Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[Joe McCluskey]

Like many others in this thread, I have been pretty underwhelmed by this new season. I recently made a brief video talking about David Lynch's self-indulgence in THE RETURN, particularly when it comes to the character of Gordon Cole. Here's a link to the video if you have any interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVy51xrDzpk

Thanks for this. Well done, and calls out Lynch for some truly cringe-worthy moments and decisions.

Glad you liked the video. Lynch certainty had a lot of those types of moments!

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.

Good point, Ahmed. There is definitely a sharp contrast between Lynch's older films and some of his newer stuff like TP:TR. As SteveLiam mentioned in an earlier post:

...Eraserhead has a central theme, and most of its scenes exist to explore and service that theme. There's a cohesiveness to it a result, and it resonates emotionally. The Return was all over the place. It didn't seem to have anything in particular on its mind. But, it didn't really have a story, either.

I suppose the lack of plot/development in TP:TR would be fine if the abstract elements & other Lynchian aspects were intriguing enough, but they weren't, so it doesn't compensate for the lack of a real plot. TP is all about the characters, and Lynch decided that he would mostly abandon this crucial part of what made the original series so good. It makes you wonder if he's actually a fan of the TP world, or if he just wanted to indulge in his newfound interests under the TP name.

[referendum]

@AhmedKhalifa

it is clear there is a change from Lynch previous stuff to inland empire and this, towards a much looser and more open-ended structure. ( which can appear messy from some angles).

But what exactly was the plot development in TP? The whole thing was based round a mystery that was never intended to be solved. There was no actual detection, as such, there was a ' detective' who arrived at insights by dreams and intuition. The real detective is the viewer. There was zero plot development in FWWM, we knew the villain at the start, and we knew the ending. It explored a situation, relentlessly. Yes the character's were better drawn and less cardboard cut out ciphers in TP and FWWM, and the acting was less functional and wooden: the whole thing was wittier and more fleet of foot. The Lynch gurning in his own drama was happily kept to a minimum.

I watched Gone Girl last week. That has a plot which has obvious twists and turns, a forward motion, consequences ( they keep saying). Shifting positions. If you showed bits in the wrong order it would mess things up.

TP s1 and 2 and TP TR are lots of anecdotes and vignettes strung on a chain ( with a fixed START / END point) - stories, rather than ' a story' - it doesn't really matter which order the different things happen in. There is no plot '' reveal '' that changes everything (until the inside-out end, in both cases). TP has always been a different kind of fish ( in a percolator) . It has never been about plot, it always been about the incidental visuals, the POV, the strange ( ok very varied) characters that inhabit the town, a little snapshot of their lives, and of course the regular weird bits. It's about exploring a world, and staying in that world, discovering new details that add to the overall picture. That is my perception of it, anyway. So i guess we will have to differ on this one.

edit: [ ps, i have mentioned before here how TP TR reminded of Bunuel's films from the 60's and 70's - connected scenes with very little ( or no) main story, absurdism, weird mix of tone and genre, character doubling, narrative mirrors, time loops, deliberately stupid jokes, complete lack of interest in character development or motivation, but a dog-with-a-bone interest in the weirder backwaters of human nature - it's all there.]

[DangerMo]

About all those arguments over the lack of narrative or the lack of comprehension, and the evolution of Lynch's output, this comes to mind....
Alain Resnais kind of worked the other way round, his movies became clearer and clearer... and one of his earliest films would have gotten at least 10 times the rage TPTR generated amongst fans.
Last Year at Marienbad.

This is something a famous movie critic / essayist wrote about it :
"For Last Year at Marienbad does not exist in itself: The spectator vivifies the film (as the play of the regard brings to life the movement in Vasarely's canvases). Resnais and Robbe-Grillet make a call on the collective unconscious, having taken care to never inflect the narration in any such precise sense, but to let it drift. Their film is not an esoteric enterprise: it lays claim , on the contrary, to the largest audience.". That's more or less how I think TPTR will turn out...

The funniest thing about it being what Resnais did after some people lashed out on the non linearity, the non sequiturs and lack of clear storyline in his movie. He got his friends from the Cahiers du Cinema, one of the most famous movie magazine at the time, to publish a grid, with lots of spaces filled, then lines, with a note explaining that it was the plan they followed and that it would help people understand and enjoy his movie more...
And then some time after that, they published a grid, just as complex and unreadable, explaining that there was a mistake with the previous one...
And yet, years later, elements from that "piece of garbage" resurfaced in a blockbuster : "Inception"... it had been digested, so much that Nolan admitted he never saw the movie, yet its influence must have permeated throught other people's works which Nolan would then have seen...
So... maybe... 25 years from now, a young director will come up with something succesful and people might just discern some elements from TPTR...

