[page 193] Abstract: Love and evil are linked in many ways in the Twin Peaks universe, creating an ambivalent aesthetics of erotic evil. This ambiguity seems to be one of the driving forces in the story, leading to a spectator attitude oscillating between fascination and terror. By watching Twin Peaks, we are seduced to enjoy repressed and forbidden parts of our conscience that are often connected to sexual taboos and transgressions. The dark drives of desire and erotic negativity are therefore the aesthetic central points in Twin Peaks: The Return. In The Return we can find a specific aesthetics of evil based on structures of evil like transgressions, repetitions/returns and sudden hits of intensity. This essay will link this aesthetics of evil to erotic and sexual motives and structures in The Return and the Twin Peaks universe more broadly.
Keywords: evil, erotic, intensity, transgression, repetition
“Love is evil.” This short and remarkable definition by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek could also stand as an unofficial subtitle for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Žižek talks about creation being a “cosmic imbalance” and identifies love as the continuation of this “mistake.” In this view, love is seen as unfair, violent, negative, or even evil.
Lynch and Frost stage the birth of evil in The Return as a metaphysical tableau linking the detonation of the atomic bomb with the negative entity of Jowday/Judy as well as with the appearance of BOB, and thus put it on a much larger scale than in the original series (1990-1991) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), in which love and evil were also inextricably linked; the whole plot around the murder of Laura Palmer could be read from the ambivalent position of sexuality being dangerous and attractive at the same time. In The Return, we can find a specific aesthetics of evil based on structures like transgressions, repetitions/returns and sudden hits of intensity.1 [page 194]
In this essay, I will link this aesthetics of evil to erotic and sexual motives and structures in Twin Peaks. Starting points for this analysis are the gnostic devaluation of sexuality and esoteric themes like Aleister Crowley’s “sex magick”: the sex scenes in Twin Peaks trigger violence and death, as in the glass box scene, or are quite odd, like the ritual encounter between Cooper and Diane. Mr. C, or Evil Cooper, is an embodiment of sexual drive (like BOB) and his violence against women, while Sarah Palmer has a gorgon-like reaction in the Roadhouse when a trucker tries to pick her up and she takes off her face like a mask (like in Lynch’s paintings Distorted Nudes) and violently kills him (also, there’s Sarah’s incubation by the frog-like animal when she sleeps after her first date, on the threshold of sexual awakening, referenced in Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks [2016]). There is also the importance to the show of Lynch’s favorite painter, Francis Bacon (Rodley 16), whose central themes are the combination of violence, death and sexuality, as well as the appearance of The Nine Inch Nails in the Roadhouse in Part 8, singing about the “spilling” of a sexual disease.
Love and evil, I argue, are linked in many ways in the Twin Peaks universe, creating a most ambivalent aesthetics of erotic evil. This ambiguity seems to be one of the driving forces in the story leading to a spectator attitude oscillating between fascination and terror. By watching Twin Peaks, we are seduced, encouraged to enjoy repressed and forbidden parts of our conscience often connected to sexual taboos and their transgressions.2 The dark drives of desire and an erotic negativity are therefore the aesthetic center of The Return.
Eros and Evil as Aesthetic Categories
The term Eros, most prominently coined in Plato’s Symposium as an idealistic concept of passionate and sensual love is characterized by its inherent negativity (Platon 281). Jacques Lacan shows this negativity of desire in his reading of Plato’s text (Le séminaire VIII: Le transfer [1960-1961]), and stresses the incompleteness of Eros. The desired object is never really [page 195] reached, it escapes every time the loving subject thinks it possesses it. At the same time this erotic negativity becomes the motor for constant and even increased desire. Roland Barthes presents specific structures and figures of love and desire in his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977) like the interplay of presence and absence, tension and relaxation, presentation and withdrawal, showing and hiding, concealment and revelation or limitation and transgression. For Barthes, the lover’s discourse is characterized by delay, secrets, and discontinuity and is therefore a counterpart to direct consumption, transparency and logical order, characteristics which can be found in the arts and in Twin Peaks. The transgressive potential of Eros is lined out in Georges Bataille’s L’érotisme (1957), where states of ecstasy, violence, and excess are ways of breaking the principium individuationis and granting the discrete individual extraordinary moments of intensity which Bataille compares to experiences of the sacred and holy.
