Aging and a seemingly deteriorating society in Twin Peaks Season 3

[wAtChLaR]

I was originally going to place this article in the Season 3 Magazine Coverage and Articles Worldwide thread, but i actually think this would be an interesting discussion as is the Gender in Twin Peaks thread. Although wordy (i kept thinking this must be the last paragraph as i was reading) i really enjoyed the writers' perspectives on the events occurring being experienced through the eyes of older generations and the relationship to Lynch's aging as an auteur....so i thought i'd share it.

favorite quote: "If we wanted to be facile about it, we’d say that Twin Peaks: The Return could be, in the end, an 18-hour “You kids get off my lawn, you’ve ruined the neighborhood” rant from a man who sees a world degraded from the one of his youth"

http://tomandlorenzo.com/2017/07/twin-p ... ire-going/

[yaxomoxay]

I was originally going to place this article in the Season 3 Magazine Coverage and Articles Worldwide thread, but i actually think this would be an interesting discussion as is the Gender in Twin Peaks thread. Although wordy (i kept thinking this must be the last paragraph as i was reading) i really enjoyed the writers' perspectives on the events occurring being experienced through the eyes of older generations and the relationship to Lynch's aging as an auteur....so i thought i'd share it.

favorite quote: "If we wanted to be facile about it, we’d say that Twin Peaks: The Return could be, in the end, an 18-hour “You kids get off my lawn, you’ve ruined the neighborhood” rant from a man who sees a world degraded from the one of his youth"

http://tomandlorenzo.com/2017/07/twin-p ... ire-going/

Meh.
Some people must have forgotten how dark, terrible, inhospitable the original town of TP was and just remember the charm.
Drugs, domestic violence, rapes, underage prostitution, horrible secrets. That was the original town, and Cooper was unable to stop it (it wasn't even his job).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[wAtChLaR]

I was originally going to place this article in the Season 3 Magazine Coverage and Articles Worldwide thread, but i actually think this would be an interesting discussion as is the Gender in Twin Peaks thread. Although wordy (i kept thinking this must be the last paragraph as i was reading) i really enjoyed the writers' perspectives on the events occurring being experienced through the eyes of older generations and the relationship to Lynch's aging as an auteur....so i thought i'd share it.

favorite quote: "If we wanted to be facile about it, we’d say that Twin Peaks: The Return could be, in the end, an 18-hour “You kids get off my lawn, you’ve ruined the neighborhood” rant from a man who sees a world degraded from the one of his youth"

http://tomandlorenzo.com/2017/07/twin-p ... ire-going/

Meh.
Some people must have forgotten how dark, terrible, inhospitable the original town of TP was and just remember the charm.
Drugs, domestic violence, rapes, underage prostitution, horrible secrets. That was the original town, and Cooper was unable to stop it (it wasn't even his job).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

yes that is at the essence of Twin Peaks...but this run has more global implications re: the proliferation of evil in mainstream society

there will be many articles written about this in the future

[Jasper]

...

I don't mean to cause offense, but I think it ought to be pointed out that bold, color text is really painful on the eyes and difficult to read, especially when it's more than a sentence or two.

[Agent Earle]

To be fair, he is admitting to be a moderator's nightmare...

[Jasper]

To be fair, he is admitting to be a moderator's nightmare...

I know, I know, but now he's branching out into becoming an optometrist's nightmare to boot.

[douglasb]

Y'know, Eraserhead was partly about Lynch's impressions of Philadelphia as a young man, so his world view need not have changed so much over the last 40+ years.

[Novalis]

Yeah, I don't buy the idea of DKL being captivated by the ideology of moral panic or a Spenglerian narrative of decline. Loss of innocence and a fall from a state of grace can be universal themes without depending on euphoric recollections of youth or a lost America. That piece tells us more about the author than about Lynch. Even when the young David Lynch's world consisted of nothing more than a few blocks, he was actively seeking out the bugs and the grime.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Y'know, Eraserhead was partly about Lynch's impressions of Philadelphia as a young man, so his world view need not have changed so much over the last 40+ years.

Yeh, a lot of the hellishness in TP:TR can be traced right back to DKL's first major work. In particular, the "honking horn" scene reminded me a lot of the scenes at Mary's parents' house in Eraserhead, in the way both scenes create a uniquely Lynchian feeling of the world going to hell in a handbasket through a combination of the mundane and/or realistic (the nursing dogs and Bill's tirade about the neighborhood transforming in Eraserhead, the honking horn and kids getting their hands on guns in TP:TR) with the surreally horrific (the chickens and odd sonic rumbling during Bill's monologue in Eraserhead, zombie girl in TP:TR).