[mine]

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...

I like your thought process. I completely agree with your reasoning. But when you use language as a metaphor you imply that there is an attempt at communicating something beyond merely an unconventional approach at composition and editing.
The Return as a whole had nothing to communicate. There was no larger narrative, feeling, mood, message, motif or anything else that ties the 18 hours together. And that's easy and convenient not innovative. The Return feels as if it was devoid of purpose because all it's constituting elements (and again some are brilliant) are just there. Putting more effort into getting the color of Diane's lipstick right than elevating the character beyond outdated stock character level isn't a new language it's a flaw.
The ending made me feel apathetic more than anything else. It was just over. It was completely predictable (because Lynch this and Lynch that) and none of the so called unresolved plots were interesting enough to made me care either way.

Sometimes I get the sense that Lynch is like a religion (Linchianity? Linchology? Linchism?). You don't try to understand Lynch, you just believe in him.

[sylvia_north]

everyone's got a different idea of what a story is.

There's at least 25 pages of telling us some day we'll like it, or condescendingly that 'one day it will click!' or other variations of wishing we'd change our attitude or try harder, like the disappointed audience is the problem, not TR.

Also, it's the 'eye of the duck,' not head, and DL was talking about slow and fast areas of a painting or movie, a jewel that's perfectly placed, set apart, but the S curve of the neck leads your eye there, It's not noticing "something familiar that you can't understand." For instance, and I guessed this one right according to Ray Wise, Leland and Teresa in the motel is the eye of the duck in FWWM. In WAH it's the car crash, in BV it's Ben's etc This was reprinted in Martha Nochimson's 1997 book The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, and many times over on the internet.

It doesn't matter what the artist's intent was or how much we should trust that it's a complete story to someone, of course it is, and this is why there's much talk of naked emperors here. "Art is never finished, only abandoned," they say. Like a turd, on the sidewalk. TR is complete, and so it the turd, which doesn't necessitate careful looking ("you must look at it carefully") at all if you smell it before you step in it.

We aren't "formatted in a comfort zone" and in need of re-"education" in a "new language." We know what abstractions are, what surrealism and expressionism are, what a visceral response to art feels like. This thread has stepped in the turd and picked it apart. The verdict here was never that it was inscrutable or overly deep, and most of us can handle abstract with no-solution, but that it was sometimes boring, the same old story plus wasted opportunities, and kind of dumb in parts.

Hopefully on page 300 this is the last time anyone needs to say it.

[AhmedKhalifa]

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.

I respectfully disagree. I have been an admirer of Lynch's work for decades. I know what he's about, or, at least, what he used to be about. His work, regardless of what you refer to in terms of what he thinks a story is, used to be about vision, originality, power, mood, and storytelling, even if it was on his own terms (like MD, FWWM, TP pilot, Blue Velvet, etc.), and that's why he was regarded as a visionary, and, personally, that's why I admired his work. Not anymore. IE and TPTR are self indulgent disasters, even if viewed through his rules and standards, and no amount of "you'll like it in the future" or "it's Lynch's vision" rhetoric is going to change that for me, since the problem with TR isn't simply its incoherence/abstractions, it's its shoddiness, ugliness, bleakness, and glaringly obvious self-indulgence and "greatest hits of Lynch" feel.

[AhmedKhalifa]

Well we almost made 300 pages guys! I wonder if we'll crawl over that mark at some point.

In the meantime thank you all for your contributions, its been real.

Hey, you got your wish! We're up to 300 pages now. Congratulations, everyone

[rugerblackhawk357]

I respectfully disagree. I have been an admirer of Lynch's work for decades. I know what he's about, or, at least, what he used to be about. His work, regardless of what you refer to in terms of what he thinks a story is, used to be about vision, originality, power, mood, and storytelling, even if it was on his own terms (like MD, FWWM, TP pilot, Blue Velvet, etc.), and that's why he was regarded as a visionary, and, personally, that's why I admired his work. Not anymore. IE and TPTR are self indulgent disasters, even if viewed through his rules and standards, and no amount of "you'll like it in the future" or "it's Lynch's vision" rhetoric is going to change that for me, since the problem with TR isn't simply its incoherence/abstractions, it's its shoddiness, ugliness, bleakness, and glaringly obvious self-indulgence and "greatest hits of Lynch" feel.[/quote]

I think you hit the nail on the head. I loved Twin Peaks, FWWM, MD, Even fucking Dune. As soon as TP:TR was announced I said "I'm in" without hesitation. I had no reservation about Lynch directing Season 3. Because I knew it was going to be absolutely fucking incredible. Then rationalization set in, then denial, then acceptance, then anger. The guy that made a video explaining how Gordon Cole took the place of Dale was right. This was Lynch's self-indulgence set loose without any kind of constraint. All the pointless characters. Actually making Laura's death not happen (and thus the beautiful ending of FWWM was invalidated). Bob getting punched into pieces by a guy wearing a dish-washing glove. I don't think it was laziness. I watched the entirety of "The Interview Project". He can still make awesome stuff.

