In 2007, David Lynch created a short film – HollyShorts Greeting – for his acceptance of the fourth HollyShorts Film Festival Visionary Award (2008). There is much to admire in this four-minute film, from a variation on the backwards talking from Twin Peaks (1990–1) through an impromptu shuffling dance by Lynch, and on to – in anticipation of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) – a lineup of beguiling chorus cuties. Perhaps of most interest, though, is Lynch's instruction that we ‘keep [our] eye on [the] donut, not on [the] hole’. This is, of course, a delicious conceit because Lynch has always been interested in holes – that is, in portals or openings – that take you somewhere unexpected, somewhere dark and beautiful. Moreover, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us in Cinema 1: The Movement- Image, we should never confuse wholes with parts, or sets. Deleuze writes: ‘sets are closed, and everything which is closed is artificially closed. […] But a whole is not closed, it is open, and it has no parts’ (1986: 10).

This chapter appeals to the w/hole David Lynch – his open set of films and artworks – to argue that those who initially objected to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) thought that the part (the prequel film) would close out the set (the first and second seasons of the television series) when in actuality it worked only to extend the mystery. As Lynch would have it:

If Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me frustrated its initial audience – especially its Twin Peaks fan base – then this might be because the experience of (serial) repetition is displaced from a closed set or sequence of texts – the connection and continuation of a film prequel and television series – to an open w/hole.