Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

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Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by Novalis »

referendum wrote:
Novalis wrote:I kind of view Twin Peaks as a vehicle for telling certain stories. I mean this both figuratively and concretely.

In the original run it was a vehicle with many articulated parts, something like a train. It took the best parts of contemporary soap and drama and utilised them to do something very different with TV. Different drivers could come and go and take it here and there, mix it up a bit, but it essentially remained what it was, and ran its course.

Today, Twin Peaks is still a vehicle for telling stories, but it is staffed and piloted very differently. It no longer runs along a linear and episodic track, for example, and diverges into multiple narratives in places.
novalis, i often read your posts and find that you have the same interest in and view of TP TR on a structural level that i do, and have often said the same thing that i have been trying to say, but more clearly. There isn't a thread ( yet) about how this thing is structured and all the patterns and echoes and connections that are built into it as ( for lack of a better term) part of it's grammar. For a couple of months now I have thought about starting a thread about this, and started several times to write something about it, and then not wanted to, because i don't want it to be another way of pinning things down. I am not interested in explaining what is going on, so much as exposing the mechanism. I don't think this is a dry subject atall, I think the way it is structured is what both gives it it's emotional tug and equally what pisses people off. It is deliberately ambivalent, people don't like that, they want it to vote one way or the other. It doesn't, and actually for me, this is it's emotional spine.

Fancy collecting your dispersed thoughts on this and starting a thread? Counterpaul is also very good on this...
Done. Let the collecting of thoughts commence!
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: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by Novalis »

There's two recent posts in the other thread that follow on from the above, so I'll link them here for reference:

viewtopic.php?p=111515#p111515
viewtopic.php?p=111519#p111519

The first one discusses the extended framing of the shot of the door at Judy's diner as Cooper approaches and the way in which this builds an emotional charge; the use of silence, wide framing and starkness is noted and comparisons with Kubrick and Antonioni are drawn; the attempt on Lynch's part to capture a zen-like emptiness and sublimity is suggested.

The second post, in reply, likens the shot to the forensic examination of things usually overlooked in everyday life, finding them not empty but loaded with subjective baggage and associations; a comparison with the writer George Perec's focus on the infra-ordinary is drawn; Lynch's progress in using digital cameras to reveal these forensic details is mentioned.

It's worth reading them both because they make for a good starting point to discuss form, and 'structures and mechanisms'.
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: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by referendum »

There are some other rambling thoughts about the way this thing is structured that i put on the '' just a thought...about the entire extent of our enjoyment'' thread, which properly belong here, so i will repost them for consideration.
( the ' Frostian' mythology backstory 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. Restricting 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 sometimes takes to shoot and edit a regular 2 hour movie ( 140 day shoot, that's an hour of completed film every 8 days) 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 ( whether by accident or design) it seemed like Lynch put parts of all his other movies in there aswell...
....
what i was trying to get at here, (thinking out loud rather than trying to formalise my thoughts) is that we often seem to be being presented with different versions of the same thing without one being given primacy. Some people refer to this as ' timelines' but ( like Novalis) i actually think there is something else going on, a sort of prismatic approach to narrative, ( Novalis compares this to a russian doll) where there isn't one unique reliable way of representing the same event or telling the same story, so we are given several, without editorialising, and left to make our own minds up, and trace our own path through the woods...

This comes back to what Lynch said about the structure of this thing back in May:

Interviewer : Do you think in terms of allegory or meta?


Lynch: ''Not really. Ideas just come, you think about them, and you figure out their meaning. Then, how they fit into the whole is another thing completely. It’s not finished until it’s finished, and you don’t really know until further down the road how one thing relates to another. It’s just like a magical thing. I also always say the whole thing exists in another room as a complete puzzle, all the parts are together, and someone from that other room is sort of a rascal and randomly flips parts over into this room. And then you to have to put the puzzle together, but one is from the end of the story, one is from the middle, and a couple from the beginning, and you won’t know until it’s more formed what it could be.''

http://ew.com/tv/2017/05/26/twin-peaks-david-lynch/
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Re: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

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Further to the above ( i give it a separate post because it is a separate thought )

You could almost compare the overall structure of TP3 to ' musical chairs' (Novalis' Mayoshka dolls again) - it starts off with all these different elements dotted about different locations and a bafflingly large array of characters, which keeps increasing, and then, in the last 6 hours, piece by piece strips them away until we arrive at a single point in time and space, with Cooper and Laura. I kind of saw this coming from ep #1 as a sort of logical device: slowly closing in on twin peaks and the start point of the original story, like an 16 1/2 hour narrative zoom, becoming less and less diffuse as it goes along, and taking us cyclically back to the start of S1 from a different angle.

