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'.