullins (Don Murray) with Dougie Jones (Kyle MacLachlan) case file doodles, to name but a few. There is an emphasis on close reading, as nothing is to be taken as arbitrary and everything must be examined in full. Fans responded with a wave of podcasts, Reddit and Facebook posts, tweets, video essays, forums and blogs, all desperately seeking to comprehend the season’s difficult narrative as – and after – it aired. This participation may not differ all that much from the cottage industry of fan-driven analysis that surrounds the puzzle-box texts mentioned above, but the revived Twin Peaks nevertheless does not fully resonate with the established definition of many of these shows.

A direct comparison with a series such as Dark, consistently likened to Twin Peaks, makes this distinction clear. Dark is incredibly complex, with numerous timelines, parallel worlds and characters intersecting in an ever-more convoluted manner, and this leaves viewers having to do a lot of intricate ‘reconstructive work’ to craft a sense of linearity and logic. Importantly, though, practically every component needed to ‘solve’ Dark is included in some form. Although the pieces are often buried deep within the scenery, the location and assembly of them can lead to resolution. Moreover, very little substance in puzzle-box texts is irrelevant to the comprehension of the narrative. No matter how abstracted the non-linear drip-feed configurations of these ‘plot machines’, their contents are carefully streamlined to facilitate completion of the puzzle. Ultimately, this rigidity of matter and structure limits creative fan involvement, only permitting viewers to play within the borders of the gridded sandbox assembled by the showrunners and leaving little space for speculative responses. Twin Peaks: Season 3 is anything but a streamlined ‘plot machine,’ instead replicating (even hyperbolising) the cult television tropes of ‘hyperdiegesis’ and ‘perpetuated hermeneutic’ identified by Hills (2002: 101–104). The former refers to ‘the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension’ (2002: 104), while the latter is the ‘drip-feed of piecemeal revelation and the persistent opening up of further speculation which together create the powerful drive of the endlessly deferred narrative’ (2002: 102–103). The incompleteness spawned by these two elements – a never-finished storyworld and substantial narrative lacunas – is crucial to cult television, as both allow for ‘enough space for subjective “creation”’ by participatory fans (ibid). Given that many of the most celebrated puzzle-box series form closed loops, prompting curative (as opposed to transformative) fan responses, there is a distinction between these ‘complex’ ‘Quality TV’ productions and what Hills and Jenkins define as cult texts.

The cult television-esque hyperdiegetic and perpetuated hermeneutic aspects of Season 3 make it counterproductive to fully assimilate it into the canon of puzzle-box television, even as its complexity is inspired by these shows. Instead of constructing elaborate timelines for fans to piece together, Lynch deploys a ‘free-form and often dream-like style that is confounding and disjunctive, [where the] viewer is introduced to characters who never appear again [and] to seemingly urgent questions and scenarios that are left tantalizingly […] unresolved’ (Fallis and King, 2019: 59). Season 3 is marked by extraneity and insufficiency, whereby fans receive a surplus of seemingly portentous information but are not afforded contextual or connective tissue for the unassembled parts. Viewers are given numbers, names and cues that would, in a conventional ‘Quality TV’ text, be secrets waiting to be decoded, but the tools/keys required to crack those codes are never provided (or, if they are, the link is impenetrably opaque). Stories trail off, clues lead to nowhere, and still the audience is continuously gifted disparate material to mould into something comprehensible. Occurrences, settings, dialogue and sounds are unmoored from any specific foundation; with few annotative blueprints or limitations, everything seems to simultaneously echo and bear no logical relationship to everything else. The season’s emphasis on doubles and triples (and more) is telling, with characters multiplying and fragmenting in ways that reflect the multivalent text that they inhabit, while frequent ‘chronological inconsistencies and “continuity errors”’ (Fallis and King, 2019: 59) upset efforts toward overarching narrative canonisation. The wealth of material of puzzle-box narratives is pushed to new lengths, but the decontextualisation renders the task of parsing meaning overwhelming. Instead of incoherently emptying the show of meaning, however, each sequence and conversation feels pregnant with potent implications for the overarching lore of Twin Peaks.