[DangerMo]

everyone's got a different idea of what a story is.

There's at least 25 pages of telling us some day we'll like it, or condescendingly that 'one day it will click!' or other variations of wishing we'd change our attitude or not try harder, like the disappointed audience is the problem, not TR.

Also, it's the 'eye of the duck,' not head, and DL was talking about slow and fast areas of a painting or movie, a jewel that's perfectly placed, set apart, but the S curve of the neck leads your eye there, It's not noticing "something familiar that you can't understand." For instance, and I guessed this one right according to Ray Wise, Leland and Teresa in the motel is the eye of the duck in FWWM. In WAH it's the car crash, in BV it's Ben's etc This was reprinted in Martha Nochimson's 1997 book The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, and many times over on the internet.

It doesn't matter what the artist's intent was or how much we should trust that it's a complete story to someone, of course it is, and this is why there's much talk of naked emperors here. "Art is never finished, only abandoned," they say. Like a turd, on the sidewalk. TR is complete, and so it the turd, which doesn't necessitate careful looking ("you must look at it carefully") at all if you smell it before you step in it.

We aren't "formatted in a comfort zone" and in need of re-"education" in a "new language." We know what abstractions are, what surrealism and expressionism are, what a visceral response to art feels like. This thread has stepped in the turd and picked it apart. The verdict here was never that it was inscrutable or overly deep, and most of us can handle abstract with no-solution, but that it was sometimes boring, the same old story plus wasted opportunities, and kind of dumb in parts.

Hopefully on page 300 this is the last time anyone needs to say it.

Yet another proof that I am not a Lynch fanatic, I was just talking about that interview from memory, we're talking about a very good interview which I'd seen when it was first aired at least 20 years ago (could have been the now long gone excellent french movie TV show Cinéma Cinémas ?), an interview which I never felt the need to watch again... and the way I remembered it seems to actually go along with your more precise quote of it (could it be you're a Lynch fan ?). There is a duck eye in TPTR, and this is a finite project...

As for comparing TPTR to a turd, I'll leave it to anyone's appreciation. Lots of things have been calledvshit, crap, etc this way before your time or mine, and your words could be put in the mouths of countless people criticizing stuff, over the past century, stuff that you might yourself consider gold standard now. So once again, to each his own tastes, I respect yours...

[Mr. Reindeer]

It's interesting to me that a lot of the people saying "I've loved everything DKL did until IE" and "DKL forgot about/stopped caring about telling a story with IE" seem to conveniently leave Eraserhead out of the conversation. I'm genuinely curious: how many people who feel either of the above sentiments like Eraserhead? Because IE and TR feel to me like a direct return to that style in a lot of ways.

Eraserhead and IE to me feel like spiritual bookends to DKL's career -- his shortest and his longest film, one sparse and one almost bursting, but both ambiguous dreamscapes, willfully defying traditional narrative, simultaneously inviting and defying analysis. They're also two of my favorite films ever. I have a hard time believing there are people out there who love Eraserhead but hate IE. However, if there are, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

TR, OTOH, is a lot messier by nature of its sprawling structure. IE honestly feels like a very focused film to me (no, I'm not joking)...whereas I think it's fair to call TR self-indulgent at points. It's like a version of Blue Velvet where the 10-minute scene of the comedian at the Slow Club making bad jokes while a cardboard chicken and egg switch spots was left in the film. For me, the highs are so great that the "kitchen sink" approach doesn't detract (and in some ways is charming and an interesting mood experiment). But I can definitely understand and accept people feeling that TR is the moment when DKL's head disappeared up his ass, as Tarantino once charmingly said. But I just can't fathom people saying "I've loved everything he did since Eraserhead, but hate IE."

[sylvia_north]

As for comparing TPTR to a turd, I'll leave it to anyone's appreciation. Lots of things have been calledvshit, crap, etc this way before your time or mine, and your words could be put in the mouths of countless people criticizing stuff, over the past century, stuff that you might yourself consider gold standard now. So once again, to each his own tastes, I respect yours...

But now you're assuming past and hypothetical future critical reception are somehow relevant to the discussion at hand. I love Boxing Helena for example, and it's considered a notoriously bad movie. I don't care if anyone respects or shares my opinion- past, present, future. Furthermore, TR is critically acclaimed RIGHT NOW for being something new and innovative, and it's just not.

