Twin Peaks - Series 3

[GirlyGirlMask]

Quote Originally Posted by Robin Davies

Quote Originally Posted by GirlyGirlMask Quote Originally Posted by Robert Adam Gilmour Twitter Really interesting stuff there. Kind of disappointed in the Sarah Palmer tidbit, but can't say many of us didn't kind of expect that was the case. What Sarah Palmer tidbit? He doesn't actually confirm that she's the girl in episode 8, though it's a popular theory.

Sorry about that, I saw your post and didn't read it because I thought it was the same tweet I saw. In that, it is basically confirmed that the girl from Ep. 8's name was Sarah Novak Palmer. I just liked the story more when it was about a man doing terrible things to his family. That was much more terrifying to me than folks being possessed by spirits and I think Laura's death feels a lot less tragic now that her mother was carrying some evil parasite around her entire life. But I may be misinterpreting or misunderstanding things.

Having said all that, Twin Peaks is my favorite thing ever. And Twin Peaks: The Return was really f'ing great too!

[Evans]

Quote Originally Posted by GirlyGirlMask

[I just liked the story more when it was about a man doing terrible things to his family. That was much more terrifying to me than folks being possessed by spirits and I think Laura's death feels a lot less tragic now that her mother was carrying some evil parasite around her entire life. But I may be misinterpreting or misunderstanding things.

Surely the horror in the case of possession is that of being internally compelled to hurt those one cares about? That's why Laura's ending in Fire Walk With Me is to an extent bittersweet - she refused to let BOB take control and use her as a means of sowing suffering as he had Leland, even though it was ultimately at the cost of her life. Personally, I find the notion of hurting others and not being able to stop more disturbing than merely being hurt.

Was there any confirmation Sarah was actually possessed? I took it that those scenes were her latent psychic powers manifesting in a Carrie type way after decades of bitterness and tragedy.

[GirlyGirlMask]

Quote Originally Posted by Evans

Quote Originally Posted by GirlyGirlMask [I just liked the story more when it was about a man doing terrible things to his family. That was much more terrifying to me than folks being possessed by spirits and I think Laura's death feels a lot less tragic now that her mother was carrying some evil parasite around her entire life. But I may be misinterpreting or misunderstanding things. Surely the horror in the case of possession is that of being internally compelled to hurt those one cares about? That's why Laura's ending in Fire Walk With Me is to an extent bittersweet - she refused to let BOB take control and use her as a means of sowing suffering as he had Leland even though it was ultimately at the cost of her life. Personally, I find the notion of hurting others and not being able to stop more disturbing than merely being hurt. Was there any confirmation Sarah was actually possessed? I took it that those scenes were her latent psychic powers manifesting in a Carrie type way after decades of bitterness and tragedy.

Subjectivity - one of the beauties of the weird/horror tale. I'm having a hard time articulating my thoughts here, I can't quite pin it down. But on my first viewing years ago, I was a bit disappointed when I began to see BOB as a parasite looking for a host, as I'd initially seen him as a psychic projection of Leland's evil nature. I don't find possession that frightening, as I don't believe it can happen. But I can see a mentally deranged person imagining an external tormentor driving their compulsions. That scares the #### out of me. I guess, from a certain point of view, they aren't really that different. It's just that one is a kind of invading spirit, while the other was conjured up from the inside, an outward explosion of his own painful experience.

As far as Sarah Palmer, you may be right. I'd initially felt the same way-- she was losing control of those psychic powers that had been hinted at since the original pilot. It was the episode where she takes off her face and reveals the rotted finger, the Experiment's blade, and that disembodied smile floating within her head that I started to believe she was possessed. And the confirmation that the 50s girl who was invaded by the frogmoth was a young Sarah Palmer at least presents her as a host to some evil entity. Unless...Ep. 8 is also some kind of dream or metaphorical representation of what happened in the Palmer household.

I feel like I'm getting a little out of my depth here, as I try not to over analyze Lynch's work. I used to do that, but it would lose its power once I felt I'd "figured it out". And I really don't want to do that with TPTR, as it stills holds the power of mystery for me.

[GirlyGirlMask]

Well, the blu ray didn't disappoint. The behind the scenes extras are really sensational and the transfer is beautiful. It's almost like seeing the show for the first time, such better picture quality than the Showtime stream. Well worth the investment if you're a Lynch and/or Twin Peaks fan.

[Robin Davies]

I've only just found out that there's a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about Catherine Coulson.

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If it's as good as I Don't Know Jack it should be worth seeing.

[miguel1984]

Alan Moore on the third season of Twin Peaks:

"Yes, I was a huge admirer of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. I greatly enjoyed season two's closing episode, and subsequently arrived at an interpretation of Fire Walk With Me that, to me, was satisfying and answered all of my really important questions about the series. At the end of last year I watched the box-set of season three, and without wishing to denigrate all of the perfectly legitimate reasons why people loved that presumably final season, I'd have to say that with the exception of a few arresting images and atmospheres, I kind of wish I hadn't bothered. Elements that I either hadn't noticed or which hadn't especially bothered me the first time, like the fact that the titular town is presumably twinned with Midsomer in that both have tons of bizarre murders and absolutely no black people, seemed a lot more intrusive in season three."

