Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[LurkerAtTheThreshold]

Couldn't agree more with the above, re the genesis of Bob. He was terrifying because he was unknowable. There are so many on this thread quick to deride the 'disappointed' because they think we want a cosy, apple pie mystery. Ok, well if you want to believe that and it makes you feel superior go ahead. One of the reasons I'm hating The Return is because it's cheapening and diluting the mythology of Twin Peaks. I'm supposed to be in rapture because this is now a sweeping social commentary on America's loss of innocence? If I want that I can read Don Delillo.

I adored FWWM. How was that cosy or apple pie in any way?

I'm interested in the psychology of people that would come into a thread such as this to deride those who are 'disappointed' by The Return and go to great lengths to try to establish that we are 'disappointed' for such pat, trite reasons (we just want a cosy soap opera!) and that we don't actually have legitimate criticisms about what we're seeing. I like my cinema as dark as anybody but I still hate The Return. Not because it's not good old cherry pie Twin Peaks but because I believe that it sucks.

Yeah. Those kind of criticisms of this thread are laughable at best. I doubt any of those people are really taking the time to read any of the posts here anyway.

There's two major currents to Twin Peaks; the warmhearted town, and the dark of the woods. So far this season is failing at depicting both of them well.

[counterpaul]

I mean yeah you can read into it all as completely metaphorical but I think you're grasping if you think there isn't a narrative that runs through the Lodge mythology. Especially now with this new season -- there is indeed autonomous spirits at work. Of course their story is told through visual and metaphor but it's still there.

I do indeed completely reject the whole idea of a Twin Peaks "mythology." I know it's a controversial and unpopular stance, with fans of the new season and folks who aren't digging it alike, but I personally think that every single theory that has tried to shoehorn all this wonderfully inscrutable, gleefully contradictory, purely emotionally-driven, surrealist imagery into something as rational as a fantasy/sci-fi mythology is what's reaching. There's no way to do it, because that's not what this is.

It would be like trying to come up with some set of supernatural rules that ties the Man in the Planet and the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead together to explain the "true origin" of the baby or something. That would be silly and futile and miss something beautiful and emotionally truthful in the process, as is trying to cobble together a similar rulebook for Twin Peaks.

I remember an interview with one of the writers (was it Bob Engles?--I can't remember)--I'm pretty sure this was during the USC retrospective--who said that the writers once asked DKL about the "rules" of the red room and he responded that there "ARE NO RULES." Exactly.

But I'm saying the human side of it was lost in this Season. I feel your view of it, which I like and follow myself as it is the story of a town processing violence, grief, and a young girl's experience of abuse, but it feels like a view more viable in the original series and the movie. Now it does feel like a supernatural battle. And the sudden introduction of unfamiliar places like the purple world only muddles just exactly what this mythology is. And there's not enough time left in this Season, I think, to truly tie it all together.

I do not agree. The difference in TPTR is that this is Coop's psyche we're dealing directly with now, and he's in a bad, bad way. And Lynch has brought a slightly more abstract approach to character development to the table (see my long, long posts above if you're interested in reading me go on at length about that).

I think the logic of Twin Peaks has remained the same, though the language continues to expand. It's still the depths of the subconscious where any battles--very, very human battles--we're seeing play out.

[mlsstwrt]

Maybe for me what it comes down to is that darkness is (or at least can be) good but ugliness is bad. Just for me, I don't find The Return all that dark, just incredibly ugly. And I'm not talking primarily about the aesthetics of the show, more its heart/soul.

[David Locke]

Maybe for me what it comes down to is that darkness is (or at least can be) good but ugliness is bad. Just for me, I don't find The Return all that dark, just incredibly ugly. And I'm not talking primarily about the aesthetics of the show, more its heart/soul.

I'd have to agree with this, w/r/t cinema or television generally as well. I think the original series had more than enough beauty to balance out the ugliness - possibly too much, in fact, if one were to critique. (FWWM corrected this problem). But that beauty and sense of an immersive world is exactly what draws me and many others back to the original Peaks, even FWWM. Deer Meadow is ugly and dinky and radiates a kind of low-level evil, but it's still somehow a place I enjoy returning to.

I'm not sure how much I enjoy or will enjoy returning to The Return (no pun intended).

I am very much of two minds on all this. Episode 8 stunned me and I think people will be discussing it for years to come, it was immense, and yet I still kind of long for the more intimate, small-scale, viscerally emotional drama that we got from the original run. Everything is so epic and big and Important now, and in a way all of that misses part of what made the 1990-92 work special, that specific focus on the town of Twin Peaks and its inhabitants.