All these aspects of Eros are important for the analysis of The Return and at the same time they have many similarities with the second key notion in this paper—evil, which (like the figures and forms of Eros) is also seen as more an aesthetic than a moral category (Bohrer, “Die Asthetik”). Especially in Bataille’s work, death and love are deeply connected with each other. The closer an individual gets to the irreversible border of death the more intensity is generated according to Bataille. Breaking rules, taboos, and forms—like opening the body as often used by Lynch—also grants access to a form of continuity the normal individual normally doesn’t experience in his everyday life structured by suppression of desire, rationality, and commonness. To show the superiority of evil Bataille compares it to the good: “The great truth: Evil in the world matters more than good. Good is the basis but Evil is the peak” (Bataille 636, translated by the author).
The transgression of limits is often portrayed in arts in all its ecstatic and Dionysian forms, its increment of the affective system, its anti-utilitarian and anti-profane waste of energies [page 196] called “dépense improductive” (unproductive expenditure) by Bataille who is clearly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche. Bataille notes: “What is at stake in eroticism is always a dissolution of constituted forms” (24, translated by the author). Other forms of evil are repetition (Alt 23), suddenness, and intensity (Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit), aesthetic formations that are key to the understanding of The Return.
Eros and evil both generate experiences of intensity, emergency states of consciousness, by overcoming bans, prohibitions, and taboos, and are both structured negatively. They do not end when they reach their goal; they keep going to the next one. In the following, I will present some scenes of transgressions in The Return where Eros and evil are connected in the ways that they have been defined.
Gnostic Devaluation of Sexuality
Sexuality in Twin Peaks is portrayed as a negative force, as something seductive and dangerous (already in the root of seduction, meaning ‘leading astray’). One possible aspect to this is the Gnostic devaluation of sexuality. In Gnostic thought, there’s a strong dualism of mind and body, the spiritual and material, and good and evil (Rudolph 65). In The Return, this duality is present in many aspects like the fight of the Black Lodge against the White Lodge, Judy against The Fireman, Bad Coop against Good Coop, but also in some not so obvious details. One example is the boxing match that the depressed Sarah Palmer watches on TV (Part 13): a boxer in white pants is fighting a boxer in black pants in a never-ending loop that can be seen as a pop cultural manifestation of the eternal gnostic fight between good and evil (Schneider 667-669). Besides this symbolic representation of Gnostic duality, Janey-E Jones talks about the power of evil in our present time when she is paying Dougie’s debts to the two thugs on the street; she confronts them with their wickedness in a gnostic phrase: “We are living in a dark, dark age, and you are part of the problem” (Part 6). [page 197]
In this essay, I’m mostly interested in the aesthetic depiction of erotic and evil and not in a content-linked investigation about the metaphysical notions of the two. The structures and artistic functions that I’m looking at emerged after German Romanticism, when evil was released of its only metaphysical notion. The late eighteenth century emphasis on demonic obsessions, doppelgänger, darkness, sexual violence, body deformations, and the unconscious is also found in the Twin Peaks universe. Repetitions, transgressions, suddenness, and aesthetic intensity are important for the series and increased by the montage of the frames, the menacing sound design, and the sudden changes from harmony to terror and back.
Repetition as a Structure of Evil
An important structure of The Return, and of evil as well, is repetition. Especially in fantasies and depictions of punishment—for example, in Greek myths or images of hell from Dante’s Inferno and through to today—this structure is obvious (Alt 241). The repetition of something bad, which Arthur Schopenhauer compared metaphorically with the myth of Ixion who was damned to rush through the sky in a never ending turning bound to a burning wheel (38), is an iconic motif in Lynch’s movies. Like Lost Highway (1997), often compared to a Möbius strip, The Return ends with a step back to starting position and gets therefore the form of an endless loop (Hughes 224).
In Twin Peaks, BOB as the embodiment of sexual violence appears again and again in an endless repetition (“I will kill again”); a combination of sexuality and BOB, a mixture of devilish demon and compulsive criminal, is located in the Twin Peaks cosmos as a dark threat and disturber of order (Alt 22). He breaks into the seemingly perfect, peaceful world of the Northwestern United States as a sexual serial killer, repeating his crimes by possessing different characters. He is the aesthetic embodiment of the dark side of the soul and, with his banal appearance (and name), a typically threatening repre-[page 198]sentation of the social precariat, whose erotic furor is often portrayed in Lynch’s movies.
