Twin Peaks

Fair point, certainly. But while season one seems to me really special, season two has kind of sort of strayed into the generic. (I guess that's partly down to taste and the sort of story you enjoy to though. (The whole thriller thing never really gripped me, in much any form.))

{{I'd say hold on in there for the return of Frost and Lynch to direct control- its worth it- then definitely watch Fire Walk With Me (youtube link a page back- I checked and its not an edited version or cut version, but it is an 18- and its the proper version (the original dvd release hardcoded subtitles to the Red Room Lodge scenes, and worst of all a nightclub scene, where its deliberate the music is too loud to clearly hear more than bits and pieces, its meant to be like being in a nightclub! Fortunately the uploaded version is the latter no subs versions.}}}

I'll certainly keep watching but I must admit my enthusiasm has dropped a tad. (Interesting to hear about the executives getting involved. That does seem to spell doom and gloom for most shows.)

{{It wasn't so much the execs got involved, it was more no one got involved as such, at least not in an overall sense. Lynch and Frost kind of lost interest a bit really and drifted off to other projects, episodes were very much the individual offspring of that weeks director and writers. Each director was given free reign pretty much to make of it what they would, shoot at as they wanted to, treat each episode as if it was their own mini-film.
This is actually quite good to a point, allowing young adventurous directors and writers as Lynch himself had been to do their stuff themselves, with only casual oversight from Lynch and Frost.
But it was to the detriment of any sense of coherence or direction.
Two things Lynch and Frost brought back to it fortunately before the end.}}}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{{I agree. Blue Velvet is excellent, well worth a watch. And more young Kyle for you Norc I'm also a fan of Mulholland Drive and the Straight Story, as well as The Elephant Man. All great films in my view.}}}}

http://www.fanedit.org/featured-fanedit-in-the-works-mulholland-drive-the-pilot/

Interesting. I wonder if this fanedit will be anything like Lynch envisioned it, or just a new take on it.

EDIT: Turns out it's a recreation of one of the cuts that was turned into ABC (but was turned down, eventually). Apparently he hated it, and was forced to butcher the pacing, amount of violence, etc. He even said he would burn the remaining VHS copies floating around if he could. Yikes.

{{An interesting idea- I imagine everything after the blue box opens would be gone- including therefore Club Silencio- which is a shame if so.}}}


{{Best not to watch if you plan on seeing the film- though saying watching a bit of any of Mulholland Drive is giving any of the plot away is probably a stretch, as one of the things about watching it is figuring out what the hell the plot actually is, and its delightful when you do   (or at least one that works for you)}}

I've seen the movie (on the big screen ; one of the best things about living in NYC), and that was one of the most confusing scenes in the movie, albeit the best. The whole movie is pretty dark, dense and cryptic, much more so than twin peaks, but I guess that comes with an R rated movie vs a TV-PG show. I was also pretty tired in the theatre, but was delightedly woken up by a certain scene

{{{Indeed...delightful I would say the Club Silencio scene, if you'll excuse the punning, is the lynch-pin of the story }}}

I was referring to this scene (not this edited version of course)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDeJwB4I9K0

{{So was I }}}

Thought you meant the Club Silencio scene, as you mentioned it right after you responded.

{{{Well worth a watch}}}

You know, the further I get into this show, the more I agree with Homer.

{{{Yes but the fun is in working it out, or at least working out what it all means to you }}}

{{Was rewatching the last series of Peaks and something particularly stuck out for me this time, I had noticed it before but it seemed sharper and more strident than on first viewing. And unlike most things Lynch related this one is not so esoteric, centered around reality or perception, mysticism or parallel universes (well not too much anyway). Its actually something relatively straightforward for once!

Lynch has a theme that crops up in most of his work probably best summed up as looking at whats under the American Dream. Or perhaps better whats under the dream America dreams of itself. The shining light on the hill, founding fathers, freedom, liberty, Hollywood, wholesome christian family values, progress and the spreading of wealth, mom's appple pie all tinged with an air of nostalgia for times lost and then Lynch juxtaposes it with a dark nasty reality hiding underneath.

