10 Things We Learned From Twin Peaks: The Return Part 3
5. David Lynch Makes Watching Paint Drying Engrossing
In the two hour premiere, Lawrence Jacoby - who despite losing his license to practise psychiatry in The Secret History of Twin Peaks epistolary tie-in novel is credited as Dr. Lawrence Jacoby - is seen accepting a delivery of shovels.
In Part 3, he dons a gas mask and spray paints them gold in a mesmerising sequence filmed with Lynch's trademark, glacial pace. This scene is mirrored with the presence of gold elsewhere. When Dougie Jones' head implodes in the Red Room, his deflated corpse transmogrifies into a golden pellet. Gold features in worlds both material and physical, but the connection, like so much in The Return, is as yet unknown.
Watching paint dry in the hands of any filmmaker would be a confrontational exercise in sadist, avant garde pretension. In Lynch's, the scene is as hypnotic as it is ludicrously mysterious, extracting mystery from something so mundane a well-worn cliche defines it. What does Jacoby intend to dig up, if anything? What is the connection between his new hobby and the pilot of the original series, in which he digs up the other half of Laura Palmer's (golden) heart-shaped necklace? What does gold symbolise? Will this thread intertwine with the unseen billionaire in New York, or the new moneyed benefactors of the Great Northern?
The scene is emblematic of The Return's success. We do not know what Jacoby intends to extract, but Lynch has extracted layers upon layers of mystery from a cliche of tedium.