Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

I guess my first awareness of PP as a kid was its last days as a TV soap (long after Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal had left the cast).

Russ Tamblyn's PP character was sooooo gay.

right now i'm more tempted to read the novel as it's much dirtier of course

I hate bobby and James but I love hating them, hope they come back to annoy me more.

My only interface with PP is its rep (it was still being referred to fairly frequently when I was a teenager) and the awesome score by my man Waxman. I've still never seen the film.

PP was set in a New England town quite obviously derived from Grace Metalious' home in NH, and 50 years later they still hadn't forgiven her...

http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/pandora-in-blue-jeans-lives-on

Here's what Mark Frost had to say about Peyton Place (the movie) in the Twin Peaks oral history that came out recently (they were asked to watch it by an executive during the development process): "We hated it, we didn't even finish watching. We watched maybe half an hour. It was just a dead piece of work at that point. It said nothing to us of any relevance whatsoever and we looked at each other and said, "Why are we wasting our time with this?""

ha!

Bobby turns it up! Side! Down!

AAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

lol

the milieu/concept is relevant to TP whether they hated it or not (nothing i've read about it suggests it's a good film)

If I recall, Audrey had maybe been blown to smithereens at the end of the series.

Yeah, I was alluding to this upthread when I said they had an explanation for why Pete is not there anymore... He and Audrey were inside the bank in the penultimate episode when it exploded, but when Lynch returned to do the final episode, he threw away the script, so inexplicably the bank explosion or Pete and Audrey's fate isn't even mentioned in the finale. The same applies to Ben Horne, who may or may not have been killed by Doc Hayward in a fight, but when the Doc appears later on, there's no mention of the fight or what happened to Ben. I know a lot of people laud the finale as the auteur's return of whatever, and it certainly has its moments, but IMO it was still a shitty thing for Lynch to totally ignore the fate of major characters in favour of 25 minutes of Red Room wankery.

Those cliffhanders are both in the last episode. I've read the initial script and its differences have been overstated -- basically the red room stuff was dumber and it had more Windom Earle, whereas Lynch just has Bob kill him.

Yeah, I forgot that the cliffhangers were in the last episode and not the one before that... But it's still weird that we get to see some the characters (including Doc Hayward) after the cliffhangers, and they don't mention the bank explosion or Ben Horne's possible death at all, even though you'd think everyone was talking about the fact that three or four prominent Twin Peaks residents have just died violently? I've always assumed that was because Lynch changed the script, but maybe it was like that in the original version too?

Also they weren't aware they were definitely writing the last episodes, although it must have been a looming possibility.

In fact I think Sherilyn Fenn said in interviews that, if a third series had been commissioned, her character was set to have survived the explosion. Hard to believe they'd just wipe that character out for the sake of it.

Yeah, I guess they thought the explosion and Ben's "death" were cliffhangers they could resolve in season three... But it still makes little sense that we have scenes that take place after them where they aren't mentioned at all, logically they should've taken place at the end of the episode. Maybe Lynch is to be blamed for that?

(xpost)

Not only was Audrey to have survived the explosion, but she was to have traveled to Hollywood to become an actress in Lynch's original pilot screenplay for the TV series Mulholland Drive.

Generally there's a weird sense of disconnectedness floating around the whole last act of the series - nobody is noting or commenting on anything that's happening outside of their immediate storylines. I think I rambled about this in the season two thread before, but really it seems like a script-level problem, maybe borne of trying to get too many juggling stories in the air. These must be problems soap opera writers learn about early.

she was to have traveled to Hollywood to become an actress in Lynch's original pilot screenplay for the TV series Mulholland Drive.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Friday, October 10, 2014 1:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've never seen mulholland drive and now i feel like i have a reason to

you do have a reason and the reason is that it is amazing

Generally there's a weird sense of disconnectedness floating around the whole last act of the series - nobody is noting or commenting on anything that's happening outside of their immediate storylines

in some cases lynch just kind of ignored, streamlined, or rendered incoherent some of the less compelling plotlines that had been developing in the latter half of season 2. or just treated them in a really alienating and defamiliarizing way. it's kind of a dry run for the film, in a way, which ret-cons the TV show in a more aggressive way.

i use the word "way" way too much there :)

i saw the unused pilot that formed the basis for the film "mulholland drive" a year or so before i saw the feature film, and frankly it kind of diminished the impact of the film for me. the first half of the film is basically the pilot. the result felt to me too much like the salvage job it was. i know that this awareness could very well make me /more/ appreciative of the film, but it didn't have that effect. i still admire the film, i've just always felt it was flawed and not his best. i really need to revisit it, since it's been perhaps eight years since i've seen it. i should revisit inland empire, too. i admired that one even more, but even so it felt a little bit like a slog watching it and i've been reluctant to attempt it again.

What was the endpoint of the pilot?

The scene behind the diner.

The pilot ends once Rita and Betty get back from finding the dead body. Everything after that in the movie (them in bed, Silencio etc) is the new stuff.

