[page 44] Abstract: The Roadhouse scenes in Twin Peaks: The Return resolutely defy the conventions of serial television drama. From showcasing interminable bouts of floor-sweeping, to featuring lengthy music videos by little-known acts, to lavishing attention on the trivial conversations of seemingly random people, these scenes give significant time and space to stuff you just don’t usually see in a tightly plotted series. I suggest that these unconventional scenes are a feature rather than a bug. I argue that the Roadhouse scenes in The Return offer a therapeutic opportunity for viewers to become well-practiced at coping mindfully with feelings of alienation that arise from thwarted expectations—a skill as valuable for everyday life as for appreciating Twin Peaks.
Keywords: Roadhouse, mindfulness, alienation, hope, social hope
Twin Peaks: The Return’s Roadhouse scenes resolutely defy the conventions of serial television drama. From showcasing interminable bouts of floor-sweeping, to featuring lengthy music videos by little-known acts, to lavishing attention on the trivial conversations of seemingly random people, these scenes give significant time and space to stuff you just don’t usually see in a tightly plotted series. I suggest that these unconventional scenes are a feature rather than a bug. The Roadhouse scenes in The Return (2017) offer a therapeutic opportunity for viewers to become practiced at coping mindfully with feelings of alienation that arise from thwarted expectations—a skill as valuable for everyday life as for appreciating Twin Peaks. By training us through the repeated thwarting of our expectations to let go of the hope that every minute will be scintillating, every song our favorite, every character fully rendered, the Roadhouse prepares us to abandon expectations for the series as a whole so that we can be more fully present to what is happening moment to moment. Better able now to revel in [page 45] the play of the experience for its own sake, we can delight in surprises from the unknown rather than expecting and then lamenting unrealized outcomes.
Once at play in the series in this way, we expand our receptivity to the show's potential to transcend the safe and the familiar and to challenge and expand our understanding. Now without fear that the looming disappointments of vain hope—What’s with Cooper? Where’s Audrey? How’s Annie?—will send us cringing to the most obvious, accessible, or ungracious receptions of what is revealed, we allow the show to present itself in all its uncanny otherness and delight in it. Ironically, losing hope—in this more mindful sense of the phrase—can give us an invigorated sense of purpose, more interpretive freedom, and thus increased potential for learning and growth.
To clarify my aims for this essay, I’ll begin with two guiding caveats and two curious proposals that inform my approach to The Return’s Roadhouse scenes. The first caveat is that my interpretation of the Roadhouse’s roles in Twin Peaks assumes nothing about the creators’ intentions. Following the giant of twentieth-century hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer, I think the meanings of a work of art always transcend the artists’ intentions, evolving in the back-and-forth negotiations of its interpretive communities. Trying to discern authorial intent in the case of Twin Peaks is especially fraught, given that this world spans multiple media created by multiple authors. The second caveat is that my interpretation is not definitive, even of my own evolving understanding of the Roadhouse. Its limits should be balanced by other readings, as I note in conclusion.
The first curious proposal is that the Roadhouse teaches that alienation can be edifying—that we can profit from feeling alienated if we learn to inhabit our estrangement from experience in a curious, mindful way. The second curious proposal is that the Roadhouse teaches that hope can be stultifying—that yearning too deeply for certain outcomes, in our favorite shows or daily lives, can limit imagination, steal joy, [page 46] and even consign us to lives of perpetual anxiety and regret. I’ll read the Roadhouse as an invitation to dwell in the provocative words of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca: “Cease to hope . . . and you will cease to fear!” (38). 1
I develop this interpretation in three steps. First, I frame the Roadhouse as a site of alienation and thwarted expectations, for the characters and the audience too. Second, I show how the continuous performance of discontinuity in these scenes offers viewers a golden opportunity to exercise the therapeutic described above. I conclude, finally, with a brief challenge to my interpretation, acknowledging a need for other readings to correct and balance a key limitation.
The Roadhouse as a Site of Alienation and Thwarted Expectations
My first experience of the Roadhouse in The Return wasn’t in fact alienating. The sense of relief I felt upon being delivered into the loving arms of Chromatics from the despair of the Palmer living room was profound. You may recall this transition in Part 2. Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) suffers in the wreckage of the home that ruined Laura. She watches, entranced—eyes bulging, skeletal fingers delivering frantic drags of her nth cigarette, as a wildebeest is devoured alive by lions.
