Great post. Joel Bocko’s review of Part 6 captured the difficulties of that scene well:derOlli. wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 2:20 pm About that... I was actually goung to revive the "Gender in Twin Peaks: The Return"-thread, but as there is a discussion here already....
Not only do I view this scene as indefensable, I see it as a pathway to a more critical view on the gender dynamics in The Return in general.
There is this whole argument that the excessive and sever brutality towards female bodies in The Return were a deliberate attempt to criticize gendered violence by confronting the viewer with it. And I get that and it was very much my first reflex watching it back in 2017. With this scene, however, that whole line of reasoning falls flat as it was quite obviously played for laughs. Having to admit that, this made me suspicous about the portrayal of women in The Return in general. A portrayal, where ton of women are framed as victims with no agency (and - having read a little in the old threads, I know this word 'agency' pushes some people's buttons, but it is how I, and others, see these narratives), where women's dead bodies are framed as sexy, where old women are not particularly seen as desirable but at best motherly (at worst as pathetic) while young women are very much reduced to their beauty and objectified by the older men and so on and so forth.
Why is the Ike the spike scene funny and why should it be OK to have scene be funny?
So much for getting away from us potentially fighting, but I would really like other people's viewpoints on this (or at least I think I do, promised!).
“Possibly this scene can be valued for the way it confuses our reactions, but I don't think I'm misreading to conclude the overall mood is horror-comedy. The misanthropy feels a little cheap, and I'm not sure whether it's courageously self-aware or indifferently self-defeating for Lynch to include it in such close proximity to a more earnest depiction of death (it even makes one question anew whether that earlier scene was supposed to be somewhat sarcastic). Why does one life matter while the others are simply laughed off? Should we thank Lynch for drawing our attention to this discrepancy or conclude that he himself holds a double standard? Is "or" even the right conjunction here? This sequence reminds me a lot of the bungling hitman in Mulholland Drive, in which the comedy is heightened and the violence is dampened so that both are less troubling.”
I think Lynch sees basically everything in life as carrying the potential for tragedy and comedy. He famously couldn’t stop laughing while directing the scene of Frank abusing Dorothy in Blue Velvet, and the aforementioned scene of Sarah Palmer’s grief has been known to provoke giggles at screenings. I think the depiction of a horrific stabbing as darkly comic contributes to The Return’s portrait of a world gone horribly wrong. The kind of violent fate that was once reserved for a crucial revelation in episode 14 is now doled out on a complete random character with little narrative import, and even treated as a joke. I think the common reaction of discomfort and shock at the narrative “unfairness” of such a gesture is entirely intentional. This is the episode where Janet-E talks about living a dark, dark age, and in which we hear about the suicide of a veteran and watch a child get run down by a truck. There’s a lot of shit to dig ourselves out of.
I respect that many people will view the scene differently, and I can appreciate why some people might regard this as a long-winded excuses for the show’s mistreatment of women. I suppose for me Laura’s characterisation in FWWM is so empathetic that I find it hard to view Lynch as truly sadistic, and the centring of Diane and Carrie in the final part of The Return further reassured me on that front.