Fan edits, fan art, official editing, etc...

[LostInTheMovies]

I am interested in seeing the fanedit at some point as an experiment (I enjoyed Q2's "Northwest Passage" in a similar light) but I have to admit I hate the idea of it as a replacement or improvement on the film. My objections are fundamental to the nature of what's being done here and probably won't change after viewing:

- These are 2 different movies. They are cut, mixed, and scored in radically different fashion, one with Lynch's sensibility of 1992 and the other with his sensibility of 2014. The Missing Pieces are told through long, quiet master shots while Fire Walk With Me consists of far more immersive close-ups, faster cutting, and a thicker sound design and score. These are fundamentally different takes on the material, and Lynch intended them as such. Slamming them together essentially amounts to disrespecting the cinematic qualities that make each presentation worthwhile in the first place, and treating the movie as an illustrated screenplay. I'm all for juxtapositions, but not juxtapositions that try to pass themselves off as cohesive when they aren't.

- Fire Walk With Me is supposed to be a rejection of the show's qualities. That's what makes it so powerful. Watering it down with lots of comforting distractions is essentially denying the strength of the material, which is a deeply subjective view of incest. The first time I watched the movie I already felt it had too much Twin Peaks-y material. I don't feel that way anymore, but it certainly doesn't need more than it's got. The movie sits us down and says "You had your fun with the murder mystery, now here's the really dark shit at the bottom of it" and by the end of the film, no matter how many times I'm watching it, I always kind of forget about Laura Palmer the myth and am totally wrapped up in the story of this one character. I don't want to be distracted from that.

- The scenes were also cut because they were non sequiturs. The film suffers from some messiness and unevenness because Lynch was torn, at the script stage, between simply "bringing Twin Peaks to the big screen" and making a standalone film that could be just as worthy as his other feature films. He eventually erred much more toward the former, but he only did so by axing most of the extraneous material. Maybe it's because I'm a film buff more than a TV fan (by far), but I don't need a fanservice movie that tries to squeeze a series into a feature film. I would much rather have a great movie that, warts and all, is a piece of cinema. It has a dual role of course, acting as a fulfillment of the series too, but for all its flaws it has its own distinct power as a movie-movie.

Hopefully this doesn't sound harsh and/or rude and I am glad that the fanedit helped you come around more to some of the things Fire Walk With Me is doing! And I'll try to keep an open mind when I eventually watch it. But ultimately I hope you and others who were impressed by the fanedit eventually find a way into the movie as it exists, because it's a very different experience. Ultimately I don't know what depresses me more: rejection of the film, or dilution of it. At least the former allows the film to exist, whereas the latter feels like it is erasing it.

[dud]

hmm interesting, i guess i just disagree with most of that. it doesn't feel watered down to me, it feels even more powerful, and it felt cohesive to me even though it wasn't lynch's vision. i guess i'd have to watch them back to back, but i feel like i'd miss a lot of the missing pieces. i'd love to hear whether or not you change your opinion when you get around to watching it

[LostInTheMovies]

hmm interesting, i guess i just disagree with most of that. it doesn't feel watered down to me, it feels even more powerful, and it felt cohesive to me even though it wasn't lynch's vision. i guess i'd have to watch them back to back, but i feel like i'd miss a lot of the missing pieces. i'd love to hear whether or not you change your opinion when you get around to watching it

I have trouble watching torrents on my computer but I'm gonna try to find a way soon, maybe having a friend get a copy for me. It does seem like I've talked enough about & around it at this point that I should have seen it by now haha...

And I'm definitely curious to see how things fit together in theory - I'm probably going to do a similar exercise just for myself soon with various characters' scenes edited together (just to get a grasp on how their stories actually unfold without ancillary material). I guess it's just the idea of treating as a substitute for Lynch bums me a bit.

EDIT: I should also add that Fire Walk With Me is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I think it's a masterpiece of avant-garde art horror (and whatever others labels you want to apply to it) BUT...I actually don't think it's a very good screenplay, paradoxical as it sounds. The greatness was achieved more in spite of the script than because of it: in the performance, the directorial touches, and the sound design. Obviously there were many interesting ideas present in the script or it couldn't have gone as far as it did (granted, I think many of these ideas got better expression in Lynch's on-set revisions than on the page...). But the closer the film gets to its shooting script, the less interesting I think it is. So for me the whole idea of a "restorative" fanedit is actually corrupting what makes the film great, rather than purifying it.

That said, I love the Missing Pieces on their own as vignettes, little peeks into the community. I'm just baffled as to what they were ever supposed to add up to. Maybe I'll have a different take watching the fanedit.