I also think (and those who follow Twitter feed will likely agree) that a lot of the material expressing displeasure with the direction of the world may come from Mark. For instance, I'd be surprised if he wasn't the one who came up with Jacoby's tirades and the idea of a kid getting his hands on his father's gun.

[wxray]

Jacoby is all Frost.

I thought the article had some good points. One of the things I like about the new series, and something that Profoundly Disappoints a segment of viewers is the harsh digital filming and lighting on location in WA. The evening shots in the traffic jam were particularly harsh. I think this is important and more than DKL going digital. No soft traffic lights or warm incandescent glow here.

Let's not forget Part 8. This is a surrealistic admission of the Great Sin of the Greatest Generation (HD Stanton) which was fought back by, but ultimately nourished by the Baby Boom generation of which Lynch and Frost are part of. Their parents started that fire, but they are keeping it going, and now feeling the guilt for it. But not so much guilt that they are reformed from their sins. Nope. Cole and Rosenfeld can't help but look upon Tammy, part of the youngsters on the lawn, as just another sex object.

[Jasper]

Yeah, I don't buy the idea of DKL being captivated by the ideology of moral panic or a Spenglerian narrative of decline. Loss of innocence and a fall from a state of grace can be universal themes without depending on euphoric recollections of youth or a lost America. That piece tells us more about the author than about Lynch. Even when the young David Lynch's world consisted of nothing more than a few blocks, he was actively seeking out the bugs and the grime.

Ehhh, I don't know. In Lynch on Lynch he had this to say about his childhood:

"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets... blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."

The thing is, Lynch sees these things no matter what he's looking at. He doesn't even necessarily always see these things negatively, he simply notices that they contrast rather strikingly with the more orderly and pretty world that we might sometimes perceive when we're not looking too closely.

Lynch also had this to say about the 1950s:

"The Fifties are still here. They never went away....It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways ... there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."

[Novalis]

Yeah, I don't buy the idea of DKL being captivated by the ideology of moral panic or a Spenglerian narrative of decline. Loss of innocence and a fall from a state of grace can be universal themes without depending on euphoric recollections of youth or a lost America. That piece tells us more about the author than about Lynch. Even when the young David Lynch's world consisted of nothing more than a few blocks, he was actively seeking out the bugs and the grime.

Ehhh, I don't know. In Lynch on Lynch he had this to say about his childhood:

"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets... blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath."

The thing is, Lynch sees these things no matter what he's looking at. He doesn't even necessarily always see these things negatively, he simply notices that they contrast rather strikingly with the more orderly and pretty world that we might sometimes perceive when we're not looking too closely.

As I said, 'even when the young David Lynch's world consisted of nothing more than a few blocks, he was actively seeking out the bugs and the grime'. I see no contradiction between this position and what you cited. The underside is always there, it's universal; no day without the night. It's also notable that Lynch's choice phrase 'Middle America as it's supposed to be' explicitly acknowledges the fantastical, idealizing dimension of that particular experience, which his discovery of the ants was quick to overturn.

Lynch also had this to say about the 1950s:

"The Fifties are still here. They never went away....It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways ... there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."

Lynch on Lynch -- I don't favour people's interpretations of themselves to be honest, and this is a beautiful, contradictory example of why not. First he says the Fifties are still here and never went away, and then he says in the same breath that they are not, and that we are living in disastrous times. He sort of equivocates what he means by 'still here' and 'the Fifties' without really drawing proper distinctions: what has changed exactly? What, precisely, is still the same? How were the roots of today's disaster laid down in the 1950s? Through what mechanisms? Not much is really being said here until these answers are clarified in relation to wider questions.

I still don't buy it. There have always been attempts to appropriate Lynch's work to a socially conservative outlook, but they all fall short of a critical outlook on his art. I basically agree with these guys (Discourse Collective on soundcloud), which Joel featured on his blog back at the start of June.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I think some people are missing the point of the passage Watchlar quoted: The authors are saying that, while one COULD read the piece as a "get off my lawn" diatribe, that would be a vast oversimplification. In fact, they explicitly call such an interpretation "dumb" in the very next sentence.

I thought it was a well-written analysis, and I particularly liked the angle about parents/kids and mistakes repeating across generations, which nicely echoes the "cycle of abuse" themes of the original series and FWWM. My only gripe about the article is that it really doesn't tie DougieCoop into the equation, and I think he is THE most important element of this season -- and I do think there's a very interesting way to analyze DougieCoop through the lens of the themes of aging etc. that the authors focused in on.

And for the record, I've come to enjoy Watchlar's textual eccentricities as a key part of experiencing this forum.

[Novalis]

True. I followed the link this time and it's not the article I thought it was.

As you were.