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

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

Wonder if the Sutherland quote about screenings being "relatively rare" has to do with the rights & how they work differently for TV shows, as Simon H speculated on his podcast. Hopefully it's more just stating the obvious re the practicalities of putting on 16 and a half hours of content, like you'd expect these to be rare, screenings of Out 1 are extremely rare too

i've been rewatching on bluray and when i got to pt8 i lingered in the projection booth at work after the square had finally fucking ended and the staff had gone home and arranged a theatrical screening for myself, in the middle of the night, alone, when no one knew where i was or what i was doing. i sat on the stage 8ft from the screen. as ferris bueller says, if you have the means, i highly suggest picking one up

whole show's terrific at home tho as long as yr able to turn it up.

damn that rules, lol @ 'when the square finally fucking ended', all i ever heard about that movie was how interminable it was

otm. i highly recommend seeing Lynch's work large, preferably projected, dark room up close. a good projector is not that expensive of an investment and is a dramatically different experience. i projected most of season 3 with a few friends at a time as it came out. the night of episode 8 there was a mini miracle and we finally got everybody together to have the night off and grab pizza. we projected out in the living room on the large white wall and had no idea it was going to be _that_ episode. it was amazing.

a few months later i went to visit a friend who had moved out of town and we planned on binge watching as much as we could while i visited. the thing is, the couch we sat on was way across the room, the TV monitor just a tiny box on the far end of the room. it was hard to focus on it. it was easy to get distracted. Lynch in particular plays with tension and dynamics far more than most other directors so i agree w him that a powerful system is necessary to get the full experience. visual details and quiet noises can be missed if it's an un-optimized viewing experience. his work triggers all kinds of (often mixed) emotions.

ah there is a cut off sentence at the end there. i meant to say: people will laugh at David Lynch's work because it is genuinely funny, sometimes cosmically so. he is constantly tip-toeing all kinds of lines and combining horror with beauty and comedy all at once. first time i saw a Lynch film in the theater was Mulholland Drive and while it was a thing of beauty, me and two friends had never laughed so much in our lives.

I liked The Square but the last 45 minutes is really quite a slog

AB I'm extremely jealous of yr setup

^same, it was fine but interminable

I stumbled across a Lynch piece in an art museum here. Hand-made paper, on which he drew a baby having a baby (more or less).

the square had one scene in the first half-hour (delivering the letters) that was so riveting and dreadful and confidently on-the-nose (the dark square of the apartment stairwell he turns round and round, descending, as he enmeshes himself violently with other lives) i wondered if by the end of the movie stockholm would be in apocalyptic flame, and then as far as i can tell nothing happened for two more hours except strained artworld satire. tasteless millennial marketing team in partic rang false w every other word.

adam's setup sounds ideal.

my peaks friend at work had an extra ticket for saturday's MOMA marathon and offered it to me. I had already told my friends I would be dungeon mastering for them that day. I didn't go to the screening. A DM is only as good as his word :(

battle of nerddoms!

adam's setup sounds ideal.

i dropped ~$100 on a consumer grade LED projector a few years ago and use it for hours daily. you can probably spend that now and get one with way better resolution (mine is kind of useless for anything with text). imo it's also a QoL upgrade as you suddenly aren't staring directly at a screen quite so much, there is the possibility for a larger image that is easier on the eyes.

I'm rather late to the ILX/TPTR party, but can I just say that the fact that it exists is such a fucking blessing.

Yeah, I'm not blasting the sound; I'd rather not be scared into permanent sleeplessness by a TV show.

There's a fair chance that will happen anyway, might as well get those good headphones on and luxuriate in the ominous rumbling imo

Won't comment until I get a few episodes in, but I finally started this last night (first two parts).

Did the first series 'rescue' DL from postmodernism?

Twin Peaks proved, at least for a while, to be not only a phenomenal critical/commercial success, but one that worked entirely on its auteur’s own idiosyncratic terms, melding an ironic view of melodramatic conventions with a surrealist vision. Indeed, Lynch has often been credited with irrevocably transforming television, paving the way for that Golden Age represented by The Sopranos (with its frequent recourse to dream sequences), The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men.

Yet it could just as easily be argued that television transformed Lynch, previously a key postmodern figure. Whereas modernism viewed narrative as a problem, postmodernism viewed it as a joke, a hoax that had been exposed and deserved only our derision. Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) belong securely within this tradition, as does the feature-length Twin Peaks pilot.

As the latter series developed, however, Lynch clearly found himself caring, in an unironic way, about characters who had initially existed in inverted commas, introducing a depth of feeling that would be retained in his later, more mature output. Turning from Twin Peaks’s 1989 pilot to its prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), one is struck by the sharp difference in tone; the scene in the pilot in which we are asked to laugh at Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)’s grief upon confronting Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)’s corpse feels callous in a manner that has no equivalent in the later film, or any of Lynch’s subsequent theatrical efforts.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/bradlands/twin-peaks-david-lynch-stretches-television-unknown

Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

the scene in the pilot in which we are asked to laugh at Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)’s grief upon confronting Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)’s corpse feels callous in a manner that has no equivalent in the later film

when truman says "is this gonna happen every damn time?" you have all of andy's character (except his physical heroism) summed in one moment, and you're not (just) supposed to laugh imo. andy is undesensitizable, which in a whole show about trauma is hardly just a joke. plus, accidental resonance: things that happen again, things that are returned to, the same as last year at mr. blodgett's barn.

at the same time yes it is played for laughs. figure it out yknow?

Whereas modernism viewed narrative as a problem, postmodernism viewed it as a joke, a hoax that had been exposed and deserved only our derision.

also i've never taken an english course so who knows but this sounds wrong.

yeah i was gonna make roughly the same post. considering how much crying and sobbing there is in the episode, it serves a much more nuanced purpose than getting a laugh