Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 42: The Return, Part 8

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I got serious Stan Brakhage vibes watching the extended "exploration of the mushroom cloud" in Part 8. What a treat. If any of you were as into this episode as I was, check out a bit of Brakhage's trailblazing work in experimental cinema. It's awesome stuff. Here's "Stellar" from 1993. Rest easy, Stan.

 

 

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Hi guys, I actually saw a tweet today that kind of blew my mind. I've read the whole thread and don't think it has been discussed. So the gif in the tweet is from the season 2, ep 1, or, in the weird numbering of the episodes, episode 8. 

 

 

It looks to be similar to Laura's golden orb from episode 8, and is "delivered" to Coop by The Giant. I thought it might be interesting to share here! I hope it's ok to link to a tweet in the post. 

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6 hours ago, Bjorn said:

My read of Bobby is that he was already dealing drugs, and that's why Laura started dating him, was to get free drugs.  It's crappy, but not evil and Bobby is doing an excellent job of making bad decisions all on his own (and him and Mike are both shown to have some pretty awful controlling and abusive behavior in regards to their girlfriends).  Bobby doesn't kill anyone for Laura.  He shoots a dirty cop dead when that cop tries to double cross him as part of a drug deal.  A drug deal he set up. 

If you watch FWWM (one of the deleted scenes I believe) there's this moment where she and Bobby are sort of arguing, she's being secretive about seeing James and Bobby is like "Well, maybe next time you need cocaine, maybe I won't be there", she completely turns on the manipulation and the charm and starts buttering him up and he walks away feeling like a million bucks again. It's so manipulative and gross. I think that illustrates the power she had over people, particularly people who are romantically interested in her. Obviously I agree with you, Bobby's actions are his own, and he's responsible for himself, but moments like that are what I consider to be her "dark" evil side.

6 hours ago, Bjorn said:

I assume the Donna thing you're referencing is coming from the FWWM other bar scene.  Laura argues with Donna about stepping foot into Laura's other world, tries to talk her out of it, finally allows it, and then has a total freakout when she realizes that Donna's too fucked up to be consenting to what's happening.  It's literally the opposite of what you described. 

This is a perfect example of the two Laura's at odds with each other. Evil Laura was perfectly OK with those creeps putting what ever drug was in her drink and possibly getting her date raped. But something about seeing Donna wearing her shirt triggered something and woke her back up to her good side. She didn't want Donna to be like her, and I think that reminded her. Had that not happened, Laura might have just let whatever happened, happen to her. I think that's what people mean when they say she had a dark side. It's not like she was pure evil or anything but she was very capable of doing harm to others, but the good in her was still present enough to stop it. 

 

She was manipulative to both James and Bobby, but part of her was also trying to push them out of her life to protect them from not only finding out the truth about her, but to keep them from harm. Harm that she herself might have caused.

 

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4 hours ago, DinerGirl22 said:

Hi guys, I actually saw a tweet today that kind of blew my mind. I've read the whole thread and don't think it has been discussed. So the gif in the tweet is from the season 2, ep 1, or, in the weird numbering of the episodes, episode 8. 

 

 

It looks to be similar to Laura's golden orb from episode 8, and is "delivered" to Coop by The Giant. I thought it might be interesting to share here! I hope it's ok to link to a tweet in the post. 

 

Woah, holy shit.

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I'm afraid someone is going to have to tell me what the colour portions of those images are from. 

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31 minutes ago, James said:

I'm afraid someone is going to have to tell me what the colour portions of those images are from. 

 

Mulholland Drive

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Thanks. I thought it might be, but it's been so many years since I've seen that film, and my memory for these kinds of things is pretty bad. I should watch it again. 

 

Oh, on an unrelated note: the horse in the poem is the one that Sarah Palmer sees, right? 

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1 hour ago, James said:

Thanks. I thought it might be, but it's been so many years since I've seen that film, and my memory for these kinds of things is pretty bad. I should watch it again. 

 

Oh, on an unrelated note: the horse in the poem is the one that Sarah Palmer sees, right? 

I was interpreting the horse thing as being about using someone as a vehicle - directing the cicadafrog towards the face initially "the horse is the white of the eyes" then into the mouth "the dark within".

 

But your guess is as good as mine! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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12 hours ago, Jake said:

A few more from the Internet.

 

 

IMG_0468.JPG

IMG_0469.JPG

 

A lot of people are trying to make the argument that all of Lynch's work takes place in a singular universe but I don't think theres much to this theory. This isn't actually anything new. Lynch has reused imagery from his films multiple time. Red Curtains are prominent in almost everything he has ever done. The famous shot from Lost Highway of the closeup of road lines at night gets used in a couple other of his films as well. Eraserhead even had the famous red room floor design:

eraserhead1.jpg

 

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might be a stretch, but the ray/badcooper driving scene after they pull off the highway in this episode seemed strikingly similar to the driving scene in which badcooper was revealed to us in ep1 --- which leads me to ask if maybe that house from ep1 is The Farm ?