Another embodiment of repetition—the gramophone and the colors of the White Lodge which Lynch also used as an overdetermined requisite of repetition in Eraserhead—return literally in The Return. There are many ambivalent ‘magical’ objects: the fan in the Palmer house; the traffic light at Sparkwood and 21, generating a diffuse and pre-reflexive feeling of anxiety and uncertainty and secrets which connects Fire Walk With Me with The Return (Bohrer, “Die Ästhetik” 539; Stiglegger, “Medusas”). The unpredictable and unknown of these objects is an important requirement for their threatening character (Bolz 267). At the same time these objects allow a very large number of interpretations and connect to other Lynch films in an intermedial game and thus increase the mystery of many parts of this cinematic world (Weinstock 42).
BOB can be read as the classic doppelgänger, as an embodiment of the dark side of the soul known from the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Die Elixiere des Teufels, 1815/16) or Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886). These characters are aesthetic forms of a transfer of evil into the psyche and refer to the fragility and instability of a coherent Self. The aesthetic form of the doppelgänger usually shows a person torn apart by its sexual drive, a motif which is at the very center of Twin Peaks. Return or repetition, therefore, can be seen as a core aesthetic structuring principle of the series and as a structure of evil, like in the writing of the Marquis de Sade, where Eros and evil are combined in an endless repetition. If we look at other works from Lynch, especially Lost Highway, it is possible to also read The Return as an endless loop. When Bad Coop says, “Let’s go back to starting position” (Part 13) while arm wrestling, it is a self-referent play with the whole form of Twin Peaks, like the gramophone or an echo to Lynch’s early work Six Men Getting Sick (1967). [page 199]
It Is in Our House Now
The Fireman’s words “It is in our house now” (Part 1) refer with their spatial metaphor to an imminent danger of a hostile principle which entered the sphere of the good. This occurrence of an evil principle is closely connected to the uncanny, where evil is not completely foreign but is an (often suppressed) part of the known and familiar, as Sigmund Freud shows in his analysis of Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman,” 1816) in “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny,” 1919). For Freud, one of the most iconic metaphors for the psyche is the house, and so, The Fireman’s sentence “It is in our house now” can be read in multiple ways: as the real entrance of evil into the world, into the human inner self, or again, as an metafictional auto-reference: Twin Peaks is screened again on TV, it is entering all our houses and bringing its beauty, terror, and uncanniness to our living rooms, to our televisions, tablets, cell phones, and all the other black mirrors surrounding us.
The house in this sense can be seen as a seemingly beautiful surface, but underneath, there is all the horror that Lynch has been showing us since Eraserhead (1977). This motif was especially prominent in Dark Romanticism and the Gothic novel, where the dark side of existence, like “death, madness, solitude, horror and the disintegration of the subject” (Brittnacher 48) is emphasized.3 Lynch himself often talks about this ‘poetics of depth’: “just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. . . . There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything” (Rodley 8). This dialectic of peace and terror embodied in the house metaphor with its permanently fragile and switching states is a foundation of Lynch and Frost’s work, where the borders between places and states of mind are also very open and permeable.4 Examples for this are the convenience store, Jack Rabbit’s Palace, the Black and White Lodges, and some characters' faculties to be at several places at the same time, like Phillip Jeffries, the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and, probably, Cooper and Carrie Page at the end of [page 200] The Return, who seem to be trapped in an endless loop like in the legend of La Llorona performed in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio (Lim 151).
The Palmer house, switching between different spheres of reality, is also the center of Laura’s sexual abuse and later of the depressive phase of Sarah Palmer. It is a liminal place, the way to another layer of time and space and, at the same time, the place of vampiric sexual crimes and eventually the home of Judy (Diaz 143). As in classic American Gothic à la Edgar Allan Poe, the house reveals the uncanny and can be seen as one of the most eerie places in Twin Peaks: “Forget the Red Room, Jacques’s cabin, even the abandoned train car—the sunlit Palmer house is Twin Peaks’ scariest location” (Bushman and Smith 52). The house in Twin Peaks often changes from a safe space to a locus horribilis; it is a spatial metaphor for the dialectic of good and evil and, with its inherent intimacy, often connected to the sphere of sexuality—for Lynch, mostly the darker and grotesque parts, if we think for example of the sex scenes in Blue Velvet.
