Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 38: The Return, Part 4

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It feels like he's just dressing up as original series Andy and I just don't buy it.

 

It certainly seems like Andy and Lucy are literally stuck in the old show. Andy looks like a cartoon character surrounded by the Lynch cinema aesthetic. It makes me uncomfortable but I almost like it in a bizarre metatextual way? Will be interesting to see where it goes.

 

Also, folks!! This is from episode two and i don't know if it's been mentioned but I'm rewatching the original in between new episodes and this connection gave me chills. It might look like a reach here but if you watch the scenes it's pretty uncanny. Bob very specifically straight devours Maddie's chin, as does the cat to the water buffalo. A couple of folks in the episode 2 thread commented on how it looked like the cat was killing and making out with the water buffalo, and, well, that certainly checks out wrt to the former scene. Present-day Sarah definitely changes her expression and perks up a bit when the weird mouth stuff starts happening (though this could just be a reaction to the intense violence). To me it seems like the violent gesture is visually echoing in the room 25 years later. I wonder if we'll see more of that. I assume it's not an actual plot point but it's a hell of a reverberating mood bit.

 

Also did anyone notice how the water buffalo's camera red-eye goes to black a few frames before it cuts to the bang bang bar? so eerie.

 

Another little echo I felt, from episode 4, was when the Casino guy directed Cooper's attention to the camera above them. Reminded me of the glass box slightly, but moreso the recording of Cooper at One-Eyed Jack's. I don't know if connections like these are meaningful at all but the lines of flight are fun.

 

(is it ok to post episode 2 stuff in the 'current' thread or should I edit this out and go back to 2?)

 

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6 minutes ago, marblize said:

 

Andy looks like a cartoon character surrounded the Lynch cinema aesthetic. It makes me uncomfortable but I almost like it in a bizarre metatextual way? Will be interesting to see where it goes.

 

I guess Lucy and Andy representing quirkier aspects of the old series would make sense in terms of my theory that Wally Brando represents the follies of modern reboots. The old series literally giving birth to the new one, and the stunt-casted actor tortuously explaining the connections between the two. But even if this was intended (which I will admit is a bit of a stretch), I still think those Lucy scenes are terrible. Plus given how tonally diverse the series has been, I think it's more like that their goofy outdated characters are actually another part of Lynch's current aesthetics and not somehow the exceptions to them. 

Great stuff with the Sarah Palmer image comparisons, by the way! 

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13 hours ago, Jake said:

Episode 4 of Rewatch is up btw!

Great episode, guys. I assume Travis McElroy is the podcaster from My Brother, My Brother and Me? Their episode this week is filled with Twin Peaks jokes!

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I was thinking about what the guys on the podcast said about Lynch using Take Five when Badalamenti's score was so similar. I wonder if Lynch might have used some licensed jazz numbers in the original series if it had been an option? Did TV at the time ever use licensed music incidentally or was it only ever used during big event episodes? 

 

 

24 minutes ago, 510home said:

Great episode, guys. I assume Travis McElroy is the podcaster from My Brother, My Brother and Me? Their episode this week is filled with Twin Peaks jokes!

Seems likely given that both groups of podcasters work in the video game industry.

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44 minutes ago, 510home said:

Great episode, guys. I assume Travis McElroy is the podcaster from My Brother, My Brother and Me? Their episode this week is filled with Twin Peaks jokes!

It is that Travis! He and Justin are both Twin Peaks Rewatch listeners, it turns out.

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I feel the same as Jake, that the Lucy and Andy stuff isn't working for me at the moment. It's interesting though that the new staff isn't having any of it either. Just her and Andy's presence seemed enough to annoy Chet, which might be a common attitude in the department. 

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just listened to the episode - great stuff! A couple of things:

 

- I'm not sure Gordon doesn't trust Agent Preston - if I remember right he clarifies that she's wearing a wire as he requested before sending her away, so it seems like he just doesn't want the following conversation on the record, obviously with good reason. Though I guess maybe it's sensitive enough info to want to only keep between he and Albert anyway.

 

- Something that would click with the Major Briggs Buckhorn corpse theory is that in Black Lodge Liminal Purgatory Outer Space, we only saw his disembodied head. The timeline on his corpse not being a skeletal nothing at this point does seem pretty wacky though.

