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Press Review

Posted: 16 August 2017, 21:27
by Lynchland
When Twin Peaks gets moving, it runs like a jackrabbit (Emily L. Stephens / The A.V. Club)
“The Return, Part 14” is built on a paradox. These stories are tense, thrilling, touching, and thoroughly believable. They’re also intentionally flimsy, riddled with reasons to doubt them. No story is entirely true to the original experience, for too many reasons to count. Memories are faulty. Moments are evanescent. Narrators are unreliable. Even the most faithful retelling necessarily leaves out great swathes of information, if only because a story that recounted every bit of its circumstances would be a cacophony of detail with no intelligible meaning.

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Just think of Lucy once again telling her sheriff which line he should answer on his phone—just as she did in her first appearance, relaying a call to Harry Truman—and you immediately see how too much detail muddies the message instead of making it clearer. Or witness Gordon Cole, whose powerful hearing aid allows him to hear vital conversation, but also makes everyday sounds like the window washer’s squeegee into an agony of information overload.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 17 August 2017, 15:46
by Lynchland
Twin Peaks season 3 decoder – The Wizard of Oz (Martyn Conterio / Little White Lies)
After Bobby Briggs reveals Jack Rabbits Palace to his colleagues (as per Major Briggs’ instructions), high up on Blue Pine Mountain, it transpires that the ‘palace’ is really an old tree stump covered in moss. Childhood imagination and storytelling have turned it into the magical ‘palace’. As the camera pushes in, it captures sunlight filtering through the canopy. The well-timed lens flare causes the moss to glow momentarily, like the Emerald City.

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It’s a spellbinding moment and beautiful use of a lighting effect which has plagued modern cinematography to the point of visual cliche. (It’s worth pointing out that cinematographer Peter Deming also shot 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful for Sam Raimi). Of course, that’s what makes Lynch such a master filmmaker.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 18 August 2017, 14:41
by Lynchland
In dreamy ‘Twin Peaks, Part 14,’ Lynch says ‘no’ to Nolan (Carlos Valladares / San Francisco Chronicle)
This episode has dream sequences a-plenty, and it’s helpful to compare their goals with those of the self-appointed master of modern movie dreams, Christopher Nolan. His “Inception” is gloriously kidded in Gordon’s Monica Bellucci dream, which evokes Nolan’s colorless and odorless Paris, non-romance and waif-like and vaguely European ingénues who are made to spout off faux-profound talk. But Lynch’s version refuses Nolan’s mechanical sleekness, his Barnum-and-Bailey world immersion which swallows and cocoons but never involves the spectator in the scene. Whereas Nolan’s art is burdened with elephant heaviness, Lynch verges on light, nimble, yet serious parody.

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See, for instance, Monica Bellucci’s topper “But who is the dreamer ?”, or Gordon hilariously repeating back all her lines after they have been said. Lynch’s “Inception” is anti-spectacle, anti-puzzle. It is ultimately anti-Nolan, for it rejects Nolan’s simplifications of D.W. Griffith and Alain Resnais’, Agnès Varda’s, and Chris Marker’s experimental narrative films. The mysteries set up in Lynch’s films have always been more concerned with surreal sensations over trying to find a dutiful, still-logic-bound end-point to them.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 18 August 2017, 22:42
by Ludolynch
Tell Me The Story (Keith Uhlich / MUBI)

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Re: Press Review

Posted: 19 August 2017, 17:21
by Lynchland
Who Is The Dreamer? ‘Twin Peaks’ Bends Time And Reality To Its Will (Evan Davis / Decider)
David Lynch’s art over the last 25 years has paid particular attention to a Möbius strip progression of time; His art since the very beginning has been obsessed with the nature of dreams and their porous relationship to reality. The original Twin Peaks made dreams a narrative engine. “Part 14” of Twin Peaks: The Return pushes both of these concepts to the forefront. [...]

