Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

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LateReg
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by LateReg »

Soolsma wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 6:00 pm
The original:
“Look Balaki,” the king said. “Do you see that spider?”
“Yes,” said Balaki, “I see the spider moving along its web.”
“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.
“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.
“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”
I mean...that's it right there. Beautifully sums up the main thrust(s) of The Return.

And yes, he did introduce INLAND EMPIRE using the quote as well.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Mordeen »

I can't ever get back all the breath I wasted privately warning people that The Return was not going to be Memory Lane, but rather the dream of a man who left the Waiting Room and entered the Black Lodge with fear in his heart.

I just shrugged and I still shrug at the whole environment surrounding it.

18 hours encapsulating the eternal torment of being shown the world you cherished could never be saved no matter how hard or as many times as you tried. It encapsulates the desperation of Cooper and the fandom for answers and closure that simply don't exist.

It's all brilliant and tragic. Love it. Hate it.

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Moving Through Time. . .
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Jonah »

You know, that's an interesting point. We often hear something referred to it as being a "love it or hate it" kind of thing, but why not both? Lots of people seem to love The Return, a few seem to hate it, and then even more are mixed, perhaps both loving it and hating it (or at least liking it and disliking it). And shouldn't that be okay? Surely you don't have to love/like something or like/dislike something. Why can't it be both? All great art and all works of entertainment should be allowed to stir mixed emotions and feelings in people that can't easily be categorized into either love or hate. And with a sprawling, 18-hour part movie like The Return there's bound to be parts people love and like and hate and dislike - and parts they're neutral on or can't decide about. I think that's perfectly normal. Same for the original series too. I think people (including me) tend to get too caught up perhaps in summing up their "overall" impressions, leaning one way or the other, but the fact is you can have all sorts of contrary feelings about a particular project, perhaps still not sure how you feel about it or open to the fact that, though you may dislike it now, it may grow on you - or vice-versa.
I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Soolsma »

LateReg wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 10:12 pm
Soolsma wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 6:00 pm
The original:
“Look Balaki,” the king said. “Do you see that spider?”
“Yes,” said Balaki, “I see the spider moving along its web.”
“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.
“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.
“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”
I mean...that's it right there. Beautifully sums up the main thrust(s) of The Return.

And yes, he did introduce INLAND EMPIRE using the quote as well.
I'd say it beautifully sums op the main thrust(s) of (modern) Lynch. I feel it fits MD also very well. Not at all being in the 'stark reality is the real reality' camp, but rather watching it through glasses coloured by sentiments described in the above poem: This is true for the entire universe. It also suits LH and FWWM.
I really wonder at what point in his career he came across this first.

Regarding the sanskrit passage and The Return, I think what puts them in juxtaposition is the tone they end on. One might say that GoodcoopDoug and his family accomplished that enlightened life though.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Jasper »

I remember this passage, and it's good to see it again. I was, however, wondering if AXX°N N. was reporting that Lynch had expressed something specifically about the ending of s3 after the fact. That I would like to see, but I might be misunderstanding and any such statement might not even exist. (That being said, I do recall Lynch expressing something along the lines of "That's the end. You saw the end.")
Soolsma wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:10 am It also suits LH and FWWM.
You'd just mentioned Mulholland Drive, and when I read "LH" I immediately thought "Laura Harring," before realizing that you meant Lost Highway. :lol:
Soolsma wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:10 am I really wonder at what point in his career he came across this first.
I had earlier wondered when Lynch first came across the passage, and if he was familiar with it when he made FWWM, and most specifically the Phillip Jeffries, "We live inside a dream!" sequence, which obviously ties in with the Monica Bellucci dream (and more) in s3. Also, in FWWM, Laura awakens from a dream into yet another dream, then awakens from the second dream into what seems more like "reality," but which might be yet another layer or facet of dreaming (in this dream-weaving way of viewing things). On the other hand, perhaps what seems most like Laura's waking reality, being the one most like our own (with the caveat that each of our "dreams" of "reality" must differ somewhat from one another), is the final layer of dream, and what lies beyond it is transcendence and dissolution of everything but the soul, and thus of the "dream" itself. This might even arguably occur for Laura in different ways at the endings of FWWM and s3. Laura's removal of her face in s3 seems to indicate that she is in a state of awareness of her pure soul (indicated by the shining light), yet she's violently yanked out of there, apparently by Cooper's time-tripping escapades, and is found deep in illusion, or in a dream, as Carrie Page, in some permutation of Odessa, TX. That dream seems like it might have been destroyed by Laura's last-minute awakening (triggered by Cooper's question about the year) and the subsequent blackout.

And THAT ties right in with what kind of direction things might go in a hypothetical fourth season. It seems that they could go virtually anywhere.
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AXX°N N.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by AXX°N N. »

Jasper wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:00 pm I'm not sure that I've seen these comments. Do you have any idea where they might be found?
It was the interview he did with Cahiers du Cinema. The full interview is here, and there used to be a reddit post with a full translation that unfortunately was removed. You can still find snippets and people referring to various points, though, as in here and here. He was asked about the ending and went on a riff about different ages in Hindu belief, referring to our current age as an iron or 'dark age,' and described the ending as fitting because he sees it reflect our current circumstance:

"DL: (Laughter) If we lived in the golden age today, we would be at the end of Twin Peaks ... But we do not live there, we are in front of the Palmer house."

