Part 6 - Don't die (SPOILERS)

[Endangered_Wulf]

Blah.Blah. Blah.

I can't even believe 'Breaking Bad' discussion has made it on to this forum. TWIN PEAKS HAS NOIR-STYLE STORY TELLING WITH A MUCH DARKER NARRATIVE THAN 'BREAKING BAD'.

IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE 'BREAKING BAD' !

TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT SHOWS.

[WhiteLodge90]

Blah.Blah. Blah.

I can't even believe 'Breaking Bad' discussion has made it on to this forum. TWIN PEAKS HAS NOIR-STYLE STORY TELLING WITH A MUCH DARKER NARRATIVE THAN 'BREAKING BAD'.

IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE 'BREAKING BAD' !

TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT SHOWS.

Um... I never said they were...I was just responding to someones comment.

[ThumbsUp]

I agree with Jerry about the coldness- or "emotional disconnect" as I call it. It's the thing I've had the biggest problem with so far, and I talked about this after the first 4 eps. I knew the series would be very different, but I still expected the emotional component to the characters to remain. I'm onboard, and am going along with the show. But the emotional aspect and interaction of the characters is sorely missed.

Yeah, this is a common complaint about season 3, and can't say I disagree. I love this season so far, but I do think it's missing a certain level of heart. Lynch movies always make me think and take me someplace, but I never feel especially close to any of the characters. The original show was soapy at times (and I'm not just talking about the satire elements), but I did feel more emotionally invested in the characters. With The Return, more of the joy comes out of trying to unpack this elaborate, beautiful puzzle.

[Endangered_Wulf]

HAHA. I AGREE COMPLETELY 100% I almost forgot about the 'SOAP-OPERA' feeling from the original series. It really gave the show a deeper level of personality. In fact, the show sort of trolled itself with "AN INVITATION TO LOVE" vignettes.

-Speaking of: I wonder if Audrey Horne and Agent Cooper will finally hook up like LYNCH & FROST originally wanted in the first place.

The way I understood it was: Kyle MacLachlan and Lara Flynn Boyle were dating at the time and Lara Flynn Boyle adamantly protested the budding romance between Audrey and Cooper on the show.

[mtsi]

Hello everyone, French poster here, so I hope my English is correct. I love reading all the reactions and theories on the forum.

...

- Of course the accident scene made me (and everyone) think of the scene with the One Armed Man in FWWM because of the intersection and the truck. But also it made me think of Al Strobel own near-death experience when he lose his arm for real, in a car accident. I think he tells that story in a bonus in the Blu-Ray. The "light"/fire floating beyond the kid, hesitating, before disapearing in the sky, made me thought of the way he described it.
But that scene makes think about a lot of sad sad things, and I must tell I cried my heart out the two times I saw it. Great great cinema. Thank you David and Mark for that beautiful work.

Yeah, great cinema indeed. What a feast this Season 3 is; every week a brand new present and a new world to explore, which somehow tells everything about our own world and the mystery of time, IMHO.

At that fatal crossroad, loaded with electricity - bad bad vibes, time again stretches and somehow I think it is difficult to grasp that The One Armed Man's "Don't die" was meant for Dougie/Coop.

They didn't have to go far for the #6 electric post either. It's about 60 feet from the fatal intersection, even though it was 'supposed' to be in Deer Meadow.

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

[BigEd]

Maybe i'm in the minority? but i can't really fault the Season so far. It's definitely building to something extraordinary

Clearly not the minority. More like the (relatively) quiet majority.

[tresojos]

i love the new season. its a lot more like fwwm than the series tho. i miss the music from the first two seasons. i wished they played lauras theme more. anyways.. wheres sky ferreira.. ive been waiting all season to watch her appear. she said shes playing a character and not a musical guest.

[homieonice]

Maybe i'm in the minority? but i can't really fault the Season so far. It's definitely building to something extraordinary

Clearly not the minority. More like the (relatively) quiet majority.

good 2 know Big Ed

[Nighthawk]

HAHA. I AGREE COMPLETELY 100% I almost forgot about the 'SOAP-OPERA' feeling from the original series. It really gave the show a deeper level of personality. In fact, the show sort of trolled itself with "AN INVITATION TO LOVE" vignettes.

