Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[waferwhitemilk]

My favourite Dern crying scene:

[AhmedKhalifa]

And if there's one thing CNN is known for, it's for it's TV and film reviews.

As a matter of fact, the article about TPTR was written by Brian Lowry, a respected, veteran film/tv journalist and published author. His only mistake seems to be that he dares have a negative opinion of the show. Imagine that, the audacity!

[David Locke]

Or, put another way, the Red Room as presented in the original series and FWWM felt like a deeply mysterious, uncanny place located out of space and time and full of beings and doppelgangers that would puzzle any rational mind; everything in the place is precisely opposite to what one sees in banal day to day experience. It was depicted as a truly powerful place, that one should not think of trivially. It was almost like an extraterrestrial planet, hostile or foreign territory where everything is backwards, literally and figuratively - you couldn't ever anticipate what might happen there because it operates by logic that is totally alien to most people. Nor could you anticipate how LMFAP or any of its denizens might act, as they may as well be aliens for the amount of difference from humans in the way they operate.

On the other hand, in TR the Red Room has turned into a kind of second-rate interdimensional motel - or perhaps an eccentric halfway house for those who can't quite yet function in their dimension of origin - where a grumpy, lonely groundskeeper (OAM) tends to occupants like Coop and all his needs. He even explains all the latest developments to Coop, quite conveniently for us viewers, I might add - like some principal showing a new student around the boarding school. ("The evolution of the arm!" was such a cringeworthy and transparently expository line).

Additionally, denizens like Coop can even see or access this trusty old one-armed geezer-helper from any old space in the normal world (that is, given the OAM's not too busy walking haltingly in a circle, arm quivering skyward and eyes closed, to answer the transdimensional call, natch). Needless to say, this all makes the Red Room about as mysterious as a shopping mall or as rarified and difficult to gain entry to as a Starbucks. And if Coop needs OAM to fetch him a seed? No problem! The Red Room lives to serve. Mike will fetch that seed like a couch potato grabbing a bag of crisps outta a vending machine. It's The Newer, Easier, Faster Red Room: Now With Unlimited Transdimensional Wi-Fi!

The absence of LMFAP is very much felt as he almost defined the vibe of the RR in the original run, as if he owned the place or something. He was a devious or even evil character, too, and all the doppelgängers and BOB etc were scary as hell. But in TR we're missing those characters and thus missing that truly scary feeling. OAM is a tired seeming but friendly helper, an ally basically, and the tree may be a bit devious but it never projects much danger. Coop getting kicked out of the RR by the tree's little floor earthquake was an interesting idea but hardly very creepy, plus the effects were a little too digital or fake looking.

Likewise, the whole place has a digital look now and it's just not quite the same without the bright red curtain backlit inexplicably... when the curtain is thick and impossible to see through, as now, it makes for less mystery or simply a less compelling visual idea. It simply no longer feels very dangerous and unpredictable, like something incomprehensibly horrific could occur any moment. It's been neutered.

And so the Red Room in TR is now more like some incompetently-run and severely short-staffed home for old and/or dead folks (Philip Gerard's Home For Elderly and Disabled Tulpas, Doppelgangers, and Sentient Trees?); a place where assorted limbo-dwellers slowly pass the time, perhaps by playing a rousing game of Lodge Bingo with that tree thing calling the numbers. Fun.

Red Room was the pinnacle of the original show, its most iconic representation. What do people do when they want to draw something out of of the world of TP? They draw the curtains and the chevron-patterned floor. Venus statues. Saturn lamps, armchairs. And now it's turned into a farcical representation of its old self. As you said it a few days ago, it is really kitsch now, isn't it? They take something most iconic about the old show and turn it into a cheap plastic imitation, a clear mockery of its old self. Very early on I observed that Coop and Phillip reminded me of Mario and Luigi the way they moved around the lodge.

As I also said earlier, I very much miss the back-lit, semi-transparent curtains, with them we were able to se:

• Owl/Planer circling in the original dream scene;
• Maddy approaching;
• DoppleCoop scrambling madly to enter the room;

None of them could be repeated anymore, none.

