Lynch Telling off his crew

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NormoftheAndes
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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Mr. Reindeer wrote:
NormoftheAndes wrote:
I don't think that what you've posted is highly relevant to discussion - its more like an excerpt from a PhD thesis! :lol:
I don’t think questioning Lynch’s mental state is highly relevant, or germane, or productive to discussion. None of us knows him, and so far as I know, none of us is a psychologist (maybe you are; but even then, you still have never actually examined him). He’s been doing fine for decades doing his own weird thing. Seems pretty happy and fulfilled, there’s zero evidence that he poses harm to himself or anyone else, and he’s produced some of the most incredible art of the last several decades. Would that we were all so lucky. I just don’t see how calling someone’s mental health into question with no data is a productive direction to take a discussion, and I think that’s at least part of what Axxon N. was getting at.
Maybe you think a forum like this is the wrong venue for talk of mental health? Lynch's own mental health is something he has discussed up to a point. No he doesn't do a daily video diary about it (as I wished for previously) but he's made mention of suffering too much anger, agitation or the 'rubber clown suit' of negativity. His involvement with Transcendental Meditation is extremely relevant and deals with many issues like PTSD, trauma, depression and so on.

Since so much of his output since Lost HIghway in particular deals with mental health areas also, I think its a very germane and interesting area. INLAND EMPIRE - isn't that film rather clearly a depiction of a confusing inner turmoil? The same can be said for The Return (Twin Peaks) if you so wish. Others may describe season 3 as being about Judy's search for home or trying to unite with BOB but I'd rather hear that applied to psychological aspects.
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AXX°N N.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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NormoftheAndes wrote:Maybe you think a forum like this is the wrong venue for talk of mental health? Lynch's own mental health is something he has discussed up to a point. No he doesn't do a daily video diary about it (as I wished for previously) but he's made mention of suffering too much anger, agitation or the 'rubber clown suit' of negativity. His involvement with Transcendental Meditation is extremely relevant and deals with many issues like PTSD, trauma, depression and so on.
Yes but this isn't proof that he looks at these things in a strictly clinical sense. Depending on who you are, meditation is either an important supplement to therapy or a substitute entirely, and Lynch clearly does not undergo psychiatric therapy.
NormoftheAndes wrote:Since so much of his output since Lost HIghway in particular deals with mental health areas also, I think its a very germane and interesting area. INLAND EMPIRE - isn't that film rather clearly a depiction of a confusing inner turmoil? The same can be said for The Return (Twin Peaks) if you so wish. Others may describe season 3 as being about Judy's search for home or trying to unite with BOB but I'd rather hear that applied to psychological aspects.
Yes, these are valid tacks in which to analyze those films. But it's clear Lynch himself does not make them with the intention that they be read as just dynamics of the purview of clinical psychology at work. He's said before that Blue Velvet had many people namedropping names of psychologists to him and asking if they informed his work, only for him to have no idea about them or their work. He's also said (to paraphrase) "if you're into psychology, that's how you see it. If you're into politics, you see politics in everything." All the things you listed can be perceived not as strictly psychological, but instead as spiritual crises. What differentiates one from the other? The perceiver.
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LateReg
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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NormoftheAndes wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:
NormoftheAndes wrote:
I don't think that what you've posted is highly relevant to discussion - its more like an excerpt from a PhD thesis! :lol:
I don’t think questioning Lynch’s mental state is highly relevant, or germane, or productive to discussion. None of us knows him, and so far as I know, none of us is a psychologist (maybe you are; but even then, you still have never actually examined him). He’s been doing fine for decades doing his own weird thing. Seems pretty happy and fulfilled, there’s zero evidence that he poses harm to himself or anyone else, and he’s produced some of the most incredible art of the last several decades. Would that we were all so lucky. I just don’t see how calling someone’s mental health into question with no data is a productive direction to take a discussion, and I think that’s at least part of what Axxon N. was getting at.
Maybe you think a forum like this is the wrong venue for talk of mental health? Lynch's own mental health is something he has discussed up to a point. No he doesn't do a daily video diary about it (as I wished for previously) but he's made mention of suffering too much anger, agitation or the 'rubber clown suit' of negativity. His involvement with Transcendental Meditation is extremely relevant and deals with many issues like PTSD, trauma, depression and so on.

