Revealing the killer - public vs. private

[StealThisCorn]

Yeah when I saw that deleted scene in FWWM of Laura at the Hayward and Leland calls on the phone, there's this look that the Doctor and his wife share while the ominous music plays and I just felt like "oh my god, they know."

[N. Needleman]

Yeah when I saw that deleted scene in FWWM of Laura at the Hayward and Leland calls on the phone, there's this look that the Doctor and his wife share while the ominous music plays and I just felt like "oh my god, they know."

Yeah, it floored me. It certainly changes the tenor of the show.

[Kmkmiller]

I have two cents on the comparison between TP and TD, .. Briefly Pizzolato, the TD guy worked on the episode of THE KILLING that got everyone so angry with Vena Sud. In this episode they ... Guess what, they led the audience to believe the killer had been revealed only to slip in a piece of evidence to show that they had the wrong guy and fans would have to wait until the next season to find out the killer.

FANS

WENT

LIVID

the amount of rage heaped on Vena Sud was painful. Damon Lindelof even had to write an op Ed in variety I think in defense of this choice, of course it's debatable if Damon really can be the best champion of unresolved mysteries in any context, but guys. Despite Kinneman's charisma and a compelling arc for Mireille Enos's character people just turned on that show on a very ugly way.

Its what I think whenever the Twin Peaks reveal topic comes up and I imagine there's probably more than a couple fans out there who would bash ABC for forcing Lynch/Frost to reveal the killer, but then turn around and bash Vena Sud for not revealing the killer and just never get the massive amount of cognitive dissonance they are displaying.. Bottom line. ABC execs can point to fan backlash on THE KILLING and say "told ya so."

So two years later Pizzolato was confronted "will you ANSWER THE QUESTIONS????" in TRUE DETECTIVE and what's he gonna say? He says "yes" ergo we get the yellow king reveal (which I thought was actually kinda cool if not for the obvious "oh look who's that painting the school ... Ahem .... Yellow?") which was yes very Thomas Harrisy....

And Joel's comments above about TRUE DETECTIVE are spot on as to how the show backed away from all that made the first episodes interesting and tied itself nicely up in an en ending that would have been just as "at home" on an episode of L&O SVU. If only maybe a little more artsy which is always cool. In the end the best reason to watch TD was, as it should be, to see McConnaghey and Harrelson deliver the performances they did.

Ok ... So what does this have to do with revealing the killer in Twin Peaks? Maybe not much but maybe everything... I don't have any great answers. .. Except that in my experience fans tend to extol the virtues of extended unresolved mysteries ..... up to a point.

We lament that Leland was revealed too soon but without having to imagine what it would be like if season 2 concluded and we still had no confirmation as to who killed Laura Palmer!! That might have WORSE for a lot of people.

All the other comments about how revealing the killer turned the mystery from a city wide twin peaks into a family drama are also spot on, but I think it's fair to say CooperBob might have kept the story going in a pretty broad way...

But this is where I get to talk about THE LEFTOVERS again. It's interesting because we are talking about this issue ... which is AWESOME.... Just to note that Damon Lindelof figured out the one way to avoid the conundrum of

1. ongoing mystery (pissing off fans -- which he has done very much himself)
vs
2. revealing answers too soon ....

Solution: You just come out and say it .... YOU WILL NEVER GET THE ANSWER. 2% of the population just disappeared. Deal with it. Don't like it. Don't watch, many will.

Love that show.

[LostInTheMovies]

Its what I think whenever the Twin Peaks reveal topic comes up and I imagine there's probably more than a couple fans out there who would bash ABC for forcing Lynch/Frost to reveal the killer, but then turn around and bash Vena Sud for not revealing the killer and just never get the massive amount of cognitive dissonance they are displaying.

Agreed. It seems like most of the bashing is very latter-day. Missing the show on its first run, I heard the same conventional wisdom as everyone else when I got into it years later: ABC ruined the show, it was popular as long as the mystery was there as a hook, the audience turned away from Twin Peaks because the killer was revealed (even Lynch himself claims this).

But the actual ratings, and perhaps even more damningly the press clippings, tell a very different story. Twin Peaks' reputation nosedived not when it did reveal the killer, but when it DIDN'T, namely in the season 2 premiere. So in the end we don't have to guess how Twin Peaks would have fared if the reveal had been further postponed because we already know. Simply by postponing the reveal a mere 7 episodes the show signed its own death warrant. The week of episode 14 Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune were publishing articles asking who cares anymore who killed Laura Palmer?

