nick1218 wrote:well said. I watched Lynch an Artists Life before I watched the last 4 eps. He really is a fairly bad painter and sculptor as well. I am really reassessing his career now feeling I was duped. How does a man that makes such a great film as Blue Velvet (which he wrote alone) get so bad as he ages and gets more and more indulgent. Well heck I just answered my own question. he is very lucky to have his career. That was something I was thinking when I watched that documentary, it came down to one person's very unlikely decision to give him a grant for AFI. he seemed to be a token non filmmaker who was the last person to get chosen for that group of grants.
Yet again, and I think that's what people are still failing to see about the reactions to TPTR : "to each his own tastes".
There was a majority of people who dismissed Pïcasso, when he was still alive, after his Blue Period. They just didn't "get" his paintings anymore once he'd moved on to more abstract paintings.
Yet, nowadays, a majority of people and/or art critics praise his most abstract paintings... Following the general tone of this thread, I guess this makes a majority of people Picasso Balls Lickers...
On another note, and still on that "to each his own tastes", I just finished listening to the last A Twin Peaks Podcast (hi, Matt, Mel, Caitlin, Brad, I still like you guys), and someone, possibly their guest, was comparing the ending of TPTR to the ending of The Prisoner, putting one against the other, basically praising the fact that the Prisoner's ending had some plot, some story, even though that was weird as fuck, as opposed to TPTR's ending. Yet, you have to remember that a majority of watchers, back then, was infuriated by it, considering it meaningless and abolute crap. To the point that MacGoohan had to "flee" the country (according to the legend, he was afraid of physical violence, more likely he must have known that it was going to be extremely difficult for him to finance any new project he might have had). We NOW have the impression that everyone agrees that it was indeed a milestone TV show, and its ending a thing to cherish... but it's only because people have vastly re-evaluated it since.
Then, on this idea that with his ageing Lynch might actually have lost "it", whatever talent he supposedly had, another example comes to mind. James Ellroy... A damn fine writer who, to appease his publisher who was afraid of publishing a 1000 pages long crime novel, went back on the job and started slashing through his full sentences to create a new, more telegraphic, style. This was considered horrendous by some of its first readers, but that's a technique that he has since completely mastered, making his writing even more powerful. The same way, I do think that Lynch has honed his talents (painting, music and film/video making). And I do think that what he's done here is "complete". It is just his way of telling a story now, you got to adapt yout way of watching the same way you had to adapt your way of reading in my previous example.
So, in short, I'm not a Lynch fan, I'm not a fan of anything, Lynch's work happens to speak to me, to my cultural background and to my emotional responses to visual arts, the same way I have affinities with other creators, famous or not. This is not a high brow vs low brow contest, and I don't consider myself as an intellectual (I'm mostly blue collar). But lots of complaints I've read so far relate to basic anti-intellectualism. Lots of people think the people behind TPTR gave a big fuck off to the viewers, I think they actually had great expectations from the viewers, but something tells me they were realistic enough to consider that lots of people would just not drink it fully the first time around, they set up new rules and, very likely, lots of showrunners/directors are gonna take some cues from it, and once this new "guidebook" has been digested by the largest audience, TPTR will look different to lots of people. The same way people like Eisenstein came up with new ways to tell visual stories and 10 years later, their techniques were used by every other mainstream directors.
PS : I know you don't like people who liked the show to chime in, but rest assured that I am very respectful to each and everyone of you who disliked TPTR, I only browse through this thread once in a while to see if a/ somet interesting point/issue has been raised (some points which have been raised as being "bad" about that show actually pointed me to things I hadn't noticed before and which sometimes help me think differently about what I've watched) b/ to hopefully see that some of you are getting a little warmer to this season, which would reassure me that you won't spend the rest of your life thinking you just wasted almost 18 hours of your time
PEACE