Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILERS)

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sylvia_north
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show.

Post by sylvia_north »

He loves Twin Peaks and its world. He's driving the buggy, and if we fix our attitude we can come along with him. -- That cowboy bit is something Lynch said on set that ended up in the movie. That's not aggressive; it's asserting the artist-audience dynamic.

That Inland Empire was so challenging and not at all a comfortable ride is proof to me of style evolution. LOTS choked on MD and LH, even the Red Room scenes in Twin Peaks. They took it personally, felt they were being treated with contempt. I mean, he's dealing with string theory, quantum complexity theory and the nature of time and matter in increasingly complex narratives. Who knew Twin Peaks would go there overtly? He experimented with and refined those narratives, and Twin Peaks was the seed of what we are watching now. How much more "grown up" to you expect him to be? IE frustrated me completely, but that's the director I signed up for. I highly doubt he's considering us AT ALL. "It's not always about you," as the idiom goes.

Rhetorically, has anyone whose done anything ever not been considered "an arsehole?" Taking personal affront to something doesn't qualify anything other than you not liking it. and no one is telling you that you can't or ought not like it
Too Old to Die Young > TP S03
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wxray
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show.

Post by wxray »

AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:
I actually liked your post. It stated honestly what a lot of Lynch fans consider in private, even if briefly, but are too scared to post online. He's a lovely man, no doubt, but there *is* aggression there, and it's not restricted to his attitudes to his characters. Call it extreme disregard for the audience, audience contempt, or self-perception as a kind of artistic Yoda constantly keeping the audience on their toes (for their own good). There is something there that gets close to the heart of the mystery of Lynch as an artist in general and S03 in particular, and you were forthright enough to express it.

If you could be bothered, it would be good to see you post about this at more length.
Well, I don't know him, and I didn't mean to put words in his mouth. I want to make that clear, it was just me projecting Mr. Eddy on him, conflated with his infamous quote about product placement. Just a joke!

But you said the rest rather well about that relationship with the audience. We all have seen interviews with him where he is probed on things, and you could just see how frustrated he is by the question, so he politely moves the interview along. The product placement interview was a rather clear exception. From most accounts, the guy is great to work with. So, any contempt will be subtle and good natured, which I think this thing with Lucy was.

There's been so much written about phones, and their artistic placement by Lynch that you just knew the subject had to come up. And come up it did. BTW, I suspect Frost had a lot to do with this scene too.
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Ragnell
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Ragnell »

I don't think Lucy's being excluded from the switchboard or that the switchboard is hidden. She's just not the dispatcher, she's the receptionist. Comm Center/911/Dispatch isn't the same as being an officeworker. Lucy's a receptionist and administrator, an old-fashioned one who uses old phones and paper files, she has plenty to do without coordinating patrols and having to answer emergency calls, being the one to answer the county 911 center when it needs a car dispatched, being the one to forward calls to county to ask for help from nearby towns or the fire dept or the ambulance in the middle of an emergency. It'd be irresponsible to merge those jobs, the dispatcher needs to be paying attention to the switchboard and where all the calls are and doesn't need to be talking to walkins or filing papers or taking messages. We've always seen other deputies, most likely that room with the dispatcher and probably a 70s or 80s era switchboard has been there forever coordinating the nameless background deputies, while most of the main action that reached Harry and Dale came in by phone calls not to 911 but to the office number. I think Lucy was on the radio maybe once, and that most likely would've been because the info Harry needed in his car was learned through a call to her line.

As for her thing with cell phones? Actually... Lucy hasn't been "dumb" and isn't really dumb or ditzy now. What she has been is extremely precise about communication, and always attempts to avoid a miscommunication. She may have something different about how her brain works that makes her very literal and prone to misunderstanding, so she overcompensates. That's not the same as being forgetful (which she is not), or absent-minded or having a low IQ. So this weird inability to understand cell phones is a quirk that could tie into that.

Conversely, I saw someone online (and I don't remember who) suggesting Lucy spending all of her time on an old fashioned phone, in Twin Peaks so close to the Lodges where the spirits and mystical energies travel through electricity, is having an effect on her sense of time and reality. Not that the Sheriff's Dept is specifically pretending its 1970 or that Dispatch doesn't exist to coddle her, but she personally can't wrap her head around certain concepts.
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KnewItsPa
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by KnewItsPa »

Ragnell wrote:Conversely, I saw someone online (and I don't remember who) suggesting Lucy spending all of her time on an old fashioned phone, in Twin Peaks so close to the Lodges where the spirits and mystical energies travel through electricity, is having an effect on her sense of time and reality.
I'd run with this. We're also getting a lot of 3-digit numbers that coincide with US telephone area codes in S3, there's a theme of tying specific places to pieces of technology. Maybe BadCoops phone hacking the prison and the Buenos Aires device ties in with this as well. Whether it's a distinct pattern or just a texture, not sure.

Wasn't there always a slight sense that Diane was inside the tape recorder, and that people talk to phones, not through them?
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Gabriel
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Gabriel »

The other, slightly mundane, explanation could be that most people call the main Sheriff's department switchboard unless they have a more personal connection with the Sheriff, so someone like Doc Hayward or Leland Palmer might call Lucy at reception because they know her; Bobby, faking his identity as Leo, would avoid professional questioning from a police officer by calling Lucy.
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Leebob
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Leebob »

Ragnell wrote:I don't think Lucy's being excluded from the switchboard or that the switchboard is hidden. ....
Go back and watch the scene where the new Sherriff Truman makes his first appearance.

