Just a thought...about the entire extent of our enjoyment

[BHell]

I think this is where I disagree then.

Originally I started writing a very long reply trying to lay out my position vis-à-vis internal talk with reference to Bahktin, Blanchot, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and then realised that this conversation would be far too overpowered for what is needed here. I'll just paraphrase the general gist and leave it there: one is never less alone than when alone.

Far cleaner and closer to the source for our purposes is the work of Martha Nochimson.

Nochimson does a good job in excavating Lynch's belief in a Unified Field theory. In Lynch's view the highly personalised readings of individuals, when meditated upon should all point (on the 'deepest level') to this unified field.

As an avowed materialist I don't buy any brand of mysticism of course (and believe me I spent a whole decade of my life up to my eyeballs in it): for me the social element, which consists of both contestation and agreement, takes place in external space, in public language use, and not in solitary meditation.

As a person with a lot of vested interest in writing about artists and their artwork, I would venture that we can assume Lynch's position, understand its context, and to some extent understand his motivations, without necessarily having to believe what he believes. The problem of other minds is for me a philosophical red herring that means we could never get started with such an enterprise, and which in practice cancels itself out.

I can sympathize with that. There will always be one point in a discussion where the participants get to a disagreement about their fundamental philosophical stances - and that's a positive: it allows us to see the discussed topic from different angles. And laying out one's most basic views (while also always revealing one's intellectual weaknesses) makes it easier for others to empathize. So, in short on, on our differences and overlaps:

I'm not a spiritualist either, nor do I have any solipsist or idealist views (thus, the sentiment "alone in our minds" is not to be read as an absolute). Categorizing myself, I'd say I come closest to being a Kantian and as such, I am a realist and cannot be an exclusive materialist, as I need my "a priori", some kind of pure conceptualism (at least for mathematical concepts and regulative ideas). This also makes me a dualist, but not with the old material/spiritual-dichotomy but with empiricism vs. conceptualism.
Other than that, I revere the greeks, abhor most of the romans and the medieval scholars, and have some respect for the modernists. Concerning Anglo-American analytical philosophers, I love their methodology but dislike their general lack of historical awareness.

All in all, I guess we do agree on some of the results, though: The "social element" can not be regarded highly enough. And whether or not we can completely get into someone else's state of mind, I do agree we can get close enough to understand them (and I think, as a conceptual realist, that's even easier for me to rationalize than for a pure materialist ^^). That does mean that, indeed, it should (at least theoretically) be possible to understand Lynch and "assume his possition", as you said. But he doesn't make it easy for us to do so.
His context and motivation, I do find interesting, and those are certainly helpful to immerse into the person "David Lynch" - yet I'd abstract from them when trying to explore his work. I feel, for example, that decades of this personality-centered approach have been more of a hindrance than a help to the mainstream Kafka research.

Knowing more about Lynches philosophical foundations, however, could help. But other than being a spiritualist (probably without adhering to a specific religious doctrin) he seems to get most inspiration from eastern philosophy and: 1) I'm not an expert in eastern philosophies. 2.) Many of these are more on the practical side of philosophy, thus allowing for many different intellectual groundworks.

Oh, and one last point on your "internal talk": I'd claim that Heidegger is never too overpowered or inappropriate for any topic whatsoever. Heidegger heideggers!

[BHell]

If you really feel monads to be a shortcut, you must be a very very experienced Haskell-programmer!!!

i'm not, i know nothing about that at all, that is my point: i dislike it because it is an inside nerd loop and i want to read this series - or any film - without all that special privilege bollocks of referencing stuff the viewer cannot reasonably be expected to read or have prior knowledge of when they watch. I don't think this is happening here ( in TP3) - Lynch invites people in on a human level not a pedagogical one ( can't understand where Frost is coming from) so when these kind of uber- technical terms happen in commentary it pushes me away. As the ' tulpa' overdose did on film. Pointing outwards to things to investigate further is another matter.

monads. honestly. Jeez.

Fair point. To be honest, I'd advice you to stay as far away from monads as possible - both the philosophical and the mathematical concepts. They both prove extremely useful in academic contexts, as they both encompass a number of ideas that are quite difficult to describe properly. But outside of very specific fields, knowledge of them is practically useless. And I agree that the use of monads was, in this thread, a bit excessive.

On the "tulpa overdose": Would it have helped if the tulpa-concept didn't exist in "our world" but was just something Lynch thought up for Twin Peaks?
Concepts being introduced and executed without much of an introduction is a typical David-Lynch-move. He did the same with Judy in FWWM - but for "tulpa" we could find a definiton by simply googling ... for "Judy" not so much (just two weeks ago, one of the most popular theorems was that Judy was Garland Briggs - now unthinkable).

