Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Discussion of each of the 18 parts of Twin Peaks the Return

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wxray
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by wxray »

David Locke wrote: The only one I've been baffled at and didn't like at all was the Duncan Todd headshot. It looked cheap without also having any kind of power or Lynchian creepiness to it. I don't see the purpose that specific look served and I'm not sure why Lynch wouldn't do something closer to the Deer Meadow cop getting shot, or countless other similar examples throughout Lynch's filmography where you see a headshot or something similarly gruesome and it's stylized but also feels fairly "real."
Yeah. It does seem out of place. But it is so cartoonish, it has to be what DKL wants. Maybe this is a clue as to what Vegas is all about.

The Todd head shot reminded me a bit of one of the worst blood spatter effects of all time: Earthquake and the elevator fall. This one goes down in infamy. I honestly wonder if DKL isn't making a little poke at that piece of Hollywood lore. If you've never seen it, here it is. Skip to time 0:41 if all you want to see is the Duncan Todd like effect. Or, watch the whole 45 seconds of awesomeness. :)


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wxray
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by wxray »

SamGGD wrote:Come to really appreciate the Dougie arc.
Rewatched part 6 last night and, wow, what a touching episode.

There are little flash forwards in it. For example, Sonny Jim pats the bed to get DougieCoop to sit down. In 16, Coop does the same thing to get Sonny Jim to sit down. Pulling those heart-strings.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by Firewalkwithme91 »

What if Tammy is Linda? If Richard is the product of Mr. C and Audrey maybe Linda is the product of Annie and Cooper. It would also fit because Richard was a criminal like his dad and Tammy is a FBI-agent like her dad. :)

They could´ve changed Tammy´s name to protect her from Mr. C.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by TheGum »

There's an excellent discussion of "The Return" in the NYTimes...
PONIEWOZIK The “what’s going on here” of “The Return” comes wrapped in (sometimes literally) head-popping surrealism. But I don’t think it’s hard to watch. There’s logic; it just happens to be dream logic. The core story is simple. There’s Dale, spirited away for 25 years. There’s his doppelgänger, who eluded the Black Lodge by copying himself like a set of keys. And there ain’t room in this here plane of existence for the both of them.

That’s the setup of a Western, a label I would not have applied to the first “Twin Peaks.” But “The Return” has that flavor, not just from Evil Cooper swaggering in black like a wicked Johnny Cash. (He’s been everywhere, man.) “The Return” is big. It’s fixated on America’s awesome and terrifying expanse, in the sweep of locations, in all that imagery of headlights on dusty roads at night.

It’s also horror, sci-fi, a screwball comedy and of course a reunion — one inflected bittersweetly by real-world deaths (including Catherine E. Coulson, Warren Frost, Miguel Ferrer and David Bowie). How does it feel to go home?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/arts ... ation.html
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by Novalis »

wxray wrote:
David Locke wrote: The only one I've been baffled at and didn't like at all was the Duncan Todd headshot. It looked cheap without also having any kind of power or Lynchian creepiness to it. I don't see the purpose that specific look served and I'm not sure why Lynch wouldn't do something closer to the Deer Meadow cop getting shot, or countless other similar examples throughout Lynch's filmography where you see a headshot or something similarly gruesome and it's stylized but also feels fairly "real."
Yeah. It does seem out of place. But it is so cartoonish, it has to be what DKL wants. Maybe this is a clue as to what Vegas is all about.

The Todd head shot reminded me a bit of one of the worst blood spatter effects of all time: Earthquake and the elevator fall. This one goes down in infamy. I honestly wonder if DKL isn't making a little poke at that piece of Hollywood lore. If you've never seen it, here it is. Skip to time 0:41 if all you want to see is the Duncan Todd like effect. Or, watch the whole 45 seconds of awesomeness. :)



earthquake.JPG
Hilarious. :)

But I think Lynch is absolutely right not to capitulate to the appetite for violent snuff effects that has become endemic in recent years. There's something deeply hypocritical about the love for decapitation, mutilation and torture that underscored many films in the body-horror and 'new extremism' genres that cascaded into theatres and in the early 2000s, in that the camera never really dwelled long enough on the viscera and carnage, the dead meat and guts and organs, to establish any kind of genuine relationship to it: it was always pure spectacle, flung at the camera for a cheap moment of revulsion in a fast-moving sequence and then just as quickly forgotten.

