Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[Venus]

It's awful.

Not just awful compared to the original series, but objectively awful as a piece of TV drama. To be honest, I was hearing alarm bells way before the show started airing. Lynch said that he would be shooting digitally. Uh-oh, I thought. Maybe this is appropriate as an aesthetic choice for something abstract and experimental like Inland Empire, but not for Twin Peaks. Next, they announced the cast list and stated that there were dozens of speaking parts. Really? How would it be possible to fit all them into 18 episodes and still have room for character development? Following that, Showtime announced that the new series would be "the pure heroin version of David Lynch". Hosannas ensued. Finally, a pure artistic statement from Lynch, unfettered by the suits and philistines at the network! Uh-oh, I thought. Did this mean that we would be getting a weekly dose of impenetrable surrealism? Relax, I told myself. Frost is on board. He's a skilled TV dramatist who'll rein in Lynch's more indulgent tendencies. They might be shooting digital, but plenty of other director do this with beautiful results. And then I started watching...

There are so many things wrong with the show that it's actually hard to remember them all. It's not until someone points out some forgotten detail from a previous episode that I think to myself, oh yeah, that was terrible. Remember the caretaker/handyman from the Buckhorn apartment building? Totally pointless, utterly irrelevant, a waste of screen time. The junkie in the Vegas house? Ditto. Dougie's flirtatious young work colleague? Yep. The weird grotesques in Beaula's shack? DING! Beverly's husband? Honestly, who cares? The weird zombie child in the car? Whatever. There are probably tons more that I can't think of right now. I have trouble remembering a lot of the previous episodes, probably because they have been so excruciatingly boring.

My feeling is this: Lynch never wanted to make a new Twin Peaks. He basically made an 18-hour Inland Empire and funded it by slapping the name Twin Peaks on top and shoving in some of the old characters as window dressing. The only thing the returning characters have in common with their former selves is their names. Norma and Ed are made of cardboard, Andy and Lucy are a pair of blank-faced retards, Audrey is a raving harridan, Dr Jacoby is some kind of sub-Alex Jones conspiracy nutter, and Special Agent Dale Cooper, the heart and soul of Twin Peaks has been reduced to a mute, brain-dead zombie, who, so far, has had precisely one line of dialogue.

Visually, it's absolutely appalling. Nasty, brittle, cold digital videography, and badly shot, to boot. Hard to believe that Showtime gave Lynch a big budget, given how cheap it looks (and don't get me started on the shockingly bad CGI). Couple this with the almost complete lack of music and some of the worst acting I've ever seen and what's left is a stagey parody of Twin Peaks shot on an iPhone.

Lynch and Frost have basically taken everything that was good about the original series (old-fashioned things like character development, story, plot, visuals, humour, music, atmosphere) and trashed it, in the pursuit of a story nobody actually cares about. Honestly, does anyone really care where BOB came from? The character was an archetype, a symbol for "the evil that men do". Albert helpfully pointed this out in S2. The real story of Twin Peaks wasn't BOB or even Laura Palmer. It was the hidden lives of the townsfolk and the conflicts between them. Laura Palmer was a classic McGuffin. Her only purpose was to serve as a pretext for the arrival of Special Agent Dale Cooper, and Cooper was the protagonist through whose eyes we would discover the mysteries of the town. The original series had a strong protagonist. This series has no protagonist whatsoever. We are adrift in a sea of...stuff.

The tone is unremittingly bleak and misanthropic with virtually no human warmth to balance it out or give it context. Weirdly, despite the graphic nature of the violence this time around, it's nowhere near as frightening or disturbing as Maddy Ferguson's murder was. So what's the point? The characters that are killed are completely undeveloped, so when they finally get stabbed/decapitated/shot the reaction from the audience is one of "meh". The only truly upsetting moment was Richard running over the little boy, and that just felt like tawdry gratuitous shock tactics for the sake of it.

