BOB1 wrote:Wonderful & Strange wrote:FWWM should either be its own separate choice or grouped with The Return, which it resembles much more than the original show.
Totally disagreed.
Agreed with your disagreement
It'd seem like a weird thing to say back in 1992, but I do see FWWM as in many ways very of a piece with the original TP -- or, more precisely, the Lynch-directed episodes. While it's also different in many ways, as has been discussed a ton here and elsewhere, I think FWWM is still far closer to those episodes than to The Return.
Part of it is the craftsmanship, and the aesthetic of Lynch. In the early 90s (or hell - really from '86 to '01), shooting on film, Lynch had a very precise style. His images were messy but still usually gorgeous or seductive. The veneer of celluloid helped suck us into that world.
Now, I do like TR (and love some parts of it), but it just feels to me very of a piece with Lynch's kind of throwing-stuff-at-a-wall-and-seeing-what-sticks method he's been doing since the early/mid 2000s after MD. The digital look (even much more polished here than in IE), the less classical and refined and exacting style... I'm not saying it's shoddy but it almost feels that way at times strictly in comparison to those beautiful celluloid works like BV, FWWM, LH, TSS, MD, etc. There's a more ramshackle quality to this 2010s Lynch. Can you imagine him doing something as perfect as the first 40 minutes of LH now? I mean, Episode 8 was kind of perfect in its own way, but there's a certain quality to those earlier works that seems different to me - I'd probably have to hash all this out in another post. But it's part of why I kind of have an inherent preference of the original series over TR - in addition to the fact of how much I love that original series, and how we're only halfway through the new season. But I'd be lying if I said I expected to prefer TR at some point. It's just not quite my thing like 86-99 Lynch was.