[referendum]

On the "tulpa overdose": Would it have helped if the tulpa-concept didn't exist in "our world" but was just something Lynch thought up for Twin Peaks?

no it wouldn't. I didn't like the way it was dropped in ( like an airbus concept bombing word parcels onto the verbally starving) from scriptwriting land, when anyway the idea was clear and did not need a label. I felt it was another one of these ' meta ' moments that took you out of the reality of the series, and showed you an older guy sitting behind a desk writing it - and not a deliberate one. Also, i felt it was an approximate term for what was happening within the reality of the series. It felt bolted on.

i'm ok with judy. She ( it ) doesn't come with baggage.

[BHell]

On the "tulpa overdose": Would it have helped if the tulpa-concept didn't exist in "our world" but was just something Lynch thought up for Twin Peaks?

no it wouldn't. I didn't like the way it was dropped in ( like an airbus concept bombing word parcels onto the verbally starving) from scriptwriting land, when anyway the idea was clear and did not need a label. I felt it was another one of these ' meta ' moments that took you out of the reality of the series, and showed you an older guy sitting behind a desk writing it - and not a deliberate one. Also, i felt it was an approximate term for what was happening within the reality of the series. It felt bolted on.

i'm ok with judy. She ( it ) doesn't come with baggage.

Mmh, well, I get that. Your point comes pretty close to the general "Show, don't tell!" mentality, and I agree that, after already showing something, giving that on-screen-concept a name was not necessary. But that's just not how Lynch and Frost think about it; they like pinning name tags on things. That's why we have tulpas, but also dugpas, doppelgängers, Garmonbozia. It also plays into how the dwarf became The Arm and the giant later became The Fireman.

It didn't feel too "meta" for me, but I understand how it can break your immersion if you're sensitive to "contrived" dialogue.

[referendum]

if you're sensitive to "contrived" dialogue.

i love contrived dialogue. I just felt the tulpa thing was shoehorned in from another (L.A. new age waffle) more prosaic dimension, and limited the concept slightly. in terms of what it was actually doing in the series. If they had been more explicitly vague, and talked about mental projections or something...might have brought you closer in. When it was used, it seemed almost like name-dropping. Especially the third time. Still, having names served to distinguish between tulpas and doppelgangers and introduced a hierarchy of fakes, for what that's worth. Yeah, it was a ' show don't tell' moment for me. A minor quibble in the grand scheme of things.

So, erm, in this terminology, Dougie was a Tulpa and Mr C was a doppelganger? You see where it gets abit limiting, losing the ambiguity...

[Mr. Reindeer]

FWIW, isn't Tammy the only one who ever uses the word "tulpa"? You can still read it as a vaguer thought-form concept, and Tammy is just defining it for herself using a buzzword she knows. Like Hastings calls the other dimension "the Zone," but L/F clearly don't expect us to actually start calling it that.

[referendum]

FWIW, isn't Tammy the only one who ever uses the word "tulpa"? You can still read it as a vaguer thought-form concept, and Tammy is just defining it for herself using a buzzword she knows. Like Hastings calls the other dimension "the Zone," but L/F clearly don't expect us to actually start calling it that.

that's true.

At risk of putting too much emphasis on this, I would like to try and clarify why I felt it struck a slightly false not for me. It is not really the word itself that bothered me, so much as all the cod-mythology guff that in this series was much more explicit and took itself much more seriously than how it was used in the TP / TP2 series. Judy, Jaio - dai, and all the other info-dumps we got about ' the zone' and so on.

In the first series, the mystical stuff came over as a light and witty comment about the new-age and self-help culture, which at the time was newly fashionable. The tibetan bowl ring tones were the kind of stuff you could buy on cassettes in new age stores alongside whale song tapes, and the '' everyday give yourself a present'' chinese fortune cookie nuggets that cooper came out with, and the throwing pebbles at bottles to divine the answer, had a lightness of touch about them, they were as much witty comment on an aspect of ( then ) contemporary culture as they were a kind of wry joke about a detective who trusts intuition more than deduction, a nice inversion of the Columbo/ Sherlock Holmes/ Hercule Poirot uber-rational logical sceptical classic detective model.

