By Stuart Mitchner

Put me on a highway

Show me a sign

Take it to the limit

One more time

—from the Eagles,
“Take It to the Limit” (1975)

Because the audience knows how far over the top the song and singer are going to go, the excitement is already building as Randy Meisner sings the first words (“All alone at the end of the evening and the bright lights have faded to blue”). A bass guitar around his neck, he’s standing front and center with the Eagles at the Capital Centre, Landover, Maryland, March 21-22, 1977.

The song’s title is itself a constant challenge for a lifelong dreamer who “can’t seem to settle down,” whose dreams keep “burning out and turning out the same,” until he gets to the “take it to the limit one more time” cadenzas, holding each note a life’s breath longer until it’s as if he’s gone so high and so far that he’s lost in an absolute and might not make it back but for the intoxicated crowd willing him to surpass the unsurpassable. As many times as Meisner gave the crowd the high they wanted, the night came when he had to tell his bandmates that he could no longer do it, and that was the beginning of the end of his time with the Eagles. As he says in the documentary History of the Eagles, “The line ‘take it to the limit’ was to keep trying before you reach a point in your life where you feel you’ve done everything and seen everything.” He was in his early thirties when he sang it and 77 two weeks ago when he died.

Origins

While I have no evidence that David Lynch ever responded to Randy Meisner’s signature song, his work has always embodied a take-it-to-the-limits aesthetic, and none more so than the original Twin Peaks (at its best) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the subject of the final chapter of Lynch’s hybrid biography/memoir Room to Dream (Random House 2018, with Kristine McKenna). It’s characteristic that music is at the heart of the chapter’s opening paragraph: “There’s something about stopping something before it’s finished that leaves you wanting it, and Twin Peaks wasn’t finished. In music you hear a theme and then it goes away, then the song goes along for a while, then you sort of hear the theme again, then it goes away again. It feels so good and then it goes and you can’t get it out of your mind.”

In a May 2018 Salon interview Twin Peaks 3 co-author Mark Frost described the famous, widely acclaimed Part 8 (“Gotta Light?”) as a platform for determining where the entire Twin Peaks project’s “pervasive sense of darkness and evil” originated: “We wrote it in great detail,” but “as we were putting down the descriptions, I knew David was going to take that as the blueprint for something extraordinary. He ran with it and elevated it to a whole other level” where “the atomic explosion was probably half a page as written,” but “in David’s hands, it could run as long as 10 or 12 minutes, and it would be riveting. It was certainly a narrative departure from what we had done before.”

“She’s Gone Away”

Every installment of TP3 except Part 8 ends with a performance at the Twin Peaks hangout the Roadhouse. Lynch, however, chooses to place a sludgy rock dirge performed live by Nine Inch Nails directly before his bravura reinvention of the Trinity blast (shown above), suggesting the relation between the explosion and the Twin Peaks “origin story.” The gruesomely evocative who-killed-Laura-Palmer lyrics of Nine Inch Nails’ “She’s Gone Away” (“You dig in places ‘til your fingers bleed / Spread the infection where you spill your seed”) suggest as much: “I was watching on the day she died / We keep licking while the skin turns black / Cut along the length, but you can’t get the feeling back … She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone away.”

Lynch usually prefers placing romantic music in unromantic contexts, as he does with Roy Orbison’s “Dreams” in Blue Velvet. The original Twin Peaks is haunted by the lovelorn singing of Julee Cruise (1956-2022) and Angelo Badalamenti’s (1937-2022) rapturously sinister score. “She’s Gone Away” doesn’t build tension as much as it delays and distances the coming spectacle. If there has to be a Roadhouse song at this point, it might be better to go with the usual Lynchian mix of irony and teen angst with a song like “Take It to the Limit” where “You can spend all your time making money” and “all your love making time.” Better yet leave Part 8 devoid of music except for Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima and the Platters’ “My Prayer,” which is playing over the radio 11 years later as a frog-moth hatched from the dust of Ground Zero crawls into the open mouth of the sweetly asleep All-American schoolgirl who will grow up to be Laura Palmer’s haunted mother.

Visions of Trinity

Lynch puts the date, time, and place in white letters on a black screen — July 16, 1945, White Sands New Mexico, 5:29 AM (MWT) — before presenting his remaking of Trinity, which will spew psychic fallout to key locales on Planet Lynch such as Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York City, and Twin Peaks, Washington, where the woods are dark and deep and the “owls are not what they seem.”

The vision of the test in Christopher Nolan’s recently released film Oppenheimer, reviewed here two weeks ago, created considerable media fallout, as in the New York Times opinion piece from a resident pointing out that “the area of southern New Mexico where the Trinity test occurred was not, contrary to the popular account, an uninhabited, desolate expanse of land. There were more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a 50-mile radius. Many of those children, women, and men were not warned before or after the test.” On July 20 the Times ran an article complete with elaborate color graphs showing that within 10 days of detonation the fallout from White Sands had reached 46 states, Canada, and Mexico. Quoted in the article, a Manhattan Project physician reported that the Trinity cloud “remained towering over the northeast corner of the site for several hours.” Soon, he added, “various levels were seen to move in different directions.” An assessment “of the fallout’s reach could be undertaken later on horseback.”

IMAX to the Limit

Nolan’s version of the test at Trinity was spectacular enough to move the Guardian reviewer to hail it as Oppenheimer’s main event, “that terrifying first demonstration … This is the big bang, and no one could have made it bigger or more overwhelming than Nolan. He does this without simply turning it into an action stunt.”

That is, no one could have made it “bigger” except David Lynch. Nolan’s blast can be seen supersized on IMAX. Made for the so-called small screen, Lynch’s version seems to be attempting to manifest something like the doomsday event the Manhattan Project scientists knew might take place should the chain reaction ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. And what would happen should audiences one day see Part 8 of Twin Peaks 3 on the IMAX? The possibilities are wild. Imagine anything. Take it to the limit. As David Lynch remarks in the last chapter of Room to Dream after describing his discovery of the “frog-moth” when stepping off a train into the soft dust of Yugoslavia (“and out of the earth these huge moths, like frogs, were leaping up, and they’d fly and flip and go back down again”): “Things just sort of show up in the world of Twin Peaks.”