Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

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

Post by counterpaul »

Novalis wrote:You mentioned being influenced by the New Critics at one point
Actually, I believe this was an assumption that BlueRose made at some point when responding to one of my posts (sorry if it wasn't you, BlueRose--I could definitely be misremembering). I never mentioned the New Critics specifically. I generally take a hodgepodge approach, but I do love a good close reading and Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was definitely an ah-ha moment for me in college. Then again, I pretty firmly reject the whole idea that there can be such a thing as an empirical critical approach to art and I'll always elevate intuitive, personal, "gut" reaction over everything. The rest is totally fascinating to me, but that primary emotional reaction to a piece is what I consider to be most truthful. You can't argue that away when it comes to art.
so you will no doubt be aware of their theoretical apparatus regarding the roughening of the medium, foregrounding of the artifice etc. As we all know this has been pretty standard artistic practice in many varieties of modernism across many artistic media for a long, long time. There's nothing 'pomo' or pretentious about your position -- it's one that any undergraduate of Art History of the early 20th Century would agree with (I'm currently pursuing a master's degree in this area). What the linguist Roman Jakobson called the aesthetic/poetic function of communication is fulfilled when the medium of expression enters the foreground, which is the same thing as the New Critics 'roughening'. As you say, it is not intended, within the formalist context, to sabotage illusionism but to aestheticise the production/artistic process. It's purpose is to produce aesthetic value, to prize and treasure the artistic process.
This is very interesting to me. I was unfamiliar with the term "roughening." I'll definitely be looking into it (if there's a good primary source you can recommend, I'd appreciate it). I took a bunch of Humanities classes as an undergrad, when I had room in my schedule, but I was a film major so I only had so much time. I'm largely an autodidact when it comes to literary theory (in film theory, we touched on some of this stuff, but definitely skated along the surface).

Anyway, I love this idea and it makes perfect sense to me. I see it all the time in most of my favorite narrative work, and I never claimed that Lynch was a pioneer on this front (in fact, somewhere above, I mentioned specifically that his work is part of a long tradition in this regard). Certainly, it's not the kind of aesthetic approach you see much on television, but that doesn't mean it's a brand new way to make cinema.
Interesting work has been done in recent years linking this critical, formal, impulse in western art both with the philosophy of Early German Romanticism (Frühromantik) and East Asian artistic practice. Historically, in the former case the freedom of the artist was won when the patronage system was overcome... Remnants of the old order remain, and corporate control of media can often function very much as a New Patronage, in which artists are pit against each other competitively to fight for their attention. From what little we can glean from Lynch's comments on the subject, this generalised economic order and the competitiveness it relies on does not really interest him. The art is the thing. Most definitely the thing.
This is all tangential to the conversation, I'd say, but it does interest me greatly. I'd personally argue that our current corporate control of funding (especially when we're talking about a medium as expensive as filmmaking) is worse than the patronage system of old. And the idea of artists competing amongst ourselves for dollars and eyeballs is entirely toxic and detrimental to good art getting made. The art is the thing, indeed.

Lynch, interestingly enough, has discussed his thoughts on this, and he made his opinions pretty clear. Have you seen the recent documentary, "The Art Life?" He discusses getting the AFI grant that made it possible to make The Grandmother, which then directly led to getting into the AFI program, which made it possible to make Eraserhead. Immediately prior to getting that grant, things were bleak. He was broke, with a young family, and he says in the film at one point that he can only imagine what his life may have become had he not received that grant and had he not gotten into the AFI. His eyes go distant and you can just see an alternate life (a life like Dougie's?) flashing before him. It's maybe the most sober Lynch interview I've ever seen.

Lynch has also discussed many times that the only reason he's a filmmaker at all is that he "kept getting green lights." He's not a Cassavettes type who will build a film around the resources he has and move heaven and earth to get something made. He has his idea and if nobody will fund it the way he feels is necessary to make it happen, he just won't make it. He'll paint, and leave a film idea in the drawer if it comes to it. He's clearly frustrated by the need to beg for money (and horrified by the idea of a life without having gotten those "green lights"), but I think he just sees it as the way things are and does his best not to let it distract him from the work he can do.
Although I might not fully agree with some posters here w/r/t the 'visceral/emotional content is the primary content' (for technical reasons which would probably bore the pants off everyone) I am more or less behind counterpaul's arguments about the rationale behind Lynch's artistic processes, which certainly hold up historically.
Thanks for sharing. I doubt your thoughts, and the technical reasons behind them, would bore me, but I guess I'm a bit of an odd bird.
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counterpaul
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by counterpaul »

So much going on in this thread! I feel like Coop waking up at the hospital after he got shot. "How long have I been out?!"

