Yeah, I did read that some time ago. It got buried with the 6 dozen other theories that came out of supposed reputable and/or reliable sources. Seemed just as soluble as all the others. 🙂
It seems to be all breaking down to the true believers and their factions. The theorizers and the ponderers and those who just want to discuss it seem to be fading away and only the dogma is left.
Really I agree, dogma is incorrect at this point, since there are so many hidden clues and contradictory stuff throughout the series that link up throughout all episodes and their progression. Right now is just the beginning of 'pondering', re-watching it, etc., since all the easy assumptions were destroyed in 18. It is all much more complex then putting some simple ending on it, like 'it was just a dream', etc.....no way that can cover what the show has appeared to us.... Seems like this reaction of a simple 'solve all' theory is just a way for people to avoid the mystery....., but of course they will end up in red room for 25 years that way....
Yeah, I did read that some time ago. It got buried with the 6 dozen other theories that came out of supposed reputable and/or reliable sources. Seemed just as soluble as all the others. 🙂
It seems to be all breaking down to the true believers and their factions. The theorizers and the ponderers and those who just want to discuss it seem to be fading away and only the dogma is left.
Really I agree, dogma is incorrect at this point, since there are so many hidden clues and contradictory stuff throughout the series that link up throughout all episodes and their progression. Right now is just the beginning of 'pondering', re-watching it, etc., since all the easy assumptions were destroyed in 18. It is all much more complex then putting some simple ending on it, like 'it was just a dream', etc.....no way that can cover what the show has appeared to us.... Seems like this reaction of a simple 'solve all' theory is just a way for people to avoid the mystery....., but of course they will end up in red room for 25 years that way....
You Murat, I would never describe as a Dogmatist. 🙂
I am glad to hear that you are still in the pondering and discussion group. I am as well. I wonder how much longer that will last.
This is probably the 100th time I've read someone who is perplexed as to why people are so confused by the simple and easy to understand ending...
...and the theories are always different and in direct opposition to each other...lol.
Stop tooting your own horn...
...you're as confused as the rest of us.
Yeah, I did read that some time ago. It got buried with the 6 dozen other theories that came out of supposed reputable and/or reliable sources. Seemed just as soluble as all the others. 🙂
It seems to be all breaking down to the true believers and their factions. The theorizers and the ponderers and those who just want to discuss it seem to be fading away and only the dogma is left.
Really I agree, dogma is incorrect at this point, since there are so many hidden clues and contradictory stuff throughout the series that link up throughout all episodes and their progression. Right now is just the beginning of 'pondering', re-watching it, etc., since all the easy assumptions were destroyed in 18. It is all much more complex then putting some simple ending on it, like 'it was just a dream', etc.....no way that can cover what the show has appeared to us.... Seems like this reaction of a simple 'solve all' theory is just a way for people to avoid the mystery....., but of course they will end up in red room for 25 years that way....
You Murat, I would never describe as a Dogmatist. 🙂
I am glad to hear that you are still in the pondering and discussion group. I am as well. I wonder how much longer that will last.
Count me in, too. I have no idea what's happened, and the ideas I contribute are just those; ideas. Some seem to hang together but I make no claim to them being correct.
I still *think* the idea of someone/something retconning the whole of reality has wheels, though. I wondered if the end result of all that was the reality we have here and now, which seems to be the one Coop and Carrie are stuck in, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
The idea has some appeal, a sort of "Well, in the Twin Peaks universe, you have nice, idealistic characters and the world is much simpler there. Here, we have a bunch of half assed schmoes, such as the new version of Cooper". Or something.
Again, no claims, just ideas.
Yeah, I did read that some time ago. It got buried with the 6 dozen other theories that came out of supposed reputable and/or reliable sources. Seemed just as soluble as all the others. 🙂
It seems to be all breaking down to the true believers and their factions. The theorizers and the ponderers and those who just want to discuss it seem to be fading away and only the dogma is left.
Really I agree, dogma is incorrect at this point, since there are so many hidden clues and contradictory stuff throughout the series that link up throughout all episodes and their progression. Right now is just the beginning of 'pondering', re-watching it, etc., since all the easy assumptions were destroyed in 18. It is all much more complex then putting some simple ending on it, like 'it was just a dream', etc.....no way that can cover what the show has appeared to us.... Seems like this reaction of a simple 'solve all' theory is just a way for people to avoid the mystery....., but of course they will end up in red room for 25 years that way....