But this kind of ironic distance was jettisoned in the way the mystical material was handled in this series; everything here was much more spelt-out and heavy handed, and the link to contemporary culture abandoned in favour of an overdose of back story and origin mythology, which for me was one of the weaker aspects of this series. The vortex felt overdone, too literal an image of passage between worlds/ states of consciousness - compared to how it was done in TP series 1/2 with dreams and Cooper trusting his instinct, shifting between worlds was done there without any ambiguity as to whether it was real or waking dream. The dream convenience store flicking between forest and rooms was great though.
I guess I am saying that sometimes the ' blue rose' stuff in TP3 - in the FBI sequences - felt a little like a device or a McGuffin - like i say, bolted on.

Compare that to the red woman in FWWM, a great way of dealing with this kind of material. Or: when Cooper goes into his fact-dump about Tibet in the first TP, there is something funny about it: Harry Truman's scepticism and ( if i remember right ) Lucy's credulousness and Cooper's enthusiasm all offset the actual content. Whereas the mystical stuff here is presented straight-faced. There isn't any ambivalence about it, and for a series which usually does it's level best to keep questions open ended and retain the mystery, let the viewer decide, not give clear answers: to have so much pinned down and made verbally explicit in the mythology without any kind of balancing element felt abit awkward and clumsy sometimes. Kind of hackneyed. Overdone.

pardon my ramblings. Just pulling at a piece of string...

[wxray]

In the first series, the mystical stuff came over as a light and witty comment about the new-age and self-help culture, which at the time was newly fashionable. The tibetan bowl ring tones were the kind of stuff you could buy on cassettes in new age stores alongside whale song tapes, and the '' everyday give yourself a present'' chinese fortune cookie nuggets that cooper came out with, and the throwing pebbles at bottles to divine the answer, had a lightness of touch about them, they were as much witty comment on an aspect of ( then ) contemporary culture as they were a kind of wry joke about a detective who trusts intuition more than deduction, a nice inversion of the Columbo/ Sherlock Holmes/ Hercule Poirot uber-rational logical sceptical classic detective model.

...

Compare that to the red woman in FWWM, a great way of dealing with this kind of material. Or: when Cooper goes into his fact-dump about Tibet in the first TP, there is something funny about it: Harry Truman's scepticism and ( if i remember right ) Lucy's credulousness and Cooper's enthusiasm all offset the actual content. Whereas the mystical stuff here is presented straight-faced. There isn't any ambivalence about it, and for a series which usually does it's level best to keep questions open ended and retain the mystery, let the viewer decide, not give clear answers: to have so much pinned down and made verbally explicit in the mythology without any kind of balancing element felt abit awkward and clumsy sometimes. Kind of hackneyed. Overdone.

pardon my ramblings. Just pulling at a piece of string...

Excellent ramblings! You've precisely touched on what bugged me about TPTR. There was a certain whimsical comedy about the mystical stuff in the original that was missing in TPTR. And as I've mentioned on the other threads, the Diane as Marjorie Cameron was too much for me.

Overall I liked looking forward to my Sundays with TPTR. But you touched on what will ultimately leave me disappointed. For all the talk of surrealism and "make your own theories," it sure seemed like Lynch and Frost went very direct this time on the mystic elements. Overdone.

[Mr. Reindeer]

pardon my ramblings. Just pulling at a piece of string...

Very much agree with much of what you wrote, and I've voiced similar concerns in other threads, although I'm not as bothered by it as you are. And honestly, all respect to Jerry and Needleman, I'm not seeing the Diane/Marjorie Cameron thing beyond each having a fetish for eccentric outfits. If there IS an intentional parallel there, it would be Frost's idea -- he's the one who's interested in this stuff. But Dern has said that Lynch let Dern work out her own wardrobe, makeup and appearance (with his approval and guidance of course), so I'm pretty sure any visual similarity is purely coincidental.

Btw, here's an interview with Mark from 1992 where he takes full ownership of all occult/black magic stuff on the original show: https://www.google.com/amp/www.independ ... html%3famp

I'm going to post it in the thread on Frost's involvement, but also thought you might find it an interesting read. Mark's career-long fascination for this stuff is truly odd to me, given that he seems to otherwise be a meat-and-potatoes guy, very level-headed and heavily invested in current events.

[mtwentz]

pardon my ramblings. Just pulling at a piece of string...

Very much agree with much of what you wrote, and I've voiced similar concerns in other threads, although I'm not as bothered by it as you are. And honestly, all respect to Jerry and Needleman, I'm not seeing the Diane/Marjorie Cameron thing beyond each having a fetish for odd outfits. If there IS an intentional parallel there, it would be Frost's idea -- he's the one who's interested in this stuff. But Dern has said that Lynch let Dern work out her own wardrobe, makeup and appearance (with his approval and guidance of course), so I'm pretty sure any visual similarity is purely coincidental.