-Speaking of: I wonder if Audrey Horne and Agent Cooper will finally hook up like LYNCH & FROST originally wanted in the first place.

The way I understood it was: Kyle MacLachlan and Lara Flynn Boyle were dating at the time and Lara Flynn Boyle adamantly protested the budding romance between Audrey and Cooper on the show.

I think some of that warmth is missing from the new season. FWWM was completely bleak and dreary (not in a bad sense), and as another poster already mentioned, season 3 is closer to FWWM than the first two seasons. I was hoping it would be the opposite, but I am not complaining too much as it is still such a wonderful puzzle. I was a bit worried after reading Mark Frost's book

Spoiler:

with all of its conspiracy theories spanning the width of both geography and history of the United States

. I am glad that the show has so far mostly steered clear from that.

I would like to see more of the human touch and humor that was present in the first two seasons. It actually made the dissonance between ordinary, perhaps even idyllic, small town life, and supernatural terror lurking right around the corner all the more striking. The characters were definitely more relatable and many of them wanted to be good people, although with varying degree of success. But again, that's what made them seem familiar to us. To give just one example from season 2:

Spoiler:

Pete Martell stops by the Sheriff's office and notices Harry Truman looking out the window through binoculars. It turns out he is bird watching and hands over the binoculars so Pete can have a look too at what is apparently some rare species. After that they begin talking about Josie and both admit that they have loved her. This is after one of her disappearances, but I think prior to her death

. It was scenes like this one, and there were many, that built up the characters and the atmosphere. I do miss that aspect of the show.

[oxyboldine]

Lynch has definitely decided on a different approach to distance between the audience and characters this season, and I think the question we should be pondering isn't "do I enjoy this" but why has he chosen more distance?

Distance in narrative is usually deployed for a couple of reasons. In Hemingway, for instance, he used dramatic objective POV with no internal reports of feeling or thought because he wanted his readers to interpret the characters' actions on their own and to discern the subtext of images and mis-en-scene.

With avant garde writers like Bertolt Brecht, however, the distance is meant to create an alienating effect where the audience has difficulty developing empathy (emotional bonds) with the characters so that they can focus on a political or thematic content and not have their reflective abilities interrupted or biased by character empathy. In Brecht's epic theater, he also designed the characters to be flat to aid in this alienation effect. They intentionally represent types instead of psychologically realistic characters (round characters).

So how is Lynch using distance? I think some of what he's doing is similar to what I described above, but that one of his tactics clearly seems to be to use distance to undermine audience expectation and judgement formation.

Dr. Jacoby is one obvious example. Our initial shots of him receiving his shovels were literally far away from him. We could barely hear his dialogue. This made judging what he was doing difficult and then later on when we are presented to his show we are placed at a much closer emotional and intellectual distance to him, and our expectations are completely undermined.

Our initial shot of Becky and Shelly is also at a distance and we are placed next to Norma as she observes the daughter manipulating the mother. This seems to invite a more objective, rather than emotional, view of mother and daughter, and we are aligned with Norma's judgement.

What the payoff here will be will be interesting to see, but Lynch's tactic so far seems to be to often begin at a distance to create some emotional objectivity (coldness) and then to shift POV later, moving closer to the characters' subjectivity.

Even the Doris scenes function this way: we begin watching her in a style similar to Hemingway's dramatic objective POV where we are forced to judge her behavior with little internal context. Instead we see a lot of external hysteria that doesn't seem justified, and people react with little empathy for her. Later another character provides the internal context and we realize that our initial judgement of her was wrong: she deserves empathy even if we still find her abrasive.

So overall I think Lynch (and probably Frost too) wanted to bring more objectivity to what was once a hyper-subjective world. But once establishing this objectivity, they want to undermine it with strategic POV shifts that bring us in closer to human experience.

Great analysis! I also feel that it will go that direction.

