It’s one of the truly singular, transcendent, and masterful pieces of moving image art made this century, and this weekend New York City audiences will have the rare opportunity to see all 18 parts of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” on the big screen as part of MUBI and Metrograph’s two-day marathon.
Making the pilgrimage to New York is Dean Hurley, who was the re-recording mixer, supervising sound editor, and sound and music supervisor on “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Appearing on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to discuss Lynch’s use of sound and creative process, Hurley told IndieWire the marathon was more than an opportunity to see the series on the big screen. The Metrograph audience will also be the first to see the full version of the series, the way Lynch intended.
“It gets back to the whole, ‘You may think you’ve seen the film, but you haven’t,’” said Hurley, paraphrasing Lynch’s iPhone rant that became an internet meme. “These are the theatrical mixes and the one thing that I’m really excited about is this is the intention, this is how David mixed them, and this is how he experienced them.”
Beyond his official titles, Hurley played a larger role in Lynch’s creative life. The filmmaker hired Hurley in 2005 as engineer at his recording studio, a converted Hollywood Hills home he used as a “Lost Highway” location. Hurley would become Lynch’s jack-of-all-trades “sound guy” who did everything from recording, mixing, session playing to post supervision and procuring instruments. Lynch preferred a DIY approach, working in the insular bubble of his studio.
For Lynch, who took the sound designer credit on his films and “Twin Peaks: The Return,” it is impossible to underestimate the importance sound played in all of his art. Sound was often the spark of emotional inspiration and his Hollywood Hills “Asymetrical Studio” was a creative space where he spent a large portion of his waking hours.
Lynch and Hurley recorded sounds used in “The Return” a decade before scripts were completed. For example, Lynch had a library of recordings of electricity, which became a throughline across three seasons of “Twin Peaks.”
“You might read electricity in [the script] and think, ‘OK, I’m going to go out and record electricity,’” Hurley said on the podcast. “But what David showed me is sounds in movies are exaggerated versions of themselves in real life… you jack them full of emotion, you make them larger than life when that sound carries that emotion, because we remember things differently.”
Lynch preached to Hurley that at the heightened moments of our lives, we remember sound as louder and having far more impact than the reality. That’s what the filmmaker wanted in his work.
“You need something that reaches into your caveman self, some primordial sound, that when you hear it your caveman self says, ‘That’s fucking dangerous,’” said Hurley. “David loved volume, he loved extremes. His filmmaking could be summed up in extremes because he’ll take an emotion and just jack it up to the nth degree, to this characterized version, a juiced up, steroidal version of that emotion, and especially with that atomic bomb sequence.”
Hurley is, of course, referencing Part 8 of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” one of the most celebrated episodes of television ever, in which an atomic bomb goes off. Hurley distinctly remembered working on Part 8 and Lynch yelling, “‘Dean, jack this up to 11, I want to make ears bleed.’ And I’m thinking, that’s a major problem. This is a television show delivery system.”
He and Lynch found themselves in paradox while mixing “Twin Peaks: The Return.” “The heartache on crafting one of his theatrical soundtracks is when you walk into a theater, it’s what the director presents. If they want something super quiet and then they want to hit you over the head with a full-level, full-channel assault they can, and as an audience member you experience that as it’s intended. Television is a different thing because you’ve got front-end compressors, treating the signal and squashing things into a band before they even go out.”
Another major limitation is home speakers that make all of us theater managers able to adjust the decibel level with a click of our remotes.
“The power of the cinema and the standards of the presentation mode that was brought about with standards like THX, where you’re tuning a room, it’s playing at 85 decibels, you’ve got these giant crossover speakers with tweeter and fiberglass horns and 20-inch woofer, that has the potential to really move a ton of air in the theater,” said Hurley. “And you can feel it physically, viscerally in a different way than on AirPods or a laptop speaker. I think that’s what David was getting at with ‘If you think you’ve seen it on the phone, it’s a fucking joke.’”
If you watch the video that inspired Lynch’s famous meme, it’s clear the filmmaker’s rant stemmed from the deep “sadness” Lynch felt about the delivery systems of how we experience his art.
That sadness was something Lynch felt intensely while “Twin Peaks: The Return” aired on Showtime, as it never had the emotional and physical impact of what Lynch felt in his studio. That frustration became anger while creating the “nearfield” mix, the broadcast standard designed to limit sound for the home viewing experience.
“It was always hard for him because we would do mixes for things, [even] Criterion remasters, when he wanted to listen to them on his flat screen TV to see how they were playing,” said Hurley. “He would get so emotional, like irate because he’s like, ‘The power isn’t there.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s there. Go in the studio and listen to it,’ and it would verify that it’s there. But a lot of these playback systems, it’s exactly what he talked about with the phone. ‘ You think you’re watching it,’ but you can only watch so much coming out of two-inch cones.”
After “Twin Peaks: The Return” aired, Lynch instructed Hurley to create a theatrical mix for the full series. He previously created theatrical mixes for Parts 1 and 2 when they screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
“’OK, Dean, go ahead, take the limiters off, put the mixes in a 85 decibel paradigm,’” Hurley remembered Lynch instructing. “Because somebody said, I can’t remember whether it was Sabrina [Sutherland], the producer, or David himself, ‘Someday they’re going to show these in a museum.’”
Up until this weekend, beyond the Cannes premieres, Hurley said only Part 8 has screened publicly in its theatrical mix. Which is why the longtime collaborator, confidant, and friend is making the trip to New York for the marathon.
“This is what David was dreaming of when we did this mix,” said Hurley. “This is how he experienced it while making it, and it’d make him happy it was finally being presented the way he intended.”
Metrograph’s two-day marathon of “Twin Peaks: The Return” will take place July 5 and 6 to mark the 35th anniversary of “Twin Peaks” Season 1. Dean Hurley will be in attendance to introduce the series for select showtimes and will also participate in a special pre-screening conversation. For more information, visit the Metrograph website.
To listen to Dean Hurley’s interview airing on July 10, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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