Blue Velvet's opening is a great example of this, its a pastiche of the idea of America that ends with a visual metaphor of harsh reality and the corruption that lies beneath the surface of the idea of America-



In Mullohand Drive we are presented with Diana's fantasy of the Hollywood dream, wide eyed country girl comes to the big city and against the odds wows them with her acting performance and catches the eye of a famous director who will catapult her to fame- in reality she was used by the Hollywood system sold her self and her soul for nothing, the director favoured her friend who was also her lover and they both betrayed her and she ordered a hit on the friend before committing suicide in a run down sleezy room. Leaving the message that the Hollywood Dream is in reality a nightmare that consumes and destroys people for profit and pleasure, and especially women.

This general theme of undercutting the American Dream is also evident in original Twin Peaks- on the surface an idyllic rural town. Laura Palmer seems to have all she could want, both her parents are alive and still married and they are a well off family, her father is a lawyer they live ina typical big American house. She is attractive in the traditional US style of blonde and blue eyed, popular at school and the Prom Queen and she is dating the captain of the Football team.
In reality her father has been drugging her mother and raping her for years whilst possessed by a malignant spirit and she sells her body to fuel her drug habit.
Surface ideal, corruption below.

Now in the last series of Peaks what is really interesting is that it is Lynch's most open and unkind attack on this idea of America.
You see in the this series there is no surface left- the America we are presented with here is sick, broken and corrupt- even the surface image is gone.
This is shown in a lot of varied ways throughout the series- right from the opening credits of every episode- the mill, that symbol of the original Peaks and the working heart of the town, is closed and boarded up. Carl's friend who lives in his trailer park does jobs, but never seems to get paid and has to resort to selling his blood to afford food. The teacher who gets beaten to within an inch of her life can't afford the health insurance for her treatment.   And everywhere we see signs of sickness, the sick zombie like child in the car, the girl in the Road House with the constant rash under her arm, the almost half rotting before your eyes prisoner in the jail cell among them.



Lynch seems to be saying that the corruption, the disease, the sickness of spirit that was always present under the ideals of the dream of America is all that is now left. It is the new normal. It is surface America now.

The simple expectations of America past- that if you need a job there will be work for you to do, that if you get ill you will be able to afford the treatment you need, if you work hard you can feed and house yourself all it takes is the willingness to make something of yourself and America is a land of opportunity to all who do, these are all absent in the new series. In its place we have illness, corruption, lies and people who have to take desperate measures to get the bare basics to live, or who even if they do everything right like the teacher still find they are left suffering by a modern American society that simply doesn't care about them.

The other side we see to this stagnation and collapse of industry and work is Twin Peaks one big success in business- Norma's R&R diner- this is important there because in a sense it represents something both nostalgic and embedded in the dream of America- something simple, mom's home cooked pie. Its the reason for Norma's success with the Double R, and the reason it became a franchise- but the more it grows the greater the pressure brought on Norma to maybe not insist all pies get made exactly her way, with exactly her fresh wholesome ingredients as profit margins would be much higher if they changed that- ruining of course in the process the very thing that made the diner popular in the first place, and more metaphorically tampering with for the sake of greed an American ideal embedded in the mythos of the American Dream and in so doing destroying its very essence.

In an odd way Lynch is addressing the concerns that led a lot of the American rural population to vote Trump- a sense of neglect, of their communities rotting away before their eyes as business close and are boarded up, houses become empty, trailer parks growing (original series Peaks had no trailer Park, now there is an extensive one) and basic needs like health care and even rent and food can no longer be met and at the other end a sense that the elites are grinding the American dreamer into dirt soley for their own gain andlike Norma's pies destroying the very essence of it.
And into the void created comes poverty and crime and viciousness and ugliness- which is exactly what we see in Peaks represented through Bob and Judy.