I'm of the opinion that the reveal was brilliant, that it had to happen, that its power depends on the private-not-public gut punch, and that it was placed when it should have been, but that the show's essential dramatic mistake was not stopping there. Imagine how powerful & effective "The World Spins" in the Road House would be as a conclusion to the series. Yes, there was potential to move forward with a broader mystery rooted in the Laura case (we've all discussed those possibilities on this and other threads) but a) the writers really hadn't positioned themselves to exploit that potential, so it's kind of a pipe dream and b) even if they had been ready to steer the narrative car along the edge of the cliff the show was doomed to non-renewal so it wouldn't have lasted much longer under any circumstances. With that in mind, it was a mistake to continue after the reveal.

At the same time, I'm GLAD Twin Peaks made that mistake because 14 more disappointing episodes are worthwhile in exchange for the brilliant finale, an episode which never would have happened if the show had been, basically, a tight two-season miniseries. And it's also hard to imagine FWWM getting made if the show ended with the reveal, even though it theoretically could have been, because of the alchemical way Lynch's mind works. The movie seems to be as much a response to the show's decline and his grieving process over ending the Laura mystery (and his discomfort with having to expose the show's dark heart, which he seemed to enjoy knowing as a sacred secret). If Twin Peaks had been better planned, it wouldn't have sunk so low but I don't think it would have reached so high either.

That's ultimately my biggest disappointment with True Detective, at least so far. It feels like, perverse as this seems to say, Pizzolatto ran too tight a ship and so, even as something deeper and richer was being discovered in production, the preordained destination was allowed to yank the season back in a somewhat unnatural direction. But that's sort of a pointless argument to make because there's no way True Detective could have been made as loosely and spontaneously as Twin Peaks ultimately was. Different circumstances, different creator (those interviews in which Pizzolatto goes into great detail about his story's meaning are evidence enough of that!). The best I can hope for is that over the next two or three seasons of the show, Pizolatto digests the growing complexity and potentiality of what he has created and ends up expanding on seeming dead ends. Hard to do with the anthology format of changing characters, locations, and mysteries, but still possible.

Somehow I suspect that if/when True Detective does get more adventurous there will be a backlash against it - when it fully realizes its potential, fans will turn on it. Always seems to work that way, doesn't it?

[Kmkmiller]

I don't think Pizzolato will change the formula as long as its working... Decently written, film quality direction/acting ... some hipster existentialism, some dirty sex (but not TOO dirty) ... murder mystery solve the crime. An R rated 9 hour SVU episode for film students.

Some of it is just too funny. McConnaughey blurting out "I don't sleep I just dream," while Harrelson gets that look on his face.... Can Colin Farrell pull it off? We will see. But that's the formula and by all accounts it's really a pretty good one....

Try to get back on topic... One thing missing from TRUE DETECTIVE and it was huge in a show like TWIN PEAKS is how the central mystery affected everyone in Twin Peaks. Donna, James, Bobby, Jacoby, Harold, Johnny, Audrey, Ben... everyone.... Indeed this was the main point, the public part of the title of this thread.... why revealing the killer would stall the show. This is what I think interested Lynch the most, ... I guess in TD they did show how the mystery affected Rust and Marty but no one else seemed to care much... If I remember correctly...

[LostInTheMovies]

One thing missing from TRUE DETECTIVE and it was huge in a show like TWIN PEAKS is how the central mystery affected everyone in Twin Peaks. Donna, James, Bobby, Jacoby, Harold, Johnny, Audrey, Ben... everyone.... Indeed this was the main point, the public part of the title of this thread.... why revealing the killer would stall the show. This is what I think interested Lynch the most,

So he says, but his actions speak differently. While Lynch certainly reveled in public aspect of Laura's death in the pilot, the funny thing is he pretty much dropped it after that. Episode 2 is more an exercise in hip, playful weirdness (you can really tell it was shot just after Wild at Heart) than a meditation on Laura's impact on the community; other season 1 episodes, like 3 & 5, are much more focused Laura's fallout among the left behind. Episodes 8 & 9 lay a lot of groundwork for the upcoming climax, and Lynch seems to be particularly drawn toward the supernatural undertones and growing darkness of the Laura mystery, but the community-impacted-by-grief theme is long gone (admittedly due as much to the writing as the direction). And then of course Lynch enters into Fire Walk With Me on the pretext that it will explore the community when Laura was still alive, yet in the script the townspeople's scenes have nothing to do with Laura (except for the Hayward living room) and unsurprisingly they are cut from the finished film.

Lynch always dwells on an abstract idea about Twin Peaks being a beautiful neverending soap opera story spinning around the axis of Laura's mystery but it was mostly left to Frost to illustrate this aspect. Lynch only really gets heavily involved when the narrative is at its most cinematic, building toward a particularly intense climax (precisely the development he claims to have hated). And this is also the point where Laura's mystery is becoming - and eventually revealed to be - more emphatically private than public.

So I dunno...it seems a bit like Lynch was lying to himself: he likes making a TV series more in theory than practice. This casts his recent beef with Showtime in an interesting light, especially the emphasis on wanting to do it like a film.