Since so much of his output since Lost HIghway in particular deals with mental health areas also, I think its a very germane and interesting area. INLAND EMPIRE - isn't that film rather clearly a depiction of a confusing inner turmoil? The same can be said for The Return (Twin Peaks) if you so wish. Others may describe season 3 as being about Judy's search for home or trying to unite with BOB but I'd rather hear that applied to psychological aspects.
I think the direct question being posed is whether we should speculate on someone's mental health based on their works of art when speculation often turns into accusation and a means to ignore or trivialize the work as simply deranged, incoherent, weird, etc. I see no value in that, and part of the reason is that I think too much passion or oddity is often misconstrued as something negative, and I think both passion and madness are a part of the best art. I wouldn't have it any other way and so what do I care if, for example, Coppola was a little nuts when he made Apocalypse Now!? It wouldn't have been made otherwise. To be clear, I think looking into the mind and experiences of an artist is wonderful and informative as it applies to the art , but I fear that so many use it to write off the work rather than engage with it, going as far as to write off the artist himself. Which is what I think Axxon was saying.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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AXX°N N. wrote:This topic is something that bugs me personally. So I'm not exactly ranting against anyone in particular.

--

The discussion of an artist's psychology in a clinical sense has too much of a tendency in my mind to end up somewhere adjacent to the Nazis, deeming whatever they didn't like as degenerate, and throwing artists who didn't do anything but propagandic 'realism' into mental wards, where they often died. Or how the Soviet film boards stopped funding anyone going too abstract and that, again, wasn't doing enough to tow the party line. Or how McCarthyism treated sympathy for the merely theoretically wrongly accused as its own admission of treason.

James Joyce was widely speculated to 'suffer' from schizophrenia, but the eagerness with which that diagnosis was made by those in the armchairs, when stripped of its self-stated intentions, was merely the attempt to thwart him from being able to be himself and from being allowed to make or to sell his work, as was the case when America banned his books. As was the case when America banned any books, or when the international twittersphere decides someone is guilty of theoretical crimes. Joyce was advised to get psychoanalyzed, with the implicit motivation being that it would be corrective, and he resisted. The point that mental illness begins to exist in a certain sense is, after all, the moment of compliance. Lynch has told the story before of only ever nearly getting pschoanalyzed, and how at the acknowledgment by the therapist that it might affect his work or change his understanding of his own creativity, he vamoosed never to be seen in a clinical setting again.

Who's going to do it, and how is it that they determine whether an artist is aware, if at all, of the clinical significance of their work? Isn't the basic premise of mental illness the idea that the sufferer's mind is not in control of itself? That being the case, how do you deal with the problem of it being near impossible to presume what the artist knows, or is in control of, not to mention the arrogance of assuming you have a clearer hold of it than the artist themselves? Merely by token of not being the supposedly deranged artist, not inflicted with the malady? How is that a convincing premise, and isn't the attempt to wrest that privelege of self-assuredness away from the individual, in the end, the definition of authoritarianism? The moral outrage against Blue Velvet was not separable from a desire for Lynch to merely disappear. It's just the age old battle between freedom and wrongthink, and Lynch is wise to not engage at all, because it's not a logical arena anyway, not when the opposition has as their premise your undoing, and little of the discussion is actually in good faith.

