"GOTTA LIGHT?" - DAVID LYNCH'S OPPENHEIMER MOMENT

Trust a maverick like David Lynch to execute the perfect cinematic reconstruction of Oppenheimer's 1945 Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in his now legendary episode 8 "Gotta Light?" of 'Twin Peaks - Season 3'. There's an absolute purity to the visual design of the hypnotic sequence that is both beautiful and terrifying all at once.

Moving slowly toward the mushroom cloud of destruction the camera seems to completely envelop inside the chaos of radioactive particles as a lengthy sequence of abstract fallout ensues while a nightmarish collage of intense sound design fused with Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” threatens to overwhelm the audience. If Terence Malick had made 'The Tree of Life' on heroin it might just look (and sound) something like this.

Talk about a front-row seat, Lynch seems to want to mediate inside the thermal blast as if it's the bookend to the original big bang, an apocalyptic sequel of biblical proportions that can only bring darkness and death in its wake.

To have the confidence as an artist to create a sequence as audacious as this proves that, if for only these few mind-blowing moments, 'Twin Peaks - Season 3' was well worth the endless head fuckery of the near-incomprehensible plotlines throughout the rest of the series that we, the bewildered viewers, had to patiently endure.

Of course, not satisfied with just this iconic Trinity sequence alone, Lynch goes even further in forging a new chapter of American gothic surrealism by delivering a haunting set of scenes later in the very same episode.

Firstly we see the hatching of an unearthly amphibian-insectoid creature from an egg on the New Mexico explosion site that crawls through the desert night suggesting this 'thing' has been born from the detritus of the atomic bomb.

Then, we see a young girl (possibly Sarah Palmer, mother of the famously dead Laura Palmer) return home from a date in 1956 with a young boy (possibly Leland Palmer) in the eerie quietness of a small American desert town that literally appears "as black as moonlight on a moonless night" to quote Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in an earlier episode of Twin Peaks - Season 1.

This idyllic scene of classic Lynchian Americana is followed by the sight of a sinister woodsman with a black oil-covered face descending upon the isolated American town and who then carries out a murderous rampage of several civilians before taking to the airwaves of a local radio station and reciting these mysterious words on a loop: “This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” This spine-chilling verse appears to act like a sorcerer's spell as all those in the town that hear it incanted through the crackling airwaves of their radios appear to fall immediately into a deep sleep like something from 'Sleeping Beauty' when, you'll remember, all the subjects of the kingdom entered a one-hundred-year state of repose.

And to cap it all off the amphibian-insectoid creature has now also arrived in the town as it makes its way purposely to the young girl ('sleeping beauty') fast asleep in her bedroom where it crawls slowly into her mouth before being swallowed deep inside her body.

All of these nightmarish scenes combined seem to suggest that a new age of evil had fallen upon America as a result of the birth of the atomic bomb in 45 and rather like that box of Pandora's there's no forcing the lid back down on the endless horrors which have now been unleashed.