Twin Peaks Return: The Profoundly Disappointed Support Group

[yaxomoxay]

Ok fine, I'm not out to denigrate Lynch personally. [...] But I seriously question his bizarre choices. Can I at least say that?

All I needed from page 1 (and I disagree about the music, or that he has contempt). And tbh I could give a fuck about this argument after what went down in Virginia today.

Yeah. XXI century America is much darker than XXI century TP.


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[depechehenke]

Great post, judasbooth. Agree in almost everything although I really like early NIN
They have absolutely no place being in Twin Peaks though. Hate those cool-band-playing-in-front-of-hipster-audience closing credits.
A nice way to totally destroy the mysterious magic of Twin Peaks though.

[Mallard]

Ok fine, I'm not out to denigrate Lynch personally. [...] But I seriously question his bizarre choices. Can I at least say that?

All I needed from page 1 (and I disagree about the music, or that he has contempt). And tbh I could give a fuck about this argument after what went down in Virginia today.

Yeah. XXI century America is much darker than XXI century TP

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Yeah, hard to claim Lynch/Frost didn't nail that aspect of it.

[Venus]

All I needed from page 1 (and I disagree about the music, or that he has contempt). And tbh I could give a fuck about this argument after what went down in Virginia today.

Yeah. XXI century America is much darker than XXI century TP

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yeah, hard to claim Lynch/Frost didn't nail that aspect of it.

Yep its definitely dark and bleak.

[BOB1]

Remember the caretaker/handyman from the Buckhorn apartment building? Totally pointless, utterly irrelevant, a waste of screen time. The junkie in the Vegas house? Ditto. Dougie's flirtatious young work colleague? Yep. The weird grotesques in Beaula's shack? DING! Beverly's husband? Honestly, who cares? The weird zombie child in the car? Whatever. There are probably tons more that I can't think of right now. I have trouble remembering a lot of the previous episodes, probably because they have been so excruciatingly boring.

The characters that are killed are completely undeveloped, so when they finally get stabbed/decapitated/shot the reaction from the audience is one of "meh".

I'll just add that we are still waiting to find out what it was that the police found in the Hasting's trunk (remember that?), and the analysis of Mr. C's puke (and that too?).

Yes, I'd say probably this is the worst thing for me, too, altogether. Undeveloped characters being a result of absurdly too many characters appearing on screen (or mentioned in dialogues) combined with all those plots and characters which are either completely forgotten or come back after so many episodes that I don't remember what it was about. Of course there are times then it works, in The Return as well, but not usually.

Maybe this thread isn't that much of an discussion thread, and more of a vetilation thread.

I'd say it is both and both are needed. What is not needed (pardon, what I don't need) was when back a few pages ago we temporarily turned into a topic for Profoundly Disappointed With Posts of Other Users Personally I was disappointed with that, too However! - if we want it back, I've got a very fitting beginning to a new argument. Cause you know, judasbooth wrote a very interesting post and all... but this... THIS?!?!

I was a teenager in the nineties, and "the" Nine Inch Nails were always nothing more than a joke band fronted by a man who took himself way too seriously and who made crappy sub-industrial electro-rock for white middle-class suburban goths. I know that he's Lynch's pal, but Trent Reznor belongs back in 1997, along with Marilyn Manson, Balthazar Getty's soul patch and Patricia Arquette's stripper heels.

This is the kind of bs up with which I will not put!!! $&#!*^*#\'"&^#$*

[Doppler]

Hello everyone. Can I just say that I'm really glad I found this place? Count me as another of the Profoundly Disappointed, I'm afraid.
I'm a long time Lynch fan. Twin Peaks hold a special place in my heart, and has done for a very long time. I persisted with this new series for as long as I could, but honestly, the time has come to admit to myself the ugly truth.

It's awful.

