Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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Rialto wrote:
Venus wrote:
Rialto wrote:For those who are truly, profoundly disappointed, I highly recommend the last edition of The Twin Peaks Podcast. Not for those who loved it with reservations, but personally I found it hilarious: https://itunes.apple.com/ie/podcast/the ... 0392072773

It's probably the most enjoyment I've derived from the whole season...
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll make a note to listen to this when I get some down time. Cheers for the heads up! :)
Like hanging out with a bunch of buddies who share your pain - which I needed, as no-one I know has watched the new season!
Hey thanks so much. Glad it was cathartic for you. :)
Kilmoore wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:The joy of not getting answers is that we can theorize for years to come.
Yes, we can theorize about things like maybe Audrey is actually hiking in the arctic and just had a nightmare, which is why her background is white when she looks in the mirror. Or we can speculate that Mr. C is actually looking for more playing cards because he wants to become a magician. Both of these theories have as much proof in the episodes as pretty much any other.

The point is, looking for the answers isn't fun when none exist in the first place.
We decided that Audrey was on one of those UFOs from Mark Frost's book. It's as valid an answer as any. :P
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by DangerMo »

nick1218 wrote:well said. I watched Lynch an Artists Life before I watched the last 4 eps. He really is a fairly bad painter and sculptor as well. I am really reassessing his career now feeling I was duped. How does a man that makes such a great film as Blue Velvet (which he wrote alone) get so bad as he ages and gets more and more indulgent. Well heck I just answered my own question. he is very lucky to have his career. That was something I was thinking when I watched that documentary, it came down to one person's very unlikely decision to give him a grant for AFI. he seemed to be a token non filmmaker who was the last person to get chosen for that group of grants.
Yet again, and I think that's what people are still failing to see about the reactions to TPTR : "to each his own tastes".
There was a majority of people who dismissed Pïcasso, when he was still alive, after his Blue Period. They just didn't "get" his paintings anymore once he'd moved on to more abstract paintings.
Yet, nowadays, a majority of people and/or art critics praise his most abstract paintings... Following the general tone of this thread, I guess this makes a majority of people Picasso Balls Lickers...

On another note, and still on that "to each his own tastes", I just finished listening to the last A Twin Peaks Podcast (hi, Matt, Mel, Caitlin, Brad, I still like you guys), and someone, possibly their guest, was comparing the ending of TPTR to the ending of The Prisoner, putting one against the other, basically praising the fact that the Prisoner's ending had some plot, some story, even though that was weird as fuck, as opposed to TPTR's ending. Yet, you have to remember that a majority of watchers, back then, was infuriated by it, considering it meaningless and abolute crap. To the point that MacGoohan had to "flee" the country (according to the legend, he was afraid of physical violence, more likely he must have known that it was going to be extremely difficult for him to finance any new project he might have had). We NOW have the impression that everyone agrees that it was indeed a milestone TV show, and its ending a thing to cherish... but it's only because people have vastly re-evaluated it since.

Then, on this idea that with his ageing Lynch might actually have lost "it", whatever talent he supposedly had, another example comes to mind. James Ellroy... A damn fine writer who, to appease his publisher who was afraid of publishing a 1000 pages long crime novel, went back on the job and started slashing through his full sentences to create a new, more telegraphic, style. This was considered horrendous by some of its first readers, but that's a technique that he has since completely mastered, making his writing even more powerful. The same way, I do think that Lynch has honed his talents (painting, music and film/video making). And I do think that what he's done here is "complete". It is just his way of telling a story now, you got to adapt yout way of watching the same way you had to adapt your way of reading in my previous example.

So, in short, I'm not a Lynch fan, I'm not a fan of anything, Lynch's work happens to speak to me, to my cultural background and to my emotional responses to visual arts, the same way I have affinities with other creators, famous or not. This is not a high brow vs low brow contest, and I don't consider myself as an intellectual (I'm mostly blue collar). But lots of complaints I've read so far relate to basic anti-intellectualism. Lots of people think the people behind TPTR gave a big fuck off to the viewers, I think they actually had great expectations from the viewers, but something tells me they were realistic enough to consider that lots of people would just not drink it fully the first time around, they set up new rules and, very likely, lots of showrunners/directors are gonna take some cues from it, and once this new "guidebook" has been digested by the largest audience, TPTR will look different to lots of people. The same way people like Eisenstein came up with new ways to tell visual stories and 10 years later, their techniques were used by every other mainstream directors.