What i didn't see coming is that this single point would actually be un-moored from time and space, drifting: first that looooong shot of Cooper and Laura driving in a car at night, hardly talking, trusting each other, but ( literally) each in their own world inside their own head, which barely connects: then, after they arrive at their destination, no resolution possible: the lights at the RR are out ( no re-assuring coffee and pie comforts available) and Cooper - and us - don't know where we are atall, reality is unstable, we don't know ' is it future or is it past?' - ''what year is this'' ? . Two fictional characters meet the real occupants of the house used for location shots in their own fictional story. They freak out. End.

Audience freaks out, too!
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Re: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by Novalis »

In terms of characterising the overall structure of S3 so far we've had various analogies: Puzzle Box/Jigsaw, Alternative Storylines, Russian Dolls (the nesting kind), Prisms, and Musical Chairs.

In light of the idea of a 'prismatic approach to narrative' (I like this very much, referendum) I want to add a very interesting departure from the 'puzzle box' analogy that was provided by Mr. Reindeer:
Mr. Reindeer wrote: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 original context for that was a discussion on different types of mystery.
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: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by referendum »

OK.

Will someone explain to me what they mean talking about this series, by ' abstracttion'
For me it is relentlessly literal and concrete ( in terms of what you are actually shown), the only difference to normal TV is that you are not told how to think about it or interpret. But what is actually there isn't abstract atall. It is as real as the donut on yr plate. There it is.
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Re: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by Novalis »

referendum wrote:OK.

Will someone explain to me what they mean talking about this series, by ' abstracttion'
For me it is relentlessly literal and concrete ( in terms of what you are actually shown), the only difference to normal TV is that you are not told how to think about it or interpret. But what is actually there isn't abstract atall. It is as real as the donut on yr plate. There it is.
There's two questions I hear in this, and I could easily get them confused. Firstly, and this is what I think you are asking: what do fans on this forum mean when they talk about 'abstraction' in their posts on the season? Secondly, and this is only because the script itself uses the word: what does Albert mean by 'abstractions' while discussing the origin of the blue rose task force?

I'm going to assume you're intending the first one. It may come from a tendency to apply the art history label Abstract Expressionism to Lynch; the era and locale of his formative years as an artist were soaked in AE. For example, he's shown interest in action painting of Pollock and Kline as much as he has in Bacon's 'biomorphic' surrealism. So it makes just as much sense to call him a film-maker with Abstract Expressionist beginnings/leanings as it does to call him a Surrealist. At the end of the day these are tags and labels that were created for the convenience of art historians, it's more a taxonomic shorthand than a deep view on real movements and influences -- as I'm sure we all know, history is never as neat and tidy as this.

That's just a guess though. I can't speak for how anyone else uses the terms 'abstraction'. I can tell you how I use it, maybe.

Actually I think I mean different things by it on different occasions. Sometimes I say that a formal property of a work is abstract if it has been 'abstracted'. That is, if it is presented as independent from a naturalistic origin, for example like the way Mondrian kept reworking an illusionistic perspective sea-scape (Composition No.10 Pier and Ocean, 1915) until he achieved a flattened nonrepresentational grid (Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black; 1929). The end product bears very little depth and doesn't retain any connection, above an extremely formal one, to the imaginary scene it was 'abstracted' from. But not all abstractions are based, however remotely, on more naturalistic and representational perspective art or on a representational image in the mind's eye, or remembered experience. I think sometimes abstractions just arise already worked, and there's no clue at all to their 'origin' in our minds. So sometimes when I write 'abstract' I don't mean 'abstracted' at all, I mean just nonrepresentational or maybe sometimes nonfigurative. And sometimes there's ambiguity about one and the same work: Mondrian's Composition mentioned above was presented to an audience as if it were nonrepresentational, even though you can trace its genesis through a series of reworkings with representational origins. Again, these are terms with fuzzy boundaries.