Violent death in Lynch is usually different. The camera lingers, and drinks in the details, which are usually obscure and unusual. Recall the yellow-suited man still standing in Blue Velvet, blood gobbing out of his head. Or the way the spatter from an exit wound to the head in MD causes a lock of hair to float uncannily. Andy's death in LH, his head impaled on the corner of a glass table allows the camera to take differing, interesting perspectives on his dead face from both above and below the plane of the tabletop. These are not the same as Saw/Hostel/Final Destination film style deaths, which are intended to titillate and fuel the appetite for mutilation, cementing it as something familiar for TV to aspire to, but on the contrary scenes that really shift things sideways, offering death in an unfamiliar, uncanny register. Murder is often botched in Lynch, to amusing effect, but also as a way of unsettling the anticipated smoothness of death, drawing it out and making it clumsy, frustrating and a stumbling block for the audience should they wish to identify with a smooth-operator assassin figure.

I see the Duncan Todd head shot (with gasping Roger), and especially the demise of the tulpas in the lodge, as examples of this kind of 'stylisation'*, as examples of intentionally making us pull up, stop and think about what is happening in dying rather than spoonfeeding us the usual visual codes representing death so we can smoothly move onwards. The shooting of Gary Hutchens and Chantal was, for me at least, less successful in this regard, appearing much more akin to standard blood-pouch cinema.


*incidentally it is not inappropriate to speak of the more familiar deaths we see regularly in mainstream films and tv as equally stylised. They follow just as many visual conventions with no basis in human physiology: the human body is like wax, and can be easily truncated at any angle with a sharp blade and enough force; blood never really spurts as it ought to and is always the colour audiences expect it to be; organs and bones are rarely visible; slashes and bullets instantly floor and paralyse people, etc, etc.
As a matter of fact, 'Chalfont' was the name of the people that rented this space before. Two Chalfonts. Weird, huh?
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by wxray »

Novalis wrote: I see the Duncan Todd head shot (with gasping Roger), and especially the demise of the tulpas in the lodge, as examples of this kind of 'stylisation'*, as examples of intentionally making us pull up, stop and think about what is happening in dying rather than spoonfeeding us the usual visual codes representing death so we can smoothly move onwards. The shooting of Gary Hutchens and Chantal was, for me at least, less successful in this regard, appearing much more akin to standard blood-pouch cinema.
I think you are right on.

One scene in FWWM that has forever stuck was when Bobby killed the deputy/drug dealer. (Oh! Chad 1.0!) The goriness was way too good. Those brains, oh those brains.

DKL could have done this with Todd, easily. He didn't, and I think it is a clue.

BTW, regarding the movie Earthquake. If you google the elevator scene, you'll find the backstory. In a nutshell, the original effect was expensive and apparently quite impressive. It took 3 days to film. You see parts of it with the original lurching elevator. There were actual injuries inflicted on the stunt people. All of this was cut because of censorship, and somehow, this cartoon got added in its place, with the original lost to history. The result is legendary among filmmakers. Lynch abhors the censors. We saw what he did in parts 1 and 2 with the black boxes over Venus statue. (Find on Youtube, the official Lynch edited for PG rating.)

I see the Todd scene as something stylistic, a clue for us. And maybe, just maybe, a poke at censorship.
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Re: RE: Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by zeronumber »

Wonderful & Strange wrote:When talking about the FX in Twin Peaks, it's important to understand that avant garde artists like surrealists and absurdists often don't value realistic representation. They intentionally value an artificial aesthetic because it challenges and subverts people's preconceptions of what realistic representation is or should be.

When people get upset or annoyed about some of the Lodge FX, it's because they have a preconception of the "real." But there's nothing necessary about this assumption; it's totally contingent on a particular cultural view of realism.

But these sorts of assumptions are obviously unjustified because who can say with any authority what looks realistic or "proper" in a fictional dimensional space like the Black Lodge? The closest authorities are Lynch and Frost.
Quite right.

