Radical: “-Especially of change or action- relating to or affecting the fundamental [root] nature of something” If you mean TP3 is relates to fundamental Lynch, ok. He didn’t bring anything novel to the table, and we’ve already seen molasses slow pacing in nearly all his other work. Others don’t do it it exactly like DL because... they aren’t DL, they by necessity will have their own style.LateReg wrote:If you want to be a total hardass about it, then technically a lot of what we see in The Return is less than radical because Lynch has done it before. However, too few people do what he does, or are able to do it in the same way, or were given the funds to do it on such a scale, so I think to deem The Return anything less than radical is simply incorrect..
David Lynch *is* prestige TV. He and Frost, already prestigious from his Hill Street Blues acclaim, was possibly the first to deserve that title. He is no longer indie, he is no longer the adventurer rebel.He has access to massive audiences, corporate support, because of his respected brand of deliberate weirdness that in its current incarnation had anyone else’s name on it would be ignored but must always be called refreshing because of said prestige. Prestige TV is the industry elite’s embrace of high art, thanks to Lynch, mixed with low-brow titallliation to capitalize on the widest possible audience.
***Gonna extend the young wild Elvis vs old establishment Elvis metaphor again, so apt because of the Vegas element I just whenever I think about it, sorry. And also a member of Elvis entourage, Jerry Schilling, said that watching Elvis for the first time had the same effect as when he saw Blue Velvet Vegas Elvis still trotted out the old chestnut hits we were oversaturated with already, but then found most success doing what everyone else had been doing in the genre he created, still an entertainer in his own class, but also existing as a revered relic of the past -an institution representing a social shift in America. Only when Elvis died could something radical- punk rock- take shape in the culture. Lynch *is* establishment positioned/marketed if you will as counterculture just as the behemoth pornography industry is now establishment posing as counterculture. He merely helped redefine it as he inherited it, and he’s an institution. He’s “old-school” and the kiddos don’t have the historical perspectiv- it’s all new to them.***
—TV is no longer a medium unto itself. Technology, and DL’s influence, have merged the long form and the short form to suit custom attention spans. So much was revelatory about Twin Peaks because it was an auteur doing serialized television (Hitchcock of course had his episodic show) but now...
— the casual treatment of death is actually how humanity used to consider death before it was sanitized by the funeral industry pre Civil War. We’re in a death-avoidant culture obsessed by death now as we’re in a rape-violence prohibiting culture that is obsessed with rape and violence. It’s just more necrophilic masculine art, which has been written about extensively. That it was a portly male audiences cared for is marginally shocking because callous objectification of the flesh is something men prefer to see done to women in art and male artists find opportune to depict. ***A friend of mine recently hung out with DL and he told her he was just shown a Betty Short death photo that I won’t reveal why is so interesting, but that’s the ultimate example of corpse art in living memory, with ur-Laura Palmer Marilyn Monroe’s death-porn morgue photos closely behind. ps Kale was there but she wasn’t told why...
— “It’s so refreshing that not every moment has to relate to the plot” - that’s what we loved about TP, right? It took it’s time in lifelike moments, and painterly composition of frame, which made the characters relatable and the lingering moments different for TV, and the universe unfolded organically for viewers to enter.
***This may have been more effective when TV was the main medium of entertainment, that a window opened at a certain time into this world than you’d miss if you didn’t set your VCR, which half of us didn’t know how to do, you had to sit through commercials in silence or risk missing something, and you were even hungrier and it was even more elusive. It made the experience more like theater and cultlike in reverence for it. If you missed an episode, you were no longer part of the water cooler discussion club, you were out of the fan loop.***
- If you’re saying it’s refreshing that almost nothing relates to the plot which then all falls apart, and it’s never been done on TV before, refer to paragraph 2. Will it affect change, which is what radical means? I doubt it, because people don’t like it and it won’t make money unless you’re already established in a unique position of privilege that I believe Lynch alone holds. Anyone trying to imitate or borrow from the aspects mentioned (“It’s a chaotic cheap slop pile and only a reboot in name, DELICIOUS!”) is going to fall on their faces without that particular privilege as scaffolding.
You can stop defending that badly written and executed Green Glover scene now. There could have been countless effective ways to show Cooper not confronting Mr C or BOB in order to avoid darkness, and anything in TP3 can mean whatever you want it to mean which makes theorizing a go-nowhere game.