Drink full: The TWIN PEAKS 2017 spoiler thread, part 2

it seems clear that once Cooper comes "back" to OG TP universe, he is intuitively aware of a bunch of other previously unidentified portals/connecting Lodge spaces which he proceeds to move between relatively freely.

xp

right. he used the 315 key (which he had apparently kept with him during his entire 25 years in the Lodge?)

jade found it, mailed it back to twin peaks, ben found it, talked to sheriff truman about it at length, who then gave it back to cooper in episode 17

Yeah, but he did keep it while he was in the lodge

xxpost That is in keeping with my growing suspicion that the various expressions of Cooper's uncanny intuition throughout the series are less because he's a highly-competent G-man than because he's always been linked to the Lodge, unmoored from time.

i still have my accidentally stolen econolodge keycard from a trip a couple years ago.

some things just stick with you the rest of your life.

*walks like a combo of dougie/bad coop/good coop toward a locked door behind a 7-11 around the corner*

Wins- thanks.

I expected Lynch would have said something by now. Maybe he's hiding like David Chase. There's no chance a bunch of people haven't asked him about more.
I think one of the Showtime guys said they were scheduled to talk after the finale.

Basically, it's as if Cooper binge-watched the entire series before he ever entered Twin Peaks.

spitballin' re: the key - perhaps also significant that it was in Room 315 in the Great Northern where Cooper first had Lodge dream + is visited by Senor Droolcup, so maybe it's just an extension of the that, the Great Northern and that key have always been a portal to Lodge-space.

xp

The whole key thing feels like the blue box moment essentially, the editing has already started to get dreamlike in the way it moves characters from one setting to another in a less rational way

the hand-wavey thing that cooper did in the lodge was the combination/key to make the curtains open back out into the real world, instead of infinite red curtain rooms like at the end of s2

that makes sense

Someone said "the little girl who lived down the lane" might be the girl from episode 8, who actually did live down a lane.

that reference - and the fact that it connects Audrey's brief string of scenes with the Arm and the larger narrative of the Waiting Room/Lodge spaces - seems like another classic Lynchian loose end, specifically designed to drive you crazy if you puzzle over it too much

The arm saying the line sounds like a taunt, especially the second part "is it?"

it's also a taunt when Audrey says it!

Audrey sounds terrified when she says it

Yeah she doesn't seem mocking at all

Imagine the Bob sphere chasing after Ray's car.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, September 6, 2017 10:43 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bouncing off the hood

― mh, Wednesday, September 6, 2017 10:56 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hanging onto the hood like Shelly

what if Audrey is in a similar state/space as Cooper at the end, wandering between these different iterations of reality, torn between indifferent father figures and forbidden paramores

Is it too soon to ask if this is the best TV show ever produced?

No, it's too late to ask. Game over imo

There's a lot of blurring of identities not just through tulpas and body-switching but through a conflation of roles and circumstances, so I don't think "...down the lane" is meant to point to one character or situation to the exclusion of others but rather to a common predicament that manifests in different ways.

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced, at least for the time being, that the young girl who lives down the lane in NM 1956 doesn't have an explicit connection to the events in Twin Peaks but we're supposed to imagine a scenario around her and her town playing out much like the one that occurs in WA 43 years later... a recurring story people must deal with in the wake of the nuclear blast that unleashed Judy.

for me it is, hands down. but i really loved breaking bad and the wire and some of the earlier "prestige" tv shows, and i appreciate the hell out of the prisoner, but i have never watched a tv show so intensely, week after week, thought about it so often, looked forward to the next episode/part more, or thought so much about a series as it relates to the other elements (in this case the original run of TP, FWWM, and DL's work as a whole).

err 33 years later

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced, at least for the time being, that the young girl who lives down the lane in NM 1956 doesn't have an explicit connection to the events in Twin Peaks but we're supposed to imagine a scenario around her and her town playing out much like the one that occurs in WA 43 years later

i'm coming around to this view as well.

otm. if twin peaks is about anything it's about cycles, repetitions, returns - particularly those of abuse, trauma, addiction & mental illness. This is consistent from the pilot thru part 18 of the return

xpost sorry, meant to correct your typo there (43 to 33). but yeah, it almost seems like some of the essential lodge entities played a role in NM (BOB, Judy, etc) but the rest was a glimpse into the first blue book case. they aren't literally the same characters/lineage as the TP crew, but their experiences overlap in certain ways

thought that was obvious from the get-go. all that stuff about the girl possibly being Sara Palmer or whatever seemed really strained, similar to the backwards blinking and airplane window morse code nonsense

Yeah the 1956 stuff felt completely self-contained from the off, to the point that I was very surprised by its slight return in the form of "my prayer"

deep sigh

I'm going to take all of the "why did I even watch the first 16 episodes" stuff upthread as deep anxiety about the show being over and not knowing how to deal

right. he used the 315 key (which he had apparently kept with him during his entire 25 years in the Lodge?) and it took him back to the Lodge... for some reason.

that was the room he was shot in, the room where he first had the Black Lodge dream.