To Novalis and to Cipher: I'm absolutely loving both your recent posts. I'm only responding occasionally because it would be pretty redundant to simply quote you and repeatedly insert my "amen"s and "thank you"s.

To Novalis especially: I now have a number of new terms/concepts to look up, which I consider a gift, so thank you for that.

Oh, and to LurkerAtTheThreshold: Sure, we're all a little bit ridiculous here. I mean, spending time on a discussion board pouring over the intricacies of a TV show is inherently a pretty ridiculous act. I say embrace it! Also, I was totally going to respond to your post with an Albert joke, but Cipher beat me to it. :)
AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:All that can be said to this is that due to the greatly increased disruption of suspension of disbelief compared to his previous works, there's barely any dream for me in the first six hours (part 8 was a different story, almost literally). And that's a shame, because at his peak he wove those dreams better than almost anybody. This is pretty much the heart of the matter for me.
This makes me curious: How do you feel about Lynch's earliest work? What about The Grandmother, for instance? The Grandmother features actors in pancake makeup, reduced to monosyllabic non-language and pantomiming the actions of dogs, and the sets are primarily sparse rooms painted black. For me, Lynch wove an incredible, totally immersive dream with that film, but I would guess, based on the pre-requisites you have laid out for achieving suspension of disbelief, that you would consider The Grandmother an unquestionable artistic failure.

I ask because I think it's a mistake to look at Lynch's methods in TPTR as new additions to his aesthetic toolkit, or as evidence that he's "losing it" or something. I don't think that TPTR is stylized in exactly the same way as The Grandmother, but I do think there's a similar motor behind the occasional disinterest toward naturalism. They're both about weaving a dream, even if this one maybe hasn't been working for you.
If the dream continues for others then I'm truly happy for them, and not a little envious. Having said that, if part 9 is anywhere near as good as 8 I'll likely be solidly on board again, a thought to cherish over the weekend.
Here's hoping!
@ Novalis

"It's as if narrative realism were some kind of timeless default, and had not emerged (and re-emerged) in answer to specific historical contexts."

Suspension of disbelief is one of the nearest things our species has to a cognitive 'timeless default'. It's almost 70 000 (seventy thousand) years old and is what enabled homo sapiens' Cognitive Revolution at that time to conquer the planet. It's literally one of the core features of our species. Have a look at Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens.


I really have to side with Novalis here (shocking, I know), and I think you've ignored a really key part of his (and Cipher's) point. What really bugs me about your stance is that you seem to believe that there's only one age-old way to achieve suspension of disbelief, and that simply isn't so. You talk abut 70,000 years of storytelling, but your own standards would invalidate about 69,900 years worth of that history. Your standards are incredibly modern! And, even more specifically, modern and western.

Let me quote Novalis from up-thread a bit:
Novalis wrote:This is exactly the point I tried to make re: parabasis and formalism more generally. These are as old as theatre, if not as old as story-telling. Neither Godard nor Brecht invented them; they observed their use in age-old traditions such as Noh and its rival Kabuki, and saw their untapped potentials for a Western audience. But far more generally formalism in Western art also has its roots in the enlightenment, in post-Kantian theories of subjectivity, aesthetics and human freedom, which had profound consequences on what artists could do and considerably expanded the field of art in a way that only really became popular and fully evident with the advent of modernism. So, yes, obviously: Lynch is really doing nothing that hasn't been done many times before.
Film is so new as a medium that, if we're going to dive into the history of narrative art here, theatre seems like the nearest mode from which to draw. Theatre is very, very old, but realism in theatre is practically a baby. Hell, aggressively naturalistic acting was still pretty radical less than a century ago.

How do you feel about Noh or Kabuki or classical Greek performance styles? Is suspension of disbelief impossible when actors are wearing masks and speaking their lines and performing their blocking with deliberately exaggerated emotionalism? Does parabasis "violate" suspension of disbelief? Were our grandparents the first generation in human history to have the opportunity to experience true suspension of disbelief at the theatre?

My argument is not that Lynch is willfully challenging the profound beauty of suspension of disbelief. My argument is that there are more ways to achieve it than you seem willing to consider. And it isn't something special about David Lynch that, as you like to say, gives him a "free pass" or "get out of jail free card" or whatever.

How do you feel about the films of Hal Hartley, for example? He's used stylized, "stilted" dialogue and performance techniques throughout his career and has done so in the service of narrative films that (in my opinion) encourage and reward an audience's suspension of disbelief even as notions of performance-as-performance and film-as-film mix, quite methodically, with the stories he's told using the medium. He's not Godard and he's not Brecht (though, unlike Lynch, he is an unapologetic intellectual and will talk your ear off about both of those guys and how they do and don't relate to his work if he's in the mood). He's interested in complex characters with rich and ambiguous inner-lives, and he's simultaneously interested in exploring the idea that stories are in fact stories and how the telling of them is inherently part of the process of, well, telling them. His work is exhilarating.

