Season 3: Scalding Hot Takes (Do Not Touch with Bare Hands)
May 22, 2017 11:12:11 GMT -8
Post by Jay on May 22, 2017 11:12:11 GMT -8
Hello and welcome to a S3 response post, I guess.
One thing I remember hearing from the Lynch camp (what little there was to hear) was that this season most effectively should be regarded as something like an eighteen-hour feature movie since that was more or less how they shot it. I’ve always been intrigued by the bygone era of films that were at or exceeded five hours and were the sorts of things you had to reserve the better part of a day for (also I attend the opera), so I’m willing to let Lynch be Lynch and do his thing and not rush to judgment over the efficacy of any individual episode until I have a better sense of the whole. However, I am by training someone who analyzes texts and it’s hard for me to wholly remove myself from that practice. Thus, I intend to do a little Levi-Strauss impersonation and bundle what little things I notice in the hopes that it eventually matters and would encourage others to do the same.
“Black and White Lodges”
One of the subtexts we had running towards the end of S2 and possibly beyond (it comes up a bit in FWWM) is the notion of a White Lodge, possibly inhabiting the same space as the Black Lodge. We end up spending a good amount of time early on in the Black one, but I’m curious if the intro scene, where we have B+W and Carel Struycken as The Giant talking to Coop, if that is not in meant to connote the White Lodge since we haven’t seen The Giant elsewhere so far. I would also point out that they’ve really pushed the visuals of the zigzag network of white and black lining, even before the rupture that occurs in ep 2, so that you really see the thing as overlapping, static-y, and checkerboarded, with positions alternating between dark and light. I regard this as effective for the overall aesthetic.
“Something in the Air”
There’s a lot of cast that I lament not being around or able to perform and I would guess that Michael J. Anderson, having not done any work since 2013, may be physically incapacitated and unable to act. That being said, I think like a lot of people I was drawn to the weird image of what the arm has become in subsequent years, that being a twitchy electrical tree with a fleshy bulb formation up top. Outside of being visually intriguing (Tim Burton wishes he could do shit like this), I’m thinking about other gestures within the show—the Mr. C version of a familiar character being an avatar of “want”—and wondering if, with other deliberate uses of technology, flashing lights, etc, if there’s this undercurrent (ba-dum-PISH) of thinking of electricity as both the medium with which we make use of technology and the internal sensory information traveling back and forth in the human body, particularly within the brain. It’s nothing revolutionary, as you could say “Well, The Matrix already did that,” but I’m interested about the specific handling of it as Lynch seems to be something of a technology skeptic and the New York City scenes in particular seemed rather intent on showing us an alienation effect. I doubt it was intended only as such, but the fellow on the couch, watching the cube, replacing various data cards, seemed to be a visual metonym for a society increasingly dissociated from one another and the meanings of one’s actions through technology use (and without being too hamfisted about it).
“Mr. C and Friends”
In order to step into this, I’d first like to step back and state something for the record that may not have been adequately considered to this point: What we know of BOB as a malevolent possessor entity is quite limited. It’s an easy mistake to make given that we see Frank Silva repeatedly, in and out of the Lodge, and we think that we have an understanding of what he is like through Leland. But we also sort of understand Leland’s non-possessed nature (goofy, sentimental) and can see how even through being possessed by BOB, there were still elements of that goofiness and sentimentality that were present even as we can look at the pure, Frank Silva BOB and see nothing of the sort. What I say this to illustrate, because I imagine it will be relevant later, is that the Mr. C incarnation we saw last night is very cold, unsentimental, and logical. There is still a playfulness that manifests as cruelty (the interaction with the mechanic at the self-storage unit, easily), but it appears that this particular version has adopted personality traits and abilities of the host body. I want to also say this as a means of getting us into an idea of how a Twin Peaks storyline can be made relevant and adapted to a contemporary setting. There’s an element of the Silva BOB that seems to take on some of the cocaine-fueled mania of the 80s and the restless scraggly other, there’s an element of the Leland BOB (with all the false starts with Ben Horne accounted for) that embodies the more business-like, American Psycho values of the era. Mr. C appears anachronistic by design, with his leather jacket and snakeskin shirt, but I wonder if he too is meant as a metacommentary on the existing value systems of society at large.
“Something Old, Something New”
Lynch was never going to give us exactly what we wanted out of the gate. Well, scratch that, he did give us a Lodge scene from the get-go. However, the first recognizable Twin Peaks resident we encounter is, of all people, Doc Jacoby and his 3D sunglasses. There aren’t a whole lot of repeat appearances of the townsfolk either beyond that. But despite his deliberate aggravation of our senses of anticipation, it seems as if the work at large is intentionally trying to integrate larger pieces. For example, we repeatedly alternate between scenes of familiar or recognizable characters or settings and ones born of the new season. There are also certain expectations of us as viewers to be familiar with Lynch’s value system, his concern with the awfulness that undergirds even the pastoral elements of American society. Putting that into context (and factoring in for a bit of background knowledge of the original Northwest Passage pitch), the fact that we end up in South Dakota, seeing what we do, should not be particularly surprising, and in that trip we encounter new characters embodying familiar concerns. I’ll admit, I really chafed at the sudden “NEW YORK CITY” jump (while simultaneously being fascinated by the camerawork and wondering what Lynch would do with his hands on the Batman franchise), but outside of the fact that Sam and Tracy talk to each other like they’re trapped in the idyllic 1950s and not America’s Most Jaded Metropolis, there were ways in which their interactions and behaviors familiarized an unfamiliar setting.
