This might just be me, but Twin Peaks finishing has put me in a huge mood to replay the Silent Hill games. Silent Hill is like Twin Peaks, but I cabn't really explain it but I do feel that something about Silent Hill 1-4 especially get the closest to capturing something Lynchian in a video game. It's not a precise thing, I doubt Lynch would ever make something like Silent Hill, and Silent Hill does have a lot of direct Lynch influence, but there's something that Twin Peaks captures for me that Silent Hill also captures that's very rare to see in works, despite being in the end quite different.
I know exactly the abstract thing you're talking about, without being able to put it into words. I didn't watch Twin Peaks until I was maybe 20, around that time I think I watched all of David Lynch's stuff, and everything he's done has this. I had played Silent Hill earlier, so I recognised the relation, and I've seen it in other things since - in a more diluted or bastarised form, like part of True Detective S1, X-files, Deadly Premonition, and things I'm forgetting. They all share a fascination with a certain kind of mystery and darkness, a certain kind of horror, I suppose. They also all share this sense that we never fully get the full thing, it's always diluted with other elements, there's always more left unseen and unsaid, or they miss the mark. So I've been pretty obsessed with it for nearly a decade - I spent months looking for a horror writer who wrote novels in this area, but I wasn't able to find any who went after this exact thing, so I gave up. I think it's because David Lynch pretty much invented it about 30 years ago, and the rest imitate it (sometimes successfully) to various extents. It's in a LOT of music, which makes sense, because it's a more emotional and abstract thing, which is something music can do like nothing else.
I feel differently after The Return, though. I had been feeling this a little before...a little tired of it. A little like maybe there's isn't as much there as I thought, it's just one man's extremely compelling fascinations and fetishes, rippling out into the wider world of entertainment and art.
I think overall, The Return was a sporadically entertaining mess with a good ending. Yeah, I actually like the ending - not most of episode 18, but the last 20 minutes or so, quite a lot. I think it's because it says something to me that in the end, all of this mystery and abstraction and fascination with 'darkness' in general eventually leads you to nothing but bewilderment and emptiness. There was never anything there, it was all a kind of collective dream of something important, but there are no hidden truths. It's just dark emotion, and I feel like I've utterly explored and felt everything this thing has to offer now, and I'm ready to move on a bit, so for that I'm glad it came back. I think this might even have been a big part of why David Lynch decided to do it - he hasn't made a movie in over a decade, and seems very ambivalent about it all now. I don't think he wanted people left nostalgic about Twin Peaks, or wanting to stay in this same old dark dreamland, so he gave us this to take it away.
Maybe I'd have got there in the end anyway, like I said I was already feeling a little tired of it, but now I've really spent some time looking at it directly - this season is that darkness in it's purest form seen so far (about 50% pure darkness!) and what's the end result of getting such a concentrated dose of it? Bewilderment and emptiness. I don't think there's any point in going down this particular rabbit hole any deeper when there are so many others in the world I haven't yet explored. It's been an obsession of mine, I've even tried to replicate it myself in music and games and writing, looked for it everywhere, and I never felt like I could get to the heart of it and now I think that's because it doesn't have one. It was fascinating, but less endless and primary than I thought.
Something like that, anyway.
