Novalis wrote:This part was packed with details, much of which was buried in dialogue and in scenery. It will be a great pleasure to rewatch this when I'm firing on all cylinders and not half-asleep at 2am. As it stands, this episode blew me away with its unsettling, brooding creep. The Audrey-Charlie argument, in which both characters remain rooted as if in sleep paralysis, was particularly challenging and disquieting. I find it hard to understand how anyone could find that scene boring or trivial. It demands a lot of attention.
Grace Zabriskie's brief scene in the grocery/convenience store, confronted with the turkey jerky (gobble gobble), and sonically accompanied by the Fire Walk With Me string scrapes from Teresa Banks' autopsy connected deep in my Twin Peaks core. This was a massive 'connect' moment as far as I was concerned.
I hear people saying the dialogue was clunky and overwritten. I disagree. I think the dialogue was to the point, drawing attention to its own play, its excessiveness and elaborateness. Incidentally, I often used the word 'milquetoast', and also often remind people that Harry is their brother even when it goes without saying. Because discourse is not purely about imparting information. Language also does things that are completely at odds with the purposes of communication. It does things, it has performative value.
Blue Rose? Hmmm. I have to be honest I had hoped for more than the Frostian origin of the term (I chose the username Novalis, after all, for the author of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the original dreamer of the blue flower). But there's nothing in what was said about 'abstractions', that ties Blue Rose phenomena to flying saucers and all the TSHOTP misdirection. The way I choose to see it is that UFOlogy (and alternate dimensions for that matter) is just how the paranoid securitarian / military mind chooses to interpret things it can't comprehend (dixit counterpaul). Ultimately, I like the way the conversation was steered wide of Blue Book with this ambiguous word 'abstraction'. It's strange that this matters to me, but it does. The intrusion of dream realities into Twin Peaks feels correct; UFOs doesn't.
Also, I disagree with a lot of posters here about time wasting. No time was wasted in the making of this film. Only if you see time as a kind of currency or commodity, which I feel fairly confident in saying, Lynch doesn't. The temporality of the art of Twin Peaks is somehow post-capitalist; it can be expended indefinitely without diminishing its store. Fuck you, finitude; fuck you, death, deadlines and the stinking boss. This thing will take as long as it takes. If we happen to fall asleep or pass out or die mid journey, so much the better. I think the Audrey-Charlie scene is very much to the point here.
I suspect I'll find few who agree with me here, but this part felt very much like classic Twin Peaks to me. We're definitely homing in on a Return vibe. We've turned a corner in the slow winding approach, and the clues are all there in the writing and the sets.
As for all the comments on Lynch supposedly 'trolling' or messing with expectations. Hmmm. I see it differently. I see some sort of pedagogical aim in his story-telling. He's not out to thwart or play with us, there's a sort of didactic element to what he's doing, the way he is offering us things to think about. If that's trolling then I guess I've misunderstood the term. From my point of view he's showing things, letting them be seen, like all artists who work with visual elements do. The sounds though: the sounds really tell you everything. Listen to the sounds.
I think I'd rate this as a part with huge rewatch value -- nothing is what it seems.
Thanks for this intelligent post!
