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Re: Press Review

Posted: 19 November 2017, 15:01
by Lynchland
David Lynch Brings It All Back Home in the Two-Part Finale (Chris Cabin / Collider)

“No matter what the reasoning might be, Lee’s final scream and the blackout of the Palmer home make it clear that she either remembers everything or can feel the horror of this place, of what Laura went through, in that moment with total clarity. Much like in comparing Twin Peaks with Twin Peaks: The Return, the aesthetic and narrative differences are plentiful between Laura Palmer and this doppelgänger but the terror and grief remain the same. There may have been no better way for Lynch to end this run of episodes than to at once seemingly confound his audience full-stop while also, in a way, ending this season on a massive cliffhanger. Maybe there will be more, but if there isn’t, Lynch has already made every other show on network television and streaming feel rote, pre-ordained, and limited in comparison, retreading and reworking the known while he continues to stroll into the unknown.”

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Re: Press Review

Posted: 25 November 2017, 17:21
by Lynchland
One For The Grandkids (Tim Lucas / Video WatchDog)
The original TWIN PEAKS series still exists, and that experience can be repeated to the heart's content, leaving THE RETURN to warn us of the myriad dangers awaiting anyone careless enough to rifle backwards through the spent pages of life.
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Re: Press Review

Posted: 21 January 2018, 15:48
by Lynchland
Twin Peaks Ended, Once Again, With a New Beginning (Winston Cook-Wilson / Spin)
Often, The Return did feel like co-writer Mark Frost was doing the legwork in terms of connecting plot points to fit Lynch’s haunting, disjunct images into a larger Twin Peaks mythology. (Frost, after all, wrote a novel to remind us that there is some hard-and-fast history and logic to keep in mind.) That dichotomy is certain to the show’s appeal, and always has been. But there’s always only so much that can be reasoned away, and presumably only so many explanatory gestures that Lynch would allow for. A man who was basically forced to betray his central desire for the original series–that the audience would never know who killed Laura Palmer–would certainly not let any of his choicest enigmas be compromised here. He had the money, and the blank slate creatively, to control the bleeding. Fittingly, that freedom even allowed him to, in a couple of shots toward the end of the season, erase that bungled murder plot entirely.

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From its ashes, Lynch assembled a whole new canvas for himself–or more likely, the audience’s imagination–but then cut to black. The end of Season 3 is a Season 4, or a new Fire Walk With Me analog, waiting to happen, but that is a pipe dream no one should waste mental energy on. Lynch seems to have left Twin Peaks a lot more satisfied than he was in 1991. All the rest of us got was the most formally adventurous show in television history, one which could set a new bar for unrestricted inventiveness in our prestige-TV-infected era if enough people in the industry paid enough attention to learn anything from it.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 24 January 2018, 15:20
by Lynchland
‘Peaks’ TV : If This Was The End Of ‘Twin Peaks,’ How Do We Feel About ‘The Return’ ? (Alan Sepinwall and Keith Phipp / Uproxx)
Good tries hard, as always, but darkness triumphs.” We get a brief glimpse of a world in which Cooper is able to prevent Laura from being killed — joined to some lovely and unsettling Orpheus and Eurydice imagery of him walking with her through the woods — but in the end her fate is sealed. And I don’t think it’s an accident that so much focus falls on the Palmer house in this last stretch. This is ultimately a story of the little girl who lives down the lane and what happened to her in that house is what set Twin Peaks in motion. Sure, there could have been stories of Blue Rose cases and we might have followed Agent Cooper’s adventures elsewhere, but that would be in a different sort of series. At heart, this is a fatalistic story about Laura Palmer (“Episode 10: Laura Is The One”), a girl who never really had a chance and how the abuse she suffered in the house have rippled out through the years (“Episode 17: The Past Dictates The Future”).

