My apologies, this thread did make me think of Teresa also and from there, yes, I kind of got lost in a tangent. I certainly was not attempting to deliberately hijack your thread and derail it off topic because of any hate for Josie or Ronette. And if you posted something on one of the threads I started that wasn't about what I specifically asked/brought up, I really wouldn't care. At best it bumps it and at worst I would just look at the off topic post and wonder to myself what the person thought they read and then move on.WILDSTYLE wrote:Talking about Josie and Ronette is why the thread exists in the first place. Unlike Teresa, Ronette and Josie were pivotal to Twin Peaks from the start. Unlike Teresa, they were close acquaintances of Laura but- just like Teresa- and much less understandably given their central importance to the story and presence in the pilot- they were marginalized from the show and most fans' conceptions of the show nevertheless, and had their importance and similarity to Laura dismissed, implicitly or explicitly, by Cooper himself...
...As recent posts make clear, it is apparently therefore impossible to talk about Teresa without going on tangents discussing the interpretation of Deer Meadow and FWWM and Lynch in a much more general way that plenty of other threads already offer an opportunity to do, and which distracts from the specific subject of Ronette and Josie, in the same way as it would be distracting and indeed rather insensitive and insulting if I hijacked a thread asking for perspectives on Laura Palmer's experiences in order to abstractly debate the meaning of creamed corn or whether Lynch was better at directing pilots or regular TV episodes, or what season three may be like.
I felt like Josie was perhaps the most disappointing character in the series for me, because I saw she could have had all this potential. Like she could have been an example of what would have happened if Laura had lived to grow up and fully submitted to the darkness and let it use her to manipulate, use, seduce etc. people to their own ruin. I feel like if Isabella Rosselini had played Giovanna as originally intended for that role, her character arc probably would have been more significant and interesting and maybe Lynch would have stuck around longer? There was certainly a mystery there in the beginning, an "out of place-ness" because this beautiful (well to some people) exotic wealthy, sophisticated woman was slumming it in a backwoods, remote logging town and it immediately becomes a mysterious curiosity.
And I have long bemoaned how the character of Ronnette is treated throughout the series. All we have to go on concerning her past are snippets from The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. And it is somewhat curious that in the film she becomes a projection of Laura's corrupted side, the opposite of Donna, yet in the series it seems to be heavily implied that Ronnette was someone who Laura manipulated into going deeper in with her than perhaps she was originally comfortable with, like how Jacques tells Cooper that Laura was the one who convinced Ronnette to make the sleazy ads for Fleshworld. It seems in the series like Laura was the bad influence on her, just as it seems she was on Bobby as revealed during his session with Dr. Jacoby in Episode 5.
I see Josie's mishandling as a mixture of writer's dropping the ball to emphasize her connection to what was important, dumb tangents that got shoehorned in involving global business and organized crime conspiracies that for some reason center on the Packard sawmill and, yes, Joan Chen's own admitted growing disinterest in the character, in part due to pressure from her own country which culminated in her request to be written off the show. Along with James, she's probably one of the most unpopular main characters in the show among fans, in no small part because of the cringe-inducing way her relationship with Harry Truman is portrayed.
As for Ronette, I agree that it kills me how everyone treats her as an afterthought and not worth their time or consideration. Part of that is the way the writer's use mental trauma and coma as a way to keep her from revealing important plot points before they want to and part of that is that she isn't the blonde, Homecoming Queen, upper class girl who's daddy is a wealthy attorney. She's the dark-haired girl with a Polish last name who no one would be surprised to find boozing it up at the Roadhouse or going on prostitution adventures in Canada, who nobody thought knew Laura and who's mommy and daddy work at the sawmill. During the weak part of mid to late Season 2, I would have given anything to scrap Little Nicky and Evelyn Marsh and instead do a plotline focusing on how Ronette is adjusting to her recovery and what she's doing with her life now. But you gotta love David Lynch for not forgetting her and bringing her back in the last episode, looking well and fully recovered (though admittedly immediately made to relive her experience by a desperate Cooper with the oil). And, to this day, I still have no clue who it was who was supposed to have gotten into hospital room past the 24 hour guard that Truman said was posted and put the letter "B" underneath her fingernail *without* killing her for some reason (every other time a girl has to die to get a letter under their fingernail).
