The landscape of Twin Peaks—the bitter mist that shrouds the sycamore trees, their gnarled branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers, the wind’s murmur threading secrets through the leaves—isn’t just a setting. It’s a palimpsest where David Lynch and Mark Frost have etched the fractures of the American psyche. The series, much like Mark Fisher’s hauntology, emerges as an archaeology of the unmanifested, an elegy to futures stillborn. Here, America isn’t a failed experiment but a lingering wraith, a repressed echo haunting the deplorables—those who, in the toxic nostalgia of a gilded past, huddle against the present’s unraveling.

Donald Trump’s election in 2024 is inseparable from the temporal crisis of late capitalism. Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life (2014), reworks Jacques Derrida’s spectral lens to frame hauntology as a condition where “the past keeps returning because the future has been canceled.” He writes, “What haunts us is not the past per se, but the futures it was supposed to deliver” (Fisher, 2014). This is no mere wistfulness; it’s a collapse of time itself, the present choked by the ghosts of what might have been. Hauntology, Fisher argues, is “the stain of the canceled future on the present,” a phantom flickering in the rusting husks of factories, the yellowed edges of old photographs, the hiss of a needle stuck in a record’s groove.

Trump emerges here not as a fluke but as a figure conjured from this void—a carnival barker in a red cap, his voice booming over a landscape of shuttered mills and cracked asphalt, summoning visions of chrome-trimmed Cadillacs rolling past whitewashed picket fences glowing under a Kodachrome sun, a heartland reborn in the amber haze of a Super 8 reel. Whether this is salvation or illusion depends on where you stand; the imagery alone is a spell woven from America’s faded celluloid dreams.

Twin Peaks, especially The Return (2017), mirrors this temporal fracture. Lynch doesn’t just portray a haunted America; he exhumes it, stripping nostalgia to reveal the bones beneath. The sycamore grove, where time frays like threadbare cloth, becomes the flesh of Fisher’s hauntology: we’re haunted not by what we’ve lost but by what we never became. Fisher nails this cultural paralysis: “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations… the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed” (Fisher, 2014). Trump strides into this tableau, his silhouette framed by rusted grain silos and flickering neon signs spelling out half-dead promises, his vows of golden prosperity unfurling like a tattered flag over a ghost town littered with the husks of 1950s gas stations, their pumps seized in rust, and black-and-white TV sets beaming canned laughter into rooms thick with dust—a political séance calling forth spirits from a reel that never finished spinning.

Deep America, this sprawl of diners with jukeboxes and abandoned gas stations is where the past replays like a warped cassette. Lynch, the cinematic sorcerer, had already whispered the truth: the past isn’t a haven—it’s a snare. Fisher’s hauntology sharpens this, positing our fixation on yesteryear as a symptom of a culture “incapable of generating new forms” (Fisher, 2014). In Twin Peaks, the town is a reliquary of unhealed wounds, a scar that festers. The Red Room, its velvet curtains swaying like a heartbeat, its backward dances twisting logic, is nowhere where time buckles—Agent Cooper adrift between what was and what might have been. The Return pushes this further, sketching an alternate “Twin Peaks”—a shadow-realm where evil might have faltered—echoing Fisher’s ache for “the ghost of a future that never came to be” (Fisher, 2014).

Who killed Laura Palmer? The question drips with nostalgia. You know it from the series’ thunderous debut. If you’re younger, it’s a refrain from reruns or its ceaseless pop culture ripples. Her face—mascara-streaked, blood-smeared—stands as Twin Peaks’ indelible glyph. In The Return, her scream in Episode 17 splits the narrative like a storm, baring the suppurating wound beneath. This scream is hauntology-made flesh: a trauma that defies the grave, a memory that claws back into being.

Angelo Badalamenti’s score amplifies this ghostly haze. His languid, otherworldly melodies conjure an ache for something never real – a soundtrack stalked by its own echoes. Fisher, musing on Burial, calls this “a melancholy that refuses to let go of the future’s absence” (Fisher, 2014). In Twin Peaks, each note bears the heft of shattered vows, a sonic wrath weaving through the tale. When Cooper asks, “What year is this?” it’s not bewilderment—it’s a reckoning. The year is 1989, 2017, and 2024; it’s perpetually the year of our discontent. Laura haunts not just Twin Peaks but the whole of America—a sacrificial lamb to a system that crowns innocence only to butcher it, her death a scalpel slicing through the veneer to expose the rot.

