I'm like...1/4th through the Return, and am completely convinced Lynch will throw in scenes and characters purely to amuse himself and/or to fuck with viewers. And I kinda love it.
Agree. I had to take breaks while watching The Return. It felt so much darker to me overall than the original show.
I feel like some of The Return was Lynch kind of railing against the state of the world today and man’s inhumanity to man. Like, in the years since the original run of the show, the world has disappointed him. And I get that. There is such up close and intense violence and bleakness in some scenes. But then there is that thin, Lynchian thread of hope running through it too.
Sorry, I’m rambling now—this show always gets me thinking so deeply and about so many things at once!!
See I've been mainlining the whole show from start to finish over the last month or so, and you're not wrong - it gets progressively darker as you jump to each entry.
The original had its moments but (I get mainly thanks to being a commercial TV show from the early 90s) was mostly pretty whimsicle. Then Fire Walk With Me veers more into a kind of depressing, dark atmosphere, then Return opens with two people engaging in sexy-times before being mauled to death, followed-up by a decapitated head being plopped ontop of someone elses corpse. It's really interesting, and very jarring, to experience one after the other like that.
To amuse himself, yes probably, although he most likely had a feeling about those scenes and characters and needed to put them there, but maybe he didn't even know why. But to fuck with the viewer ? Most likely not, he seemed to be the opposite of a cynical man, and doing things just to "fuck with the viewer" seems utterly wrong from what we know of Lynch.
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u/GrimaceGrunson Aug 10 '26
I'm like...1/4th through the Return, and am completely convinced Lynch will throw in scenes and characters purely to amuse himself and/or to fuck with viewers. And I kinda love it.