Ah, they say, what about Episode 8, one of the most ground-breaking pieces of visual art ever made, they say. I respectfully disagree. All I saw was a rather bad rehash of the stargate sequence of 2001 bolted on to Night of the Living Dead. Oh, and by the way, I was a teenager in the nineties, and "the" Nine Inch Nails were always nothing more than a joke band fronted by a man who took himself way too seriously and who made crappy sub-industrial electro-rock for white middle-class suburban goths. I know that he's Lynch's pal, but Trent Reznor belongs back in 1997, along with Marilyn Manson, Balthazar Getty's soul patch and Patricia Arquette's stripper heels.

As a Lynch fan, I've defended him many times when people who don't like his films dismiss him as a self-indulgent piss-taker and his fans as pretentious pseuds. Blue Velvet, to me, is a masterpiece. Mulholland Drive is one of my favourite films of all time. And yet, as I watch this new "Twin Peaks", I can't shake the feeling that Lynch is conforming to every negative stereotype that has ever been pinned on him; glacial pacing, bad acting, baffling non-sequitors, wilful obscurantism, meaningless symbolism masquerading as profundity, gratuitous and pointless violence, leery misogyny, and an antagonistic contempt for his audience. I can't tell you how sad this makes me.
And yet, and yet... I'll be here until the bitter end. I'm resigned to the fact that the show will go out with a whimper. Even if, in the unlikely event that the remaining five episodes turn out to be flawless, they still won't make up for what has everything that preceded them. We're at the point when we can stop kidding ourselves that it's going to get better.

Profoundly disappointed? Yep.

Some things I'd like to contest here:

It being "ugly" cinematographically: well yes, it looks nowhere near as cinematic or polished as shows like Fargo or True Detective etc. But from the early 00s forward Lynch has embraced the very raw look of digital, dating right back to its consumer beginnings. And complaints about bad CGI are imo completely worthless ones, because he's using CGI in exactly the same way he's used practical effects and paint and clay right back from Eraserhead through into the terrible composite face shots in the Twin Peaks pilot into Robert Blake in Lost Highway into the jitterbug in MD... it's just done digitally instead. When Dougie's melted into the little gold ball it is meant to look as crude and ridiculous as it does.

Some of the throwaway characters you mention are possibly valid criticisms, but I disagree about a few. Beverly's husband is important. It informs her relationship with Ben completely; it humanises her and explains her behaviour beyond being a simple TV trope. The zombie child in the car is an extremely memorable moment for me. It tops off a great sequence of sound and energy. Whether it returns or not I don't know but I don't really care if it doesn't.

Now, crucially: I think David Lynch DID want to continue Twin Peaks, but he had little interest in many of the characters that he left 25 years ago. I think it was telling when he referred to the "world" of Twin Peaks as being the thing that he loved, and it's the idea of taking a world that's been broken and depraved and potentially seeing it reborn (through Coop) that is the root interest in the story. Lynch (and Frost, judging from his Twitter) are very pessimistic about the state of culture and humanity today and it shows. For some this may not be justifiable enough to warrant the application of such an idea over a show that they loved, but for me it is. In a blanket kind of way it is pretty misanthropic, but there are beacons of hope and humanity dotted throughout. I've been touched many times over the hours we've had so far.

I don't want to try to turn everything back into a "Well, but like, that's the point, man!" thing but I really think a lot of the new show's portrayals of violence have to be seen in the context of the above too. When Ike the Spike stabs the woman to death, it's intentionally gratuitous in a way I can't remember seeing Lynch go for before. The casual treatment of murder, corruption, all forms of violence are symptomatic of a greater cultural problem. Something's bad wrong.

Some people just don't buy that I guess, or they feel it's heavy-handed or unwarranted... and that's fine. But I really feel it. And I'm glad Lynch & Frost decided to tell this story in this particular way.