When Truman walks thru the door to the back room, freeze the frame and look to the left of the door he walks thru. There are two signs on the wall.
The first reads "Restricted Access Only - Authorized Personnel Only".
The second reads "Warning Prohibited Items (Cell phones, IPads, ..., Thumb Drives, MP3 Players)* ARE NOT ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT"
and below the signs is a digital thermostat.

This is also following Lucy's conversation re: the Thermostat and how does it work when no one is there.
The thermostat on her wall is an old school dial which likely is not even connected to the heating system, the one in the back room is digital.

Lucy is being placed in a protective bubble and the whole TP station is participating; I had originally attribute this to a possible Alzheimer's/dementia storyline, but now I am tending to agree with the theory offered up earlier in this thread re: the death of Wally and a potential mental breakdown following his death.

*Note: I may not have all the items listed correctly, the image was pretty blurry on my TV.
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Leebob
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Leebob »

Here is a picture of the signs in the TP Sherriff stations back room. Forgive the image quality, it is the best I could manage.
TPST-backroom signs.jpg
TPST-backroom signs.jpg (57.91 KiB) Viewed 9686 times
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Leebob
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Leebob »

of course it's also possible this is just one big meta reminder from Lynch and Frost to fans at the onset of the new season re: not getting stuck in the past...
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Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILERS)

Post by Putontheglasses »

sylvia_north wrote:In the words of Hawk, seeing new Kimmy and Andy like this "was like taking a hike to your favorite spot and finding a hole where the lake used to be." :
I think this quote is great way to describe what Lynch is doing with S3 as a whole, not just Andy and Lucy. So much revered art has been about taking something familiar and warping/subverting it...Dali, Picasso, etc.

The scene with Bobby crying was when I really started to suspect this.


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LateReg
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by LateReg »

Putontheglasses wrote:
sylvia_north wrote:In the words of Hawk, seeing new Kimmy and Andy like this "was like taking a hike to your favorite spot and finding a hole where the lake used to be." :
I think this quote is great way to describe what Lynch is doing with S3 as a whole, not just Andy and Lucy. So much revered art has been about taking something familiar and warping/subverting it...Dali, Picasso, etc.

The scene with Bobby crying was when I really started to suspect this.


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What do you mean about the scene with Bobby?
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by N. Needleman »

The scene with Bobby is basically identical to how Lynch treated emotion in the original series and pilot, particularly with Sarah Palmer. Intense to the point of awkward emotional displays you weren't sure whether to feel for or laugh at after a certain point. With him then and now I think the answer is both.

His sympathy for Bobby is sincere and so is his dedication to displaying the awkwardness. I see no difference.
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Dalai Cooper
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Dalai Cooper »

^^^yep

It's weird, I posted in this thread about how silly I thought the Reddit theory about wally was but I guess it got deleted?! Pretty baffling, it was an innocuous comment.
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Putontheglasses
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by Putontheglasses »

LateReg wrote:
Putontheglasses wrote:
sylvia_north wrote:In the words of Hawk, seeing new Kimmy and Andy like this "was like taking a hike to your favorite spot and finding a hole where the lake used to be." :
I think this quote is great way to describe what Lynch is doing with S3 as a whole, not just Andy and Lucy. So much revered art has been about taking something familiar and warping/subverting it...Dali, Picasso, etc.

The scene with Bobby crying was when I really started to suspect this.


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What do you mean about the scene with Bobby?
In my eyes (and my wife's as well as some other fans I've seen post about it online), the scene with Bobby comes across as disingenuous. It's subtle no doubt, but all of the elements of the scene add up to us as subverting scenes of that kind from the original series. I don't think it's satire where we're expected to laugh at Bobby the way that Laura did when he cried in front of her, but I think it's not the same as the scenes with Sara crying in S1 for instance, which seemed genuine.



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Last edited by Putontheglasses on Thu Jun 08, 2017 11:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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N. Needleman
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by N. Needleman »

To each their own. I think if that were the case we wouldn't have Lynch deploy Laura's theme, which is very important to him, or show Andy and Lucy joining hands. We also know the direction he gave Dana on the scene - simply "Bobby comes in, sees Laura and is deeply affected."
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LateReg
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Re: Theory: Lucy is not a blithering idiot. ...She's giving us clues about the duality that permeates the show. (SPOILE

Post by LateReg »

Putontheglasses wrote:
LateReg wrote:
Putontheglasses wrote:
I think this quote is great way to describe what Lynch is doing with S3 as a whole, not just Andy and Lucy. So much revered art has been about taking something familiar and warping/subverting it...Dali, Picasso, etc.

The scene with Bobby crying was when I really started to suspect this.


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What do you mean about the scene with Bobby?
In my eyes (and my wife's as well as some other fans I've seen post about it online), the scene with Bobby comes across as disingenuous. It's subtle no doubt, but all of the elements of the scene add up to us as subverting scenes of that kinds from the original series. I don't think it's satire where we're expected to laugh at Bobby the way that Laura did when he cried in front of her, but I think it's not the same as the scenes with Sara crying in S1 for instance, which seemed genuine.



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Thanks for explaining. I've heard others say the same thing, but I don't see it that way at all. It felt sincere to me, and no different than the original show. I teared up. It perfectly fit my understanding of Bobby (who I always envisioned becoming a cop, btw), as well, and I think his character was exactly the right one to call upon to give us the first outpouring of raw, uncomfortable emotion, especially as it pertained to Laura. Coupled with the music, it was a wonderful sudden jolt of pure Peaks to me.

I wonder how one's perception of the series up to the point would affect how they saw that scene. If they already thought Lynch was being disdainful towards Twin Peaks, would those viewers finally find something to love about Bobby's scene, or would they be more prone to dismiss it as disingenuous? Just thinking out loud.
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