Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017)

In Terror from the Air, Peter Sloterdijk argues that from the beginning of the twentieth century warfare operates according to an ‘atmoterrorist model’ whereby air becomes an attackable zone that compromises everyday lifeworlds. The ‘breather’ in this situation is ‘an unwilling accomplice in his own annihilation’ as twentieth-century military assaults on atmosphere make explicit the ‘living organism’s immersion in a breathable milieu’ (Terror, 22–23). This atmoterrorist ‘explication’ (making explicit) of our vulnerability to an air-envelope is supplemented by mass media ‘vectors’ that everywhere produce anxiety about our weaponised atmosphere. For Sloterdijk, mass-mediated anxieties and hallucinations accompany the awareness of an imperceptible atmosphere that threatens us with homelessness and the potential prohibition of life itself. Closely reading ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017), this essay argues that Mark Frost’s and David Lynch’s visually, aurally and atmospherically potent television episode not only serves as a backstory to the long-running mystery of Laura Palmer, who is discovered raped and murdered in the original Twin Peaks (1990), but also foregrounds the role of air and breath normally backgrounded in the series. In tension with this surrealistic drama of explication is the primal vocality (calls, gasps, screams) of female characters who bear the traces of the toxic atmosphere they abide.