Hey everyone, been following this board for a while, as we're getting closer towards episode 18 I felt I had to ventilate a bit. I think regardless if you are leaning more towards being a Lynch fan or a TP fan, in the end, this is Twin Peaks show.
I was so glad to hear the return of twin peaks but I must admit I did think it would involve more of twin peaks and somehow be about how life was going and what coopers doppelgänger was up to etc IN Twin Peaks.
Obviously in Season 1 and 2 the world of twin peaks is a tight place, its confined as most shows back then were to certain places, only. Which created the lovely soap opera feel and deep emotional affection for its characters. which was what I came to love very much about tp.
In the return altho we are looking at 'the bigger picture' which is interesting, but percentage wise it leads the viewer too far away from twin peaks, to the point it's difficult to justify the whole show as 'twin peaks'.
If I could put a word on how 'the return' makes me feel, it would be 'scattered'.
The show is all over the place, in episode 13 we learn (out of the blue) Norma has a franchise and that alone would be an interesting story to know more about.... but due to time, were only shown glimpses of what has been, what could be, and what will be.
Too many distractions that take away focus of what should have been more focused on the primary agenda, or goal, purpose.
Its like being shown beautiful tasty dishes rolling on a conveyer belt but not being able to taste it first hand personally.
For me the highlights has simply been seeing the old cast, it brought back golden memories of the old show, the story line is very interesting, highly complex in presentation, but it has in the end, very little to do with twin peaks. For good and bad I suppose.
I have enjoyed 'The Return' looking forward to the remaining episodes, and altho the show will not continue I hope well get to see Dale snap back into his old self, that would leave me rest assured that everything is alright in the end.
And wherever his life takes him from that point I guess we can all debate until infinity. 🙂
Happy Weekend Folks!
How much influence has Mark Frost had on this series do you think? I know, back in the early nineties, it was Frost who wanted to continue the story whereas Lynch wanted to go back and and make a prequel.
Can we foresee a season 4 with Frost having more influence? And if it did happen, would we go back to more of the quirky, soap elements we saw in the first two series?
Then as now they co-wrote the script, but D. Lynch does not solely follow a script, he allows creativity to lead him into new places. Without D.L. there would have been no Bob & Mike, the Arm, and the Black Lodge, and TP would not have become a global sensation that gained major cult status.
"Can we be so sure that the French lady scene is trolling impatient viewers, and not the uncritical Lynch crowd instead? Maybe exasperation IS the expected reaction and and he's grinning at the people who'll proclaim as art regardless?"
Translation: "I know nothing about David Lynch's work."
Showtime is run by CBS, which owns rights to the original TP, that's why it was a natural to go with Showtime.
How much influence has Mark Frost had on this series do you think? I know, back in the early nineties, it was Frost who wanted to continue the story whereas Lynch wanted to go back and and make a prequel.
Can we foresee a season 4 with Frost having more influence? And if it did happen, would we go back to more of the quirky, soap elements we saw in the first two series?
Then as now they co-wrote the script, but D. Lynch does not solely follow a script, he allows creativity to lead him into new places. Without D.L. there would have been no Bob & Mike, the Arm, and the Black Lodge, and TP would not have become a global sensation that gained major cult status.
Yup. Lynch is fond of incorporating accidents into his work - Bob being a notable one - which help give the whole thing an off centre look and feel. Other writers and directors would pull out their hair, Lynch just keeps rolling.
Ad libs, though... well, we know he's not too pleased about those. ☺️
Plenty of other things on TV for the Bud Light crowd.
And there's "that guy".
Which did the same as you did.
I also didn't backtrack. This season has been more boring than exciting. Too much lame scenes catering to guys in sweaters drinking boxed wine than people who are looking for a story to chew on imo.
My comment on episode 13 is it seems the pace is seeming to pick up and frankly what I've waited for seems like it's starting to happen.
I'm over the whole "art" convo. I want to talk plotlines, what's happening, and what will happen. Not sit in a dark room with blackout shades, burning incense, and talking about how the entertainment center Sarah's tv sits on affected my emotions on a sub nuclear level.
Here.
Wow. What a great description. Not at all stereotyped. Really.
*lit incense, open Rudolph Steiner's biography, while eating bio veggies from Venus*
"Translation: "I know nothing about David Lynch's work."
Really? Seen most of his films + TP, and know a lot about the context of his work and biography. Even details like the financing of the final 3rd of Mulholland Dr. coming from French Canal+, the popularity of original TP behind the Iron Curtain, and his overall style being essentially European.
Have I passed the test for the adoring Lynch crowd?
Oh good. Now can we go back to rational critique?
"TP would not have become a global sensation that gained major cult status. "
There are plenty of other shows that became global sensations and/or gained major cult status, and Lynch had nothing to do with them. It's a catch-22 situation with TP, because it was written as a project in Lynchian style ONLY because he was on board. Kinda like Six Feet Under was born out of American Beauty and was planned around Alan Ball's style. It's like a role written for a certain actor being played well by that actor BECAUSE it was made for them. It would have been written differently for someone else.
