WARNING: Contain spoilers for TWIN PEAKS (2017).

The existence of continuity errors in films can be a fascinating one, and when it’s “done” right, it creates perplexing feelings that makes the viewer question the fictional reality, especially in a work that’s as destabilizing as Twin Peaks. And there are a lot of such errors which had sparked numerous debates over its conspicuous intentions. But the fact that such errors are remained in the film emphasize that a film is always a collection of choices by its maker, however they might sometimes resemble mistakes and carelessness.

In Part 7 of Season Three (aka The Return), we discovered finally, through Hawk, that Laura indeed wrote down, in her secret diary, the message she was told to write down when she encountered Annie Blackburn in a dream (from Fire Walk With Me), who told her that “the good Dale (Cooper) is in the Lodge.” This is the same episode where in the end, the extras dining in the usually charming Double R diner all changed without reason between two master shots, which was likely just a continuity error. But the debate at the time, the crazier ones at least, suggest Lynch intentionally put the error in there to hint at the existence of alternate universes/timelines within the series, which was more or less confirmed in the finale, when Cooper changed the history by preventing Laura’s murder, an event that distorted the entire existence of Twin Peaks. But another debate revolves around these newly found diary pages, and despite Hawk obviously being an unreliable narrator, we wonder how this was possible. How did Laura wrote down these words in her diary, when it was already in the possession of the agoraphobic Harold Smith, before she encountered Annie in her dream?

Well then, there’s a lot of ways to make sense of it from a narrative standpoint, depending on the viewer’s taste, but this can also be understood intuitively, in the same sense that this dream Laura had in the prequel/sequel film was, in itself, a temporal paradox, a thing made possible only because it was manifested by the filmmaker, the same way that this film was Lynch’s afterthought after his unpleasant experience when making Season Two, an attempt to give Laura Palmer a second chance and to bring a sort-of closure to the Twin Peaks universe. So, let’s just say that time does run backwards when you want it, in a somewhat Proustian sense. And Lynch did it again, along with Mark Frost, in Part 8 of Season Three, which they created an origin story of BOB, the Fireman, Laura Palmer, and practically all things Twin Peaks, all depicted through a wordless and dazzlingly avant-grade sequence. But just like the unlikely record of Laura’s dream encounter, this can only exist “after the fact”, and so is Laura’s apparent “origin” depicted in the episode, with her “soul” or “being” conjured up as a golden sphere by the Fireman and sent to Earth by Señorita Dido. Needless to say that there is danger and tension, in that by doing this, the authors had seemingly rewritten the story of Fire Walk With Me, sabotaging Laura’s much grounded agency in that film by recontextualizing her as an archetypal “chosen one” who destined to suffer, but the authors had too much love for the character to truly went that far. The event of Part 8 became rather a confirmation of Laura’s suffering, in conjunction to the series’ acknowledgement of the grand history of suffering in the 20th century: the Fireman and Señorita Dido saw Laura’s fate in the future via her eternal image (the choosing of the prom portrait is important) as an answer to the creation of atomic weapons, the same way we are now transported to the past to see the retrograde “completion” of that story. If the Red Room can make time flow backwards, so is this. In a way, if Cooper’s relentless effort to save Laura from certain death in Parts 17 and 18 ultimately served as a warning of our desire to change the past, we should consider that for us, the past is always viewed from the present, and our mind, therefore cinema, helps us relish the pain, which can’t be undone.

A side-note: If The Irishman’s de-aging effect wasn’t technically “perfect,” which would’ve been meaningless, it’s because Scorsese’s film will always be a piece of remembrance, that of an old man reliving his past at the end of his time. Optic illusion only goes so far, but his body reveals itself nonetheless, and that’s the morality of “continuity errors.”