There is not a thing in the world people haven't been negative about. Doesn't change the validity of the opinions here in this thread, right now, and I don't think it's a total turd, I think it's a mixed bag, but it is annoying -- still -- that newcomers will start a profile, loving the show, then spend most of their time on the one thread that wasn't created for debate and mutual opinion validation and start off by saying they didn't have time to read the thread, but want to jump in and change minds, saying the same. thing. over. and over

[nick1218]

I respectfully disagree. I have been an admirer of Lynch's work for decades. I know what he's about, or, at least, what he used to be about. His work, regardless of what you refer to in terms of what he thinks a story is, used to be about vision, originality, power, mood, and storytelling, even if it was on his own terms (like MD, FWWM, TP pilot, Blue Velvet, etc.), and that's why he was regarded as a visionary, and, personally, that's why I admired his work. Not anymore. IE and TPTR are self indulgent disasters, even if viewed through his rules and standards, and no amount of "you'll like it in the future" or "it's Lynch's vision" rhetoric is going to change that for me, since the problem with TR isn't simply its incoherence/abstractions, it's its shoddiness, ugliness, bleakness, and glaringly obvious self-indulgence and "greatest hits of Lynch" feel.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I loved Twin Peaks, FWWM, MD, Even fucking Dune. As soon as TP:TR was announced I said "I'm in" without hesitation. I had no reservation about Lynch directing Season 3. Because I knew it was going to be absolutely fucking incredible. Then rationalization set in, then denial, then acceptance, then anger. The guy that made a video explaining how Gordon Cole took the place of Dale was right. This was Lynch's self-indulgence set loose without any kind of constraint. All the pointless characters. Actually making Laura's death not happen (and thus the beautiful ending of FWWM was invalidated). Bob getting punched into pieces by a guy wearing a dish-washing glove. I don't think it was laziness. I watched the entirety of "The Interview Project". He can still make awesome stuff.[/quote]

well said

[nick1218]

It's interesting to me that a lot of the people saying "I've loved everything DKL did until IE" and "DKL forgot about/stopped caring about telling a story with IE" seem to conveniently leave Eraserhead out of the conversation. I'm genuinely curious: how many people who feel either of the above sentiments like Eraserhead? Because IE and TR feel to me like a direct return to that style in a lot of ways.

Eraserhead and IE to me feel like spiritual bookends to DKL's career -- his shortest and his longest film, one sparse and one almost bursting, but both ambiguous dreamscapes, willfully defying traditional narrative, simultaneously inviting and defying analysis. They're also two of my favorite films ever. I have a hard time believing there are people out there who love Eraserhead but hate IE. However, if there are, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

TR, OTOH, is a lot messier by nature of its sprawling structure. IE honestly feels like a very focused film to me (no, I'm not joking)...whereas I think it's fair to call TR self-indulgent at points. It's like a version of Blue Velvet where the 10-minute scene of the comedian at the Slow Club making bad jokes while a cardboard chicken and egg switch spots was left in the film. For me, the highs are so great that the "kitchen sink" approach doesn't detract (and in some ways is charming and an interesting mood experiment). But I can definitely understand and accept people feeling that TR is the moment when DKL's head disappeared up his ass, as Tarantino once charmingly said. But I just can't fathom people saying "I've loved everything he did since Eraserhead, but hate IE."

Eraserhead was the first feature of a promising "different" type of director. You can love Eraserhead yet not want to follow the career of one who does nothing but Eraserhead type films. It is not hypocrtical to like eraserhead and even The Grandmother yet have disdain for IE or TR. It is about timing for one thing, plus Eraserhead, which I watched again during TR is simply far better.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Eraserhead was the first feature of a promising "different" type of director. You can love Eraserhead yet not want to follow the career of one who does nothing but Eraserhead type films. It is not hypocrtical to like eraserhead and even The Grandmother yet have disdain for IE or TR. It is about timing for one thing, plus Eraserhead, which I watched again during TR is simply far better.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply hypocrisy. Obviously everyone is entitled to his/her personal tastes and is under no obligation to explain them, but I was genuinely curious. There's a lot of "I've loved everything DKL did before IE"-style posts in this thread lately, but as far as I can recall, there's never been much love for Eraserhead expressed in here. I was genuinely curious if anyone here likes Eraserhead, particularly those who dislike IE.

And I agree that Eraserhead is a stronger work than TR.

[AhmedKhalifa]

Sometimes I get the sense that Lynch is like a religion (Linchianity? Linchology? Linchism?). You don't try to understand Lynch, you just believe in him.

I guess it's because a lot of staunch Lynch supporters seem to think that everything Lynch does is almost flawless or defies criticism, or that he's infallible. I believe Lynch's greatest achievement is that he really did convince some people that he's so good and so original that he shouldn't be questioned or critiqued at all, and that if you don't like something he made then "you just don't get it".