Experiments and Suddenness: The Birth of Evil
Distinct from seasons 1 and 2, Lynch and Frost present in The Return an aesthetic and cosmological fantasy of the birth of evil. After Bad Coop’s ritual revival by The Woodsmen—his demonic accomplices with dirty beards, pitch-black faces, and shabby clothes—The Nine Inch Nails perform “She’s Gone Away” (2016) at the Roadhouse, a dark-aggressive industrial rock song about the spread of an infectious sexual disease (Part 8). The central placement of these two scenes full of the combination of danger, disease, darkness, and sexuality arouses that some extraordinary event might take place.
The following sequence shows the atomic test in White Sands, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945; it is a surreal superimposition of dust, smoke, flashes, and psychedelic forms set to the atonal piece “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960) by Krzysztof Penderecki. The ignition of the atomic bomb marks the beginning of the era where man could destroy [page 201] himself in a total self-annihilation. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, equating himself with death and circumscribing this caesura with sacral words. In The Return, the Trinity Test functions as a gateway for evil into the world of the twentieth century. After the eerie but beautiful image of the nuclear cloud, Lynch cuts to a birth scene of evil where a mysterious figure called The Experiment spits out a jelly-like ray with lots of eggs and an orb with BOB’s face in it. Here we can see an intensification of the aesthetics of evil which, in Seasons 1 and 2, was mostly centered around the killer BOB: in The Return, he is just a single offspring of a mightier entity.
The spectator witnesses this genesis of evil, but there is no moral judgment of it, only an aesthetic pleasure in the terrible and the beautiful. The detonation of the bomb and the birth of evil are signs of an anticlassical aesthetics celebrating the dialectic of beauty and evil. In The Return, there is no direct impact of didacticism or morality, and so, the imagination of evil for the sake of evil becomes an aesthetic quality in the work of art (Bataille 13). The ambivalent attraction of imaginative self-destruction, the appeal of the death drive described by Freud in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 1920), leads to a combination of forbidden and unknown aspects and thrills the spectator (Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit 81). This thrill, deriving from the threatening splendor of the explosion, is a mixed feeling of fascinosum et tremendum and refers to the irrational substructure of evil. With the explosion as a metaphor and gateway for evil, Lynch and Frost stress the importance of aesthetic intensity emerging of suddenness and a stroke of the sublime. Evil in this sense is an active and destructive force, tackling order and everyday measurements (Bergfleth 174).
On the border of life and annihilation, the spectator experiences a delectatio morosa (Praz 267-273), a ‘delightful horror’ that lay at the center of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime, connecting pleasure and pain to an enjoyable shudder (Burke 51). Only because imagination circles around [page 202] the most terrible pictures of death can a maximal quantum of threat and horror in high intensity be reached. The detonation of the bomb sets free the power of the sublime in its connection of shock and suddenness and thus produces an aesthetic explosive power, like the flash described by Longin (Pseudo-Longinos 1,4). Lynch’s artistic imagination of evil—for Nietzsche, coincidence, uncertainty, and suddenness (“Fragment” 466)—helps to come close to the unknown, to deeper layers of experience. Evil therefore is a seductive agent working with the pleasure of intensity and leading us to suppressed sources of joy that are imaginable in the work of art (Stiglegger). Lynch and Frost translate the terror of a self-inflicted end of the world into (audiovisual) pictures, an essential modus operandi for the aesthetics of evil since Baudelaire, who wrote, “It’s a wonderful advantage of art that the terrible, expressed artistically, becomes beauty” (123).
Sex Magick
In The Return, there are many allusions to ‘sex magick,’ esoteric sexual rituals used for the invocations of demons. Mark Frost in particular draws from many aspects of this esoteric tradition and the work of Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons. An important idea for The Return is the possibility of a sexual rite, like the one between Diane and Cooper in the final episode, opening gates to different spheres (Boulègue).5 A paradigmatic and unsettling scene after a sexual encounter with an aesthetic explosion is Judy’s appearance in the glass box in New York. Like in a classic proscenium theater, Lynch and Frost prepare the audience for the invasion of the demonic that appears in the glass box. While Sam and Tracy get intimate on the couch, a white figure without a face manifests in the glass box, then attacks the couple furiously and with brutal violence. For Bohrer, this literal appearance is the most important aspect of an aesthetics of evil, as he showed with the classical tragedies of Aeschylus and the new interpretations in Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) (Bohrer, Das Tragische 116). [page 203]
The modus of suddenness—which Kierkegaard treated as equivalent to the demoniac—is key for the intensity of a scene (599). With the help of an evocation of terror, Lynch and Frost set off an “event of perception” (Bohrer, Das Tragische 116), an experience of the unknown and incommensurable, and manage to “lift the course and the law of rational thinking reason” (Schlegel 319). The lack of certainty, what this monster was and why it attacked, increases the discomfort of spectators. An explanation—which Lynch never gives—could confine the horror and therefore make it more digestible and morally judgeable, but The Return mostly works with the macabre enjoyment of evil and abysmal. Like in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, the recipient becomes a witness to an “announced but postponed catastrophe” (Bohrer 167), and its tension can be felt all over Lynch’s work where it is discharged at any moment like an electric shock.
