prangman

Members
  • Content count

    10
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About prangman

  • Rank
    Member
  1. @SkullKid you are right but the big difference is in the season 2 finale Lynch, after an absence of 14 episodes (I think) chooses to brutally and effectively finish off most of the loose threads- with the bank explosion, Bobby and Shelly's romance blossoming, Nadine's harsh awakening, Andy and Lucy's consumption of their relationship, etc etc, as well as the whole Windom Earle saga, all in 45 minutes, while also setting up a third season based around Major Briggs as the protagonist. The Black Lodge Scenes are so mesmerising and unforgettable that we forget how many other ways this episode is totally definitive. In that sense it's very different indeed from TR!
  2. @Don't Go There you raise some really good points. I'm not so bothered about the incomplete character arcs- I think whether or not you see them as incomplete is subjective to an extent- but some of the plot dead ends do bother me. In particular: -the 119 drug addict and her son -the box in Buenos Aires (which I wasn't in alone in thinking could have 'been' Phillip Jeffries, or at the very least a means of transmission between the 'real' world and wherever Jeffries is/was -Hawk finding the entrance to the red room in the first episode(s). Why were we shown this- I was mega excited as I really thought Hawk was going to go into the Lodge and save the day. Looking at these now, I can accept that '119' is standard Lynch enigma, and Hawk's scenes could have been poorly edited (although, as a massive Hawk fan, there was also an element of wish fulfillment in the possibility of Hawk saving Coop). But the box in Buenos Aires? And its link to the Hip Hop woman gruesomely murdered by Ike, who types 'Argent' into her phone?
  3. Thank you! Just to take it a bit further, what really satisfied me about this ending was that it restored ambiguity to the supernatural/black lodge elements of the show, especially with regards to personal culpability, which I was worried were becoming overly literal in the sometimes lore-heavy plotting of TP:TR (which i have mostly enjoyed). Just as FWWM and to some extent the finale of S2 were a clear challenge to the easy, dualistic 'Leland is not responsible, it was all BOB', which I think is effectively Cooper's achilles heel, his totally inability to believe that a man could really rape and murder his own daughter, S3 led us to believe that there really was 'a good Dale' and 'a bad Dale' and that the good Dale was completely innocent of all the crimes committed by the bad Dale- and then in the last episode we suddenly have a Dale who is neither. I guess it's worth recalling that, presumably, between S2E22 and FWWM, it was impossible to tell if the mirror-smashing Dale was the same Dale we saw enter the red curtains, only possessed by BOB, or the doppelganger imposter with BOB 'riding' him. The latter theory is more or less confirmed by Annie telling Laura that 'the good Dale is in the lodge and he can't leave'. But what if the biggest denouement of what we've just seen is that there is no doppelganger, only Dale Cooper, who, BOB or no BOB, was a forever changed man the moment he left Twin Peaks.
  4. When you put it like that, it seems ridiculous to suggest it could have happened any other way. Whether Dale Cooper literally spent 25 years out of time and existence, or just came out of the black lodge and became a murderous criminal and rapist, what else could he be as he approaches his 60s other than empty, damaged and alone, and on a quixotic quest to right a wrong (laura's murder) which is irreversible and from which, like many trauma victims, he can never move on. It's the most psychologically true outcome.
  5. Can't really add much to what people have already said. But on a different note, the Zawaski accounting guy's response to Chantal and Hutch parking in his drive reminded my straight away of the scene in lost highway when Mr Eddy is being tailgated on the road and beats the shit out of the tailgater. In an interview with Michal J.Anderson he mentions how he was in a car with Lynch around the time of LH and how he was silently fuming after being tailgated, and that he was amazed when he watched lost highway and saw Lynch effectively creating an elaborate revenge fantasy on screen for a real life incident. So I suppose it's not unreasonable to presume that Lynch was having trouble with people parking on his drive when these scenes were filmed...
  6. Like the comparison to BCS- I did find this season (of BCS) slightly duller than the previous two, which I loved (way more than Breaking Bad btw). My interest massively dipped once TP started- ironically partly because the 'slow' bits of BCS seemed so aware they were slow and could be considered boring by the audience that the directors had actually done everything to make them more 'entertaining'. There was one scene in particular when Mike (Ehrmentraut, not MIKE) is setting up some booby trap in the desert for the Mexican smugglers. After 30 secs in real time it switches to a time lapse, so that whatever dull, painstaking task Mike is doing becomes more like a musical montage/interlude. And all I was thinking was how amazing the scene would be if Lynch had directed it, where we would have silent, 2 minute shots of Mike slowly trudging across the desert, or maybe him spending a minute to find a tool, going over to where he is working, then realising he has the wrong tool and spending another minute going back to the toolbox and finding the right one... Which is a long way of saying that pacing-wise BCS feels like Breaking Bad when put next to TP:TR!
  7. Loved it! Think the crying girl watching James was another nod to Donna (along with brunette backing singers)- reminded me straight away of Donna crying with James during the roadhouse scene in s2 as Maddie is being murdered.
  8. Loving how measured and thoughtful people's reactions are here. People have completely lost their shit on Reddit! I really liked it, apart from the French woman scene, not because it was slow or because she was another 2D female character but because of the ridiculous French! Worth it though for Albert's amazing reaction. i buy Audrey's story arc totally: troubled childhood, ending in catastrophic accident and pregnancy, raises (or doesn't raise) a psychopathic son alone, never loses her scheming ambitions but also retains naivety and innocence. Not at all improbable she's stuck in this crazy relationship, or that she is not interested in Richard. the Sarah scenes were amazing, classic Lynch suggestive horror. Did anyone else notice that the music playing in the supermarket, and also when Diane said 'Let's rock' was the super creepy music from FWWM, I think when jeffries shows up in Philadelphia?
