Afterward

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Posts posted by Afterward

  2. Posted

    I just recalled an important fact, or an important-if-factual memory:

     

    On some Twin Peaks DVD, I think one of the discs of the TV series in an edition that preceded The Entire Mystery, there's an interview of sorts where David Lynch is talking in a bar with Kyle MacLachlan and Mädchen Amick. The conversation has something to do with Twin Peaks but meanders quite a bit. At some point Lynch is talking about numerology and mentions his fondness for the number seven. Amick interrupts in a teacher's-pet sort of way to say: "You know what number I really like, is seventeen."

     

    Lynch shuts her down: "Seventeen's an eight—but that's a good number, too." and continues with what he was saying.

  4. Posted

    I'm gonna choose to believe the irony was intended by the writers though because it adds another layer to one of my favorite gags in the series. I don't think it was mentioned on the podcast how perfect Nance's delivery is.

     

    (Perhaps you saw me in Westworld; I acted like a robotic cowboy? It was my best role, I cannot deny—I felt right at home, deep inside that electronic

    .)

  5. Posted

    You guys ranting about how stupid the latest Mill Plot Twist was made me realize: In years of thinking about this show, I never bothered trying to parse that plot. I processed the whole thing only as flavorless intrigue spaghetti.

     

    Struggling to come up with a reason this episode would be named "Masked Ball", I thought the idea might be that Denice can be construed as wearing a mask, and the wedding reception is basically a ball. Kind of a stretch to read this into the German title-writers' intentions, but the alternative is... they just gave the episode a random title?

  8. Posted

    I don't remember feeling very strongly about this episode one way or the other when I saw it the first time, but after reading the comments here and seeing the episode again, my main reaction is one of pity, mostly for the writers.

     

    ABC put Lynch and Frost in a terrible position by forcing them to reveal the killer. Long before jaded fans were saying "You can stop watching after this one," Lynch knew that the mystery wasn't just the premise that let the series begin, but the driving force that was necessary for it to continue. In making "Lonely Souls", all he could do was be as true to his story as he could be while he essentially destroyed it.

     

    What Twin Peaks will become in the absence of its central mystery remains to be seen. In this instant, though, the writers are in an awful predicament. Leland can't go back to being the pathetic/charming goof whom we used to know, but he can't be ignored, either. For the audience, he can only be Bob, and unlike Mike, the Midget, or the Giant, Bob's presence can never be taken lightly.

     

    Maddy's murder also created a tension where the audience knew Leland was the killer, but the characters, critically Cooper, didn't. This is used to some effect in "Drive with a Dead Girl", but can you imagine that scenario extended into another couple of episodes? The rest of the season? For me, even the scene where Leland offers to show Cooper his new clubs takes it a bit too far: Leland creeps up almost like a monster in a Looney Tune, whistling innocently when Bugs Bunny happens to turn around. If Cooper doesn't solve the mystery, the show runs the risk of becoming a farce.

     

    The writers have been painted into a corner, and it shows in this episode as characters are shoved forcibly into the necessary positions, expository dialog flows as from a fire hose, and dreams are retconned into clues with all the elegance of my trying to fit another analogy into this sentence. Lynch and Frost never intended for the murderer to be revealed, so the minutiae of early episodes could never have been intended to convey the meanings that Cooper reads into them here. Similarly, because Leland has to be eliminated, we have to get an explanation for his crimes out of the way, and this results in a speech that explains Bob in terms that the authors probably never imagined would be necessary.

     

    In many ways this is a story that Twin Peaks was never meant to tell, an episode that the show simply wasn't built to handle. The result is a disappointment for many viewers, especially for those who watch it with the critical eye that Twin Peaks always wanted and often deserved. But think of its creators, and what a disappointment it must have been for them!

  10. Posted

    It is my hope that, at the end of it, we can do a couple weird Rewatch episodes about Missing Pieces, and things like the Dual Spires Psych episode and any other longform or really impactful Twin Peaks hits in culture.

    Like, maybe, perhaps, Deadly Premonition?

  11. Posted

    It seems to me that not everybody at the Roadhouse reacts to the murder. Donna definitely does, and interestingly Bobby appears to have some idea of what's going on, but dopey James is utterly confused by Donna's breakdown, and the extras are all carrying on without a care in the world. I didn't get the sense that Harry was aware of anything—the camera was basically ignoring him for the whole sequence. I did feel like that the Log Lady was able to see the Giant along with Cooper. She wouldn't think to mention it if she did.

     

    So by my count, the only people who feel the psychic shock of what's happening are Cooper and Margaret, whom we know to be spiritually aware individuals, and Donna and Bobby, who are a couple of teens. And any number of people could have shown up at the Roadhouse for this scene: Why don't we see Norma, who frequents the Roadhouse, or Shelly, or Audrey? Donna is heavily invested in Laura's story, as the teenage Cooper, but why does Bobby (who hasn't had cause to think about Laura for at least a week) get all empathetic all of a sudden?

     

    I have something to say about the Giant's apparent unhelpfulness but since my analysis kind of implicitly draws from later episodes I will spoil-tag it.

    Some people have concluded otherwise, and it's not totally explicit in the text one way or the other, but my view is that the Giant inhabits Señor Droolcup in the same way Bob inhabits Leland Palmer and Mike inhabits Philip Gerard. On this view, the statements "It is happening again" and "I'm so sorry" are coming from the same entity.

     

    As StealThisCorn notes, Mike is still babbling about the Great Northern the morning after he first made his grand revelation. The thing is, Leland was at the Great Northern that night, but he almost certainly has returned to his home by the time Mike has had his coffee the next morning. So Mike's Bob-detecting ability is in error: He's able to pinpoint Bob's location at one point in time, but after that he either can't do another "reading," or he just doesn't for some reason. When he has an attack at the Great Northern, it's when Ben Horne walks in. Leland is nowhere to be seen.

