thanks for the heads up! i watched it a few years ago but thought it was more or less standalone next to the series, will check it out before i go much further.
re. alienation, one of my favourite moments so far was thinking “jesus no wonder everyone gets into weird baleful conspiracies if this is how it feels to get old in america” and having the next scene be the introduction of the golden shovel prosperity gospel youtube cult. of course nadine would be into something like this now.
Unless this is intentionally misleading the fans (lol) this seems like a strong hint that some part of the new lynch thing (wisteria/unrecorded night/whatever it might be) will take place at the RR diner in washington, even though all reports point to LA.
There’s also a shooting date in May attached, but might be working from old info and still nothing concrete from anyone who might be involved.
I want to believe but it being a new thing just seems more likely. but all these twin peaks actors keep being weird about it
I can’t believe how the slightest shred of information on whatever the hell this is makes my mood do a complete 180 every time. if only I could harness that feeling by caring about a second thing
Text from my mum
season 4 will feature only Becky and the girl from the piano recital
Elephant man and now dune on uhd. great, exactly my two least favorite lynch movies lol. I like elephant man, just compared to his other movies it feels like a for hire job only one that went well instead of poorly like dune, which it is
I’m curious if this means you think The Straight Story is better than those two? I personally feel a strong affinity between Eraserhead (as Lynch as it gets) and Elephant Man, but Straight Story and Dune feel pretty severed from the rest in my opinion.
I do like straight story better, maybe better than wild at heart too
straight story is great. makes me weep. totally underrated
Wild at Heart felt like the odd one out to me when watching in order
I had never heard of this, but I watched it last night. What a great movie about just vibing with people on a long journey while pondering our short time on this planet.
finally watched season 3. several hours of truly great television counterbalanced by some truly awful garbage - it’s a little hard to believe that this is as universally acclaimed as it is. lynch is a traditional narrative filmmaker all the way down; he hasn’t really made anything major you could call abstract and almost all aspects of his work are to some degree diegetic or directly symbolic, so generally when he reaches past that it comes across as clunky and literalistic; he’s not an avant-gardeist, he’s a melodramatist. the last 20 minutes of the last episode are perfect, but this season also does a lot to undermine what it clearly recognizes in that ending as the thematic and emotional crux of the show. the excess dead-end lore is necessary for a work about how trauma grows more meaningless and repetitive and less fixed in time and place the longer it’s dwelt with, but the vaguely christian origin story episode in particular muddles the personal empathy and specificity fire walk with me establishes so well. the racism, use of disabled people and addicts as props and constant cheap reliance on rape and assault of women is increasingly unforgivable, and the tacky old timey shit still grates. i would have liked more sad old people doing nothing in the gray light of day (digital suits him so well there) and i particularly wish everything involving the horne family was excised. it’s extremely funny and charming when it wants to be. shoutout to sharon van etten and dougie. we want donna
couldn’t disagree more. but its hard for me to even imagine the show that would be left with everything you disliked gone
so i had a similar sort of mixed reaction when the series first came out. a lot of ugliness, screaming nagging women, assault etc. i also didn’t like the whole Laura glowing orb thing because it oversimplified a lot of stuff about the original series… still don’t like that part. but over time i guess i’ve come to feel a little different about the thing as a whole. S3 doesn’t replace Inland Empire as my favorite David Lynch thing by any means… in a way it feels like a regression from where he seemed to be heading with Mulholland Drive/Inland Empire. i really wonder how much he truly wanted to revisit that world and how much of it is a deliberate attempt to alienate people who are so obsessed with Twin Peaks. but i think that might be baked into the whole project consciously.
the thing with trauma is that it gets worse over time the more it is not dealt with, not better. a lot of people harden and become angrier because they never were able to deal with a lot of stuff from the past… they let it pass them by without confronting it, not understanding all the ways it would affect them. that theme of getting old and hardening i think really has a lot to do with the series as a whole. Twin Peaks as a series has festered and doubled down on the ugliness because the world around it has festered. and the magical stuff feels all the more dissonant and distanced from reality in the way so many more people are living in Disney dreamworlds far away from reality these days. so many people’s obsession with Twin Peaks comes from the “damn good coffee” stuff and seemingly ignores what’s at the heart of the series.
anyway maybe my post will offer more perspective on this:
what do you disagree with? what function does the freakshow-style treatment of disabled people play? why did richard need to be in the show at all? do you really think audrey being in a psych ward and crazy the whole time was a brilliant dramatic plot twist? why does the only black character in lynch’s entire body of work afaik need to be a sex worker? i love fire walk with me (and secret diary of laura palmer! s/o jennifer), a movie that is entirely about rape and is deeply true and compassionate, but imo that did little here besides fill the lynch quota for tormenting beautiful young white women. that element itself is thematically congruent with what liz says below, but that only works if the material itself succeeds, and i don’t think it did. i still loved quite a lot of it - i wouldn’t be posting about it here if i didn’t.
i 100% agree with all of this; my problem is that a significant chunk of the show fails to deal with this in an interesting or thoughtful way imo, and when that fails in those moments you are mostly left with cynical malice. and this sticks out to me because of the moments where it truly succeeds. again, i’m not wishing it was lighter or that didn’t have anything that would make me uncomfortable or that it was too “weird” or anything like that.
yeah, this was the bit i was referring to as well. i get that it’s meant to ground it in america as a fundamentally evil entity but it muddles the very thin allegory that is central to the point of the show and almost absolves leland in the process.
i can see that. i think its best moments do develop on this thread. i really love the opening parts of both of those movies and am not crazy about where they go from there. my ideal lynch basically just makes tv pilots that never get produced into full shows.
Lynch is often tripping over himself and I don’t excuse any of it, but I see Dougie as an indictment of how we see people with IDD - just pushing them along with a grimace and not a thought to their interiority. He’s obviously employing other disabled characters to induce discomfort but it’s twisted with Dougie because I’m angry with everyone around him.
