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

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!

Agree and of course nobody is arguing for that

lynch / frost write their scripts with the understanding that woke minds can really watch (experience life in general) like they take their dreams as prophetic precollections

ashbery was apparently a big lynch fan too, and i find it utterly heartbreaking that he died just before the finale.

I would love to read Ashbery on Lynch, is this in interviews?

Nowadays film watchers such as John Ashbery can do things differently. He doesn't go out very much these days. Movies can come to you now. You can see them at home. Some of his recent favourites have included David Lynch's Inland Empire and There's Something About Mary, starring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz. 'I saw that one about four times. All the essential dirty parts were cut for TV.'

http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8311

I love both those movies too

how could you leave out the next sentence

For all his addiction to home cinema, he made at least one trip out to the movie house recently, to see Sacha Baron Cohen camping it up in Brüno. 'That has to be the filthiest non-porn movie ever made,' he wrote to me later, 'and worth seeing if only for that, though it's quite funny. There was only one other person in the audience.'

'Yes, I'd like to make a collage-type film. They do cross over, poetry and movies. My poetry seems to be something I make up as I go along. Certain movies strike me that way - going in and out of one's dreams...'

i'm fascinated by the unease generated by approaching TP's kooky bits literally

like every few years i get interested in this show and i'm surprised to see internet communities treating it like a big puzzle, it's surrealism! not chris nolan clockworkism

and then twenty minutes of wiki wormholing later i'm re-surprised to realize it's totally justified

Ha yes.

like everything that happens in the red room in episode 2 end up making literal sense, everything has a literal name, the red room itself is a literal place

the internet puzzle-solving communities are still pretty gross though

CHECK THIS OUT: https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6z818g/s3e18_the_key_to_understanding_the_return_is_dune/

i have NO IDEA if it's supposed to be satire, i don't think it is

not gonna believe it until we see the tptr cut scenes featuring sting as judy

Lynch seems to encourage 'puzzle' approaches, though - like with Mulholland Drive and the sheets of paper you got going in to see it: "David Lynch wants you to understand Mulholland Drive..." or whatever it said, with its list of clues.

http://bonobo.jones.free.fr/cinema/clues.jpg

http://bonobo.jones.free.fr/cinema/clues.jpg

like this kind of thing

yeah there were even more in the DVD liners. and they all have answers

lol @ "if you don't get it the first time see it again"

lol that's not great advice, most people don't want to treat a movie like it's a video game with puzzles/keys to open doors

sure about that

sure about what? my post is in reference to "if you don't see it the first time, see it again"

oh i thought you were talking about the list of clues

"see it again" is definitely lol marketing (so is the list ofc)

Never seen that MD flyer before. When Dune first came out, theaters handed out a glossery sheet.

DVD liner went one stage further (mine is different, but has the same questions):

https://garmonblogzia.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/24073-muldriveinsert.jpg

I'm not sure whether I remember being handed a list of clues on theatrical release, if I'm honest.