That's pretty much what I figured. I do really like the movie, and the final act is one of the best depictions of utter misery I've ever seen, but I would have been totally into more Betty/Rita adventures and Justin Theroux's life getting ruined until the show's inevitable abrupt cancellation.

there are a lot of things in the first 1/2 of the film that set in motion plot threads that aren't even referenced let alone resolved in the second half. i think a lot of people interpreted this incoherent as a kind of radical recasting of the narrative conventions of film noir or something. but the fact that i had watched the "pilot version" before just left me feeling that they were exactly what they were, artefacts of an abandoned serial narrative. rather than agreeably incoherent the finish film just feels kind of messy to me. well not "just"--it's clearly much more than that. but.

sorry for typos.

What I want to know is, is there a super-extended fan edit of FWWM reinstating all the deleted scenes yet? I'd have done it myself, but I feel like that would kill any enthusiasm for actually watching the thing.

Ah, it turns there is one...but the person responsible has already withdrawn it. Off to torrentland I go.

http://welcometotwinpeaks.com/news/twin-peaks-missing-pieces-fanedit/

Also, did anyone watch "Northwest Passage", the condensed 5-hour edit of the original series the same guy did?

i found the deleted scenes from the film disappointing.

That may be so, but I'm still curious to see them in context(if not enough to spend hours painstakingly re-assembling them into a coherent narrative).

haha, good luck w/ the "coherent narrative" thing!

Huh. Turns out I downloaded Northwest Passage months ago, but have no memory of doing so.

http://laceibamfi.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/brainproblems.png

David Lynch, well known for his mastery of coherent narrative

haha, good luck w/ the "coherent narrative" thing!

― I dunno. (amateurist), Friday, October 10, 2014 9:31 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, yeah, that's one of the reasons why, even though I wanted to see it done, I didn't want to have to be the one to actually have to do it. Piecing together the disparate elements of a David Lynch movie is probably a fool's errand, unless you happen to be David Lynch. I am curious to see how Q2 has done it though.

David Lynch, well known for his mastery of coherent narrative

― Οὖτις, Friday, October 10, 2014 9:39 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uh, that point's been made, thanks. Not sure the purpose of restating it other than needless dickishness.

joeks bruv

Lynch is perfectly capable of making straightforward narrative films. He's done it multiple times.

Anyone who wants a straightforward "murder of Laura Palmer" edit of the show/movie, there's some fanedits on YouTube for you.

yeah, lynch can make more straightforward narratives (elephant man, straight story), but i don't think a more "coherent" version of FWWM is really in the cards.

the weird thing about the scenes in the FWWM script that weren't in the final film (and most of them aren't in the "extra" 90 minutes released on the blu-ray set, either) is that although they kind of elaborate some of the motifs and mysteries presented by the series and the film, they don't really do anything to explain or resolve them. it's pretty obvious, if it wasn't before, that lynch didn't have much interest in that.

and i'm neither criticizing nor valorizing that -- it's just sort of how it is/was

there's some good stuff in FWWM but on the whole I don't enjoy it - I think he hit a trough after Twin Peaks that he didn't really start to climb out of until Lost Highway. Like he was transitioning to a new set of themes/ideas/methods and Twin Peaks is the start of that (what with its obsessions about dualities, intersecting realities, twins, etc. that would carry through the rest of his work) but he didn't really figure out how to get them to all work together until the end of the 90s.

that's sort of a weird thing to say, since he didn't make a feature between TP:FWWM and LOST HIGHWAY. WILD AT HEART is def. his worst feature, it's the only one where he sometimes seems to be working down at the level of an Oliver Stone or John Waters.

there's a way in which TP:FWWM is both a carry-over from and a corrective to WILD AT HEART (both continuing and critiquing the heavy-breathing taboo-breaking sexuality of the earlier film). I think it's an improvement.

LOST HIGHWAY has the very conceptually satisfying puzzle structure, but I think it lacks for grace notes and it's certainly less humane than FWWM. though I still think it's been unfairly overshadowed by MULLHOLLAND DR.

I was referring to Twin Peaks the tv series there. Like it set some things rolling in his head but he didn't know what to do with them - he let the series get out of hand, made Wild at Heart (which I really don't like), tried to cobble together FWWM, and then wandered in the wilderness for a few years. LH is a tentative stab at what would later culminate in more fully realized works (sorry Tuomas).

i think that's too simplistic and doesn't account for the strangeness of how MULHOLLAND DRIVE, in particular, came to happen

Jacques Rivette said this fwiw:

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992)

I don’t own a television, which is why I couldn’t share Serge Daney’s passion for TV series. And I took a long time to appreciate Lynch. In fact, I didn’t really start until Blue Velvet (1986). With Isabella Rossellini’s apartment, Lynch succeeded in creating the creepiest set in the history of cinema. And Twin Peaks, the Film is the craziest film in the history of cinema. I have no idea what happened, I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground. Only the first part of Lost Highway (1996) is as great. After which you get the idea, and by the last section I was one step ahead of the film, although it remained a powerful experience right up to the end.

FWIW FWWM

I don’t own a television,

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television

Area Man has not made as many boring films as Rivette