Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

was Windom Earle going to be in this reboot?

Man, I like Inland Empire a lot, but there is some hyperbole afoot here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO934i9uO1c

Man, I like Inland Empire a lot, but there is some hyperbole afoot here...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i love inland empire and it might be my favorite as well, but that changes all the time. it's definitely up there.

let's not rehash Tuomas' ridiculous opinions about how Lost Highway is Lynch's best movie

Inland Empire is pretty amazing gonna throw my hat in there. That horrible face at the end of it still gives me shudders...

Fact: Lynch's two best films are his two most recent films.

By which I mean IE and his Duran Duran concert film.

LOL, was going to agree until ...

they should just give the reigns to ryan gosling.

gtfo

Maybe the Duran Duran movie really is his most spectacular yet. Has anyone actually seen it?

i watched it for about 10 minutes. i came away baffled. did anyone ever publish a story on the background of his involvement in that project?

His two best films are Inland Empire and Inland Empire: More Stuff That Happened!

Ok, that might be hyperbole. I saw Wild at Heart last night, btw. It's not that good.

Yeah, Wild At Heart is among my least favorites. It became even less of a favorite after watching the deleted scenes in the Lime Green Set and seeing how much stuff he cut that obfuscated the narrative in what seemed (to me) like a self-conscious attempt to make the film more Lynchian.

Maybe that's just how he works, though. I generally grant him a huge amount of leeway so I don't know why I'm less inclined to do so with WAH.

I think Wild at Heart (while not without issues) is way underrated, but I seem to be nearly alone in that view.

It seems a step back to me. Made after the production company that made Blue Velvet went into bankruptcy and waiting for Twin Peaks to become what it became. It's an adaptation, like Dune and Elephant Man. And it seems less like Lynch and like standard nineties violent postmodernism like True Romance or even Natural Born Killers.

The weird thing is, of course, that it hit at exactly the right time, and won the Golden Palm in Cannes. And with the prestige from that and Twin Peaks, Lynch kinda never looked back again, and just grew progressively weirder. Except for the Straight Story, but let's ignore that.

I think it's underrated too.

Wild at heart is about as good as perdita durango

And it seems less like Lynch and like standard nineties violent postmodernism like True Romance or even Natural Born Killers.

agree w all this, it's v tedious, probably his least enjoyable work

I don't think it all quite hangs together in WaH, but there are at least a half dozen A+ classic Lynch scenes in it that make it worthwhile.

^^^ yeah, some classic scenes, some off the rails wtf-ness, which I find true of all Lynch. Haven't watched WaH in years, but as I recall it's still better than Lost Highway.

i don't know that WAH seems less like lynch

lipstick on face, sherilyn fenn as car accident survivor, harry dean stanton's execution scene, bobby peru's "seduction" of lula, helium-voiced guy at bar, cockroach cousin, etc etc etc etc

guy on fire running through the house in flashback, coming across that car crash in the middle of the desert, lula and sailor's metal/elvis dance scene, etc.

oh, i see you got the car accident. i think of that a lot.

bobby peru's "seduction" of lula

this scene is super classic, can do w/o most of the rest of the film tbh

I agree that there are lots of classic moments despite the movie not hanging together as a whole.

WaH a pretty straight-forward story with added Lynchian elements. Lost Highway is a Lynch down to the way it's constructed. Wild at Heart is an adaptation. I mean, it's not as if it's less Lynch than something like Dune, I think, but it's weird that it's what he won his big award for. It seems less Lynch than Blue Velvet and onward.

Except for the Straight Story, but let's ignore that.

this is hogwash, the straight story is as good and in its way as gloriously weird as a lot of the other ones, the weirdness is just not on the surface and yeah sure it was financed by disney

but so what? farnsworth is incredible in that flick

There is always an interesting story about what people mean when they just say something is more or less 'Lynch' or 'Pynchon' or 'Kubrick' or whatever - and I know I started this conversation, I'm not saying it's bad, just interesting. Like, what is the most Lynch? I think most people would say Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (right?) but there is kinda a lot more to him than that. The metal-fascination in WaH is also found in Lost Highway, for instance. Is it the weird characters and a depraved sexuality? Is it the fascination with old-school Hollywood and stories looping in on themselves? Is murder and violence a typical Lynchian motif, or is it something he spices his stories up with, when they need to be more commercial?