But even futher. I submit that those who perceive representations as "off" or even ridiculously absurd may fail to realize that their very conception in their very own mind may be faulty or dislodged such that they my be unable to discern the "rorscht" imagery before there eyes; and leap to simplistic codifications nd judgement of appehension.

It is what it is,and never necessarily what it is seen.

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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by whoisalhedges »

Novalis wrote:A+ work, really!
One thing nearly all Hollywood productions have in common: where's the f'ing blood?

Have you ever seen somebody get shot? Let me dial this back a bit - have you even been cutting up a carrot and sliced your finger? The human body contains A LOT of blood; and it is not shy about spilling it. Even relatively minor injuries may result in the loss of, say, half a pint of blood. Let's do an experiment. Take a cup of something a little thicker than water - maple syrup? - 8 oz.

Pour it on your kitchen floor.

You've just made a bigger mess than most FX houses make when staging a goddamn gunshot death.

You can lose a lot of blood before you bleed out. Even half a gallon is sometimes survivable. Half a gallon of blood, my god... this is something I think about more than I probably should. :lol:

But it's a real distraction to me. You see someone shot - in the heart! where all the blood pumps through! - and there's a little stain on their shirt. In real life, first responders slip and fall in blood. There's between 1-1 1/2 gallons of blood in the adult human body; and if there's a severe arterial injury (severe enough to preclude clotting), that blood will flow until it's all gone or the heart stops.

Put some red food coloring in a gallon of milk. Now dump it on the floor. That's a crime scene.

I'd much rather see Duncan Todd's head explode like a party favor than another "realistic" death scene with no blood.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by wxray »

whoisalhedges wrote: I'd much rather see Duncan Todd's head explode like a party favor than another "realistic" death scene with no blood.
Yes. Our concept of realism has been altered by hollywood expectations.

The world caught a glimpse of the ugliness of a head shot in the Zapruder film frames of the Kennedy assassination.

There's also a few real world head shots on the internet that, uh, show all the blood: Budd Dwyer suicide, and police interview room suicide.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by docLEXfisti »

The first head might not be so bad, but the second shot bloats the head too much - I guess that's what makes it look so weird...
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by TheGum »

One thing I'm really interested in after watching the finale is piecing together a timeline of what happens when in relation to other things (ny vs Vegas vs washington etc) we know it's not all shown in a linear way- possible time glitches aside, coopers lodge exit and brief appearance in NYC for example is shown in episode 3, but occurs in episode 1, for example. (Also just rewatched ep 1- what were those horny fools thinking!? Like- even barring getting killed, there's cameras everywhere, he'd definitely be fired)
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by Panapaok »

About the VFX stuff, I'm on board with everything except from Duncan Todd's murder and Dougie's/Diane's decomposition in the Red Room.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by sewhite2000 »

When Bobby kills Cliff Howard in FWWM, and Laura keeps telling him "You killed Mike!", he yells at her, "That' isn't fucking Mike!", and then suddenly hesitant and doubtful looks back at the body and says "Is it Mike?" That's exactly like Hawk saying "It isn't about the bunnies!" ... "Is it about the bunnies?" Surely that was an intentional nod to the earlier scene.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by trismegistus »

sewhite2000 wrote:When Bobby kills Cliff Howard in FWWM, and Laura keeps telling him "You killed Mike!", he yells at her, "That' isn't fucking Mike!", and then suddenly hesitant and doubtful looks back at the body and says "Is it Mike?" That's exactly like Hawk saying "It isn't about the bunnies!" ... "Is it about the bunnies?" Surely that was an intentional nod to the earlier scene.
Well, they're drunk and I presume have done coke on top of that. That combination can leave you not being unable to remember the simplest of details and leaves your recall to be extremely hazy. I never took it for surrealism. I just took it as Laura being unintentionally cruel because of the drugs and her emotional downward spiral. The scene perfectly encapsulates a detour on the way to rock bottom for the two of them.
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Re: Part 16 - No knock, no doorbell (SPOILERS)

Post by Deep Thought »

docLEXfisti wrote:The first head might not be so bad, but the second shot bloats the head too much - I guess that's what makes it look so weird...
You left off the final effect. Fade to black.

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