Don't forget that important message they've passed on through this storyline - that dandruff can save your life #nevergetsold

[Venus]

In any event, I think things on this board are inevitably going to become increasingly divided over the last five Parts. I really hope things stay civil, particularly in this thread. I just want to thank mlsstwrt and many of the other contributors in this thread -- while I haven't agreed with many of the opinions expressed herein, checking in on this thread has been an essential part of my TP:TR experience, and not in a gloating "haha, these guys aren't enjoying it and I am" kind of way. The arguments and opinions in this thread have challenged me to analyze why certain things connect with me, and to reflect more on what does and doesn't work in this season. And I really admire all of you guys for sticking it out to the end, despite how painful that must be, so you can form a fully-reasoned opinion based on the entire work.

As gracious as ever Mr R, human and real. Thank you for your open mind.

[boske]

Persistence does pay off, the reward is right around the corner!

Part 2: Ray, I want those coordinates;
Part 8: Ray, I want those coordinates;
Part 13: Ray, I want those coordinates;

Once I take the experimental elements out of the script, the rest is simply shallow, boring, and predictable. Minus the dandruff part, there is no way that anyone could have predicted that.

[mlsstwrt]

In any event, I think things on this board are inevitably going to become increasingly divided over the last five Parts. I really hope things stay civil, particularly in this thread. I just want to thank mlsstwrt and many of the other contributors in this thread -- while I haven't agreed with many of the opinions expressed herein, checking in on this thread has been an essential part of my TP:TR experience, and not in a gloating "haha, these guys aren't enjoying it and I am" kind of way. The arguments and opinions in this thread have challenged me to analyze why certain things connect with me, and to reflect more on what does and doesn't work in this season. And I really admire all of you guys for sticking it out to the end, despite how painful that must be, so you can form a fully-reasoned opinion based on the entire work.

As gracious as ever Mr R, human and real. Thank you for your open mind.

Seconded. Thanks for the kind words Reindeer.

[boske]

In any event, I think things on this board are inevitably going to become increasingly divided over the last five Parts. I really hope things stay civil, particularly in this thread. I just want to thank mlsstwrt and many of the other contributors in this thread -- while I haven't agreed with many of the opinions expressed herein, checking in on this thread has been an essential part of my TP:TR experience, and not in a gloating "haha, these guys aren't enjoying it and I am" kind of way. The arguments and opinions in this thread have challenged me to analyze why certain things connect with me, and to reflect more on what does and doesn't work in this season. And I really admire all of you guys for sticking it out to the end, despite how painful that must be, so you can form a fully-reasoned opinion based on the entire work.

As gracious as ever Mr R, human and real. Thank you for your open mind.

Seconded. Thanks for the kind words Reindeer.

Thirded, thank you Reindeer.

[judasbooth]

There have been some interesting replies on this thread, but the case for the defence has been well made on many other forums/websites/blogs. I was a regular at welcometotwinpeaks.com before I found this forum. The threads there are broken up episode by episode and there is no board dedicated to the series in general. A curious thing I noticed was that after each episode, most people seem to be preoccupied with minutiae (what was the significance of that colour? what did that glitch signify? is that a code?) in an effort to ignore the gigantic elephant in the room - that the show isn't engaging on the most basic level. It's like (and I was guilty of this for a while) a lot of folk are bending over backwards to find something positive to say - endlessly dissecting and praising the detail and craftsmanship of the emperor's fancy new clobber as a way of taking their mind off the fact that he's standing there with his knob swaying in the breeze.

To defend the ugly look of the show and the amateurish effects as deliberate is no kind of defence at all. Whether it's accidental or deliberate, it's still ugly and jarring. Comparing it to Eraserhead is fallacious. Firstly, Eraserhead was made on a tiny budget and the effects were a product of necessity. Secondly, the were inventive and imaginative (necessity - mother of invention, etc). The CGI in the new TP just looks lazy and tossed off. The in-camera effects Lynch employed in previous films were vastly superior to the digital effects employed in the new TP. To give one example, Bill Pullman's jail cell metamorphosis in Lost Highway is an optical effect, but it works.

