Twin Peaks: Classic or Dud?

Fire Walk With Me was, I say, Lynch's masterpiece up until the '00s.

the only sub-plot i truly loathe is the one involving the woman and james, but i also hate everything involving james, so that's a given.

^^^This is completely otm. Though I have to ask if I am the only one who likes the Benjamin Horne civil war shenanigans, as all my friends seem to hate that bit. I think it's hilarious.

Think there was a TP babes poll last year.

Choose, But Choose Wisely. Anyone Picking Joan Chen Will Be Grouped With Momus From Now On (A Twin Peaks Female Lead Poll)

shitty poll imo

I love the series - watched it again fairly recently - but have never seen Fire Walk With Me. Should probably do something about that.

Nadine is the character I mostly can't stand in the second season.

There wasn't anything inherently wrong with most of the mid-second-season sub-plots (except the nadine one), but there were too many of them, and too little focus.

the james subplot was pretty dumb, made worse by bad writing and direction (I maintain that the episode directed by Diane Keaton that focused on that was the worst episode of the series)

(oh someone said that right above, glad I'm not alone, not that I thought I was)

also, lara is donna, but I liked Moira Kelly in the role more, but I also liked Donna at the beginning of twin peaks more than I did her character later, so maybe I just like innocent donna more than skanked donna.

Nadine plot, James plot, Leo plot, Windom [sic] Earle plot... yeah the second season pretty much blowed, imho. Fire Walk With Me is awesome tho.

Windom (sic) Earle

Huh, spelled like my hometown, would not have guessed.

As much as I <3 Twin Peaks to the infinity and back, S2 I would agree is pretty snoozy. Bookended awesomely though--for weeks after watching it (alright maybe several days) all I needed to do was picture the i've-heard-about-you-thumbs-up scene and I'd be restraining some serious giggles.

Season 2 probably would have been so awesome if they hadn't rushed them into solving Laura's murder.

I think Earle was a cool idea for a villain, but just generally miscast and mishandled, perhaps because Lynch was busy with Wild at Heart.

Fire Walk With Me is pretty horrible in places, on par with the worst of S2 afaic

i thought lynch was busy with "on the air" during s2 iirc?

Fire Walk With Me is pretty horrible in places, on par with the worst of S2 afaic

― (*ﾟーﾟ)θ L(。･＿･)　　　°~ヾ(･ε･ *) (Steve Shasta), Monday, August 3, 2009 2:50 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the worst of Season 2 bears no resemblance to FWWM. What made Season 2 so bad at times was that it became so ordinary and pedestrian (e.g. the James subplot), while FWWM is pretty much wall to wall crazy/weird/beautiful.

i love the civil war reenactment stuff, season 2 is hilarious in general.

just started rewatching TP with my gf last night (she hasn't seen any of it before), it's nice to see it on something other than about-to-disintegrate VHS tapes.

i thought lynch was busy with "on the air" during s2 iirc?

I think On the Air was made later, it's pretty common knowledge Lynch was busy filming Wild at Heart during Season 2 and only came back in time to do the final episode.

S2 recap:

Absolutely horrible/nigh unwatchable - James and the Vixen subplot
Marginally entertaining - Dick Tremayne and the Spawn of Satan (Dick is pretty much always funny, so he redeems this somewhat), Super Nadine (this goes nowhere), Josie gets turned into a doorknob (the mill stuff was always pretty lame but Piper Laurie is teh awesome. also her as a Japanese guy was funny)
Great - Windom Earl, Civil War Reenactment

also absolutely horrible - the Billy Zane stuff

I think On the Air was made later, it's pretty common knowledge Lynch was busy filming Wild at Heart during Season 2 and only came back in time to do the final episode.

Well, Lynch must've had some awareness of what was happening in Season 2 - he's in 5 of the episodes, including 3 of the post-reveal "crappy" ones.

And besides, Wild At Heart premiered at Cannes in May of 1990, when the first season of Twin Peaks was still airing.

i think the wild at heart thing is just an alibi -- i'm not sure lynch had the patience for TV work. it seems to be that the micro-managing "show runner" is mostly a recent invention, e.g. deadwood, the wire, veronica mars. i don't think it was all that uncommon for an exec producer like lynch to sort of lie back and let the show take its course in those days. but the deal is that lynch is so talented and distinctive as a director that all the stuff he didn't have his hand in really seems a few cuts below.

it's weird that lynch tried not one, not two, but three times to get back into TV: on the air, hotel room, mulholland drive. i actually would really have liked to see where that last one would have gone as a show. the film has always been somewhat crippled for me since i saw the unaired pilot first.

is the pilot on the DVD?