Trouble on the home front—domestic trauma—has always been the dark heart of Twin Peaks, and the Palmer house is its emotional nerve center: a black-shuttered Dutch Colonial amygdala where love, fear, anger, and sexual desire primordially reside together. So when the opening measures of “Shadow” suddenly deliver us from the Palmer house to the Roadhouse, I was ecstatic. Like Laura, many of us would rather be anywhere but home, and initially it seems like the Roadhouse delivers just the escape that we crave: dreamy music, sweet nostalgia, tequila shots with Shelly (Mädchen Amick), risky flirting with a mystery man, and a chaser of “two ice cold Colonials” with James (James Marshall) and Freddie [page 47] (Jake Wardle). At first, I couldn't agree more with Freddie: “It's the dog's bullocks in here!”
But after a big night at the bar, things often look different in the morning. What is concealed of the Roadhouse inevitably reveals itself relentlessly: the Roadhouse is not a friendly place where everybody knows your name and certainly not a place where you know everybody else's (here’s looking at you, Renee, Charlotte, Chloe, Ella, Abbie, Natalie, Trick, Angela, Clark, Mary, Sophie, Megan, Paula, Tina, Chuck, Skipper, Ruby, and Monique). The Roadhouse is a place for being anxious, ill-at-ease, alienated—literally and figuratively not-at-home. It's a place where people estranged from their children, significant others, jobs, and especially their best selves engage nightly in tedious escapism, mind-numbing small talk, and throwaway acts of cruelty and betrayal. It's a place where psychopaths who beat up their own grandmothers pay off crooked cops between assaults and attempted murders. And a place where exploited artists perform for gas money, singing about death, suicide, self-doubt, unfulfilled longing, unrequited love, looming failure, irreparable loss, the unaffordability of salvation, and of course the desperate hope, though everything seems to be receding into shadow, that “love won't go away” but will “come back and stay, forever” (as Julee Cruise yearns in her Roadhouse performance of “The World Spins” in Season 2, Episode 7 of the original series). The Roadhouse is potentially alienating for its televisual audience too. Its appearance often signals the ending of a much-anticipated episode that, during the first run, anyway, was for many viewers the highlight of their week. Endings are often a letdown, but they can be especially disappointing when accompanied by unmet expectations. The Roadhouse demands that we listen to music we may not love and that we witness the trivial conversations of people we couldn't care less about.
We must do these things repeatedly, perhaps with growing irritation, as the weeks pass and we are forced to calculate the increasingly high opportunity costs of watching “Ella” complain to “Chloe” about work or “Sophie” compliment “Megan” [page 48] on the sweater she borrowed from “Paula.” Viewers can be forgiven for failing to care that “Trick” is “lucky to be alive” when Audrey's fate remains a mystery and we've seen more of some rando sweeping out the bar than of our hero, Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), at least as we remember him.
For Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the Roadhouse is especially alienating—first because it’s the one place she wants to go but can’t, and then because, when she finally gets there, it’s not what she expected. It’s simultaneously the place on which all of her hopes depend, and—perhaps inevitably—the place those fantasies go to die. But here’s the thing: we are all Audrey. The higher and more specifically we set our expectations of life and the more our happiness depends on this or that anticipated outcome, the more estranged we become from the goodness, truth, and beauty of what is presently before us, as we teeter-totter back and forth between anxiety over expectations and regret over past disappointments. Caught in this oscillation of regret and expectation, the past and future dominate us, and joy in the present is diminished or lost.
The Roadhouse’s Continuous Discontinuity as Therapeutic Wake-Up Call
Alienation and the feelings of discomfort and defensiveness that accompany it can be instructive if we pay attention. And that’s why the Roadhouse piqued my curiosity—I wondered, why are we spending so much time in this alienating place? How can I learn and grow from interrogating the source of my discomfort?
I followed my curiosity into a full investigation for The Glass Box. I cataloged the location and time of every Roadhouse scene, the characters and narratives, every word spoken and lyric sung. I categorized the scenes into types that, I hypothesized, were woven through reality, fantasy, and dreams, across timelines and other possible worlds. With the data amassed, I created a table to facilitate comparing the infor-[page 49]mation from all sixteen scenes in hopes of seeing from above the grand metanarrative. Like Audrey, I became obsessed with the Roadhouse. And I discovered—or at least imagined that I discovered—some fascinating things along the way. Some suspected that the Roadhouse offers little but music videos and chatty strangers, but I found in it a pivotal location for weaving together, from threads of reality, fantasy, delusion, and dreams, the two crucial narratives that respectively draw Mr. C (MacLachlan) and Freddie to the Sheriff’s Station for the “unofficial version” of the showdown that FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) will remember. What I didn’t find, much to my dismay, was the “master narrative” that I expected. My efforts to master the Roadhouse mastered me into the deflating realization that these scenes strenuously resist any unified interpretation. The arrangement of these scenes—the fits and starts of partial patterns taken up and then abandoned—couldn’t be more resistant to prediction or better suited to thwarting expectations if they had been contrived to do so.