And yes, Leland said "Find Laura" this time around, remember that? Now that we have these coordinates having spent 15-16 parts on finding them, finding Laura cannot be that behind. Now do the find Laura first, or Linda? Now that's what TR is about...

Yeah, there was just something special about the backlit curtains - the color was also different. Maybe because of that light, but even besides it the original RR had curtains that were colored a bright, deep, rich shade of Red. Now not only can we not see through the curtains via backlighting, and glimpse those mysterious apparitions like Maddy or the bird/owl, but the curtains in TR are a thick, darker red. They have a velvet look to them.

Actually the old curtains look "cheaper" technically, they're not these majestic heavy fabric.... but it works. The simplicity of the original RR made it: the iconic layout with the chairs and the statue and/or Saturn lamp, and also the very simple but immensely effective set design which probably didn't cost much (besides the backlighting which was I'm sure a pain for the crew to deal with). But it LOOKED otherworldly. It looked immersive and deeply textured. And a big part of why is indeed simply because it was shot on beautiful 35mm film.

The RR of TR being shot digitally isn't even inherently the problem - it's that Lynch then made everything else in the RR follow suit and have a digital, shiny, brand-new look to it. But remember the dustiness of the RR in Episode 2? Or even in 29 and FWWM it felt "lived-in," it had atmosphere. Now it, as many have correctly pointed out, possesses a kind of video game look and feel to it.

Partly this is because it is all much more easily understandable in there than the original run. All Cooper's interactions with OAM/in the RR have the same dull flavour of a video game "quest" where the OAM spews exposition in cut-scenes and Coop the protagonist takes his advice and help and goes on his way. Even the floor-quake scene felt both visually and otherwise like an interactive VR thing more than a sumptuously filmed, mysterious piece of cinema that raises more questions than answers. Above all, sadly, it's clear that the place is no longer ontologically ambiguous and terrifying by default, but actually intrinsically Good and has a obvious goal to assist Coop.

And yes, even the way they move around the RR has that synthetic feeling to it.... and it's weird because the RR is bigger and more expansive than ever, spatially, but it feels like a closet, and like there's less spatial depth there. Like, there's not as much room between the curtains in back and the front/wherever the camera-eye is.

It's ironic and telling that while the RR is the most iconic location or even single element of any kind, of the original run, despite only appearing for 5-10 min in Coop's Dream, and then nothing for 20 episodes until half the finale was set there. FWWM had a generous amount of RR scenes, but never excessive. And now - the RR has been featured a ton in TR, especially if you include the bits where Mike drops in on normal reality with the chevron pattern underneath. It's been very heavy on the RR and yet none of these scenes would ever at all approach the greatness or iconic level of the original RR scenes. I guess Coop and Laura's scene in TR was pretty great and by far the best one but it's still not at the same level.

So, Lynch and Frost took the most memorable and unique location/aspect of TP, and they beat it into the ground. They set tons of scenes there and made the Lodge stuff generally FAR more prominent than previously, but if anything it makes it less effective. The RR is best in, and needs to be confined to, fairly small doses. If you had, say, an out of body experience every day, what was first astonishing and powerful and mysterious would soon become just as commonplace as anything else in the world. That's what has happened to the RR it seems.

Leland's scene is just one example of many in TR of something interesting or seemingly important popping up only to be never mentioned again, or forgotten for several episodes (perhaps 15 or so, if they do return to the "find Laura" scene in the finale). FWIW, I bet that Laura will be a big part of the finale in some way, though how much screen time she'll actually get is anyone's guess.

Where we stand, I'm frankly very surprised that Lynch - who loves Laura's character so much - hasn't done anything with her since Part 2, bits of old FWWM or series footage aside. I guess this kind of sums up my disappointment with the thematic and narrative thrust of TR: too much expository, cerebral sci-fi and mythos building and time spent on new or not too compelling characters... and not nearly enough Laura (whether via presence or absence and the aftershocks of her death etc). Or just some firmer grounding in the mood and fixations and humanity/pathos of FWWM and the best of the original run.

