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Twin Peaks Rewatch 52/53: The Return, Parts 17 and 18

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6 minutes ago, pabosher said:

And Cooper’s line from the superimposed face: “We live inside a dream.” It really did seem like a dream, with everyone there, one big happy family. 

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? 3033955294_bfb8c89f09.jpg.313206861c8e47bd5e0b6e323dc3a093.jpg8008f9bac2af23387a33d3d2b502061f--glinda-the-good-witch-wicked-witch.jpg.74f1ec4f1eac54579f95a42dbdac3bc8.jpg

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1 minute ago, pabosher said:

 

 

And Cooper’s line from the superimposed face: “We live inside a dream.” It really did seem like a dream, with everyone there, one big happy family. 

I read that stone faced as the real cooper and the happenings in the sheriff's station as the dream. It was like a hackey end to a tv show intentionally. Dreaming of a better life he'll never get to live. Same thing when dougie woke up from the coma.  Bulk of the season was in his head.

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2 hours ago, Don't Go There said:

I feel it is important to preface this with the statement that I really liked “The Return”

 

I feel you on this list of grievances. This, to me, is the anxiety created when a story endures too many sequels. It is the feeling of a living being kept alive beyond the point of death. Yes, I am making another Dark Souls reference. I feel like Dark Souls 3 is a comment on stories that endure too many sequels, the story itself becomes a zombie abomination. This is why Stephen King was right to instruct Lindeloff to end LOST. Stories need to have endings, to feel like balanced compositions, or to feel like.

 

But maybe Twin Peaks is about the impossibility of endings, the impossibility of finding resolution. If it's still about soap operas, it might be fitting to end it in a way that invites a soap opera style reboot into the dark and edgy universe of premium cable serial television.

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Just now, SuperBiasedMan said:

 

The thing is, I don't think a plot has to be resolved or relevant to not be pointless. Audrey's scant scenes still had an effect, and underlined the themes of cycles and being lost. I think leaving them out would be to the detriment of the show, even if it doesn't 'go anywhere'.

I also think leaving them out would be to the detriment of the show. But it wasn't even an unresolved plot. It was an abandoned one. I think that's also to the detriment of the show. It's not that Audrey's fate is ambiguous, it's that it is simply absent. As is any hint of significance regarding the amphibious bug that crawled into the girl's (whoever she was) mouth. And on and on. No, I didn't expect a straightforward conclusion. I actually liked what I saw. But I am baffled- and not in a good way- by what I didn't see. I didn't need the Audrey plot to resolve so much as I don't for the life of me understand why, if it was just going to be dropped, it was there in the first place.

 

I don't know. I need some time, I think.

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5 minutes ago, UnpopularTrousers said:

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? 3033955294_bfb8c89f09.jpg.313206861c8e47bd5e0b6e323dc3a093.jpg8008f9bac2af23387a33d3d2b502061f--glinda-the-good-witch-wicked-witch.jpg.74f1ec4f1eac54579f95a42dbdac3bc8.jpg

 

It wouldn't be the first time he referenced Wizard of Oz

wild-at-heart18.jpg

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1 minute ago, Don't Go There said:

I didn't need the Audrey plot to resolve so much as I don't for the life of me understand why, if it was just going to be dropped, it was there in the first place.

It's hard to explain but I'm wondering if it was there specifically to be dropped. A lot of this show has created unease in so many ways, this is certainly one of them.

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I would actually love if, once they wrap up this season, if Chris & Jake could do a few more episode covering each of Lynch's movies, since they're some of my favorite people at looking at his work.

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Was there ever any analysis on the coloring of the Rancho Rosa logo at the beginning of each episode and a possible correlation to theme/etc? Not sure if I missed anyone diving a bit deeper into that.

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1 minute ago, Mister said:

I would actually love if, once they wrap up this season, if Chris & Jake could do a few more episode covering each of Lynch's movies, since they're some of my favorite people at looking at his work.

 

Or a short miniseries of pods for the Final Dossier book, so we can read along at the same pace. Who am I kidding, I'll plow through that the day it comes out.

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I know when fire walk with me was being made they planned on doing (i think) 3 films, was some of the black and white footage of Laura and dale in the woods filmed back then? Was it earmarked to be put in one of the other films that were never made? Even the Pete fishing stuff could have been filmed in 92, or was just left over b roll from the pilot, also it could be just digital manipulation. Who can say.

 

Whatever internal logic exists to explain the last episode, What it felt like was a character from a deep dream where crazy bob heads fly around attacking people, left and went into a different dream that was a step closer to reality. The character was still on the same mission from the deeper dream, but after trying to make the two realities connect, fails, until the last second when something reaches out from and even deeper dream to grab them.

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I'm getting hints of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, where Orpheus is granted passage to the underworld to bring Eurydice back on the condition that he not look back until they've passed the threshold into our world. Of course this rule is broken, he looks back, Eurydice is taken away and Orpheus eventually is torn apart by Maenads and his soul taken into the Underworld be be reunited with Eurydice.  This season's ending seems to be a blending of that concept and a re-imagining of what would have occurred if Orpheus had been at least partially successful and broken his own timeline before being banished into an infinite recess of possible worlds forever dictated by his muse, his Eurydice. The past dictating the future over and over again.

