Hey folks,
I love the complexity and the depth that TP has shown. And I love the theories and ideas it has inspired. But I wonder if all the complexity is not there to drive the story but rather to decorate it. And what we are dealing with is more simple. Taking into account:-
Tibetan Mysticism, Kabbalah, DLs love of dreams and representing/extrapolating them, Themes of balance in the universe etc.
we see in episode 8 not just the girl fall asleep but the entire population listening to the radio broadcast. Dale Cooper literally tells us we are all in a dream. We see the A bomb supposedly uncage a primal evil. Maybe, it's not one persons dream but the collective consciousness dream. Everyone has fallen asleep a la the poem broadcast (Log Lady's dead husband? Another theory). We see one frogmoth enter one girl. But millions of eggs spewing from the experiment. Maybe it's all just frogmoth infected sleeping people collectively dreaming up the ultimate good vs evil story? Kinda basic but, all good science should be as simple as possible.
so "is it 'just' the story of the girl who lives down the lane?"
I like this. A lot of people on here do not want to accept that it was a dream, but we have 3 major characters say "we are living in a dream." I like your basic theory because I am reading a book currently on the collective unconscious an there are a lot of applicable themes to twin peaks. Book is called "the field."
we have 3 major characters say "we are living in a dream."
The dream motif is used so much and in so many places within S1-2 as well as The Return that I've decided this is just a red herring. It's a kind of breaking the fourth wall in that it reminds the audience that this is fiction; it lets us suspend our disbelief enough to allow Lynch/Frost to play with things that "feel" right as opposed to following linear logic. There are still more and less compelling options or explanations to things. But I don't think it is a dream in the sense that things aren't "real" within the universe of the show.
we have 3 major characters say "we are living in a dream."
The dream motif is used so much and in so many places within S1-2 as well as The Return that I've decided this is just a red herring. It's a kind of breaking the fourth wall in that it reminds the audience that this is fiction; it lets us suspend our disbelief enough to allow Lynch/Frost to play with things that "feel" right as opposed to following linear logic. There are still more and less compelling options or explanations to things. But I don't think it is a dream in the sense that things aren't "real" within the universe of the show.
What would be the point of that from the perspective of the artist? It would be like a Michelin chef designing a 3 star menu around the idea of communicating to the guest that they are eating dinner. It would be redundant and probably far beneath David Lynch and Mark Frost.
Well, to start off, the motif of "dreams" is all over DL's work, not just TP, and cataloguing the number of times different characters refer to dreams would take forever. They can't *all* be dreams.
A dinner is a fundamentally different thing (but yes, there is definitely an element of self-conscious theater involved in meals!). A play is a constructed world and many good artists want to remind you of that, to make you think, not just consume. The idea of "breaking the fourth wall" is one way that authors and directors can try to shake people out of the spectacle they are watching. This is not exactly new. I mean, Shakespeare did it, for crying out loud. For Brecht, for example, the idea was political activation - to get people to stop being so passive. Even Hitchcock famously walked through his films. You are watching DL play Gordon Cole - LITERALLY SHOUTING EXPOSITION AT YOU. In that case it's being played as comedy.
Even with the most famous example: is the Wizard of Oz "just" a dream? There's a frame at the beginning and end of the movie telling you that it is, but if you are trying to understand what happens, you would say, there is a good witch and a bad witch, Dorothy walks on a yellow brick road, etc. There are rules and meanings within the dream.
So my point is that I'm only interested in theories if they help to explain something about why things happen the way they do in TP. If everything is "just" a dream, then there's no point to anything we saw, which I don't think is how Lynch/Frost feel about the world they created.
Well, to start off, the motif of "dreams" is all over DL's work, not just TP, and cataloguing the number of times different characters refer to dreams would take forever. They can't *all* be dreams.
A dinner is a fundamentally different thing (but yes, there is definitely an element of self-conscious theater involved in meals!). A play is a constructed world and many good artists want to remind you of that, to make you think, not just consume. The idea of "breaking the fourth wall" is one way that authors and directors can try to shake people out of the spectacle they are watching. This is not exactly new. I mean, Shakespeare did it, for crying out loud. For Brecht, for example, the idea was political activation - to get people to stop being so passive. Even Hitchcock famously walked through his films. You are watching DL play Gordon Cole - LITERALLY SHOUTING EXPOSITION AT YOU. In that case it's being played as comedy.
Even with the most famous example: is the Wizard of Oz "just" a dream? There's a frame at the beginning and end of the movie telling you that it is, but if you are trying to understand what happens, you would say, there is a good witch and a bad witch, Dorothy walks on a yellow brick road, etc. There are rules and meanings within the dream.
So my point is that I'm only interested in theories if they help to explain something about why things happen the way they do in TP. If everything is "just" a dream, then there's no point to anything we saw, which I don't think is how Lynch/Frost feel about the world they created.
I've been wondering why anything is taken literally when it comes to musing over TPTR. Why would most things in this show be wrapped up in riddles and suppositions only for dream to suddenly come right out of the dictionary and mean "a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep." Why does "The dreamer" have to be somebody in what would essentially be our world sleeping and thinking up this whole fictional world? Doesn't that seem to easy and discount too many things?
Just a thought.
Fire walk with