David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

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AgentEcho
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by AgentEcho »

People consistently mistake their interpretations of David Lynch's work as literal representations that all people should see the same way, which just feels like a mistake no one who has any familiarity with Lynch should be making. Remember how people were running with the idea that Bob had somehow left Evil Cooper after he was shot like it was literal plot development that had been explained with some pointed exposition? Well that eventually turned out to be literally wrong, but so too are people running with this "We live inside a dream" thing as though it is a very literal explanation of what is going on in Twin Peaks. It is fine to interpret it that way, but don't start talking about it like it's the only explanation.

Lynch's films with maybe a small number of exceptions have always worked with dream logic, and the lines between dreams and reality have been fairly blurry. Even in Twin Peaks where you have actual representations of character's dreams that seem distinct from the "real world", what happens in those dreams? The characters travel to metaphysical planes that are later traveled to in "the real world". My own take is that the dream world in Twin Peaks is indeed as real as anything else that happens and they are governed by the same logic.

"We live inside a dream" has been in the Twin Peaks lexicon for twenty five years so if people are going to take that literally with a reductionist perspective of dreams, they should have been doing it from the start of The Return.
Last edited by AgentEcho on Fri Sep 08, 2017 4:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cipher
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

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I mean, the single biggest WTF within a "Richard's dream" interpretation would be the shift to Laura's POV at the end, followed by her screaming the lights out of the Palmer house.

There's a lot that implies it can't be the case. But that reading is teased because it's poignant enough to entertain. We're forced for a moment to recontextualize our understanding of the series as a mirror of Cooper's (or Richard's) psyche, or our own, just as it asked us to do for Laura in FWWM and the final seconds of The Return. But that's not actually what's going on; not that simply.

(Though the show does literally deal with impossible supernatural phenomena that are connected to the characters' emotional and psychic states, so really, how much more dreamlike can you get?)
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powerleftist
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by powerleftist »

Fans are arguing all over the internet that TP is not a dream because it would be lazy. Therefore, since Lynch is a genius, he wouldn't film anything so cheap, despite all the suggestions and clues pointing in that direction.

Try to convince me that it isn't a dream by using in-universe logic. Don't say it can't happen because David Lynch is a genius, because everybody makes mistakes.
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OrsonWelles
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by OrsonWelles »

What do you suggest. A court case?
If Lynch and Frost wanted it to end with the revelation that it's a child's fantasy and he made drawings of all the Lodge figures they are allowed to. If it's all a literal dream, they are allowed to. I do think that the dream-theory is possible without it being too straightforward. All the anger. It's weird.
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

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powerleftist wrote:Try to convince me that it isn't a dream by using in-universe logic. Don't say it can't happen because David Lynch is a genius, because everybody makes mistakes.
Boy, gee, did you like, read the first page of this thread?

If Richard dreamed up the Chalfront/Tremond connection before encountering it, then dreamed a shift to Laura's POV and her ability to scream the lights out of a house into the waking life, he's the best damn dreamer in the world.

(He also dreamed up the ability to locate a waitress he had never met before, who looked exactly like someone from his dream, and who identified with that identity in the final minutes. He also dreamed up the Palmer house before going there.)

That's ... a big stretch. On the other hand, a system of supernatural occurrences that could and were implied to lead to the exact same set of circumstances were also in place -- ones that also account for everything I posted above. It's almost like everything really could have happened in the "real" world, but Lynch is interested in blurring and playing with subjective experience (so as not to dismiss in this post the fact that it very much does tease a dream reading without really landing on or fully allowing for it).
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powerleftist
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by powerleftist »

OrsonWelles wrote:All the anger. It's weird.
I spent countless hours on this universe, only to finally get a middle finger from its creators. Part 18 destroyed Twin Peaks, wether it is a dream, a parallel universe or a pocket dimension. I think some anger is justified.
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by Cipher »

powerleftist wrote:
OrsonWelles wrote:All the anger. It's weird.
I spent countless hours on this universe, only to finally get a middle finger from its creators. Part 18 destroyed Twin Peaks, wether it is a dream, a parallel universe or a pocket dimension. I think some anger is justified.
I think you should gloss over some of the responses to your reading.
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OrsonWelles
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by OrsonWelles »

powerleftist wrote:
OrsonWelles wrote:All the anger. It's weird.
I spent countless hours on this universe, only to finally get a middle finger from its creators. Part 18 destroyed Twin Peaks, wether it is a dream, a parallel universe or a pocket dimension. I think some anger is justified.
Why? If a band I've been loving for seven albums makes a terrible eight, I accept that it's not what I expected from it and appreciate the good stuff they did release. Same with this. They've created something. It's a different thing to dislike it, or point out flaws or why you think it's bad. But being angry is a strange sentiment. Saying they gave a middle finger would mean they actually did something terrible on purpose. Whereas they a) just created a series based on their vision b) terrible is subjective.
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N. Needleman
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by N. Needleman »