Note the deliberate wording here. He talks about an ending separate from the one we see, as if there's a difference between the ending of the season and where Twin Peaks 'ends.'
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Mordeen »

Jonah wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 2:17 am You know, that's an interesting point. We often hear something referred to it as being a "love it or hate it" kind of thing, but why not both?
I mentioned in a previous post that most people I'm acquainted with in the Fandom have a love/hate relationship with the overall show.

If I was to sum up The Return in two words?

Wonderfully Awful.

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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Soolsma »

AXX°N N. wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 6:01 am Cahiers du Cinema.
That was probably the most interesting interview Lynch ever gave on the return. I might be bothered translating it soon, with my half assed french combined with google translate.

Or do you have the link for the reddit post? It might be archived
Last edited by Soolsma on Sat Oct 16, 2021 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Brad D »

The Return is like a doomed first love that I meet twenty-five years after the fact, a love I could not forget or erase. So many things I’ve built up in my mind, expectations and ideals, built on both excitement and shortcomings that can’t be bridged together. A terrible idea to revisit and reconnect, yet one I don’t regret.

(I was fully prepared for a minimized original cast, a majority of scenes taking place out of town… and for all the spoilers I knew, was shocked I couldn’t really put a story together beforehand. I can now laugh at that mission) we all look at the return differently, and each viewpoint is valid
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by Jasper »

AXX°N N. wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 6:01 am
Jasper wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:00 pm I'm not sure that I've seen these comments. Do you have any idea where they might be found?
It was the interview he did with Cahiers du Cinema. The full interview is here, and there used to be a reddit post with a full translation that unfortunately was removed. You can still find snippets and people referring to various points, though, as in here and here. He was asked about the ending and went on a riff about different ages in Hindu belief, referring to our current age as an iron or 'dark age,' and described the ending as fitting because he sees it reflect our current circumstance:

"DL: (Laughter) If we lived in the golden age today, we would be at the end of Twin Peaks ... But we do not live there, we are in front of the Palmer house."

Note the deliberate wording here. He talks about an ending separate from the one we see, as if there's a difference between the ending of the season and where Twin Peaks 'ends.'
Thank you. :D

I recall the existence of this interview, but I don't think that I ever managed to read a full translation. It's a fascinating comment. (I'm assuming that it was translated into French, then translated from French back into English, but hopefully it's relatively accurate.)

What he might be saying is that the Twin Peaks universe (universes?) and the Twin Peaks story remains a place/thing of pain, conflict, and illusion, whereas a true ending would be a final golden transcendence of this turmoil, but that such a golden ending is currently impossible, perhaps because it is our own reality/age that is being reflected in the universe(s) of Twin Peaks.

There is, naturally, plenty of ambiguity. If Laura's scream destroys the illusory world of part 18, it doesn't necessarily mean that it destroys illusion altogether, or that it destroys negativity altogether (or at all). She hears her mother's call (from the pilot), so she might wake up back in the painful "reality" of FWWM (although she doesn't hear her mother's call in the pilot, because she's dead).

The dreamer, or at least one of the dreamers, might be Laura, who may have drempt the majority of what we know as Twin Peaks.

EDIT: Perhaps Laura is like the screamer who screams, then lives inside the scream.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by missoulamt »

Watching some of the episodes again, I feel the same way I did in the beginning. Many of the story arcs simply don't engage. Richard's hunt for money, the Mitchum brothers' plotting vengeance against Dougie, the drug addict acting out on Shelley's daughter, Jerry's struggle with his own foot. Some of these scenes are memorable and funny taken on their own while many of them just drag. With no relation to TP other than in name, they sure eat up a big part of those 17 hours.

There is no back story to the majority of these characters and you merely get a glance into their existence. Since you don't know them you don't really emphatize with them. Compare and contrast with the original, where you really got to know the characters and subsequently felt for them. Pete, Bobby, well, all of them.

Interestingly, all the scenes with Lynch and Ferrer are great. You have their backstory and their rapport is both funny and sharp. I don't mind the amount of space given to Dougie either. Maybe the end result would have been stronger if they had simply focused on fewer characters / storylines?
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by mtwentz »

missoulamt wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 11:14 pm Watching some of the episodes again, I feel the same way I did in the beginning. Many of the story arcs simply don't engage. Richard's hunt for money, the Mitchum brothers' plotting vengeance against Dougie, the drug addict acting out on Shelley's daughter, Jerry's struggle with his own foot. Some of these scenes are memorable and funny taken on their own while many of them just drag. With no relation to TP other than in name, they sure eat up a big part of those 17 hours.