     

    Plot-wise, this all happens because the surface level of the story is doing all it can to convince Cooper to suspect Ben and, if possible, convince the audience even sooner. But in the lore, it means Mike is just plain wrong. And the Giant, who is the same kind of thing as Mike, is just as capable of screwing up. When he says "I'm so sorry" to Coop, it's because they've both failed. I'm convinced that the Giant's (and Mike's) intentions are good, but they're limited in how much they can help.

     

    Why does the Log Lady send Cooper to the Roadhouse when there's still time to save Maddy? Maybe once Cooper concludes that Ben Horne is the man, the die has been cast, and he's sealed Maddy's fate by not following the Giant's and Mike's clues correctly. He's dragged off to the Roadhouse (which, as we've seen, is also a courtroom) to hear the sentence for his failure.

  12. Posted

    When Maddy asks "How are you going to get him out of the house?", Donna sidesteps and says "Not outside, just out of the front room", but she also answers the question by brushing her man-seducing hair.

     

    I think this is the first time I've noticed how this episode is structured around parallel heists. Donna and Cooper both have fairly straightforward "fetch quest" goals, and they both decide to use James Bond-esque methods rather than going through normal law enforcement channels. And they both get in over their head!

     

    The parallelism is even more obvious in the next episode, when James busts in to rescue the girls—probably at the very same moment when Deputy Hawk rescues the boys. This is kind of foreshadowed when Maddy blows James off in the diner, the same way Truman told Hawk he could head home early.

     

    As for what this correspondence means, I think it's most potent in presenting Donna as a worthy counterpart to Cooper, the brains of the teenage end of the investigation. Maddy and Truman are both dependable, but ultimately doofy sidekicks. How are Hawk and James similar? My personal preferences are clouding my judgment; Hawk is one of my favorite characters, and James is James.

     

    And Harold, of course, reflects as if in a clouded mirror the dark underside of Jean Renault...

  15. Posted

    Japanese isn't a mirror image of English, though. If I understand correctly, written Japanese is either top-to-bottom and then right-to-left (this is like English if you rotate the page 90º clockwise), or left-to-right and then top-to-bottom (like English).

     

    So if you were drawing a correlation between writing direction and video game direction, you'd expect English-language games to go left to right, Japanese games to go top-to-bottom, and Arabic games to go right-to-left.

     

    Well, and here's what Wikipedia says:

    Historically, vertical writing was the standard system, and horizontal writing was only used where a sign had to fit in a constrained space, such as over the gate of a temple or the signboard of a shop. This horizontal writing is in fact a special case of vertical writing in which each column contains just one character.

    Therefore, before the end of World War II in Japan, those signs were read right to left.

    Today, the left-to-right direction is dominant in all three languages for horizontal writing: this is due partly to the influence of English, and partly to the increased use of computerized typesetting and word processing software, most of which does not directly support right-to-left layout of East Asian languages.

     

    If we can trust Wikipedia on these points, I'd say that even Japanese developers can have an bias toward left-to-right movement based on their writing system.

     

    It'd be interesting to find out whether the metaphors of rightward and leftward motion for progression and regression in film bear out in the cinema of these other countries...

  17. Posted

    I remember that compilation of Legends of the Hidden Temple screwups, but I can't find it now...

     

    Those temple guards were so terrifying, in a way that seemed so cruel! I like to think that after they dragged you away, they'd sit you down with a 7-Up, try to calm your nerves. Maybe some days Melissa Joan Hart was waiting back there to give you her autograph.

  24. Posted

    I guess I'm pretty late to this party, but I hope nobody will mind if I ramble about Pokemon for a while...

    I was disappointed too that the game didn't match up with Japanese history/geography as much as it could have, but I think the choice basically makes sense. For one thing, the worlds of the main series already take place in a goofy version of Japan. Sinnoh (where Diamond and Pearl take place) is in the shape of the Hokkaido prefecture; Red/Blue/Gold/Silver take place in and around the Tokyo area; various in-game locations map to real-world landmarks in extremely goofy ways. The tradition with spin-off games has been to take them out of the map of the main series, for whatever reason.

    Pokemon Conquest also saddled itself with associating each town with one of the 17 Pokemon types, which are traditionally "gated" in a convoluted way to maintain an established curve of type-interaction complexity. You always always start out with the Fire/Grass/Water triangle (this has gotten pretty boring over the years, but they keep doing it), and more powerful and fancy types like Ghost, Ice, Steel, and Dragon have to be kept from you until the endgame.

    This is on top of matching the historical figures to Pokemon types that fit their fictionalized personalities, and of course you have to keep Nobunaga way at the other end of the map from the starting point, and so on. Doing this all on a map that looks like Japan (much less putting each warlord somewhere near their real-life location) would be basically impossible. It would have been really cool if they were able to let go of some of their other priorities to indulge the historical aspect a little more, but Pokemon tradition won out.

    There's another "good" reason that the map isn't Japan, but it's a spoiler! Beware! Beware of spoilers!

    When the last set of kingdoms is opened up and the entire map is revealed, true Pokemon nerds will notice that the whole Ransei region is an island in the shape of Arceus, the God Pokemon, which Nobunaga has been trying to summon by uniting the kingdoms under his iron fist! All along! Yes, this is extremely stupid!

    By the way, according to the experts at Bulbapedia, in Japanese the name "ransei" means "turbulent times"—which I guess makes sense.

  25. Posted

    That's the problem with minecraft survival. Too quickly you ramp out of that awesome feeling of being helpless to being filthy rich. I need to find another way to play it.

    On one map I've been playing with a couple of nethack-style "conducts": I'm a vegetarian who's afraid to go underground.