Twin Peaks

[mmmark]

Just watch.com is best to see where to get stuff without having to check multiple places. But yeah you’re shit out of luck. It was probably a different production company and has licensing issues.

 

wink wink tho

[one-armed dwarf]

Watched season 2 finale, FWWM and the first episode of season 3. Three very different flavours of Peaks. I forgot that even in the last episode of season 2 they were still carrying on with the dead end soap opera plots. The bit where they deal with 

Spoiler

Windome Earle 

is still brilliant tho.

 

Mainly I just wanted to post my thoughts on FWWM before I forget and dive into the next 17 episodes. When I saw it originally I thought it was kind of a messy disaster. I feel a bit more kind to it now, it is sort of like the fresh wound of the trauma that the OG series is all about. 

 

There's this whole preoccupation with angelic imagery in the film which to me is

Spoiler

Laura wanting something/anything to whisk her out of her predicament. Which by the end of the film it seems almost to suggest that death itself was the release from a life of torment. Nobody in her life was worth living for or could protect her.

Or at least that's my reading, I prefer to read the stuff in Lynch's films in more an allegorical rather than literal sense. Which is what frustrated me first time watching season 3 cause it really doesn't seem to allow that kind of reading. I'm hoping though I get more out of it this time.

 

I am skipping the OG series on this rewatch cause there's just too much chaff in it now and season 1 is the only truly great season, but even then most of it isn't relevant to season 3 which almost feels like it's own story entirely. I think also Lynch just changes his mind constantly on the significance of certain stuff and the three different styles of TP don't always blend together

 

The other reason I'm rewatching s3 is to see if I was correct the first time that the way you're supposed to watch it is in binge form like a Netflix series rather than a week by week drip feed. Sometimes a plot will get setup in episode 2 and only get continued 4 episodes later. Which to me feels like it's paced like an 18 hour film and not a TV series.

 

Also I am skipping these Dougie scenes, I just can't. 

[mmmark]

14 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Also I am skipping these Dougie scenes, I just can't. 

What is this?

 

And this very much a weekly tv series to me. Watch one, soak it in and think about it until the next.

 

These are good:

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Dougie Jones, the 

Spoiler

tulpa that 'Mr C' creates to stay out of the black lodge.

 

[mmmark]

2 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Dougie Jones, the 

  Hide contents

tulpa that 'Mr C' creates to stay out of the black lodge.

 

Lol I know who that is. It was more like why would you skip those parts? That’s barbaric.

[one-armed dwarf]

In one of the episodes I just watched there is a seven minute scene where he fails to drink coffee and hangs his tie around his head, another later on has him shouting 'hellooooo' at slot machines for 5 minutes or so.

 

The thing is I get the point, it's that

Spoiler

Dougie is a blank slate which people will often project whatever is is they wish onto. And there is also the delayed gratification of Cooper properly returning

or at least that's what my interpretation of him was, but it's too belaboured a point by the show. If I watch all the Dougie scenes all over again I'm not finishing this rewatch, so I'm skipping the ones that I remember don't really lead to anything. I already know what happens in them and most of them don't tell you anything interesting. There's no narrative there, no interesting Lynchian visuals or situations that lead into something interesting to think about. It's an extended non-sequitur in character form. I love Lynch but not everything he does is gold and I feel like those scenes are the ones where someone needed to tell him 'no'.

 

IMO the Dougie Jones scenes are the silent draperunners of season 3, or those scenes where James has the affair with the older woman. I can watch doopelCoop all day but not this guy.

 

I was gonna get into it after watching the 18 episodes but that's my take on Dougie, worst part of season 3. The thing is I'm already enjoying the show more on the second run through by skipping them cause they annoyed me so much last time so it's nice to know I can do that. I know there are a few scenes with him which you can't really skip so I'll just watch those ones

[shinymcshine]

First time around I found the Dougie (and to some extent the Audrey) scenes annoying, as after all the time (waiting for Season 3) I wanted to explore their characters more.

 

On a second watch though, I actually quite enjoyed what they'd become.

