Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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N. Needleman
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by N. Needleman »

I dug her little scene with the pictures, she sold it. I couldn't understand people bashing her even for that. Bell's persona in interviews, etc. often throws me too, but I think she's giving this her all and not just posturing - the question of whether Lynch wants her to affect a certain pose onscreen is another story. She's green but she's doing okay for me.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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I enjoyed the "male gaze" shot of Tamara... and didn't feel the slightest bit guilty, because, to be blunt, I'm a heterosexual man who admires a good butt, and that's okay. That's just how I'm wired. Enjoying the view doesn't mean I'm objectifying her.

That being said, her character is total rubbish so far, nearly nothing like the TP of the book.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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KillerBOB wrote:I'm a heterosexual man who admires a good butt, and that's okay. That's just how I'm wired.
We may need to check the PC handbook, but I'm not sure this is even allowed in the 21st Century. :x

( :lol: )
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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FPC. ;)

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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by TheAlien »

Btw, sex and sexiness is alright.


But I can assure you a lot of people who complain about this kind of trivial stuff are into really kinky shit anyway, we all are. We're all adults :lol:
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by douglasb »

That Denise (I think) points out her age reinforces the idea she's a little green. She can't have been out of the FBI Academy terribly long. When Gordon tells her to wait in the restaurant, Bell's reaction is a little hokey but it's part of an overall flounce - she's mad as hell at being left out of the conversation.

Odd that people think Frost got her persona 'correct' in the book and Lynch has got it wrong. Suspect Bell was a pretty early name on the cast list - and Frost would have some understanding of her persona.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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KillerBOB wrote:I enjoyed the "male gaze" shot of Tamara... and didn't feel the slightest bit guilty, because, to be blunt, I'm a heterosexual man who admires a good butt, and that's okay. That's just how I'm wired. Enjoying the view doesn't mean I'm objectifying her.
It does when you have no interest in her as a person, she's just a "good butt", that's called objectification. Don't worry, Lynch clearly shares your viewpoint, along with pretty much every male director in Hollywood history.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by douglasb »

Good butts are ten a penny. Lynch clearly enjoys working with her across different forms. He could just take photos of her backside if he so wished. That he doesn't suggests his relationship with her is more nuanced than you imply, as his work with Lee, Dern, Watts, et al more than proves.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by kkillevippen »

douglasb wrote: Odd that people think Frost got her persona 'correct' in the book and Lynch has got it wrong. Suspect Bell was a pretty early name on the cast list - and Frost would have some understanding of her persona.
Yes, precisely.

Tammy's personality isn't exactly fleshed out in Frost's book. We see enough of her commentary to conclude she is inquisitive and, as Rudagger pointed out earlier in the thread, somewhat wide-eyed (she researches an archive full of "supernatural" notions, after all), but nothing more than that really. There's no dissonance with what we've seen from her persona in the show so far.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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douglasb wrote:Good butts are ten a penny. Lynch clearly enjoys working with her across different forms. He could just take photos of her backside if he so wished. That he doesn't suggests his relationship with her is more nuanced than you imply, as his work with Lee, Dern, Watts, et al more than proves.
Not discussing real life relationship - discussing portrayal onscreen. It's not a checking account, you don't balance out objectification with non-objectification. He has a clear history of objectification and the new series is tripling down on that.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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Yes, Lynch enjoys the female form. In other news water is wet. But if that was the sum total of his work - or his work with women's stories - I'd wager most of us, myself included, would not be here. It's far more complex than that.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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N. Needleman wrote:Yes, Lynch enjoys the female form. In other news water is wet. But if that was the sum total of his work - or his work with women's stories - I'd wager most of us, myself included, would not be here. It's far more complex than that.
His work in general? Yes, I agree. As for his work with women's stories, they all involve sexual exploitation/violence in some form. I think they are all problematic in some ways. Some more than others, of course. This new series is the worst he's done, I think, though, in this regard. There are still 13 episodes, but it's been really rough so far.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by N. Needleman »

All art is problematic on some level. That's life. We're problematic.

Lynch's work deals in violence against women and almost always has. I don't find it to be exploitative or a private weapon to vent personal aggressions, I find it to be a preoccupation stemming from what is likely formative trauma and experiences. I see next to nothing here that could be called an assault on women, certainly not comparative to how, say, Ebert misinterpreted Blue Velvet.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

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N. Needleman wrote:Yes, Lynch enjoys the female form. In other news water is wet. But if that was the sum total of his work - or his work with women's stories - I'd wager most of us, myself included, would not be here. It's far more complex than that.
This is a very worthwhile conversation (and maybe appropriate to have on a thread that has seen a kind of shocking amount of blatant misogyny directed at Bell). Lynch, in his art, has always been interested in examining and complicating his own admittedly prurient desire to take pleasure in the female form. It's a hallmark of his work in film, photography and painting.

I can't find any scans online (I admittedly didn't spend a ton of time looking, though, so they may be out there), but one of my favorite examples is his "Nudes and Smoke" series from the early/mid '90s. These are gorgeous, sensual photos of a nude woman in a room enveloped in smoke--but their beauty is not as simple as form and texture. The model poses in variously awkward and confrontational stances. Her body's contortions are not those of pornography, which is meant to create the illusion that the camera simply caught parts of the body that are not so easily captured by a camera, but instead emphasize her discomfort (the bending of limbs and straining of muscles) and create that same sense of unease and discomfort in the viewer. The shots of her face are quite striking in their confrontational quality. She seems extremely aware that she is being seen. The pictures are beautiful and sexy, but complicated. You don't get to be a passive ogler of this woman.

I think Lynch's film work, very consistently, works in the same manor. Beautiful women doing sexy things abound, to be sure, and Lynch enjoys the looking, but almost never is it a simple thing. The most famous dramatization of this, of course, is in Blue Velvet when Dorothy rips through Jeffery's illusion that he can "just see" her by opening that closet door with her knife in her hand. Looking isn't a one-way transaction. And it isn't simple.

Lynch has always been fascinated by how we navigate sex in our culture, and he's never shied from depicting its horrors. I don't see things working any differently in TPTR. He went out of his way, in the Denise scene, to set up that moment when Gordon and Albert ogle Tammy. And I do not doubt that Tammy is incredibly aware of how she is seen. I think we've only seen the start of this exploration.
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Re: Tamara Preston - Chrysta Bell (Spoilers)

Post by 4815162342 »

N. Needleman wrote:All art is problematic on some level. That's life. We're problematic.

Lynch's work deals in violence against women and almost always has. I don't find it to be exploitative or a private weapon to vent personal aggressions, I find it to be a preoccupation stemming from what is likely formative trauma and experiences. I see next to nothing here that could be called an assault on women, certainly not comparative to how, say, Ebert misinterpreted Blue Velvet.
First point, I agree! To the extent that you are using that as an excuse to dismiss the topic, I disagree. Life/art is problematic in really specific ways re: for example, sexual violence/exploitation of women, I think this is an important topic to point out and discuss.

You can have your interpretation, of course, others might disagree. I think he shows an alarming tendency to dehumanize, brutalize and sexually exploit his female characters, and I don't see any sort of consistent commentary or attempt to examine that tendency. He seems to just "fall in love" with the idea of women being a certain kind of object, which just happens to be something a large number of writers/directors/authors, etc have been doing for much of human existence. The reason why this stands out to me is that in many ways his style is so idiosyncratic and so personal, but when it comes to women, he falls back on some of the oldest cliches in fiction.
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