You Murat, I would never describe as a Dogmatist. 🙂
I am glad to hear that you are still in the pondering and discussion group. I am as well. I wonder how much longer that will last.
Count me in, too. I have no idea what's happened, and the ideas I contribute are just those; ideas. Some seem to hang together but I make no claim to them being correct.
I still *think* the idea of someone/something retconning the whole of reality has wheels, though. I wondered if the end result of all that was the reality we have here and now, which seems to be the one Coop and Carrie are stuck in, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
The idea has some appeal, a sort of "Well, in the Twin Peaks universe, you have nice, idealistic characters and the world is much simpler there. Here, we have a bunch of half assed schmoes, such as the new version of Cooper". Or something.
Again, no claims, just ideas.
In an effort not to get boxed into a storytelling corner, I feel Lynch-Frost outsmarted themselves. They made an ending so wide open that it invites endless speculation with little 'evidence.' There are actually TOO MANY plausible or half-baked answers to the fate of many characters.
By contrast, the end of season 2 left many mysteries, but one of them was NOT whether the entire history of Twin Peaks was erased. That allowed people to keep dreaming about what happened next. For 25 years!
I think part of the reason the ponderers like myself are fading away is because, with the season 3 ending, what's the point of pondering this imagined world if it was all may have been erased by time-traveling Coop? I really think this is a serious, fatal flaw with the finale. Instead of enhancing imaginative possibilities, it feels like it has made them all MEANINGLESS. Twin Peaks may as well be non-exist-ant.
In an effort not to get boxed into a storytelling corner, I feel Lynch-Frost outsmarted themselves. They made an ending so wide open that it invites endless speculation with little 'evidence.' There are actually TOO MANY plausible or half-baked answers to the fate of many characters.
By contrast, the end of season 2 left many mysteries, but one of them was NOT whether the entire history of Twin Peaks was erased. That allowed people to keep dreaming about what happened next. For 25 years!
I think part of the reason the ponderers like myself are fading away is because, with the season 3 ending, what's the point of pondering this imagined world if it was all may have been erased by time-traveling Coop? I really think this is a serious, fatal flaw with the finale. Instead of enhancing imaginative possibilities, it feels like it has made them all MEANINGLESS. Twin Peaks may as well be non-exist-ant.
Interesting observations, Robert-- thanks for your thoughtful analysis. I think you couldn't be more right about L's and F's constraining postmortem imaginative possibilities for the Twin Peaks fan community (a paradox, as you rightly point out, given how wide open the ending is for interpretation!).
I think this leads to a set of questions that merit more discussion here than they've received-- Sam's excellent recent thread notwithstanding. We might do well to shift discussion from the explanatory dogmatism Brandy and Murat diagnosed to why L & F may have chosen this course and what we might learn from it.
I'm going to riff on this for a hot minute-- hopefully the following thoughts will stimulate further discussion?
Like most artists, Lynch and Frost seem to want people to congregate around their work, but I also sense that The Return aimed to seriously call into question "cultish" (and superficial? consumerist?) varieties of fan culture (e.g., conventions, costumes, merchandise, etc.-- let alone the "Visit the Filming Locations of Twin Peaks" tourism industry!)
I think I can relate to the position Lynch may have found himself in terms of his vexed or ambivalent relationship to his audience(s)... Dune and Twin Peaks reached the widest audience, yet Lynch has expressed serious misgivings about each (in so many words, conceding they amounted to artistic failures or disappointments), taking more or less full responsibility for the "mistake" of signing on to do Dune without rights to the "final cut" protected in his contract. In the case of the original Twin Peaks, Lynch has since been outspoken about the difficulties of working within broadcast network constraints and the resulting disappointment he felt Season Two turned out to be.
In the end, it strikes me that Lynch might well feel frustrated with contemporary media culture, all told (c.f. his impassioned YouTube rebuke of mobile-phone/earbud viewing!). This seems unsurprising given that his "riskiest" (and most artistically ambitious?) wide-release films (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Fire Walk with Me, and, especially Inland Empire) didn't do especially well at the box office and proved polarizing among mainstream U.S. critics (e.g., Roger Ebert), too weird for mainstream audiences, too mainstream for the more experimental arthouse crowd.
