Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

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

big fan of twin peeks over here. that log lady is such a kook! how about that second season though - talk about a drop off in quality!

just my $0.02

lol

good post

no one's brought up Richard Beymer at all. think he'll make a return?

This was on at the laundromat where I play pinball sometimes, and the TV was set to that horrible eely motion-smoothing setting where all movements are rendered uncannily fluid and gross. It was also saturated and resharpened or something, kinda blasting out the shot-on-video look. All this made it look a hell of a lot like a contemporary soap opera, which should be a winner for Twin Peaks but it just felt totally wrong and awful, and not the kind of wrong and awful that Lynch was trading in. I realize this is sorta true of almost anything you watch in that TV mode, but man, Leland's dancing just looked soooooooo bad.

This was on at the laundromat where I play pinball sometimes

My grandmother somehow set her TV to that mode and nobody can figure out how to change it back and watching TV with her is horrible.

My grandmother somehow set her TV to that mode and nobody can figure out how to change it back and watching TV with her is horrible.

Ah, I think I can help with this, if it's a Samsung TV at least. When I got my new one it was set to that mode by default and it drove me demented for a while, trying to find the right setting to turn it off, or how to describe it for Googling the problem.

Samsung calls it "Auto Motion Plus" and it's basically interpolating an extra frame, to give a pseudo-HFR look.

It's actually kind of fascinating to turn it on if you want sets to instantly look like sets – like getting a sneaky behind-the-scenes look at the film. Particularly weird with really old films.

People do call it the Soap Opera Effect (http://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-the-soap-opera-effect/)

I didn't go see The Hobbit in real HFR, so not sure how it compares, but audience reports suggest it has a similar effect.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

for a second i thought you were referring to twin peaks. very crude trolling, must do better

The laundromat is effectively a pinball arcade, they have maybe a dozen tables...I favor Theatre of Magic tho.

why does anyone like this and why does it exist?

Maybe it's part of an industry-wide push to get our brains used to HFR.

this feature is widespread and completely unnecessary. I nearly had a heart attack when I bought a new tv and all my favorite films looked completely horrible and cheap. Any tv owner's manual should have a section called "how to stop making things look terrible". I have to imagine this has been a problem for many, many people, and that there are plenty that never figured out how to fix this.

I don't even know if it is good or bad that there is a motion smoothing feature available on new tvs, but it definitely shouldn't be cranked up by default

I think the first time I consciously saw it was at a different laundromat, where The Dark Knight was showing and I was convinced the TV station was actually showing the film slightly fast in order to squeeze in more commercials.

I once bought a Logik CD player that put pauses between tracks(as far as I knew you couldn't change it), ever since I've been scared I'll buy another music player that does the same. It's a terrible idea so I don't know why somebody would specifically design it that way.

That CD player feature you didn't like is going to come back in style.

embrace the pause. use those 2 seconds to rebalance, center yourself, and listen inward. 2 seconds is an eternity compared to the infinitely small. a series of 2 second pauses leads to a collective pause that is infinitely larger than the collective pause of a series of 1.99 second pauses. the eternal pause, infinities on top of infinities. only now you are ready to listen to the next Wilson Phillips song.

Seriously? This is genuinely upsetting me. I'm gonna need an iPod or mp3 player soon and I'm scared there will be pauses.

Or when my CD player breaks, which will hopefully be at least 10 years from now.

Hope they still make CD players in 10 years