PS : I know you don't like people who liked the show to chime in, but rest assured that I am very respectful to each and everyone of you who disliked TPTR, I only browse through this thread once in a while to see if a/ somet interesting point/issue has been raised (some points which have been raised as being "bad" about that show actually pointed me to things I hadn't noticed before and which sometimes help me think differently about what I've watched) b/ to hopefully see that some of you are getting a little warmer to this season, which would reassure me that you won't spend the rest of your life thinking you just wasted almost 18 hours of your time :-) PEACE
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by sylvia_north »

Kilmoore wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:The joy of not getting answers is that we can theorize for years to come.
Yes, we can theorize about things like maybe Audrey is actually hiking in the arctic and just had a nightmare, which is why her background is white when she looks in the mirror. Or we can speculate that Mr. C is actually looking for more playing cards because he wants to become a magician. Both of these theories have as much proof in the episodes as pretty much any other.

The point is, looking for the answers isn't fun when none exist in the first place.
It's just going to be a metric ton of asinine and badly written fan fiction. Even the scholars couldn't get on the same page about Inland Empire.

Audrey is in a nuthouse. Part 17 is Back to the Future 2. It was all Cooper's dream. Embarking on a future of infinite debates is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship in the middle of a purple sea with no rescue in sight. A fool's errand. For those that think it's a worthwhile effort and not a kind of hell, have fun. I'm okay with the open ended mood piece. I "get" it. I even like it.

I listened to the TP Podcast and one of the listener feedback says "the death of art is apathy"
TVLINE asked DL, "Were you ever concerned about doing all of this work and then having Showtime — or any other outlet — decide not to produce it?
"Sure, there [was] a risk. It would’ve been OK if nobody wanted to do it." [Laughs] http://tvline.com/2017/05/19/twin-peaks ... vid-lynch/ <--- these are the words of someone who gives much less of a f*ck than fan theorists who can't admit they are irrevocably lost.
Last edited by sylvia_north on Wed Sep 13, 2017 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
Too Old to Die Young > TP S03
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by bowisneski »

waferwhitemilk wrote:Looking back on it all, I think the plot and acting of the original Twin Peaks wasn't all that great either (to me anyway), in fact it was probably pretty average at best. But what elevated it to something great was:

1. the beautiful way they filmed it, with beautiful locations and a beautiful wardrobe for all the actors
2. the beautiful music
3. the terrible sense of dread of BOB and the red room scenes lurking behind it all

With The Return the plot again wasn't that great, in fact i'd call it below average, but what let it down (to me anyway) wasn't that. It was the ugly digital look of it, the lack of music and a lack of dread. In Lynch's defense: digital is the norm now, music is somewhat played out in general, Silva passed away and MJA made it impossible to hire him. I no longer think Lynch made it bad on purpose, he probably did his best and a lot of people are happy with it, so that's great. But it wasn't for me. Still, i had a lot of fun reading this thread every week. I'd get up a half hour early every monday to watch the first half of the new epi, already looking forward to what you all would make of it this time, then read the topic during work (lol) and watch the second half when back at home. So thank you all for that, thanks to mlsstwr for daring to start the topic, and thanks to dugpa forums for being gracious enough to tolerate it! If anyone here wants to be profoundly disappointed all over again, Morrissey has a new album coming out midnovember. :mrgreen: Take care!
I would agree that it wasn't great, but it was focused and even when it lost focus, the plot still grew out of the central narrative and just spiraled out. That's why I think that most of the Twin Peaks stuff could've been cut or moved to create a tighter focus. Right from the beginning of the original show, every character we met along the way we knew how they spiraled out of Laura Palmer(or at least we did within the first hour or so of the Pilot if I'm remembering correctly). In TR, we are introduced to arcs like Becky and Steven and Beverly and Tom without them growing out of the story. Looking at it from a narrative sense, the first scene of Ben we should have gotten was the 315 key arriving which could have just been part of the Beverly intro and Jerry weed business stuff, then the Ben and Beverly relationship and Jerry high in the woods could've grown out of that. Then you could have had Jerry watching Jacoby which could have then cut to Nadine. For Bobby, Shelly, Becky, and Steven we should've seen Bobby on the case and then flourished out in to the Becky, Steven, and Shelly of it all from Bobby. For this season, Cooper was the goose that laid the golden egg instead of Laura, so to tighten it and make the plot stronger everything should have grown out of that.

