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March 28, 2024, 12:39:27 PM

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Twin Peaks Season 3...

Started by Mister Six, June 06, 2018, 01:56:17 PM

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NoSleep

I was thinking more of the lie that James has always been cool. Copious evidence against this in season 2.

garbed_attic

Quote from: NoSleep on May 28, 2019, 11:02:11 AM
I was thinking more of the lie that James has always been cool. Copious evidence against this in season 2.

haha but that made me cackle out loud - I quite enjoy Lynch and Frost being trolly

I've just been listening this the track 'Woodcutters From Fiery Ships' from Lynch and Badalamenti's 1990s album Thought Gang and with all its talk of woodcutters and bleeding from the mouth I feel we need hedgehog or another The Return obsessive to make the deep dive and find clues in the album's lyrics!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=275&v=BsjLj-udZDk

https://thoughtgang.bandcamp.com/

Mister Six

Quote from: Pearly-Dewdrops Drops on May 28, 2019, 05:32:20 AM
If you've seen Series 1 & 2 and FWWM in the past, I don't think there's any need to rewatch them. The continuity comes from our emotional investiture in the characters rather than specific plot points really.

Disagree - FWWM in particular is referenced and essential to understanding a lot of the mythic stuff.

Twed

Not remembering any of FWWM works too, though. I personally watched The Return and read a lot of fan interpretations on the web. It's good fun, they all contradict each other so you need to form your own interpretation too. That's what it's all about, IMO.

holyzombiejesus

Well, just started the rewatch. First time I've watched these since they were first aired nearly 30 years ago. I forgot how many different genres were crammed in to this and I also forgot how shit and irritating all the younger men were. Bobby, James and that one that looks like Jason Donovan are fucking appalling. I only remember them being in the first few episodes, I hope I'm right as they're just shit. I also remembered Leo as being far more terrifying than he actually is. Glad I'm rewatching though. Was there ever a C&B rewatch thread? Or a decent fansite that talks about the imagery and symbolism etc?

garbed_attic

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on May 28, 2019, 11:49:06 PM
Well, just started the rewatch. First time I've watched these since they were first aired nearly 30 years ago. I forgot how many different genres were crammed in to this and I also forgot how shit and irritating all the younger men were. Bobby, James and that one that looks like Jason Donovan are fucking appalling. I only remember them being in the first few episodes, I hope I'm right as they're just shit. I also remembered Leo as being far more terrifying than he actually is. Glad I'm rewatching though. Was there ever a C&B rewatch thread? Or a decent fansite that talks about the imagery and symbolism etc?

Nah Bobby's ace! He's like a fey Nic Cage

BlodwynPig

Quote from: gout_pony on May 28, 2019, 11:52:58 PM
Nah Bobby's ace! He's like a fey Nic Cage

he's a wrongun and no mistake

Mister Six

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on May 28, 2019, 11:49:06 PM
Well, just started the rewatch. First time I've watched these since they were first aired nearly 30 years ago. I forgot how many different genres were crammed in to this and I also forgot how shit and irritating all the younger men were. Bobby, James and that one that looks like Jason Donovan are fucking appalling. I only remember them being in the first few episodes, I hope I'm right as they're just shit. I also remembered Leo as being far more terrifying than he actually is. Glad I'm rewatching though. Was there ever a C&B rewatch thread? Or a decent fansite that talks about the imagery and symbolism etc?

Bobby, James and Mike (Bobby's Jason Donovan-meets-STEVE HOLT! mate) are all quite shit but get substantially better, especially in season two (and again for The Return). Sadly, Leo remains shit and not remotely scary in perpetuity.

Shaky

I think it works that Leo is largely a blustering, ineffectual loser. He's exactly the sort of drug addicted, strutting twat who's all mouth and no trousers, albeit one who's prone to random bursts of violence whenever he manages to corner smaller targets.

Mister Six

#189
It's mostly the actor's performance I object to, not the writing. He's a big lad but he carries no menace at all. Just not capable of convincingly expressing open anger, quiet rage, seething menace or much of anything at all. He's quite fun at the end of season two, and there's a bit that's almost a proto-Family Guy cutaway gag in the season two finale that made me laugh. But he's mostly awful.

NoSleep

Quote from: Twed on May 28, 2019, 07:08:46 PM
Not remembering any of FWWM works too, though. I personally watched The Return and read a lot of fan interpretations on the web. It's good fun, they all contradict each other so you need to form your own interpretation too. That's what it's all about, IMO.

I think interpretation is a hole that you dig for yourself. I don't think it's put together like that in the first place. Lynch makes films like others make music (and nobody hears music the same, nor expects others to).

mjwilson

Quote from: NoSleep on May 29, 2019, 06:31:38 AM
I think interpretation is a hole that you dig for yourself. I don't think it's put together like that in the first place. Lynch makes films like others make music (and nobody hears music the same, nor expects others to).