 

- Wally Brando minus lyBran = Waldo. Lucy loved that bird as proven by the voice activated tape recorder and it certainly contributed to the naming of her son. I'm sorry but this is canon.

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I think people's exasperation with the Lucy scenes might be causing some elements of her character to be missed.

Considering how "hard-wired" and menacing the circuitry is between the Black Lodge and the diegetic "real" world (like... literal wires & pipes), I actually find Lucy's struggles -- with presence & absence, dual name confusion, wirelessness, and automated devices like the thermostat that operate while no one is looking --- to be oddly prescient of the alchemical quasi-logic that the agents just accept and assimilate.  Wired systems & names are her domain, and both of those are rather charged in the Twin Peaks universe.

 

The way she delivers her lines to Andy after her fall makes it seem like she does understand how cell phones work, but part of her finds it completely abject and wrong in spite of herself. When someone is looking for someone under an ambiguous name, or using circuitry to communicate, and/or assuming the circuitry functions seamlessly without explanation, Lucy sets them straight. In her view, these things & rituals operate with specificity, monitoring, & instructions. If something is assumed to work without monitoring, Lucy is suspicious. In Lynch's world... what IS a thermostat doing when no one is looking (glass cage, anyone)? If people start losing specificity with names, stop heeding instructions, or relay phone messages without hard wires, horrific things creep in, and apparently not just in Lucy's context.

 

I think part of her brain functions in the Blue Rose spectrum of logic, without quite understanding why and without the ability to completely synthesize everything the way the agents do, and I think she's fascinating because of that. She's more than just a comedic prop. 

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1 hour ago, richardco said:

I can't accept that people don't like Wally Brando. I won't accept it.

 

Wally Brando is cool. Wally Brando has always been cool.

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When the female casino flack is freaking out trying to find Douggie/Cooper and frantically states "He's here! He's leaving!" I was reminded of Ben Horne's secretary excitedly shouting, "The Norwegians are leaving!"

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On 2017-5-31 at 10:49 PM, purps said:

Yes, when tree is going crazy it's head is a different color and is presumably the doppelganger. It's established in the final episode of season 2 that the lodge people also have doppelgangers. In that episode they were portrayed as having white eyes. 

 

And yes, that is Mike's arm. It is also the dancing dwarf from the red room scenes of the original show. In Fire Walk With Me the dwarf says "I am The Arm, and I sound like this..." which the tree repeats when we first meet it. Also in FWWM at the end there is a part where the dwarf puts his hand where Mike's arm would be and they speak in unison. 

 

So yeah, Mike cut his arm off and it turned into a little dancing dwarf which evolved into a weird tree thing over the last 25 years. You know, Lodge stuff.

 

Whaaat. Okay. I don't pay too much attention to the Black Lodge stuff, really. I have a hunch most of it doesn't matter in the end. I like the esthetic and the weirdness, but there's too much lore. 

 

I loved seeing that Andy and Lucy are in the show, but it doesn't feel like them. They were pretty dumb before, but now they are totally incapable of even the most basic stuff. 

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Hey guys.  I really like the show, but I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty disappointed that the show's portrayal of women hasn't come up in discussion.  After you spent time talking about casual racism with Hawk, there is absolutely no mention of things that could at this point read as blatant misogyny.  So far on the show 4 women have been murdered, 2 in various states of undress.  There is a notable lack of lines delivered by female characters and when agent Preston appears, a character that could potentially be relatable to female viewers, her character is developed by talking about how hot she is and directing the actress to walk as though she's a runway model.  Kind of what the fuck?!   If this was a different series, I wouldn't be shocked, but it stands in stark contrast to the original series, which despite being centered around the sexual abuse and murder of a teenage girl didn't feel completely alienating to female viewers.  I'm hoping they fix this problem in episode to come because I think the show looks gorgeous and I'm intrigued by the lore, but if they don't, there is a good chance I'll stop watching which would break my heart as a long time fan.

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I was kind of waiting until we were farther in to the season and could see more of the whole picture before getting into it, but I agree. Combining what you said about the four murdered women, with the letcherous creeping on agent Preston and Lucy being turned into a one note ditz and it's very frustrating. Janey-E Jones is one of the few women who has had any screen time this season who has been shown to have any agency or inferiority and hasn't been killed or flattened into a single dimension or object, and that's bleak considering she's only been in one episode so far. 

