[page 256] Abstract: David Lynch’s work has long been concerned with what he’s termed the absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence. This interest aligns him with the playwrights surveyed in Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd. a book built on the philosophical foundation laid by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus’ is one of two major 20th century philosophical explorations of life’s absurdity; the second, included in Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions, is aligned in some ways with Camus but differs meaningfully. These two divergent perspectives are expressed both individually and in tandem throughout Twin Peaks: The Return. The series is ultimately illustrative of Esslin’s argument that absurdist drama represents writers reckoning with the overwhelming horrors of the 20th century, as Lynch and Mark Frost extend Esslin’s trajectory into the absurdist dread of 21st century American life
Keywords: theatre of the absurd, absurdism, Albert Camus, Thomas Nagel
Towards the close of Part 3 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), members of the Blue Rose Task Force—the top-secret joint venture between the FBI and the US military devoted to the investigation of so-called troubling abstractions—process the news that long-missing Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has mysteriously appeared in a South Dakota prison. As he prepares to begin what will be a circuitously fateful journey back towards the town of Twin Peaks, Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) grumbles nine significant words: “The absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence.”
To anyone familiar with Lynch’s work, the line serves as a winking reference to the subtitle of his unrealized feature film Ronnie Rocket, but this absurd mystery has been a uniting force across the entirety of Lynch’s career—in 1980, he told Gary Indiana, “I love absurdity you know” (Indiana 13), while [page 257] in 1989, he told Kristine McKenna, “Absurdity is what I like most in life.”
The term “absurd” has a common usage, generally referring to anything so shockingly outrageous that it can’t help provoking laughter. This definition could be applied to much of Lynch’s often comic work, but “absurd” carries two significant alternate definitions, one aesthetic and the other philosophical, and both definitions resonate within Lynch’s filmography, particularly in The Return.
The Aesthetically Absurd
The term “Theatre of the Absurd” was coined by critic Martin Esslin in his 1960 book of the same name. In codifying the notion of theatrical absurdism, Esslin identified five postwar writers—Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter—whose works can be classified as “absurdist.” Esslin’s definition of the term refers less to humorous situations than to those situations that violate reason and logic: “The Theatre of the Absurd,” Esslin wrote, “can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time . . . that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away” (23). By identifying this common feeling of disillusionment, Esslin argued, this handful of writers abandoned the effort to make sense of life’s nonsensical pointlessness and instead dramatized this pervasive nonsense, depicting the world as absurdly irrational. The resultant works, while often humorous, are predominantly evocative of existential anxiety, and can even approach the terrifying.
Among the criteria for absurdist works, Esslin identified two qualities prominent in Lynch’s oeuvre: a “radical devaluation of language” (26) and an abandonment of realistic characterization: “if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation,” Esslin wrote, then absurdist works “are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets” (22). A radical devaluation of language is at play in much of Lynch’s work, [page 258] perhaps most prominently in the faux-sitcom Rabbits, produced as an element of Inland Empire (2006). The series’ action consists primarily of ominous conversational non-sequiturs exchanged by the central characters, anthropomorphic rabbits who inhabit a cavernous domestic set. In these brief episodes, words are thoroughly divorced from context, with nonsensical dialogue greeted as the height of comedy by an unseen studio audience. The first episode begins with nearly three-and-a-half minutes of static silence, and then proceeds as follows:
JANE: I'm going to find out one day.
SUZIE: When will you tell it?
JACK: Were there any calls?
JANE: What time is it?
[audience laughs]
JACK: I have a secret.
JANE: There have been no calls today.
[audience laughs]
JACK: I am not sure.
[audience applauds]
The effect is reminiscent of a central interrogation sequence in Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party (1957), in which the psychologically vulnerable central character is driven to mental collapse after being bombarded with nonsense by two ambiguously malevolent operatives:
GOLDBERG: You stuff yourself with dry toast.
MCCANN: You contaminate womankind.
GOLDBERG: Why don’t you pay the rent?
MCCANN: Mother defiler!
GOLDBERG: Why do you pick your nose?
MCCANN: I demand justice!
GOLDBERG: What’s your trade?
MCCANN: What about Ireland?