But the problem with that, with the story they told us, would have been that we really wouldn't have seen any of Twin Peaks, outside of the sheriff's station until probably Part 6 at least. People are already upset with how little time we spent in Twin Peaks, so I'm not sure how that would have gone over. The other problem is that they didn't write it as episodes and just wrote one long script that essentially just dropped us in to a show in progress in it's 27th season, only we didn't get to see seasons 3 - 26. Though this could have been remedied if the first Frost book bridged the gap and TSHoTP could've been released after this series concluded.

I totally agree about digital, but I think the use of music/sound design(even if I would have like more Peaks-y music in the scenes set in Twin Peaks) and mood/dread really worked well in TR as a whole. Though I agree that the dread no longer really grew out of BOB and the Red Room specifically, it was more grown out of the way those things had effected our world in the last 25 years and the way they were solidified in combination with the way the world has changed.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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future's past wrote:I love you guys, but if you really think that Frost and Lynch are writing to specifically piss you guys off, then I reckon you're way off. They are not. Wonderment is cool and it's not all about the payoff.
For what is worth, writing to piss people with certain expectations off is an argument I've seen made more often by people who were satisfied with the show than those who weren't.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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powerleftist wrote:
Steve Liam wrote:We don't know that the image on the playing card is an image of Judy. You're projecting that meaning onto it. There's actually a reason to think that it isn't Judy - when Evil Cooper meets with Jeffries, Evil Cooper asks Jeffries, multiple times, "Who is Judy?" So, Evil Cooper doesn't seem to know the first thing about Judy.

Even if it is an image of Judy, we have no idea what Judy is capable of, nor do we have any idea what Evil Cooper wants from her. "It would obviously be an atomic bomb level catastrophe." Again, you're projecting that meaning onto it. We don't know anything about it.
People are just assuming that Experiment = Judy. They are also assuming that Experiment = Symbol from the card.

Both of these things are just assumptions based on sheer speculation. The irony is that people that are pretending to be OK with not getting answers, are also jumping to manufacture them.
The reason people are assuming Experiment = Judy = (and i'll add) whatever posses Sarah = Mother is because neither of those was developed enough for there to be enough differentiation between those entities. Basically there's so little to them that you can't exclude them being one and the same. The problem is that whether they are the same or separate entities is actually irrelevant.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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DangerMo wrote: So, in short, I'm not a Lynch fan, I'm not a fan of anything, Lynch's work happens to speak to me, to my cultural background and to my emotional responses to visual arts, the same way I have affinities with other creators, famous or not. This is not a high brow vs low brow contest, and I don't consider myself as an intellectual (I'm mostly blue collar). But lots of complaints I've read so far relate to basic anti-intellectualism. Lots of people think the people behind TPTR gave a big fuck off to the viewers, I think they actually had great expectations from the viewers, but something tells me they were realistic enough to consider that lots of people would just not drink it fully the first time around, they set up new rules and, very likely, lots of showrunners/directors are gonna take some cues from it, and once this new "guidebook" has been digested by the largest audience, TPTR will look different to lots of people. The same way people like Eisenstein came up with new ways to tell visual stories and 10 years later, their techniques were used by every other mainstream directors.
That's just the thing. No one has much to complain about how the stories were visually represented (personally I think there were moments of pure brilliance) it's the lack of the underlying stories in the loosest possible meaning of story that it's the issue.
It's not about conventional narrative or anything like that. It's a matter of TR being a story about nothing once all is said and done. It's a side effect of being too lose on storytelling and character development (Cooper was reduced to a plot device). TR had no real story to tell. Everything I liked or even loved about The Return is brought down but the lack of context that would elevate it. This isn't anti intellectualism it's maybe lack of effort put in creative thinking. I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
I'd be much more interested in the take on Twin Peaks by most of the people who form theories and see the stories they do in TR than in Lynch's vision at this point.