Hills (2020) attributes this to the consistent inclusion of fan-pleasing elements throughout the season, in the form of aged original cast members, connections to (and extensions of) established Twin Peaks mythos/canon, in-jokes, and more. ‘Subversive world-haemorrhaging’ is balanced ‘with more conventional world-(re)shaping’ (2020: 202), straddling the border between the authorial centrality and curative puzzle-solving of ‘Quality TV’ and the transformative fan participation of cult television. As Hills notes, Season 3

gave fans a clear return on their long-accumulated and perhaps dormant fan cultural capital. Lynch and Frost [make] a performative show of not delivering a standardized, franchised product whilst still respecting fans’ […] investments in the artistic world of Twin Peaks, and hence revising and expanding its ontological scope without wholly displacing prior fan knowledge. [They provide] enough ‘backstory’ and ‘origin story’ to reassure fans that the storyworld they’d wrestled with over time remained canonically validated, [with] just enough ‘trolling’ to reassure followers of the Lynchverse that Lynch was pursuing his own artworld vision. (ibid)

Lynch and Frost have expressed their passion for producing art that provokes fan engagement (see Lynch, 2007: 21; Bushman, 2020: 252). Their creation is perfectly aligned with the two dominant modes of hypermediated Web 2.0 participation: it invites puzzle-box television-esque examination while persistently ‘challenge[ing] and obstruct[ing] the viewer’s ability to put [its] pieces together’ (Bocko, 2017), meaning speculation is required to such a degree that analyses of the text effectively take the form of exhaustively considered ‘fan fiction’. However, while fan fiction is historically attributed to viewers’ extra-textual expansions of a cult television storyworld, in which the fanbase ‘fills in gaps in timelines, develops life stories for incidental characters, and extends narratives when a series ends’ (Cherry, 2019: 77), the amount of labour required to ‘fill’ and ‘extend’ the narrative in Twin Peaks is arguably greater than that of other cult series. Rather than a supplementary activity, fan conjecture becomes essential – even at the foundational level of narrative comprehension.

Twin Peaks: Season three fans, then, are given endless amounts of matter to parse, but no framework to prioritise or disregard material when connecting the dots in this complex cult text. This tide of information, its multivalent over-signification destabilising totalising readings of the season, places the same ‘overwhelm[ingly] incessant demands’ on viewers that Mark Fisher attributes to digital technology and social media (2014: 173). These ‘diffuse and centre-less’ platforms contain ‘everything happening across the world [and] everything that ever happened’ (Reynolds, 2011: 34), causing an ‘insomniac […] besieging of attention’ (Fisher, 2014: 24) and putting ‘excessive strain [on] people’s nervous systems’ (Fisher, 2014: 169). Fisher (2014, 2018) and Franco Berardi (2009) see the ensuing information overload as a problematic by-product of the complete integration of these media into everyday life. It impacts on an individual’s ability to make distinctions based on validity, ‘relevance’ and ‘quality’ due to an unbalanced ‘signal-to-noise ratio’ within the magnitude of sources and materials that they must process (Hargittai et al., 2012: 162). The social media at the heart of this information glut ‘let anyone say anything [and] concentrate attention on what is already popular; [their] design skews discussions away from careful debate grounded in evidence, and towards the extreme, favouring sensation, repetition and force’ (Oliver, 2020: 33). The term ‘post-truth’, popularised during the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, has come to describe the discursive effect of this context. A very brief overview of the term is useful to understand its relationship to Frost’s politicised aims for Twin Peaks: Season 3. Vitorio Bufacchi (2020) posits that

post-truth is a deliberate strategy aimed at creating an environment where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion, where theoretical frameworks are undermined [to] make it impossible for someone to make sense of a certain event, phenomenon, or experience, and where scientific truth is delegitimized (2020: 350)

Crucially, there is a blurring of the boundaries separating so-called ‘objective’ facts and ‘subjective’ beliefs; a conflation of ideology or illusion with verifiable truths caused by ‘the valuing of affective response over evidence [and] expertise’ (Oliver, 2020: 33). There are immediate resonances here with Frost’s insistences that ‘what we assume to be history […] may be more elastic than we care to believe’ (Halskov, 2021: 173–174) and that ‘documents are always contradictory and difficult to reconcile’ (Bocko, 2017). Frost was an outspoken critic of Trump’s ‘unsound’ rhetoric throughout the 2010s (Bushman, 2020: 187; 232), and it is not a stretch to assume that this leaked into his script for Season 3 (Anderson, 2021, and Fradley and Riley, 2021, have also highlighted many links between the season’s motifs and ‘Trumpism’). Indeed, the writer went so far as to equate Trump with the evil presences of Twin Peaks lore, obliquely inferring his possession of the Black Lodge-affiliated Owl Cave Ring in The Final Dossier (2017: 77).

