Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

It seems a step back to me. Made after the production company that made Blue Velvet went into bankruptcy and waiting for Twin Peaks to become what it became. It's an adaptation, like Dune and Elephant Man. And it seems less like Lynch and like standard nineties violent postmodernism like True Romance or even Natural Born Killers.

The weird thing is, of course, that it hit at exactly the right time, and won the Golden Palm in Cannes. And with the prestige from that and Twin Peaks, Lynch kinda never looked back again, and just grew progressively weirder. Except for the Straight Story, but let's ignore that.

I think it's underrated too.

Wild at heart is about as good as perdita durango

And it seems less like Lynch and like standard nineties violent postmodernism like True Romance or even Natural Born Killers.

agree w all this, it's v tedious, probably his least enjoyable work

I don't think it all quite hangs together in WaH, but there are at least a half dozen A+ classic Lynch scenes in it that make it worthwhile.

^^^ yeah, some classic scenes, some off the rails wtf-ness, which I find true of all Lynch. Haven't watched WaH in years, but as I recall it's still better than Lost Highway.

i don't know that WAH seems less like lynch

lipstick on face, sherilyn fenn as car accident survivor, harry dean stanton's execution scene, bobby peru's "seduction" of lula, helium-voiced guy at bar, cockroach cousin, etc etc etc etc

guy on fire running through the house in flashback, coming across that car crash in the middle of the desert, lula and sailor's metal/elvis dance scene, etc.

oh, i see you got the car accident. i think of that a lot.

bobby peru's "seduction" of lula

this scene is super classic, can do w/o most of the rest of the film tbh

I agree that there are lots of classic moments despite the movie not hanging together as a whole.

WaH a pretty straight-forward story with added Lynchian elements. Lost Highway is a Lynch down to the way it's constructed. Wild at Heart is an adaptation. I mean, it's not as if it's less Lynch than something like Dune, I think, but it's weird that it's what he won his big award for. It seems less Lynch than Blue Velvet and onward.

Except for the Straight Story, but let's ignore that.

this is hogwash, the straight story is as good and in its way as gloriously weird as a lot of the other ones, the weirdness is just not on the surface and yeah sure it was financed by disney

but so what? farnsworth is incredible in that flick

There is always an interesting story about what people mean when they just say something is more or less 'Lynch' or 'Pynchon' or 'Kubrick' or whatever - and I know I started this conversation, I'm not saying it's bad, just interesting. Like, what is the most Lynch? I think most people would say Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (right?) but there is kinda a lot more to him than that. The metal-fascination in WaH is also found in Lost Highway, for instance. Is it the weird characters and a depraved sexuality? Is it the fascination with old-school Hollywood and stories looping in on themselves? Is murder and violence a typical Lynchian motif, or is it something he spices his stories up with, when they need to be more commercial?

But Wild at Heart seems different from typical Lynch to me. It's also, that 'normal' Lynch is a nice world with evil and depravity lurking underneath (Twin Peaks! The town in Blue Velvet!) while Wild at Heart is about two characters trying to find good in an incredibly screwed up and evil world. Which is fundamentally different to me. It takes two minutes before the first murder is committed!

Yeah, I'm thinking about WaH a lot, I'm writing about it in Danish as part one of my 1650-part weekly look at every Cannes-nominee ever. I've calculated that I should be done by the time I'm 80.

wild at heart is based on a barry gifford novel that is much more straightforward trash noir than lynch usually leans, lynch makes it plenty weird but when push comes to shove it's p much an equal meeting of minds

the straight story is as good and in its way as gloriously weird as a lot of the other ones, the weirdness is just not on the surface

there was a really good essay in film quarterly that convincingly makes the case for this.

to be fair that film's co-writer and lynch's longtime editor/former significant other, mary sweeney, was my partner's instructor and m/l her mentor at USC so i'm prob a little biased

true, WAH doesn’t have the moebius strip reality/dream or doppelgänger structure of other films, but it does have the day to night, innocent’s descent to hell/ trip to oz thing (like blue velvet & twin peaks in its way).

also has, occasional lynch signature, the dreamlike (oft ecstatically, transcendentally) happy ending, dissonant after so much ugliness: FWWM’s angel, IE’s song & dance, BV (intentionally “fake” feeling, cf. bird), even MH (last flickering images of happy couple, and beautiful blue-haired lady)

edit to: dissonant after so much horror

BV's ecstatic happy ending is more reunion of mother & child than couple's suburban contentment

Ugh, that FilmComment article is horrible. So because Alvin seems really frightened by fire, it means he burned his grandchild years back? Oh, ok, I guess it really is 'hidden'. I kinda hate all that puzzlesolving that goes on with Lynch. That Mulholland Drive prob is a dream of an unsuccesful actress who has hired a contract killer, or that Lost Highway prob is the pulp fantasy from a man who has murdered his wife, that kinda takes away from my enjoyment of the film. It's too neat, too psychological. That's another reason I love Inland Empire, it doesn't seem to make psychologically sense, and instead seems fueled by the logic of stories eating each other.