What about the claim that the nihilistic tone of the new series is an accurate reflection of Lynch and Frost's current worldview? I have major problems with this. But first, let's be clear, Lynch is a boomer, and like many of his generation, he seems to view the world as a kind of paradise lost - the idyllic perfection of the 1950s despoiled by evil and corruption. A lot of his previous work harkens back to this, from the strangely out-of-time town of Lumberton with its picket fences and manicured lawns to the original Twin Peaks with its bikers, twangy spring reverb rock n' roll and Sherilyn Fenn's tight sweater / saddle shoes combo. I mean (and please understand that I have no interest in starting a political debate) isn't the main driving force behind the current US government a reactionary need to go back to a fictional time when things were "better"?
Lynch, Frost and the rest of the boomers are the most privileged generation that have ever lived. Yet their worldview has become increasingly sour. It reminds me of the weaselly defence employed by low-rent rappers when accused of glorifying violence, greed or misogyny. They claim that they're just "tellin' it like it is" or "keepin' it real". The real skill would be acknowledging how it is, but telling it like it could be. What's better, creative art or psuedo-reportage masquerading as art?

Oh and, mtwentz, there is something that Lynch and Frost could have done to please everyone on this thread. They could have made a well-scripted, well-shot, well-directed, well-acted and well-edited piece of televisual art. They had everything laid out for them - a budget, complete artistic control, a guaranteed number of episodes, and most of the original cast. They had an open goal, the goalie had been sent off and they chose to (deliberately) hoof the ball into the stand. At the other end of the pitch. The new series can only be assessed on its own merits. Much like Norma's food at the RR. I mean, you had to judge it objectively, didn't you? You couldn't just give Norma a free pass just because she was your daughter...

Whose idea was it to bring Diane into this? Laura Dern could have been cast as anyone and been as wonderful as always, yet she's stuck playing this redundant character. Let's get this straight - Diane is an unseen character. She was never meant to be on screen. Her primary purpose was as a narrative device - Cooper's personal Basil Exposition. Everyone who watched Twin Peaks the first time around formed an idea in their head of who Diane was. Showing her onscreen completely destroyed that. The power of unseen characters comes from the very fact that you never see them. Think Maris Crane from Frasier, The PM in The Thick of It, Norm's wife in Cheers etc. Diane it merely one of several examples of minor characters being elevated to an undeserved level of significance. Gordon Cole should have been left as an eccentric bit-part. Albert Rosenfield was a small, but pivotal, character whose skill as a pathologist served as an important driver of the narrative. Now we're supposed to take him seriously, not merely as the finest pathologist in the FBI, but as one of a secret group of inter-dimentional alien/demon hunters?

As I said in a previous post, nobody really cares where BOB came from. That was never the point. Likewise, Laura Palmer. She was a McGuffin, a plot device. Now, apparently, she wasn't just a promiscuous teengage cokehead, she was actually a Christ-like saviour, sent down from a parallel dimension to do battle with a demon who entered our world via a tear in the space-time continuum. Typing that out actually makes it even more preposterous. S2 was criticised for drifting way to far from the original point of the show. S3, instead of correcting this, has actually compounded it and then some. Or maybe it's just too much for my bourgeois sensibilities? To hell with verisimilitude - the is Art, doncha know?

Be honest, if the script had leaked and someone had told you that the new show would take place mostly outside Twin Peaks and that the main plot would revolve around insurance fraud in Las Vegas(!) you'd have quite reasonably dismissed it as a silly hoax. I can't shake the feeling that we're all the butt of a massive joke. Ha-bloody-ha.

[RedRum]

More and more, as I read posts by many people who keep staunchly defending this season, it becomes clear that many, not all, of them are against any criticism of Lynch whatsoever, to the extent of dissing the original series because it wasn't "pure Lynch"! I find this viewpoint mind-boggling, to be honest, since the collective love and admiration for the original series is what made THE RETURN possible.