What about Fellini's total disregard for sync? Does that relegate his work to the dustbin of artistic failure? What about someone like Charlie Kaufman? What about Spike Lee? What about Almodovar? What about Kubrick or Lars Von Trier or Wes Anderson? I'm trying to think, here, of fairly mainstream folks who unabashedly use stylized, performative acting and/or production design and simultaneously tell stories, and encourage and reward suspension of disbelief.
Narrative artists fucking with this are playing a riskier game than I suspect many realise, and had better have some tasty Big Fish cooked for us to make it worth it.
But what, exactly, is the risk? Obviously, there's the risk of turning some members of the audience off, but you imply something more existential here. What exactly will happen if one TV show dares to challenge some people's assumptions about how to achieve suspension of disbelief without offering sufficiently "big fish" to make it worth it? You're putting an awful lot of responsibility on every filmmaker who might be thinking of making anything. What's more, you're leaving no room for experimentation at all! The very nature of an experiment is that it might fail. If the stakes are so high--if the risk is so existentially great--I suppose any artistic experiment is a dangerously reckless act!
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Novalis
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by Novalis »

counterpaul wrote:This is very interesting to me. I was unfamiliar with the term "roughening." I'll definitely be looking into it (if there's a good primary source you can recommend, I'd appreciate it)
Paul Fry uses this term a lot in his Yale lecture series on the New Critics. A primary source for this branch of theory would be Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky's essay 'Art as Technique'. Most readers on formalist methodology will include it -- for them it's considered seminal.
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LurkerAtTheThreshold »

counterpaul wrote: Oh, and to LurkerAtTheThreshold: Sure, we're all a little bit ridiculous here. I mean, spending time on a discussion board pouring over the intricacies of a TV show is inherently a pretty ridiculous act. I say embrace it! Also, I was totally going to respond to your post with an Albert joke, but Cipher beat me to it. :)
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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YAAAAAAWN!... Gabriel, where are you when we truly need you? :)
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by Venus »

I am looking forward to watching the next episode in the hope that, in my opinion, it improves. You see I still have hope which can only be a positive thing! I just rewatched Gotta Light and it was like watching a mini movie all on it's own. One that felt, to me, completely disconnected to anything in Twin Peaks but it is what it is. Some good directorial moments and imagery. If smoking ads weren't banned now Mr Gotta Light would be a good modern day replacement for the Marlboro man. I just think now I am watching something brand new that is unrelated in any way to TP. So we'll see what the chair episode, that I won't get to watch until tomorrow, brings. Please, please, please give us disappointed folk something to cheer about. I'm bracing myself.
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LurkerAtTheThreshold
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LurkerAtTheThreshold »

Venus wrote:I am looking forward to watching the next episode in the hope that, in my opinion, it improves. You see I still have hope which can only be a positive thing! I just rewatched Gotta Light and it was like watching a mini movie all on it's own. One that felt, to me, completely disconnected to anything in Twin Peaks but it is what it is. Some good directorial moments and imagery. If smoking ads weren't banned now Mr Gotta Light would be a good modern day replacement for the Marlboro man. I just think now I am watching something brand new that is unrelated in any way to TP. So we'll see what the chair episode, that I won't get to watch until tomorrow, brings. Please, please, please give us disappointed folk something to cheer about. I'm bracing myself.
Right there with you Venus. Hoping.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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LurkerAtTheThreshold wrote:I love you Sherrif Truman
Your path is a strange and difficult one.
counterpaul wrote:To Novalis and to Cipher: I'm absolutely loving both your recent posts. I'm only responding occasionally because it would be pretty redundant to simply quote you and repeatedly insert my "amen"s and "thank you"s.
Just wanted to say thank you for the kind words and to cite this bit in particular ...
My argument is not that Lynch is willfully challenging the profound beauty of suspension of disbelief. My argument is that there are more ways to achieve it than you seem willing to consider. And it isn't something special about David Lynch that, as you like to say, gives him a "free pass" or "get out of jail free card" or whatever.