[one-armed dwarf]

The thing is I will gladly watch a scene where someone sweeps the floor for 5 minutes, it's just the Dougie stuff is like a bad Mr Bean parody or something. I think it also wasted Naomi Watts who was obviously brilliant in Mulholland Dr. 

 

On the bright side the casting of Laura Dern as Diane is like the best casting decision ever.

[mmmark]

Shocking behaviour. The shouting hello when gambling is one of the highlights early on as well. Everyone loves that. Or so I thought.

 

Thing about twin peaks tho is that it’s different things to different people. Like an abstract painting. Interoperate it however you like there’s no right answer.

 

[DANGERMAN]

same as @shinymcshine  I enjoyed them more 2nd time through.

 

I still think the coffee scene in the office is funny, but more for the guy who has his coffee taken

[one-armed dwarf]

There's one scene where a guy discovers he has a taste for green tea lattes that I like.

 

I tried them for a while and they're alright but it feels like concentrated sugar.

[one-armed dwarf]

 

 

I was watching a comedy scene in this and someone turned the dryer on and I heard a low hum and thought something scary was going to happen.

 

So I think I've found the secret to Lynch's soundscape, turn on your dryer in a separate room and film people bringing cherry pie to a gun fight.

 

That's all, I'd guess I'll finish this in the next couple days. Actually on rewatch I've found there are far fewer of the Dougie scenes that I remember and most of them are plot based, not always the mr jackpots stuff. They're more like Mitchum Bros scenes really.

[shinymcshine]

The last live gig I went to was in Oct 19 when, inspired by Twin Peaks S3, I went to see the Chromatics in Bristol, and they were fabulous - think I popped this in the "Gigs" thread at the time.

 

The music, & interludes, in TP S3 are really well done, and takes it from just a narrative base into that Lynch world of encompassing different art forms into the feel, sounds, lighting and concepts. 

[one-armed dwarf]

I just finished my rewatch there. Also I found my bluray set so I might continue my peaks journey a bit tho and watch some of the weird shit I've never seen, like the European pilot (sort of a reverse Mulholland Dr situation, it's a made for TV movie version of the Twin Peaks pilot with apparently a very crap ending but some of the scenes got re-used in the proper show) and maybe that missing pieces thing but I will probably watch that while doing other stuff cause it's apparently not really got much of a narrative.

 

I think I liked season 3 better the second time cause I watched the episodes all together rather than stretched out over months. I really do think it's paced like an 18 hour film. One thing I found is a whole lot of stuff happens in the first couple episodes, then there's a massive plateau from about episode 3 onwards to much later in the show where little to nothing happens and it feels like a scrapbook of different ideas Lynch wanted to get out while he still could. My feeling is he wrote the ending first and probably the beginning too and joined the dots with his trademark dreamlike logic but I still think he got too much freedom with S3 and large swathes of it challenge me. Like at least half of S3 is terrible imo, but it hits moments and even stretches of beauty. Particularly in the back section of episodes. 

 

But like the project as a whole is as close as he gets to a Phantom Menace or Hobbit Trilogy for me. My whole take is the season is 

Spoiler

a doomed odyssey to undo the damage of the events of Fire Walk With Me. You can't unmake scar tissue or the trauma that caused it, even if you travel through different dimensions via awkward sex scenes. Even in her alt form 'Carrie Page' in Odessa is still a victim of some unspecified abuse. White horse on the mantlepiece, dead dude. 

 

What I like about the ending IMO is how it all sort of points into a time loop for the central figures. Most ofthe characters of Twin Peaks have all moved on with their lives after the Palmer stuff. Bobby sorts his shit out and Nadine 'dumps' Ed, Andy and Lucy have a family. Just cause it's 25 years later doesn't mean that there aren't bad things still happening but they happen on the outskirts of the story and never get explained. Apparently people online are really curious about what that Billy guy is all about, I think it doesn't matter. But hardly anyone knows or cares about the Laura Palmer stuff anymore or ever talks about it. But Coop who's been trapped in amber 25 years has this thing he's got to settle, tbh I never really understood what his mission was. Just that he tried to be Orpheus leading his wife out of the underworld (I think they are specifically invoking this myth in the final shots of episode 17, that's my take anyway). But he fucked it up and fixed nothing and gets unstuck in time with a single shot that sums up the entire history of bad shit that happened Laura stretched out to eternity. So it goes. 