Her scream is a nation’s denial of its shadows. Trump steps forth amid this nightmare, his red cap a beacon against the dusk, his words painting murals of gleaming steel plants belching smoke into a cerulean sky, aproned housewives pouring coffee in spotless kitchens with linoleum floors shining like mirrors—images that shimmer like mirages over cracked highways littered with faded billboards and tumbleweeds. Lynch unveils Twin Peaks’ past—the diner, the coffee, the cherry pie—as a fragile dream veiling a bleaker truth. His America is a realm of hollowed-out diners, sycamore trees muttering in forgotten dialects, and a beauty gnawed by ancient violence. Who killed Laura Palmer? is less a detective’s riddle than a parable of the American Dream’s demise. Laura, the homecoming queen, is the maiden slain on late capitalism’s altar, her body swathed in plastic and oil—a totem of innocence that was always a fiction.

Whether staged in rural Washington or the Midwest, the setting blurs. The Return shrugs off metamodernism’s self-aware games, revealing not a cozy hamlet but a factory necropolis—an archipelago of small businesses gasping beyond their destined end, generations bound to trauma’s wheel, replaying violence and silence. And there, flickering at consciousness’s edge is the myth of brighter days—which, as the early seasons attest, were never bright. Progress falters in Twin Peaks, leaving only a haunted standstill. This rhymes with Fisher’s view of a culture “stuck in a feedback loop of nostalgia and repetition” (Fisher, 2014), where history sours into melancholy instead of marching toward tomorrow.

This temporal snare resonates with broader currents of thought. Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) paints a world where historicity has withered, leaving us paralyzed before a present that rummages through its own attic for meaning. He describes “a society bereft of all historicity, whose putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles” (Jameson, 1991)—a carnival of moth-eaten costumes and faded props, where Twin Peaks’ diners serve as wax museums of Formica counters and chipped mugs, and Trump’s promises unfold like a traveling salesman’s suitcase of tarnished trinkets: rusted factory keys, sepia postcards of suburban lawns, a jukebox spitting out warped 45s. It’s a pastiche that flattens time into a flickering View-Master reel, each click revealing not history but a simulacrum—grease-stained blueprints of a prosperity that never broke ground. Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second (2006) amplifies Lynch’s cinematic warping, arguing that film “preserves a moment and embalms it,” turning time into “a kind of museum of stopped clocks” (Mulvey, 2006). The Red Room becomes this celluloid crypt, its crimson curtains a shroud over a projector stuttering on a single frame—Cooper trapped in a flickering loop, Laura’s scream a soundwave fossilized in amber, the sycamore groves a forest of petrified reels where every shadow is a ghost of a take that never rolled credits. Together, Jameson and Mulvey cast Twin Peaks and Trump’s America as a double exposure: a culture embalmed in its own nostalgia, the future a scratched negative, the past a reel rewound until the tape snaps.

In this weave of spectral pasts and unborn futures, saudade rises as a living thread—a Portuguese word born from the seafaring soul of a nation, its roots tangled in the Age of Discoveries when sailors gazed back at receding shores, yearning for homes they might never reclaim, and later distilled in the mournful strains of fado, music of loss and longing that defies translation. It’s a deep, soul-stirring ache that holds presence and absence, joy and sorrow, in a single, tender embrace—not just nostalgia, but a visceral pang for what was lost, what never came to be, and what lingers as a phantom limb of the heart, an emotional tapestry woven from memory, hope, and the unutterable void between. Unlike the Japanese mono no aware, which finds beauty in the fleeting impermanence of cherry blossoms or a sunset’s fade, saudade clings to the weight of what’s gone, a heavier, more possessive melancholy that doesn’t let go. Saudade is the sycamore trees’ whispered dirge for a Twin Peaks forever broken, Laura’s scream reverberating through an America that mourns without understanding, Trump’s Kodachrome visions of a heartland glowing like a dream half-remembered then lost to waking.

It’s Fisher’s canceled futures pressing against the present, Lynch’s Red Room looping in crimson limbo, the diner’s coffee cooling on a counter where no one sits—a longing that doesn’t just haunt but inhabits us, a bittersweet residue of lives unlived and promises unkept. Readers, let this saudade seep into your marrow, then seek its echo in sound: go listen to Dead Combo, Portugal’s troubadours of twilight guitar and mournful horns, whose music weaves that same ineffable ache into every note—a sonic saudade that dances with the ghosts of this essay, urging you to feel the weight, then sway it into the night.

Link to Bibliography

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In 2022, Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera premiered at the Opera Philadelphia’s Opera-on-Film Festival on September 30, 2022. I was lucky enough to attend an opening night with Merhige and his crew in the audience. After the movie, everyone was invited to dinner, and I got to ask Merhige a few personal questions about his films. Merhige is a private person who refutes any popular opinion about what anyone sees on film. Some have suggested it has something to do with lesbians or homosexuality (far from it). Eugene Thacker thought his films “would allow everything to dissolve – human into the non-human, body into the environment, image into emulsions of gelatin, crystal, and camphor.”1 Begotten alone influenced the noise genre of “Power electronics” and gave a voice to the “aesthetics of violence.”