i like how this ending posits a _possible_ 4th breaking awareness but it is still not explicit. the real lady who owns the house is there, the gas station is a modern one, everything is very realistic and Cooper constantly fucking up was the most real thing ever because we had just witnessed him gliding Harpo-like through life. it is shot in realistic style, no stop motion animation, no dancing dwarfs. so compared to what we witnessed for ~17 previous hours even though this world was crazy and bizarre it felt real, because of the way it was shot, because of the lack of audio design. Lynch often gets accused of gimmickry and its nice how stark and REAL the final sequences felt. what snaps us out of it is when Laura explodes the lights of the house with her scream. could this be her defeating electricity, killing that which haunts the Palmer house? did they actually defeat Judy here?

the ending was supremely creepy like the Twilight Zone. it is really impressive, to kind of take Film Noir tropes like the spooky disappearing femme fatale and the FBI agent rescuing a girl and bringing her safely home, and have these people sleepwalk through that sort of phony narrative, then shatter the illusion.

season 3 feels like it was meant to play concurrent alongside the others as we are seeing scenes jump around to different times. there is only so much series, if it were possible, we would see many variations on the Lodges and everybody and everybody's doubles. we are meant to be chronologically jumping all over the place across the entire series so the ending really isn't necessarily the ending. this is what is meant by infinite Twin Peaks. the abstract storytelling gives us the freedom to go to places we could never go with a "proper" story. season 3 is sort of a 18-hour pilot for a cable channel's worth of Twin Peaks spinoffs. dreams within dreams. season 3 is like Twin Peaks Galaxy.

rewatching FWWM it seems like they were already playing with this 25 years ago, there is David Bowie, there is Harry Dean Stanton reminiscing in FWWM while looking at the telephone pole about an event they wouldn't film until 25 years later. i did love how David Bowie's character stopped glitching in and out of time long enough to be the steampunk Dungeon Master to both Coopers while he is under the spell of the Black Lodge, that was very cool.

the past dictates the future, Bowie's dialog may have been just a "bunch of nonsense" that didn't mean anything at the time. now it is created a whole universe of ideas. 18 hours of new Twin Peaks dreams. i really hope they do a 4th season, imo the mystery is meant to go on forever.

Cooper creating Dougie makes me think he has created other doubles and there are infinite Cooper variations in the Twin Peaks multiverse

Rewatched 18 last night properly--after dark, all the lights out, no other sounds in the house, volume cranked--and the tone of it (quiet dread pulled absolutely taut) reminded me a lot of No Country For Old Men. Which itself is pretty Lynchian.

"abstract storytelling" is a great descriptor for the thing about this approach to narrative that I enjoyed so much.

xpost

I grew up in Shelton, WA, in the 80s and early 90s, which at the time was not only still dominated by logging but was also a major port for heroin smuggling. I didn't watch Twin Peaks for the first time until years later (on the hazy SLP VHS set), when I'd escaped to Portland. I was captivated by how accurate it was at catching the creepy mood of that time and place, yet there was something more to it, a romanticizing that wasn't trivial but opened it up and made it feel like something more... I went onto usenet and discovered that the series grew out of Frost and Lynch's attempt to adapt the Marilyn Monroe bio Goddess. I tracked down a copy (as well as the Secret Diary) and was captivated again, this time by the idea that a story that played out in the larger, more brightly-lit world could have an analogue in a compelling facsimile of my shitty little town whose barely-disguised traumas I was still trying to grapple with.

Anyway, wins otm: all of these thematic elements were already there in the original series, both in the series itself and in its relation to time and place and source material, just a bit more oblique.

I expected Lynch would have said something by now. Maybe he's hiding like David Chase. There's no chance a bunch of people haven't asked him about more.

he's been hiding out in france since the premiere iirc

already on a rewatch - and the one thing that sticks out is how CARTOONISH everything is compared to part 18. which makes that final part such a gut punch. i dont think albert/cole's "youre getting soft in your old age." "not where it counts, albert." was a dick joke, but dl being like "i still got it, motherfuckers." re: his filmmaking.

^ also it's Lynch telling the audience there would be no easy answers over-all

One thing I've been coming back to again and again: In the original series, there's a show called Invitation to Love, watched by the people of Twin Peaks, who are involved in deadly serious real life shit. In The Return, most (80%?) of the show basically is Invitation to Love; meanwhile there's a whole nother level of deadly serious real life shit.

https://media.giphy.com/media/l0JMrPWRQkTeg3jjO/giphy.gif

Put another way the original series simultaneously captures the feel of living in that time and place and also the sensation of immersing yourself in books and movies in an attempt to escape it. Yet there's really no escape, since books and movies will just draw you back. Or something. It's hard to explain.

literally in the middle of watching episode 18 for the first time i was like "damn he sure hasn't gone soft where it counts"

The associations of the names of the two lead investigators is also hugely important from a local perspective: D.B. Cooper, the man who jumped into the northwest woods and disappeared; Harry Truman (this one), the local who refused to leave, and was buried...

"there is Harry Dean Stanton reminiscing in FWWM while looking at the telephone pole about an event they wouldn't film until 25 years later." what? I don't get that at all.

it's a dick joke

I wouldn't put it past Lynch to have an idea of what references and symbols mean, even if it's never revealed on screen. Maybe even multiple ideas.

glad to see that NA is with me on this dick joke though

someone make me a supercut of all the times people stare at Gordon because he makes some innuendo, they think he is about to say something lecherous, or he makes a bad joke about his libido

ending the finale by turning cooper into "richard" is also a dick joke. the finale was book(houseboys)ended by dick jokes.

Did we ever get any confirmation that Coop's new last name is Tremayne?

Dick/Dale