Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Spacevessel
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Back in the day, I think his idea for the next feature film was too vague to receive a proper budget from a serious company.
He got pissed, picked up a trashy digital camera and made Inland Empire. I don't think it was received very well, critics called him names, and his ego got hurt - his win streak was broken. Not being able to devour that event, he switched to making wooden cabinets and paintings at his home studio for years.
TPS3 is his first time "seeing the light of day" since then, no wonder he let all of his accumulated grudges out while filming it.
So yeah, season 3 is mean spirited. I guess transcendental meditation isn't so effective after all.
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by Poiuyt »

Inland Empire was a critical success.

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/inland-empire

It also grossed $4 million worldwide.
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Spacevessel
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Poiuyt wrote:Inland Empire was a critical success.
So that is where the movie's budget went...
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
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powerleftist
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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Poiuyt wrote:Inland Empire was a critical success.

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/inland-empire

It also grossed $4 million worldwide.
... which is nothing and makes it the 239th most successful film of 2006.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by lotjx2 »

I was having this discussion with my friend who got me into Twin Peaks. I stated that this was not an ending to Twin Peaks. He stated the fans wanted the end of Twin Peaks and they got it. Now, is it the end, we wanted? No, but its an end. I think...so, its not really mean spirited as much as it is not what we wanted.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by lotjx2 »

powerleftist wrote:
Poiuyt wrote:Inland Empire was a critical success.

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/inland-empire

It also grossed $4 million worldwide.
... which is nothing and makes it the 239th most successful film of 2006.
Hey, it was successful.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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lotjx2 wrote:Hey, it was successful.
It was hyped. Mulholland was great, and everyone was waiting for maestro's next magnum opus.
When I went to see it in the theater, half of the audience walked out midway, and the rest, including me, watched until the end and then silently went home with a strange look on their face.
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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The fact that Inland Empire didn't have a fairly simple pre-defined place to slot into in popular culture in the way that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest did, or that it was not massively (commercially) successful, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with its value to critical discourse. When I watched FWWM at the cinema in 1992 there were plenty walkouts. It's still one of the most interesting films ever made, which is something that can hardly be said about Home Alone 2, which presumably no-one walked out on.

And I don't see what any of this has to do with S3 of Twin Peaks either, i.e. the thread topic. This thread feels like it's becoming focused on trashing Lynch to stir up reactions.
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by Poiuyt »

Back on topic, the cynicism in season three has to have come from Lynch's hatred of season two. I just think Lynch's idea of Twin Peaks was vastly different than ours. This was his way of making it entirely his own creation again.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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mine wrote: But Laura's remark can just as well mean she lives in a parallel universe which is not inconsistent with the finale. Relatively speaking there's far more indicating Cooper was fulfilling what the spirits needed him to and was on the right track than whichever version of Cooper being a moron and causing a clusterfuck. The strongest argument to the contrary ironically comes from expectations or understandings of Lynch in general, not The Return itself. This implies that The Return failed at communicating what it intended to , people just count as if did based on what they assume Lynch wanted to convey with it.
So your interpretation is that Cooper's actions are in fact serving the Fireman's purposes, and that his role in this ongoing battle just unfortunately comes at significant personal/psychological cost to himself and to Carrie/Laura? I suppose that's possible too, depending on exactly how Blue and Orange, as opposed to White and Black, the morality of the Lodge spirits is. I guess I'd like to think that the Fireman, at least, is a good guy in his own understanding *and* ours and has the best interests of human beings in mind, as opposed to just being another inscrutable entity pursuing inscrutable goals.

As for whether this means that The Return failed, I don't know. If the Fireman is meant to be an unambiguous good guy *and* we're meant to see the ending as Cooper doing what he's supposed to do, then I'd say it's missing the mark somewhat. Positive endings don't conclude with one of the series' most iconic characters wondering what year he's in and the other screaming in horror. It seems like we're meant to come away with the impression that either Cooper and/or the Fireman have miscalculated somehow *or* that preventing Laura's murder and/or looking for Judy still results in something pretty unpleasant happening to both Cooper and Laura.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by claaa7 »

FlyingSquirrel wrote:
mine wrote: But Laura's remark can just as well mean she lives in a parallel universe which is not inconsistent with the finale. Relatively speaking there's far more indicating Cooper was fulfilling what the spirits needed him to and was on the right track than whichever version of Cooper being a moron and causing a clusterfuck. The strongest argument to the contrary ironically comes from expectations or understandings of Lynch in general, not The Return itself. This implies that The Return failed at communicating what it intended to , people just count as if did based on what they assume Lynch wanted to convey with it.
So your interpretation is that Cooper's actions are in fact serving the Fireman's purposes, and that his role in this ongoing battle just unfortunately comes at significant personal/psychological cost to himself and to Carrie/Laura? I suppose that's possible too, depending on exactly how Blue and Orange, as opposed to White and Black, the morality of the Lodge spirits is. I guess I'd like to think that the Fireman, at least, is a good guy in his own understanding *and* ours and has the best interests of human beings in mind, as opposed to just being another inscrutable entity pursuing inscrutable goals.

