Drink full: The TWIN PEAKS 2017 spoiler thread, part 2

"it's for insurance"

the people Ross feels are right are, in fact, wrong

the other people otm

Few things. Haven't seen them covered but I stopped reading posts itt tbh.

Dunno if we can say definitively if/when coop truly fucked up, but can't help feeling that Bob escaping dead bad cooper before ring was put on him is significant, and not for a second do I think that Cooper's Twin Peaks level is completed when gray Bob cloud shrapnel floats up through the ceiling after a few hulk glove smacks.

TP level coop moves on-as do we from 'Twin Peaks'-as soon as naido removes her mask to reveal Diane, whence coops face is a background to the end of level cutscene where it's a big goodbye to our friends from this story throughout.

Think that it's as likely as anything else that Richard is actually the base person, and any other character portrayed by KML is a splinter in a mindspace or whatever.

And lastly, I wasn't really feeling the 'different realities' as something concrete at any stage, but bad coop being zod-imprisoned in the theatre and thence commuted to TP seemed to me as clear a clue as any I'd seen that the TP we had experienced to that point was a containment-zone or gameboard type environment. Whether that means only characters we've seen moving between lodges etc are real and the others are regens or whatever, I'm not particularly tied to.

Fwiw, felt 18 was a copout and 17 was a fanservice. Hasn't spoiled any of 1-16 for me but I don't feel a particular need to make the finale fit where it doesn't, either logically or emotionally/symbolically. All credit to lynch for the ride, but he couldn't finish it and I'm not convinced there's even Mulholland drive levels of coherency at play here.

on the whole, this entire series was the least fan servicey it could have been and still been called Twin Peaks.

Disagree, there was plenty

Not where you'd necessarily expect it, and not certainly ito main plot focus, but both threads have called out numerous and significant examples.

Don't think I've ever seen a show where the creator's awareness of the viewers expectation/speculation was so much to the fore, for good and ill

Lucy being the one that shoots Mr. C was v fan servicey & I appreciated it v much

there were a lot of ways this series could have gone and I expected very little of what I saw. I think I'm going to bow out of the discussion of what constitutes fan service and what doesn't because I find it annoying. I very much appreciated this approach.

my stupid podcast got linked on the criterion blog and now I request a tranquil, solitary, satisfying death

:-)

Well-deserved imo.

(The Criterion mention, not your death.)

*Simon H.'s head vaporizes into a black void; floating gold orb comes out*

Andy encountering Mr. C outside the sheriff's statement was a great moment of suspense.

That climax was fine but the smash the orb boss battle was deeply stupid.

My big complaints: We never got to see even two minutes of Cooper shooting the shit with Albert and Cole and old pals. And not once during those 90 minutes do we have a clear sense of what Cooper is doing or more importantly why he's doing it. Even just a brief convo with Cole that hinted at his motivations would have gone a long way toward making me vested in that oblique final quest.

Cooper's original descent into the Black Lodge in the S2 finale was so terrifying because we experienced it from the perspective of a relatable, sympathetic character with clear goals and fears and shortcomings. His behavior was so arbitrary in the Return finale he was just an avatar in a suit.

for me that whole spell from mr c arriving at the sheriff's office up to uh i guess its deflation with the boss battle was one big peak of anxiety. then it picked up again with the overlaid cooper. (though i both found the boss battle tense and loved its absurdity, a great cosmic battle of good and evil coming down to, this.)

here's a non-narrative question that still burns at me: why did Lynch not get more Badalamenti score music in this? Was it timing, availability? Just taking a stroll through the 'twin peaks archive' which I found and downloaded and there were hours upon hours of recorded music cues from the first two seasons and FWWM. Budget? What Badalamenti we get now is mostly him solo; but most of the cues from the past were bass, cymbals, piano...a small ensemble. It seems to have been a specific artistic choice to only use about 4 new tracks from Badalamenti, but I think this, more than anything else about the Return, is what differentiated it from the originals as a viewing experience.

Maybe he wanted to differentiate it from the originals as a viewing experience

Has there been any discussion of the 17&18 simultaneous theory?