Btw, here's an interview with Mark from 1992 where he takes full ownership of all occult/black magic stuff on the original show: https://www.google.com/amp/www.independ ... html%3famp

I'm going to post it in the thread on Frost's involvement, but also thought you might find it an interesting read. Mark's career-long fascination for this stuff is truly odd to me, given that he seems to otherwise be a meat-and-potatoes guy, very level-headed and heavily invested in current events.

Although the Cole-Albert-Tammy-Diane scenes were my least favorite part of the series (except for the prison sequences with DoppelCoop and the vortex scene in S.D., which I loved), I thought the series did a good balancing act of Frost mythology and Lynch surrealism. In the last two episodes though, I feel strongly that the Lynch surrealism pretty much swept away the Frostian interpretation of events (or at least confined it to a corner).

Personally, I enjoyed the vortexes, but I enjoyed even more where they led to.

[referendum]

although I'm not as bothered by it as you are

i'm not that bothered by it really, that is the trouble with spelling things out, it draws more attention to details than they might warrant.

In the end this kind of ( as you say, Frost) material fits in with the ' twilight zone ' side of the series, so I guess it earns it's place as another part of the deliberate genre-mixing or scene by scene changes in tone that is characteristic of the series as a whole. The awkwardness of these tonal shifts is part of what keeps the viewer on their toes, you never quite know where you are going next. I guess the characteristics of the different overlapping 'threads' ( or whatever you want to call the different storylines that move along in parallel, touching each other without ever really converging) have to be exaggerated in order to clearly distinguish between them: right, now we are here, doing this - ok, now we are over there and we are doing this. The deliberate clunkiness of the exposition, and the crap jokes, and the film-maker in his own film meta stuff, and the staginess of having this bunch of people, usually in a room, trading mythology dumps were all features of the FBI thread. Resstricting certain kinds of material, and different approaches, to different storylines, is what gave this series it's structure and definition. I suppose it is inevitable in an 18 hour series/ film that was shot and edited in the time it usually takes to shoot and edit a regular 2 hour movie that some elements will be integrated better than others.

Again, fumbling towards something, I haven't counted the amount of different storylines ( audrey, bad coop, dougie, FBI, becky/stephen, jacoby, nadine/ ed, twin peaks sherriff station, random social townpeople in the roadhouse, sarah palmer, and so on), but what i like about TP3 is the way they are all given equal weight without actually really intersecting, you never know from scene to scene where you are going next, but each thread sort of loops back into the same overall narrative arc, abit like starting from the same point, and arriving at the same destination, but going by about 12 different routes. It would have been very easy to separate this material out into digestible chunks, and told these stories in ( say ) 6 movies, but instead we got one 18 hour drift that moved almost randomly between them, which makes sense if you see it as a kind of dream logic, which in the last 4 hours we were explicitly told it was. I really like this way of approaching narrative, to use a modish term i would call it modular. Which - to pursue the analogy to breaking point - achieves it's synthesis in the audience's head. Like telling x different versions of the same story, or 12 different people describing the same event in 12 different ways. Each different angle reveals something new. There isn't a definitive version. You can always make another 18 hours. It's not so much that there are endless stories as that there are endless ways of telling the same story. Which tells me why Lynch put all his other movies in there aswell...

again, pardon the ramblings. TP3 has given me alot of food for thought...

[Mr. Strawberry]

The black box "reveal" is a very overt moment that even the most inattentive viewer will spot. It pretty much hits us over the head. I'm not sure that that particular example is the best support for your apparent assertion that there is some hidden key we have to unlock in the work.

Ever since Eraserhead, DKL has generally been opposed to saying there is one definitive interpretation of his work, and Sabrina Sutherland also stated on her AMA Reddit that DKL feels all/most fan theories are valid. Not that he doesn't plant clues -- MD has the ashtray and the pillows, and TP S3 has the Sarah/Jumping Man mashup and the (maybe-)intentional glitches. Theorizing is great. But I really don't think we're going to arrive at the One True Interpretation ever.

Are you responding to TheGum in relation to the glass box in New York or to me in relation to the black box in Beunos Aires?

Regarding what you've said here, I don't think there's any single "key" to this work. It's served as a mysterious window through which we've caught glimpses of shadows in a forest beneath the moonlight. Opening it to bring those shadows in where we can better see them in the candlelight requires a complex incantation made up of many phrases rather than a single physical object of unlocking. However, I do believe that between Mark and David's years of discussion and writing there is an explanation for everything, and that it all makes sense and ties together wonderfully.

