UnpopularTrousers

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Everything posted by UnpopularTrousers

  1. I feel like things going so well was somewhat contingent on Mike's helping hand, though. I don't think their lives will be universally bad and it's not like I think people without their full mental capacities can't be happy and experience love. But the scene did at least have a hint of sadness and melancholy to me. I felt an absence in Dougie's face that reminded me of when he cried looking at Sonny Jim. And I don't think I can endorse the idea that a cheerfully lobotomized husband is better than a philandering one. It left me with a mixture of emotions.
  2. I'm surprised that everyone sees Dougie's return as being a purely happy ending to that storyline. It's shot like a cheesy over-the-top triumph, but Dougie still seems like an artificial and mostly empty vessel. When Janey-E and Sonny Jim run up to hug his he says just says "Home...". He's not mirroring the last word of a sentence and he looks happy, but he also still sounds vacant and lost and likely incapable of composing complete sentences. His life has no substance to it. Without Mike guiding him along anymore, I feel like Janey-E will have to babysit and do everything for him once again. They have all the boxes checked to have a happy suburban American family, but deep down their lives look sad and meaningless.
  3. Yeah, I'm totally with you. My point was that people only usually bring up those things because the other person disagrees, not because they're actually against making claims of meaning or intent.
  4. I actually thought something was totally off about the behind-the-back Jack Nance body double on the dock. It actually took me out of it for a second because, like you, I thought it couldn't possibly be that hard to find someone who looks close enough from behind.
  5. I feel like people are talking about somewhat different things here. The 'true' intent of a work of art can never truly be known. Even if the artist tells you, they may be lying. The 'true' meaning of a work of art can never be known. Some would argue that even the artist can't speak definitively about this. Art is created independently of the person consuming it, but it is also in a sense interactive because you bring your own interpretations and meanings to it. There are also very smart people who would argue that everything I just said is wrong. All of this can/his/will be debated forever. But is any of that stuff actually what y'all are talking about? Or are people just displeased that the meaning and intent some people are projecting doesn't line up with their own projections? I feel like people only argue that you can't possibly speak of intent when that intent doesn't match with their own assumptions.
  6. http://twinpeaks.org/faqeps.htm#e25
  7. Maybe we should also be thinking about the person who is doing the chanting. The chanter is in neither world. The chanter is between them. I think we live in that fuzzy transitory middle of the Worlds Venn diagram. Good Coop sitting on one shoulder, Bad Coop sitting on the other.
  8. I think we were owed 18 episodes and that he delivered on that promise.
  9. Rather than the motel scene being an event which took place after the rape, I thought it was an alternate version of the rape. In both stories Diane had kissed Cooper once before and then they met and then they had sex/he raped her. While there were no punches or direct violence, Cooper's words felt like they were orders and that Diane felt like she had no choice. I have no interest in getting into a discussion of what level of persuasion constitutes rape (because that's besides the point) but at the very least Cooper seemed to be using his power in an immoral and shitty way. This goes into my view of the finale being about how there isn't merely good and evil and how the real Cooper is a mixture of Good Coop and Bad Coop. I think the series was about extremes and the finale was about asking you to look to see the truth that exists in the unsaid middle.
  10. I understand why people would hate the Bob hulk smash. It's cartoonish, anti-climactic, and somewhat flippant with aspects of the series. I think you're absolutely right that it doesn't take certain aspects of the lore all that seriously. It took all the most superficial elements of good versus evil and neat resolutions and ratcheted it all up to an extreme. The plot resolution it provided was deliberately shallow. While I did get some satisfaction out of seeing all the pieces fall into place, I would have been pretty unhappy if the series ended right there. But it didn't. Instead, by pushing that stuff past the breaking point, it felt to me like it shed itself of the plot machinations and asked the viewer to look back on the series not in terms of how the plot got us to where we are but in terms of the ambiguities and flaws in characters that would have otherwise gone unexamined. I liked how it left me feeling scattered and how even the most blatant comic book fight doesn't truly extinguish evil, because evil exists in shades of grey in everyone. The dualistic nature of Lynch's work is about how people are made of contradictory internal elements and not how opposing external sides are at war. It was a pull the rug out from under you approach, but I think it was with a point and a purpose. So I don't think it's that Lynch didn't care, I think its that he cared about different things than you. Which is totally fine. You cared about the plot and the lore, and I think he wanted to show that he considers those elements to be disposable and metaphorical and pushed them aside to focus on the signified rather than the signifiers. Did it work? Is that a strong enough reason to flippantly toss aside the importance of lore and plot you have invested significant energy in dissecting? Well, you seem to think not and honestly I think you could make a pretty strong case. But I don't think it was a fuck you. It was merely a shift in focus.
  11. Twin Peaks is just about the only way Lynch will get a big enough budget to make something, and I'm thus hoping for more things called Twin Peaks. But I'd prefer it if it made an even bigger break from what Twin Peaks has been up until this point.