Everything old is new again.
AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:The Return is clearly guaranteed a future audience among stoners and other drug users.
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Voided
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by Voided »

Cipher wrote:
powerleftist wrote:Try to convince me that it isn't a dream by using in-universe logic. Don't say it can't happen because David Lynch is a genius, because everybody makes mistakes.
Boy, gee, did you like, read the first page of this thread?

If Richard dreamed up the Chalfront/Tremond connection before encountering it, then dreamed a shift to Laura's POV and her ability to scream the lights out of a house into the waking life, he's the best damn dreamer in the world.

(He also dreamed up the ability to locate a waitress he had never met before, who looked exactly like someone from his dream, and who identified with that identity in the final minutes. He also dreamed up the Palmer house before going there.)

That's ... a big stretch. On the other hand, a system of supernatural occurrences that could and were implied to lead to the exact same set of circumstances were also in place -- ones that also account for everything I posted above. It's almost like everything really could have happened in the "real" world, but Lynch is interested in blurring and playing with subjective experience (so as not to dismiss in this post the fact that it very much does tease a dream reading without really landing on or fully allowing for it).
Well, if it were Richard's dream, he would already have spied the waitress and the Palmer house in his waking life that we weren't privy to. We would only have seen from when awakes in the motel with a letter left from a Linda. Granted the Chalfont/Tremond reference would be hard to explain unlesss he'd already looked into that information through some means prior to dreaming. If you mean Carrie's POV....well, that was in reality rather than dream, in this case.
Just forget you ever saw it. It's better that way.
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Panapaok
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by Panapaok »

I think L&F planned TPTR with many different interpretations as possible, in order to keep things mysterious and keep the conversation going. You can argue that it's all a dream ("We live inside a dream"), or that there are different timelines ("Is it future or is it past?", "What year is this?") or that parallel/alternative realities exist (Richard & Linda, Carrie Page, Chalfonts/Tremonds in the Palmer House).
This is - excuse me - a damn fine cup of coffee.
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Spacevessel
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by Spacevessel »

Panapaok wrote:in order to keep things mysterious and keep the conversation going
I agree. I think L&F just wanted viewers to get mindf*cked and start arguing about their theories.
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Novalis
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by Novalis »

I don't understand the feeling of being middle-fingered at all.

When Hitchcock used romantic irony / metafiction in some of his films, or when a story by Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges lets you know that it knows itself to be fictional, do people flip out over it?

I can understand the feeling of 'I've invested 25 years of suspension-of-disbelief in Twin Peaks and its characters'. That's fine, I'm sure we all have. But when those characters turn towards the audience and proclaim themselves fictional (which is something that is far from settled, by the way), why is this then taken as flipping us the bird? For me it's more like the reciprocation of our embrace -- a 'thank you' for us having kept them alive, a gesture similar to a bow to the audience in a stage play at curtain call. If it is 'all a dream' (and arguably any work of fiction has an oneiric quality) then we, collectively, the viewers, are the dreamer. To be acknowledged and thanked in this way, by the characters we lend existence to through our interest and investment in them -- if this is what is happening, would it be such a bad thing? It's like being told that its we, the fans, that made it all possible, not some isolated genius-auteur figure directing things in a purely top-down manner. It's acknowledging our active participation, rather than passive consumption.
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
RetconMetatron
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by RetconMetatron »

The problem is that all of fiction is basically a dream.

You could end literally any book and film with "and it was all a dream". There's nothing clever about it, it's a lazy problem-solver, except if the dream-world plays an integral part of the plot, something like Total Recall for example. But there's nothing in S1 and S2 which requires or needs that resolution.
Last edited by RetconMetatron on Fri Sep 08, 2017 4:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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AgentEcho
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Re: David Lynch should not get away by declaring TP as a "dream"

Post by AgentEcho »

All those people complaining that they've been victimized by David Lynch and Mark Frost might be surprised to learn that the real perpetrator can be found in a mirror. I hope it's not Bob.
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