I've only done side by side and not overlay; there are a handful of real coincidences but they may well be just that:

• Cole briefs Albert & Tammy and starts with "listen to me" which excites the gold sphere and Cooper hair creating the new Dougie tulpa in the other ep, and Cole doesn't continue speaking until the tulpa is alive and alert.
• Cole connects to a phone call from the Vegas FBI and as he presses the button to accept Al Strobel vanishes in the other ep.
• Naido and Diane's arms both reach up at an identical time, when Naido is in the cell and Diane touches Cooper's face after he walks through the curtains and there's the "is it really you?" exchange.
• Booper and Cooper reach the location their instruments are taking them to at the same time, including getting close and then the last bit of accuracy, and Booper even reacts to something Diane says to Cooper. Cooper is blown by the winds from Booper's crossing through the portal at Jack Rabbit's Palace.
• Booper gets moved by The Fireman through the cinema screen to the Sheriff's Department at the same time as the Diane and Cooper's car journey turns from day to night as they move through a portal.
• The sex ritual in the motel hits the same timing beats as hulk hands vs beachball. The song fades out at one point as the action intensifies in e17.
• The door in Odessa where Carrie lives and the door the Great Northern key opens get entered at exactly the same time.
• The last couple of minutes appear to be completely in sync, one screen goes dark, then the other, then back, the photo smashing aligns with Cooper and Laura's awareness of the 'reality' at the end, etc.
• As "starring Kyle McLachlan" comes up in the e18 credits, we see Cooper start to lead Laura in the Orphans/Euridyce scene.
• Julee Cruise starts singing exactly as the Lynch/Frost logo ends the other ep.

I'm aware, obviously, that the nature of the experiment means you're deliberately looking for the connections so are more inclined to see them, but none of the above are a stretch.

I started lining up an overlay version and watched the bit that's getting the most online traction (Mike enters the shot through the body in Carrie's duplex, and speaks framed by the plate with the horse in front of it on her mantlepiece) but I'm not convinced any alignments in that format aren't easily explained away by the rule of 3.

link?

https://medium.com/@onantiad/episodes-17-18-of-twin-peaks-the-return-are-meant-to-be-watched-in-sync-81352ce38e8

I made a quick and dirty side by side in iMovie.

Oooohhhhhh

Top marks even if it turns out nothing that's great rabbit hole stuff

lol, I have heard of this theory (I got some shit for posting about this the other day and overreacted)

The last couple of minutes appear to be completely in sync, one screen goes dark, then the other, then back, the photo smashing aligns with Cooper and Laura's awareness of the 'reality' at the end, etc.

This is the part that I thought was really cool. Intentional or not (and it works so well together it's hard to believe it was accidental) the way it plays out is amazing and I'm glad that it exists and it's a thing that we'll be able to cue up to amaze our twin peaks loving friends and family

Reading it I realise I misremembered which scene the sex ritual is synced with.

If this turns out to be even a tickler then I'm doing same for 8 and all of them just to see

(Not really)

(Maybe)

https://heavyeditorial-files-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/briggs-note.jpg

2:53 is the time the clock stops at, and the right icon might well represent the possessed Diane.

Haha yeah I was joking because it was discussed at length a few posts above

My position was basically that I find this kind of thing depressingly literal, trying to treat art like sudoku at the very point where it seems to leave those games behind for something more slippery, and (most crucially) it doesn't convincingly add anything meaningful that can't be gleaned by just watching the two eps normally. We agreed to disagree and I guess I'm glad ppl are having fun with it

Didn't mean to black hat anybody, couldn't remember whether it had been discussed here or not and wasn't going to try opening the full thread to find out.

My position was basically that I find this kind of thing depressingly literal, trying to treat art like sudoku at the very point where it seems to leave those games behind for something more slippery

there's always been something appropriately digressive about both the show and the growing complexity of (attempted) exegesis around it and lynch's parallel effort to always bring that whole thing back around to the central trauma which motivates it.

(like, my personal favorite take on the whole saga is that it's laura's fantasy which places her suffering in some cosmic narrative which grants it meaning)

i'm resistant to attempts to crack the code through this kind of alchemy too, but still think it's completely to the credit of episode 18's specific kind of ambiguity that it provokes this kind of thing.

that said, v happy to note that the numerological pointers of the final episodes decisively prove my candie = laura thesis.

yeah it's not really the point to figure it all out, but it's not not the point either, i think.

How do you work that out? xp

I have to say, in episode 17, I was most surprised that the 'bunny girls' from Vegas entered TP's sheriff's office. The Mitchum bro's I can kind of see, but seeing the girls there too felt so out of place it has to mean something right?

yeah it's not really the point to figure it all out, but it's not /not/ the point either, i think.

Yeah it's just a particular strain of facile 1:1 mapping that rubs me the wrong way (even before this Reddit style stuff I never liked the "character x literally = character y" stuff you would get) but that's my problem

i'm resistant to attempts to crack the code through this kind of alchemy too, but still think it's completely to the credit of episode 18's specific kind of ambiguity that it provokes this kind of thing.