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It’s a pessimistic vision but I don’t think it’s a nihilistic one. From the start, Twin Peaks has depicted a universe in which the good we make in the world comes from the moments we kick back against the darkness. (Or sometimes, the moments in which we can use gloved, superpowered fists to punch at it.) But the darkness has a way of creeping in. Once you let go of what you want from a Twin Peaks finale, I think “Episode 18” is one of the most haunting depictions of this in Lynch’s career, an uncompromising variation of what he did with Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire brought to the world of this beloved TV show whose universe we think we understand. We’ve been waiting all season for MacLachlan to go Full Coop, and he gets to live in that Boy Scout-ish skin for maybe 10 minutes of screen time. But the Cooper we see after he loses Laura and, especially, after he wakes up from his night with Diane is different. He’s not full-on Bad Coop, but the Cooper we know would take no pleasure in assaulting a diner full of hicks, even if they had it coming. And if, in this alternate dimension, Carrie Page is a Laura who lived, she’s clearly had a life of hardship and violence as well. They’re beaten-up characters attempting to find the light by going to what Cooper believes to be a place that can redeem the troubles they’ve experienced but, in the end, the voice screaming out “Laura” confirms there’s no escape. [...]

But really it always ends the same way, with a scream and a whispered secret and an unanswered mystery that only deepens the more we learn and the longer we try to chase it down a road that seems to grow darker with each turn.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 27 January 2018, 16:53
by Lynchland
A potentially frustrating Twin Peaks finale asks one big question: are we owed answers ? (Todd VanDerWerff / Vox)
In trying to restore Laura to life (maybe), Cooper, then, is trying to fix what’s gone wrong. But he can’t do that any more than someone can un-invent the atomic bomb. On the one hand, the events of “Part 8” (the episode that flashed back to the birth of BOB in that bomb’s explosion) have little to do with everything else that’s happened. On the other, they’re like prophecies of everything that followed. It doesn’t matter what Eden you invent and tell yourself is perfect, because there’s always a snake.

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Twin Peaks, America, the world — they’re all built atop endless cycles of abuse and terror, but also punctuated with moments of great kindness and caring. Yet the only way to get to those moments of beauty is to acknowledge that the cycles of cruelty exist. The snake didn’t destroy Eden; Adam and Eve did. But in so doing, they also found a way to rebuild it on their own terms, and maybe the work of that has been all of human existence.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 15 February 2018, 16:25
by Lynchland
One last time, Twin Peaks takes your hand and walks you into the dark (Emily L. Stephens / The AV Club)
“What year is it ?” reveals how that man, finally returned to this world, has lost grasp of it in his quest to do good.

Much of Twin Peaks’ mythology revolves around a gold ring with a carved green stone. That ring is a closed circle, and the figure 8 that Phillip Jeffries conjures from its carving might as well turn sideways to form an infinity symbol. David Lynch loves a time loop, and Twin Peaks: The Return’s finale creates a time loop that manages to break the repetition that phrase implies. As Dale Cooper warns Diane—the true Diane, now that they’ve found each other—“Once we cross, it could all be different.” It is, and it isn’t.

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David Lynch and Mark Frost have done it to us again. “Part 17” and “Part 18” make the events of the series, stretching over more than 25 years, into a circle that loops around to create a mystery bigger than the one that started the whole thing. They’ve told a story with no end; they’ve posed a question that couldn’t satisfy us even if they offered an answer—which they do not.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 20 February 2018, 14:52
by Lynchland
In Twin Peaks’ Finale, Dreams Have a Cost (Laura Miller / Slate)
The final scenes of Twin Peaks: The Return, however you interpret them, have an unmistakable air of devastation and loss. Either the beloved, quick-witted Eagle Scout Cooper has lost his wherewithal while wandering the passages between worlds or the dreamer is finally beginning to wake up for real. (“What time is it?” is the question most people ask when you wrench them out of a dead sleep.) Perhaps Cooper, like the character Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive, is the innocent, capable person the dreamer wishes he could be, or could be again. Whoever Richard is, however compromised, he’s never going to achieve the simple, satisfying conclusion that Cooper reaches in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s office. What were we thinking? Twin Peaks is where we long to be, among old friends at the Double R and in the company of ancient, inscrutable trees with a mystery to solve. It is the place we dreamed of one night a week and have yearned to return to ever since. And now we’ve woken up, back in Odessa, with only that last, terrible scream from Sheryl Lee to remind us of the price of such dreams.
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Re: Press Review

Posted: 25 February 2018, 15:40
by Lynchland
A fitting end to TV's greatest treasure (Clarisse Loughrey / The Independent)
What have we done ?

