Henry O'Brien
Quentin Tarantino’s much-discussed 10-movie limit comes from a self-imposed belief of wanting to “go out on top.” To him, he feels that many of the greats have fallen to an inevitable decline. His question isn’t without merit. How can a filmmaker, or an artist for that matter, maintain their narrative and stylistic trappings while holding onto some form of overarching narrative in their filmography? This question rings further true when so many of the Golden Era Hollywood greats like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford had less filmmaking and thematic strengths in their later films.
Contrary to Tarantino’s instincts, there are plenty of filmmakers today obsessing over the same ideas they had 50 years ago, only applying them to a more modern context and confronting their own mortality. Martin Scorsese has used his last three films — Silence, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon — to examine his own relationship to Catholicism and the great sins of 20th century America, all the while he knows he’s “running out of time.” Meanwhile, David Cronenberg continues to understand how art and technology become extensions of the human body in 2022’s Crimes of the Future, while additionally processing the death of his wife in his upcoming release, The Shrouds.
Around this time, there have been two filmmakers whose “final” major works share a deep instinct of wanting to understand America through the lens of cinema and their careers in the industry. David Lynch, who sadly passed away in January at the age of 78, did not intend for Twin Peaks: The Return to be his last massive project for film or television. Along with making short films like WHAT DID JACK DO?, Lynch apparently “was not, in any way, done,” according to a Los Angeles Times interview with Naomi Watts. Similarly, we still don’t know if the 94-year old Clint Eastwood, who released his 40th directed feature Juror #2 just last year, will be his final directorial effort.
With Twin Peaks: The Return and Juror #2, Lynch and Eastwood continued to obsess and examine their interests in all of the nastiness, beauty and foibles of America. While these works from two major directorial figures may have differing conclusions and thoughts on America itself, Lynch and Eastwood still display a curiosity about this country and its people, even in their advanced age. The endings of Lynch’s 18-part odyssey and Eastwood’s courtroom drama highlight not just the horror and unsettling nature of the suburbs, but they also undercut the entire notion of wanting to “go out on top.” Once Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) lets out one final scream in The Return and District Attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) tracks down Justin (Nicholas Hoult) in Juror #2, we see how Lynch and Eastwood never stopped thinking about a wound at America’s heart, and these two directors keep dissecting it.
Although both men seem to acknowledge the problems in their home county, they both go about portraying it differently and their politics wildly vary and are at times hard to exactly pin down. That’s less the case with Eastwood, who is most famously a Libertarian and in many ways, just wants to be “left alone.” However, he has been undoubtedly politically active throughout his life, mostly infamously in his incident at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where he talked to an empty chair that represented then-President Barack Obama. Eastwood has voted for the Republican Party for much of his life in presidential races, and his movies, including Juror #2, can espouse a view of American greatness in its systems and its ideas it purports.
This is most clear during the juror selection process, when the judge (Amy Aquino) explains to the potential jurors that since they do not have any “skin in the game” and don’t want to be stuck in a courtroom, they can be perfectly impartial. The judge acknowledges the system is flawed, but feels that it’s the best system for finding justice. This could undoubtedly stand in for Eastwood’s own beliefs, with an additional history of doing PSAs for “taking pride in American land.” Yet, he and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams spend the next 105 minutes peeling away at that belief, questioning what it means for the legal system to uphold justice and how that can butt up against ideas of right and wrong.
Once Justin realizes he is responsible for Kendall’s (Francesca Eastwood) death, he wrestles with what the right thing to do is, especially since he feels like he’s near his happy ending after coming out the other side of his battle with alcoholism. With light shining down on him in the deliberation room, Justin feels precisely like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men. He’s trying to find a just compromise and give the defendant, accused of killing his wife following abusive behavior, a fair go with the American justice system, but trying to do the right thing isn’t exactly on the side of fairness and justice, considering he wants the accused to go free and him to avoid jail time for a hit-and-run.
This inversion of Fonda’s famous character from the 1957 Sidney Lumet film feels as though Eastwood wants to solve a thorny experiment: What if a guilty man determines an innocent man’s life? It’s a fascinating dynamic where Eastwood, who still believes in the American justice system and promoted downright right wing and fascist views in the Dirty Harry films, shows the cracks that can occur.