I wasn't saying that Lynch was totally unaware of what was happening during season 2, just that (besides his few appearances as an actor) his creative input for the series was minimal between the "reveal" episode and the final episode; IIRC this was exactly when he was working with Wild At Heart. (It's worth noticing that Mark Frost didn't write or direct any of the episodes between those two either.) There are several reasons why the series starts to meander after the "reveal" episode, the obvious one being that the murder mystery was the driving force behind the series, so what are you gonna do when it is solved, but I'm sure lack of Lynch didn't help things.

And besides, Wild At Heart premiered at Cannes in May of 1990, when the first season of Twin Peaks was still airing.

True, but I think most TV series are shot well in advance of their airing. There's only four months from Wild at Heart's premier to the premier of Season 2, so it seems quite likely that Season 2 and WaH were being made around the same time. And most articles I've read on TP and Lynch explicitly state WoH as the biggest reason for Lynch's absence from Season 2, so why would they be lying? I'm sure he had other reasons too, such as getting bored with the whole series, as he never even wanted to reveal the killer in the first place.

(xxx-post)

True, but I think most TV series are shot well in advance of their airing.

Not in the U.S.

they actually introduce the windom earle subplot in the 2nd episode of the 2nd season, but it takes FOREVER for them to ramp that up. that was a mistake, i think. but i suppose at the point they made that early episode, they didn't know they were going to reveal laura's killer halfway through the season, so they had no rush in elevating the earle plot to be the focus of the series. so what happens is there is a horrid few episodes where laura's killer is revealed and caught but windom earle is hardly a palpable threat. do you remember the half-assed major plot at that point? the DEA investigation/jean renault/canadian mountie zzzzzzzzzzzz. that said, the earle plot was so mishandled in the end that it almost didn't matter.

this thread is like the part of the show with the escaped weasel or whatever it was

no, the mulholland pilot isn't on the dvd, but I think it's around as a bootleg.

Some of the deleted MD material:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P4-Lg7GvLw

the DEA investigation/jean renault/canadian mountie zzzzzzzzzzzz.

you forgot Mulder in a dress. yeah that is bad.

mulder in drag is awesome. it's like fbi hazing before he could become agent mulder.

i completely forgot the save the pine weasel stuff.

It's interesting to me on rewatching just how much the show deals with female sexuality as taboo. Laura is open to her own sexuality in ways than none of the other females in this town seem to be. Males are drawn to this and react to it with violence; she is too open, too revealing. Even Cooper with all his restraint is tempted by this femininity in the form of Audrey. The red curtains are such a blatant metaphor/image in this reading. It's when the show moves away from this theme that it loses its bearings. Thus, the James/woman, Nadine/Ed, Ben's madness subplots seem unmoored because they are. They are extensions of those characters from earlier in the show, but really have nothing to do with the first 12-13 episodes; they are marginal. The introduction of Annie returns it a bit, but it seems clear to me that Lynch was not involved with the story/themes beyond the first arc because none of his usual obsessions are there anymore.

he reintroduces the theme with a vengeance in the film. though he also delves into the theme of family sexual abuse which for obvious reasons he had to skate around on the TV show. of course, the intimation that leland/BOB raped laura is present in the series, if you connect the dots, it's not dwelled upon.

the idea of aggressive female sexuality as necessarily stemming from childhood trauma and/or neglect is a troubling one that lynch shares with a lot of popular culture.

But female sexuality also as access to something that is otherwise inaccessible. The red curtains appear in 3 places: One-Eyed Jack's, where sex is sold; Leo's cabin, where it is taken; an the Lodge, where well I'm not sure what goes on there.

From an article about Iran in NYRB recently:

"The East–West battle over gender is brilliantly described by Janet Afary in her groundbreaking survey Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. As in other patrilineal societies the woman is the "door of entry to the group." Improper behavior on her part can expose her community and family to all sorts of hidden dangers. Systems such as these

'exercise a double standard wherein a woman's infidelity (but not a man's) is seen to allow tangible and damaging impurities to infiltrate the family, both physically and morally.... A woman's sexual and reproductive functions turned her body into a contested site of potential and real ritual contamination. The concept of namus (honor) and the need to control women's chastity may be related to this fear of sexual contamination.'"