When Twin Peaks first returned to our screens, we yearned for fairytale endings. For Dale Cooper and Audrey Horne, or for Laura Palmer to finally be given her rest. But at what cost ? It's the question which seemed to centre the show's finale: a dizzying, heartbreaking end which both roared and whispered in its last breaths. [...]

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“What year is this ?” Cooper asks. Then Carrie starts to scream. That same, awful scream. This is no fairytale ending. We looked for, fought so hard for answers. For neat resolutions. It's the way we consume TV, how we desire out stories to play out. Our lives, too. But when we chase those things that are, in reality, impossible, we lose ourselves in our own dreams. We cannot change fate. Let's return to Cooper's own words: “there are some things that will change. The past dictates the future.” That is true, but we are fools to think we can dictate our own future. Neither can we change the past.

And in this perfect ending to Twin Peaks, we learn these things with a devastating sense of hopelessness. For all the inevitable talk of season 4, it seems unlikely. David Lynch wanted us to feel like this. To feel utterly lost. It's one of the most powerful emotions there is.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 02 March 2018, 15:24
by Lynchland
How to Make Sense of David Lynch’s Baffling Finale (Zack Sharf / IndieWire)
Before Phillip Jeffries allowed Cooper to enter the past in Part 17, his smoke took the shape of an infinity sign. By the end of Part 18, it’s clear Jeffries was warning Cooper that to enter the past would be to enter a never-ending loop in which good battles evil across timelines and planes of reality. Evil triumphs good in the past when Judy eliminates Laura from the timeline. Evil triumphs good in the alternate dimension when Carrie Page reawakens as a horrified Laura Palmer. But good will keep trying nonetheless; that’s the optimism of David Lynch.

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Part 8 turned the scope of “Twin Peaks” into a grand fight between evil (Judy appears to be the monster figure that gave birth to BOB) and good (the Fireman gives birth to Laura Palmer, the only being that can defeat the evil created by the atomic bomb). Part 18 ended the series by saying that fight never ends. It’s destined to keep repeating itself; but as long as we have Dale Cooper’s in the world, good will always have a shot. Lynch’s finale ultimately makes this grand statement understandable and unavoidable; it’s what “Twin Peaks” is all about. Here’s hoping we get to see Cooper have another shot at evil in the future.

Re: Press Review

Posted: 21 March 2018, 16:05
by Lynchland
'The Return' Passes Away On His Own Terms (Jeff Jensen / Entertainment Weekly)
“The meaning of life is that it stops.” – Franz Kafka

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Lynch’s 18-hour magnum opus was actually every Lynch film rolled into one. Eraserhead: An alienated man, conflicted about domestic life. The Elephant Man: A misfit, abused outsider yearning for a home free from exploitation, pining for mystic reunion with Mother. Dune: The sleeper must awaken! A man-child transforms into a superman to liberate an oppressed desert slave-people. Blue Velvet: A wannabe detective seduced by mystery, forced to confront his darkness. Wild at Heart: Renegade lovers on the run from sinister forces that don’t want them together, including one very toxic mother. Lost Highway: An impotent, fallen man trying to run away from himself. Mulholland Drive: A betrayed, heartbroken woman trying to escape herself. The final act was The Straight Story transmogrified into Inland Empire: It was a road trip through a series of shared nightmares about flawed folks full of regret searching for reconciliation and restoration.