Not just awful compared to the original series, but objectively awful as a piece of TV drama. To be honest, I was hearing alarm bells way before the show started airing. Lynch said that he would be shooting digitally. Uh-oh, I thought. Maybe this is appropriate as an aesthetic choice for something abstract and experimental like Inland Empire, but not for Twin Peaks. Next, they announced the cast list and stated that there were dozens of speaking parts. Really? How would it be possible to fit all them into 18 episodes and still have room for character development? Following that, Showtime announced that the new series would be "the pure heroin version of David Lynch". Hosannas ensued. Finally, a pure artistic statement from Lynch, unfettered by the suits and philistines at the network! Uh-oh, I thought. Did this mean that we would be getting a weekly dose of impenetrable surrealism? Relax, I told myself. Frost is on board. He's a skilled TV dramatist who'll rein in Lynch's more indulgent tendencies. They might be shooting digital, but plenty of other director do this with beautiful results. And then I started watching...

There are so many things wrong with the show that it's actually hard to remember them all. It's not until someone points out some forgotten detail from a previous episode that I think to myself, oh yeah, that was terrible. Remember the caretaker/handyman from the Buckhorn apartment building? Totally pointless, utterly irrelevant, a waste of screen time. The junkie in the Vegas house? Ditto. Dougie's flirtatious young work colleague? Yep. The weird grotesques in Beaula's shack? DING! Beverly's husband? Honestly, who cares? The weird zombie child in the car? Whatever. There are probably tons more that I can't think of right now. I have trouble remembering a lot of the previous episodes, probably because they have been so excruciatingly boring.

My feeling is this: Lynch never wanted to make a new Twin Peaks. He basically made an 18-hour Inland Empire and funded it by slapping the name Twin Peaks on top and shoving in some of the old characters as window dressing. The only thing the returning characters have in common with their former selves is their names. Norma and Ed are made of cardboard, Andy and Lucy are a pair of blank-faced retards, Audrey is a raving harridan, Dr Jacoby is some kind of sub-Alex Jones conspiracy nutter, and Special Agent Dale Cooper, the heart and soul of Twin Peaks has been reduced to a mute, brain-dead zombie, who, so far, has had precisely one line of dialogue.

Visually, it's absolutely appalling. Nasty, brittle, cold digital videography, and badly shot, to boot. Hard to believe that Showtime gave Lynch a big budget, given how cheap it looks (and don't get me started on the shockingly bad CGI). Couple this with the almost complete lack of music and some of the worst acting I've ever seen and what's left is a stagey parody of Twin Peaks shot on an iPhone.

Lynch and Frost have basically taken everything that was good about the original series (old-fashioned things like character development, story, plot, visuals, humour, music, atmosphere) and trashed it, in the pursuit of a story nobody actually cares about. Honestly, does anyone really care where BOB came from? The character was an archetype, a symbol for "the evil that men do". Albert helpfully pointed this out in S2. The real story of Twin Peaks wasn't BOB or even Laura Palmer. It was the hidden lives of the townsfolk and the conflicts between them. Laura Palmer was a classic McGuffin. Her only purpose was to serve as a pretext for the arrival of Special Agent Dale Cooper, and Cooper was the protagonist through whose eyes we would discover the mysteries of the town. The original series had a strong protagonist. This series has no protagonist whatsoever. We are adrift in a sea of...stuff.

The tone is unremittingly bleak and misanthropic with virtually no human warmth to balance it out or give it context. Weirdly, despite the graphic nature of the violence this time around, it's nowhere near as frightening or disturbing as Maddy Ferguson's murder was. So what's the point? The characters that are killed are completely undeveloped, so when they finally get stabbed/decapitated/shot the reaction from the audience is one of "meh". The only truly upsetting moment was Richard running over the little boy, and that just felt like tawdry gratuitous shock tactics for the sake of it.

Ah, they say, what about Episode 8, one of the most ground-breaking pieces of visual art ever made, they say. I respectfully disagree. All I saw was a rather bad rehash of the stargate sequence of 2001 bolted on to Night of the Living Dead. Oh, and by the way, I was a teenager in the nineties, and "the" Nine Inch Nails were always nothing more than a joke band fronted by a man who took himself way too seriously and who made crappy sub-industrial electro-rock for white middle-class suburban goths. I know that he's Lynch's pal, but Trent Reznor belongs back in 1997, along with Marilyn Manson, Balthazar Getty's soul patch and Patricia Arquette's stripper heels.

