agree, i think that’s the one instance which genuinely does not come across that way at all. i loved the whole dougie plotline (though obviously it’s a fine line to tread).
the horne family stuff seemed critical to the whole thing to me. seeing dale coopers kid and he’s the shittiest human being alive. and audrey being like the laura and cooper the leland and the audience the towns people of season 3
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i recommend the straight story then
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i meant in the context of twin peaks specifically, not abstractly
he’s evil cooper’s kid, he raped audrey on the hospital. he has “bob genes” that make him evil or whatever. that doesn’t feel particularly insightful or interesting or like a dramatic inversion. none of audrey’s appearances felt like they reflected on laura at all either, idk.
the double being a magic satan man from hell and laura a golden orb christchild and audrey just crazy and in a psych war is also not interesting to me so I don’t look at those things that way
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so you disagree with me about the aspects of the show i dislike because you deliberately choose not to acknowledge them?
I mean I’m not covering my eyes and pretending the double isn’t there just because I’m not interpreting him as just magic satan. to me he’s cooper as much as good cooper is cooper and the inbetween the two coop at the end is cooper. when coop does the thing that first fractures his identity (kills windom earle in the lodge in s2 finale (through the bob that exists in himself)) he goes to leave and the first guy who pops out is leland saying “yeah I didn’t kill anybody either buddy, it was all that bob guy.” we love to hate leland but when it’s our boy coop we’re glad to have this double to pin things on and excuse him for, like the towns people and leland
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I had to actually stop and think through this after you having said it because “retconning circumstantially interesting events so that they appear to be even more significant and preordained, robbing them of their narrative weight in the moment” is one of my least favourite things in storytelling but when lynch does it here it seems… fine? it just comes across as him saying “what if I turned this allegory dial up as high it will go, do you want to noodle on that for 45 minutes?”
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honestly i didn’t even think any of that stuff was weird when i watched it. i just assumed he was being kind of metaphorical or something. and i always treated evil coop as being part of coop, cuz that just makes sense to me? idk!
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never thought we’d get to a point where the scene where the giant levitates and emits golden smoke from his head until it coalesces into an orb with laura’s face on it in a space heaven theater where a nearby woman kisses it and then sends it through a tube to 1945 america would be called out for simplifying things too much
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my issue with this episode is that lynch is just a shitty experimental filmmaker. all of his worst work is when he is trying to work in the abstract or surreal. i’m fine with the allegory, i just think it was a dreadful episode of tv.
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yup
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Inland Empire is my favorite movie of all time. so… can’t say i agree in any way, shape, or form. can say i am kind of baffled by that observation tho.
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i like inland empire a lot, and twin peaks and mulholland drive. inland empire has a pretty good balance of his more directly experimental work, it functions more as vignettes in the whole and i think the dv aesthetic glues together over the whole movie really well.
generally i just think something like ~that~ episode of twin peaks is pretty embarrassing when considered alongside any directors who work in that mode full time.
It’s hard to do exposition while remaining surreal. It’s a little to literal but I don’t think it’s embarrassing at all. But I get how it might come off as corny. Personally, I was kind of moved but I’m also pretty sentimental and liked the idea that Laura Orb was a purely good antithesis to the Bob Orb.
I don’t know how experimental directors would be rated against one another on how skilled they are but I guess I also don’t care too much about random director’s contextless full time experimental weird fragments of things. somebody on itchy-o might have perfected mechanical shooting in their textureless wireframe no budget game thing, I’d still be waiting for someone to put it into an actual game. I need something more to work with. even with inland empire I have all of lynch’s previous stuff and years of thinking about it as a foundation for it
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directors who work in what mode full time, exactly? i find the assertion that lynch is a shitty “experimental filmmaker” bewildering enough that i am curious what your points of reference are
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that’s definitely where we diverge. i’d much rather have a smaller self contained thing that works through it’s ideas directly rather than someone trying to use more conventional narrative forms as a vessel for it. it’s also just the world of film/making that im personally a lot more invested and interested in.
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