the TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN non-plot-specific summing-up thread

we're not going to talk about molly shannon

I would have died laughing if her character turned out to be important in the Return

i loved that one scene where she plunged her hands deeeeep into her armpits, then held the odorous fingers up to her nostrils and inhaled so deeply. the intake of her breath seems especially crisp (sound design by david lynch showing here) and it lasts a couple beats longer than you'd expect. then: "Starring Kyle McLachlan"

since this thread has served its major function i'd like to say thanks also - it's been a lovely and stimulating thread and it's been a good time! an excellent reminder of what ilx is at its best!

i'd like to say thanks to ilx lurker, Priory, who sent me a helpful email off the back of this thread. I was unable to reply to your message since I couldn't find your details (ilx mail doesn't allow one to simply respond to a message!) - anyway, thanks and please de-lurk. x

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-_aJ1BiFE

FWWM is the last edition!

wrong thread obv!

Now that it's over, I've signed up for a free month of Hulu & Showtime and am binge watching. With all the weekly episode synopses that have been published (AV Club, Vulture, etc.), what's a good one for spotting small details, making connections and theorizing? Bonus points for a good comments section.

I'm generally wary of recap culture, but my favorite episode-by-episode discussions of The Return have been Joel Bocko's writeups on lostinthemovies.com and the conversations on the podcasts Diane, Lodgers, and Counter Esperanto.

i can't say i read a ton of recaps, but whenever i ran across the Vulture recaps i thought they did a pretty good job and i usually learned a thing or two as well

Just watched 17 then dinner then let's do this

Your optimism is cute

unless you know something I don't, dinner is guaranteed and the download of ep 18 is fine

I'm generally wary of recap culture, but my favorite episode-by-episode discussions of The Return have been Joel Bocko's writeups on lostinthemovies.com🕸 and the conversations on the podcasts Diane, Lodgers, and Counter Esperanto.

Cosign all of this. I've heard the av club & culture reviews are good but haven't really read anything about the show beyond bocko's blog & the ilx thread

i've pretty much only read jess zimmerman's recaps on vice, those are all excellent

Emily Stephens is probably the best writer at the AV Club and her recaps were quite good

Dinner was good

ayyyyyyy love dinner

Jesus do I really have to go through all the bad takes before giving out about this on the other thread

If you don't eat your vegetables you can't expect dessert that's like the first rule of dinner

The repast dictates the future

what vegetable is this

I can't really read this yet, but I like the writer and the whole "spoiler" thing once your must-watch-TV cycle over is so 21st-century-annoying...

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2-peaks-2-1-twin-peaks-the-return

Now that it's over, I've signed up for a free month of Hulu & Showtime and am binge watching. With all the weekly episode synopses that have been published (AV Club, Vulture, etc.), what's a good one for spotting small details, making connections and theorizing? Bonus points for a good comments section.

― Hideous Lump, Saturday, September 9, 2017 12:24 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm generally wary of recap culture, but my favorite episode-by-episode discussions of The Return have been Joel Bocko's writeups on lostinthemovies.com and the conversations on the podcasts Diane, Lodgers, and Counter Esperanto.

― one way street, Saturday, September 9, 2017 12:33 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i want to reiterate that the lodgers podcast (with ilx's own simon h.) is very very good. i didn't start listening to it until the show was over but now i'm working my way through it backwards and am really getting a lot out of it, not so much about plot points and clues but more about references and influences.

I enjoyed tracking Simon's dread regarding the possibility of Dern playing Diane. It was funny to follow with the benefit of hindsight. Hopefully this ended up as a happy surprise for him.

lol yes my dread ended up being rather silly

Finale (though maybe not "last") ep is in the bag, gonna take some time to edit though due to TIFFness

With all the weekly episode synopses that have been published (AV Club, Vulture, etc.), what's a good one for spotting small details, making connections and theorizing? Bonus points for a good comments section.

Wasn't very into many of these but belatedly discovered the MUBI.com ones and Keith Uhlich does a great job. Good writer.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/Twin%20Peaks%20Recap

It’s never been a secret that Lynch is a student of Tibetan Transcendental Meditation, and he has often talked about how this informs his art. Less known is his long-time study of the Hindu Vedas as well as other sacred texts such as the above-mentioned Upanishads. Martha Nochimson has even gone so far as to formulate a theory of Vedic physics related to quantum physics that drives Lynch’s work.

