Upon
returning to Twin Peaks it only evokes what we all already knew; you cannot go
back. It is so cruel that in life we are destined to go forward whilst we long
to go back, we envy our younger selves as they mock us with the freedoms of
youth, the beauty, energy, vigour and zeal that only youth can bestow, however
we are obligated to trudge ever forward into the grey murk of tomorrow, without
anything but wrinkles, old age and mortality to greet us along the way. In an
age obsessed with youth and its inherent beauty, whereby your own experiences
have been repackaged and reframed and romanticised a thousand times over, it is
impossible to escape the allure of nostalgia and the seductive shimmer of
yesterday. This cultural appetite for our former years and decades past says an
enormous amount about our culture today, and by dwelling in the past we impede
the vitality of our future, as what has been can never be again, yes, you can
dust off the old suit, but it won’t fit the same.
This is
where we find ourselves in the contemporary climate of post-modern meta TV,
film and mass media consumption. Everything is being given a soft reboot, prequel, reimagining, continuation, or belated sequel. By
re-entering old relics of film and TV’s golden era, we hope to find salvation
and sanctuary in the fiction of a century that in hindsight looks simple,
unfussy and extraoridnary. Perhaps we took it for granted, perhaps they were the
golden years. The cinema of the seventies and eighties, the television of the
nineties, certainly had a vibrancy that has never been recreated or bested, so
we journey back. We re-tread the paths we have already trodden, we reframe it,
redress it, adorn it in new clothes, but essentially this is make believe,
dress-up – we are deluding ourselves that it is 1990 again, that these haggard
and worn bodies are immune to the inevitable decay of mortality and will live
eternally in these fictional lives. And in many ways, they will, such is the
power of cinema and art, celluloid is immortality, the characters we love from
every film and TV show we have ever adored will remain unblemished by the
passing of time and retain eternal youth as the world goes on trucking. There
is no need to go back, to try and make that which has passed present again, it
is there whenever we wish to return for that is the beauty of art and the true sanctity
of cinema.
So, as we
begin to re-enter the world of Twin Peaks in the year 2017, some twenty-five
years after the initial shows cancellation, it is with a pang of heavy dismay
that we are left feeling un-satiated, naturally disappointed as we realise upon
watching the season premiere that this isn’t the same as we remember,
everything looks familiar but we recognise nothing of what it was that we
loved. Because you cannot decant youth or the experiences which amounted to it,
you cannot preserve or recapture the purity of how those experiences made you
feel, nostalgia can only ever be the pang that that beautiful thing is no more,
which makes it more beautiful as it will never age, never deteriorate and never
disappoint. But once you revisit the past, once you put yesterday’s clothes on
today, it only reminds us how much time has passed, how old we have all gotten,
how much the world has deteriorated, how far away that golden century now
seems, so it can only be viewed with a sense of sadness, a heavy sigh and a
sense of dissatisfaction.
It is
important for us culturally as we sail the choppy waters of tomorrows uncertain
future, that to ensure the beauty and vitality never fades from the art we
create, the films we adore and the TV shows we fall in love with, we must
create new stories, new narratives, new characters and new worlds for it is in
the genesis of pure creativity that we fall in love. We must relinquish our
obsession with the past, the attachments we have for our former selves, our
former lives, and our former bodies, no matter how wondrous they appear in
hindsight. It is integral we greet our future, not with resignation and despair,
but with the same romance and reverence we have for the past. It is time to
create new stories and fall in love all over again.
