DangerMo wrote:mine wrote:DangerMo wrote:
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.
That's just the thing. No one has much to complain about how the stories were visually represented (personally I think there were moments of pure brilliance) it's the lack of the underlying stories in the loosest possible meaning of story that it's the issue.
It's not about conventional narrative or anything like that. It's a matter of TR being a story about nothing once all is said and done. It's a side effect of being too lose on storytelling and character development (Cooper was reduced to a plot device). TR had no real story to tell. Everything I liked or even loved about The Return is brought down but the lack of context that would elevate it. This isn't anti intellectualism it's maybe lack of effort put in creative thinking. I'm primarily interested in the story I'm supposed to be told than trying to find a story where there doesn't seem to be one.
I'd be much more interested in the take on Twin Peaks by most of the people who form theories and see the stories they do in TR than in Lynch's vision at this point.
Even if The Return will end up being influential it's not likely that the lack of narrative narrative and fragmental character development aspect of it will.
There are so many different forms of narrative fictions, not even considering non-narrative fiction....
Maybe we are to formatted and too much in a comfort zone.
Think of it this way, present someone with a very classic scene of discussion between two characters nowadays. You've got one take on character A, who asks a question, CUT, a take on character B who answers, CUT.
Show this to someone who has never seen edited footage, and he might not understand what is going on. Show him the same scene shot from a distance, so that both characters are in the field. A asks a questions, B answers, the frame hasn't moved, virgin spectator understands what's going on.
Submit said viewer to the first edited footage, time and time enough for him to assimilate what is going on, and there you go, you've got your lambda TV viewer who can easily manage most everything that is submitted to him. This is educating people to a new language. If it seems hard to fathom, consider sending a smartphone back in time to the middle age and as soon as Siri asks "What year is it", you'll have people screaming "Burn the witch"...
What you see as lack of narrative or fragmental character development might (I just say might) turn out to be a full blown new language. Recent examples, tons of them deriving from what the New Wave directors did back in the days : jump cuts, natural lighting, sound distortions, non linear storytelling... all of these were completely alien to viewers prior to the 60s, they're common use nowadays. This could be a next step in storytelling, or a miserable failure in trying to do so, time will tell...
Here, we've got something, according to me, which is not completely new, and it happens to have been made by a guy who's primarily a painter. You've got an 18 hours long work, which (tries to?) convey a general feeling by using a large palette of colors and strokes, a plethora of characters, situations, moods, which all combined give the general ensemble a specific meaning. Meaning which is up to the viewer to decide on. Look around you next time you go to a museum, any museum, this is what is happening to all the people around you : "what the fuck is this all about", "oh, fuck, it's like that guy lives inside my brain", "what the heck am I doing here", "I love those colors, it would look nice in my living room, what's the price tag", "I like the tits on that model", "I can see the Scientology influence on the technique used by that famous blind moldavian painter, and yes I'm a pompous prick", "why does that picture make me want to cry, I hope Mandie doesn't notice or she'll tell everyone at school that I'm a crybaby", "Wow, the buns on that guy!"
AND, I can only go along with what referendum said just above... lack of narrative is already well present in our culture, fiction or non fiction...