As for whether this means that The Return failed, I don't know. If the Fireman is meant to be an unambiguous good guy *and* we're meant to see the ending as Cooper doing what he's supposed to do, then I'd say it's missing the mark somewhat. Positive endings don't conclude with one of the series' most iconic characters wondering what year he's in and the other screaming in horror. It seems like we're meant to come away with the impression that either Cooper and/or the Fireman have miscalculated somehow *or* that preventing Laura's murder and/or looking for Judy still results in something pretty unpleasant happening to both Cooper and Laura.
yeah i agree with you, it certainly doesn't come off as a happy ending in any way.. the ending reeks of despair and darkness to me. but hey, i always loved a downer ending!
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by RetconMetatron »

If at least the downer-ending was there for a good reason, but... yanking Laura from the timeline?!

Doesn't matter whether Cooper succeeded or not.. the fact that he got such a stupid idea in the first place. Damn. The whole part felt like some kind of fan-service from hell: "Oh look, it's young Laura from FWWM! Oh look, flashback to classic scene! Is your nostalgia-meter exploding already? Oh look, goodie Coopie wants to save her! Isn't that great?"

Cooper being in the lodge had nothing to do with Laura anymore, get over Laura damn it.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by Jasper »

claaa7 wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:
yaxomoxay wrote:
He started reading the daily newspaper.
Nah, he just started talking to Mark Frost more frequently. Which, if you've seen his Twitter feed, is the same as reading the paper.

I'm being glib, but I really do think there's a lot more of Mark in this season, for good or ill, than most people are giving credit for. I think we saw a lot of Mark's ideas and philosophy filtered through David's abstract lens.
yeah you're probably right.. i still find it a bit curious considering that Frost at one point dissed Mulholland Drive as flat out bad storytelling.. the structure of TR is more similiar to MD than any other Project in either Frost or Lynch's canon imo
The only thing I'm aware of Frost saying is that he'd heard that MD was a mess, without having seen the film.
Mastershake wrote:A quote from an interview with Frost:
Luke: "Did you understand what David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was all about?"

Mark: "It started as a conversation David and I were having about a sequel to Twin Peaks. We wanted to take the Audrey Horn character, played by Cheryl, to Hollywood. I proposed Mulholland Drive, which I lived on, as a title. He sold it as a pilot to ABC and then convinced the French that if he shot 45 more minutes, he could make something out of it. I haven't seen it. I heard it was a mess. I knew that the pilot was a mess.

"David's strength and weakness is that he is often able to transcend story because he's such a master creating mood. His failing is that he's not a strong storyteller. He doesn't have a lot of interest in telling a story. He's not as interested in character as fragments of personality. He's a surrealist."

Luke: "He's got a great eye for hot looking women."

Mark smiles: "That was always one of his strengths. The mistake that people make about David is that they assume he's an ironist [saying the opposite of what he means]. He's not. He's a sincere simple guy. He doesn't work things out. He's not that good in logic. When people spend a lot of energy trying to figure out exactly what he meant by Mulholland Drive, I can assure you that he didn't know.
Thanks for your assurances, Mark. I hope you ended up actually watching the film at some point.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

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FlyingSquirrel wrote:
mine wrote: But Laura's remark can just as well mean she lives in a parallel universe which is not inconsistent with the finale. Relatively speaking there's far more indicating Cooper was fulfilling what the spirits needed him to and was on the right track than whichever version of Cooper being a moron and causing a clusterfuck. The strongest argument to the contrary ironically comes from expectations or understandings of Lynch in general, not The Return itself. This implies that The Return failed at communicating what it intended to , people just count as if did based on what they assume Lynch wanted to convey with it.
So your interpretation is that Cooper's actions are in fact serving the Fireman's purposes, and that his role in this ongoing battle just unfortunately comes at significant personal/psychological cost to himself and to Carrie/Laura? I suppose that's possible too, depending on exactly how Blue and Orange, as opposed to White and Black, the morality of the Lodge spirits is. I guess I'd like to think that the Fireman, at least, is a good guy in his own understanding *and* ours and has the best interests of human beings in mind, as opposed to just being another inscrutable entity pursuing inscrutable goals.

As for whether this means that The Return failed, I don't know. If the Fireman is meant to be an unambiguous good guy *and* we're meant to see the ending as Cooper doing what he's supposed to do, then I'd say it's missing the mark somewhat. Positive endings don't conclude with one of the series' most iconic characters wondering what year he's in and the other screaming in horror. It seems like we're meant to come away with the impression that either Cooper and/or the Fireman have miscalculated somehow *or* that preventing Laura's murder and/or looking for Judy still results in something pretty unpleasant happening to both Cooper and Laura.
I don't interpret the ending as neither positive nor negative. It just doesn't work as an epilogue. It's a to be continued. It ends at a point where you aren't provided enough information to reach either conclusion. Cooper can still fail, but at the point The Return ends there's no real reason to believe so.
Had the show ended just before Cooper's inquiry about which year it was and Sarah was never heard and Laura never let that scream out there'd be a far stronger argument to be made about the ending being negative/dark and allow multiple interpretations of what it meant as such.
Laura's scream can easily mean Laura landed into Carrie at that moment afte being catapulted out of the black lodge earlier making a similar scream. Kind of like Cooper replaced Dougy minus the electric socket.

