the TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN non-plot-specific summing-up thread

Wonder if the Sutherland quote about screenings being "relatively rare" has to do with the rights & how they work differently for TV shows, as Simon H speculated on his podcast. Hopefully it's more just stating the obvious re the practicalities of putting on 16 and a half hours of content, like you'd expect these to be rare, screenings of Out 1 are extremely rare too

i've been rewatching on bluray and when i got to pt8 i lingered in the projection booth at work after the square had finally fucking ended and the staff had gone home and arranged a theatrical screening for myself, in the middle of the night, alone, when no one knew where i was or what i was doing. i sat on the stage 8ft from the screen. as ferris bueller says, if you have the means, i highly suggest picking one up

whole show's terrific at home tho as long as yr able to turn it up.

damn that rules, lol @ 'when the square finally fucking ended', all i ever heard about that movie was how interminable it was

otm. i highly recommend seeing Lynch's work large, preferably projected, dark room up close. a good projector is not that expensive of an investment and is a dramatically different experience. i projected most of season 3 with a few friends at a time as it came out. the night of episode 8 there was a mini miracle and we finally got everybody together to have the night off and grab pizza. we projected out in the living room on the large white wall and had no idea it was going to be _that_ episode. it was amazing.

a few months later i went to visit a friend who had moved out of town and we planned on binge watching as much as we could while i visited. the thing is, the couch we sat on was way across the room, the TV monitor just a tiny box on the far end of the room. it was hard to focus on it. it was easy to get distracted. Lynch in particular plays with tension and dynamics far more than most other directors so i agree w him that a powerful system is necessary to get the full experience. visual details and quiet noises can be missed if it's an un-optimized viewing experience. his work triggers all kinds of (often mixed) emotions.

ah there is a cut off sentence at the end there. i meant to say: people will laugh at David Lynch's work because it is genuinely funny, sometimes cosmically so. he is constantly tip-toeing all kinds of lines and combining horror with beauty and comedy all at once. first time i saw a Lynch film in the theater was Mulholland Drive and while it was a thing of beauty, me and two friends had never laughed so much in our lives.

I liked The Square but the last 45 minutes is really quite a slog

AB I'm extremely jealous of yr setup

^same, it was fine but interminable

I stumbled across a Lynch piece in an art museum here. Hand-made paper, on which he drew a baby having a baby (more or less).

the square had one scene in the first half-hour (delivering the letters) that was so riveting and dreadful and confidently on-the-nose (the dark square of the apartment stairwell he turns round and round, descending, as he enmeshes himself violently with other lives) i wondered if by the end of the movie stockholm would be in apocalyptic flame, and then as far as i can tell nothing happened for two more hours except strained artworld satire. tasteless millennial marketing team in partic rang false w every other word.

adam's setup sounds ideal.

my peaks friend at work had an extra ticket for saturday's MOMA marathon and offered it to me. I had already told my friends I would be dungeon mastering for them that day. I didn't go to the screening. A DM is only as good as his word :(

battle of nerddoms!

adam's setup sounds ideal.

i dropped ~$100 on a consumer grade LED projector a few years ago and use it for hours daily. you can probably spend that now and get one with way better resolution (mine is kind of useless for anything with text). imo it's also a QoL upgrade as you suddenly aren't staring directly at a screen quite so much, there is the possibility for a larger image that is easier on the eyes.

I'm rather late to the ILX/TPTR party, but can I just say that the fact that it exists is such a fucking blessing.

Yeah, I'm not blasting the sound; I'd rather not be scared into permanent sleeplessness by a TV show.

There's a fair chance that will happen anyway, might as well get those good headphones on and luxuriate in the ominous rumbling imo

Won't comment until I get a few episodes in, but I finally started this last night (first two parts).

Did the first series 'rescue' DL from postmodernism?

Twin Peaks proved, at least for a while, to be not only a phenomenal critical/commercial success, but one that worked entirely on its auteur’s own idiosyncratic terms, melding an ironic view of melodramatic conventions with a surrealist vision. Indeed, Lynch has often been credited with irrevocably transforming television, paving the way for that Golden Age represented by The Sopranos (with its frequent recourse to dream sequences), The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men.

Yet it could just as easily be argued that television transformed Lynch, previously a key postmodern figure. Whereas modernism viewed narrative as a problem, postmodernism viewed it as a joke, a hoax that had been exposed and deserved only our derision. Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) belong securely within this tradition, as does the feature-length Twin Peaks pilot.