 

i'm not  super interested in suggesting a plot-based connection between the two scenes, but i loved the similarities in their shooting.

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On 6/26/2017 at 0:18 PM, Gamebeast23456 said:

As much as I want Lynch to be the guy who tells complex and nuanced interpersonal stories, that's probably not him. Mark Frost probably has input, and he probably worked with him trying to give this story volume, but deep characterization has never been Lynch's ballgame. I think a lot of trouble he gets into as a writer springs from his education and background, his emphasis on the power of symbol and image and sound. He's a cold director. 

 

I don't think Lynch's late films are cold (quite the opposite usually) and I definitely don't think they lack deep characterization. I do wonder the extent to which Mary Sweeney brought out the passionate, subjective/impressionistic, empathetic qualities he kept more subdued in his early films (and if her absence is why The Return often feels like a return to the more reserved, distanced feel of his Eraserhead-Blue Velvet work, despite dipping into the style and other signifiers of his more recent stuff). But I really can't agree Lynch's filmography is cold and simplistic toward character overall. FWWM and Mulholland Dr (the last third especially) stand out as major counterpoints to that idea.

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Hey LostInTheMovies! I watched your TP series on youtube to prepare for this season. Really loved your comparison between Twin Peaks and Evangelion as well! Looking forward to what you do with season 3.

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On 6/26/2017 at 1:52 PM, marblize said:

Weird to me that anyone considers the show as 'dangling the cooper thread'/'manipulative' especially after a feast of an episode such as this one. Seems to me like the need to Have Cooper Proper and Have Cooper Proper Now comes from a place of impatience and borders on a demand for fanservice. 

 

 

Yeah, I have to say the constant and near-ubiquitous demand for Bring Cooper Back perplexes me. Not only do I think what they're doing is more interesting, and that restoring Cooper ends the story just as ending the Laura investigation prematurely ended the original one...I also don't understand how that would even work. *Going in* to this series, I knew that a good and/or fully-integrated Cooper could not be a thing based on this premise.

 

I assumed (having no premonition of the rather ingenious Dougie solution of course!) that the good Dale would remain in the Lodge for 18 hours while the bad Dale rampaged, and/or another character would be guiding us slowly toward him, and/or good/bad Dale would fight for control over the body in the real world.

 

Did people really expect to see the Cooper of s1/2 in a black suit, grinning and sipping coffee and eating donuts, 25 years older but fundamentally unchanged? I just don't get how this would work narratively/thematically at all but since I seem to be in a significant minority, I gotta ask for clarification!

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6 minutes ago, richardco said:

Hey LostInTheMovies! I watched your TP series on youtube to prepare for this season. Really loved your comparison between Twin Peaks and Evangelion as well! Looking forward to what you do with season 3.

 

Thanks - btw, this episode felt super-End of Evangelion to me at times.

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On 6/26/2017 at 1:28 PM, Gailbraithe said:

 I mean clearly the Woodsman's broadcast was intended to help the frogbug find a host, and it's hard to believe anything related to the Woodsman is good. 

 

I liked the inventiveness and ambiguity of having the frogbug be Laura, which was my initial instinct, given the way we move directly from the Laura gold ball descending over earth to the egg hatching in the desert, plus the fact that we hear a horse whinnying in the end before cutting back to the girl in bed - this plus her age suggesting she might be Sarah.

 

However, the Woodsman's message *does* seem to be closely tied to the frogbug's entry and it's hard to imagine a couple innocent people needed their skulls crushed so that Laura could enter the world. Besides, we see plenty of eggs released alongside Bob and such emphasis is placed on the gold ball's color in an otherwise b/w world (except for a brief moment when it first enters the "movie") that the egg's grayness doesn't seem to match.

 

That said, one possibility (a stretch) is that the girl was supposed to die from the radio message but in fact the frogbug's entry saves her. Or, maybe less of a stretch than it initially seems, that the two events are "coincidental" in the Lynchian sense: not causally related, but thematically so.

 

There does seem to be some kind of fuzzy correlation between adolescent romance/sexuality, the frogbug, the atomic blast, the woodsmen, and the violence visited on the townspeople - as if the feelings stirred from this date/kiss blossom into a perverse, overwhelming mini-apocalypse for the whole town (which seems rather disproportionate but feels fairly Peaksian/Lynchian).

 

The coin she picks up - with a copper Lincoln on the front - certainly seems to have something to do with the figure who descends from the sky immediately afterwards (sorry if this has already been mentioned - I'm slowly making my way through the thread), but the lookalike quality of the Woodsman is no coincidence - Lynch/Frost hired an actor whose resume primarily consists of Lincoln impersonations.