This narrative sort of writes itself into a corner where it never reflexively looks back at and questions its basic premise. Because even if Lynch were mentally ill, shouldn't the mentally ill be allowed the right to exist however they want, including creating whatever art they want? That's the point of what they call art therapy, so long as it's in a government facility. But it's not like liberty and justice or moral or philosophical discussion is the deciding factor, anyway. Regardless of the groupthink, Lynch's clout is either profitable or attractive as a cultural investment to those funding his work, and that's the real deciding factor.

Sorry if I was dismissive of this post. However, I don't think this thread as a whole was about denigrating Lynch.
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NormoftheAndes
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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AXX°N N. wrote:
NormoftheAndes wrote:Maybe you think a forum like this is the wrong venue for talk of mental health? Lynch's own mental health is something he has discussed up to a point. No he doesn't do a daily video diary about it (as I wished for previously) but he's made mention of suffering too much anger, agitation or the 'rubber clown suit' of negativity. His involvement with Transcendental Meditation is extremely relevant and deals with many issues like PTSD, trauma, depression and so on.
Yes but this isn't proof that he looks at these things in a strictly clinical sense. Depending on who you are, meditation is either an important supplement to therapy or a substitute entirely, and Lynch clearly does not undergo psychiatric therapy.
NormoftheAndes wrote:Since so much of his output since Lost HIghway in particular deals with mental health areas also, I think its a very germane and interesting area. INLAND EMPIRE - isn't that film rather clearly a depiction of a confusing inner turmoil? The same can be said for The Return (Twin Peaks) if you so wish. Others may describe season 3 as being about Judy's search for home or trying to unite with BOB but I'd rather hear that applied to psychological aspects.
Yes, these are valid tacks in which to analyze those films. But it's clear Lynch himself does not make them with the intention that they be read as just dynamics of the purview of clinical psychology at work. He's said before that Blue Velvet had many people namedropping names of psychologists to him and asking if they informed his work, only for him to have no idea about them or their work. He's also said (to paraphrase) "if you're into psychology, that's how you see it. If you're into politics, you see politics in everything." All the things you listed can be perceived not as strictly psychological, but instead as spiritual crises. What differentiates one from the other? The perceiver.
I don't think this whole thread is genuinely about judging Lynch. Whilst the OP was making an observation that Lynch had a lot of anger in him at that point, I can't ascertain how genuine they were since they're not posting now.

I am not suggesting that Lynch makes his works on the basis of expressing specific mental illnesses or psychologies. But still, the expression psychogenic fugue did inform Lost Highway. It is more than obvious that depression and mental crises informed Mulholland Dr. The Straight Story definitely has a lot about denial in it.

Viewers could find an over-arching political story in The Return, but to claim it is more apparent than a psychological overlying narrative would seem far-fetched to me, at best.

It is also quite obvious that the behind-the-scenes on a project does shape the finished work. Asked about the set during the making of FWWM, James Marshall said Lynch was not as calm as he was on the series. Somewhat depressed and a bit grouchy - I think this comes out in the film, albeit for the best. He was in the spirit of the film itself, regardless of his own feelings.

In terms of Twin Peaks - The Return, there is anger and depression in the work and possibly these were being felt by Lynch and others during the making. Was it the work itself creating that feeling or vice versa? In my view, The Return was as a work about finding and feeling a way back into the world of Twin Peaks and I don't believe Lynch and Frost had an entirely cohesive or clear route back in. I think they felt that was a more honest approach, rather than imposing an over-arching narrative which could have felt poorly shoe-horned in.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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I think we are making too much out of nothing, or very little, in this case. If nothing else, that scene showed us Lynch is simply human. He was working on a large project with a huge responsibility, was probably concentrated, was not ready for a remark that maybe took him out of a train of thought, and simply snapped. Did he regret it later on, probably. And the fact that he let that scene ship on the DVD showed (to me) that he is willing to show that he has weaknesses too. I guess most of us had bosses that had such outbursts at least once, and what about us personally, it is not like we are perfect either.