The Fireman has always represented the antithesis to what Bob stood for. His role seems to be balancing out the damage caused by Judy (I guess?). We know him to be cryptic and speaking in cues rather than giving explicit instructions. It seems to be clearly implied that he fully expects complicated paths and costs for the "chosen ones" leading to the fulfillment to the missions. Even the green glove guy got a hell of a beating from BOB before defeating him. Dianne and Cooper anticipated there were risks associated with the crossing, meaning a miscalculation isn't really likely on either his or The Fireman's part. "What year is this?" can easily represent Cooper getting ahead of the situation and what follows with Sarah and Laura isn't in disagreement with this.

This also follows the go to narrative approach based on heroic protagonists. There's always a point in the narrative where defeat seems inevitable...but then the hero finds a way to overcome the obstacle and the mandatory damsels in distress are always at hand too in Twin Peaks. If the reveal of the killer in the original Twin Peaks was as intended delayed to the end, that's exactly what Cooper would have been inevitably.

I don't think character analysis can realistically be made for Cooper and Laura in a context like The Return. Cooper spent most of his adult life sitting still, trapped in a wacky dimension. When he was catapulted back, he first spent days in a for all practical purposes incapacitated state, when he woke up he immediately underwent a mission that we never saw the conclusion of. Translated he was merely a plot device never becoming enough of a character to speak off.
I remember there being anticipations about him being confronted with the evil deeds of his doppelganger but that never happened. He seemed pretty oblivious to all of it actually and we only got hints of the doppelganger's shenanigans in the past 25 years. There's nothing worse that came Laura's way than what she's been through in her life as we originally saw it, so what we saw happen is actually an improvement. And again her being the chosen one implies she wasn't going to have it easy to begin with.

Personally I don't think Twin Peaks needed a defeat of the villain epilogue. Bob should have stayed an inevitable part of Twin Peaks' universe and the town should have stayed oblivious to it except for a few inhabitants. I think the whole idea of a mission to defeat Judy with Laura being chosen for it should have been scrapped. Hell Judy/the entity that gave birth to Bob should have been scrapped. With that out of that way they'd have a better opportunity for a narrative around Cooper's return while retaining the inevitability of evil as a defining trait of the universe.

There's two things tying up both finales. The first is the unease with which everyone approaches what they are set out to do. The mood is constantly that of being forced to go in a direction and being terrified with what is waiting for them at the end of the road. This is very masterfully done, by the way. Cooper and Diane's (and latter Carrie's) car ride are exactly that. Cooper doesn't approach the mission with blind optimism by any stretch of the imagination. It's constantly people doing what they know they have to do but aren't at all confident about.
The second thing is Cooper's role of being the person who puts together the pieces of the puzzle. I think this gives away how the epilogue was envisioned by the creators. How it ended up could be seen as an analogy to Dale being stuck in the Dougy state much to The one armed man's despair .....until the narrative needed him to snap out of it. In that case too he woke up just in time so that the prophecy would be fulfilled. That set the precedent that made the finale so underwhelming for many of us. It's hard to buy a sense of doom at the end when you know full well it's merely a matter of convenience that could promptly resolve the situation. By the very standards of Twin Peaks that ending is no big deal.
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Re: Season 3 was incredibly mean-spirited (spoilers)

Post by Castledoque »

mine wrote:I don't interpret the ending as neither positive nor negative. It just doesn't work as an epilogue. It's a to be continued. It ends at a point where you aren't provided enough information to reach either conclusion. Cooper can still fail, but at the point The Return ends there's no real reason to believe so.
Had the show ended just before Cooper's inquiry about which year it was and Sarah was never heard and Laura never let that scream out there'd be a far stronger argument to be made about the ending being negative/dark and allow multiple interpretations of what it meant as such.
Laura's scream can easily mean Laura landed into Carrie at that moment after being catapulted out of the black lodge earlier making a similar scream. Kind of like Cooper replaced Dougy minus the electric socket.
Very well said. Actually Cooper and Carrie/Laura disappearing despondent into the night of Twin Peaks after not finding Sarah in the house - fade to black -the end, would have been an open and depressing ending, but an ending none the less. Or if Carrie/Laura suddenly showed signs of recognizing the house as they approached it and the whole thing faded to black, that again would have been an open more optimistic ending. I am not saying that either of these two proposed endings would make the show better, as I am not at all happy with the idea of bringing Laura back again, but they would be endings. What we actually got was not an ending, it was a cliffhanger.
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