^^^^ this otm

agree re Inland Empire

i also know of a really good essay on inland empire that explains it all

Bless Lynch for letting us run wild w meanings tho, I would hate for him to say "the red lamps symbolize THIS and the blue keys symbolize THIS". Can't blame critics or theorists doing what they are doing but Lynch's work is strong enough and genuinely weird enough to withstand analysis.

i also know of a really good essay on inland empire that explains it all

:) zing?

if not, curious to read it

haha, it was just a joke in response to the frederik hating my previous link so much.

i do know of a big explainer website, though, that goes waaaaaaaaaaaay too far in trying to find meaning in everything, is organized in a chaotic fashion, and resembles early 2000s internet in a pleasant way. http://xixax.com/halfborn/

Haha yes, sad to say I spent quite a while on that site!

IE was, for me, the film among Lynch's more difficult work that took the least amount of effort to 'get'. It's labyrinthine, for sure, but I was able to grasp his version of a through-line the first time I saw it.

i screwed a couple guys for drinks; no big deal. this one guy was kinda cute. fucker had a dick like a rhinoceros. he'd fuck the shit out of you, i tell you what. he'd buy me a couple of drinks after. we'd talk. he'd tell me about the town he grew up in, all the little girls he fucked. there was a chemical factory in this town, and he'd tell me it was putting so much shit in the air you couldn't think straight. it got to a lot of the people. there was a lot of crazy shit going on there-- people having weird dreams. seeing things that wasn't there. this one time, this one little girl--she was staring off at something one time--starts screaming. the people hanging round come to her and ask what's wrong. and, uh, she says she sees the end of the world. all fire and smoke and blood running. you know. like they say. the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

Like a grown up version of Linda Manz in Days of Heaven.

i'm guessing Lynch asked for more money because he didn't want to do the series.

― poxy fülvous (abanana), Wednesday, April 8, 2015 1:43 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's my theory too... that he was having second thoughts about the series (and the commitments it would entail), and made demands he knew showtime wouldn't meet as a means of backing out. but who knows!

seems crazy that he would go as far as he did, writing all the scripts and whatnot, then just be like "hmm, actually, i don't wanna do this" but, yeah, who knows wtf is going on here.

Yeah, I don't buy that at all. Dude's been trying to get this off the ground now and again since the show went off the air and has been officially working on it for over a year.

and i would think if it got down to it and he decided he didn't have it in him to direct the whole series, he'd at least produce or oversee it and not end it on what seemed like a very stormy note.

Mulholland Drive is the most 'lynch' film to me (and I also think it's my favorite). It hits every motif he flirts with in every other film and does it very well.

Lost Highway is a close second for "most Lynch" and it also hits those motifs and yet it kind of fails at it in comparison (and it's one of my least favorites)

xpost

yeah, it doesn't make a ton of sense, but this is david lynch we're talking about. but i admit i was extremely surprised that he was willing to do this in the first place.

Yeah, I was surprised that he was going to do this as well. I mean, when he decided to make the Twin Peaks movie, he already had the perfect chance to give the series the kind of closure it didn't get because of the cancellation, but instead he chose to do a prequel. So it felt like he had no interest in what happened to the characters after season 2 finale, but maybe that's changed as the years have rolled?

hope he does do it, or at least does some tv - a lot of his interviews about why he isnt making films anymore is about the decline in arthouse cinemas/audiences in the US since when he started, so im surprised he hasnt thought about doing TV. and i imagine someone comissioning at US tv networks would be up for doing something with him.

wild at heart is brilliant, my personal favourite of his films, and nic cage is absolutely perfect for lynch - wish they had worked together more. inland empire, wild at heart, blue velvet are his best films (gold). followed by mulholland drive, eraserhead (silver). and then fire walk with me and lost highway (bronze). lost highway i think would have been better if the soundtrack was different. elephant man and straight story i have to consider separately. i do like elephant man, and actually think its excellent, but theres something a bit muted about lynch doing 'normal' moviemaking. i dont want to talk about dune...

I like Dune a lot. He should make all the sequels.

I know there's a lot of talk about TV (particularly cable TV or even more particularly pay-cable TV) taking up the slack with the sort of "adult" programming that the film studios have largely abandoned, but I still don't see almost anything on TV close to what Lynch might be interested in doing, that is something close to avant-garde or even art-house TV ("Top of the Lake" might come closest). Twin Peaks remains pretty anomalous IMO, despite the whole "new Golden Age of TV drama" stuff.

and that said TP only occasionally lived up to it's more avant-garde promise, chiefly in the episodes directed by Lynch. which is why the prospect of a new season with him directing /all/ the episodes seemed so promising-but-unlikely, and why the prospect of a new season w/o him directing anything doesn't seem to appeal to anyone.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/twin-peaks-david-lynch-showtime-1201469031/

"The tussle over the budget emerged after Lynch and Frost turned in the nine scripts they co-wrote and it became clear that the cost of production would be significantly higher than the budgets outlined in the original deal. Sources said Showtime was willing to kick in more coin but asked for concessions in other areas, including the profit participation definitions for Lynch and Frost."

lol that's a p shitty move on Showtime's part - "you wanna do more, it comes out of your pocket"

this is why showtime has all those great shows that everyone's always talking about

The situation with the famously eccentric director has been complicated by what sources say was the fact that Lynch had not been in contact with his longtime lawyer, Tom Hansen of Hansen Jacobson, before announcing his decision to depart. He is not believed to be repped by an agent or manager at the moment.

haha this is crazy?! love this guy

he didn't let frost know about his decision beforehand either, it seems

poor mark frost. i imagine he's just holed up somewhere drinking heavily