Sent from my Lenovo A2020a40 using Tapatalk

Its because people (myself included) have invested so much emotion and thought and Twin Peaks has influenced us heavily over the last 26 years... that's a much personal investment in the series, its phycologically hard to reconcile honest thoughts and feelings when augmented by that kind of entrenched admiration when faced with Season three.

It took me until episode 13 to outwardly face what I was feeling and thinking and be totally honest with myself.... Twin Peaks Season three is NOT a return... its not a continuation...

Those that keep saying they love it are like looking at a Monnet painting with a magnifying glass and saying you love what you see. That’s fine but they are NOT appreciating the full picture or able to do so with what little information there is to hand... Sure they might like the pretty dot patterns in some way but its not what it is supposed to be.

[boske]

I keep thinking about the structure (or the lack of it) in the Return. I mean, we get pumped about this having something to do with Hawk's heritage, and then all of a sudden it turns out it is about a nickel and a bathroom stall (very classy, not!) that lead to missing diary pages that lead to nowhere (yet?)

And then, I realize what the structure reminds me of. All these plot threads seem each like a thread of a spiral that all converge into a single point of nothingness, just like water being flushed down the toilet. Each of the 18 parts then becomes a horizontal or diagonal cross-section of this vortex culminating in a black hole of nothingness.

[Venus]

I keep thinking about the structure (or the lack of it) in the Return. I mean, we get pumped about this having something to do with Hawk's heritage, and then all of a sudden it turns out it is about a nickel and a bathroom stall (very classy, not!) that lead to missing diary pages that lead to nowhere (yet?)

And then, I realize what the structure reminds me of. All these plot threads seem each like a thread of a spiral that all converge into a single point of nothingness, just like water being flushed down the toilet. Each of the 18 parts then becomes a horizontal or diagonal cross-section of this vortex culminating in a black hole of nothingness.

Yes it is like a dream, where a random series of events happen that don't connect. 'We live inside a dream'. But when it comes to the continuation of the show Twin Peaks, for me it doesn't work.

Maybe the last few episodes will be mind blowing. Or maybe the ending will end up frustrating the hell out of everyone, including those who are enjoying the show. Time will tell.

[boske]

I keep thinking about the structure (or the lack of it) in the Return. I mean, we get pumped about this having something to do with Hawk's heritage, and then all of a sudden it turns out it is about a nickel and a bathroom stall (very classy, not!) that lead to missing diary pages that lead to nowhere (yet?)

And then, I realize what the structure reminds me of. All these plot threads seem each like a thread of a spiral that all converge into a single point of nothingness, just like water being flushed down the toilet. Each of the 18 parts then becomes a horizontal or diagonal cross-section of this vortex culminating in a black hole of nothingness.

Yes it is like a dream, where a random series of events happen that don't connect. 'We live inside a dream'. But when it comes to the continuation of the show Twin Peaks, for me it doesn't work.

Maybe the last few episodes will be mind blowing. Or maybe the ending will end up frustrating the hell out of everyone, including those who are enjoying the show. Time will tell.

That dream may turn out to be a nightmare.

Five parts is like two movies' length. Can it be salvaged? Yes. Will it happen though? I am increasingly skeptical that the damage can be undone at this moment.

[mtl]

gotta light?

[Venus]

gotta light?

...so we can see through the darkness and fog of the script? Nope, don't have one on me.

[boske]

gotta light?

Hey! We can't see you, our monitors are not properly callibrated...

[Rialto]

Random thought: is Norma's extra special cherry pie, made with local, organic ingredients, the only thing that can bring Coop back from Dougie-land?

[Rialto]

In seriousness though: Judasbooth, AnotherBlueRoseCase, I feel you. Don't need to add more than that.

My logical brain tells me that everyone likes different things, each to their own, art is subjective, etc. My visceral, lizard brain is screaming at me that S3 is utter shite. So disappointed.