One thing I remember hearing from the Lynch camp (what little there was to hear) was that this season most effectively should be regarded as something like an eighteen-hour feature movie since that was more or less how they shot it. I’ve always been intrigued by the bygone era of films that were at or exceeded five hours and were the sorts of things you had to reserve the better part of a day for (also I attend the opera), so I’m willing to let Lynch be Lynch and do his thing and not rush to judgment over the efficacy of any individual episode until I have a better sense of the whole. However, I am by training someone who analyzes texts and it’s hard for me to wholly remove myself from that practice. Thus, I intend to do a little Levi-Strauss impersonation and bundle what little things I notice in the hopes that it eventually matters and would encourage others to do the same.
“Black and White Lodges”
One of the subtexts we had running towards the end of S2 and possibly beyond (it comes up a bit in FWWM) is the notion of a White Lodge, possibly inhabiting the same space as the Black Lodge. We end up spending a good amount of time early on in the Black one, but I’m curious if the intro scene, where we have B+W and Carel Struycken as The Giant talking to Coop, if that is not in meant to connote the White Lodge since we haven’t seen The Giant elsewhere so far. I would also point out that they’ve really pushed the visuals of the zigzag network of white and black lining, even before the rupture that occurs in ep 2, so that you really see the thing as overlapping, static-y, and checkerboarded, with positions alternating between dark and light. I regard this as effective for the overall aesthetic.
“Something in the Air”
There’s a lot of cast that I lament not being around or able to perform and I would guess that Michael J. Anderson, having not done any work since 2013, may be physically incapacitated and unable to act. That being said, I think like a lot of people I was drawn to the weird image of what the arm has become in subsequent years, that being a twitchy electrical tree with a fleshy bulb formation up top. Outside of being visually intriguing (Tim Burton wishes he could do shit like this), I’m thinking about other gestures within the show—the Mr. C version of a familiar character being an avatar of “want”—and wondering if, with other deliberate uses of technology, flashing lights, etc, if there’s this undercurrent (ba-dum-PISH) of thinking of electricity as both the medium with which we make use of technology and the internal sensory information traveling back and forth in the human body, particularly within the brain. It’s nothing revolutionary, as you could say “Well, The Matrix already did that,” but I’m interested about the specific handling of it as Lynch seems to be something of a technology skeptic and the New York City scenes in particular seemed rather intent on showing us an alienation effect. I doubt it was intended only as such, but the fellow on the couch, watching the cube, replacing various data cards, seemed to be a visual metonym for a society increasingly dissociated from one another and the meanings of one’s actions through technology use (and without being too hamfisted about it).
“Mr. C and Friends”
In order to step into this, I’d first like to step back and state something for the record that may not have been adequately considered to this point: What we know of BOB as a malevolent possessor entity is quite limited. It’s an easy mistake to make given that we see Frank Silva repeatedly, in and out of the Lodge, and we think that we have an understanding of what he is like through Leland. But we also sort of understand Leland’s non-possessed nature (goofy, sentimental) and can see how even through being possessed by BOB, there were still elements of that goofiness and sentimentality that were present even as we can look at the pure, Frank Silva BOB and see nothing of the sort. What I say this to illustrate, because I imagine it will be relevant later, is that the Mr. C incarnation we saw last night is very cold, unsentimental, and logical. There is still a playfulness that manifests as cruelty (the interaction with the mechanic at the self-storage unit, easily), but it appears that this particular version has adopted personality traits and abilities of the host body. I want to also say this as a means of getting us into an idea of how a Twin Peaks storyline can be made relevant and adapted to a contemporary setting. There’s an element of the Silva BOB that seems to take on some of the cocaine-fueled mania of the 80s and the restless scraggly other, there’s an element of the Leland BOB (with all the false starts with Ben Horne accounted for) that embodies the more business-like, American Psycho values of the era. Mr. C appears anachronistic by design, with his leather jacket and snakeskin shirt, but I wonder if he too is meant as a metacommentary on the existing value systems of society at large.
“Something Old, Something New”
Lynch was never going to give us exactly what we wanted out of the gate. Well, scratch that, he did give us a Lodge scene from the get-go. However, the first recognizable Twin Peaks resident we encounter is, of all people, Doc Jacoby and his 3D sunglasses. There aren’t a whole lot of repeat appearances of the townsfolk either beyond that. But despite his deliberate aggravation of our senses of anticipation, it seems as if the work at large is intentionally trying to integrate larger pieces. For example, we repeatedly alternate between scenes of familiar or recognizable characters or settings and ones born of the new season. There are also certain expectations of us as viewers to be familiar with Lynch’s value system, his concern with the awfulness that undergirds even the pastoral elements of American society. Putting that into context (and factoring in for a bit of background knowledge of the original Northwest Passage pitch), the fact that we end up in South Dakota, seeing what we do, should not be particularly surprising, and in that trip we encounter new characters embodying familiar concerns. I’ll admit, I really chafed at the sudden “NEW YORK CITY” jump (while simultaneously being fascinated by the camerawork and wondering what Lynch would do with his hands on the Batman franchise), but outside of the fact that Sam and Tracy talk to each other like they’re trapped in the idyllic 1950s and not America’s Most Jaded Metropolis, there were ways in which their interactions and behaviors familiarized an unfamiliar setting.