Twin Peaks - There and Back Again

The prospect of a presidential election at this moment seems a farce, and a nightmare: the game is up, but the rules are still in effect, severe as ever. Broadcasting from his rec room, Joe Biden is like a senescent version of Twin Peaks’s hero FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: a shell of a man, malfunctioning from afar. He reaches us as if faxed from the Black Lodge, passing through a thick sludge of metaphysical static, slurring his slogans and bungling lessons to children, his benevolent smile trapped in amber, a yellowing Xerox of white male authority. Trump is there too: a deranged superego, wrecking the castle, telling his subjects to mainline bleach and tasking his team of experts to “[bring] the light inside the body … through the skin, or in some other way.”