As much as I did not like S3 overall, I think it largely stuck to a script. Where it did not, it almost always had to do (I think) with Lynch writing himself into it, be it for the scene with the escort in his hotel room, smoking with Diane, drinking fine Red Bordeaux, bringing in Monica Belucci, and especially not being soft where it mattered, etc., all these places where he let himself indulge at viewer's expense. I could be wrong, but to me that is more of a sign of an inflated ego than of anger or depression. But we'd have to have the original script that both Lynch and Frost signed upon to be certain that scenes were his own and not written in from the beginning.

If we compare scenes that Leo and Shelly share in S1 to Stephen and Becky ones, I think Leo is much more menacing than Stephen, and his level of anger and violence surpasses Stephen's by a large margin. Portrayal of Ruth's, Darya's, or NYC couple's demise are shocking, but I think these were probably part of the original script and were trying to portray Mr. C and the Experiment in a particular light (or darkness).
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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boske wrote:I think we are making too much out of nothing, or very little, in this case. If nothing else, that scene showed us Lynch is simply human. He was working on a large project with a huge responsibility, was probably concentrated, was not ready for a remark that maybe took him out of a train of thought, and simply snapped. Did he regret it later on, probably. And the fact that he let that scene ship on the DVD showed (to me) that he is willing to show that he has weaknesses too. I guess most of us had bosses that had such outbursts at least once, and what about us personally, it is not like we are perfect either.

As much as I did not like S3 overall, I think it largely stuck to a script. Where it did not, it almost always had to do (I think) with Lynch writing himself into it, be it for the scene with the escort in his hotel room, smoking with Diane, drinking fine Red Bordeaux, bringing in Monica Belucci, and especially not being soft where it mattered, etc., all these places where he let himself indulge at viewer's expense. I could be wrong, but to me that is more of a sign of an inflated ego than of anger or depression. But we'd have to have the original script that both Lynch and Frost signed upon to be certain that scenes were his own and not written in from the beginning.
I wholly agree with the first paragraph. The second paragraph, not as much.

Like you said, we don't know exactly, and it would be fun to find that original script. And it's probably true (and I think even proven) that Lynch wrote some of those scenes on the fly, but I don't think they had to do with ego at all. Just some good ideas he had that fit his view of what a series or film could be, and each of those scenes you mention are, imo, some of the best in The Return. I love the reverse strip tease of the escort and the smoking with Diane. They add to the vibe of the series. The "not where it counts" line is one little line in a larger script that must have always been written to set the endgame in motion (and it's a line I've always taken as being more nuanced in its winking way than some would allow - and it actually may be the only egotistical moment in the series because it has less to do with Lynch's junk and more to do with his artistry, but even so it's more fun in context as a taunting foretelling of things to come, another instance of directly communicating with the viewer), and the Monica Bellucci scene is, if not the most important scene in the whole season, then at least as vital as any other moment. It's just hugely important in so many ways that I could never see it categorized as indulging at the viewer's expense. Again, I don't see any of those scenes you mentioned as indulging at the viewer's expense, but rather for their benefit, or at least central to the idea of The Return.

FWIW, before the series aired it was revealed that Gordon Cole would have a larger role, and when I brought this up to a friend he said that that seems only natural since he would probably feel somewhat guilty about Cooper's disappearance. Regardless of the plot-based scenes or tangents, Lynch's presence never felt remotely gratuitous or egotistical to me.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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That is ok, we can disagree on that part. What is interesting here is that Lynch anticipated responses like that from some of the viewers, hence the Albert's attitude toward Gordon in the escort scene, first his puzzled and then stern look at Gordon, as if he had enough at that point. Anyway, I won't say more on this here so not to derail the discussion, cheers.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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boske wrote:That is ok, we can disagree on that part. What is interesting here is that Lynch anticipated responses like that from some of the viewers, hence the Albert's attitude toward Gordon in the escort scene, first his puzzled and then stern look at Gordon, as if he had enough at that point. Anyway, I won't say more on this here so not to derail the discussion, cheers.
Ha, true. There is a lot of that throughout. It seemed to predict viewer response in a lot of ways week to week.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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I do have to add that the flaw in an argument that most of the possible late additions to the script are Lynch-performed scenes and therefore signs of ego is that I'm sure he also wrote at least as many other scenes on the fly that don't include his character. We know he did so for Chantal and Hutch, and that he did for Sarah, and you can imagine many other instances of him wanting to give an extra scene or two to other beloved cast members that have little to do with the plot. I really don't believe it had anything to do with ego beyond the ego that most artists must possess, and the other flaw I find in previous arguments that Lynch shouldn't have been in the series as much is that if it were a different actor playing the character nobody would bat an eye. I simply find the argument flawed all around.