GOLDBERG: What’s your trade? (61)
Pinter’s subtitle for his play, “A Comedy of Menace,” could be aptly applied not just to Rabbits but to many of Lynch’s absurd works. [page 259]
Language is devalued in a variety of configurations and contexts throughout The Return, but the effect is most powerful in Part 8, in which the mysterious Woodsman (Robert Broski) performs his incantatory radio broadcast: “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” The words are fraught with menace despite only barely hanging together by any logical standard, a nonsensical effect that might invite hilarity, but only as an expression of intense discomfort. In an absurdist story, Esslin notes, language does not perform its typical role, and so poetry must emerge from “the concrete and objectified images” rather than dialogue. “The role of language still plays an important part in this conception,” Esslin goes on, “but what happens on the stage transcends . . . the words spoken by the characters” (26, emphasis in original). This line of thought resonates with Lynch’s own preference to view language the way a painter wields visual and tactile tools—“Words excite me as shapes,” he explains in Lynch on Lynch. “A word is also a texture” (Rodley 22). Later in the same book, he suggests that “you could see dialogue as kind of a sound effect or a musical effect” (72). This Lynchian preference for illogical dialogue represents a distinctly absurdist use of language.
Esslin’s second qualification—characters who behave more like mechanical puppets than realistic human beings—similarly applies to any number of Lynchian scenarios, perhaps nowhere more plainly than the nightmarish family dinner in Eraserhead (1977). The director’s debut feature takes place in a classically Lynchian liminal space, one influenced by Philadelphia, the city in which, he said later, “I started to appreciate the absurdity of life” (Woodward). The dinner sequence is stock sitcom material—the anxious young man subjects himself to an audience with the in-laws—but the details are stretched into an outlandish realm: Mary (Charlotte Stewart), romantic partner of protagonist Henry (Jack Nance), suffers a brief fit, as does her mother (Jeanne Bates), with neither episode acknowledged nor responded to in any realistic manner. Later, [page 260] Mary’s father (Allen Joseph) attempts small talk with Henry but ends up sitting silently, a grin plastered across his vacant face, for nearly a minute. These are certainly not naturalistic characters, but rather the type of seemingly malfunctioning simulacra of life that Esslin describes as classically absurdist figures.
In a series of scenes spread across Part 12, Part 13, and Part 15 of The Return, Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) and Charlie (Clark Middleton) debate the prospect of leaving for the Roadhouse. These scenes feel less like naturalistic conversations than they do vapid imitations of life, with their absurdly protracted debate generating an eerie robotic quality that transforms the common act of negotiating plans into a grueling gauntlet. In Part 12, we meet the couple and learn of a vague predicament that Audrey believes requires a trip to the Roadhouse:
AUDREY: Okay, I’m tired of waiting for the phone to ring. I’m going to the Roadhouse.
[...]
CHARLIE: Audrey, look at this paperwork I have, and I’ve got a deadline. Look, stacks of it. How can I leave this and go out so late at night? ... Can’t we start out in the light of day? It’s a new moon tonight. It'll be dark out there. Stay here and get a good sleep, and we'll both go looking tomorrow.
By Part 13, the debate over leaving for the Roadhouse has taken on an existential dimension:
AUDREY: Who am I supposed to trust but myself? And I don’t even know who I am! So, what the fuck am I supposed to do?
CHARLIE: You’re supposed to go to the Roadhouse.
[...]
AUDREY: I guess. Is it far?
CHARLIE: Come on, Audrey, you know where it is. If I didn’t know better, I would swear you were on drugs.
AUDREY: Just where is it? [page 261]
By the end of the conversation, Audrey is in the grip of a fit of ambivalence:
CHARLIE: You're the one that wanted to go. Now you’re looking like you want to stay.
AUDREY: I want to stay, and I want to go. I want to do both.
By Part 15—with several days having passed in the other narratives—Audrey and Charlie have made it to the door:
AUDREY: I’m just tired of waiting for the phone . . . but—oh. You got your coat on.
CHARLIE: Of course I do. We’re going out. We’re going to the Roadhouse. I will need my coat.
AUDREY: Yeah, well, yeah, I just—You’re really something, Charlie. What the hell?
CHARLIE: Put your coat on, Audrey. It’s already late and I’m so sleepy.
And, shortly:
CHARLIE: Now, are you gonna put your coat on or shall we stand here all night?
AUDREY: Here you go again. You can’t stop for one fucking second.
CHARLIE: Audrey, seriously, in one fucking second, I’m taking my coat off and staying in for the night. You’re the one that wanted to go to the Roadhouse, not me.