Even if The Return will end up being influential it's not likely that the lack of narrative narrative and fragmental character development aspect of it will.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
You can't really call Inland Empire or Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive or even Eraserhead to be stories in the traditional sense, they have a central idea and a basic structure which they hang scenes round, but stories? Lynch has never really done plot development. Even the straight story is just a situation, a guy goes on a journey from A to B, things happen along the way. There are loads of writers whose books are like this, too. You would be hard pressed to find much of a story in a book by J G Ballard: his books explore set ups, situations, worlds. Usually focusing on a small group of people whose characters never develop. You could say the same for Celine, Burroughs, Bernhard, etc. Nobody reads Beckett for the plot. Alot of so-called ' poetic' literature or film-making is like this. There are ' stories' but not much of a story, as such. If you want plot development, go elsewhere. There's enough of it about.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by DangerMo »

mine wrote:
DangerMo wrote: So, in short, I'm not a Lynch fan, I'm not a fan of anything, Lynch's work happens to speak to me, to my cultural background and to my emotional responses to visual arts, the same way I have affinities with other creators, famous or not. This is not a high brow vs low brow contest, and I don't consider myself as an intellectual (I'm mostly blue collar). But lots of complaints I've read so far relate to basic anti-intellectualism. Lots of people think the people behind TPTR gave a big fuck off to the viewers, I think they actually had great expectations from the viewers, but something tells me they were realistic enough to consider that lots of people would just not drink it fully the first time around, they set up new rules and, very likely, lots of showrunners/directors are gonna take some cues from it, and once this new "guidebook" has been digested by the largest audience, TPTR will look different to lots of people. The same way people like Eisenstein came up with new ways to tell visual stories and 10 years later, their techniques were used by every other mainstream directors.
That's just the thing. No one has much to complain about how the stories were visually represented (personally I think there were moments of pure brilliance) it's the lack of the underlying stories in the loosest possible meaning of story that it's the issue.
It's not about conventional narrative or anything like that. It's a matter of TR being a story about nothing once all is said and done. It's a side effect of being too lose on storytelling and character development (Cooper was reduced to a plot device). TR had no real story to tell. Everything I liked or even loved about The Return is brought down but the lack of context that would elevate it. This isn't anti intellectualism it's maybe lack of effort put in creative thinking. I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
I'd be much more interested in the take on Twin Peaks by most of the people who form theories and see the stories they do in TR than in Lynch's vision at this point.

Even if The Return will end up being influential it's not likely that the lack of narrative narrative and fragmental character development aspect of it will.
There are so many different forms of narrative fictions, not even considering non-narrative fiction....
Maybe we are to formatted and too much in a comfort zone.
Think of it this way, present someone with a very classic scene of discussion between two characters nowadays. You've got one take on character A, who asks a question, CUT, a take on character B who answers, CUT.
Show this to someone who has never seen edited footage, and he might not understand what is going on. Show him the same scene shot from a distance, so that both characters are in the field. A asks a questions, B answers, the frame hasn't moved, virgin spectator understands what's going on.

Submit said viewer to the first edited footage, time and time enough for him to assimilate what is going on, and there you go, you've got your lambda TV viewer who can easily manage most everything that is submitted to him. This is educating people to a new language. If it seems hard to fathom, consider sending a smartphone back in time to the middle age and as soon as Siri asks "What year is it", you'll have people screaming "Burn the witch"...

