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Essays

Posted: 05 February 2018, 15:33
by Lynchland
How Twin Peaks stretches television into the unknown (Brad Stevens / British Film Institute)
If Lynch is unique in having progressed from a postmodernist to a modernist position, the revived Twin Peaks suggests he may now be essaying an entirely new mode – and still progressing by moving backwards. When I first saw Inland Empire (2006), I had the impression this would be Lynch’s cinematic finale; the communal celebration with which it concludes indicated he had achieved a personal/artistic resolution, rendering anything he might do afterwards redundant. And one can hardly describe the new Twin Peaks as free of redundancy; on the contrary, it is very much about redundancy, treating narrative as less a dynamic process than a form of stasis, something constantly folding back upon itself (ultimately folding all the way back to the opening shots of the 1989 pilot).

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Lynch’s latest creation is thus a perfect example of a ‘between’ text – between cinema and television, modernism and postmodernism, narrative and non-narrative, work and play. Suspended precisely between two opposed regimes of images – one promising undemanding entertainment, the other stylistic rigour – it demonstrates that the gap separating Hollywood from the avant-garde may not be so wide as we might think.

Re: Essays

Posted: 13 February 2018, 15:52
by Lynchland
David Lynch’s Haunted Finale of “Twin Peaks: The Return” (Richard Brody / The New Yorker)
“Twin Peaks: The Return” is filled with episodes of horrific, grotesque sexual abuse of women, and also with the drama of women struggling with and against traditional gender roles. For instance, Janey-E—fulfilling with a stereotypical precision the role of the suburban housewife, concerned with the child, the meals, the budget, and the car, and who talks in domestic clichés to match—turns out to be tough-minded, bold, and courageous, able to stand up to bloodthirsty gangsters and face them down. Lynch depicts a wide variety of women in a wide variety of circumstances, almost all of which involve an element of submission and degradation, frustration and resentment. But, far from depicting their plights with a passive or bewildered detachment, he also suggests exactly what causes them to bear their burden in the face of pain and anguish: the wonder and the curse of love.
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Re: Essays

Posted: 14 May 2018, 14:48
by Lynchland
Twin Peaks: A Language More Powerful Than Words (Nicholas Rombes / Filmmaker Magazine)

“Of all the remarkable aspects of Twin Peaks: The Return, perhaps the strangest is not something that is present, but something that’s absent: the utter lack of any recognizable psychology. Characters simply aren’t motivated by the familiar psychological archetypes and cliches that underpin almost all narrative entertainment, especially series-based television. It’s not so much that the plot is inscrutable or resistant to interpretation, but that characters react to what’s happening around them in ways that look and feel familiar, but which betray little if anything of what’s going on in their heads. [...] Twin Peaks works in a much different register, relying on something closer to the expressionism of silent cinema, when acting was largely gestural.

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In fact, much of Twin Peaks plays like silent film, or film whose only sound is music and noise, as there are long stretches that feature either no dialogue or only intermittent words, such as the opening of part 3 featuring Cooper and Naido, the eyeless woman. Nearly 12 minutes pass with no dialogue, just a few utterances by Cooper. The scene — tinted and flickering — plays like a fragile document from pre-1910 Georges Méliès or D.W. Griffith.”

Re: Essays

Posted: 22 May 2018, 13:16
by Lynchland
One Year Later, I Can't Stop Thinking About Twin Peaks: The Return (Dom Nero / Esquire)
Not only did Lynch complete the story he began over almost 30 years ago, he also completely rewrote it—and in effect rewrote the medium of television itself. [...]

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According to Lynch, trauma doesn’t ever leave you. You can hide it or suppress it. You can even pretend it’s not there. But travel between universes and skip through as many timelines as you want—the truth of who you are, and your past, will stay with you forever. Rest assured, though. If we are to trust the wisdom of perhaps America’s last great auteur, then there’s another power at play here, one that’s equally powerful and everlasting. It's the other “peak”: love.

Re: Essays

Posted: 27 June 2018, 22:32
by Lynchland
‘Twin Peaks’ Is More Satisfying If You Stop Trying to Figure Out What It Means (Eric Kohn / IndieWire)
During his decade of absence, TV has become far more prominent than movies as the preeminent delivery method for moving image storytelling, and that has led to the assumption that audiences prefer long-form narratives to the more unseemly propositions of filmmaking that exists outside of those parameters.

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But the sheer enthusiasm for “Twin Peaks,” the way it excites and baffles audiences as they sit transfixed at the screen, proves that the medium doesn’t have to rest on the familiar to find a way forward. In an age of customizable entertainment and lazy viewing habits, we need Lynch more than ever to wake us up to the wonders of the moving image — and its capacity to dissect the world as we know it. Don’t expect a light at the end of the tunnel; it just keeps getting deeper.

Re: Essays

Posted: 22 September 2018, 16:24
by Lynchland
A Cry for Compassion (David Johnson /Cinematic Detective)
“We’re Going Home”

Why did Cooper choose the night of Laura’s death to intervene? He could’ve gone back years earlier and prevented her suffering. He could’ve exposed Bob before he did so much damage.

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Laura is full of garmonbozia at the point when Cooper arrives. She has been raped by Leland/Bob for years, and she has just realized that Bob had been masking the identity of her father all along. She has been numbing herself with sex and drugs. She questions the goodness of her own nature. She realizes that Bob wants to possess her, and she would rather die than let that happen. She indicates to Bobby at one point late in the film that she is going home, presumably referring to death rather than the Palmer residence. She is at the height of her “loneliness, guilt, shame, confusion and devastation of the victim of incest,” as David Lynch describes it in Lynch on Lynch (185).

If Cooper takes her back to the White Lodge at this point, it will deny Judy a maximum amount of Laura’s garmonbozia. All the work that Leland/Bob did will be for nothing.

The reason Cooper intervenes when he does is because Laura is filled to the brim with garmonbozia, and therefore extremely valuable to Judy.

Re: Essays

Posted: 02 June 2022, 10:59
by Lynchland
It’s Slippery in Here: Five Years Since We Returned to Twin Peaks (Caemeron Crain | 25 Years Later)
I’ve never valued nostalgia myself, but I am nostalgic for those days of 2017 and the spirit of communal obsession that pervaded my life for months and months, well into 2018. There is no denying that this has faded, and I miss it. But even that’s still there, in an attenuated and diffuse fashion. Maybe the final act of the repetition of Twin Peaks is yet to come, where it once again becomes a cult show—something most people have never seen, or only vaguely remember, that is perhaps hard to track down—and I don’t know that this would be a bad thing.

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Obsessing over Twin Peaks binds us together and serves as a calling card to others, both wonderful and strange. Let’s keep strolling together, forever.

See you in the trees.