[Kmkmiller]

So I dunno...it seems a bit like Lynch was lying to himself: he likes making a TV series more in theory than practice. This casts his recent beef with Showtime in an interesting light, especially the emphasis on wanting to do it like a film.

There is actually a pretty rich history of film types backing out of TV schedules.

Genvieve Bujold in ST Voyager.
Our own Isabella Rosselini was to be an Italian Josie.
Keaton was supposed to be Jack in LOST until he found out he wouldn't die in the pilot and would have to show up every day for the next six years.

it's a poor choice of words but I'm sure Nevins knows how film types get "cold feet" when confronted with TV schedules, etc. yet I see no reason to pursue that speculation, I can be critical of taking the issue to the public but I do take Lynch at face value. It's budget unless he says otherwise.

But yeah I've often thought the same thing, if MULHOLLAND DRIVE really did turn into a TV show, it's hard to imagine Lynch working the way a normal showrunner does, that schedule, pulling together and keeping tabs on a writers room. Etc...

[LostInTheMovies]

it's a poor choice of words but I'm sure Nevins knows how film types get "cold feet" when confronted with TV schedules, etc. yet I see no reason to pursue that speculation, I can be critical of taking the issue to the public but I do take Lynch at face value. It's budget unless he says otherwise.

I think so too, but at the same time "bigger budget" could be a way of making sure he doesn't get stuck in the TV trap. Maybe even he knows that he isn't really suited for TV-style filmmaking and so he is trying to make it as "filmic" as possible to ensure he's within his comfort zone? Maybe not super-consciously, but like on a gut level this is what feels right to him? Just a complete guess, of course.

But yeah I've often thought the same thing, if MULHOLLAND DRIVE really did turn into a TV show, it's hard to imagine Lynch working the way a normal showrunner does, that schedule, pulling together and keeping tabs on a writers room. Etc...

Totally. And the fact that he didn't have a co-showrunner like Frost makes it even more mind-boggling to try and figure out how the hell that would have ever worked.

I get the distinct impression from like Reflections/USC/etc anecdotes that Lynch really wasn't a presence in the writer's room at all on Twin Peaks, even at the points when he was directing and/or appearing in a lot of episodes (basically just the first third of season two). You hear about occasional "notes" like put-Josie-in-a-doorknob or I-want-to-make-out-with-Madchen but otherwise he doesn't seem to have been very hands-on. And this would also make sense of stuff he was supposedly deadset against, most notably Laura's mystery ending. But I may be totally wrong about that. At any rate it is hard to picture him participating in that process given his typical working methods.

[Gabriel]

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they'd revealed Leland as the killer and kept the series running without him being caught. It would have added a lot of tension if Leland had been in scenes when we knew he was the killer and Cooper and co didn't...

Imagine having a Dexter/Vic Mackey/Walter White character wreaking havoc revealing all the town's dark secrets as a smokescreen for his own murderous activities!

[Jonah]

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they'd revealed Leland as the killer and kept the series running without him being caught. It would have added a lot of tension if Leland had been in scenes when we knew he was the killer and Cooper and co didn't...

Imagine having a Dexter/Vic Mackey/Walter White character wreaking havoc revealing all the town's dark secrets as a smokescreen for his own murderous activities!

I've often wondered about this too. I imagine it would have been like a series of Episode 15s. I think they possibly should have done this for awhile, in addition to exploring Bob and who he's going to possess next, and maybe having Donna targeted like she was in 16, but if they had overdone it or stretched it out too long, it might have gotten old pretty fast. Still, probably would have been better than Little Nicky, Lana, Evelyn, et al.

[Ygdrasel]

Had the killer reveal spoiled for me by virtue of only discovering Twin Peaks in the post-2010 years where everything ever is spoiled by jerks. But the reveal itself was still very well-executed and honestly, I suspected he had something to do with it anyway. He was an odd little man...

The network forcing the reveal undoubtedly left things on shaky ground for the latter half of season two but I can't say I was disappointed.

As far as I can see, it still was the story of the town's secrets and evils even in the end. The evil in the woods preys on the citizens in the town, the secrets in the town enable the evil in the woods. That the evil chose to inflict itself upon a particular family doesn't mean the story shrank down in scope or anything. It was only able to prey on the Palmers so effectively because the town as a whole was so secretive and twisted just beneath the surface. When everyone minds their own business, evil things go easily unnoticed. And the choice of prey was designed to hurt the rest of the residents as well, what with Laura being this icon of goodness to (mostly) everyone.

The story of the town didn't reduce itself to become the story of Laura. The story of Laura was a conduit for the story of the town, while the story of the town enabled the story of Laura. And both fed into the woods. The twisted nature of the town fueled Laura's troubles which further contributed to the twisted nature of the town which further fueled Laura's troubles...And all of it fueled BOB (and company).

It's like an ouroboros with a leech on its back.