As the latter series developed, however, Lynch clearly found himself caring, in an unironic way, about characters who had initially existed in inverted commas, introducing a depth of feeling that would be retained in his later, more mature output. Turning from Twin Peaks’s 1989 pilot to its prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), one is struck by the sharp difference in tone; the scene in the pilot in which we are asked to laugh at Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)’s grief upon confronting Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)’s corpse feels callous in a manner that has no equivalent in the later film, or any of Lynch’s subsequent theatrical efforts.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/bradlands/twin-peaks-david-lynch-stretches-television-unknown

Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

the scene in the pilot in which we are asked to laugh at Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)’s grief upon confronting Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)’s corpse feels callous in a manner that has no equivalent in the later film

when truman says "is this gonna happen every damn time?" you have all of andy's character (except his physical heroism) summed in one moment, and you're not (just) supposed to laugh imo. andy is undesensitizable, which in a whole show about trauma is hardly just a joke. plus, accidental resonance: things that happen again, things that are returned to, the same as last year at mr. blodgett's barn.

at the same time yes it is played for laughs. figure it out yknow?

Whereas modernism viewed narrative as a problem, postmodernism viewed it as a joke, a hoax that had been exposed and deserved only our derision.

also i've never taken an english course so who knows but this sounds wrong.

yeah i was gonna make roughly the same post. considering how much crying and sobbing there is in the episode, it serves a much more nuanced purpose than getting a laugh

"narrative deserves only our derision" reads like a characterization of postmodernism by... someone who thinks you can be rescued from it by television

Narrative is funny though.

Jeeze I'd say one would only have to watch 10 minutes of THE ELEPHANT MAN to realise where Lynch's heart is.

no matter how hard I try i will never understand what is or isn't postmodern

congratulations, you're postmodern

feel like anything before WWI is modern but past that it gets fuzzy. once you've passed Andy Warhol and the birth of the internet there's no looking back

i chose WWI cos Dada/surrealism being the first cracks in the facade of pop postmodernism

icymi

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/02/15/film-poll-twin-peaks-nathan-for-you-and-the-great-tv-vs-film-debate-of-2017/

Netflix finally sends the DVDs on Tuesday. See you in the Other Place!

i'll probably start it this weekend, as i'm watching the original's finale tonight i think.

we'll see you both at the curtain call

O Lucky Men!

Re: the revive, why do so many hot takes of Lynch's work seem to so fundamentally misunderstand Lynch and his aims? I mean, I geddit, he can be a slippery customer, but still.

I think there's a fundamental mismatch between how fans watched the Twin Peaks revival—obsessively, in online forums, sleuthing and pouring over every crevice for deeper significance—and how Lynch has suggested we enjoy it: as an experience, a dream that works best on the immediate level. He's all but said "just watch it, enjoy it and be moved by it."

Obviously artists don't get to control how viewers engage with their work, but it does make the 15,000 Reddit threads devoted to Judy seem very silly.

I'm not going to not talk about Judy.

frankly the obsessive poring-over is why I like to watch such series long after they debut.

(ie to abstain from it)

i don't think he minds a huge group of fans obsessing over every tiny detail in his work. he even nods to that kind of community/culture a few times in the return (i won't be specific even though it wouldn't really be a spoiler at all)

in terms of how an audience consumes his work, he seems much more concerned about the quality - he hates people watching on phones, and he recommended several times that people use headphones (which i do too; if you're into the eraserhead soundtrack you'll love this)

Yeah that's a noble priority. I remember this debuted in the summer, and every Sunday night even on the most sweltering days I'd have to turn off the air condition when watching the new episode so I didn't miss any of the sound details

Never watched anything else in our place at such a volume (although my gf did insist on a significant reduction wrt the Penderecki).

Do you have neighbors, pal?

Figure I'll go about 2 episodes a week, an 18-hr marathon doesn't seem optimal for my mental state.

i tried but can't do more than 2 episodes at a time. 3 is a stretch.

I just finished the fourth episode. So far I'm glad it exists but I'm not blown away either. Much of it is attenuated for no reason.

comedy/horror of duration, as we discussed in the Lynch thread

was genuinely surprised when J J Leigh showed up

Much of it is attenuated for no reason.

it gets worse.

Slow TV, doodz

Morbs, lecturing on teevee politics.

I've said elsewhere that this feels like the OG 9-episode Showtime order spread margarine thin to self-indulgent effect. I watched eps 1-9, one at a time, and had to stop for a while.