Although Lynch seemingly did not have the same right wing views as Eastwood, he does have a history of not completely aligning with left-wing views. While Lynch supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, he also voted for Ronald Reagan back in 1984. Lynch may have had these varying views on political figures, but he has always wanted to escape to his art and his Transcendental meditation. As Dennis Lim of The New Yorker described, there is a certain level of privileged detachment that can create a level of intersection between Lynch and the current leader of right-wing thought in America, Donald Trump.
“It is perhaps inevitable that Lynch and Trump—both first-wave baby boomers, born six months apart, in 1946—would somehow intersect in the cultural imagination,” Lim continues. “Each, in his way, is a quintessential product of postwar white America, and trafficks in its myths, icons, and taboos (not least among them the figure of the abusive patriarch).
“The bomb looms large for these children of the atomic age: one brags about his nuclear button, the other consecrates the Trinity test as the original sin of the twentieth century. They share an interest in the uses of fear, a tortured relationship with language, and a vision of America that is overwhelmingly white, and prone or susceptible to extreme, sudden violence.”
Lim is also quick to acknowledge that while there can be an intersection between Lynch and Trump, they undoubtedly go down far different paths.
All of this is to say that Lynch may not be able to be easily put in one box or another, showing how his works can portray the light and darkness of a certain world, particularly American worlds like suburbia or Hollywood. Blue Velvet and the first two seasons of Twin Peaks revel in the beauty of the suburbs and Americana in general, while depicting the horrors that lie underneath or are simply nearby.
Lim continues by saying how Twin Peaks: The Return effectively becomes a thorough rejection of nostalgia, almost entirely ignoring a sense of obligation to the fans. The whole season rarely takes place in the town of Twin Peaks, instead becoming an odyssey about America in a post-2008 recession world. Yes, there are appeals to nostalgia, like when Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) sees Laura Palmer’s picture or when Dale Cooper, finally regaining consciousness, declares, “I am the FBI.” While both moments can get fans excited, they are tinged with sadness and a level of discomfort, particularly when Cooper not only becomes the FBI in his own eyes, but also a time-traveling god who can make everything OK.
Part 18 of The Return deals with the consequences of Cooper not only defeating BOB (Frank Silva), and also traveling back in time to save Laura from her death. The episode plays as the ugly B-side to Part 17’s more hopeful and nostalgic tone, and the final minutes of Part 18 only amplify the ugliness and horror.
The final eight minutes of Part 18, titled “What is your name?”, see Cooper and a waitress named Carrie Page (Lee), who to Cooper looks exactly like Laura Palmer, drive back to Twin Peaks in the dead of night. As the time ticks down on the episode, a creeping comes not from what’s going to happen, but more so that this is the amount of time we have left with characters we thought we knew and love. While Cooper and Carrie drive to Laura’s old house, there’s very little dialogue and the digital cinematography has little light and the characters are left in the near pitch black. These characters, symbols of our nostalgia and belief in going back to the past for comfort, are now washed out by the darkness of the present. There’s additional tension from how the camera is held; it shakes while the characters sit in the car, only heightening a form of sinister angst.
Cooper and Carrie see Laura’s old house, the camera still shakes, but a little more violently than before. Something evil lurks in this suburban home, and it’s been lurking there since the Palmers resided there. Carrie doesn’t remember the house, so Cooper and she go to the front door of the white house, holding hands, and meet the current residents. Out comes a stranger named Alice (Mary Reber), who has no clue who Cooper is talking about when he asks for Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), Laura’s mother. After Cooper questions Alice about the house’s ownership history, he apologizes for the disturbance and he and Carrie go back into the street.
Despite the indoor lights and front porch light serving as our source to see Cooper and Carrie, there still is an evil quality to the conversation with Alice. Ownership, or lack thereof, plays a part in The Return. We first find Dougie Jones, a tulpa of Cooper, inside a semi-abandoned cookie-cutter home, which is surrounded by suburban and desolate cookie-cutter homes. The housing crisis that caused the 2007-08 recession adds to the air of quiet death in Twin Peaks’ America and America in general. Alice and her off-screen conversation with a figure she calls “honey,” reeks of unsettling mystery and a coldness or lack of soul within these families and suburban homes.