The ‘ideological polarisation’ engendered by post-truth discourse (Spohr, 2017: 150–151) informs Eli Pariser’s controversial ‘filter bubble’ concept. According to Pariser, algorithms ‘intended to customize and personalize the user’s online experience place the user in a bubble where [they are] only presented with information that matches with previous consumption behaviour’ (2011). The term entered mainstream consciousness in the decade following the publication of Pariser’s book, and it is likely that a politically active figure such as Frost is aware of its definition and implications. Nonetheless, the filter bubble model has been debunked as ‘outlandish and unrealistic’ by Bruns, whose research shows ‘no empirical evidence for these information cocoons’ (2019: 95). Although this does not disprove the notion that Frost could have been inspired by the idea of filter bubbles (Season 3 was written prior to the publication of Bruns’ commentary), I include Bruns’ conclusions here due to their affirmation of Frost’s insistence that viewers/readers of Twin Peaks and its epitexts must relentlessly ‘doubt the veracity of what [they] see and hear’ (in Halskov, 2021: 174). Bruns finds that ‘a preference for particular ideas, values, and beliefs does not inevitably lead to the exclusion of anybody who holds different views’ (2019: 96). The problem is

…polarisation, not fragmentation. […] Fragmentation implies the existence of […] filter bubbles, where like-minded partisans connect and communicate amongst themselves and are oblivious to the views of the outside world. But this manifestly does not represent contemporary experience. Rather, as citizens especially on the fringes of the political spectrum become more polarised in their worldviews, they still hear but are increasingly less willing to listen to the views of their political opponents, preferring instead to repeat their own beliefs ever more noisily. […] The question is no longer what material these hyperpartisans encounter and how much [this] is shaped by algorithms, but rather how they receive and process this content (2019: 105–118)

He proposes alternative terms – ‘homophily’ and ‘selective exposure’ – as more demonstrative of social media communication, while detailing hyperpartisans’ exploitation of the ‘connective and communicative affordances’ of social media to push ‘partisan content’ (often colloquially dubbed ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’) into wider public consciousness and, subsequently, mainstream journalism (2019: 107–108). There is a cyclical effect to the increased media exposure of, for example, (predominantly right-wing) conspiracy theories: fringe ideas are popularised and seemingly legitimated, therefore forcing/necessitating expanded coverage. This amplifies the confusions of post-truth discourse, transporting once-marginalised extremist views (and the insubstantial evidential bases on which they are formulated) into the broader public sphere and further distorting the internet’s ‘signal-to-noise ratio’.

Even if Frost is cognizant of the limitations of the filter bubble model, that does not discount the influence that polarised perspectives and the circulation of fake news had on his political motivations for returning to Twin Peaks. Bruns’ argument that self-educational reading strategies are the most effective tactic for reducing the infiltration of hyperpartisan materials into the mainstream, with the ‘caveat’ that these ‘very strategies of critical media literacy have also been adopted and weaponised by the merchants of mis- and dis-information themselves’ (2019: 114), mirrors the importance that Frost situates in scrutinising the media/stories presented to users/viewers (Halskov, 2021: 173–174; Bocko, 2017). As Bruns asserts,

users of […] social media [must] be empowered not only to identify the biases of the human creators of the content they encounter, but also the biases introduced by the algorithmic filtering and recommendation mechanisms that have shaped these encounters. […] Such literacy should aim to increase the diversity of the media sources that online and social media users engage with and emphasise fact-checking as a fundamental media usage routine (2019: 112–113)

These intersecting themes of information overload, post-truth polarisation and media/algorithmic literacy are reflected in the hyperbolic superfluity and redundancy of Twin Peaks: Season 3. The show’s clues can be made to add up to anything, depending on the ideological framework of the subjective viewer. Its fusion of the intricate layering of mysteries typical of complex puzzle-box television with the requirement for conjectural fan participation that exemplifies cult texts echoes the multiplicity and insubstantiality of narratives circulating on social media. However, the need to investigate, to ‘make sense of it’, also pushes viewers toward more considered reading strategies. Without wishing to stray too far into assessments of its exceptionality, I believe that Season 3’s structure does not merely offer a self-congratulatory exercise in constructing yarn maps and ‘working it out’. Equally, it is not just a sandbox inviting fan fictional worldbuilding. It necessitates deep, measured and (crucially) creative analysis on the part of the viewer. It is complex and cult television.