That said, if I were in his shoes, I'd have long since grown weary of anti-elitist resentment of art and artists... Something, regrettably, I think is pretty evident here at WTTM. I don't wish to fault Pieter or any of the forum participants, but I do think it's safe to say that there's a certain strain of forum discussion here that indicts Lynch's experimentalism as pretentious. I don't dispute anybody's right to feel this way or to discuss it here, but I do think-- at least in the U.S. -- the proliferation of "art-like" prestige tv runs corollary to (and perhaps exacerbates) popular perceptions of art and artists as self-indulgent or undeserving of any sort of special status outside of the media marketplace.... Which, I think, is both sad and unhealthy, economically and socially. But that's another, bigger discussion....
Of course, the auteur status accorded Lynch is pretentious (and misleading, and outmoded...) But this is hardly new, and the popular resentment thereof belies the commercial success of countless showrunners and filmmakers framed as possessing similarly singular vision....
All told, I can see why an artist who has dedicated the energy, time and money to an uncompromising vision of weirdness that Lynch has... would have long since grown weary of the Homer Simpson response to his work...
FWIW, I've really come to appreciate/find satisfaction in the Brechtian turn things took in the end. It strikes me as the most irreverent and unconventional thing I've encountered in the contemporary media landscape in as long as I can remember. That I'm still impressed by "irreverence" for its own sake perhaps betrays my ripeness... I can certainly understand why others have grown weary of "fearless, uninhibited [male] artists not afraid to do things on their own terms." They are rather like "detectives who aren't afraid to take the law into their own hands..."
In sum, I think the impulse to rationalize away what's weird about The Return reflects a mistrust of art and artists, a discomfort with narrative ambiguity and a profound resistance to the sort of self-examination set up by an alienating artwork in an escapist medium. I share some of each of these, so I'm as much a hypocrite as anybody-- I certainly got burnt by the end (and still have misgivings)...
But I don't see "winning" Twin Peaks: The Return as a solution to my discomfort. I suspect others among us do-- more power to them, I suppose!
Hmmm, maybe BadFan is the dreamer.....or the secret Lynch spy/sleeper cell. 🙂
I must think on this and hopefully get back to you.
Hmmm, maybe BadFan is the dreamer.....or the secret Lynch spy/sleeper cell. 🙂
I must think on this and hopefully get back to you.
Thanks, Brandy. No rush, all in due time. Apologies for the unfiltered post!
Bad,
Some interesting thoughts. I think the gap that both sides of this idea are left grappling to overcome is the art for art's sake or as a corporate tool. I come from the other side, where everything a company (Showtime) is doing is for a purpose (ratings, subscriptions, awards = more money). This is an idea and concept I understand. I don't know Lynch or Frost, but wonder if the original fight with the network broadcast back in 90-91 was a direct result of this art for art's sake vs as a corporate tool. I understand an artist wishing to see his vision unencumbered, but I also see the network's side that they need to reach their goals for the project. I can equally understand Lynch or Frost opposing entanglements to their vision as well as Showtime's need to have a product that accomplishes their goals. I sometimes wonder which side of that equation is more reasonable in working with the other.
In an effort not to get boxed into a storytelling corner, I feel Lynch-Frost outsmarted themselves. They made an ending so wide open that it invites endless speculation with little 'evidence.' There are actually TOO MANY plausible or half-baked answers to the fate of many characters.
By contrast, the end of season 2 left many mysteries, but one of them was NOT whether the entire history of Twin Peaks was erased. That allowed people to keep dreaming about what happened next. For 25 years!
I think part of the reason the ponderers like myself are fading away is because, with the season 3 ending, what's the point of pondering this imagined world if it was all may have been erased by time-traveling Coop? I really think this is a serious, fatal flaw with the finale. Instead of enhancing imaginative possibilities, it feels like it has made them all MEANINGLESS. Twin Peaks may as well be non-exist-ant.
Interesting observations, Robert-- thanks for your thoughtful analysis. I think you couldn't be more right about L's and F's constraining postmortem imaginative possibilities for the Twin Peaks fan community (a paradox, as you rightly point out, given how wide open the ending is for interpretation!).
I think this leads to a set of questions that merit more discussion here than they've received-- Sam's excellent recent thread notwithstanding. We might do well to shift discussion from the explanatory dogmatism Brandy and Murat diagnosed to why L & F may have chosen this course and what we might learn from it.
I'm going to riff on this for a hot minute-- hopefully the following thoughts will stimulate further discussion?