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The misogyny has bothered me too, but I'm hoping Lynch is doing this with a purpose and is (quite likely, given that it's David Lynch) just messing with us.

 

Making Agent Preston wear a wire, then immediately sending her away because she's wearing a wire, could very well be a commentary on institutionalised workplace sexism. Particularly when paired with the conversation Cole has with Bryson prior to that scene where he sees Denise very much as an equal. Does Cole treat her differently because she was originally male and because he, on some level, still identifies her as such? I'm interested to see where this goes.

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I realize we are all just speculating at this point but there are a couple of things that surprised me in your theorizing:

  1. You listed off nearly all the female characters in Twin Peaks who might be the one Cole and Albert are talking about but never mentioned Annie (Heather Graham). I know Graham says she's not in The Return but that can't be trusted 100% and it still seems worth mentioning as the most logical choice to me. Why would the character have become a drunk? Because the man she loved, the man who saved her life, abandoned here 25 years ago? Given the fact that the original series ends with the question, "How's Annie?" it seems at least worth talking about.
  2. You keep talking Duggy as if you are sure he has been living as a separate entity for many years. This might be true but I didn't take it like that at all. I figured that Bad Coop has been living a relatively normal cover life as Duggy for many years and doing his evil business on the side. This also gives us some reasons as to why people are trying to kill his Duggy persona and why Dyggy's wife is afraid about the money they owe. I think Bad Coop only recently made a fake Duggy to escape being pulled back into the Black Lodge but he has been living much of the time as Duggy. I also think that the two bodies found in that S. Dakota bed are the remains of what Bad Coop used to make the fake Duggy. 

Does anyone else see it this way?

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43 minutes ago, antikewl said:

Making Agent Preston wear a wire, then immediately sending her away because she's wearing a wire, could very well be a commentary on institutionalised workplace sexism. 

 

Maybe, but I don't see it as being a, "very well," possibility. Preston was asked to wear a wire because she she's the junior person on the team, so you get extra duties. She was not "immediately" sent away; she was sent away after many hours together and only for a short time, while Cole and Albert talked about this being a Blue Rose case and other details that you don't want on the record and you might not want to share with a junior agent (remember that Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) is a rising star in the FBI in Fire Walk with Me but he's not let in on what the Blue Rose means).

 

Does their gaze at Preston waking away say something about men in general? Yes. And some men in the workplace? Yes. Does the Denise conversation tell us that Cole likes attractive women under 30? Yes. But there is no evidence that Cole or Albert or other men on their team are misusing their authority or disrespecting any of the female staff in some institutionalized manner. I think it's more reasonable to argue that Lynch is acknowledging real life. Cole is "Old School" and he is who he is. He likes pretty, younger women. But he is not about to let that stop him from being a professional in the workplace, just like he stood up for Dennis when he transitioned to Denise but he doesn't want to hear about her, "raging hormones." He is walking a line between his gut reactions and his professionalism. He is imperfect but better than most when it comes to the bottomline.

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The way that actress is directed to walk is ridiculous though. Can't she just walk like a person?  The four women murdered and agent Preston's portrayal thus far individually would have probably just mildly annoyed me, but cumulatively it's a lot to take 

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The original series treated women in a very similar way though. Josie, Audrey, the whole One-eyed Jack's plot, it's all there. It's less obvious because you can't show nudity on network TV and because of the fashion of the time, but the original series was far from perfect in that regard.

 

It's complicated conversation because where do you draw the line between parody (Tammy Preston) and a questionable choice (Jade being completely topless in her first scene). I would find Tammy less frustrating if the Jade scene had been directed better. Or the Daria scene.

 

I don't want to be frustrated by these things, because I genuinely believe that Lynch has no ill will towards women. As long as he's not using his authority to take advantage of anyone, this stuff shouldn't really matter. But it does matter because society is so tipped towards this kind of portrayal of women's bodies. That's not really something you can blame on Lynch nor is it something you could reasonably expect him to fix by eliminating female nudity (except maybe Jade's nudity, I really did not like that scene), but it will always stand out until we start seeing more diverse depictions of sex and sexuality in mainstream pop culture. 

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