(And I want to reiterate that the Bellucci sequence, always controversial and subject to ridicule on the disappointed board, is one of the most vital scenes and cannot possibly be attributed mainly to ego.)
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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boske wrote:
As much as I did not like S3 overall, I think it largely stuck to a script. Where it did not, it almost always had to do (I think) with Lynch writing himself into it, be it for the scene with the escort in his hotel room, smoking with Diane, drinking fine Red Bordeaux, bringing in Monica Belucci, and especially not being soft where it mattered, etc., all these places where he let himself indulge at viewer's expense. I could be wrong, but to me that is more of a sign of an inflated ego than of anger or depression. But we'd have to have the original script that both Lynch and Frost signed upon to be certain that scenes were his own and not written in from the beginning.

I think plenty of other stuff not involving Gordon was added during production or improvised too. Certainly all the Audrey scenes, Sarah stabbing Laura’s photo with the bottle (which IMO became one of the most important pieces due to the way it was used in the edit), likely all the Roadhouse conversations, probably a lot of the Carl / Fat Trout scenes (we know Lynch added the Kriscol / blood donor scene when he saw a resident of the park and decided to write a role for him). Plenty of other stuff too, I’m sure. None of which is anything new for a Lynch production.

EDIT: I see that LateReg posted something very similar just as I was typing this!
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

Post by 4815162342 »

I think the most interesting "self-conscious" Lynch scene is the "I'm old school" scene with Denise. It really dances around something, but never quite makes a point, and I am really curious what they were thinking with that scene.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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4815162342 wrote:I think the most interesting "self-conscious" Lynch scene is the "I'm old school" scene with Denise. It really dances around something, but never quite makes a point, and I am really curious what they were thinking with that scene.
The cool, curt vagueness there is very interesting, indeed.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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We may also be missing the Gordon/Albert dynamic. In part 12, Albert is clearly not happy with Gordon's attitude toward the escort lady and the information Albert rushed to share with him, as if Gordon was taking his priorities the wrong way. But it has not started here, there was that "say please" and "you heard me" scene where Gordon was first whistling in his office, as if Albert were a part of Lynch that was trying to keep him focused and not wonder around losing focus on silly things. To me that seemed clearest when Albert pulled Gordon from the brink, where he was almost sucked in by that turbulence. That felt like an acknowledgement that he can sometime lose focus and get carried away, needing somebody to pull him back before going too far, and losing his head figuratively.
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Re: Lynch Telling off his crew

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boske wrote:We may also be missing the Gordon/Albert dynamic. In part 12, Albert is clearly not happy with Gordon's attitude toward the escort lady and the information Albert rushed to share with him, as if Gordon was taking his priorities the wrong way. But it has not started here, there was that "say please" and "you heard me" scene where Gordon was first whistling in his office, as if Albert were a part of Lynch that was trying to keep him focused and not wonder around losing focus on silly things. To me that seemed clearest when Albert pulled Gordon from the brink, where he was almost sucked in by that turbulence. That felt like an acknowledgement that he can sometime lose focus and get carried away, needing somebody to pull him back before going too far, and losing his head figuratively.
That never occurred to me but it does make a lot of sense!
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