Being Sri Lankan American, with Hindu heritage on my Tamil side and many years spent living in India learning about the culture, people, and religion, imagine my surprise to find the Twin Peaks interwebs suddenly flooded with think piece after think piece whitesplaining Hindu mysticism, The Upanishads, and The Vedas. I watched as the beautiful, rich, and deep tradition of these sacred Indian texts and practices were suddenly and irretrievably reduced to a catch phrase in an American television show. #WeAreLikeTheDreamer

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/entertainment/unavoidable-whiteness-new-twin-peaks

Upanishads

"Irretrievably," huh.

ha i went to high school with the author of that piece

there are some fair, if obvious, points in there, but the whole "we are the dreamer who lives in the dream etc etc" part isn't just a catch phrase, it's essentially the thesis statement of the new season

I got through ep 8 and now I'm having a hard time convincing my gf to pick it back up, mostly because of this Fresh Air review that talks about the lack of resolution and clarity (which misses the point imo, but sure yeah): http://www.npr.org/2017/09/07/548972584/two-high-profile-creators-pass-the-baton-from-twin-peaks-to-the-deuce

fwiw, I thought the ending lacked clarity in the same way that the ending of mulholland drive lacked clarity. There are always going to be people that claim that it made absolutely no sense, but there are plenty of ways to interpret what happens.

transcendental meditation is not tibetan

Pitchfork interview with Lynch about the use of music in the show. Explains the overdubbing of Bowie's voice:

Pitchfork: After making a cameo in 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Bowie’s character Phillip Jeffries reappeared in the new series via footage from that film and as a big, talking tea kettle. Did you ever approach Bowie himself to be in the new series?

David Lynch: Absolutely. I never even talked to him, but I talked to his lawyer, and they weren’t telling me why he said he couldn’t do it. But then, of course, later on we knew.

Why did Phillip Jeffries take the form of a tea kettle?

I sculpted that part of the machine that has that tea kettle spout thing, but I wish I’d just made it straight, because everybody thinks it’s a tea kettle. It’s just a machine.

Did Bowie know that his character was going to appear in that capacity?

No, no, no. He didn’t know that. We got permission to use the old footage, but he didn’t want his voice used in it. I think someone must have made him feel bad about his Louisiana accent in Fire Walk With Me, but I think it’s so beautiful. He wanted to have it done by a legitimate actor from Louisiana, so that’s what we had to do. The guy (voice actor Nathan Frizzell) did a great job.

That's not non-plot-specific

Sorry, wrong thread! Mods feel free to delete if possible.

the first couple paragraphs of Dennis Lim's review in Artforum (paywalled) provide a decent, non-spoilery description for people who haven't seen it yet:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said that he sought to build a house with his films, each one a wall or floor or window - an additive process that would ultimately reveal a representative edifice. This metaphor helps illuminate the wondrous improbability of David Lynch's eighteen-hour Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). What we have here is not an artist in his twilight years unveiling a crowning capstone, but one with the resources and the will to erect a whole new structure from the ground up: a house built in a single late burst of inspiration, big enough to hold a life's work.

Directed in full by Lynch and cowritten with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, The Return is both culmination and summation. All of Lynch is here: the primitive movie magic of his handcrafted early shorts; the lever-cranking cosmology and slo-mo slapstick of Eraserhead (1977); the crude body horror and extreme violence of his art brut paintings, the words and numbers of obscure significance floating in pockets of white noise; the peerlessly intuitive actors (Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Grace Zabriskie) tuned in to his particular wavelength, sly and deadly serious; and of course, the parallel-world and alter ego confusion that has become his stock in trade.

haven't read this FC critical feature yet ie spoiler-likely

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/now-its-dark-twin-peaks-the-return-david-lynch/

It’s really good but also wall to wall spoilers.

Vadim Rizov:

I *will* say, after rewatching (nearly all of) Twin Peaks: The Return this weekend at MoMA, that (Showtime logo aside — that’s still in the DCP for every episode except the ones broadcast together), this absolutely benefits from big-screen viewing. You can see the tiniest visual elements much more clearly, some of which were previously illegible, and unless your home stereo setup has a seriously effective subwoofer (Lynch leans bass-heavy as usual) you want to hear this on the biggest speakers available. It’s my hope that with DCPs now created for this weekend’s marathon screening, Twin Peaks theatrical showings will become a regular addition to Lynch retros, a readily available occurrence rather than a Very Special One Time Only Event. [Update: according to this podcast with executive producer Sabrina S. Sutherland, screenings will not be “once in a lifetime,” but relatively rare. She also notes that the color timing and audio mix was adjusted for the DCPs.]

http://filmmakermagazine.com/104268-nyfcc-awards-and-an-alternate-top-10-of-2017/

i would love to see any of The Return on the big screen. my favorite episodes tended to be the ones that I watched on my meager home projector, with headphones. Plus, the Showtime stream was awful with darker colors, especially blacks. so many scenes were filled with ugly pixellated blotches that. It would be a treat to see the darker side of the show as it was intended to be seen!