All of the return earned it imo

fwwmiw wins I think there's universes of space between "there are tricks, treats,rewards and intentional resonances in watching numbers, sound cues, simultaneous convergences in episodes etc etc" and "study these things my son and ye will find the fair maid Palmer" and I think it's perfectly likely lynch does the first and perfectly unlikely he does the second

xp if the girls aren’t around, who serves them sandwiches?

fwwmiw

Consistently have mistaken FWIW for FWWM. No idea what this mash-up of both means.

xp very true.

Reddit will debate what I mean by fwwmiw for at least ten minutes

Truth talk!

I feel like the way lynch works is that he'll put in these echoes and resonances (and also yes just the notion that there are secrets to be grasped even tho they are deliberately out of reach), like in fwwm there are scenes which you can put side by side with scenes from the pilot and they look near-identical (you can see this in Bocko's video series) - but these echoes are obvious just by watching and their emotional impact is too.

What's the emotional impact of putting parts 17 and 18 side by side (and, I'm assuming, doing this comparison on the biggest screen possible, getting as close to the screen as you can, putting headphones on &c as lynch pleads rather than idk playing 2 avi files on yr laptop)?

Mostly it cemented (for me) the defeat of JowDay (if indeed that's what was possessing Sarah) comes as Carrie remembers Laura. And that the 'rescue' of Laura by Cooper is repeated across the realities and times.

But then I believe all art is there to be interacted with and interpreted by the observer - and this is perhaps more true of surrealism than other forms - and not just joylessly codified as a specific image alone. Wrapped in plastic, as it were.

this video will probably be taken down soon, but for those who don't feel like downloading videos, starting them up at the same time and then waiting for the last 10 minutes, skip to 52:36 in this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryVJPCs67WM

besides the juxtaposition of what is going on inside the palmer household (judy/sarah palmer losing her shit and stabbing the picture) just as coop and laura are putting 2 and 2 together on the outside, there is a really...emotional, goosebump raising fade to black in 17 just as laura screams in 18, then a perfect fading in of coop leading laura palmer by the hand in 17, then, after a really long pause in 18, it fades back in with laura whispering in coop's ear.

i don't know, just watch it. it's just absolutely beautiful. and then, by cosmic coincidence (because david lynch would never think to edit these two episodes at the same time and do it on purpose, that's ridiculous), the julee cruise song comes in juuuust as the credits finish in 18.

What's the emotional impact of putting parts 17 and 18 side by side

lol, xpost

To my eye, the bunny girls in the sheriff's office completed what was basically a religious tableau. Cooper's passing back into the world(s) of the lodges was similar to a wedding, or a funeral, or just a church service (with the added gravity of the prophet himself being in attendance). The Mitchum brothers, for sure, had become something like Dougie/Cooper's disciples by the end, and the girls were like attendants, or handmaidens. The food on their trays was a kind of symbolic bounty.

The abstracted symbolism, where drawing a clear 1-to-1 line between the signifier and that which is putatively signified does a disservice to the actual depth of the system of representation, reminds me of the Mystery in the Catholic mass.

Ya

By which I mean, when the chalice is held up, and the chimes ring, isn't it obvious that there's more going on than the trite story of transubstantiation that is attached to the actions?

xpost

CAndie is the virgin mother

At a dinner party last night for whatever reason we started talking about Wieland (Charles Brockden Brown) and in talking about it I realized that the Return (and maybe all of TP) is very much like that;what is difficult about Wieland for many people is that it sets out to seem like a 'novel' with a beginning, middle, and end; and in fact there are kind of those things, but it's also more a series of set pieces with a giant event at the end, that seems like an ending, or is at least a 'finish', but it is unsatisfying to a culture who has been indoctrinated with standard narrative format over the past 180 years. Anyway, at the time I found this comparison quite amazing but I was also kind of stoned.

also, unconnected, but the mix of Windswept on the soundtrack album is really amazing, I think it's different than the one Jewel released earlier this year.

best part of the original series (season 1) is when horne orders leo to burn down the sawmill in order to sell putin on the icelanders (fuck norway!) buying stock in the moscow trump hotel : )

I've been thinking for obvious reasons about Twin Peaks and John Ashbery. On the one hand it's clear that the wrong way to think of Ashbery's poems as puzzles whose "true meaning" you can unlock. At the same time, the process of finding associations, of identifying pronouns with potential antecedents, etc., is definitely part of reading Ashbery's poems, and should be! He is writing his poems with the understanding that the reading mind can't not do that and it's part of what generates the effect. I guess what I'm saying is that a hypothetical watcher who watched Twin Peaks purely as an exercise in tone and visual effect and was TRULY indifferent to the question "what's going on" wouldn't be seeing the whole thing. But I also don't believe humans can really watch like that!