By this point, the notion of departing for the Roadhouse comes to seem as futile as the prospect of waiting for Godot. Audrey’s plight consumes all of her energy while yielding no tangible progress, much like one’s efforts in a dream. By stripping away all of our recognizable signposts for existential logic, human life comes to appear entirely futile, as meaningless as the plight of Sisyphus. And it’s this mythic figure who forms the core of one major study of absurdism, this one in the philosophical vein. [page 262]
The Philosophically Absurd
Esslin’s theory of theatrical absurdism was predicated on Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), a foundational work on the absurd condition that is human existence. Camus posits that we as a species are nagged by a constant suspicion that life may be meaningless and fail to operate according to any comprehensible system of logic. Thus, in Camus’ view, “judging whether life is or is not worth living . . . is the most urgent of questions” (3-4). When confronted by the absence of any recognizable proof of a higher cosmic order, our daily routines and efforts are likely to appear unnecessary and ridiculous, a sort of “divorce between man and his life,” Camus wrote, that is triggered by perceiving “a universe suddenly divested of illusions.” It is this existential cognitive dissonance that “is properly the feeling of absurdity” (6).
Among the sensations that might trigger this internal divorce, Camus believed, was the perception of “the world [as] ‘dense’ . . . foreign and irreducible to us.” He goes on to describe “the primitive hostility of the world,” an awareness of which means “we cease to understand it” (14). Robbed of the illusion that the world might conform to comprehensible patterns and laws, we see ourselves as hopeless creatures, no more impactful than Sisyphus endlessly pushing his boulder. The only way of suppressing this despair and avoiding suicidal ideation, according to Camus, is to maintain the “implacable nobility” (127) necessary to go on living a potentially pointless life. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (121), Camus decides, and it’s thus best to meet the meaningless world with precisely that scorn.
In 1979, philosopher Thomas Nagel returned to Camus’ theories with his own essay on life’s absurdity, included in his collection Mortal Questions. Some of Nagel’s conclusions align with Camus’—Nagel agrees that “most people feel on occasion that life is absurd” (11) and that this sensation triggers a feeling that our daily efforts may be meaningless. The two diverge, however, in their conclusions on the essential cognitive dissonance that triggers this feeling. Where Camus (in [page 263]
Nagel’s words) sees absurdity as deriving from “a collision between our expectations and the world,” Nagel sees absurdity as “a collision within ourselves” (17). If we imagine the world to be a place of, as Camus says, primitive hostility, then this anthropomorphizes the natural elements in such a way as to violate the theory of the universe as absolutely devoid of order.
Rather, Nagel sees absurdity as arising from the cognitive dissonance of justifying our behaviors to ourselves. This task entails simultaneously existing in the world and objectively gauging our own significance, most likely by an illusory standard. And this anxious self-consciousness triggers the feeling we call absurdity: “Humans have the special capacity,” Nagel writes, “to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand” (15). A mouse cannot experience life’s absurdity because it “lacks the capacities for self-consciousness” (21). As humans, the only way to avoid absurd self-consciousness would be either never to attain it, or to forget it, neither of which can be achieved deliberately. As Nagel describes it, Camus’ belief that“we can salvage our dignity . . . by shaking a fist at the world” is “romantic and slightly self-pitying. Our absurdity warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance” (22). Given that absurdity is ultimately a testament to the power of human consciousness, “it need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so” (23).
The Camusian and the Nagelian in The Return
The seemingly dissonant perspectives of Camus and Nagel are brought into alignment in The Return. Turning first to Camus’ belief that absurdity is triggered by glimpsing the world as a place of untamed chaos, the notion is resonant with Lynch’s preferred shooting style for the natural world of Twin Peaks. In other works of cinematic horror equally concerned with an ominous presence in the woods—e.g. Sam Raimi’s highly stylized The Evil Dead (1981)—impressionistic camerawork and ominous sound design can be used to connote some [page 264] inhuman force. Going back to the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, however, Lynch has preferred to eschew such stylization. In the wide shots of distant wooded mountains that form a motif in all three seasons, this supernatural forest is depicted with deep focus and flat lighting, eliminating any aesthetic tricks that might be used to heighten terror. By taking such a neutral perspective, at least from Camus’ point of view, Lynch triggers an absurd form of terror, divesting the viewer of the illusion that this series’ horror will be familiar and manageable. In The Return, the camera often lingers on landscapes that more resemble Ansel Adams’ photography than classically stylized horror imagery. Lynch heightens the defamiliarization effect in this third season by stripping Angelo Badalamenti’s score from these interstitial shots, removing the final aesthetic guidepost preventing these images of the natural world from suggesting an irrational void.