If you're in NYC later this year and wanna watch any of the Bluray, let me know!

somehow, i have gone this far in life without watching a blu-ray, to my knowledge. i hear it's high tech!

i heard pretty negative reports about the audience at the moma screenings so i never made it to any of them. would embark on a rewatch with you morbs whenever you get around to it

negative reports about the audience

really? that's fucking lame. just talking and making jokes and stuff?

Audiences are what worry me about these things but I'd love so much to see this in the cinema

really? that's fucking lame. just talking and making jokes and stuff?

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, January 10, 2018 10:04 AM (thirty-two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lotta inappropriate laughter

Oh yeah that was my experience of seeing fwwm at the cinema for sure

gobble gobble

two friends of mine went, haven't heard much bad stuff

this wd involve all kinds of nervous laughter i'm sure

I think Wild at Heart also has the road shots, which was before Safe. He uses that a lot.

While stuck at home I’ve rewatched all things Lynch, even the commercials and *shudder* the Duran Duran movie. The Return holds up well, even if it sometimes works better as a collection of Lynchisms than a coherent narrative. It helps to know that a lot of minor subplots won’t resolve and that it doesn’t really matter who Billy is. I love the last episode maybe more than Got A Light? Still not sure about the green glove bit.

I started reading the screenplay to Ronnie Rocket, and interestingly enough it features a character who is transformed through vague electrical “magic” into a passive character who repeats back what others say, like Dougie.

psyched for you to finish morbs

will try to finish b4 i'm finished, could be tough with 2019 film poll also comin' up

u guys are killin' me, no really

I see by a search i'm not the first to point this out (Reddit), but Cooper in eps 17-18 could've learned from Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" Star Trek episode that you can't fix history.

There's a sort of just (if grim) comeuppance in Cooper learning this, bcz I never accepted the character's face-value heroism as many seem to, with his annoyingly sunny "give yourself a present" Boy Scout shit.

Have to admit I was hoping "Richard and Linda" would result in a Thompsons music cue.

"My dreams have withered and died" would have been a little too on the money.

https://www.avclub.com/paul-giamatti-twin-peaks-the-return-1851072447

lynch wanted paul giamatti to play one of the mitchum brothers but they couldn't make the scheduling work

OTOH Jim Belushi's casting really added to the uncanny not-rightness of the Dougie sections

Green glove kid is the only casting that bugs me. The entire green glove thing bugs me. Am I remembering right that Pete was going to wear the green glove but it was reworked because Jack Nance died?

I'm still saving the last two episodes to watch. I enjoyed it so much I couldn't bear to watch the last ones.

And now I've forgotten it all so I'll have to watch the whole thing if I want to finish it.

it might not make the difference you are presuming tbh

Green glove kid is the only casting that bugs me. The entire green glove thing bugs me. Am I remembering right that Pete was going to wear the green glove but it was reworked because Jack Nance died?

yeah was kinda daft, but didn't "Pete" die at the end of the original series?

I think lynch said the green glove stemmed from an idea he had for jack nance back in the day, not for twin peaks specifically (nance died over a decade before the return had even been conceived)

There was a cutaway & an explosion in the original finale — it was a cliffhanger! — but had nance been alive in 2014 I’m 100% sure he would have been in it one way or another

Yes, I was taking my info from the Mark Frost book where he stated he had died in the explosion but now realise that the book was released in 2016

"If David Bowie can be a boiler..."

Just had to familiarize myself with the episode 16 you would have last watched, this one has the amazing scene with Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh and the crazy neighbour guy! haha

People are under a lot of stress, Bradley.

lynch wanted paul giamatti to play one of the mitchum brothers but they couldn't make the scheduling work

― na (NA), Wednesday, December 6, 2023 10:15 AM (yesterday)

Agreed with the OP commenters suggesting to just watch Lodge 49 instead.