And it also extends to relationships and marriages- I think the only two relationships we see throughout which could be called loving still are that between Deputy Andy and Lucy and the hitman and his partner.
One of the main reasons Andy seems to be picked out by the Giant for his part in the task is not for his bravery or his intelligence, but because he is one of the few people left in this reality who still retains the belief of the American dream and ideal- his idea of being a police officer is rooted in a naive nostalgic ideal of policing, the strongest arguments he has with Lucy are over the colour of their furniture, and their child is deliberately reminiscent of an American cinema legend from a period now filled with nostalgia for a lost America.

The only other couple who seem genuinely in love are Andy and Lucy's complete opposites- the hitman and his partner who hold onto the criminal American Dream as it were- that its a land of opportunity if you have the balls and the guns to go take it. Their dream unsurprisingly ends in a deadly hail of bullets.

(I should note there is more on relationships in the series than this, we also have Big Ed and Norma, in which Ed has always done the decent thing since Norma was married and so was he, until Norma becomes free and Nadine frees Ed of any guilt to pursue his true love- this is set against Benjamin Horne and his secretary, a man who has never had a faithful relationship in his life and has used and abused women throughout callously for his own pleasure and causes, but who has developed genuine feelings of love for his secretary but refuses to act on them because she is married. )

But those aside what we see in relationships is mainly cheating, lying, violence, abuse, power games, betrayal and a lot end up with one partner or both dead before its all over.
Even the seeming loving relationship between Dale and Diane turns into something seemingly dark and sour when they cross over and become Richard and Linda.

Like many things in Peaks whether the American Dream survives is left open, though there are signs of hope- at least in the 'prime' Peaks universe of series 1 and 2 where Laura is indeed saved and Dale Cooper never had cause to go to Twin Peaks. There is no Bob or Judy there and we are shown as a result 'ideal' American imagery such as a mornings fishing on the lake in peaceful idyllic bliss.

But what we see of the subsequent worlds saving Laura entails is not so encouraging, the world of Richard and Linda seems if anything even more diseased than previous, Dale/Richard is noticeably more violent here, this version of Laura has a fresh corpse in her living room, everywhere looks run down and shabby, even Laura herself.
For every world Dale saves the American Dream in by eradicating Bob and Judy and saving Laura there is another, in the same moment of time in the infinite realities opened up in the heart of that first nuclear explosion to keep Dale chasing forever in a loop where for him the American dream is always already dead and Laura always needs saving and Judy always needs defeated.



In Peaks Lynch takes his notion of the surface American Dream and the corruption beneath and gives us a world in which there is largely only corruption left until saved by Dale, who then finds that beneath the new ideal created there is yet another corrupt one beneath waiting to be saved all over again, forever.}}}

{{ More thoughts on Peaks and the American Dream. No idea if any Peaks watchers here actually read this stuff but you know my policy- post and to hell with it anyway!

Its easy to forget with Lynch's distinct style that Peaks the Return is written by Lynch and Frost and Frost is no less important to the mix.
Like Lynch he is very interested in the American Dream and its fraudulent nature in current times (if it ever was anything but fraudulent of course).
But where Lynch is more likely to apply a mystical, spiritual meaning to his interpretation of this Frost tends to address it more directly.
The result is that you often get characters and concepts with dual themes merging, one from each writer.

I mention this because it brings us to Dougie Jones, or as he becomes Dougie/Cooper.
Dougie tale is the middle class achievement of the American dream. Dougie's story is considered by many to be the only really truly happy ending in the Return.

As Dougie Jones the family were in debt, Dougie was cheating on his wife with prostitutes and had hit-men after him thanks to loan shark debts run up by his gambling.

When he becomes Dougie/Cooper things change- firstly he changes physical appearance as Dougie Jones was fatter and had longer hair, and secondly despite the fact he is little more than a walking vegetable, things turn round for the family.
By the end of the Return the family have made it, they have the American Dream and the tulpa Dougie created by Cooper for them goes off into happy retirement with his family having achieved the American Dream.

Except of course its all entirely fraudulent.
Dougie Cooper only turns things round because the Lodge entities are leading him around by the nose to where he needs to be when he needs to be and manipulating events to turn out in his favour. This is not done out of any kindness but the simple necessity that they need to keep him alive long enough to restore Dale Cooper and get Bob back.