[mlsstwrt]

Maybe for me what it comes down to is that darkness is (or at least can be) good but ugliness is bad. Just for me, I don't find The Return all that dark, just incredibly ugly. And I'm not talking primarily about the aesthetics of the show, more its heart/soul.

I'd have to agree with this, w/r/t cinema or television generally as well. I think the original series had more than enough beauty to balance out the ugliness - possibly too much, in fact, if one were to critique. (FWWM corrected this problem). But that beauty and sense of an immersive world is exactly what draws me and many others back to the original Peaks, even FWWM. Deer Meadow is ugly and dinky and radiates a kind of low-level evil, but it's still somehow a place I enjoy returning to.

I'm not sure how much I enjoy or will enjoy returning to The Return (no pun intended).

I am very much of two minds on all this. Episode 8 stunned me and I think people will be discussing it for years to come, it was immense, and yet I still kind of long for the more intimate, small-scale, viscerally emotional drama that we got from the original run. Everything is so epic and big and Important now, and in a way all of that misses part of what made the 1990-92 work special, that specific focus on the town of Twin Peaks and its inhabitants.

Very well said David, you certainly captured my sentiments very well! In particular I find the scope so big now that it's ultimately dilutive.

[Nikki Grace]

I think this is the right thread to post this in. I should preface by saying I'm actually really enjoying The Return and don't count myself among those disappointed. However, I gotta talk about Part 8.

I liked it -- it's obviously very visually arresting and wonderfully cold -- but I'm not sold on how it aims to explain BOB and The Black Lodge. BOB was/is a force made even more powerful by being a mystery; he was beyond comprehension, and the only thing that could describe him was that he was "the evil that men do." One of my favorite lines is the one in which he declares, "I have the fury of my own momentum." It was a terrifying declaration because we didn't know what he was. He was as dangerous as the void. He was chaos. And you can't comprehend that, not fully.

Besides defanging BOB as vomit from a burping demon, there's also the creation of The Lodge -- a place that was intriguing because we didn't know why it was, only that it ran concurrently within our reality in a different space. There's The Black Lodge and The White Lodge, and as Hawk recalls in Season 2, it's a place that was referenced by his people long ago with the Owl Cave featuring ancient markings of Lodge symbology, and the Owl Ring going as far back as the colonial era (this being explored in The Secret History of Twin Peaks). This conflicts with what we're shown in Part 8, that The Black Lodge broke through the atom bomb in the 50's and that BOB came about because of it, birthed from a mother. The mystery and intrigue of the nature of these worlds built with subtle mythology explained... and explained with an event that's quite obvious. The Native spirituality aspect of The Lodge gave it more character. It felt ancient and old with an otherworldy wisdom in its existence.

If revealing Laura's killer was killing the goose laying the golden eggs then I wonder how explaining BOB/The Lodge didn't kill the other goose in Lynch's mind.

Besides this, I didn't care much for Laura being a golden orb sent down specifically to counteract BOB in some universal battle. It takes the bite out of what was so endearing about the original series in that it was a small town caught up in something beyond the limits, and that someone precious to them was taken away by it without reason - the way it is in reality. TP gave us a visualization of it, it was subtle and simple but understandable. We knew it was evil. It was here before us. Now it feels like Laura is Neo taking on Agent Smith. It's charmless and basic.

I also feel like they're leaning towards retconing the ending of FWWM in Laura finding peace. Looks like she's still in it in some form, reincarnated or not. It's a bummer because that ending is so wonderful that it should be preserved. The ripples of her death should obviously still exist in TP but with her actually being in the town once again.... fuck.

Otherwise I loved it. I loved the Woodsman, even though the ash people only now showing up and being so important in this universe feels a little out of place. The scene where they appear and 'heal' Mr. C was delightfully creepy. The synth plucking of Moonlight Sonata felt grotesque.

I would definitely agree that the rule of horror is 'show less/imply more' and this series has definitely thrown all that out the window with endless exploration of the mythology. Some of its fun to see, but it's killed all scariness of Bob etc for me

As much as E8 may have "explained" the origin of Bob, it still arises from that void beyond comprehension (I mean, we all saw that incredible sequence inside the atom bomb!) so nothing has changed for me in that regard. This isn't anything like a Star Wars midichlorians situation. We got a mythology lesson, but done in an enigmatic, open way. The forces that govern Bob and the universe are still unexplained and I imagine always will be.

In terms of scariness, I don't agree. For me, Bob's scariness dissipated in the old show the more he appeared, which is just natural really.

[Nikki Grace]

Couldn't agree more with the above, re the genesis of Bob. He was terrifying because he was unknowable. There are so many on this thread quick to deride the 'disappointed' because they think we want a cosy, apple pie mystery. Ok, well if you want to believe that and it makes you feel superior go ahead. One of the reasons I'm hating The Return is because it's cheapening and diluting the mythology of Twin Peaks. I'm supposed to be in rapture because this is now a sweeping social commentary on America's loss of innocence? If I want that I can read Don Delillo.