[waferwhitemilk]

All in all, it's just a damn shame imo. They had almost all of the old cast reunited some 25+ years after, Lynch & Frost at the helm, Badalamenti and Cruise ready to burst out in song, a budget from Showtime, and then they spend most of the time in Vegas focusing on MacLachlan only, who doesn't even play his original character, and some gangsters in a series of events totally unrelated to Twin Peaks. Now even if i were to hypothetically like the Dougie story, to me that seems like such a wasted opportunity. And if that makes me a reactionary conservative so be it!!!

[boske]

Yes, this all feels like a such missed opportunity. I think I was lulled into a false expectation having seen the Ottis and Buella scene in part 1, everything in that scene was to me set up right, earthly and dark color tones, grotesque characters. Everything was moving, including the Laura's part until Dougie when it all started going downhill.

@David, regarding the old RR being technically cheaper, yes, definitely. judasbooth did talk about that a few weeks back about there being some constraints on the director that resulted in him producing a superior show.

[David Locke]

All in all, it's just a damn shame imo. They had almost all of the old cast reunited some 25+ years after, Lynch & Frost at the helm, Badalamenti and Cruise ready to burst out in song, a budget from Showtime, and then they spend most of the time in Vegas focusing on MacLachlan only who doesn't even play his original character and some gangsters in a series of events totally unrelated to Twin Peaks. Now even if i were to hypothetically like the Dougie story, to me that seems like such a wasted opportunity. And if that makes me a reactionary conservative so be it!!!

Absolutely, it's hard not to be upset considering all the potential. And while there's so many factors as to why it's like this, I think Lynch simply being a lazier and lesser artist now than he was in the time of Eraserhead to Mulholland is the biggest problem.

Simply put, he's given up on honing his craft, on not settling for less. He's become content not only with digital, but with barely-graded, desaturated, flat-looking, unimaginatively shot digital. There's not much particularly creative or outstanding about the camera work in TR, and Lynch seems to just shoot everything in wides or mediums for some reason, losing sight of aesthetic DYNAMICS (a very important thing). He used to be brilliant with emotive and immersive close ups, used only when apt of course, but now it's like there's a basic, static-wide shot kind of "point and shoot" laziness, disguised as mere simplicity, which is all over TR. At least Inland had a ball experimenting with different ways of shooting a scene.

But TR feels and looks resigned and tired and detached, but not in the Old Master way like with many greats who become patient and minimalist as they age, using less movement and more long takes from a wide angle to seamlessly capture everything from a fixed vantage point. With Lynch the distancing on display in TR just seems unnecessary. Why are we suddenly at arms length now? Especially when Episode 14 & 29, FWWM, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive embraced a hands on dive into pure subjectivity, a real visceral cinema that stands along the likes of Ferrara, Polanski, Cassavetes, Denis...

Hard to compare Lynch's current output with those master filmmakers, though. I truly think working with film and also working with runtime constraints and similar limits imposed on the work, sharpened Lynch and helped him become a greater craftsman and thus a greater artist. Can you imagine if FWWM didn't have a length limitation on it? A 1992-era Lynch may well have unleashed a rambling, fragmented 2.5 hr+ film that lacked all the devastating focus the movie we know and love today has in spades - in other words, it'd be like another Wild at Heart, in love with its own digressions. (Sound like any show we know?)

But that didn't happen because of that kind of limitation imposed on Lynch. Now we have the results of what happens when the same man, 25 years later and 15 years past his prime, is given carte blanche to make the 18 hour quarter-century later televisual sequel he wants. The blank check helps him feel he can indulge any whim, but so does the endless possibilities given by 18 hours that continue a series cancelled 25 years prior. So he and Frost had a lot of room to play with stories they liked and indulge themselves, and not much incentive to craft something tightly knit and truly of a piece with its predecessor series and film.