The show has thus provoked countless ‘thematic’ and ‘reflexive’ interpretations (Hills, 2020: 201–202), encompassing (to name a few) numerological, multiversal, psychological, meta-textual, ufological, ecological and magical readings. Fans and critics comb for revelations, running episodes alongside one another to locate parallels, ‘remixing’ conversations to establish more rational patterns of dialogue, slowing down/speeding up sequences to find covert messages and constructing intricate configurations of numerical codes. Every set of coordinates, every one-off reference to a never-before-seen character, every ‘119’, every glint of light bouncing off the windows of an aeroplane – it must all add up to something. Or, if it does not, there must be meaning/intention behind this inconclusiveness. In attributing the season’s excesses and ruptures to the ‘late style’ of its creators, for instance, Jonathan Foltz’s analysis embraces the ‘feeling of being surrounded by clues and patterns and dream images’ (2017) instead of (perhaps futilely) struggling to unite them. Similarly, the hosts of the Diane podcast have compared Season 3’s textual fractures and abundance of meaning to the haunting eeriness of trauma, the techniques of ergodic fiction, and more. Adam Stewart, one of the co-hosts, ventures that

Season 3 is riven with […] absences of narrative and temporal cohesion. […] The season continuously defers, confounds and obscures its meanings, a quality which finds focus in elements that imply a hidden order, such as the recurrent instances of mysterious, seemingly metaphysically significant numbers. […] All this absence generates a feeling that there’s a radical outside to this tale, […] where these structuring elements reside just behind a curtain that the fans attempt to glimpse behind through theories and readings (2018)

Stewart acknowledges an alignment between the show’s content/form and participatory culture, pinpointing how the lacunas and surpluses titillate the transformativity of cult television fandom while gesturing toward the forensic curation of complex television recap culture. Viewers are given ‘glimpses’ at ‘meanings’, even as they are incessantly ‘obscured’ and ‘confounded’. Twin Peaks is always half-finished.

Instead of discouraging the ‘paranoid conspiracy logic’ (McAvoy, 2019: 98) that a post-truth sociological mindset germinates, these fragmentary techniques contribute to audiences becoming convinced that ‘meaning abounds, right under reality as we know it, and nothing is the result of pure chance’ (Boulègue, 2020). Conspiracy theories are often colloquially labelled as 21st century folklore, and such ‘secret knowledge’ seems buried within Season 3 and Frost’s novels. These texts, whose storytelling ingredients include confusion of realities/fictions, disparity of perspective and dissolution of selfhood, demand deep reading ‘strategies’ that parallel those of the conspiracy theorist. They also simultaneously critique the weaponisation of such ‘strategies’ by hyperpartisan ‘merchants of mis- and dis-information’ (Bruns, 2019: 114). In The Secret History…, Frost ‘explor[es] the pitfalls of believing narratives’ (McCarthy, 2019: 171) by remaining ‘resistant to answering questions [and] forcing the reader to reflect on what can and cannot be seen as the unimpeachable truth’ (McCarthy, 2019: 177). References to powerful esoteric groups (the Freemasons, the Illuminati) and Fortean mysteries (UFOs, greys, the Nephilim, Bigfoot) are woven into provable histories, while purportedly objective factual details (such as the date of the first Moon landing) are presented inaccurately. Timothy Galow identifies Season 3’s flirtation with the

fear/desire that the amorphous forces guiding events might result from actual controlling agents. [It] suggests an elusive order primarily through brief but incomplete references to [figures] who might control the jumble of events. […] Twin Peaks, with all of its attendant gaps and instabilities, […] draws on forces that operate beyond the immediate experiences of most individual characters. […] They leave behind little more than echoes and fragments that suggest an on-going presence without revealing anything specific about their influence on events (Galow, 2019: 210–212)

Dr Amp/Jacoby’s (Russ Tamblyn) frequent transmitted diatribes are designed to intensify this paranoia. Many critics interpret Amp as a charlatan, a mere snake-oil salesman ripping viewers off with gold-painted shovels. McAvoy’s reading of Amp as a parody of a ‘Peak TV online showrunner [who] livestreams an Alex Jones Infowars-style red-faced rant’ epitomises this (2019: 98). Yet Frost’s own opinions mirror Amp’s, even if his ideological social media posts are more level-headed than those of his creation. Joel Bocko aligns Frost’s political concerns ‘with the threat of small-minded or power-hungry authority figures, […] with different factions of the elite aligned with either light or dark forces in an eternal struggle’ (Bocko, 2017). Amp underscores Frost’s own suspicions of unseen agendas, clandestine power dynamics and alternative histories while histrionically reminding the viewer that nothing in Twin Peaks: Season 3 is unarbitrary – meaning is everywhere, and everything should be scrutinised. McAvoy argues that Frost and Lynch are critiquing ‘a worldview in which every structure has an antagonistic hand acting as puppeteer’ (2019: 98). Rather than refusing to engage with hyperpartisan worldviews, however, they actively embrace – even nurture – conspiratorial mythmaking.