I adored FWWM. How was that cosy or apple pie in any way?

I'm interested in the psychology of people that would come into a thread such as this to deride those who are 'disappointed' by The Return and go to great lengths to try to establish that we are 'disappointed' for such pat, trite reasons (we just want a cosy soap opera!) and that we don't actually have legitimate criticisms about what we're seeing. I like my cinema as dark as anybody but I still hate The Return. Not because it's not good old cherry pie Twin Peaks but because I believe that it sucks.

Yeah. Those kind of criticisms of this thread are laughable at best. I doubt any of those people are really taking the time to read any of the posts here anyway.

There's two major currents to Twin Peaks; the warmhearted town, and the dark of the woods. So far this season is failing at depicting both of them well.

But I think you're trying to apply standards to something that isn't there anymore. The warmhearted town isn't a major current anymore in Twin Peaks; by all accounts it isn't a warmhearted town anymore - just look at Chad if you want personification of that! So it's not depicting it well because it doesn't exist.

The dark of the woods I think has in fact been tackled well. Hawk's visit to Glastonbury Grove was beautiful and enigmatic - a time displacement seems likely to me as people speculate, it may in fact be the final scene of the show - and the mood with Andy's endeavours in episode 7 recalled another dark woods feeling not far off FWWM.

[mlsstwrt]

I know this hasn't been developed yet but, if this is the direction this goes in, I HATE the idea of Laura as some sort of supernatural force, Bob's equal of sorts. I loved Laura because she was a human, a teenage girl, nonetheless who was completely and utterly over-matched but still ultimately didn't give in to Bob, even though it meant dying.

[The Gazebo]

I'm not sure how much I enjoy or will enjoy returning to The Return (no pun intended).

I am very much of two minds on all this. Episode 8 stunned me and I think people will be discussing it for years to come, it was immense, and yet I still kind of long for the more intimate, small-scale, viscerally emotional drama that we got from the original run. Everything is so epic and big and Important now, and in a way all of that misses part of what made the 1990-92 work special, that specific focus on the town of Twin Peaks and its inhabitants.

I tried binging the whole thing in one, exhausting day last week (I had previously watched 1-4 a handful of times). To me, the DougieCoop storyline seemed a lot more coherent and natural, as opposed to the tedious feeling of watching him stumble around week after week. Still, my appreciation of the indivdual scenes didn't change all that much. I still love Wally/Frank, get bored with Jacoby's showels, and shake my head at Ike/Lorraine.

I'm still hugely invested in the show, and look forward to each new episode. The last two episodes have each in their own way been brilliant. But like you, I'm a bit concerned with the "epic" ambition of the story. A lot of fans argue that this direction is Frost/Lynch challenging the audience, avoiding fan-service. But to me, it's as if they have feared that today's viewers wouldn't be satisfied keeping it in town - that it somehow needed that supernatural/epic bombardement to draw in new fans.

I still hope that I'll eventually knock on the door of the DKL fanclub - hat in my hand - expressing my absolute devotion to this season. We'll see.

[waferwhitemilk]

I watched the original show in I guess around 1993 or whenever it was first broadcast in my country and I literally had nightmares of BOB up until very recent times as a 40+ year old, especially when brushing my teeth at night. Nothing in the new season matches that in scariness so far. This is not my only complaint, but prolly one of the main ones: the new season just isn't scary to me. And I find the use of cgi-BOB kind of tacky really. In my opinion they'd been better off just recasting an average looking guy in his 40s with a denim jacket. Not one that looked like Frank Silva. Especially in these times a single older guy/regular joe is seen as pretty creepy by a lot of people it seems, so yeh I think that might have worked. The more normal looking the better really.

[opium]

I mean yeah you can read into it all as completely metaphorical but I think you're grasping if you think there isn't a narrative that runs through the Lodge mythology. Especially now with this new season -- there is indeed autonomous spirits at work. Of course their story is told through visual and metaphor but it's still there.

I do indeed completely reject the whole idea of a Twin Peaks "mythology." I know it's a controversial and unpopular stance, with fans of the new season and folks who aren't digging it alike, but I personally think that every single theory that has tried to shoehorn all this wonderfully inscrutable, gleefully contradictory, purely emotionally-driven, surrealist imagery into something as rational as a fantasy/sci-fi mythology is what's reaching. There's no way to do it, because that's not what this is.

It would be like trying to come up with some set of supernatural rules that ties the Man in the Planet and the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead together to explain the "true origin" of the baby or something. That would be silly and futile and miss something beautiful and emotionally truthful in the process, as is trying to cobble together a similar rulebook for Twin Peaks.