As a Lynch fan, I've defended him many times when people who don't like his films dismiss him as a self-indulgent piss-taker and his fans as pretentious pseuds. Blue Velvet, to me, is a masterpiece. Mulholland Drive is one of my favourite films of all time. And yet, as I watch this new "Twin Peaks", I can't shake the feeling that Lynch is conforming to every negative stereotype that has ever been pinned on him; glacial pacing, bad acting, baffling non-sequitors, wilful obscurantism, meaningless symbolism masquerading as profundity, gratuitous and pointless violence, leery misogyny, and an antagonistic contempt for his audience. I can't tell you how sad this makes me.
And yet, and yet... I'll be here until the bitter end. I'm resigned to the fact that the show will go out with a whimper. Even if, in the unlikely event that the remaining five episodes turn out to be flawless, they still won't make up for what has everything that preceded them. We're at the point when we can stop kidding ourselves that it's going to get better.

Profoundly disappointed? Yep.

Okay, can we just close this thread? Nothing more needs to be said.

[sylvia_north]

^^ judasbooth, bravo.

Worse has been said than a tongue in cheek suggestion of "declining faculties" http://observationdeck.kinja.com/three- ... 1705079895

[Metamorphia]

It's awful.

Not just awful compared to the original series, but objectively awful as a piece of TV drama. To be honest, I was hearing alarm bells way before the show started airing. Lynch said that he would be shooting digitally. Uh-oh, I thought. Maybe this is appropriate as an aesthetic choice for something abstract and experimental like Inland Empire, but not for Twin Peaks. Next, they announced the cast list and stated that there were dozens of speaking parts. Really? How would it be possible to fit all them into 18 episodes and still have room for character development? Following that, Showtime announced that the new series would be "the pure heroin version of David Lynch". Hosannas ensued. Finally, a pure artistic statement from Lynch, unfettered by the suits and philistines at the network! Uh-oh, I thought. Did this mean that we would be getting a weekly dose of impenetrable surrealism? Relax, I told myself. Frost is on board. He's a skilled TV dramatist who'll rein in Lynch's more indulgent tendencies. They might be shooting digital, but plenty of other director do this with beautiful results. And then I started watching...

There are so many things wrong with the show that it's actually hard to remember them all. It's not until someone points out some forgotten detail from a previous episode that I think to myself, oh yeah, that was terrible. Remember the caretaker/handyman from the Buckhorn apartment building? Totally pointless, utterly irrelevant, a waste of screen time. The junkie in the Vegas house? Ditto. Dougie's flirtatious young work colleague? Yep. The weird grotesques in Beaula's shack? DING! Beverly's husband? Honestly, who cares? The weird zombie child in the car? Whatever. There are probably tons more that I can't think of right now. I have trouble remembering a lot of the previous episodes, probably because they have been so excruciatingly boring.

My feeling is this: Lynch never wanted to make a new Twin Peaks. He basically made an 18-hour Inland Empire and funded it by slapping the name Twin Peaks on top and shoving in some of the old characters as window dressing. The only thing the returning characters have in common with their former selves is their names. Norma and Ed are made of cardboard, Andy and Lucy are a pair of blank-faced retards, Audrey is a raving harridan, Dr Jacoby is some kind of sub-Alex Jones conspiracy nutter, and Special Agent Dale Cooper, the heart and soul of Twin Peaks has been reduced to a mute, brain-dead zombie, who, so far, has had precisely one line of dialogue.

Visually, it's absolutely appalling. Nasty, brittle, cold digital videography, and badly shot, to boot. Hard to believe that Showtime gave Lynch a big budget, given how cheap it looks (and don't get me started on the shockingly bad CGI). Couple this with the almost complete lack of music and some of the worst acting I've ever seen and what's left is a stagey parody of Twin Peaks shot on an iPhone.

Lynch and Frost have basically taken everything that was good about the original series (old-fashioned things like character development, story, plot, visuals, humour, music, atmosphere) and trashed it, in the pursuit of a story nobody actually cares about. Honestly, does anyone really care where BOB came from? The character was an archetype, a symbol for "the evil that men do". Albert helpfully pointed this out in S2. The real story of Twin Peaks wasn't BOB or even Laura Palmer. It was the hidden lives of the townsfolk and the conflicts between them. Laura Palmer was a classic McGuffin. Her only purpose was to serve as a pretext for the arrival of Special Agent Dale Cooper, and Cooper was the protagonist through whose eyes we would discover the mysteries of the town. The original series had a strong protagonist. This series has no protagonist whatsoever. We are adrift in a sea of...stuff.