The concluding Roadhouse scene in Part 2 sets us up for a nostalgia-fest with favorite characters. Parts 3 and 4, then, build on this foundation of concluding in the Roadhouse, but abandon the interaction with past characters, tempting us to expect a “band showcase” at the end of each part moving forward. But then, the Roadhouse shows up in Part 5 well before the episode's end, wading deep into narrative waters: introducing Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) and exposing corruption in the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department. Part 6 veers back to the band showcase, but Part 7 departs entirely from precedent by showing us the Roadhouse after hours. And Part 8 goes even farther off script by taking us to the Roadhouse just eleven minutes in, introducing the pinecone-mic-wielding emcee, subjecting us to “THE Nine Inch Nails,” and then launching us into a mushroom cloud. Part 9 introduces the “random strangers drinking beer” thing, and matters only get increasingly unhinged in the second half of the series as we careen, willy-nilly, from another band [page 50] showcase in Part 10, to the omission of the Roadhouse altogether in Part 11, to more and still more boozing strangers in Parts 12 and 14, to bizarre meta-performances from the soundtracks of previous Twin Peaks seasons, such as “Just You” in Part 13 and “Audrey's Dance” in Part 16. And why not visit the Roadhouse twice in the same episode (Part 15), first to get hopped up on ZZ Top while Freddie pulverizes Chuck (Rodney Rowland) and Skipper (Casey O’Neill) and then to witness two dirty, bearded men callously assault a young woman?!
What I’m left with in the face of this chaos is the impression that these scenes are continuous only in their unrelenting discontinuity. The Roadhouse simply will not let us settle, forcing us part after mystifying part to abandon our received views about televisual narrative, let go of our hopes for precious time with favorite characters, and fearlessly experience the beautiful and terrible possibilities before us. Here are some concrete ways this happens in the Roadhouse:
1. Mood Framing: Through the careful juxtaposition of music, dialogue, and events, the Roadhouse scenes conjure a mood of productive anxiety and alienation that reminds us of our tendency wallow in the familiar and calls us out to transcend the known. Dozens of lines in Roadhouse songs resonate here, but Chromatics sings my favorite exemplar of the genre in “Shadow”: “At night we're driving in your car, pretending that we'll leave this town. I took your picture from the frame, and now you're nothing like you seem.” When we stop pretending to leave the old ways behind and jettison the inherited frames of reference that limit growth, new revelations can appear.
2. Thematic Texturizing: The Roadhouse scenes provide many case-studies of the ravages of the familiar gone bad: domestic violence, sexual abuse, infidelity, parental neglect, escapism through drug- and alcohol-abuse, gossip, fantasizing about unavailable people, and cruelty. We are [page 51] reminded of the gravitational pull of the familiar, of its destructive power, and of the need to face these scourges head-on to transcend them.
3. Therapeutic Expectation-Foiling: By consistently foiling our best efforts to master them, the Roadhouse scenes help us to get over the need to have our expectations met so that we can enter the play of the unknown, appreciating horizon-expanding adventures as the mystery unfolds.
Like Audrey, the upshot of my time in the Roadhouse was that my projected fantasies couldn’t be sustained under scrutiny. That failure of my grand aspiration for a unified theory woke me up to how much goodness, truth, and beauty there is just in rolling with what’s there and allowing it to teach me. And that is why I see Audrey’s awakening as both a potentially beautiful thing for her and a guiding example for us. Like Audrey, we have an opportunity to experience the Roadhouse as a wake-up call for disabusing us of delusions and self-defeating false narratives and raising our consciousness of the present moment.
The Roadhouse, like being human, is dazzlingly unpredictable and always difficult, but potentially beautiful. Show up with rigid expectations, and you’ll oscillate between hoping for something that never arrives and lamenting what’s happened. But show up for it with curiosity, humility, and openness to growth, and even the most difficult present can be a gift. The trick is to be radically open to what's there, even and especially when doing so requires an unwelcome departure from our expectations or desires.