  12. Are you sure that's what we saw? Might to consult the podcast boys on this one...
  13. I should clarify: I don't think any one fan theory will provide a key to put everything into place. Lynch's work is always too messy and loose for that. Every attempt to pin down the relationship between Bob and Leland has shown that to be the case. A lot of his stuff has elements that seem like dreams and projections of certain characters as well as elements that seem like dreams and projections of the audience as well as bits that might actually be happening like scenes in a normal movie. I think the first half of Mulholland Drive is largely Betty's dream, but I don't think she actually imagined the Winkies diner scene or Kesher going to talk to the cowboy. When dealing with three seasons of a TV show and a movie, this spirals completely out of control. However, I still think it's worth considering various reductive explanations and seeing if they enrich certain scenes for you. Enjoy the bits that work and look at what doesn't under a different light. So, no. I don't actually think all of The Return is Audrey's dream. However, there was at least one scene that was presented as if it was her dream, so I think it's worth considering that there could be more. And if Bob/Leland could be an analogy for the need to compartmentalize in order for Laura or Leland to deal with abuse, then I think the same could be true of Good Coop/Bad Coop for Cooper or Audrey. Maybe how we see Diane is also a projection based on Audrey's experience with Cooper and her having heard him say her name into a tape recorder. It doesn't make sense for all the scenes, but it's interesting for some. Other bits I think are totally about the viewer and our dreams and expectations. It's a big swirling mess of things. For me, this is the only way I can penetrate Lynch's work. It eludes direct interpretation, but I enjoying helplessly grasping at it anyways.
  14. I think it might make some amount of sense if Audrey was the dreamer for the whole of The Return, though. In a loose Twin Peaks-y sort of way, anyways. She idolized her special agent, and he had inappropriate feelings towards her that he didn't act upon in the original run of the show. But when she was in a coma and he had the opportunity, he took advantage of it and raped her. These two things are so irreconcilable, that she more than anyone else had a reason to invent two Coopers in order deal with the trauma. Laura Palmer did the same thing to deal with Leland being her rapist. So, we could in effect have two interlocking dreams created by Audrey and Laura to live with how the men they looked up to and trusted betrayed them in the most horrible of ways. Maybe? EDIT: And to be clear, I in no way think there is a neat and tidy solution. It's always a hazy mixture of different explanations with Lynch. However, I do feel that if Frost/Lynch decided to show us explicitly that one sequence was Audrey's dream, then it seems likely that at least some other bits are too.
  15. It was very much like the end of Wizard of Oz. Speaking of which, has anyone noted how similar the golden ball looks to Glinda's bubble as it floats around the screen in Oz?
  16. I feel like Bad Coop's path to the sheriff's station is important. He arrived there by going through a portal into a movie theater and was then fed through a tube into the movie screen. This movie world he went into was the cartoonish world of old Twin Peaks. "What is this?" he asks. This is where the bad Lucy jokes exist and where Andy walks around with a picnic basket. Even when Lucy shot Coop, it punctuated by Truman's hat doing an absurdly silly hop atop his head and Lucy delivering a punch line to the running phone gag. I think Lucy's terrible characterization this season may have actually been a deliberate choice to mock the squeaky clean style of the old show. It is only through this travel from The Return to old Twin Peaks that the two Coopers were able to meet, because they don't actually coexist in a single world. At least not in sense of two separate entities who could run into one another on the street. It was then through the collision of these two worlds that we get the more realistic character of episode 18.
  17. This is in line with my reaction. The over-the-top battle between a gloved superhero and a giant evil orb was such an on-the-nose showdown between good and evil that I think it felt more like the destruction of the stark and binary distinctions between good and evil rather than the destruction of evil itself. And with episode 8 where that song was played on the radio before the DJ's head got crushed to bits. And with the overhead shot of Becky's face in the car when she gets high with her abusive husband and I Love How You Love Me plays. And with Diane's story about Cooper in episode 16. And it takes place in a motel that brought to mind where Leland went in FWWM. Oh, and the way the song faded in and out was odd and not unlike the Otis Redding song when Norma and Ed got together. Gosh, this is all a lot to deal with here. I also noticed that this took place in room 7 shortly after the importance of the number 8 shown.
  18. Well sure, but it was after they had kissed once before and certainly seemed coercive and not like something Diane wanted to do. So much of the world was off and altered at that point that I don't think a change in location rules it out.
  19. I expected this to be a controversial topic on the forum but no one has really talked about it yet, so I will ask: Are we to assume that the sexual encounter we saw between Diane and Cooper was the rape which she spoke about in episode 16? Because that's how I saw it, but can also understand why someone might disagree.
  20. Never has an empty sexual boast so encapsulated two confounding hours of television.
  21. Dose that mean that part of the show exists purely in TV land, and another part exists in place that combines TV land with reality? Like how Jim Belushi is an actor, but Monica Bellucci is just Monica Bellucci? I mean, probably not.
  22. So, I think episode 17 was the most deliberately reductive good versus evil superhero fight imaginable, and episode 18 argued that such a dichotomy doesn't exist. The Cooper of episode 18 was neither good Coop nor bad Coop, he was just Coop. And he used his power to force Diane to have sex with him. I think when the evilness of Bob was destroyed, it was actually the false dichotomy of good and evil being destroyed giving us a world where everyone is both. Or at least that was what my gut was telling me was happening on an emotional level. I can justify it at all, and I need more than a couple of minutes to figure out what the fuck I just saw in terms of actual plot.
  23. Just finished episode 17. I can't fucking believe that Bad Coop was defeated half an hour in by a callback to the terrible Lucy phone jokes and a shaky cam punching battle with a floating orb. And then a bunch of Back to The Pilot time travel? My instinct is to say that this was all rather stupid, but at least it's a unique and interesting brand of stupidity. On to episode 18, I guess!
  24. My bad. I forgot that we are required by law to communicate exclusively in Twin Peaks quotes.
  25. Before tonight's episode I wanna give a big ol' thanks to Chris and Jake for making such a great show every week and to everyone else in the community for engaging in such fun, insightful, and oftentimes ridiculous conversation. I don't think I would have enjoyed this season nearly as much without y'all. Now, let's do this thing.