This highly aggressive style can also be found in the Sarah Palmer scenes. Her ominous surroundings, her isolation, and her immersion in cruelty, like the documentary about predators or the apocalyptic roar accompanying her dialogue in the supermarket, prepare for the horror at the Roadhouse. Like the volatile, demonic appearance of the figure in the glass box, Sarah takes off her face as though it is a mask and revealing a gruesome inner, resembling Lynch’s series of prints Distorted Nude Photogravures (2021). Like the gaze of Medusa reveals the sight of the horror of Nothingness, the intrusive trucker looks into an abyss of evil and is slaughtered by Sarah in a sudden explosion of violence. Here the spectator is confronted with his own abyss, promising horror and intensity at the same time (Stiglegger, Ritual).
It is clear that Sarah is possessed by an entity but it is not clear if it is Judy herself or not. Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier confirms that the sleeping girl in Part 8, into whose mouth a frog-like animal with wings enters, is Sarah, full name Sarah Judith (Judy?) Novack, who lived in a suburb of White Sands, New Mexico, during the Trinity Test. Also, the incident of 1956, when The Woodsmen put listeners into trance [page 204] by chanting a hypnotic mantra over the radio as part of a killing spree, is mentioned in connection with Sarah (135-136).
All these connections between evil and erotic—Sam and Tracy are killed when they start to make out, the trucker gets slaughtered because of his sexual harassment (Truck You!), Sarah comes home from a date and kisses a boy possibly for the first time before she goes to bed—can only be implied here. It is important to note the extreme violence that The Woodsmen, whose appearance spreads fear and terror, use when cracking the skulls of their victims; this destruction of the head as a representation of reason breaks all the taboos of the classic western philosophical and aesthetic discourse (Menninghaus 86). Like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí destroyed the eye as a symbol of reason and conventional enjoyment of art in Un chien andalou (1929), Lynch and Frost shatter the heads of the characters and therefore the rational access to their art. Bohrer’s formula of an aesthetic of evil working as a “withdrawal of sense through horror” (Bohrer, “Die Ästhetik” 550) is realized here in a bold way and put on screen. The spectator experiences audiovisual moments of high intensity with brutality and beauty that might stay in memory forever (Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie” 295).
After this unsettling Return, it is not clear if there is a “journey from light to darkness and back” (Fischer 131) like in Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart or if the dark prevails in the end. Lynch and Frost release us with more questions open than answered. This might cause discomfort for many spectators who are interested in a classical narrative concept based on order, structure and harmony, but for all those who want to dive into the dark depths of the soul, this ending offers the perfect fall into the open and unknown, the source of erotic and evil.
Notes
Parts of this essay have appeared in my chapter, “‘It is in our house now’: Zur Ästhetik des Bösen in Twin Peaks” (Mysterium Twin Peaks. Zeichen—Welten—Referenzen, edited by Caroline Frank and Markus Schleich, Springer VS, 2020, pp. 193-212). [page 205]
1. See Bataille; Alt; Bohrer, Imaginationen.
2. See Stiglegger, “Medusas,” and Bataille.
3. See also Jürgen Klein, Der gotische Roman und die Ästhetik des Bösen (WBG, 1975); Praz, p. 34; André Vieregge, Nachtseiten. Die Literatur der Schwarzen Romantik (Peter Lang, 2008), p. 135.
4. See Miranda Corcoran, “Gotta Light?: Intersections of Science and Supernatural in Twin Peaks” (Supernatural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2019, pp. 19-45) and Adam Daniel, “Under the Skin of the World: The Multiversal Spaces of Twin Peaks: The Return” (Supernatural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2019, pp. 49-72).