I remember an interview with one of the writers (was it Bob Engles?--I can't remember)--I'm pretty sure this was during the USC retrospective--who said that the writers once asked DKL about the "rules" of the red room and he responded that there "ARE NO RULES." Exactly.

But I'm saying the human side of it was lost in this Season. I feel your view of it, which I like and follow myself as it is the story of a town processing violence, grief, and a young girl's experience of abuse, but it feels like a view more viable in the original series and the movie. Now it does feel like a supernatural battle. And the sudden introduction of unfamiliar places like the purple world only muddles just exactly what this mythology is. And there's not enough time left in this Season, I think, to truly tie it all together.

I do not agree. The difference in TPTR is that this is Coop's psyche we're dealing directly with now, and he's in a bad, bad way. And Lynch has brought a slightly more abstract approach to character development to the table (see my long, long posts above if you're interested in reading me go on at length about that).

I think the logic of Twin Peaks has remained the same, though the language continues to expand. It's still the depths of the subconscious where any battles--very, very human battles--we're seeing play out.

So how does The Secret History work with your stance? And also Blue Book?

[douglasb]

I always just took the BB element to mean it was something that Briggs / air force had looked into without it being integral to the ongoing mystery.

Personally, I'm ignoring Frost's book for the time being. It seems to complicate the lore of TP when that lore was perfectly fine.

[Venus]

Couldn't agree more with the above, re the genesis of Bob. He was terrifying because he was unknowable. There are so many on this thread quick to deride the 'disappointed' because they think we want a cosy, apple pie mystery. Ok, well if you want to believe that and it makes you feel superior go ahead. One of the reasons I'm hating The Return is because it's cheapening and diluting the mythology of Twin Peaks. I'm supposed to be in rapture because this is now a sweeping social commentary on America's loss of innocence? If I want that I can read Don Delillo.

I adored FWWM. How was that cosy or apple pie in any way?

I'm interested in the psychology of people that would come into a thread such as this to deride those who are 'disappointed' by The Return and go to great lengths to try to establish that we are 'disappointed' for such pat, trite reasons (we just want a cosy soap opera!) and that we don't actually have legitimate criticisms about what we're seeing. I like my cinema as dark as anybody but I still hate The Return. Not because it's not good old cherry pie Twin Peaks but because I believe that it sucks.

Yeah. Those kind of criticisms of this thread are laughable at best. I doubt any of those people are really taking the time to read any of the posts here anyway.

There's two major currents to Twin Peaks; the warmhearted town, and the dark of the woods. So far this season is failing at depicting both of them well.

But I think you're trying to apply standards to something that isn't there anymore. The warmhearted town isn't a major current anymore in Twin Peaks; by all accounts it isn't a warmhearted town anymore - just look at Chad if you want personification of that! So it's not depicting it well because it doesn't exist.

It could be anything they wanted it to be. It's derived from their script that they wrote. So the warm heart 'could' exist if it had been written.

[N. Needleman]

I think there is warmth there, though. YMMV.

[counterpaul]

I do indeed completely reject the whole idea of a Twin Peaks "mythology..." ...I think the logic of Twin Peaks has remained the same, though the language continues to expand. It's still the depths of the subconscious where any battles--very, very human battles--we're seeing play out.

So how does The Secret History work with your stance?

My initial reaction to TSHOTP is: It misses the doughnut for the hole.

It's ambiguous and inscrutable enough that it doesn't do any active harm to S1-S2, FWWM, or TPTR and I have no problem pretty much ignoring its existence completely. I mean, whatever MF's plans are with all the weird, obviously deliberate contradictions to the show, and however he does or doesn't end up resolving everything with The Final Dossier, the tie-in books in general have always existed as a kind of parallel endeavor to the series--running alongside the cinematic work, but never meeting. That's fine.

And also Blue Book?

Well, I also discussed this business a bit way above, somewhere else in this massive thread. Lynch employs all the top-secret government jazz much the same way he uses all the numbers scattered everywhere. It's all about focusing the attention in a specific way. When things seem important in a mysterious way and when folks with badges and "shiny metal objects on (their) chest(s)" start inspecting cryptic documents and throwing around coordinates and whatnot, our senses get prickly and we sit up and start looking really closely at everything for important clues. It isn't the clues themselves that interest Lynch, it's that special kind of attention.

When we're in that state, paying that kind of attention, inspecting every tiny detail for clues, we're receptive. We're open. We're watching. And so when Lynch hits us with the emotional stuff he actually cares about, we feel it in a way that we wouldn't otherwise.

This is a key aspect of Lynch's working method and has been since he started making films.