Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

yeah, but it's just a warm-up for Inland Empire really, in terms of narrative, visual, and tonal disjunctions

fwwm is totally extreme and also all the people who are like "lol the lady has a log and the people eat pie luv this show" hate and ignore fwwm.

Oh wow, yeah, I always thought FWWM was basically all Lynch's thing.

itt REAL twin peaks heads

lol fair enough i'm just sayin if this is full inland empire the drop in ratings b/w episodes 1 and 2 could be pretty ugly

This is great to hear right now since over the last two weeks I've been in full on twin peaks immersion mode, watching the whole series for the first time in about fifteen years, reading the secret diaries book which was actually pretty great, and listening to shit tons of the soundtrack stuff they released from the archive a few years ago. The show was a whole lot more emotional for me than last time I watched it. Gonna watch fire walk with me tonight.

Frost and Engels credited as cowriters for FWWM. It seemed like such a full on Lynch thing, always thought it was just him running away with it. So yeah, this could totally be Inland Empire in the woods. Don't mind me, had a few beers and shooting the shit.

i love inland empire but i think david lynch has a decent understanding of what makes twin peaks work well

Inland Empire is cool plus I think ppl are a lot more open to weird anti-TV nowadays than ever before.

xp

Debatable. FWWM is, uh, controversial. I'm a Lynch stan and I think it's one of his weakest films. Not a popular opinion around here, I know.

Showtime shows frequently look cheap and lousy, i'm more inclined to believe that they were initially stingy than that the guy who made Eraserhead demanded an extravagant production budget

I trust that David will know what to do: follow his instincts. I really don't care how this turns out, it will be worth watching regardless.

Showtime is Premium Cable. For a one-season show, ratings don't matter.

I don't expect this to be anything like Inland Empire. I expect he will take a queue for shows like True Detective and do a more modern, darker take on the original with lots of Lynchian flourishes. I doubt it will be super artsy or obscure.

there best be some 'damn good coffee and hot!' isms in this thing!

Twin peaks is back, and this time it's... actually back?

This whole thing has been crazy, would love to know just what's been happening behind the scenes this last 6 weeks. I guess we'll find out one day.

probably a lot of grandstanding over dollars

I'm about as interested in what's happening behind the scenes as I was the James sideplot in season 2.

Immersion continues. Finished fwwm this morning and just finished The Missing Pieces a few minutes ago. I understand why he cut some of these, especially the ones that don't directly feed Laura's story, but Jesus Christ at least half of them are fucking essential and add so much resonance to the movie. Was the fan edit the regular movie with these scenes interpolated in the appropriate places?

it's been hard to track down. the added stuff with Bowie at the very least seems in retrospect to be completely necessary because that scene has never made a lick of sense; not that it makes that much more sense with the deleted stuff but there is more context and you find out where he goes.

(the fan-edit has been hard to track down, I meant. . . . the person who did it took it off the 'net pretty quickly for some reason or other)

i was gonna say, i'm not sure that you /want/ fire walk with me to make more than a lick of sense.

I recently got the Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery blu-ray set and just started working my way through it. I'm only a few episodes in, so the material is fairly strong, but I'm kind of dreading diving into season 2. It's so long!

One thing that's really been standing out to me is how much the melodrama tropes are amplified and pushed to the forefront in a very exaggerated manner. I'm wondering if season 3 is also going to go heavy with that retro melodrama style or if it will be more in line with modern gritty mystery shows.

The romantic ecstasy angle is so elementally important to what tp is, not just romantic = love scene sense but in the capital r sense, the terrible beauty of nature and death

Biggest diff between my late 90s rewatch and the one I just did is the stuff that last time made me go "oh lol irony ott" this time made tears well up in my eyes

https://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lt7zffUE2N1r3i5wxo1_540.png

Something I've noticed about Lynch's work (specifically his last couple of films) is that, once I've watched it a time or two and worked through the knots and the winding and the twisting, there's a pretty deep emotional core that, yeah, is pretty affecting. It's more surface-level with his mainstream work (The Elephant Man made me cry, for sure).

The romantic ecstasy angle is so elementally important to what tp is, not just romantic = love scene sense but in the capital r sense, the terrible beauty of nature and death

otm (& not just in twin peaks)

simultaneity of apparent lol irony & profound sincerity of melodrama unique to lynch, key to his work's power (inducing existential vertigo, access to the real)

related to effectiveness of his musical choices too

Yeah feel like you can tell when the writers are treating it like a parlour game & when they're actually invested in the characters, and it seems directly related to lynch's proximity to the show. There's such an ache to the silly soapy ed-nadine-norma & james-donna-maddy triangles that just completely disappears when he leaves. I think of all the implicit rebukes of the latter episodes in the finale the most effective is how lynch in a single pair of scenes manages to re-imbue the Lucy/andy and ed/Norma plots with that big-hearted sadness

Cooper guides Leland through the afterlife was not directed by lynch though and that scene made me weep, not all the emotional peaks were dir lynch

But generally otm

Yeah sorry lynch's proximity to the show does not necessarily = lynch involvement, more that his episodes set the tone. That ep (which I have mixed feelings about) follows his lead in wrapping up the Laura plot imo, the huge tonal shift comes 1 ep later

Oic what u mean

agree after lynch abandons show heart largely drains out of it; there's quirky sentimentality/ soapiness but not that ache (or ecstasy & terror)

also reminded of director's instructions in mh audtion scene: "don't play it for real until it gets real"

in lynch's work, at any (unexpected) moment, in midst of artifice/ performance/ irony-- like flicker of the screen-- it gets real

One of my favorite moments in the pilot is when Leland finds out and drops the phone and the camera starts panning across the phone. And. Keeps. On. Panning. All the way down the cord. It's the kind of moment that has been done a million times in a soap opera but the amount of attention the phone gets here is almost creepy and it's that kind of filmwork that the post-Lynch TP is lacking most imo.

i always thought "invitation to love" was a way of "othering" the soap operas that twin peaks sometimes resembled... and reflects both the creators' anxiety and humor about that.

i've probably mentioned this somewhere else in this very long and very old thread, to which i've contributed for over a decade. yikes!

i'm O.G. twin peaks btw, having watched it in its original broadcast, back when i was 12-13 y.o.

Just read the oral history book ("reflections") and that def seems to have been the intent with Invitation To Love.

i should read that book! it's been on my amazon wishlist for a long time.

It's great

I'm not sure about how much of who was doing what, but is maybe unfair that that Mark Frost is never mentioned in these discussions? Given his role as the active co-creator of the show, is it accurate to be putting so much agency on David Lynch alone in guiding it (I seem to recall that Mark Frost, like DL, was also working on other stuff rather than TP during the dip in the second season)???

(Also, if someone wants to make and send me a screenshot with captions of Dale saying "I would very much like to make love to a beautiful woman who I had a genuine affection for" - near the beginning of the first episode of the second season - I would very much appreciate it).

For sure, the whole esoterica aspect comes from Frost and his obsessions

eighteen episodes, wow

is that confirmed? all i can find is reference to some comments that sheryl lee made at a conference

woohoo!

http://welcometotwinpeaks.com/news/18-new-twin-peaks-episodes-angelo-badalamenti-washington-state/

angelo badalamenti :D

so the $$ that lynch was holding out on might have been funding for the extra 9 episodes? that makes way more sense than the accusations that he was holding the show hostage to get more money for himself

Badalamenti signing on is crucial

how in hell did they go from 9 to 18?! that's insane.

presumably split up into two seasons?