 

Episode 8 obviously gets picked out for attention a lot. Visually and audio wise it's the most accomplished of anything in the new season. But it's also a sort of turning point where all the black lodge lore becomes really really important and gets into being an origin story for BOB. All the black lodge stuff is stuff I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about. To me it always worked best on the level of symbolic metaphor where the idea of a father abusing and murdering his daughter is so unthinkable you have to conjure some sort of demonic influence to have it make sense. But as the series goes on it takes that stuff to a much more literal degree. 

 

If I had to rank all the Peaks stuff now it would be S1>FWWM>S3>S2, S3 edging it out over S2 mostly cause it has a fantastic ending but the worst parts of S3 are easily as bad as the bad parts of S2. There's a lot of stuff I think that IMO is kind of tedious. One thing I feel is they spend way too much time in the red room and take something which was a realm for the grotesque, surreal and macabre and render it very mundane. It used to be that mundanity concealed the darkness in Lynch's stuff but here he makes the dark stuff seem ordinary after a while. Partly due to his usage of very cheap digital effects and a particular fondness for taking a digital camera in people's faces and shaking it around very fast. It might also be the digital shooting of the series as well, the OG series is all on film. 

 

So my mind's not been much changed on S3, I still think it's an underwhelming and disappointing effort by Lynch and in trying to make a magnum opus he stretched far too thin (and took way too much of a starring role).The thing that it shows imo is even if you're a master of weaving a narrative framework out of dream-logic you still have to give viewers (or me at least) a bit of structure as well. Something to help support some kind of engagement with the material. For me S3 is a disconnected collection of anecdotes that can sometimes be interesting and even beautiful but more often than not frustrating cause of their lack of connection to more solid matter. There's points in S3 which challenge the basic definition of setting up narrative. Parts which undervalue how it can actually elevate the more dreamlike weirdness Lynch wants to explore. There's a scene at one point where Norma's boyfriend does a very on-the-nose impression of an ABC executive recommending some changes to the story of Twin Peaks to make it more marketable. The thing is I think they were always correct that they had to draw a line under that storyline in the original series and Lynch was wrong to oppose it. He sees himself as Norma wanting to suffer for her art of making the best cherry pie but sometimes you've got to kill your darlings a little bit as well.

 

I wrote a lot I know but I felt I really had to give this thing a second chance before I really felt satisfied with how I feel about it. I'm always like that with Lynch's stuff but I put this one off for ages cause it's 18 hours long. Now maybe next time I'll rewatch something very easy to understand like Lost Highway lol

[shinymcshine]

I'll always go with Lynch predominantly making films over TV, and therefore following that mantra, rather than simply telling a linear narrative (and the more you try to look for it, the more frustrating it might get, as it's not actually there), and as such:

 

[one-armed dwarf]

The thing is though Lynch is still a storyteller, he just tells his stories in a more visceral way. The issue for me is all the imagery and sounds which might otherwise be striking and profound threaten to dissolve into a nothing when the narrative is as loose, unfocused and undisciplined as what Lynch put out for this.

 

I really think it is important to have both and would say other than Inland Empire most of his stuff does subscribe to some basic principle of narrative (IE he went all the way off the deep end IMO cause of the 'freedom' of digital camera). Similar in that vein TP3 feels like a series of skits.

 

TP3 also spends a lot of time invested in the dark underworld exploring the folklore but neglects the human element, or the characters who are more interesting to spend time with (not Gordon Cole or Tammy, maybe Albert if he had someone more interesting to bounce off). Bobby Briggs ends up being the best character cause they're continuing a development with him where they left off in the old show.

