Twin Peaks re-reviews

[Gabriel]

Snark is an unfortunate disease spread more than ever by the Internet. It targets the joy people find in something and bluntly, unnecessarily undermines that enthusiasm with a combination of wilful ignorance, wilful misconception and general sarcasm. That said, I didn't hate the bmd reviews. They were often uncomfortably on the money.

Thing is, though, Lynch's stuff has a lot heart, even in his darkest works. And snark is easy in such circumstances.

[David Locke]

Yeah, that was a great Dissolve article (and by the way, what a shame it is that that site is no longer -- it was one of the very best on the web for insightful film discussion and doesn't seem to have a real successor).

Snark is an unfortunate disease spread more than ever by the Internet. It targets the joy people find in something and bluntly, unnecessarily undermines that enthusiasm with a combination of wilful ignorance, wilful misconception and general sarcasm. That said, I didn't hate the bmd reviews. They were often uncomfortably on the money.

Thing is, though, Lynch's stuff has a lot heart, even in his darkest works. And snark is easy in such circumstances.

Exactly -- Lynch's work invites postmodern snark and derisive above-it-all ironic laughter precisely because it's so sincere. I would place Lynch as, if not fully a modernist, then certainly more of a modernist than postmodernist filmmaker, partly due to this sincerity and this belief in the possibility of Good triumphing over Evil (even if it doesn't always necessarily do so). Some people would cite Blue Velvet as a postmodern film that snickers at its impossibly naive amateur detectives, but Lynch isn't doing that at all. The closest he gets to that kind of attitude is in Wild at Heart and even there you have a very passionate and deeply felt romance. Basically, I think he very very rarely looks down on his characters. Lynch takes film seriously, and more importantly he takes morality and life and death seriously -- he's on the opposite side of the spectrum from someone like Tarantino, who just mixes and matches various forms with no regard to the world outside the cinema.

But another reason why Lynch's films invite many people to laugh or snicker is that they are so uncanny and uncomfortable in how they work, so different from the films that most people are used to. It's easy to look down on and laugh at the unfamiliar and the weird.

[enumbs]

For sure. One of Lynch's greatest assets is his way of taking potentially cornball moments and committing to them with such intensity that they somehow become transcendent, e.g. Laura Dern's Robin speech in Blue Velvet, or the scenes between James and Donna in the pilot (the likes of which often felt goofy in the hands of other directors).

[N. Needleman]

I think opinion has turned more and more on FWWM in at least the last decade, though I think The Entire Mystery and the new series will definitely help with that and continue to do so. As for the finale, many sites I know have often said the finale was a masterpiece (directed by Lynch, natch) but the rest of Season 2 was a hash, which just isn't so. BMD/Faraci's site prides itself on being unctuous and is not really a great barometer, IMO.

There will be quasi-progressive thinkpieces about TP as the new show approaches and airs, and many of them will be lazy and, I suspect, attack Lynch's use of female characters. The problem is they're about 25 years too late and Lynch will never care. Nor will the show's overall audience, IMO. Whatever people write about Twin Peaks, it has always stood the test of time. To me it's somewhat fruitless to worry about how people will perceive it during or after this, because I think time and legend has already made TP immortal. That's never going to change. It wasn't able to be dismissed despite being driven into the dirt for much of the '90s, it continued to hold a lasting appeal and a place in countless "best of TV" lists and articles, it survived into syndication and streaming, and it's stronger than ever now. It is what it is. It is television history, it's in no danger of being lost or dismissed again.

[LostInTheMovies]

Fire Talk was an interesting beast - I nearly bailed when one guest (in, I think, the second episode) boasted about how cool he and the co-hosts were for living in L.A. and working in the film industry and how any (completely hypothetical) listeners who were going to spoil the mystery for the newbie host were just jealous losers who weren't nearly as cool as them. It was delivered as comedy but more of the smug you-know-this-is-true variety than self-parody. However, I kept with it and enjoyed the TV writer's room perspective that a lot of guests brought to it. That 3-month delay before the final episode annoyed the hell out of me though. I wonder if they'll ever get to FWWM.

Twin Peaks podcasts in general are an interesting subject. A while back I listened to a few and told myself that's enough, no more, how many times can you hear different people talk about the same material? Eventually I broke down and am now listening/have listened to about seven or eight I think lol (and been fortunate to participate in a few, via long-ass listener feedback and/or guest spots). I find each has its own flavor that brings something interesting to the table. But YMMV depending on the approach.

[LostInTheMovies]

There will be quasi-progressive thinkpieces about TP as the new show approaches and airs, and many of them will be lazy and, I suspect, attack Lynch's use of female characters.

I'm really curious about this myself. It seems like in 1990, there was a general feeling - among people who gave it any thought at all - that the show (and Lynch) was sexist and/or misogynist and defintely not progressive (Lynch's favorable opinion of Ronald Reagan got a lot of play). The most famous example would be Diana Hume George's article for Ms. A lot of the reviews of FWWM, when they aren't busy avoiding the subject of incest altogether, pin the film as a kind of BDSM fantasy for Lynch in which he gets to gleefully torture female characters. It seems like within a year or two of the film, the feminist defenses started coming from scholars like Diane Stevenson and Martha Nochimson. At the risk of generalization, it seems like both the critiques and defenses came from what might be called a "second-wave" perspective.

Today, the show seems to be really popular among young viewers who are heavily into the social justice aspects of the Tumblr/Twitter/blog-osphere and I've only seen a few criticisms of Twin Peaks from a feminist perspective (and those I have seen are usually outweighed by praise from the same party). More often it seems to be celebrated - usually for things other than its politics, but occasionally its politics too - at a time when many other pieces of media are being put under a much harsher microscope. (The exception was the spate of essays on how Twin Peaks started the "dead girl" trend a year and a half ago, some of which weren't entirely unfavorable.) I wonder if this is a function of Twin Peaks still safely being a cult show - not quite attracting enough attention (as it did in 1990) to be taken down a peg or for a backlash to form. And therefore if its return to Showtime will draw the attention of more skeptical/hostile writers or commentators, who aren't coming to it because they want to but because they have to and may be harder to persuade.

David Lynch, despite apparently moving leftward politically (he endorsed Obama and criticized Romney in 2012 - albeit in terms about as sophisticated as his celebration of Reagan's brush-clearing abilities in the 80s!) and becoming more outspoken about peace, love, etc. since his rebirth as a prophet for TM, has often criticized political correctness and avoided overt social-consciousness in his art. I wonder if this will come back to bite him now or if enough people have a friendlier framework through which to view him than they did 25 years ago.

[MasterMastermind]

Yeah, there will be great feminist critique of this new season, but it won't be the day-after hot takes we'll see flooding jezebel and the like. I had to make myself quit with the Twin Peaks podcast as well, it seems like the speculation kept spiraling further and further out of control just to find stuff to talk about (I remember a few months ago hearing something to the effect that bailing on Twin Peaks was Lynch's plan all along, for instance).

Also, re: the idea Lynch's movies may be slyly post-modern mockery of his characters, I've always wondered if that was the misconception Roger Ebert took to some of Lynch's work, until Lynch's approach finally clicked for him with The Straight Story. He'd talked about how he went back and watched Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, etc. and liked them more the second time around.

Also, re: Lynch's attack on Mitt Romney was one of the funniest, aphoristically cogent political takes I've read in awhile.