The Idea of Waste in David Lynch's Films

[James Pate wrote the following post in response to my last post about David Lynch.]

The idea of “waste” in Lynch’s work referred to in your previous post is super-interesting and makes me think of the broom sweeping scene in episode 7 of The Return, where we watch someone sweep trash up from The Roadhouse floor for several minutes. It appears to have no direct narrative importance and could be considered a moment of “waste” within the Twin Peaks series (Lynch wasting the viewers’ time, or Showtime’s money, or the series wasting its momentum in an instance of self-indulgence).

There is an aesthetic tension to the scene. The camera is precisely situated to emphasize the expanse of the floor, and the space is lit to create a chiaroscuro effect, with the floorboards being brighter than the shadowy sweeper. And a great song, “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs, plays on the soundtrack. Yet for all of its moody, noir-ish charge, it’s still a scene of a guy sweeping for two and a half minutes.

I’ve read a lot of interpretations. One fairly popular take is that it’s a call-back to the scene in Fire Walk with Me where the floor of The Roadhouse is covered in cigarette butts, a symbol of the crime and corruption of the place (a corruption epitomized by the Renault brothers, one of whom appears in the background of the sweeping scene). The sweeper is trying to “clean up” the place, but of course there will only be more trash and cigarette butts (more moral corruption) the following night. The Renault brother in the background is a reminder that The Roadhouse will always be a site of violence and exploitation. (I think the point about the Renault connection between the Fire scene and this one is interesting, but I tend to find this interpretation too-directly symbolic).

Another take is that this is Lynch messing with his audience. Here, Lynch is once again undercutting our desire to move forward with the story, to resolve its many diverging plotlines. I remember the summer The Return aired, a friend of mine said he thought Lynch was a bit of a jerk for so continually going against what we the viewers would like to see (though the friend is still a big fan of Lynch). And Lynch does seem to have a love/hate relationship with the Twin Peaks audience (for example, his famous description of Fire Walk with Me as “my cherry pie present to the fans of the show—however, one wrapped in barbed wire”).

But going back to your idea of waste, the creative potential of waste…I like how the sweeping scene is both too much and too little. It’s too much because most such moments of this sort in a TV series would last for seconds, not minutes. It’s a gesture of excess a more streamlined narrative would have trimmed. It’s needless surplus.

But it’s also too little. Nothing (in the storytelling sense) happens. It’s empty, it’s bare, it’s devoid of characterization and narrative drive. It’s not realism in the usual sense but an everyday act carried out in “real” time.

And this tension between too much and too little opens up (to me at least) breathing space within the storyline of The Return. It’s a refusal in one way—a refusal to “get on with it.” But I see it as eerily affirmative too, demonstrating a willingness to stretch time out, to be more real than realism (and by doing so to make the real unfamiliar, intriguing, even dream-like).

And there’s the whole issue of labor too…it’s rare in U.S. films and TV shows to see a character simply working like this. Sweeping floors after closing time, the scene suggests, is as much a part of the Twin Peaks universe as Bob and the Black Lodge and garmonbozia. One isn’t truer or more real than the other. The mundane and the otherworldly aren’t a dichotomy in The Return: they’re mutually reinforcing.