There is no back story to the majority of these characters and you merely get a glance into their existence. Since you don't know them you don't really emphatize with them. Compare and contrast with the original, where you really got to know the characters and subsequently felt for them. Pete, Bobby, well, all of them.

Interestingly, all the scenes with Lynch and Ferrer are great. You have their backstory and their rapport is both funny and sharp. I don't mind the amount of space given to Dougie either. Maybe the end result would have been stronger if they had simply focused on fewer characters / storylines?
I'll just pull one example out there:

The Steven/Becky 'storyline' is a frightening look at what is happening all over rural America right now, as I write this.

Yes, the soap opera-fed public is looking for some kind of traditional story telling to hang onto. But that's not really the point of it.

The point is to show a very grim 'slice of life' in rural America. The addiction, the abuse, the hopelessness. Steven has no future, and no way to find a future. He has no skills, no means of earning an income. And Becky cannot break herself away from him. Steven's final end....and we are to infer, Becky's final end, makes perfect sense.

The final scene with Steven and Gersten is very bleak, with Gersten looking up at the sky in a drug induced haze. Is she seeing a vortex? I don't think so. She is looking for ....hope.

Postscript: For me, it felt like much of the 'subplots' were done in a 'slice of life' manner. I personally love 'slice of life' filmmaking. Florida Project is about my favorite new film of the last decade. I have had several friends complain 'nothing happens' in Florida Project. But that's not the point- the point isn't to contrive grand plots, but to show you how a hidden, forgotten class is living its life.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by mtwentz »

AXX°N N. wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:48 pm I really think it boils down to what you think is or isn't proper in terms of narrative, what it has to do in order to reflect or inform life, what your perspective is or isn't on what is meant by 'realism' and what obligations one has to convention and narrative tradition. Although, again, to pause and bring attention to the word 'tradition' as a potential misnomer: tradition in terms of modern storytelling is self-evident, yet the further back you go in the history of narrative, the less 'traditional' it is despite its age. Early epics and myths, from the Odyssey to the Bible, were intensely surreal and their treatment of character nowhere near the dominating current style and method.
Personally, I love all different types of narrative. Sometimes I don't want to strain my brain on a difficult work of art, and I can easily get caught up in a traditional soap opera or suspense thriller as much as anyone.

What irks me, and it probably shouldn't, is when viewers don't understand when a filmmaker is taking a different route. You can't take a piece of surrealistic film making and complain it fails at creating a traditional narrative. It can't 'fail' at something it is not trying to do.

I would be shocked if Unrecorded Night goes with a traditional, straightforward narrative style: The Return will like seem like 'The O.C.' in comparison to Unrecorded Night...
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by AXX°N N. »

Soolsma wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:46 pm Or do you have the link for the reddit post? It might be archived
Here it is. The translation was the first nest of deleted comments.

Wayback Machine didn't archive it, and unfortunately, the prior sites used to view deleted reddit comments have been taken down, with replacements operating momentarily and then also being taken down. A few months back, that wasn't the situation. I'll try to find if there's any currently working later if no one else has figured it out yet.
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Re: Season 4? Or is it over after this? Wisteria/Unrecorded Night? Something else? (Speculation thread.)

Post by AXX°N N. »

missoulamt wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 11:14 pm Since you don't know them you don't really emphatize with them. Compare and contrast with the original, where you really got to know the characters and subsequently felt for them.
We don't know Sarah Palmer or Leland Palmer at all when they're introduced, but I had no trouble empathizing with them in the Pilot as they learn the bad news. Really, every character was introduced grieving over a person we don't know yet, without knowing their relationship. I've said it before, but I feel S3 more closely resembles the Pilot than anything, because they both skip from character to character and setting to setting, not just later major ones but big scenes with minor characters like the school principal with his announcement, and are very "vignette"-esque.

With S3, a lot of inference has to be done, but I think it's possible to do and that room is left to be able to do it; I don't think the in-media-res nature of it is total chaos. Instead, I get the feeling that a lot of the intention of the viewing experience was to be in suspense and constantly piecing things together; Who is this? How have things changed for this to be like this? etc. That was pretty much the entirety of my weekly post-viewing discussion with friends, and it lended to some memorable analysis.

But overall, it's a result of 25 years passing and is pretty unavoidable without heavy exposition; I felt like the choice was taken to just dive into it and play around with how little information anyone has to work with. It almost feels like the 26th season of a show and we're tuning back in randomly. It seemed like the basis of every writing decision; but whether the execution worked for you is a different thing entirely. Personally, the characters worked for me despite no background. From the lady with the chihuahua to the grunts at the arm-wrestling silo, a lot of the enjoyment is just who the characters are in their particular scene.
Recipe not my own. In a coffee cup. 3 TBS flour, 2 TBS sugar, 1.5 TBS cocoa powder, .25 TSP baking powder, pinch of salt. 3 TBS milk, 1.5 TBS vegetable oil, 1 TBS peanut butter. Add and mix each set. Microwave 1 minute 10 seconds. The cup will be hot.
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