  9. Amazing you should say that, because for me, when I first watched FWWM (and every subsequent time) that stuck out for me as one of the most amazing and powerful scenes. I've seen the missing pieces, and rewatched both the convenience store and Phillip Jeffries in Philadelphia scenes from TMP several times, and while I love the extended versions, I think Lynch's decision to shorten both scenes and lay them over the top of each other is a brilliant one. The scene is so disorientating and confusing- you, the viewer, feel as Gordon, Albert and Cooper, not to mention Jeffries must be feeling, and the electricity/static must represent the energy Jeffries brings with him. And the intrusion of the lodge/convenience store into the physical world, and the way the static first appears when Jeffries points at Cooper and asks 'who do you think this is here?' is so uncanny. In the extended scenes, I feel way too much is given away- we know where Jeffries has come from and returns to, we know in some detail (or can surmise) how the LMFAP and his pals work ('from pure air'... 'animal life'... 'fell a victim'... 'fury of my own momentum'...) and while this is fascinating for Peaks obsessives i don't think it's something we should, or could know. What Jeffries brings us in the canonical FWWM feels right to me. Would still love to see the full cut though! Just a thought. Given that what we have so far is the same length more or less as the first series, and also given that so many of Lynch's films over the past two decades are split into 2 parts, usually not quite equal in length and related but not in a direct way (e.g. Desmond-Laura in FWWM, Betty-Diane in Mulholland Drive, Laura Dern filming with Jeremy Irons- Insanity in Poland in Inland Empire, Bill Pullman-Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway) it's not at all impossible that the second (slightly more than) half could be distinctly different both in tone and setting from the first half. That may even mean that it is (mostly) set in Twin Peaks...
  10. Hi all, first timer, this is my favourite TP podcast and discussion forum- definitely appreciate the quality not quantity vibe here :-) Just a few thoughts about the episode. -I loved it, but share concerns with many about the complex, human drama of Twin Peaks becoming a cosmic battle. I also much preferred the Native American take, which seemed to be the principal interpretation in the original series- for example, Hawk's accurate prediction of the dweller on the threshold, perfect courage etc, the fact that Frank Silva was part Indian and also the visual similarity between the jumping man and some ritual masks, not to mention the geographical location of Twin Peaks, in the most remote corner of the US, where I imagine native culture held on for much longer than in the East Coast, or the Southwest. The names for the Lodges also seem to come from Native American lore. -Related to that, many have pointed out a discrepancy between this idea of Laura-orb as pure good, and the real life, flawed, Laura we know from FWWM. If she is some kind of messiah figure, the show did not suggest that at all. But for me the bigger problem is BOB as some kind of manifestation of pure evil. BOB as we know him, both in his pure form and as Leland/Doppelcoop, is nothing of the sort, and certainly as far away from the cold, calculated apocalyptic evil we associate with the atom bomb (and the Holocaust etc). He is a creature of passion, lust and impulse. If he is the embodiment of pure evil, it's rather surprising that over forty years he kills only 3 (4 if you include Jacques) people, and chooses to repeatedly rape a single person. His motivation is pleasure- which is why he only kills when his ability to seek pleasure is compromised. BOB for me is, rather than a satanic emblem of pure evil, much closer to the trickster figure we see in almost every culture, not to mention native American culture. He is bad, but his evil is born of a desire for self gratification and chaos rather than apocalyptic destruction. -Therefore I really am hoping that this episode will be more than just a dualistic reduction of the meta-drama behind everything we've seen up to now. I know that, despite the Lynchian visuals, this has been interpreted as a more Frost-heavy episode in terms of plot and lore. I don't know a great deal about Frost but I will say that despite his obsession with evil, in none of Lynch's films is it ever suggested that the evil faced is simplistic or pure. In fact, in many films (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, , Eraserhead) the evil is to some extent within the protagonist themselves. Even in Blue Velvet, where Frank Booth is 100% physical and pretty irredeemably evil, there is a pretty clear implication that he has been seriously abused and neglected as a child. What's more, Jeffrey can only move on in the story by partly embracing Frank's evil (ie when he assaults Isabella Rosselini's character), and Frank identifies him as a potential protegé ('you're just like me'). In TP, Laura is fighting against the (almost) literal introduction of evil into her own body, and obviously Coop is undone by an embodiment of everything bad in him, or rather, all his cunning, strength, guile and power with none of the compassion and wonder that makes him who he is. Given all this it would be really shocking if in the end it was just a question of pure good vs pure evil, especially as this series is to some extent a summation of all of Lynch's work, visually at least. Then again, I remember finding the ending to Wild at Heart almost shockingly crude and simplistic, so it's not out of the question! -On an unrelated note, I love that nearly every Black Lodge figure we have seen across the series has their own signature poem, and that they kind of suit their characters. MIKE, who is played in an almost hammy, Shakespearean way by Al Strobel has 'one chants out between two worlds, Fire walk with me' a rhyming, formal poem with arcane language. BOB has a dark version of a children's nursery rhyme ('catch you with my death bag...') and the woodsman has an almost hippyish free piece of free verse ('water...well...white horse'), perfectly suited to his almost hipster-y appearance. Thanks for reading!