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“Part 13” began to break time apart in such ways that by the series’ end, we may not be entirely certain when—or if—certain events occurred. “Part 14” made sure that reality and dreams began to fold in on each other, with only the stories of those dreams tethering them to our reality. Dreams are sometimes more real than the Real. The future may be the past. For David Lynch, there really isn’t much of a difference.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 20 August 2017, 16:08
by Lynchland
David Lynch Dreams of Monica Bellucci in “Part 14″ (Chris Cabin / Collider)
The fragile nature of gathering and recollecting information was something that came up often in this episode. Surrounded by computers and massive storage spaces for information, in a knowing moment of deadpan, Albert lays out the history of the terminology of “Blue Rose,” tracking it back to a case that Cole and Philip Jeffries (David Bowie) worked on involving a woman named Lois Duffy.

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Not long after, it’s revealed that Diane is Dougie’s estranged sister-in-law. That moment would have been explosively staged and surrounded on all sides by a tailored score or a particular song to signal the emotional importance in any other program. Lynch sees it primarily and maybe even exclusively as the revelation of data, rather than a moment that speaks to the show’s spiritual and philosophical undercurrent. Instead of milking the moment, Lynch seemingly taunted those who would get excited by this information by reflecting their response in his underling’s eruptive, overblown response to Cole sending him into action. “This is what we do!”

Re: Press Review

Posted: 21 August 2017, 17:34
by Lynchland
‘Twin Peaks’ Just Explained How Dougie Came Into This World (Hanh Nguyen / IndieWire)
The word “tulpa” comes from Tibetan mysticism — a subject near and dear to David Lynch’s heart — and refers to a thoughtform : a being that is created through a person’s mental or spiritual powers. This is not just an imaginary friend, rather a real, sentient being. According to a post on the anthropology blog Anthrodendum, the blog formerly known as "Savage Minds" :

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“Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations, and (relative) autonomy… Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ —seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ — and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.”

Re: Press Review

Posted: 13 August 2018, 10:17
by Lynchland
David Bowie's back, and more small miracles (Dan Martin / The Guardian)
It’s those on the fringes who dominate. Andy from the sheriff’s office had hardly been one of life’s winners, yet here he is, chosen by the Fireman for a trip to his realm and gifted a recap of the entire Twin Peaks mythology before emerging back in the forest somehow wiser, somehow instinctively knowing how to protect the eyeless lady.

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And yet … if Andy was not a character you would have predicted to be pivotal, spending so long with British Freddie telling the tall tale of the green glove to James Hurley was even more unlikely. Until you realise, whatever the Fireman’s motives, he’s all about the little guy. In a world so corrupted, this controlling hand seems preoccupied with the innocent. We’re all stories in the end. And some people’s are bigger than they realise.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 13 August 2018, 23:06
by Lynchland
When Twin Peaks gets moving, it runs like a jackrabbit (Emily L. Stephens / The AV Club)
“The Return, Part 14” is built on a paradox. These stories are tense, thrilling, touching, and thoroughly believable. They’re also intentionally flimsy, riddled with reasons to doubt them. No story is entirely true to the original experience, for too many reasons to count. Memories are faulty. Moments are evanescent. Narrators are unreliable. Even the most faithful retelling necessarily leaves out great swathes of information, if only because a story that recounted every bit of its circumstances would be a cacophony of detail with no intelligible meaning.

Just think of Lucy once again telling her sheriff which line he should answer on his phone—just as she did in her first appearance, relaying a call to Harry Truman—and you immediately see how too much detail muddies the message instead of making it clearer. Or witness Gordon Cole, whose powerful hearing aid allows him to hear vital conversation, but also makes everyday sounds like the window washer’s squeegee into an agony of information overload.

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This scene is full of nods to the challenges of combining the effective transmission of information with the subtler, more ambiguous aspects of effective storytelling. Even the staging of the FBI’s many portable instruments arrayed around the room nods to it. To accommodate all their equipment, they’ve had to pull down some framed paintings, which sit propped against the wall. There’s often a tension between artistry and exposition, and sometimes one has to be sacrificed to make room for the other.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 16 August 2018, 11:44
by Lynchland
Tell Me The Story (Keith Uhlich / Mubi)
Words have the power to transfix, but they can also be inadequate, diluting "the absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence."
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