Like most artists, Lynch and Frost seem to want people to congregate around their work, but I also sense that The Return aimed to seriously call into question "cultish" (and superficial? consumerist?) varieties of fan culture (e.g., conventions, costumes, merchandise, etc.-- let alone the "Visit the Filming Locations of Twin Peaks" tourism industry!)
I think I can relate to the position Lynch may have found himself in terms of his vexed or ambivalent relationship to his audience(s)... Dune and Twin Peaks reached the widest audience, yet Lynch has expressed serious misgivings about each (in so many words, conceding they amounted to artistic failures or disappointments), taking more or less full responsibility for the "mistake" of signing on to do Dune without rights to the "final cut" protected in his contract. In the case of the original Twin Peaks, Lynch has since been outspoken about the difficulties of working within broadcast network constraints and the resulting disappointment he felt Season Two turned out to be.
In the end, it strikes me that Lynch might well feel frustrated with contemporary media culture, all told (c.f. his impassioned YouTube rebuke of mobile-phone/earbud viewing!). This seems unsurprising given that his "riskiest" (and most artistically ambitious?) wide-release films (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Fire Walk with Me, and, especially Inland Empire) didn't do especially well at the box office and proved polarizing among mainstream U.S. critics (e.g., Roger Ebert), too weird for mainstream audiences, too mainstream for the more experimental arthouse crowd.
That said, if I were in his shoes, I'd have long since grown weary of anti-elitist resentment of art and artists... Something, regrettably, I think is pretty evident here at WTTM. I don't wish to fault Pieter or any of the forum participants, but I do think it's safe to say that there's a certain strain of forum discussion here that indicts Lynch's experimentalism as pretentious. I don't dispute anybody's right to feel this way or to discuss it here, but I do think-- at least in the U.S. -- the proliferation of "art-like" prestige tv runs corollary to (and perhaps exacerbates) popular perceptions of art and artists as self-indulgent or undeserving of any sort of special status outside of the media marketplace.... Which, I think, is both sad and unhealthy, economically and socially. But that's another, bigger discussion....
Of course, the auteur status accorded Lynch is pretentious (and misleading, and outmoded...) But this is hardly new, and the popular resentment thereof belies the commercial success of countless showrunners and filmmakers framed as possessing similarly singular vision....
All told, I can see why an artist who has dedicated the energy, time and money to an uncompromising vision of weirdness that Lynch has... would have long since grown weary of the Homer Simpson response to his work...
FWIW, I've really come to appreciate/find satisfaction in the Brechtian turn things took in the end. It strikes me as the most irreverent and unconventional thing I've encountered in the contemporary media landscape in as long as I can remember. That I'm still impressed by "irreverence" for its own sake perhaps betrays my ripeness... I can certainly understand why others have grown weary of "fearless, uninhibited [male] artists not afraid to do things on their own terms." They are rather like "detectives who aren't afraid to take the law into their own hands..."
In sum, I think the impulse to rationalize away what's weird about The Return reflects a mistrust of art and artists, a discomfort with narrative ambiguity and a profound resistance to the sort of self-examination set up by an alienating artwork in an escapist medium. I share some of each of these, so I'm as much a hypocrite as anybody-- I certainly got burnt by the end (and still have misgivings)...
But I don't see "winning" Twin Peaks: The Return as a solution to my discomfort. I suspect others among us do-- more power to them, I suppose!
Thanks Bad. You have a lot of interesting thoughts here.
I'm of 2 minds. As much as I like to see artists unchained from commercial concerns, sometimes too much freedom can be a bad thing. (Yep, I said it.) It seems to me there are very very few who don't go up their own asses with it. I think the lack of restraints in this instance led Lynch to impose his obsessions from Inland, Mulholland & Highway upon Twin Peaks. Unnecessarily so, IMO. I suspect that Frost put more of his energy into the books side of their arrangement and offered no resistance to this direction.
Once art is put out into the world everyone who sees it is entitled to any opinion they like. Yes, the philistines jump to quick conclusions fearing that the artists are mocking them (and sometimes they ARE). Once has to be a big boy or girl to take the heat. I admire Lynch's career on the whole. He has dug into uncomfortable places for dark truths. But again, to a fault, I think, in this case.
If Lynch hadn't previously used the fractured narrative / identity device in Mulholland, Highway & Inland, I might well have considered the end of Twin Peaks a radical masterpiece. But in light of his history of work, the most radical ending I can think of would have been a happy ending! Really.