Beyond that, it's hard to know what you are after without pointing to some uses of the word already posted somewhere. What do others mean by 'abstraction'? Who has used this term on the forum, especially in relation to Twin Peaks, and can have a go at putting it into other words?
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: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by referendum »

What do others mean by 'abstraction'? Who has used this term on the forum, especially in relation to Twin Peaks, and can have a go at putting it into other words?
the word appears in the post above mine, your own post, in a quote from Mr Reindeer. It doesn't really matter. It just seemed like an odd word to use when talking about a film-maker who is so concerned with showing us things - clothes, rooms, cars, shoes, house exteriors, lamps, chairs, doors, hairstyles, decor: nothing very abstract in Lynchland. He worries at different ways of representing things like a dog with a bone. He likes filming surfaces stylishly. His films always feature ordinary objects given some kind of significance or charge.

Mr Reindeer uses the term 'abstraction' about narrative -''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.''. I shouldn't have complained, really, I can see exactly what he means, and it's quite a good way of putting it. It's just that this thread is supposed to be about structure, and i think abstraction is the wrong word for Lynch's approach to narrative here.

We know how he works. He has all these ideas, and they are separate, but then one attaches itself to the other, and then a third comes along, and sooner or later he has a shape. Until inland empire these ideas were all attached to something resembling a conventional narrative sequence. Here, in TP 3, there is a sort of prismatic effect, like turning an object round in your hands and looking at it from different sides,different angles, turning it over, working on this bit for a while, turning it round, working on that bit. We know he makes furniture. I think he is almost seeing the structure of TP as something 3D, rather than something like Mulholland Drive which was a ''moving picture'', as they used to call them. People compared the structure of MD to a Moebius Strip. TPTR is more like a thing with moving parts.

I suppose the thing about TP TR is that in 18 hours and 200 characters you have alot of elements in play at once. So the structure is always gonna be more complicated than a 2 hour movie. He is not just telling one story here, but several ( or rather several different aspects of the same one) and they all overlap, and he keeps introducing new mini-stories right until the end. We get a whole lot more inconclusive ' slice-of-life' overheard parts of someone else's story from people in the Roadhouse. We get things like the 119 woman, that we see but are unexplained.

It might seem an odd thing to say when talking about a series that was so digressive and for many people frustratingly messy ( all those loose ends and unresolved plotlines ) that, far from being an ' abstract' approach to narrative what we have here is Lynch trying to do realism. Lynch-style. There is a matter-of factness about the way alot of it is filmed that you don't find in his other films ( apart from Straight Story). In interviews about TP TR he often says things like ''Some things came to a conclusion. And some things dangled out there. And that’s sort of the way it is in life.'' I think somewhere else he says '' life has loose ends''. He says '' There were just things going on in places other than Twin Peaks. Sometimes you get a need to travel from Los Angeles to New York for a meeting. So there you go.'' When asked in another interview about the shifts in tone from absurd goofy jokes to emotional melodrama in eps 1-4, Lynch replied that how in the course of a day, ''you might be crying in the morning, and laughing in the afternoon''.