Of course, the world of Twin Peaks does have an organizing spiritual force, one encompassing a robust network of supernaturally powerful beings. There is room, however, in both the Camusian and Nagelian worldviews for an organizing spiritual force, so long as that force is incomprehensible to humanity. If the universe’s order can’t be comprehended, then it does no good in alleviating absurd dread, and might in fact amplify it—such a universe would prompt us to perceive ourselves as insects, bumbling about under a more advanced plane of consciousness. In The Return, Lynch heightens the absurd unknowability of his series’ cosmology, often by complicating work done in the prior season. By the close of Season 2 of Twin Peaks, the characters have begun assembling a viable framework for the spiritual laws governing this corner of the Pacific Northwest, and seeing this sense of structure applied to the absurd chaos of this fictional world provides some comfort. In The Return, Lynch sets about undoing this palliative effect by layering on a dazzling density of new iconography, from ashen woodsmen to massive talking teakettles to a mansion on a purple sea. None of these newfound examples of absurdity can be accounted for by the explanations in the series’ first two [page 265] seasons—with a chain of Camusian flourishes, Lynch divests the viewer of the illusion of comprehension, alienating the audience from the fictional universe and triggering a feeling of absurd dislocation.
The Nagelian perspective is perhaps best epitomized by the narrative motif of the Roadhouse’s peripheral patrons, whose melodramas are briefly touched upon at the close of several episodes of The Return. The viewer is deposited into the midst of byzantine narratives, afforded no opportunity to build investment in the characters and their plights. Thus, the topics that they discuss so passionately can easily appear ridiculous to the point of absurd illogic, as in this vignette that closes Part 12:
ABBIE: Where’s Angela?
NATALIE: I haven’t got a clue. She was supposed to show last night. She didn’t show then either. She might be with Clark.
ABBIE: Clark?
NATALIE: Yeah. They’ve been hanging out lately.
ABBIE: Really?
NATALIE: Yeah. You look surprised.
ABBIE: Yeah, ‘cause I saw Clark and Mary together here, like, two nights ago.
NATALIE: I hate her. And Angela fucking really hates her too. What were they doing?
ABBIE: Like, practically making out. Slow dancing and getting real close. Over in the corner. Off in their own world. Lots of people saw ‘em.
NATALIE: Angela’s gonna go crazy when she gets wind of this. She’s getting really serious about Clark. He’s been on her for a couple of weeks now. She’s even dreaming about the guy.
None of these characters have appeared or been alluded to in the previous 12 hours, nor will their story be touched upon again. It represents a narrative cul-de-sac into a neighboring melodrama, creating an eerie, dissociated effect. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost invite the viewer to consider how inane our [page 266] own personal dramas might sound if observed by some alien third party, a sensation very likely to trigger a Nagelian feeling of absurd futility.
In two sequences, both found in Part 11 of The Return, Lynch and Frost explore the absurd cognitive dissonance that comes with being pushed outside one’s own perspective and forced to reckon with the disconnect between self-perception and the awareness of a broader context. The sequences take distinctly different approaches to achieve distinctly different effects, but they both land in a place of Nagelian absurdity. In the first sequence, the Blue Rose Task Force visits the gateway to the mysterious “zone,” at which point Gordon Cole (David Lynch) experiences an overwhelming encounter with some cosmic force. Initially, the viewer observes this encounter from very close to Cole’s perspective, allowing the sensations to feel as powerful to the viewer at home as they do in Cole’s own head. The perspective then shifts outside of Cole’s viewpoint to depict the perspective of the other characters, who observe an experience that is deeply intense for Cole but appears illogical from the exterior. Not content simply to demonstrate this dissonance, Lynch shifts the camera once more to an even further perspective, depicting the scene in long shot and rendering Cole something like an insect waving its antennae—the essence of Nagelian absurd anxiety.
Later in the episode, meanwhile, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and his ex-wife Shelly (Mädchen Amick) meet their daughter Becky (Amanda Seyfried) for a heart-to-heart at the Double R Diner. Soon, Shelly—who, we understand, remains the love of Bobby’s life—leaves the diner with another man, causing Bobby to experience a moment of intense personal emotion. This internal sensation is suddenly interrupted by a shocking eruption of external chaos, pulling Bobby outside of his immediate perspective and into a drama that he must struggle to comprehend. We can tell that a child has gotten his hands on a gun, inviting the abrupt awareness of a vast dramatic context of which Bobby is entirely unaware, rendering the scenario halfway surreal. Soon, though, Bobby is dragged [page 267] even further into an illogical world when he attempts to calm a driver who is compulsively honking and screaming, with the woman revealed to have an extraordinarily ill child in the car with her. The scene is as absurd a vignette as Lynch has ever created, and it gradually divorces Bobby from any recognizable logic, forcing him into a space of Lynchian absurdism that effectively blends the perspectives of Camus and Nagel—Bobby is confronted with the world’s hostile disorder, and this reminder of his own limited perspective serves as vehicle for the unnerving existential confrontation.