For instance, there has been some changes about our point-of-view in the lasts episodes.
- The Golden Shovels, showed as something deeply mysterious in the first episodes, reveals itself as a tool for a crazy internet show
- Doris Truman, depicted as an horrible and stupid wife, suddenly appears as a tragic mother in the last episode
- Richard Horne, first a purely evil guy, appears as someone lost in darkness and despaired, a much more complex human being
- Janey-E, very much like a robot at first, appears now as a woman who have learned to ignore her unfaithful husband, just to avoid becoming crazy.

Maybe there are more examples. The music of Angelo Badalamenti seems to indicate the shifts, from a cold world to a warm one (or emotional one)
- In episode 4, the Laura Palmer theme when Bobby cries (I almost cried)
- In episode 5, the first (?) new track, when Cooper/Dougie cries (I cried a little)
- In episode 6, big tragic music, during the collision scene and Carl seeing a "soul" leaving a body... (I cried a lot)

I guess we enter the world of Twin Peaks slowly, as a foreigner or a ghost, and we re-discover our feelings little by little too. Just like Cooper trapped in his amnesia. First, he was trapped inside the Black Lodge (ep.1-3) and the show was totally dark, weird, and cold. Then, he is trapped in amnesia/re-birth, and emotion appears little by little, as memory too, as Twin Peaks characters too, and as music.

[Nighthawk]

- Janey-E, very much like a robot at first, appears now as a woman who have learned to ignore her unfaithful husband, just to avoid becoming crazy.

Janey-E seems to be a very specific name. Is it a reference to Wall-E?

[oxyboldine]

- Janey-E, very much like a robot at first, appears now as a woman who have learned to ignore her unfaithful husband, just to avoid becoming crazy.

Janey-E seems to be a very specific name. Is it a reference to Wall-E?

Wow, never thought of that! But, sometimes, she seems very human (in episode 4, she is first caricatural, but when she discovers the money she seems really surprised and moved ; same in episode 6). It seems that she was once a human, but that mariage has transformed her in a "robot" and dehumanized her. But the "-E" thing may be a nod to the robotic aspect of the character, good point!

[Nighthawk]

- Janey-E, very much like a robot at first, appears now as a woman who have learned to ignore her unfaithful husband, just to avoid becoming crazy.

Janey-E seems to be a very specific name. Is it a reference to Wall-E?

Wow, never thought of that! But, sometimes, she seems very human (in episode 4, she is first caricatural, but when she discovers the money she seems really surprised and moved ; same in episode 6). It seems that she was once a human, but that mariage has transformed her in a "robot" and dehumanized her. But the "-E" thing may be a nod to the robotic aspect of the character, good point!

I probably wouldn't have thought of that either. You mentioned the word "robot", that made the connection happen. Collaborative thinking

[MoondogJR]

It would be cool, I think, if they released the missing pages from Laura's diary as a (free) downloadable addendum for the book. Before the content of it is touched upon in the show. Not going to happen, but still, like the idea so much I wanted to ventilate

On another note: I've seen some other members mention it here before, but I think we should take the possability into account that Good Coop is in some sort of sleep/coma (hence Gerard asking him to wake up). For me, it would explain a lot of the scenes in DougieCoop's world that seem 'off'.

On the other hand, other plotlines seem to interwoven with the DougieCoop plotline, that it seems a bit farfetched. I don't now.

RE to the 'coldness' of the show. I agree, but I also kinda like it and reminds me (as stated here before) of the tone of FWWM. It makes the scenes were there is a lot of emotions and interactions going on (Steve/Becky - phone calls from Margeret - Carl and the accident - DougieCoop touched by looking at Sonny Jim - even Shelly and Red sharing glances for instance) stand out even more.

I have the same feeling with (what some call) the lack of music. It makes the impact of the music (including the songs in the Roadhouse) a lot more intens.

I'm really falling in love with this season 3, but I can understand that some have a difficult time with it.

[Endangered_Wulf]

I'm really falling in love with this season 3, but I can understand that some have a difficult time with it.

So what. Maybe some folks really really really really enjoyed the original formula better.