I guess what I am getting at here, is that: he has all these characters, all these stories, some we just hear in passing, some we get in alot more detail, sometimes we are in this place, sometimes we are in that place, some times there is just ' stuff happening' , like sweeping the roadhouse to a record, and for Lynch: that's life, it's all part of it - so let's try and get it all in there, all those different dynamics. And if it comes over as abit over-complicated or messy to some people, well, that's just the way it is out there. On an ordinary day, you go to work in the morning, you go somewhere at lunch, maybe after work you meet someone, you go home, go to the shop: and in amongst all that, all kind of little things might happen, conversations, stories you pick up: not everything is ' relevant' ( or everything is relevant! ) but it all adds to the overall picture of what your day was like if you had to sit down and describe it in detail. So I think Lynch had that kind of approach in the back of his mind this time round when he came to representing the world of ' Twin Peaks'. The so-called random stuff ( people have complained about this or that character or storyline being 'pointless') isn't random atall. It's another kind of detail in the overall picture. I really got a sense here from scene 1 episode 1 ( NYC glass box) that Lynch is using this broad canvas to show us something recognisably set in the world we live in, in the present day - and usually Lynch films don't come across like that, they come across as little capsules outside of time, ' preserved in amber' as someone on this board said of the original Twin Peaks. But then, we are also given that side of things with all the Red Room/ Lodge / Convenience store stuff.

Sorry, that was alot more of a long-winded post than I had intended. But i hope you can see why i balked at the word ' abstraction'. :)
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Re: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by Novalis »

No worries. I see what you were saying now. I think I missed the part where it was Mr. Reindeer's use of the word that you were responding to, and I just took it as a general question.

One of my first ever encounters with the word abstraction was during an art class years ago. We drew a still life of some sliced oranges and lemons, and then used this drawing as a reference for 'an abstract', in which we tried to distil just the minimal, formal features of the drawing (colour and line, for example, but not the modelling and shadows) and recreate them in a separate work. Part of my attempt was a very zoomed-in view of the shape of some pips, which went down ok. So I guess abstraction does not have to take us away from naturalism, it can home in on the infra-ordinary and highlight overlooked experience too -- as with the ear in BV which you mentioned above.

About the jigsaw / several jigsaws analogy which has come up a lot. Is it really so different to musical chairs?

Musical chairs is also a fruitful metaphor. Without taking it too literally, we could imagine that each iteration or version of a basic narrative corresponds to a round of the game -- the relative positions of the chairs (roles) may stay the same, but the players occupying those roles may change. Or less concretely, the chairs may represent different thematic elements of the narrative and the players may represent not just characters but items, objects, even entire relationships. But I wonder if this is just another way of saying 'puzzle box', in that presumably there is some kind of original setup which, through permutations and the passage of time (rounds of the game, iterations of the narrative), becomes muddled.

Lynch is especially and frustratingly ambiguous in his own analogies because while he speaks of a 'rascal' that throws us 'puzzle pieces' from 'another room' -- which suggests that there is a basic narrative, origin or groundstate to be reconstructed -- elsewhere he appears to deny that any 'one true story/meaning' reduction would be adequate to what he has made.

Rather than trying to eliminate one half of this verbal ambigram, let's take its ambivalence seriously.

So, to be clear, Lynch is presenting or offering the product of his labour to us as if it is and at the same time isn't a game for us. Insofar as the rascal in the other room only feeds us morsels piecemeal, of course it is a game -- a game of detection and fitting things together; yet insofar as playing the game of detective generates so many new and surprising misreadings, and those creative misreadings have so much value in themselves and allow us to discover other things (about the world and about ourselves, as well as about the puzzle itself) then this is not a game at all but a very serious, almost therapeutic, exercise. It's almost as if the many creative 'misreadings' we generate are the serious point, the pedagogical element, while 'getting the story straight' is of secondary, and purely ludic or recreational value.

This 'is and isn't' seriousness closely corresponds to Friedrich Schlegel's view on wit/romantic irony/art. There is something both comical-buffoonish and at the same time deadly serious at stake in romantic irony. It's worth looking at the philosophy of it closer, and particularly the value it places on artwork as being necessarily fragmented.

On this account, even if one could 'get the story straight' (say, through a series of lucky guesses) this would itself be a kind of misreading -- a refusal to do the processual work of struggling to make things fit and finding they don't, and so trying something else, and so on. But Lynch denies that there have in any case been any such lucky guesses: as noted by others, as of the late 1990s Eraserhead had never been 'solved', i.e. interpreted in such a way as to resemble Lynch's intentions to a satisfactory degree.