[shinymcshine]

I'm really not sure - with all of Lynch's work he's either; nailed everyone down to such a watertight NDA, so no-one he works with can say anymore; or, everyone is fed individual parts, rather than the whole; or there simply isn't a full formed 'answer' or consistant narrative to what you see/hear (and it's left open for individual interpretation/feeling).

 

I'm not even sure, when taking a synopsis of Mark Frost's written works on TP (Secret History and Final Dossier - (I've not read them, as I like the opened ended mystery of it all)) whether there is ever suppose to be a linear narrative, or if it is all deliberately left to ambiguity / confusion.

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I actually ended up watching some of that popular Twin Peaks analysis video, the 4 hour one by 'Twin Perfect'. I wasn't going to watch it cause it's not the point of Lynch's stuff. But it's very unlikely I'll ever watch Season 3 again so figure I might as well and tbh I'm not too fussed on preserving the mystery of S3. Although I only watched 90 mins before I had to tap out. I'm not sure if I'll try to finish it cause it's very freshman liberal arts (speaking as someone who has also wrote overwrought shite on David Lynch)

 

What I didn't know going in is that this same guy has also tried to make conclusive 'theory' videos to explain every bit of subtext and plot in the Silent Hill games. So it's easy to see the overlap in technique between 'game criticism/theory analysis' video and his attempt at trying to provide a rosetta stone to David Lynch. 

 

Basically it tries to unite every bit of 'Peaks' under a umbrella interpretation of

Spoiler

it's all an allegory on throwaway TV violence.

 

I'll say I think it's far off the mark, but

Spoiler

conceptualising the black lodge entities as demonic representations of viewing audiences gluttony for violence is kind of neat. Even tho I don't think it's quite correct. Most of the video is a very strained attempt at trying to link everything back to this central thesis statement. eg in one bit he tries to argue that the fact that the season 1 finale takes place in a saw mill is symbolic of 'making dreams (like on TV)' cause sawing logs === snoring. That's the point I had to turn it off cause I found it so funny and stupid. It also imo dismisses the moral core of the story to pursue a purely metatextual interpretation, which I don't like. Metatext is nowhere near as interesting as text

 

The thing is I recognise the technique a bit cause when I was in college I would write essays where I would take a strong thesis statement and try to flesh out the wordcount by searching for every bit of evidence that could potentially be construed as pointing to my argument, no matter how weak. There's a lot of that in this. But I think also it's about trying to take a contrarian position to the popular interpretations of Lynch's work and trying to get some viewership clout through that. Which I guess I can't knock that hustle, his Twin Peaks video is the most watched Twin Peaks video on youtube now.

But it's not hard to see the overlap between 'Silent Hill critic' and 'David Lynch whisperer', he's trying to turn his films into Silent Hill 2. But SH and DL don't really use 'evidence' in the same way, that smashed window might be a metaphor for James Sunderland's guilt or whatever but that isn't necessarily the same for every scene in a Lynch film.

 

FWIW for me the series is pretty simple, it's just about

 

Spoiler

the collective culpability of the town in what happened to Laura Palmer, and the consequences of trying to come to terms with that guilt. I even think that applies to S3 to a certain extent where Sarah Palmer is an insane demon lady who now hates her daughter. It's a pretty depressing picture of what 25 years of unimaginable grief and guilt might do to someone

 

[shinymcshine]

I'm sure there's a niche of people who like cycling and Twin Peaks, but I do find this a weird crossover collection of sportswear:

 

https://milltag.cc/collections/red-room

 

[shinymcshine]

Probably more relevant here than in the General RIP thread, as Julee Cruise took her own life a few days ago.

 

"Her husband, Edward Grinnan, wrote on Facebook: “She left this realm on her own terms. No regrets. She is at peace … I played her [B-52’s song] Roam during her transition. Now she will roam forever. Rest in peace, my love.”"

 

I'd already started my annual rewatch of Twin Peaks The Return, it'll be especially sad to see and hear her on screen.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jun/13/julee-cruise-obituary