I agree with your post 100%. "Scattered" is a good description for TPTR. It's also seriously lacking in a heart, which the original run had in abundance even at the lowest points. This whole outing feels like Lynch commandeering the TP world to make a mammoth Lynch movie (seeing as he has no chance of getting any funding for an entirely new project).
You know what else works against the warmth in original recipe TP had in this season? The constant gruesome violence. You become so desensitised to it that it loses dramatic impact. After a while you're like:"oh, great - ANOTHER headless mannequin prop with CGI blood..."
There is a reason that Breaking Bad kept explicit violence down to a min. despite having the carte blanche to do so on a cable network and with the show's subject matter: it was far more effective when it actually occurred and you were sure that it was necessary to the story. Oftentimes censorship actually stimulates creativity. The old TP's nail+tweezer scene was more impactful than all of this season's graphic violence combined. TV censorship back then forced Lynch into a subtlety he's not used to and the end product was all the better for it.
You know what else works against the warmth in original recipe TP had in this season? The constant gruesome violence. You become so desensitised to it that it loses dramatic impact. After a while you're like:"oh, great - ANOTHER headless mannequin prop with CGI blood..."
There is a reason that Breaking Bad kept explicit violence down to a min. despite having the carte blanche to do so on a cable network and with the show's subject matter: it was far more effective when it actually occurred and you were sure that it was necessary to the story. Oftentimes censorship actually stimulates creativity. The old TP's nail+tweezer scene was more impactful than all of this season's graphic violence combined. Network TV standards forced Lynch into a subtlety he's not used to.
I'm not sure he's doing it for impact. If anything, the presentation of the gruesome stuff is deadpan, as if to say, "This is it, folks, this is what you get. Go ahead, take a look.". The reactions of the others around are the only clues and cues to the possible emotional content.
In fact, I believe that's what's happening in most scenes. Not all, but a majority. The camera is a dispassionate observer to the story, with no context, no exposition and no external input. Maybe that's why it feels so disjointed to everyone, because apart from the "Buckhorn", "New York", "Las Vegas" captions, there's been damn all in the way of explanation, exposition or the general hand holding that happens with television and movies.
"Translation: "I know nothing about David Lynch's work."
Really? Seen most of his films + TP, and know a lot about the context of his work and biography. Even details like the financing of the final 3rd of Mulholland Dr. coming from French Canal+, the popularity of original TP behind the Iron Curtain, and his overall style being essentially European.
Have I passed the test for the adoring Lynch crowd?
Oh good. Now can we go back to rational critique?
FWIW, Groovy Llama Fan, your agreeably rational critique has more than satisfied my admittedly unfair expectation-- voiced elsewhere on the forum-- that skeptics of The Return make at least a cursory attempt to establish a context within which to evaluate it ... by contrast with the haste with which some appear to have concluded that 1) what they don't like is not good; and, 2) their assessment of what is good is worthy of other's attention, absent meaningful analysis or 'rational critique,' both stemming from what I suspect is a tacit belief that, 3) it is self-evident that what is good is what people like (tautology intended).
It seems to me, at this point, that both camps--the lovers of The Return and the skeptical/disappointed-- have demonstrated a tendency (myself included) to descend into snarky recriminations that reduce "reaction" threads for each episode to rather superficial proxy arguments (the fire of which I have fueled at several points with ill-considered rants) over what I suspect actually has more to do with mutual resentment over the "tone" of each sides' respective reactions... My sense from several remarks ("boxed-wine" and "sweater-wearing" "art farts" on one side and entitled, attention-span-deficient, lowest-common-denominator philistines on the other-- my paraphrase) is that these argument over tone are a proxy for a sort of class resentment/conflict with cultural capital the object of dispute or what's at stake. Hence, sanctimonious paternalism on one side and shoot-first-ask-questions-later anti-elitism on the other, all of which seems awfully familiar, a postmodern return of the midcult vs. highbrow conflicts of the "high modern" moment of the post-WWII era but with the positions reversed (i.e., mass-media entertainment now rules the roost via "prestige tv," so much so that it seems that the amateur TV critics are now the most threatened and vociferous in their disdain for the traditional highbrow, not the highbrow running scared from the encroaching threat of midcult, or bourgeois entertainment or 'degraded art' or what have you... (Louis Menand's essay on midcentury critic Dwight Macdonald--who coined the term 'mid cult'-- unpacks both here).
All that having been said, I'm particularly grateful, Groovy Llama Fan, for the insights and recommendations you offered me in another topic re: where to look in the mass-media environment for similarly artistically ambitious/challenging/thought-provoking television programs and films. Two routine frustrations I experience are how few people I meet are interested in this sort of thing and how challenging it can be to find points of access to such "content" that are a) free or affordable; b) local and accessible. So your tips are much appreciated!
But what I'm most eager to know is what, at root, is your axe to grind with David Lynch or The Return? I see that you affiliated yourself with the "Twin Peaks" fan community-- by contrast with the "Lynch" fan community you posited above...
But is what you most take issue with that you feel Lynch is unjustly valorized or overrated?