I don't think that trying to interpret The Return is inherently a bad idea, if that's what you're saying. It's not just Lynch making Peaks, it's Lynch/Frost, and I'm pretty sure Frost could happily give you a rundown of what the intention was behind all the mysterious stuff. The Final Dossier, for example, solidifies some of what was behind Parts 17/18, at least in Frost's mind at the scripting stage.

NoSleep

I think Frost rationalises (which is what interpretation attempts, too) in hindsight of some of the directions that Lynch has taken. I think Lynch goes to places with the plot and direction where stuff can happen onscreen; it harmonises and works like a kind of poetry but it doesn't want to be pinned down; it just works. Frost entices you to think you can finally understand it all.

Shaky

For all it's strange bells and whistles, Twin Peaks does have a plot that can quite easily be written down. If you read detailed episode summaries you can see just how well structured and laid out the whole saga really is, regardless of whether we have any concrete explanation or background for most of it. Characters come in with a purpose, events happen, things lead directly to other situations... it's hardly pure dream logic for hours on end by any means. I'd be willing to bet Lynch has his own fairly definitive idea of what happened at the end of S3 after discussing it with Frost for years - there's no way their writing partnership could really operate otherwise. He just has no intention of spelling it out to the audience.

colacentral

#194
Being a bit vague here since there are people reading the thread who haven't watched season 3 yet:

I think Lynch knows exactly what 99% of the show means, and it's much clearer if you've heard him in interviews over the years and read his books. I'd say the broad plot and symbolism up to episode 17 is pretty clear. For example, the creatures of the Black Lodge are portrayed as buglike - the Judy symbol, the experiment, the frogmoth etc. The Woodsmen = men of wood = the ants that Lynch talks about crawling on the trees in his childhood home. The scene of them moving about in fast forward in episode 8 is probably meant to make them appear as a swarm. That bug imagery is used for the same reason he used it in the opening to Blue Velvet. And Freddie defeats them using a tool typically used for clearing gardens.

I think the blog linked a few posts back is exactly right but focused too narrowly on the drug angle, which is just one aspect of it. Lynch often talks about the power of meditation and spreading positive energy (he often refers to enlightenment as "pure gold" and gold orbs are plentiful) and season 3 in particular is about that - he often refers to enlightenment as "pure gold" and gold orbs are seen frequently, particularly in relation to Dougie who is the most purely good character. The Black Lodge / drug aspect is just the opposite of that, the spreading of negativity.

The "living inside a dream" thing is related to the above because it is about the world being shaped by your motives and intentions - good dreams create good places and bad dreams create bad places. The Lodges are literally both dream worlds and real places as they are entered both via sleep and via portals like that one in the woods. So the characters of Twin Peaks do all literally live in each other's dreams, in a sense, since that would suggest a mental connection. That too is linked to Lynch's meditation beliefs - he quotes "we live inside a dream [...] but who is the dreamer?" in his Big Fish book - and it boils down to meaning that everyone is linked, everyone is one organism, so don't be a twat.

Of course, there are individual moments and images which are still confounding. I still have a hard time working out how to interpret Naido, for example, whether to take her reveal as another character at face value. An interesting bit of trivia about her is that the first episode of season 3 was originally supposed to be mostly following her and she was credited in the script as "Asian Woman," but Lynch and Frost ultimately decided that the audience needed to see a few more familiar elements early on. That really makes me wonder about her if her role was originally that important, and also that she was specifically written as asian.

Episode 18 is much more cryptic but I think that's by design - I still maintain that the final episode was written that way to leave some threads dangling, just like Fire Walk with Me and the season 2 finale before it. But that doesn't mean Lynch doesn't know exactly what's going on in it. If you take FWWM as an example: for years there were elements of it that were incredibly cryptic, but which season 3 has made pretty clear. If you watch it again now with the knowledge gained from season 3 I think you can see that Lynch knew what the relevance of each piece of FWWM had to the overall plot, whereas for years it would have been easy to dismiss some of it as pure randomness.

Having said that, I do think the subtext of 18 is somewhat clear and I'm confident about my interpretation of what it's saying, but there's not enough exposition or hard clues to say "we're in the lodge" or "we're in an alternate timeline". My gut feeling has always been that it's a bleak ending though, and it occurred to me the other day how often Lynch has used suicide as an ending - Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, FWWM to an extent (self-inflicted murder via the wearing of the ring). So he does love a downer ending.

Rewatching the final two episodes now and I wonder if there's an argument to be made for the characters in 18 sharing the same fate / going to the same place as another character is trapped in with Charlie earlier in the season. It would make that subplot more directly relevant to the overarching plot - the idea that it has already been established pre-episode 18 that characters can be trapped in Lodge worlds that appear real, with no memory of their former life.

hedgehog90

I've never read any discussion or theories about what was going on with Steven and Gersten, the scene in the woods when Mark Frost makes a cameo appearance, and how it relates to the rest of the series. It's quite a mysterious moment for me still.
Any ideas?

colacentral

I think that blog linked above covers it - Steven ruins his life and those around him with his drug use. That links in to Bobby and Shelley's story (another theme of the series is generational decline); and Gersten is there with him to contrast with her appearance in the original series where she's shown to have a good upbringing, and to be intelligent, talented etc.