I mean, Lynch didn't direct virtually anything for a whole decade from whenever shooting wrapped on IE circa 2005, and Fall 2015 when TR started filming. And so he's taken a ton of ideas he's come up with in the meantime and included them in TR, despite them often not really being relevant or fitting in a number of ways.

Well, we asked for it, I guess. But "pure Heroin" Lynch is a very different and more questionable proposition in the 2010s than it was in the 1990s when he was creatively at his peak. I swear, if TR was even just shot on film, it would induce a discipline of craft... but instead we get a sprawling mess from a lazy and overly satisfied artist who no longer seems to care if his 18 hour opus really coheres together (I'll eat my shoe if it turns out all the countless continuity errors and dropped plot lines or characters and timeline inconsistency and general structural confusion of TR is actually revealed in the finale to have been some kind of intentional grand plan).

Best just to keep expectations low, I suppose. But it's sad that it's hard to picture Lynch directing and crafting a film like The Straight Story today - an extremely simple work in many ways, but deceptively so as it really is thoughtfully composed with an immense depth and wisdom and knowledge of film form and structure and subtext and narrative that all but seems to have deserted Lynch since he picked up a digital camera.

[boske]

About OAM/PG, yes, he does go around like a grumpy groundskeeper, but this "do you have a seed" line almost made him a Clippy-like character "It looks like you are generating a tulpa, I need a strand of hair from the back of your head". (for those who do not know I am talking of the old MS Office Clippy helper assistant).

[David Locke]

About OAM/PG, yes, he does go arround like a grumpy groundskeeper, but this "do you have a seed" line almost made him a Clippy-like character "It looks like you are generating a tulpa, I need a strand of hair from the back of your head". (for those who do not know I am talking of the old MS Office Clippy helper assistant).

LOL! Perfect.

It really does make you wonder why they turned OAM into a one-dimensional helper (indentured Lodge servant?) when he used to have much more mystery to him or his motivations before. It's not even a matter of him not being able to fill LMFAP/BOB & co's shoes; they could have made his character a bit more interesting and complex than just a plot-advancing device, really.


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[boske]

About OAM/PG, yes, he does go arround like a grumpy groundskeeper, but this "do you have a seed" line almost made him a Clippy-like character "It looks like you are generating a tulpa, I need a strand of hair from the back of your head". (for those who do not know I am talking of the old MS Office Clippy helper assistant).

LOL! Perfect.

It really does make you wonder why they turned OAM into a one-dimensional helper (indentured Lodge servant?) when he used to have much more mystery to him or his motivations before. It's not even a matter of him not being able to fill LMFAP/BOB & co's shoes; they could have made his character a bit more interesting and complex than just a plot-advancing device, really.

He is basically double-shifting for LMFAP, but in general this is just another questionable decision that would leave one scratching his head. I honestly hope the final two hours end up the best two hours of the Return, but I think we are all much closer to having shoes on our menus.

[waferwhitemilk]

To me it's basically like a bunch of old friends carefully gathered all the ingredients to make a wonderful cherry pie together and then just when they want to start Lynch barges in with a chef hat, pushes everyone out of the kitchen and says: right i'm gonna make banana crepes with this and just improvise.

[David Locke]

To me it's basically like a bunch of old friends gathered all the ingredients to make a wonderful cherry pie together and then just when they want to start Lynch barges in with a chef hat, pushes everyone out of the kitchen and says: right i'm gonna make banana crepes with this and just improvise.

I'm (of course) a big Lynch fan and I'm usually very auteurist/director-centric when it comes to dissecting films. (And, often, assigning either praise or blame for the work as a whole). But in recent years it's really struck me that, besides the obvious Lynch-directed hours, a lot of what made the original TP so great did have to do with the collaborative nature of it, both on the writing and directing side. Naturally when there was weaker material everything kind of suffered, as in Episodes 17-22 etc, but when the writing was firing on all cylinders - like from Pilot to Episode 14 at least - I think the show worked brilliantly as a group effort with a stable of different reliable directors (Dunham, Linka Glatter, Hunter) and one-off guest directors (my favorites of these easily being James Foley and Stephen Gyllenhaal).