What you see as lack of narrative or fragmental character development might (I just say might) turn out to be a full blown new language. Recent examples, tons of them deriving from what the New Wave directors did back in the days : jump cuts, natural lighting, sound distortions, non linear storytelling... all of these were completely alien to viewers prior to the 60s, they're common use nowadays. This could be a next step in storytelling, or a miserable failure in trying to do so, time will tell...

Here, we've got something, according to me, which is not completely new, and it happens to have been made by a guy who's primarily a painter. You've got an 18 hours long work, which (tries to?) convey a general feeling by using a large palette of colors and strokes, a plethora of characters, situations, moods, which all combined give the general ensemble a specific meaning. Meaning which is up to the viewer to decide on. Look around you next time you go to a museum, any museum, this is what is happening to all the people around you : "what the fuck is this all about", "oh, fuck, it's like that guy lives inside my brain", "what the heck am I doing here", "I love those colors, it would look nice in my living room, what's the price tag", "I like the tits on that model", "I can see the Scientology influence on the technique used by that famous blind moldavian painter, and yes I'm a pompous prick", "why does that picture make me want to cry, I hope Mandie doesn't notice or she'll tell everyone at school that I'm a crybaby", "Wow, the buns on that guy!"

AND, I can only go along with what referendum said just above... lack of narrative is already well present in our culture, fiction or non fiction...
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by Rialto »

I wouldn't say there has been a strong thread of anti-intellectualism on this thread - over the course we've had some ranting and raving, but also some discussions on semiotics, gender theory, film theory, the novels of Joyce... this is far from a thread populated by those who shy from non-conventional narrative.

Personally, I wouldn't have cared what approach L&F took; if they deconstructed narrative, if they used not a single original character, if they never set foot in TP. I could have overlooked anything conventionally perceived as a flaw, if I hadn't been so damned bored.

I may be proved wrong, but I'll be literally eating my hat if TPTR has a significant influence on TV. It's a production with extremely niche appeal. Just as Inland Empire didn't change the face of independent filmmaking. Doesn't mean some people didn't like it. But it's appeal was extremely limited.

It's a fascinating study though of how someone can produce something with so little coherent narrative overall, yet with such a large amount of time dedicated to boring exposition dumps. How could something be so narrative-light and so weighed down by backstory at the same time?
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by Tailsun »

sylvia_north wrote:
Kilmoore wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:The joy of not getting answers is that we can theorize for years to come.
Yes, we can theorize about things like maybe Audrey is actually hiking in the arctic and just had a nightmare, which is why her background is white when she looks in the mirror. Or we can speculate that Mr. C is actually looking for more playing cards because he wants to become a magician. Both of these theories have as much proof in the episodes as pretty much any other.

The point is, looking for the answers isn't fun when none exist in the first place.
It's just going to be a metric ton of asinine and badly written fan fiction. Even the scholars couldn't get on the same page about Inland Empire.
I'm right there with you. I don't think I can read any more "theories" about the particulars of the narrative or mythology without my eyes glazing over. I've really enjoyed thinking through different readings of the finale but those final two hours exist in such a vacuum that trying to work through the other sixteen in a similar way seems like a big waste of time. I loved the experience of watching this thing but I can't decide whether or not to be upset about the "bigger picture."

Call it groundbreaking television or the ultimate swindle - having a bit of distance and seeing all the puzzle pieces laid out makes it extremely clear that it they were never intended to fit together in the first place.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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I accused TR of pretentiousness but that is not the same as anti-intellectualism.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by AhmedKhalifa »

referendum wrote:
I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
You can't really call Inland Empire or Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive or even Eraserhead to be stories in the traditional sense, they have a central idea and a basic structure which they hang scenes round, but stories? Lynch has never really done plot development. Even the straight story is just a situation, a guy goes on a journey from A to B, things happen along the way. There are loads of writers whose books are like this, too. You would be hard pressed to find much of a story in a book by J G Ballard: his books explore set ups, situations, worlds. Usually focusing on a small group of people whose characters never develop. You could say the same for Celine, Burroughs, Bernhard, etc. Nobody reads Beckett for the plot. Alot of so-called ' poetic' literature or film-making is like this. There are ' stories' but not much of a story, as such. If you want plot development, go elsewhere. There's enough of it about.
I beg to differ. Lynch has repeatedly said in interviews that for him films, unlike paintings and sculptures, are all about story. All his movies up until Inland Empire, were tightly if strangely constructed plots with surrealist overtones. TWIN PEAKS and FWWM were about stories and characters that were very well developed and that's why viewers cared about Cooper, Laura, Audrey and waited 25 years to know what happened to their stories. TPTR is arguably Lynch being lazy and self-indulgent to the point of taking TP, which in the pilot that Lynch cowrote, was marvellously written with well developed characters, and doing to it what he has been doing for years, resting on his laurels and recycling his absurdist schtick to the point of self parody, IMO.