The Dominant Perspective
If the world of The Return could be said to operate on principles resonant with both Nagel’s and Camus’ perspectives, then one might wonder which philosopher Lynch and Frost ultimately align with. Does this series suggest that we might salvage our dignity by shaking our fists at the world, or might it instead offer us the opportunity to accept our human limitations and bypass agony? By way of answering this question, we might consider the shift between the naive character—one of several played by Kyle MacLachlan—whom I’ll term Dougie-Cooper and MacLachlan’s recognizable protagonist, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. Dougie-Cooper is a perfect embodiment of Nagel’s theoretical anti-absurdist human—this character has forgotten the ability to be self-conscious, and so, lacking any observing eye, he simply pursues his impulses. As he shuffles about, enjoying his coffee, Dougie-Cooper becomes Nagel’s mouse, freed of the burden of self-conscious angst. And as a result, Dougie-Cooper is able to make the world around him a notably more harmonious and fulfilled place, enabling those he encounters to achieve peace and satisfaction, facilitating their redemption.
Once the character is returned to his full capacities as Special Agent Dale Cooper, however, he immediately sets about pursuing solutions to this world’s problems, even as we have now seen it demonstrated that this world operates on pure absurd illogic. And in return for his attempts to “fix” Twin [page 268] Peaks, Cooper is moved irrevocably into a realm of absurd alienation. By shaking his fist in defiance of absurdity, he does nothing but amplify it. As Nagel says, our absurd condition need not be a matter of agony unless we choose for it to be. While it’s unlikely that anyone reading these words would hope to emulate Dougie-Cooper, he serves as an extreme example of the good that can come as a result of relinquishing the romantic self-pity—as Nagel puts it—of Camus’ defiant perspective.
The Sociopolitics of Absurdity
Martin Esslin believed that absurdist storytelling emerged as a direct response to the atrocities of World War II. After the horrors of the holocaust and the atomic bomb, “the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away” (23), and the only way storytellers can reckon with their feeling of living in a newly unreasonable world is to tell stories that operate on illogic. The Return represents a twenty-first century extension of Esslin’s theory. The series plants its roots in the epic, incomprehensible evil of the atomic bomb, but rather than rest on that original sin, Lynch follows the thread through the fallout of the Bush years, the failures of the Obama promise, and the dawning horrors of the Trump era. Frank Truman’s (Robert Forster) son was so traumatized by the meaningless war in Iraq that he succumbed to suicide; the residents of the Fat Trout Trailer Park are regularly forced to the absurd length of selling their own blood just to afford survival; and weaving through it all, Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) inhabits his new role as conspiracy theorist scammer. If absurdist storytelling is a reflection of unreasonable sociopolitical conditions, then in The Return, we can see that by 2017, there was very little exaggeration necessary to tip the American condition towards Lynchian absurdity.
For as much as this essay has focused on the existential dread, anxiety, and despair endemic to The Return, however, it should not go unsaid that this is a season of television rife with comedy, beauty, and pleasure. This in itself is an embodi-[page 269]ment of a particularly Lynchian form of absurdism. In 1997, Lynch told David Breskin that in life, “there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities. . . . It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain” (Breskin 72). If there is any ultimate message in this particular portrait of life’s absurdity, it must be that the fun and the pain go hand in hand, and we needn’t focus on one at the exclusion of the other. Nobody is going to solve the absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence any time soon. In the meantime, we may as well try our best to enjoy the strange carnival.
Works Cited
Breskin, David. Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation. Da Capo Press, 1997.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Random House, 1961.
Indiana, Gary. “Good Eraserhead: Indiana.” East Village Eye, Feb. 1980. David Lynch: Interviews, edited by Richard A. Barney, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 9-18.
McKenna, Kristine. “A Real Multi-Media Kind of Guy: David Lynch, Artist in Many Forms, Tells His Tales of Hollywood after Blue Velvet.” Los Angeles Times, 20 Aug. 1989. www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-20-ca-1327-story.html. Accessed 25 May 2022.
Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge UP, 1979.
Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. Complete Works: One, Grove Press, 1976, pp. 17-98.
“Rabbits 1.” YouTube, uploaded by David Lynch Theater, 9 June 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=66XPYk9bdhc.
Rodley, Chris, editor. Lynch on Lynch: Revised Edition. Faber and Faber, 2005.
Woodward, Richard B. “A Dark Lens on America.” New York Times, 14 Jan. 1990. www.nytimes.com/1990/01/14/magazine/a-dark-lens-on-america.html. Accessed 25 May 2022.
Ethan Warren is the author of The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, published in 2023 by Columbia University Press.
MLA citation (print):
Warren, Ethan. "'It’s a Strange Carnival': Tensions between Camusian and Nagelian Absurdity in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 256-269.