But Wild at Heart seems different from typical Lynch to me. It's also, that 'normal' Lynch is a nice world with evil and depravity lurking underneath (Twin Peaks! The town in Blue Velvet!) while Wild at Heart is about two characters trying to find good in an incredibly screwed up and evil world. Which is fundamentally different to me. It takes two minutes before the first murder is committed!

Yeah, I'm thinking about WaH a lot, I'm writing about it in Danish as part one of my 1650-part weekly look at every Cannes-nominee ever. I've calculated that I should be done by the time I'm 80.

wild at heart is based on a barry gifford novel that is much more straightforward trash noir than lynch usually leans, lynch makes it plenty weird but when push comes to shove it's p much an equal meeting of minds

the straight story is as good and in its way as gloriously weird as a lot of the other ones, the weirdness is just not on the surface

there was a really good essay in film quarterly that convincingly makes the case for this.

to be fair that film's co-writer and lynch's longtime editor/former significant other, mary sweeney, was my partner's instructor and m/l her mentor at USC so i'm prob a little biased

true, WAH doesn’t have the moebius strip reality/dream or doppelgänger structure of other films, but it does have the day to night, innocent’s descent to hell/ trip to oz thing (like blue velvet & twin peaks in its way).

also has, occasional lynch signature, the dreamlike (oft ecstatically, transcendentally) happy ending, dissonant after so much ugliness: FWWM’s angel, IE’s song & dance, BV (intentionally “fake” feeling, cf. bird), even MH (last flickering images of happy couple, and beautiful blue-haired lady)

edit to: dissonant after so much horror

BV's ecstatic happy ending is more reunion of mother & child than couple's suburban contentment

Ugh, that FilmComment article is horrible. So because Alvin seems really frightened by fire, it means he burned his grandchild years back? Oh, ok, I guess it really is 'hidden'. I kinda hate all that puzzlesolving that goes on with Lynch. That Mulholland Drive prob is a dream of an unsuccesful actress who has hired a contract killer, or that Lost Highway prob is the pulp fantasy from a man who has murdered his wife, that kinda takes away from my enjoyment of the film. It's too neat, too psychological. That's another reason I love Inland Empire, it doesn't seem to make psychologically sense, and instead seems fueled by the logic of stories eating each other.

^^^^ this otm

agree re Inland Empire

i also know of a really good essay on inland empire that explains it all

Bless Lynch for letting us run wild w meanings tho, I would hate for him to say "the red lamps symbolize THIS and the blue keys symbolize THIS". Can't blame critics or theorists doing what they are doing but Lynch's work is strong enough and genuinely weird enough to withstand analysis.

i also know of a really good essay on inland empire that explains it all

:) zing?

if not, curious to read it

haha, it was just a joke in response to the frederik hating my previous link so much.

i do know of a big explainer website, though, that goes waaaaaaaaaaaay too far in trying to find meaning in everything, is organized in a chaotic fashion, and resembles early 2000s internet in a pleasant way. http://xixax.com/halfborn/

Haha yes, sad to say I spent quite a while on that site!

IE was, for me, the film among Lynch's more difficult work that took the least amount of effort to 'get'. It's labyrinthine, for sure, but I was able to grasp his version of a through-line the first time I saw it.

i screwed a couple guys for drinks; no big deal. this one guy was kinda cute. fucker had a dick like a rhinoceros. he'd fuck the shit out of you, i tell you what. he'd buy me a couple of drinks after. we'd talk. he'd tell me about the town he grew up in, all the little girls he fucked. there was a chemical factory in this town, and he'd tell me it was putting so much shit in the air you couldn't think straight. it got to a lot of the people. there was a lot of crazy shit going on there-- people having weird dreams. seeing things that wasn't there. this one time, this one little girl--she was staring off at something one time--starts screaming. the people hanging round come to her and ask what's wrong. and, uh, she says she sees the end of the world. all fire and smoke and blood running. you know. like they say. the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

Like a grown up version of Linda Manz in Days of Heaven.

i'm guessing Lynch asked for more money because he didn't want to do the series.

― poxy fülvous (abanana), Wednesday, April 8, 2015 1:43 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's my theory too... that he was having second thoughts about the series (and the commitments it would entail), and made demands he knew showtime wouldn't meet as a means of backing out. but who knows!