The tone is unremittingly bleak and misanthropic with virtually no human warmth to balance it out or give it context. Weirdly, despite the graphic nature of the violence this time around, it's nowhere near as frightening or disturbing as Maddy Ferguson's murder was. So what's the point? The characters that are killed are completely undeveloped, so when they finally get stabbed/decapitated/shot the reaction from the audience is one of "meh". The only truly upsetting moment was Richard running over the little boy, and that just felt like tawdry gratuitous shock tactics for the sake of it.

Ah, they say, what about Episode 8, one of the most ground-breaking pieces of visual art ever made, they say. I respectfully disagree. All I saw was a rather bad rehash of the stargate sequence of 2001 bolted on to Night of the Living Dead. Oh, and by the way, I was a teenager in the nineties, and "the" Nine Inch Nails were always nothing more than a joke band fronted by a man who took himself way too seriously and who made crappy sub-industrial electro-rock for white middle-class suburban goths. I know that he's Lynch's pal, but Trent Reznor belongs back in 1997, along with Marilyn Manson, Balthazar Getty's soul patch and Patricia Arquette's stripper heels.

As a Lynch fan, I've defended him many times when people who don't like his films dismiss him as a self-indulgent piss-taker and his fans as pretentious pseuds. Blue Velvet, to me, is a masterpiece. Mulholland Drive is one of my favourite films of all time. And yet, as I watch this new "Twin Peaks", I can't shake the feeling that Lynch is conforming to every negative stereotype that has ever been pinned on him; glacial pacing, bad acting, baffling non-sequitors, wilful obscurantism, meaningless symbolism masquerading as profundity, gratuitous and pointless violence, leery misogyny, and an antagonistic contempt for his audience. I can't tell you how sad this makes me.
And yet, and yet... I'll be here until the bitter end. I'm resigned to the fact that the show will go out with a whimper. Even if, in the unlikely event that the remaining five episodes turn out to be flawless, they still won't make up for what has everything that preceded them. We're at the point when we can stop kidding ourselves that it's going to get better.

Profoundly disappointed? Yep.

Some things I'd like to contest here:

It being "ugly" cinematographically: well yes, it looks nowhere near as cinematic or polished as shows like Fargo or True Detective etc. But from the early 00s forward Lynch has embraced the very raw look of digital, dating right back to its consumer beginnings. And complaints about bad CGI are imo completely worthless ones, because he's using CGI in exactly the same way he's used practical effects and paint and clay right back from Eraserhead through into the terrible composite face shots in the Twin Peaks pilot into Robert Blake in Lost Highway into the jitterbug in MD... it's just done digitally instead. When Dougie's melted into the little gold ball it is meant to look as crude and ridiculous as it does.

Some of the throwaway characters you mention are possibly valid criticisms, but I disagree about a few. Beverly's husband is important. It informs her relationship with Ben completely; it humanises her and explains her behaviour beyond being a simple TV trope. The zombie child in the car is an extremely memorable moment for me. It tops off a great sequence of sound and energy. Whether it returns or not I don't know but I don't really care if it doesn't.

Now, crucially: I think David Lynch DID want to continue Twin Peaks, but he had little interest in many of the characters that he left 25 years ago. I think it was telling when he referred to the "world" of Twin Peaks as being the thing that he loved, and it's the idea of taking a world that's been broken and depraved and potentially seeing it reborn (through Coop) that is the root interest in the story. Lynch (and Frost, judging from his Twitter) are very pessimistic about the state of culture and humanity today and it shows. For some this may not be justifiable enough to warrant the application of such an idea over a show that they loved, but for me it is. In a blanket kind of way it is pretty misanthropic, but there are beacons of hope and humanity dotted throughout. I've been touched many times over the hours we've had so far.

I don't want to try to turn everything back into a "Well, but like, that's the point, man!" thing but I really think a lot of the new show's portrayals of violence have to be seen in the context of the above too. When Ike the Spike stabs the woman to death, it's intentionally gratuitous in a way I can't remember seeing Lynch go for before. The casual treatment of murder, corruption, all forms of violence are symptomatic of a greater cultural problem. Something's bad wrong.