Case in point, a quote from the late 90s, before he started to lose his way: "I fell in love with television for the purpose of telling a long story and staying with characters and getting some depth." - David Lynch (http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/quote ... on/tv.html)
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by wxray »

Tailsun wrote: Call it groundbreaking television or the ultimate swindle - having a bit of distance and seeing all the puzzle pieces laid out makes it extremely clear that it they were never intended to fit together in the first place.
We were warned. Lynch said we could watch the parts in any old random order... jokingly. He wasn't far off.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by DangerMo »

AhmedKhalifa wrote:
referendum wrote:
I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
You can't really call Inland Empire or Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive or even Eraserhead to be stories in the traditional sense, they have a central idea and a basic structure which they hang scenes round, but stories? Lynch has never really done plot development. Even the straight story is just a situation, a guy goes on a journey from A to B, things happen along the way. There are loads of writers whose books are like this, too. You would be hard pressed to find much of a story in a book by J G Ballard: his books explore set ups, situations, worlds. Usually focusing on a small group of people whose characters never develop. You could say the same for Celine, Burroughs, Bernhard, etc. Nobody reads Beckett for the plot. Alot of so-called ' poetic' literature or film-making is like this. There are ' stories' but not much of a story, as such. If you want plot development, go elsewhere. There's enough of it about.
I beg to differ. Lynch has repeatedly said in interviews that for him films, unlike paintings and sculptures, are all about story. All his movies up until Inland Empire, were tightly if strangely constructed plots with surrealist overtones. TWIN PEAKS and FWWM were about stories and characters that were very well developed and that's why viewers cared about Cooper, Laura, Audrey and waited 25 years to know what happened to their stories. TPTR is arguably Lynch being lazy and self-indulgent to the point of taking TP, which in the pilot that Lynch cowrote, was marvellously written with well developed characters, and doing to it what he has been doing for years, resting on his laurels and recycling his absurdist schtick to the point of self parody, IMO.

Case in point, a quote from the late 90s, before he started to lose his way: "I fell in love with television for the purpose of telling a long story and staying with characters and getting some depth." - David Lynch (http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/quote ... on/tv.html)
Yep, but everyone's got a different idea of what a story is.
Back in the days of the original TP, I remember seeing an interview of Lynch, in his favorite dinner, I think that was the one where they came up with the idea, with Frost, and he was talking precisely about that, what's a complete work, his idea of it. And he took an example that seemed dear to him : a duck... he described precisely why a duck's head was perfect and "complete", with the way the feathers were, the way the eyes were just right and just where they should be.... Can you see the abstraction here ? Watching, or thinking of that duck's head, he was seeing or imagining something that was complete, it all made sense to him. And I do think that, with no irony, no sarcasm, when he takes a step back and watches what he unfolded with TPTR, it IS, to him, a full and complete story. That my or your perception of it differs is just down to us. Think of the duck's head, if you don't look at it from the right angle, if you look at it while hoping to see, say, a dog's head, then you just won't see it, you'll see something that looks like something familiar but which you just can't understand.
What he's done here must be looked at carefully ("pay strict attention to details", "keep your eyes on the donut, not the hole", these are but a few of his favorite mantras...), it might just happen someday that something will click, something you'll hear, or something you'll experience, which will lead you to looking at it from another perspective...
Honestly, that's all I can wish to all of those who felt insulted by it so that they can make something better from that experience than feeling cheated.
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