(I recall from another thread your shrewdly sociological assessment that what fuels Lynch's success is not its merit as art but rather the willingness of a certain segment of mainstream audience to indulge-- and be ennobled by--his particular brand of accessible "art house" film...)
IIRC, we share a disdain for Game of Thrones (mine being hypocritical in so much as I can't help but watch it but consistently feel icky afterwards)... but you have piqued my curiosity by clearly knowing a great deal across the cultural hierarchy divide but emphatically aligning with the "Twin Peaks"-not-David-Lynch group...
I'm hoping that someone who clearly can see past the balkanized/polarized camps we've otherwise tended toward can help us all see past our preconceptions or prejudices.
Eager to hear your thoughts!
You know what else works against the warmth in original recipe TP had in this season? The constant gruesome violence. You become so desensitised to it that it loses dramatic impact. After a while you're like:"oh, great - ANOTHER headless mannequin prop with CGI blood..."
There is a reason that Breaking Bad kept explicit violence down to a min. despite having the carte blanche to do so on a cable network and with the show's subject matter: it was far more effective when it actually occurred and you were sure that it was necessary to the story. Oftentimes censorship actually stimulates creativity. The old TP's nail+tweezer scene was more impactful than all of this season's graphic violence combined. Network TV standards forced Lynch into a subtlety he's not used to.
I'm not sure he's doing it for impact. If anything, the presentation of the gruesome stuff is deadpan, as if to say, "This is it, folks, this is what you get. Go ahead, take a look.". The reactions of the others around are the only clues and cues to the possible emotional content.
In fact, I believe that's what's happening in most scenes. Not all, but a majority. The camera is a dispassionate observer to the story, with no context, no exposition and no external input. Maybe that's why it feels so disjointed to everyone, because apart from the "Buckhorn", "New York", "Las Vegas" captions, there's been damn all in the way of explanation, exposition or the general hand holding that happens with television and movies.
Is strikes me that the new, more violent Twin Peaks splits the difference between Quentin Tarantino's camp approach to 'realistic' violence and the subtlety GLF recognizes in the violence in the original TP. FWIW, Sam, I think you hit it on the nose by calling it 'deadpan'-- recall Gordon's droll assessment of Hastings's exploded skull: "Well, he's dead."
Interesting point, GLF re: how judicious Breaking Bad was in its use of graphic violence-- creating an ominpresent mood of impending violence but depicting a great deal less of it than, say, The Sopranos or Game of Thrones routine "whackings," noble beheadings, crucifixions, honor killings and/or sexy rapes. Too bad Breaking Bad's moral ambiguity was lost on the Walter-White fan merchandise audience, many of whom made Anna Gunn an object of vile expressions of hatred by the social-media homicidal rape-threat crowd. Woof.
You know what else works against the warmth in original recipe TP had in this season? The constant gruesome violence. You become so desensitised to it that it loses dramatic impact. After a while you're like:"oh, great - ANOTHER headless mannequin prop with CGI blood..."
There is a reason that Breaking Bad kept explicit violence down to a min. despite having the carte blanche to do so on a cable network and with the show's subject matter: it was far more effective when it actually occurred and you were sure that it was necessary to the story. Oftentimes censorship actually stimulates creativity. The old TP's nail+tweezer scene was more impactful than all of this season's graphic violence combined. Network TV standards forced Lynch into a subtlety he's not used to.
I'm not sure he's doing it for impact. If anything, the presentation of the gruesome stuff is deadpan, as if to say, "This is it, folks, this is what you get. Go ahead, take a look.". The reactions of the others around are the only clues and cues to the possible emotional content.
In fact, I believe that's what's happening in most scenes. Not all, but a majority. The camera is a dispassionate observer to the story, with no context, no exposition and no external input. Maybe that's why it feels so disjointed to everyone, because apart from the "Buckhorn", "New York", "Las Vegas" captions, there's been damn all in the way of explanation, exposition or the general hand holding that happens with television and movies.
Is strikes me that the new, more violent Twin Peaks splits the difference between Quentin Tarantino's camp approach to 'realistic' violence and the subtlety GLF recognizes in the violence in the original TP. FWIW, Sam, I think you hit it on the nose by calling it 'deadpan'-- recall Gordon's droll assessment of Hastings's exploded skull: "Well, he's dead."
Interesting point, GLF re: how judicious Breaking Bad was in its use of graphic violence-- creating an ominpresent mood of impending violence but depicting a great deal less of it than, say, The Sopranos or Game of Thrones routine "whackings," noble beheadings, crucifixions, honor killings and/or sexy rapes. Too bad Breaking Bad's moral ambiguity was lost on the Walter-White fan merchandise audience, many of whom made Anna Gunn an object of vile expressions of hatred by the social-media homicidal rape-threat crowd. Woof.
I never understood the hatred for her character. I liked and vouched for Walter for three or four episodes (there was something romantic about wanting to provide for your family in whatever means was possible), but then I hated him throughout from midway through the first season. His wife was the only main character with a moral compass!
Fire walk with