5. In addition to Boulègue, see also Jeremiah Beaver, “The Scarlet Woman: Diane, Cameron, and Sex Magick,” in this issue.
Works Cited
Alt, Peter-André. Ästhetik des Bösen. C.H. Beck, 2010.
Bataille, Georges. “Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art.” Œuvres completes, vol. 9. Gallimard, 1979, pp. 11-81.
Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes en deux tomes. vol. 2. Gallimard, 1976.
Bergfleth, Gerd. “Die Souveränität des Bösen. Zu Batailles Umwertung der Moral [afterword].” Die Literatur und das Böse. Emily Brontë—Baudelaire—Michelet—Blake—Sade—Proust—Kafka—Genet, by George Bataille, Matthes & Seitz, 2011, pp. 173-222.
Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins. Suhrkamp, 1981.
---. Imaginationen des Bösen. Für eine ästhetische Kategorie. Carl Hanser, 2004.
---. “Die Ästhetik des Bösen. Oder gibt es eine böse Kunst?” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, vol. 51, 2007, pp.536-550.
---. Das Tragische. Erscheinung, Pathos, Klage. Carl Hanser, 2009.
Bolz, Norbert. “Das Böse jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Das Böse. Eine historische Phänomenologie des Unerklärlichen, Suhrkamp, 1993, pp. 256-273.
Boulègue, Franck. “Sex Magick and the Scarlet Woman.” Unwrapping the Plastic, 7 Sept. 2017, unwrappingtheplastic.com/2017/09/07/sex-magick-the-scarlet-woman/. Accessed 15 July 2022.
Brittnacher, Hans Richard. Ästhetik des Horrors. Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der fantastischen Literatur. Suhrkamp, 1994. [page 206]
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Bushman, David, and Arthur Smith. Twin Peaks. FAQ. All That’s Left to Know about a Place Both Wonderful and Strange. FAQ Series, 2016.
Diaz, Martha L. “Evil and Vampirism in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series, edited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace, McFarland, 2017, pp. 143-153.
Fischer, Robert. David Lynch. Die dunkle Seite der Seele. Heyne, 1992.
Frost, Mark. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. Macmillan, 2017.
Hughes, David. The Complete Lynch. Virgin POD, 2001.
Kierkegaard, Sören. “Der Begriff Angst.” Die Krankheit zum Tode und Anderes. dtv, 1956.
Lim, Dennis. David Lynch: The Man from Another Place. Icons, 2015.
Menninghaus, Winfried. Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung. Suhrkamp, 1999.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Zur Genealogie der Moral.” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. dtv, 1999.
---. “Fragment 154.” Sämtliche Werke. dtv, 1999.
Platon. “Symposion.” Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 3, WBG, 2011.
Praz, Mario. Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik. Hanser, 1963.
Pseudo-Longinos. Vom Erhabenen. WBG, 1966.
Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. Faber & Faber, 2007.
Rudolph, Kurt. Die Gnosis. Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990.
Schlegel, Friedrich. “Gespräch über die Poesie.” Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2. Schöningh, 1967.
Schneider, Helmut. “Malum in der Gnosis und dem Manichäismus.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 5, Schwabe, 1980, pp. 667-669.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1. Sämtliche Werke. Reclam, 1892.
Stiglegger, Marcus. Ritual und Verführung. Schaulust, Spektakel & Sinnlichkeit im Film. Bertz und Fischer, 2006.
---. “Medusas Spiegel. Überlegungen zu einer Ästhetik des Bösen im Film.” www.getidan.de/kolumne/marcus-stiglegger/7853/medusas-spiegel. Accessed 15 July 2022.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Wondrous and Strange: The Matter of Twin Peaks.” Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to [page 207] Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 29-46.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Love is Evil.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg7qdowoemo. Accessed 18 July 2022.
Bernhard Winkler is a DAAD Lektor in the German Programme at the University of Ljubljana. His research focuses on German literature in Romanticism and Modernity. His current work focuses on erotic discourses in contemporary literature. He studied at the University of Regensburg, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the University of Colorado at Boulder where he also taught as Teaching Assistant. He worked for two years as DAAD assistant at ELTE Budapest before starting his DAAD lectorate at University of Ljubljana. Winkler received a BA in German Studies and a MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Regensburg with an emphasis on early 19th-Century German, French and American Literature and is just finishing his PhD project on Botho Strauß.
MLA citation (print):
Winkler, Bernhard. "Evil Erotic: Sexual Negativity in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 193-207.