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 mythopoetic summation of his deepest beliefs and concerns. In Black Coffee Lightning: David Lynch Returns to Twin Peaks, Greg Olson (David Lynch: Beautiful Dark), 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 through Twin Peaks territory all make appearances.
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, a soulful song of the forest, America, the world, the cosmos. 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. Here his chronicle includes personal interaction with Lynch and Frost and their colleagues, as well as Olson’s perception of Lynch's inner world of karmic balancing, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and veneration of women.
Black Coffee Lightning: David Lynch Returns to Twin Peaks
A longtime David Lynch scholar takes on the latest season of Twin Peaks in this new book.
If anyone were ever destined to write about David Lynch and the world of Twin Peaks, it would be Greg Olson, founder of the Seattle Art Museum's award-winning film program. Born in Seattle, Olson grew up in the Twin Peaks region, where his father was a Swedish emigrant 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). He introduced Lynch the only time the director has appeared live with one of his films in Seattle, for a screening of the famously esoteric INLAND EMPIRE, and has hosted numerous Twin Peaks cast members, including Sheryl Lee just prior to the premiere of The Return. When he is not writing about Lynch or Twin Peaks, he is still writing about film, having contributed reviews and articles to the University of Washington Daily, Bellevue Journal American, Seattle Times, Seattle magazine, and Moviemaker magazine, as well as eighteen essays for the book Vietnam War Films, and The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide’s sections on visionary director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes), film noir, and director Jacques Tati, one of Lynch’s favorites. And when he is not writing about film, he is curating film screenings, like the Seattle Art Museum’s film noir series, reportedly the longest-running noir series anywhere in the world. Olson is also on the founding boards of the Seattle Film Society and the Film Noir Foundation.