On Twin Peaks: The Return, this summer's 18-part sequel to David Lynch's iconic early-'90s show, things happen in ways you never see on TV—even now, even in this era of "peak TV." It is paced like nothing else out there. It sounds like nothing else. It is odd in all kinds of delightful and unexpected ways, periodically startling, and even at its most abstruse and capricious, it somehow always pulls you along with it. But maybe more remarkable than how things do happen on Twin Peaks is how things don't happen.
One mesmerizing moment, from part seven: a scene at the Roadhouse, the local tavern, empty but for a man behind the bar and another man sweeping the floor. The shot is framed, wide and still, so that you can see them both. Eventually the man behind the bar will answer a phone call, and the story will advance. But before that happens there is…more or less nothing. Ten seconds pass. (The man sweeps.) Thirty seconds. (Still sweeping.) A minute. (Sweeping on.) Two minutes. On and on, until finally the phone rings and time, unfrozen at last, moves forward.
Why is this so magical to watch, when it could so easily be tedious and pointless and affected? Kyle MacLachlan—who sits at the center of the show, playing three characters—watched this scene, as well as every other moment in the series, every week on TV just like the rest of us, at home on Sunday nights. (He is married, with a young son, but he preferred to watch it alone.) And like the rest of us, he has his own theories on what David Lynch is up to.
"So you're waiting," MacLachlan says. "And you know you're waiting. And you're like, 'Oh, maybe he's extending this moment because there's actually something in what I'm seeing right now that I should be paying more attention to.' And then you're waiting a little longer, [until you're] like, 'No, that's not it either.' In your mind you're jumping ahead, and he's asking you not to jump ahead. He's asking you to stay right here and just enjoy this moment. You know, like, Cooper has that great expression, 'Give yourself a present'? It's like, 'Oh, just give yourself a present.' Of just relaxing and watching this guy sweep for a few minutes. Just relax and enjoy that. Then, '…Okay, did you have a little break?' "
MacLachlan chuckles.
"Sometimes I think that's what he's doing."
Do you think when he does something like that he privately thinks it's hilarious?
"Yeah. Oh yeah. But it's not just a toss-off. There's a reason for everything. Whether it serves the story or not."
And because of moments like this—along with many others, some of them deeply disturbing—what David Lynch does on your TV screen may not be suited for a weekend marathon.
"It's not kind of a binge-y show," MacLachlan says. "It's just so much to mull over after you see one episode. You can binge Twin Peaks, but your brain's going to explode."
In a sense, Kyle MacLachlan is another of David Lynch's great inventions. He had never appeared on-screen when Lynch plucked him from nowhere-ish (Yakima, Washington) to be the blossom-haired lead in the 1984 science fiction debacle Dune. Then, undeterred by Dune’s failure, Lynch gave MacLachlan his breakthrough role within the transgressive magnificence of Blue Velvet. And after that, most crucially of all, Lynch chose MacLachlan to be Special Agent Dale Cooper, the disconcertingly perky FBI agent—a man forever resolute in the face of whatever surreal weirdness he might encounter in the world of Twin Peaks.
For the past quarter of a century, MacLachlan has had to find his own way without Lynch, mostly in episodic TV of every kind (Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, How I Met Your Mother, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Portlandia) punctuated by scattershot movie credits. Until two years ago, when Lynch summoned him to a New York hotel for a cup of coffee and told MacLachlan it was time to come home.
"I guess for a number of years I've been just swimming along at a certain rate and enjoying the currents and the eddies," MacLachlan muses. "And suddenly the river's got a little faster. It's rushing, and I'm trying to keep up."
ABOUT THIS SHOOT
We knew we wanted to finish 2017 with a big story celebrating this new breed of suits—the kind you might wear if you have a creative-class job like, say, an architect. So it only made sense to shoot in a brilliant new building by a master of the form. Right up until she died last year, Zaha Hadid was one of my all-time favorites. Walking down the High Line on the West Side of Manhattan, I would watch her experimental condominium taking shape at 520 West 28th Street and think to myself, "I gotta get in there." So we took the idea to Kyle: Wear the suits of the moment in the building of the year. He loved the concept. And the way he wears the clothes (with Chelsea boots and totally un-corporate underpinnings) feels just as modern as the space itself. —Jim Moore, GQ Creative Director
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.
This story originally appeared in the December 2017 issue with the title "Peak Style."