ABSTRACT
The physiology of the ear haunts David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, in which Lynch himself portrays the hard-of-hearing FBI bureau chief Gordon Cole. Gordon’s hearing aids serve as tools for Lynch to break the boundary between the diegetic and nondiegetic levels of sound, allowing him to position the viewer in the subjective hearing of the character. This chapter focuses on the 2017 sequel of the show, Twin Peaks: The Return. Drawing on the theoretical work of Michel Chion and Gilles Deleuze, I examine the role played by Gordon’s literal deafness and damaged hearing within Lynch’s cinematic rhetoric as it defines points of audition, evokes intimacy, and draws the audience across an aural topology which binds different and detached subjectivities.