How do you feel about the films of Hal Hartley, for example? He's used stylized, "stilted" dialogue and performance techniques throughout his career and has done so in the service of narrative films that (in my opinion) encourage and reward an audience's suspension of disbelief even as notions of performance-as-performance and film-as-film mix, quite methodically, with the stories he's told using the medium. He's not Godard and he's not Brecht (though, unlike Lynch, he is an unapologetic intellectual and will talk your ear off about both of those guys and how they do and don't relate to his work if he's in the mood). He's interested in complex characters with rich and ambiguous inner-lives, and he's simultaneously interested in exploring the idea that stories are in fact stories and how the telling of them is inherently part of the process of, well, telling them. His work is exhilarating.
... as articulating the difference between Lynch and some of the other artists I and others brought up last page in a way I wish I'd thought to, making the way they use non-naturalism a bit more clear. I may be stealing bits of this for conversation and explanation in the future.

Thank you for an excellent post all around! And even from those who aren't enjoying the new series, this has generally, at least for the last few pages, been one of the more interesting and rewarding threads on the board, as we're all talking about the ways the series may or may not work as a piece of fiction and art, rather than simply breadcrumbing for clues.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by John Justice Wheeler »

counterpaul wrote:Sure, we're all a little bit ridiculous here. I mean, spending time on a discussion board pouring over the intricacies of a TV show is inherently a pretty ridiculous act.
I don't think it is, especially when the TV show has been conceived as a work of art. Also, I don't think it's necessary or advisable to conceive of intuition and the intuitive process as strictly or primarily "emotional" based as opposed apparently to the intellect. There's no reason to think that it must be so and that dangerously neglects the cognitive element of intuition as well as positing it again unnecessarily in some sort of direct binary opposition to cognition and its intellectual intuitive capacities when they are just as likely intertwined, interdependent, often indistinguishable.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by tresojos »

i kinda miss the teenage spark s1 and to an extent s2 had. there have been moments, like becky and her boyfriend. richard horne and sky ferreira. but like theres so few of them. i think what was compelling about twin peaks is that it had some of this teenage reckless feel of "its so hard being young" that a lot of shows have, but twin peaks did it so well, bc it was deeper than that. i mean laura palmer being the central character. idk the scenes at the road house seem to evoke some of this feel, but i wish we could spend more time with young characters. lol
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by mlsstwrt »

tresojos wrote:i kinda miss the teenage spark s1 and to an extent s2 had. there have been moments, like becky and her boyfriend. ben horne and sky ferreira. but like theres so few of them. i think what was compelling about twin peaks is that it had some of this teenage reckless feel of "its so hard being young" that a lot of shows have, but twin peaks did it so well, bc it was deeper than that. i mean laura palmer being the central character. idk the scenes at the road house seem to evoke it some of this feel, but i wish we could spend more time with young characters. lol
I'm not complaining we don't have it now but I miss this a lot too, I loved all that stuff.
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by LurkerAtTheThreshold »

Ok. I really enjoyed that episode. Best piece of television I've seen for a long time.

Does that make me a traitor to this group?
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

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LurkerAtTheThreshold wrote:Ok. I really enjoyed that episode. Best piece of television I've seen for a long time.

Does that make me a traitor to this group?
We told you: Resistance is futile.

:)


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

Post by LurkerAtTheThreshold »

yaxomoxay wrote:
LurkerAtTheThreshold wrote:Ok. I really enjoyed that episode. Best piece of television I've seen for a long time.

Does that make me a traitor to this group?
We told you: Resistance is futile.

:)


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It definitely proves me wrong about some of the things I've complained about thus far. Because I can see in this episode that the very things which would've previously made me impatient were precisely what made this episode great.

It's been such an arduous process, but the natural fertilisation that Frost and Lynch have undertaken to make Twin Peaks slowly blossom into a real place again is amazing.

I dip my hat in shame.
Sticking a sock in my mouth and returning to other threads.
So many clues and weird shit to talk about!
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Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)

Post by yaxomoxay »

LurkerAtTheThreshold wrote:
yaxomoxay wrote:
LurkerAtTheThreshold wrote:Ok. I really enjoyed that episode. Best piece of television I've seen for a long time.

Does that make me a traitor to this group?
We told you: Resistance is futile.

:)


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It definitely proves me wrong about some of the things I've complained about thus far. Because I can see in this episode that the very things which would've previously made me impatient were precisely what made this episode great.

It's been such an arduous process, but the natural fertilisation that Frost and Lynch have undertaken to make Twin Peaks slowly blossom into a real place again is amazing.

I dip my hat in shame.
Sticking a sock in my mouth and returning to other threads.
So many clues and weird shit to talk about!
Lol, well I am glad that you're liking the series a bit more now.

Since we're confessing our sins, I admit that there is ONE thing I truly hate about S3: The Roadhouse. Not the bands, the actual place. Filled with druggies, dirty cops, some with ugly rashes, all in plain sight. Add to that, Roadhouse usually means end of the episode! Grrrrrr...


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