Lynchworld

Film maker David Lynch’s two-hour “Twin Peaks,” his unconventional nighttime soap opera that airs on ABC in mid-March, will end with a cliffhanger--a tease for weekly episodes to follow. For a European video release, though, Lynch tagged on 15 minutes of new footage: “We needed a resolution, so I made a resolution,” he explains.

Lynch’s “resolution” may be destined to become a classic in the lexicon of Lynch film weirdness: Set 25 years in the future, it has an FBI investigator (Kyle MacLachlan), old and gray, sitting in a red room with a midget and a beautiful young woman. MacLachlan remains still; the others move in odd, jerky motions. A few lines of oblique dialogue are garbled. The midget begins go-go dancing, a strobe light flickers, an ominous shadow crosses a red curtain, the girl kisses and whispers to Mac-Lachlan. That’s it--all unexplained.

What gives?

Lynch tells us he shot the sequence backwards --actors moved in reverse motion and even spoke “mirror language,” each word read from right to left. Then the backwards footage was run backwards again, so that the action moves forward . . . in a weird sense.

“I just sort of took off and got into a very strange world,” Lynch says. “I was free to do whatever I wanted for the alternate ending, so I, uh, got into something that was very strange, indeed.”

Although there are no plans for the extended version to be shown in the U.S., parts of the foreign ending may turn up in episodes of the TV series here, Lynch said.