Re: Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group (SPOILERS)
Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 6:03 am
Your post made me chuckle!AnotherBlueRoseCase wrote:Absolutely.TwistedFate_L4 wrote:
Sadly, at the end of the day, despite all the gushing critical reviews and praise- The Return will largely not be remembered by anyone with the exception of Twin Peaks fans and hardcore Lynch lovers- the world has already moved on to their next show- Heck, I moved on before The Return even ended and stopped watching weekly. I caught up the night of the finale but even that was a challenge. Showtime boasted about The Return giving them their highest subscriptions ever, but I wonder how many of those people canceled their subcriptions in the 4 months since the show actually aired.
The Return's legacy will amount to "Oh yeah, they brought Twin Peaks back in the 2010s." and that's about it. A footnote, nothing more.
One simple fact argues strongly that many viewers and critics have their fanboy blinkers on. This is the relative shortage on sites like this of people who weren’t already Lynch admirers before the premiere – in other words, the show’s failure to make many enthusiastic converts, especially among the young.
Every such person I know who was tempted by the hype to watch The Return quickly saw it as an ugly, boring joke, switched it off and got on with their lives barely giving it a second thought. And there haven’t been many if any high-profile reviews enthusing about a first exposure to the world of Twin Peaks.
But The Return can only be understood and therefore appreciated by pre-existing TP fans, some have argued.
This is just mistaken. Firstly, who really understands The Return, even among its fans? Think about how headwrecking and complex and unconnected to the original run and FWWM most of this show was. How did prior knowledge of them help anyone understand more than a portion of it? Newbies were only marginally more confused than everyone else watching, so it’s unlikely they switched off because e.g. they didn’t know who or what that crackling tree/neurone topped with gum was an evolution of. No, they mainly switched off because it was ugly and nasty and they were bored silly.
Secondly, several TR defences have gone like this: stop looking for coherence, purpose, meaning, understanding. Lynch is a painter, first and foremost, who gives you an experience of light, colour, texture, composition, and the like. Well, if that’s the case where are all the TP converts enthusing about this new painterly experience? If this is what Lynch is really all about then a viewer’s ignorance about the previous incarnation of that teapot etc becomes even less relevant. Surely nobody would claim non-TP fans are incapable of appreciating such an experience.
And thirdly, there aren’t zero converts, are there? It wasn’t impossible for new TP viewers to like The Return. It’s just that hardly any of them did.
If The Return were the masterpiece some are claiming, sites like this should be swarming with new Twin Peaks fans enthusing about their revelation. That converts are so thin on the ground speaks volumes about its quality. Almost the only people enthusing about it were already confirmed hardcore Lynch fans, as you say, which suggests they’re doing so because of who made it and not its merits. In fact the extent of this may well be unprecedented. Seldom if ever has any new TV show, never mind any true masterpiece, had such a low % of fresh converts amongst its fans.
TLDR The relative shortage of new TP converts, neutrals uninfluenced by past fandom, suggests that TR enthusiasm is largely down to fanboy blinkers. A scientific test of such blinkers could hardly find a better control group than these newbies.
Straw Man and Ad Hominem Suggestions for the Lynchbots:
He just said The Return made no converts! He just said I prance around wearing a horse’s blinkers! He’s just jealous cos Lynch’s dick is harder!
And no, there is no equivalence in how older women are presented in this show and how older men are. This is the great gaping hole at the heart of TR discussions. The portrayal of older women was just icky, especially compared to the portrayals of older men like Gordon Cole (of course) and Dougie/Coop (Lynch’s surrogate), and is one more reason not to grant the showrunners the benefit of the doubt in other areas. It was unarguably meanspirited and petty, so much so that it’s natural to then see those same attributes elsewhere.
(He just said Lynch punches older women IRL!).
Still think it’s notable how many of the regular posters here were English, Irish or Scottish.
(He just said no English people like The Return! I do! He just admitted all of Wales loves it! He just said The Return is the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome!).