I was startled at how well this seems to describe the situation in Twin Peaks, like jaw-dropped on the bus.

But female sexuality also as access to something that is otherwise inaccessible. The red curtains appear in 3 places: One-Eyed Jack's, where sex is sold; Leo's cabin, where it is taken; an the Lodge, where well I'm not sure what goes on there.

and on the stage at the roadhouse!

i think there's a danger in trying to systematize or rationalize a symbolic system in lynch's works, e.g. the use of a particular motif necessarily carrying the same meaning across different scenes/contexts. that said, the show establishes decisive linkages between the pure malevolence of BOB/black lodge, prostitution, whatever freelance kinky sex leo/laura/jacques/ronette engaged in, drugs.... in this way lynch is purely reactionary, in the way that your quote from the article about iran implies. there's very little in the way of a healthy model of sexuality in the show. maybe if they had allowed the audrey/cooper romance to play out. even poor maddy is smote a few episodes after she establishes that she's got the hots for james.

I think the fear of (especially female) sexuality and perversion is evident in most of Lynch's work, Twin Peaks being one of the more obvious examples. Even in Mulholland Drive, where the protagonist is a sympathetic lesbian (and therefore a "pervert"), there's certain desperation associated with sex. I think only in Inland Empire Lynch finally treats sexuality without this sort of reactionary negativity or repulsion, partially because Laura Dern is stronger and more forceful than almost all previous "Lynch women".

, partially because Laura Dern is stronger and more forceful than almost all previous "Lynch women".

lolz yeh just like in Blue Velvet eh

lolz yeh just like in Blue Velvet eh

Well, yeah, I was gonna add I meant older Laura Dern, not the Laura Dern of Blue Velvet.

I'd say up until Mulholland Drive most of Lynch's films (and Twin Peaks) are pretty much "male" films, i.e. they're driven by typically masculine fears and neurosis, At his best, like in Lost Highway, Lynch can put these fears under harsh judgement (LH as a whole could be seen as a critical analysis of male jealousy), but they're nevertheless driven by them. Only with his last two films, especially Inland Empire, Lynch seems to be going for something, I dunno, healthier. Of course it could be argued that it's exactly those male neurosis that make him interesting, and who wants to see wholesome David Lynch movies?

I totally forgot the curtains at the Roadhouse! Of course Lynch places them on stage, where sexuality is a performance and where Cooper's visions/dreams are performed.

i think there's a danger in trying to systematize or rationalize a symbolic system in lynch's works, e.g. the use of a particular motif necessarily carrying the same meaning across different scenes/contexts.

I agree in that Lynch tends toward dream logic and as such it necessarily is not consistent, however, I think that this motif of the red curtains is intentional and consistent, as is much of the symbolism surrounding the Lodge. See the contrast between the smell that emanates from there, burnt motor oil, and the fact that the girls who work at One-Eyed Jack's (and thus taken by BOB to the train car) came from the perfume counter. Despite his inconsistencies, Lynch is often careful about his dualities.

Anyway, this is getting way too academic. What I found most interesting is how strongly this theme is reiterated in an emotional way to the viewer. Everyone in this town (especially the males) is literally fighting over the body of this girl. When Truman hits Albert (in an argument about whether or not he will be allowed to cut into Laura's body), Albert falls on top of her. Incredible!

you mean like the Straight Story?

x-post

Yeah, Straight Story is the obvious exception. I would have no problem with him doing more "wholesome" movies like that.

Though SS doesn't deal with sexuality at all, unlike most of his films. Inland Empire was really the first Lynch movie where it felt like sex isn't something scary.

Just everything else.

Of course it could be argued that it's exactly those male neurosis that make him interesting, and who wants to see wholesome David Lynch movies?

exactly dude.

thanks for xposting, you have saved me from making a really awful Dune joke in response to Tuomas

I wish he would come into terrible financial ruin and then be forced to direct Star Wars/Transformers franchise nonsense, though michael bay is becoming increasingly lynchian himself. am pretty bummed lynch never directed 'empire' though.