Certainly Lynch provided so much to the show and his episodes were the best ones. Still, the more workmanlike - but just as brilliant - tone struck by, say, Deschanel's Episode 6, or Linka Glatter's Episodes 5 & 13, or Hunter's Episode 4, et al, was special in its own way, in hewing to the house style perfectly and trying new things when appropriate, in letting the story move along in the best possible way. There's something about a multiple writer/director show like that when it's really cooking, you get more variety and more perspectives on the material.

With TR now though, with Lynch at his most unquestioningly self indulgent, we naturally get nothing less than his uncompromising, singular vision. Usually that'd be great, but needless to say it's a mixed bag and I'm starting to wonder if the flaws of TR implicitly provide a strong argument against the kind of rabid auteurism that led to this uncompromising version of a return to TP.


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[boske]

To me it's basically like a bunch of old friends carefully gathered all the ingredients to make a wonderful cherry pie together and then just when they want to start Lynch barges in with a chef hat, pushes everyone out of the kitchen and says: right i'm gonna make banana crepes with this and just improvise.

It is like a Beatles reunion album that sounds like Meat Loaf material. And there is only one song on it with some slow and repetitive parts, but "it is very avant-garde and stretches the medium as it embraces it. It is very bold and daring, audacious in its approach. You do not know when a theme ends or begins, it is totally unpredictable which makes it so challenging and audience-antagonistic, yes they surely are redefining what music as a medium is."

For an example on how to keep your ego in check and produce great stuff one should simply look into Traveling Wilburys. Now that's a band to hang around with.

[David Locke]

It really bugs me when a flawed work like TR which happens to be very ambitious and artful and unconventional gets those really positive reviews - the ones that say basically that this is the ne plus ultra of challenging/non-idiotic TV/cinema/literature/etc, and so unless you're a philistine who needs everything spoonfed for you and wrapped in a nice little bow, you'll undoubtedly agree that this is a masterpiece, Lynch's magnum opus etc.

It's like critics aren't secure enough in just praising the show, and they have to imply that only bad people or people with bad taste don't share their enthusiasm. Bleh.


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[mlsstwrt]

It really bugs me when a flawed work like TR which happens to be very ambitious and artful and unconventional gets those really positive reviews - the ones that say basically that this is the ne plus ultra of challenging/non-idiotic TV/cinema/literature/etc, and so unless you're a philistine who needs everything spoonfed for you and wrapped in a nice little bow, you'll undoubtedly agree that this is a masterpiece, Lynch's magnum opus etc.

It's like critics aren't secure enough in just praising the show, and they have to imply that only bad people or people with bad taste don't share their enthusiasm. Bleh.


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Good job it's only critics doing that and not our fellow TP fans.

Um........

[David Locke]

It really bugs me when a flawed work like TR which happens to be very ambitious and artful and unconventional gets those really positive reviews - the ones that say basically that this is the ne plus ultra of challenging/non-idiotic TV/cinema/literature/etc, and so unless you're a philistine who needs everything spoonfed for you and wrapped in a nice little bow, you'll undoubtedly agree that this is a masterpiece, Lynch's magnum opus etc.

It's like critics aren't secure enough in just praising the show, and they have to imply that only bad people or people with bad taste don't share their enthusiasm. Bleh.


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Good job it's only critics doing that and not our fellow TP fans.

Um........

Ha, yeah - as we all know, I think it's safe to say the fans are far worse at doing those things than the critics. And I'm glad Dugpa is such a generally great forum, with so many insightful members and rarely ones you need to ignore. By contrast, the TP Reddit is just all about loving everything about TR all the time. I mean there's just zero room for critical discussion or debate, it's all very unquestioning fanboy type people in there.

Which is probably why it's such a boring place since TR aired (I used to enjoy it more last year, the weekly community rewatch threads for each episode then FWWM and TMP was very fun). And that's also why Dugpa and especially this thread is so good - there's eloquent speakers from all sides of the spectrum, and most don't blatantly insult or condescend to anyone who dares to differ with their personal opinion.


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