A Concluding Challenge: Why Personal Quietism Needs Social Activism
I’ll end with a brief discussion of a limitation that calls for criticism. This take on the Roadhouse offers what one might call a “meditative” or “quietest” approach to dealing with personal adversity; it describes a spiritual orientation that seeks to accept whatever the present dishes out, even when [page 52] destiny upends best laid plans. However valuable this interpretation might prove for individuals confronting the chaos of life in general, though, it’s crucial to recognize that it is not adequate on its own to secure, much less improve, the common good in a troubled world like ours. However hope-less (i.e., free of domineering expectations) we strive to be in our personal lives, we must still commit, in my view, to collective agitation—activism for social hope that doesn’t go quietly where matters of justice are at stake.
This limitation of the “quietist” approach I develop here calls, I think, for a more “activist” reading of the Roadhouse that develops the potential of these scenes for confronting and dismantling social problems like anti-Blackness and the criminalization of Black men in policing and the war on drugs in the United States, underrepresentation of Black artists in white spaces and institutions, anti-Asian xenophobia, and violence against women. This activist reading is important not only because Twin Peaks itself has received justified criticism as a “white fantasia” (Orr) that suffers from racial typecasting, exclusion, and “problematic orientalism” (Nguyen), but also because its grim depiction of the myths and pitfalls of whiteness are potentially instructive for the dismantling of white supremacy in the name of social hope (Guan).
On the day I presented the conference paper on which this essay is based, it was Juneteenth—the holiday in the United States that commemorates the 1865 anniversary of the emancipation of people who were formerly enslaved. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 but didn’t take effect across the country for more than two years due to the entrenched structural injustices on the ground, and over 150 years later, we have too many tragic reminders of how much difficult liberation work we have yet to accomplish. I think mindful readings of Twin Peaks that recognize the need to balance personal spiritual flourishing with agitation for the common good can help us with this work. When we lose the kind of entitled hope that makes us self-absorbed and regretful, [page 53] perhaps we are in a better position to gain social hope for a more inclusive and just common good.
At the time The Return aired, I would have been tempted to frame the juxtaposition of “quietist” and “activist” approaches to Twin Peaks as respectively Lynchian and Frostian. Lynch is Mr. Meditation, after all, and famously reluctant to get political. Frost wears his politics on his sleeve, peppering his tweets and Twin Peaks novels alike with rebukes of Trump, the prison system, and other ills.2 But in the wake of recent events here in the U.S. that have galvanized resolve to agitate like hell for social hope, Lynch has been more explicit that personal peace and social justice must stand side by side (“Watch”). In that spirit, may fear be banished and let peace and justice embrace, that love may come back and stay forever.
Notes
This chapter is based in significant part on a longform article and photo essay originally published online (“The Glass Box Incomplete Guide to the Roadhouse: A Non-Definitive Essay on Being Not-at-Home, Coping with Thwarted Expectations, and Fearlessly Losing Hope in Twin Peaks' House Away from Home” in The Glass Box: A Place to Anticipate, Experience, and Ponder What Happens in Twin Peaks). The conference version of the paper, with accompanying slides, is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTJYHjrChco&t=10908s.-
1. Seneca himself is not the progenitor of this wisdom, though he propelled it to lasting fame in Letter V, where he credits the Roman Stoic philosopher Hecato of Rhodes as the original source.
2. Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier includes an exceedingly thinly veiled jab at a certain former U.S. President, humorously framing him as among the widow Lana Milford’s uncountable dalliances with blowhards of a certain age (77).
Works Cited
Frost, Mark. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. Flatiron Books, 2017.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. [page 54]
Guan, Frank. “What Does David Lynch Have to Say About Race? In the Filmmaker’s Vision of America, Whiteness is the Source of All Evil.” Vulture, 12 Sept. 2017, www.vulture.com/2017/09/david-lynch-racial-politics.html.
Nguyen, Hanh. “‘Twin Peaks’: Diane’s Style Continues the Problematic Orientalism from the Original Series.” Indie Wire, 21 June 2017, www.indiewire.com/features/general/twin-peaks-diane-asian-orientalism-stereotype-exoticism-1201844974/.
Orr, Niela. “It Is Happening Again: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Returns—to its White Fantasia.” The Baffler, 4 June 2017, thebaffler.com/latest/it-is-happening-again-orr.
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics, 1969.
Twin Peaks: The Return. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Showtime, 2017.
“Watch David Lynch Support the Black Lives Matter Movement.” NOWNESS, 4 June 2020, www.nowness.com/picks/watch-david-lynch-support-the-black-lives-matter-movement.
Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and fellow in the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, UK. He is the creator of The Glass Box, a philosophically-inflected online celebration of Twin Peaks: The Return, and author of Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan.
MLA citation (print):
Halteman, Matthew C. "The Roadhouse and Mindful Alienation: On Fearlessly Losing Hope in Twin Peaks’ House Away from Home." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 44-54.