We also have to bear in mind that Lynch is not only describing our process in watching his show, but the way he sees his own processing of ideas. He is not the rascal in the other room who knows how things really fit together: he is in the room with us, and as much subject to the problems of interpretation as we are regarding where his ideas come from and what they 'mean'. He is, in this sense, the first viewer of an artwork that both is and isn't his own; it comes from 'a deep place', or an unconscious mind. Like the primal wellspring that is a stream of (un)consciousness in meditation or dreams, or the fountainhead of the primordial stream Alph of Xanadu in Coleridge's Kubla Khan, it intermittently throws up chunks of stone. We never see them as they were beforehand, integrated into some monolithic seam of rock, and in a sense they don't really pre-exist their emergence as fragments: they emerge into existence as always-already broken-apart. This is why the game of reassembling a mythical groundstate, a 'straight' narrative, is both futile and deeply rewarding; ludic and at the same time a serious occupation. The prehistoric image of a cosmic coyote-rascal who has mixed everything up only exists because we always, everywhere, have to begin with fragments, and fragments are all that are ever given to us. I say 'prehistoric' because this rascal is a back-projection, retrofitted, as an explanatory device to provide a mythical account of why the universe (or at least, conscious sentience) is the way it is. Everything is a game of synthesis, of seeing what fits and what works, and there is no final answer, no monolithic bedrock, just local approximations that we have to dynamically alter according to circumstance.

Is this something that you are saying? That far from being 'abstraction' in the sense of moving away from experience, Lynch's way with narrative is actually close, in a phenomenological, lived sense, to the reality of our conscious experience? I can get behind this idea, in any case.
Last edited by Novalis on Tue Sep 19, 2017 4:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Season 3 structures and mechanisms [SPOILERS]

Post by referendum »

Is this something that you are saying? That far from being 'abstraction' in the sense of moving away from experience, Lynch's way with narrative is actually close, in a phenomenological, lived sense, to the reality of our conscious experience? I can get behind this idea, in any case.
yes, i think that is where he is coming from - what he is trying to show. It doesn't mean it is 100% achieved. There are loads of things in what you wrote that clarify what i was trying to say by saying a similar thing in a different way or from another angle ( ha! ) - and that, i think, is a also part of Lynch method here. This is just guesswork and thinking aloud obviously.

If you draw ten pictures of the same thing they are all going to be different. If you sit 10 different people in front of the same thing to draw it, the results are again going to be different. - but in a different way. Well, he ditched the ten different directors idea from S1 and 2, the first time round: it didn't work out. So what we have here is something like the ten different pictures of the same thing by the same person all presented on the same timeline. A suite. But sliced up so that all the separate elements weave in and out of each other, instead of being presented ABCDEFG. It would be fairly easy and perhaps useful to write a list of these separate elements, or story lines. Perhaps I will try.

The point of the slightly iffy musical chairs analogy - which differentiates it from ( Lynch's own ) jigsaw analogy, comes down to structure.
TP TR starts off from multiple different narrative threads and geographic locations and different characters and gradually strips them away one by one until it arrives at this sort of yin/yang ending - Cooper and Laura, nowhere in limbo. The various storylines don't so much converge as get abandoned ( Richard Horne, Stephen/ Becky, the Hutches, Audrey etc are all pretty much summarily dismissed with the narrative equivalent of a blunt instrument) as we zoom in to what is important: first the town of Twin Peaks, and it's people, then Coop & Laura.

We are told early on that ' Laura is the One' and that it starts and ends with Laura and we see that Cooper is the central character. So if musical chairs is a useful clue as to the structure, it is ( aaagh i am about to mix my analogies) a game played with loaded dice because there have to be two players in play at the end, and it can only be those two, and we know who they are from the start - Richard and Linda. Scene one, Coop is told the end and given instructions, even though we don't understand them, and (?) neither does he. Or does he? And we know the end has to be in Twin Peaks, because it is about Cooper's journey back there. The end is not random. It ends with these two people, lost somewhere in time and space, each in their own reality, left hanging, the detective and the victim, two sides of the same coin. Scream. Big reverb. Whisper in the ear. Question mark. Moody music.

It seems to be only you and me on this thread :) oh well.
there is alot more i would like to address in what you wrote. I will try and come back to it later. Cheers.
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