But Merhige personally told me a story about cave art (to paraphrase),

“When you see the array of hands in Argentina, they were trying to communicate something together. It won’t make sense the first time. Although we feel a sense of anxiety in that medium beyond words. That is something film can be beyond the novel.”

This idea is clearly expressed in his 2006 film Din of Celestial Birds. If the act of creation could be expressed without words, what would it look like? When you project the film on the wall without any context or sound, what could be heard? Merhige works with black and white film to signify origin and that the artifact we are watching isn’t theater at all but a piece of a film from a different universe.

His mainstream film Shadow of the Vampire is a story about how we can’t trust film. The original Nosferatu in 1922 was made with real footage, and Count Orlok is not Max Schreck “acting” a fictional role. All of it is potentially real without the historical backdrop. In Merhige’s interpretation, Max Schreck is a real vampire, and the darkest conspiracy of all was believing that Nosferatu was a harmless picture play. We start to learn that the origin of film is more powerful than the imagination we bring with us.

Polia & Blastema is that 40-minute head spin. There is no plot, no actors, or no traditional devices found in theater. It’s pure collage art. The type of art film in the tradition of Stan Brakhage where colors and hand-painted imagery are confused between dancers in costumes and CGI that mocks the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft. The soundtrack is hypnotic and eerie. While not as gruesome as Begotten, Polia & Blastema hits the audience and gravitates you towards an inward meditation of anxiety. Once the film stops, you wake up from a nightmare. Humanity does not exist in this work of art. Merhige has created something of an anti-film.

It’s hard to explain what I saw. I love a film that does not follow the cliche of what it’s supposed to do. In the same way, I love a “novel” that tries to be anything but it. You can’t dance while you see Merzbow perform live. But you can rock your head and thrash as if it were metal. Watching Polia & Blastema makes me feel the film is attacking me. There is no denying that a majority of Merhige fans come from industrial and noise music backgrounds. While Merhige denies this influence, the catering towards Eugene Thacker’s trendy pessimism of a “world without us” makes me think otherwise.

The academic talk of a problematic “Anthropocene” is concerning. Philosophers like Timothy Morton believe that the age of humanity is problematic in that we should respect the rights of “non-humankind” and erase ourselves for a transhumanist future. Thacker talking about a “world without us” also implies that humanity is evil, that we have to get rid of “human supremacy” like it’s “white supremacy.” I wish I were making this up, but this is casual talk among late Gen-X American philosophers.

All this talk of negativity, guilt, and shame does not advocate an enlightened way of living but promotes the kind of shallow and pretentious self-destructive punk rock attitude of the noise musician and his urge to hate without reason. They soon latch onto the work of Merhige and justify the violent imagery as a reason behind their subculture. I get the moody appeal of Philip Best and his publishing house “Amphetamine Sulphate.” Yet this is a far cry from industrial music and its aesthetics of a bygone era. This popularity contest that Xerox “zines” of serial killers and pornography show us some kind of truth is absurd. I can see how Merhige plays a tightrope balancing act between this audience and serious connoisseurs who enjoy the film as art.

I talked with some of Merhige’s crew about concerns for Thacker’s irrational antinatalism. They seemed confused about what I was addressing, and one said I should “say it in his face.” …I would love to! But Thacker did not show up for the opening night. Rather, I talked to a fan from Oakland all the way and talked to him about how Ryan Trecartin seems to be both a fad and an elite smugness and commenter on Y2K culture. He got what I was saying, at least. A composer for Merhige followed me on Twitter and, days later, unfollowed me because of my politically incorrect opinions. I talked to him about Dennis Cooper and how his transgressions of childhood trauma relate to the blackness of Merhige’s film. Of course, not everyone is going to relate to that.

Merhige’s mother was also there. They talked a bit about the failure of Suspect Zero and how the producers wanted the film to be something that wasn’t in his vision. I enjoyed the aesthetics in that film the same way I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project. The horror relies solely on the viewer and what is perceived through a filter. However, suspect Zero makes allusions to the Weimar Republic and Viennese Actionism. The Blair Witch Project is found footage, as is, without any doubt that it’s fake. Both play on film having power over the viewer.

Begotten has influenced a generation of viewers who demand the A24 avant-garde over the normal, but Merhige remains the same. His resume speaks for itself and reaches beyond his first film. Polia & Blastema is a spiritual successor to Begotten, albeit with its pretty moments and drunken movements. Merhige is a hidden treasure in the American avant-garde canon. He made the right choice to focus on future film productions that could illustrate his interest in horror theater. I highly recommend the film, even if it is a pretty galactic slideshow and cosmic pour painting. What is thought-provoking isn’t the horror aspect but the audacity to express pain found in cave paintings. Art is something that moves us as much as we want to move it.

1. Thacker, Eugene (2015). “Chapter 3: Meditations on the Gothic”. Tentacles Longer Than Night. Horror of Philosophy. Zero Books.

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