If part of their game plan is not giving the audience quite enough to reach the one true interpretation with any form of ease, that's fine with me. Not only does it allow us to dig in and think deep -- "solve the mystery" so to speak -- it also lets us feel the connected totally of the events through extrasensory or subconscious means long before we eventually reach those conclusions through investigative means. Each of us will have those "aha!" moments through the years and they will be powerful and memorable, but more importantly, these feelings being imparted through the story, and churned within our curiously analytical and emotional minds, are probably more personally significant and life changing than the truth they surreptitiously reflect.

[Mr. Reindeer]

Are you responding to TheGum in relation to the glass box in New York or to me in relation to the black box in Buenos Aires?

Heh, I was responding to TheGum. I meant the glass box. I'd just rewatched Part 5, I must have had black boxes on the brain.

As to the rest of your post, which is beautifully stated, I completely agree that DKL is more interested in each of us having personal moments of realization about what his works might mean than in spoon-feeding. Where we differ, I think, is your apparent belief that there is some "true" interpretation we will all eventually agree upon. DKL has resisted even fully affirming the seemingly straightforward "solution" to MD as the one true "answer." He has also said that, as of the late '90s, he still hadn't read any interpretation of Eraserhead that matches his own, and he seemed to delight in that. Between his seeming love of keeping his works ambiguous, his focus on intuitive storytelling, and the intentionally messy nature of the way this season was presented, I don't get the sense that this is going to resolve itself into a neat little game of connect-the-dots.

Of course, there are different types of mysteries. By way of example, DougieDale smushing/massaging his own jaw before getting into the Mitchums' limo the same way Mr. C did to Jack when he mysteriously killed him is a weird parallel that I'm pretty sure was just an intuitive bit of dream-logic that came from somewhere deep in DKL's subconscious, not a clue about something deeper in the mythology or Coop's identity. Whereas something like the Buenos Aires black box might have a more traditional answer, and maybe L/F even decided on an explanation amongst themselves...but even there, I'm not convinced that DKL was interested in leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for us to figure it out. As I said, DKL seems perfectly happy with people never figuring out what his intent was in a work, and even seems to revel in "misinterpretations" to some extent. The sense I get of this season isn't a puzzle box with a few pieces strategically left out to make the viewer mentally fill in the blanks. It's 5 or 6 unrelated puzzles, all missing a ton of pieces and thrown in a box together, and DKL finds the abstraction gorgeous. So do I.

The last, and most important, types of mysteries are the ones that go to the core of what this season is about. Dougie and Richard, questions of identity, dream logic and time. In the case of these mysteries, I really doubt there is some clear, articulable "answer" or mission statement to be had, even if you could probe to the deepest most unguarded recesses of DKL's brain, any more than Eraserhead can be explained in a traditional sense. Honestly, I doubt L/F talked much about what things "meant." Everything I've ever read of DKL indicates that the "why" of it all isn't terribly important to him. He works on an intuitive level. And I suspect that Frost and Lynch have very different interpretations of what the work ultimately means to each of them. For instance, TSH makes clear that to Frost, Judy has connections to Crowley, Thelema and Babalon. I imagine that any time Mark brought up any of those things, DKL made the same gesture Gordon makes when Denise talks about her hormones.

Anyway. YMMV, and obviously we're going to continue to make intriguing connections and draw our own conclusions for years to come. But in terms of reaching an "interpretation," I think this work will be more in the Eraserhead/INLAND EMPIRE mold than in the Mulholland Drive.

[Novalis]

The sense I get of this season isn't a puzzle box with a few pieces strategically left out to make the viewer mentally fill in the blanks. It's 5 or 6 unrelated puzzles, all missing a ton of pieces and thrown in a box together, and DKL finds the abstraction gorgeous. So do I.

Thank you, this is brilliant. You've articulated precisely what I felt was wrong with the 'puzzle box' analogy that people seem to repeat and circulate without questioning. That analogy works much better, perhaps, for MD, IE and LH than it does for TP S3 -- and you've really put your finger on why this is. If I may I'd like to borrow this quote for my own thread on structures and mechanisms.

[Mr. Reindeer]

The sense I get of this season isn't a puzzle box with a few pieces strategically left out to make the viewer mentally fill in the blanks. It's 5 or 6 unrelated puzzles, all missing a ton of pieces and thrown in a box together, and DKL finds the abstraction gorgeous. So do I.

Thank you, this is brilliant. You've articulated precisely what I felt was wrong with the 'puzzle box' analogy that people seem to repeat and circulate without questioning. That analogy works much better, perhaps, for MD, IE and LH than it does for TP S3 -- and you've really put your finger on why this is. If I may I'd like to borrow this quote for my own thread on structures and mechanisms.

Absolutely!