 

There's a rich sense of interrelationship between the spirit world and the human psychology that reminds me of FWWM more than anything else in The Return so far.

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9 hours ago, LostInTheMovies said:

 

I liked the inventiveness and ambiguity of having the frogbug be Laura, which was my initial instinct, given the way we move directly from the Laura gold ball descending over earth to the egg hatching in the desert, plus the fact that we hear a horse whinnying in the end before cutting back to the girl in bed - this plus her age suggesting she might be Sarah.

 

However, the Woodsman's message *does* seem to be closely tied to the frogbug's entry and it's hard to imagine a couple innocent people needed their skulls crushed so that Laura could enter the world. Besides, we see plenty of eggs released alongside Bob and such emphasis is placed on the gold ball's color in an otherwise b/w world (except for a brief moment when it first enters the "movie") that the egg's grayness doesn't seem to match.

 

That said, one possibility (a stretch) is that the girl was supposed to die from the radio message but in fact the frogbug's entry saves her. Or, maybe less of a stretch than it initially seems, that the two events are "coincidental" in the Lynchian sense: not causally related, but thematically so.

 

There does seem to be some kind of fuzzy correlation between adolescent romance/sexuality, the frogbug, the atomic blast, the woodsmen, and the violence visited on the townspeople - as if the feelings stirred from this date/kiss blossom into a perverse, overwhelming mini-apocalypse for the whole town (which seems rather disproportionate but feels fairly Peaksian/Lynchian).

 

The coin she picks up - with a copper Lincoln on the front - certainly seems to have something to do with the figure who descends from the sky immediately afterwards (sorry if this has already been mentioned - I'm slowly making my way through the thread), but the lookalike quality of the Woodsman is no coincidence - Lynch/Frost hired an actor whose resume primarily consists of Lincoln impersonations).

 

There's a rich sense of interrelationship between the spirit world and the human psychology that reminds me of FWWM more than anything else in The Return so far.

I don't think the frog is Laura. It's not Bob either, but it's from the same source as Bob. When The Experiment vomits we see several of those eggs as well as a black orb with Bob's face. I also presume that there are more than one of those frogs. When the Experiment is vomiting, we see SEVERAL of those eggs. Presumably several of them hatched and found hosts since probably hundreds of people were put to sleep by the Woodsman's broadcast. That's how I read it. 

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Good Coop:

  • Shot in episode eight of the original run. 
  • The bullet pushed the parasitic wood tick on his belly into his abdomen.
  • Doc Hayward removes the parasite from inside him with the bullet fragment.

 

Bad Coop:

  • Shot in episode eight of the new series.
  • Bob, a parasitic orb, is inside him.
  • The woodsmen remove the parasite inside him, Bob.


Parallels to the new series aside, it's clever that Coop was portrayed as being invaded by a parasite as early as episode eight of the OG series. It didn't seem like a meaningful thing at the time and I'd largely forgotten that happened.

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4 minutes ago, purps said:

I don't think the frog is Laura. It's not Bob either, but it's from the same source as Bob. When The Experiment vomits we see several of those eggs as well as a black orb with Bob's face. I also presume that there are more than one of those frogs. When the Experiment is vomiting, we see SEVERAL of those eggs. Presumably several of them hatched and found hosts since probably hundreds of people were put to sleep by the Woodsman's broadcast. That's how I read it. 

This seems likely. There's Mike for instance, another Lodge being who very well may have the same situation going on. There must be hundreds of those eggs.

EDIT: There must be an entire town's worth of Lodge creatures on this Earth that we don't know about! I assume everyone in that town who heard the broadcast is inhabited by one of those moth toads.

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3 hours ago, FRENDEN said:

Good Coop:

  • Shot in episode eight of the original run. 
  • The bullet pushed the parasitic wood tick on his belly into his abdomen.
  • Doc Hayward removes the parasite from inside him with the bullet fragment.

 

Bad Coop:

  • Shot in episode eight of the new series.
  • Bob, a parasitic orb, is inside him.
  • The woodsmen remove the parasite inside him, Bob.


Parallels to the new series aside, it's clever that Coop was portrayed as being invaded by a parasite as early as episode eight of the OG series. It didn't seem like a meaningful thing at the time and I'd largely forgotten that happened.

 

Watch out Ray, you may end up in a wooden ornament! :lol:

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On 6/27/2017 at 1:49 PM, Jake said:

The podcast episode is live! This episode is a hard one to do justice to in a single episode, so fortunately for everyone we can keep talking about it next week! We're taking advantage of the week gap before Part 9, to do a "catch up, reflections, and further thoughts" episode about the season as a whole, and to continue unpacking what we saw this week.

 

So many days without a new episode of the return is harsh, this will soften the blow quite a bit. Thanks for doing it, on a holiday week/end no less!

 

 

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