To answer your question - "Why did they create this ending?" - I think there are many possibilities, including a desire to nip TP nostalgia. To prove a point that you can 'never go home again.' But life has taught me that in fact you CAN go home again. No, it's not exactly the same, but good things from the past can be reclaimed and brought into the present.
How crazy would it have been to save Laura Palmer from being murdered and grow to happy adulthood against all odds? Again, I think that's more radical than what was offered.
To answer your question - "Why did they create this ending?" - I think there are many possibilities, including a desire to nip TP nostalgia. To prove a point that you can 'never go home again.' But life has taught me that in fact you CAN go home again. No, it's not exactly the same, but good things from the past can be reclaimed and brought into the present.
How crazy would it have been to save Laura Palmer from being murdered and grow to happy adulthood against all odds? Again, I think that's more radical than what was offered.
Thanks for much food for thought, Roberto. I've singled out only the last portion of your post, need some time to chew on it and produce a more thoughtful and thorough reply soon. In the meantime, pardon me for the unfiltered, "thinking out loud" reflection here...
I like your idea that Lynch would have achieved something less characteristically Lynchian had he eschewed the WTF ending ... although I wonder if it would have been read by audiences/critics as radically experimental or merely a conventional ending to an unconventional story... For that matter, I wonder if Lynch already played his meta- "surprise straight-ahead film" card with The Straight Story.
Your observations have led me to consider more carefully whether or not the "nostalgia critique" angle I've posited really has legs to stand on.... Perhaps Lynch fans like me are getting a different kind of nostalgia service ...
I'll never forget hearing Patricia Arquette whisper "You'll ... never ... have ... me!" or Laura Harring's terrifyingly abrupt vanishing... Or Grace Zibriskie's scariest line ever ("Bru-tal f*ck-ing mur-der!") ...
Not sure what this tells me ... Other than, perhaps, that those were exhilarating experiences that left an indelible impression, one that has stayed with me like little else I've ever seen in a movie theater.
The Return did the same, repeatedly (Parts 3, 4,. 9 and 18 were unlike anything I could have imagined) but maybe that says more about me than it does about Lynch, Frost, or The Return.
What I'm sure of, at very least, is that I haven't seen anything this compelling or thought provoking in a looong while.
I think I may start a topic called: "What's better than Twin Peaks: The Return?"
I've started a loosely chronological survey of Hitchcock's films that should keep me occupied until the post-Return grief subsides...
But what I actually should probably do is give up on TV altogether and actually start reading seriously again...
"If you liked Dougie Jones and family.... .... you'll love Don DeLilllo's White Noise!"
"If you liked Laura Palmer and Family... ... you'll love Henry James .... or Ibsen's Ghosts!"
etc., like an Amazon bot.
Iron Fist Cockney Teen didn't leave an indelible impression?
I mean his punches were like totally POWERFUL!
Iron Fist Cockney Teen didn't leave an indelible impression?
I mean his punches were like totally POWERFUL!
I can't tell whether I'm the butt of the joke here, or Lynch/Frost, or Freddie Sykes. But, yes, his fists were as powerful as your wit, to be sure. : )
Honestly, I really liked the Freddie Sykes deus ex machina ... In part b/c everybody else seems to hate it, but, more fundamentally, because it elicited the same kind of awe/wonder as the other scenes I mentioned above.... There's something really amazing (to me) about watching a Lynch (or Lynch/Frost) narrative unfold... I think Freddie Sykes certainly confirmed that. (When Sykes first appears, I'd asked myself "WTF is James accompanied by a Scotsman [yes, I know he's a Londoner] with a single latex glove??" If only I'd known the answer was: to deliver one hell of a monologue and ultimately infuriate everybody!") Maybe I'm just a sucker for the Lynch brand of weird.
Ultimately, I actually think it's the comic parts of The Return that are some of what I'll remember most fondly... Dougie Jones, Janey E, The Mitchum Brothers, The Fusco Brothers, Hutch and Chantal, Red and Shelley (still, wtf?!) ... And Freddie. Always Freddie.
The sideshow, in other words.
...And the hairpins between terror, horror and comedy, sometimes all at once (Red and Shelley! Audrey and Charlie!) ... Amazing, IMO. Worthy of wonder, I feel.
Fire walk with