Some people just don't buy that I guess, or they feel it's heavy-handed or unwarranted... and that's fine. But I really feel it. And I'm glad Lynch & Frost decided to tell this story in this particular way.

[referendum]

But from the early 00s forward Lynch has embraced the very raw look of digital, dating right back to its consumer beginnings.

about this. There is quite alot of ' silent cinema' early techniques used in this, the atom bomb was one of the rare examples of convincing cgi. IMuch of the rest has a handmade collaged quality. The dougie strand has clear links to Tati. Andy has turned into stan laurel. Lynch using the digital quality of digital unapologetically is i think an ' art ' idea of ' truth to materials' - create the illusion but reveal the manner in which it is created at the same time ( whilst guarding the mystery) It's an old school showman device. Lynch is an old school showman. Think about edison and tesla with their competing american touring circuits demonstrating....electtricity. Think about the handmade quality of Lynch's paintings which always are explicitly THINGS with stuff STUCK ON rather than any attempt at realism. The clumsiness here is alot to do with his wish to leave the ' artists hand' visible . It often makes for very awkward viewing ( the deliberately stilted acting being a big distancing device sometimes) and as has been acknowledged here it is a long way from the glossy warm ambient surfaces of the original TP. But it is consistent with him saying arthouse cinema is dead, now we have to see what we can do on the networks. Using the tools of the day available that everybody else uses and repurposing them. Yeah, It doesn't always work and he sometimes falls flat on his face....but....

[mtwentz]

Ok so this thread has criticized the use of modern technology in shooting the film, the opening credits, the closing credits, the color of the curtains, the height of the curtains, the type of coffee cups used, Lynch's taste in music, the fact that they used the Pilot sets instead of the Season 1 and Season 2 sets, too many pie jokes, not enough pie jokes, the idea that characters killed in the original series are not showing up in every episode 25 years later, the idea that characters that weren't that central to the main plot in the original series aren't showing up in every episode 25 years later...

It should be quite clear at this point there is nothing Lynch and Frost could possibly do (nor could any writer/director team) that would please everyone on this thread. And that's not unique to the posters on this thread- there is literally no piece of artwork that can please everyone, even in an established fandom like TP.

So what's left is Lynch's philosophy- he falls in love with ideas and stays true to those ideas, knowing if he tries to to cater to what he thinks the crowd (maybe) wants, he'll not only probably fail to please said crowd, he'll feel awful that he's betrayed his commitment to the ideas that fired him up in the first place.

Thus, I would counsel the following to the good people of this thread: Make your peace with The Return. Being caught in a state of negativity has rarely served anyone, IMHO. And if you can't be with the Twin Peaks you love, (at least try to) love the one you're with...

[yaxomoxay]

Andy has turned into stan laurel.

Andy, the guy that was chasing a bottle of his own sperm in a Sheriff department while on the clock?


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[mtwentz]

Andy has turned into stan laurel.

Andy, the guy that was chasing a bottle of his own sperm in a Sheriff department while on the clock?


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LOL

[sylvia_north]

I love a good pep talk on a negativity thread

[Snailhead]

Pretty damn sure Lynch and Frost didn't make this out of contempt. Are the results successful? Maybe not. But I genuinely believe it came from a place of them loving the world of Twin Peaks and wanting to revisit it, regardless of how good or bad it turned out. I have no issues with people finding the series to be thoroughly awful and I think that's a pretty reasonable perspective considering that The Return is very different from S1 and S2.

But the notion that Lynch and Frost despise the audience and were driven by their disdain to produce this new series is something I find utterly preposterous!

Back on topic - I wish they'd shot this on film.

EDIT: mtwentz, I don't think it's fair to take issue with the variety of reasonable disappointment found in this thread. Some people will say "too many pie jokes", some will say "not enough pie jokes" - what's the matter with that? There should be space for a variety of criticisms.

[starmand]

I love Twin Peaks: The Return. I come out of it each week buzzing with happiness, and I spend the next 7 days eagerly anticipating the coming Sunday. That said, this thread is home to some of my favorite discussions about the new show. Thanks for that! Cheers!