But the result of keeping Dougie Cooper alive and well is all the success promised in the American Dream. And that dream is blinding- his wife firstly barely comments on the fact he acts like a vegetable as soon as she finds out about all the money he has got, and secondly his new physique which sparks her interest in him sexually again and when he starts buying cars and a garden gym set for their son she ceases to question at all anything about him.

The people at his work don't seem to notice either because his success in his job thanks to the Lodge utterly blinds them to the ridiculous fact he is obliviously a walking vegetable. There is more with the Dougie scenes than Lynch wanting to make stuff that's quirky and funny, its that too because Lynch likes his humour but its also deliberately ridiculous, to highlight that so long as Dougie is achieving no one notices the reality of him. The more success he has the less people notice his condition or ever question it- after all how could a walking vegetable achieve all this success?

Dougie Cooper's achieving of the American Dream step by accidental step only elevates and confirm him in the eyes of all those about him- juxtaposed by him walking round like a dazed zombie or reacting like a small child gleefully taking everything in.
In fact the only things Dougie Cooper seems to react to in a real sense are immediate of the moment stimulation that Dale Cooper enjoyed- coffee, pie, and when he discovers it sex.

Which brings us into the second thematic level Dougie is part of which falls towards the Lynchian end of the interpretation of life- and that is the idea that the three versions of Cooper represent past, present and future in the mystic sense- Mr C is Dale Cooper's ambition, his drive to do what needs to be done to succeed and to get reward in the future for doing so, Mr C is the planner his whole story is about him trying to work out the future and how to either avoid it or reshape it to his own ends, its the small part of Dale that underneath wanting to solve Laura Palmer's murder considered it probably wouldn't do is reputation or future career any harm either, blown out of proportion and twisted by Bob into a dark drive for future gains.

The original Dale Cooper represents the past and his nostalgia for that ideal of America, the coffee and apple pie, small town Americana, healthy living and good honest exercise and good manners. And also we the viewer watching, enjoying Dougie but longing for Dale Cooper of past Twin Peaks to return.

Dougie on the other-hand is the present, his only reactions are to immediate stimuli: taste, smells, shiny lights, sounds and touch, at almost all other times he seems oblivious.

Given arguably the Dougie Jones story is the only Cooper tale to end happily this could be taken as Lynch implying that the only way to be truly happy in this world is not to dwell on the past and not to worry about the future but just to pay attention to and live in the now. Whilst Frost seems to be saying with Dougie that the only way the American Dream is now achievable for the middle classes is if they achieve it fraudulently.

This seems initially to undercut the live in the now message, yet both I think are true. Dougie does have a greater appreciation of and enjoyment of the moment than anyone else in the series, that complete absorption in the now is something precious and shown as so as it draws people to him, and even draws the best out in them such as the Mitchell brothers, its portrayed as something to be enjoyed and savoured and which leads to better things.
But at the same time the idea you can just live in the moment and still achieve the American Dream, given the state of America portrayed in the Return, is an untrue idea, unless you cheat.

One of the reasons I enjoy delving into Peaks is because of its many facets and that's in no small part down to how Frost and Lynch work together, the things they are interested in and the manner in which they express that split and converge, split and converge over and over forming a dream-like narrative whole. }}}

{{Interesting little vid looking at Lynch's relationship with language }}

Still haven't watched S3. Still haven't recovered from the experience of watching S1 and S2 either

Twin peaks is next up on my queue. Didn't watch it when it first came out, but this thread convinced me to give it a go.

Had to go back and watch some clips, I think I'm going to have to rewatch the show myself. Weirdest television experience ever, but no doubt one of my favourite shows

I'm looking forward to comparing it to Northern Exposure, which is another small country town show where strange things happen.

Rewatching from the beginning, and didn't realise I had come as far as season 2, ep 1 before the final scenes - a hundred dollars on me waking up from nightmares tonight

{{{ The Owls are not what they seem!



Sleep well! }}}

I sent this gif a week ago to my daughter, I bet she hasn't slept since

Night night............

Hmm. Say the pilot last night, it hasn't developed it's full strangeness yet. Be watching the first couple episodes tonight.