 

While I'm on the subject, I enjoyed the mystical concept of dictation in this series. There are so many instances of intra-diegetic note-taking, note retrieval, memorizing coordinates, dictaphones, gramophone recordings.  It's like the idea of dictation carries an obligation not only to transcribe what's being said, but to somehow transmute what's being dictated into significance at just the right places and just the right times. Take those dictations into other contexts, and they reverberate & fall apart. And as stated above, one of the core acts of dictation, recording, and eventual loss of self in that message is between Laura and Dale.  That final frame was an amazing way to end it.

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30 minutes ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

It's hard to explain but I'm wondering if it was there specifically to be dropped. A lot of this show has created unease in so many ways, this is certainly one of them.

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.

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I have to think of the dream and dreamer as a metaphor.  The dreamer is any of us filtering, making sense, making judgements of the world through our own experience and senses when these same events can be viewed completely differently by anyone outside of us.  As dreamers we are creating the world we live in and imagine it is reality and that we know reality, when all we know is OUR reality, and our reality is mutable and inconstant. "The past creates the future" and Cooper's latest journey add another wrinkle in that time and destiny are dreams, if they can be changed then the one who does the changing is the dreamer, but like a dreamer has little control on the full effects of any decision's outcome.  If time is inconstant reality is only one of an infinite possibilities.

 

If the series is an actual character's dream than it is all but worthless.  No character has agency or importance, no encounter, mishap or mistake has any meaning.  There were never any rules, and there need not be any logic.  The only meaning that could be derived is possible insight into the dreamer, but even then is it a reflection on the core of their being or the pizza they had for dinner?

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15 minutes ago, UnpopularTrousers said:

I think it might make some amount of sense if Audrey was the dreamer for the whole of The Return, though.

 

I could see her being a dreamer for some, but not all. That'd mean she dreamt up things involving Diane, Jeffries, etc, that I couldn't imagine her having any prior knowledge of. Maybe Diane.

 

Waiting for someone to come up with a new proposed order to watch the episodes in. And character-centric threads combined into single viewing experiences would/will be interesting.

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30 minutes ago, lethalenforcer said:

 

I could see her being a dreamer for some, but not all. That'd mean she dreamt up things involving Diane, Jeffries, etc, that I couldn't imagine her having any prior knowledge of. Maybe Diane.

 

Waiting for someone to come up with a new proposed order to watch the episodes in. And character-centric threads combined into single viewing experiences would/will be interesting.

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.

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From a interview with Sherylin Fenn this week...

Quote

If David Lynch wanted to do another season of Twin Peaks, would you do it?

“Oh yeah. He said if people loved it he would do another one, and the hardest part is just sitting down and writing it. But he had so much fun this time, he really loved it. And he got to do it the way he wanted to. It’s like an 18-hour movie, so he’s happy. Let’s just stay positive. It really turned out the way he wanted it to in his heart.”

 

https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/twin-peaks-sherilyn-fenn-audrey-david-lynch/

 

 

Also some people noticed that Mark Frost was liking tweets where people were saying that they hope a season 4 happens.

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I've got a lot of contemplation ahead of me, but I'm leaning towards awe that this finale was everything all at once, from tropiest trope to downer to crowdpleaser to troller to head-scratcher to fitting end to no-end-at-all.

 

I don't get why anyone wouldn't want more. This whole series has been a fantastic experience. I also want to see what Albert would be turned into next series.

 

I liked that Drunk peeled back his wound to reveal a band aid. Didn't see that coming.

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13 minutes ago, purps said:

From a interview with Sherylin Fenn this week...

 

https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/twin-peaks-sherilyn-fenn-audrey-david-lynch/

 

 

Also some people noticed that Mark Frost was liking tweets where people were saying that they hope a season 4 happens.

 

I... kinda hope it doesn’t happen. I adored the whole experience of S3, but whomever it was that said it was right: how the hell can you continue a show that was gone for 25 years? And then just pick it up a season later as if nothing has happened? I like the idea of the end signifying the futility of Cooper’s quest, really: the good in him wants to change the past, and save Laura. But he can’t, he never can. I felt the entire scene where his face is transposed over the moving image was inside his head, and felt that supported by “We live inside a dream.”

 

that, I think, is cooper’s flaw: he lives inside a dream world, where you can save the life of a dead girl. That’s the second tragedy, the inability to change the past. The past may dictate the future, but it cannot be changed. 

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2 minutes ago, dartmonkey said:

I liked that Drunk peeled back his wound to reveal a band aid. Didn't see that coming.

Are you sure that's what we saw? Might to consult the podcast boys on this one...

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Kyle MacLachlan has also said he would be there in an instant for a season 4, and that Lynch has a mindset of "everything is Twin Peaks, and everything comes back to Twin Peaks."

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Lynch seems like he legitimately loves the world and storytelling it allows him to explore. I'd be all for it, personally. S3 hit so many marks for me and I absolutely loved it. Sure, maybe I would have liked a bit more of this and that, but it really affected me in ways a show has never ever done before. Going to be a special watch when I'm older, that's for sure. I was too young with original TP to form some of the same emotional connections.

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39 minutes ago, dartmonkey said:

I also want to see what Albert would be turned into next series.

 

He was so great this season. I wish he had one final triumphant moment, but I suppose being told he was lied to for 25 years will suffice.

 

I know it's been mentioned before but I really think they did such a fantastic job of integrating actors that had passed away.

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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.

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