Black Coffee Lightning: David Lynch Returns to Twin Peaks

Greg Olson, author of David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, the essential book on Lynch’s life and art, has resided in the Twin Peaks region of the Northwest for decades, and David Lynch spent youthful years in the Northwest; both of their fathers were woodsmen. Lynch believes that the world hums with spirituality, and over a thirty-year span Lynch and Mark Frost created forty-eight hours of Twin Peaks TV and film, hypnotic cinematic music immersed in the depths and divine heights of human nature, an artistic song of the forest, America, the world, the cosmos. David Lynch is an international icon of visionary artistic innovation, humanistic thought and philanthropy, and spiritual exploration, and Twin Peaks: The Return is his magnum opus, a mytho-poetic summation of his deepest beliefs and concerns. Author Olson, in his characteristically intimate and personal way, traces the Twin Peaks currents of Lynch’s emotional-visceral storytelling, themes, imagery and sound: the way the artist and viewer share an electrified circuit of mystery and understanding. Olson details Lynch’s kinship with transcendence-seeking artists like William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jean Cocteau, Philip K. Dick and the post-World War II mystical Northwest painters. Small town values, coffee culture, the color pink, the Bible, Vedic literature, Marvel Comics Superheroes, and a Parisian camera crew wanting Olson to guide them throughTwin Peaks territory all make appearances. Olson’s chronicle includes personal interaction with Lynch, his colleagues, and the artist’s inner world of karmic balancing, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and veneration of women. Twin Peaks centers on the abiding presence of a lost woman, Laura Palmer, the downward, then upward arc of her life, afterlife, and goddess potential. Olson. Lynch and Twin Peaks have been on parallel tracks for decades. Olson’s longtime love, Linda Bowers, died shortly before Twin Peaks: The Return aired, and his lived experience with Lynch’s art speaks to the healing power of artistic engagement.

Greg Olson, founder of the Seattle Art Museum’s award-winning film program, was born in Seattle. Olson grew up in the Twin Peaks region, where his father was a lumberjack in the same woods of northwestern Washington as Pete Martell. Olson is the author of David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (2008) and has also written about Lynch for Film Comment and Premiere (Japan).