Technological devices become a focal point for Season 3’s studies of social media polarisation and information glut. The mystical buzzing wires, bizarre apps, impossible phone phreaking and immense banks of monitors suggest unseen networks through which influence is arcanely exercised. In Lynch’s hands, these technologies are fetishised: the camera lingers on the glass case in New York, the communication box in Buenos Aires, the ‘machine’ that houses (or is?) Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie/Nathan Frizzell). This infuses each exoticised sculpture with a narrative pregnancy comparable to that of the season’s numerological cyphers. Joel Hawkes suggests that Lynch’s ubiquitous employment of screens as ‘frames’ allegorises the post-truth blurring of ‘fictions and reality [into] a surreal continuum’ (2019: 153). They function as metaphors for collective dislocation, reshaping cognitive and social abilities. Characters’ identities become ‘increasingly mediated through the[ir] screen(s)’; they are ‘dehumanized figures, isolated, and alienated from each other and from themselves’ (2019: 150). Hawkes concludes that

Lynch’s vision [is] a maze of images and realities, reflected and warped, built and destroyed, through the ‘realities’ of the screen, [which] becomes a source of stress – a force acting upon the body of the viewer, isolating and contorting, and fracturing the body of community. […] With a life lived through the screen – bombarded by screens and filmed onto the screen – we are exposed to multiple forces of control and manipulation (2019: 161–164)

Consider the (woods)men-in-black travelling through wires and radio broadcasts, covertly surveilling the action and spreading viral mind-controlling memes (literally pushing their way into characters’ heads). Frost and Lynch are fascinated by these enigmatic ‘forces’ and their reality-distorting machines, and the recurrent attention drawn to them across the season and its paratexts is not insignificant.

These mysterious technological elements leave viewers ‘firmly rooted in a state of uncertainty. [They] struggle to make sense of the scientific laws that govern the place [they] are visiting’ (Cobb and Potter, 2019: 244). The season’s preoccupation with dreams and unanswerable central maxim of ‘Who is the dreamer?’ aggravate these anxieties. Storylines and non-sequiturs drift in and out of focus, most offering little in the way of concrete resolution and thus compelling fans to speculate on their outcome and relevance. The ‘main’ plot (if it can be said there is one) makes sudden leaps into new planes of diegesis, introducing tropes from genres that seem alien to those which Twin Peaks has previously been understood to inhabit (Freddie Sykes [Jake Wardle] and his green glove being a paramount example). Fans ‘strive vainly to make meaning of the world’ (ibid) but cannot trust the information provided, as ‘scenes take place within illusions, or illusions nested within illusions’ (Poniewozik, 2017). Characters are revealed to be manufactured ‘tulpas’, but they often feel – as with Diane Evans (Laura Dern), for example – more embodied than many of the supposedly ‘human’ figures around them. Several purportedly ‘human’ individuals come across as mere ‘types’ or, in the case of Janey-E and Sonny Jim Jones (Naomi Watts and Pierce Gagnon, respectively), absurd automatons. The atomic structure of Twin Peaks is literally split with the reproduction of the Trinity detonation in ‘Part 8’, a historical quotation that ruptures the border between the fantasy storyworld of the show and the quantifiably ‘real’ world of its audience. In contrast with 1990s Twin Peaks, ‘there is a more pluralistic, multiversal set of possibilities, and a more radically destabilized sense of diegetic ontology’ (Hills, 2020: 192), setting Season 3’s storytelling devices directly within the post-truth context of ‘fake news, gaslighting, […] contested objectivity [and] an overwhelming flood of inputs – hoaxes, trolls, bots, clickbait, conspiracy theories’ (Poniewozik, 2017).

