Eva Marie wrote:In regard to Lynch's persona, did you guys/gals ever buy into that whole naive and kooky "Oh, golly" image he's so successfully cultivated? I was always skeptical of it, but TR totally destroyed it for me.
I don't think anyone has ever doubted that Lynch has a dark side, from the moment that his first film ended in an act of infanticide-as-spiritual-ascendence, as a reaction to his own ambivalence toward having an unplanned child. He has even talked about his parents wondering how that movie could have come from their son. And clearly the guy who wrote Frank Booth and Bobby Peru has some "strange and unproductive thinking" going on somewhere. I also think, pound for pound, the brilliant but deeply misanthropic 'Lost Highway' is a much darker (or as one thread put it, mean-spirited) work than TP S3. Like BV and W@H, S3 has ample doses of humanity, particularly revolving around Dougie, to balance out the darkness.
Now I can certainly understand the season not working for you, or if you're unhappy/unsettled seeing the darker elements of Lynch's larger body of work seeping more heavily into the world of TP. But in terms of this show shattering the "boy scout" public image he's cultivated, I disagree. I don't think S3 showed us anything new, and I've never found the "aw shucks" persona and the darkness mutually exclusive. Like all of us, he's a human being with plenty of complexity. He seems to work most of his darkness out in his work, as others might in psychiatry, and that seems to be working for him. As Jack Fisk said, if David hadn't gotten that AFI grant, someone might be dead.
All of that being said, Cooper dropping his sunny but formal "holy smokes" demeanor (which Lynch and Kyle have acknowledged was modeled on Lynch) and seeming to become something darker and more primal in Part 18 did feel rather autobiographical to me.