Mister Six

Yep. Steven is being destroyed by drugs and his own bad deeds, and contrasted with once-promising Gersten, and with the old fella who's just happily walking in the woods with his dog, enjoying nature.

Blumf

There does seem to be a whole thread, barely touched, around that new(ish?) drug that's being distributed by Red and clearly seems to be linked to the Black Lodge. Does the Final Dossier cover it at all?


mjwilson

Quote from: NoSleep on May 29, 2019, 07:57:36 AM
I think Frost rationalises (which is what interpretation attempts, too) in hindsight of some of the directions that Lynch has taken. I think Lynch goes to places with the plot and direction where stuff can happen onscreen; it harmonises and works like a kind of poetry but it doesn't want to be pinned down; it just works. Frost entices you to think you can finally understand it all.

Agree with a lot of this but not the "in hindsight" part, I think Frost's understanding and explanations come from the scripting stage, rather than from looking back at what Lynch added during filming.

Rev+

Frost is all about density and background, plus he's well into his conspiracies.  I've no doubt he could explain pretty much every moment of series 3, or at least what it meant before filming started.  A lot of the more peculiar things in Twin Peaks almost certainly came from him - episode 8 in particular feels very much like Lynch going to town on something Frost came up with.

He didn't create the series, but he did write a load of episodes of Hill Street Blues, which may have informed his later style.  That famously had the approach of building the wider world around the story that the camera is following, with scripts in columns to include conversations going on around the main dialogue, stuff that the audience would only overhear the occasional word of but was there.  That's why he's a good match with Lynch, really - there's always this assumption that Frost was there to rein him in a bit and make things more TV-friendly, but they're both a bit crackers and pull each other in different directions.

Shaky

Quote from: Rev+ on May 29, 2019, 10:59:05 PM
Frost is all about density and background, plus he's well into his conspiracies.  I've no doubt he could explain pretty much every moment of series 3, or at least what it meant before filming started.  A lot of the more peculiar things in Twin Peaks almost certainly came from him - episode 8 in particular feels very much like Lynch going to town on something Frost came up with.

I think this is pretty spot-on but in regards to Episode 8, it feels to me like Lynch is finally unleashing something he's been sitting on for a long time. I've read that he and Robert Engels were originally going to include a 50's flashback/birth of BOB-type scene in Fire Walk With Me so there's an interesting revision of the idea there. Not that it couldn't have had heavy input from Frost, of course.

But generally, I don't hold much truck in the idea that Lynch just turns up, does that hand-wavy thing he does and makes most of it up on the fly leaving others to try to work it all out. He's far too accomplished a writer, director, musician and artist to not be able to knuckle down and decide, "Right, this is what I want to do because it means THIS to me."

Mister Six

Yeah, if you watch the behind-the-scenes clips on the DVDs or read interviews with the cast, he's clearly fully in control of the set and working towards a very specific vision. He might change his mind or incorporate a new image or idea he's had in the interim, but he sets out with a purpose. Jim Belushi said he got a polite bollocking for trying to ad-lib some dialogue on set.

I think Inland Empire was the only proper film he's made where he's made stuff up on the fly. Even Eraserhead was put together in dribs and drabs over the course of several years due to budgetary problems - there's a bit in Catching the Big Fish where he says he filmed Jack Nance approaching a door, then filmed him walking through the other side about a year later. I think that showed him how to maintain his vision over the long haul.

NoSleep

I'm sure Lynch has a clear idea of what he wants to be seen and it follows its own inner logic. It's its rational meaning that isn't so apparent (even to him).

mjwilson

Quote from: Shaky on May 29, 2019, 11:44:38 PM
I think this is pretty spot-on but in regards to Episode 8, it feels to me like Lynch is finally unleashing something he's been sitting on for a long time.

There's a picture of a nuclear explosion in Eraserhead.

Shaky

Quote from: mjwilson on May 30, 2019, 07:13:57 AM
There's a picture of a nuclear explosion in Eraserhead.

Ah, now... I've still not seen that somehow, but there we go.

colacentral

There's also an interview with Lynch from I think 2000 or so, on Charlie Rose, where he's asked what year he would travel back in time to, and he says 1956 because "it was the birth of rock n roll" or something. Considering the cheesy 1956 we see in that episode, with "My Prayer" playing, and "Let's Rock" previously established as a catchphrase of the Arm / the Black Lodge, I'd be pretty confident saying that that whole episode has come from Lynch.

NoSleep

Lynch has incorporated the same themes in his works from the very start. His earliest attempts at animation were of streams of vomit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMZOgev1ErU

holyzombiejesus

As an aside, what was the Oliver Stone directed Twin Peaks-y tosh that BBC2 showed, I think, in the TP slot once it had finished?