Finding no results for Sarah Palmer, Cooper and Carrie returned to the street, perplexed and terrified. Cooper, now walking mechanically, desperately asks, “What year is this?” Carrie gives no response and looks back at the house before giving a horrified look and a Laura Palmer-esque scream when she hears Sarah’s voice coming from the house. Once she screams, Cooper looks at her in horror and the white house’s lights go out and there’s one spark before we cut to black and her scream starts to fade away.
Ending the story of Twin Peaks with a Laura-esque shriek makes it feel like Lynch is trying to say that the world of the show, and in essence America, has succumbed to a silent terror. Throughout the final scene, the camera is shaking and taking on a floating presence as if a spirit or spectre is guiding Cooper and Carrie to a malevolent end. Fan theories and easter eggs point to time loops of a non-stop battle of good and evil, and the presence of a grander villain in Judy, but there is a clear re-awakening of Laura Palmer, who remembers the horrors that have befallen her. It’s a re-examination of the show’s past and our past, and while there will be Cooper there to try, and in the series finale’s case, fails, to fix everything, there is a continuous inquisitive nature to understand how we got here and what good can be done. The last image we see of Twin Peaks in the credits is Laura whispering something to Cooper in the Red Room, implying there’s more information to be given. There’s always more to solve.
Lynch’s quest to understand the world we live in through the lens of Twin Peaks: The Return takes us to dark places, and Eastwood does similarly, though Juror #2 is far from a surrealist nightmare. The closing moments of Eastwood’s 40th directed film do not leave the audience feeling exactly thrilled about the justice system.
With the life sentence given out to the accused, Justin, now with a child at home, and Faith, now the District Attorney, discuss the case and the thought that an innocent man is going to prison in very hypothetical terms. Justin and Faith are shot with a bizarre angle of over-the-shoulder and shot-reverse-shot, where we can still see both characters in frame. The discordant nature of the tension and dynamics is definitely indicative of Eastwood’s nature to shoot as few shots as possible. It also speaks to how both Justin and Faith understand the nature of right, wrong, justice and truth, but still remain splintered because they both know he committed the hit-and-run. Justin departs, and Faith is left watching him go while the camera is placed at a high angle above a statue of Lady Justice. Even as the case is over, the scales of justice are still moving up and down. There are two quick scenes of Justin visiting his victim’s grave, giving flowers and driving away with his car that he now has up for sale. Meanwhile, Faith is packing up her office following her win as District Attorney, which was a key subplot for her character throughout the trial.
Like The Return, Juror #2 ends in and around a suburban home. The establishing shot shows Justin and his wife Allison’s (Zoey Deutch) white and light blue home surrounded by lush sunlight and trees with hints of Spanish moss. The film follows this up with a mixture of medium close-ups of Justin and his wife, and a wider shot of Justin throwing paperwork on a table for selling the car that he inadvertently killed the woman with. Justin goes to sit back down with Allison and their child, with sunlight shining down on them. Eastwood, for all of his insistence on moving on quickly from shot to shot, seemingly uses a form of artificial lighting from the outside to shine down on the ideal, beautiful American family.
All of the dynamics shift when Faith knocks on their door. When Justin gets to the door, the shot starts on his hand grabbing the door handle before the camera swings up to meet Faith. The film ends with the camera zooming in on both Justin and Faith twice, concluding on Justin’s face with crickets’ sounds getting louder and louder before a cut to black. What happens after remains a mystery, and the semi-ambiguous yet semi-certain outcome for Justin points back to the shot of Faith in the presence of the scales of justice. The system will keep playing out if Faith goes through with investigating some of the incriminating evidence against Justin further. But will she?
The shaking scales and ambiguous ending play right into Eastwood’s whole mantra. No matter how he feels about these systems (mostly positive) and no matter how beautifully he can portray an ideal American life, it can feel artificial when faced up against the law and the truth. He wants to know what America is like when there is a person like Justin, who finds that truth and justice do not always agree with one another.
Both endings for Eastwood and Lynch point to the idea of never remaining still. They never want to keep their conclusions fossilized into one moment in time. Although Lynch is no longer with us and Eastwood is at such an advanced age, his next film is still very questionable; their concluding projects serve as non-stop-moving scales of justice. Both men always wanted to work and obsess over America. Sure, you can lose some of your skills with age, but having such an interest and curiosity over a subject can keep your material as fresh as ever.