This unsettled modality haunts Lynch and Hurley’s ‘excessive’ contrapuntal sound design, whose ‘musical and sonic sense of defamiliarisation’ (Halskov, 2021: 216–218) is exemplified by the garishly twinkling bells and alarms of The Silver Mustang Casino, the perpetual bleeping noises of the FBI’s hotel room and the background hum of electrical static. No diegesis is stable: in ‘Part 16’, Gordon Cole seems to hear the (non-diegetic?) ‘American Woman (Remix)’ that accompanies Diane’s ascent to his hotel room. When rare snatches of nostalgic music emerge from the busy soundscape, such as ‘Laura’s Theme’ in ‘Part 4’ or ‘Heartbreaking’ (whose opening note, not trivially, is reminiscent of ‘Laura’s Theme’) in ‘Part 11’, their significance is exaggerated so that artificiality disturbs any straightforward emotional response. This ‘is exactly the point’ of these techniques, replicated in the ‘unnatural and unrealistic’ ‘Just You And I’ Roadhouse performance and the ‘evident’ lip-syncing of singer Rebekah Del Rio, as these ‘mechanical reproductions’ mean viewers ‘never [know] what is real and what is not’ (Halskov, 2021: 219–220). Lynch’s fantastical imagery increases the potency of this, with ‘baffling changes in colour palette’ (Halskov, 2021: 218), visual ‘glitches’ (Halskov, 2021: 221) and conspicuous special effects sabotaging verisimilitude. The non-synchronous proportions that define Lynch’s use of superimposition, as deployed in the woodsmen’s revivals of Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan), The Experiment’s (Erica Eynon) materialisation in the glass box, and Cooper’s head enveloping the sheriff’s station, are especially forceful in this regard. They imply innumerable realities concealing one another, convincing viewers ‘there is something hidden behind the objects and spaces [they] are being shown’ (Daniel, 2019: 67). Lynch’s theatrical, uncannily naïve aesthetics tease the presence of covert figures and meanings guiding the narrative. Ontological insecurity and conspiratorial mindsets are again invoked, and again fans are expected to ‘make sense of it’.

These experiments risk situating Season 3 within the extended ‘Lynchverse’ (Nochimson, 2014) as opposed to within the Twin Peaks canon. However, the show does not disconnect itself entirely from Twin Peaks, consistently reassuring ‘fans that the storyworld [remains] canonically validated’ (Hills, 2020: 202). Metafictional winks to the established universe and its fandom ‘liminally [merge] the show’s extra-diegetic fan reception and its diegetic world’ (Hills, 2018: 321), from the in-story naming of ‘Audrey’s Dance’, to the Roadhouse reproduction of James Hurley’s [James Marshall] ‘Just You And I’ (and Shelly Johnson’s [Mädchen Amick] reprimanding reminder of his pervasive coolness), to the casting of Mary Reber, owner of the ‘Palmer house’ (not to mention her allusion to the Tremonds and Chalfonts of Twin Peaks deep lore). These meta moments, alongside the many historical references, nod to Frost’s evocation of a ‘magic realist’ style, as the line between the diegesis of Twin Peaks and the real-world familiarity of its audience is frequently muddied. They also prevent the series from lapsing into pure ‘Lynchverse’ abstraction, which would have the undesired potential consequence of discouraging participation from invested cult fans. This brings into focus the many significant continuity errors that unmoor Season 3 and Frost’s novels from the original two seasons and Fire Walk With Me. Frost and Lynch are aware that fans, trained to ‘draw not only on the material explicitly presented but also on ancillary texts [and] extratextual commentary’ when forming their interpretations (Jenkins, 1995: 57–60), will pore over every detail and quickly observe these inconsistencies during their deep reading practices. By building overt paradoxes and canonical discrepancies into the show and its apparently supplementary (but contradictory) paratexts, the creators remind viewers that ‘what we assume to be history’ in the storyworld of Twin Peaks ‘may be more elastic than we care to believe’ (Halskov, 2021: 173–174).

While Lynch and Frost tantalise hypermediated viewers with an excess of information and an artistic flourish, playing along with a curative culture of complex ‘quality’ puzzle-box television, the integration of irresolvable narrative holes and references to the original series invites the more creatively conjectural participation of cult television fandoms. The season’s ambiguous meaning and ontology eliminate the prospect of a ‘final’ unified interpretation. In this way, as a complex cult series, Twin Peaks: Season 3 becomes a product of, critique of and antidote to the sociocultural context in which it is consumed. Frost and Lynch urge fans to ‘make sense of it’, to engage both critically and transformatively with Twin Peaks. In doing so, viewers can enhance their media/algorithmic literacy, learning to better navigate the glut of information surrounding them and to ‘reflect on what can and cannot be seen as the unimpeachable truth’ (McCarthy, 2019: 177) in an era when the very notion is contested.