"Another thing that stood out was David Lynch's customary Bizarro-Republican stance, whereby the intrusive supernatural evil in his stories always seems to be firmly rooted in the underclass. Structurally, it also seemed that there was rather a lot of irrelevant padding, notably the slapstick Dougie Jones digression, which didn't seem to have anything atmospherically or thematically to connect it to the main narrative in any meaningful way."

"Overall it seemed to me, as a large amount of Lynch's later work does, to be relying on disconnected set-pieces and ultimately not saying very much. This may, of course, be a fault with me rather than with David Lynch, but while some of the most arresting and affecting moments in Lynch's work have seemed to be plucked straight from the director's subconscious mind and dreamlife, the ones that have best worked for me are those moments that, while dreamlike, work within the context of the overall narrative: for me, the dead man who is still standing upright in Blue Velvet or the whole of Henry's collapsing and hallucinating mental landscape in Eraserhead work perfectly within their contexts, while a golden Laura-Palmer-infused egg sent from another dimension to what is apparently a nuclear test-site, which then hatches into a sort of insect-frog hybrid that subsequently crawls into the mouth of a sleeping young girl who, unless I missed something, is never seen or referred to again, really doesn't, at least for me. If everything is weird, then, relatively speaking, nothing is weird. All of this is, of course, entirely subjective, and it may well be that the season three of Twin Peaks that I watched was significantly worse than the one everybody else was witness to."

This was taken from an interview about The Prisoner:

Alan Moore Remembers Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner�: Part 1

Alan Moore Remembers Patrick McGoohan Part 2

I like Moore and love The Prisoner, but I don't see how anybody could prefer S2 to S3. S3 had a few faults (the new Sheriff Truman didn't work for me), but it's otherwise consistently brilliant and inventive. S2 opens and ends well, but it has a long run where it's generic, artless and downright boring. S3 did so much to bring the pulsing, brooding mystery back to Twin Peaks after it became a typical over-explained genre show – the kind of thing all those 'TWIN PEAKS S3 EXPLAINED!!!!' videos are trying to chip The Return into while it defies their linear minds.

[Frater_Tsalal]

I finally got around to watching the first two seasons of TWIN PEAKS recently, after putting it off for, well, years (though I did watch the Pilot episode back in the late 90's, and also saw FIRE WALK WITH ME a few times). I watched season 1 last summer/early autumn, took a long break, then watched season 2 this summer, finishing it off last week. Overall I found it very enjoyable. Season 1, of course, was great, and I thought season 2 was fairly strong for at least the first 10 episodes or so... after that it kind of bogged down a bit, though it picked up the last few shows and ended on a strong note. This probably puts me in a minority, but I actually found the whole White Lodge/Black Lodge Theosophical angle more interesting than the "Who killed Laura Palmer?" story (though of course, they're both related). It's just sad that the Black Lodge story line is surrounded by some pretty bland filler. But one thing that endeared me to the show was the very large cast (which is also something I enjoy about GAME OF THRONES, incidentally).

After that I rewatched TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (though it was the first time I've ever seen the Criterion version). I think the last time I saw it was... 2005? 2006? I recall it was around the time I was writing CONFUSION, and in fact I sprinkled a number of FWWM allusions into that book... why I have no idea, as plot-wise the two have nothing in common at all! The first few times I saw the film it felt extremely mysterious and confusing to me, mainly for the obvious reason that the film is a prequel to a TV show that I had never seen (aside from the pilot). Now that I have watched the show it feels a little less cryptic to me (well, it's still pretty confusing), though I feel it still holds up very well: it's certainly a very effective horror movie (Sheryl Lee has quite a scream, and I like how Lynch can make something even as banal as a ceiling fan or telephone lines seem menacing), and the sound design is extraordinary... though the absence of a number of key characters of the TV show I found a little strange with this new viewing. It was also jarring to see how some of the characters looked older here than they did in the TV show, despite these events predating the show (a common trap many prequels fall into): most noticeably in the case of Kyle MacLachlan, who looks as if he aged five years in the short span of time between the end of the second season and the filming of this movie.

I hope to get to season 3 soon, though first I'm watching a few Dennis Potter BBC shows I've been putting off for awhile now (PENNIES FROM HEAVEN & THE SINGING DETECTIVE, mainly). The good thing about season 3 is that I know very little about it going in, whereas with the first 2 seasons of TWIN PEAKS I already knew many of the major plot points. As regards the Moore commentary, he can suck the fun out of anything with his tedious class obsessions but his comment "If everything is weird, then, relatively speaking, nothing is weird" is something I maybe kind of agree with...

I like Moore's political/class conscious readings of things and wish more famous artists would be that willing to take a stand about such things. I believe David Lynch's work undeniably often portrays the working class and homeless as somewhat ghoulish, but there is a Marxist reading to be made as these economic problems are the horrifying secret the bourgeois main characters' lives are built upon, but they repress them at their peril until they become nightmarish intrusions. These are horror stories of late capitalism, whether it's the homeless woman behind Winkie's or the 'Gotta light?' woodsmen.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Sorry old boy, but the alchemical marriage of the two words "Marxist reading" are all but guaranteed to put me out like a light, ha ha. Of course when it comes to art everyone has their own manias and obsessions, but I'm less interested in "readings" and more interested in the story being told. Which I suppose makes me bourgeois.

I fear that S3 of TWIN PEAKS might not have as much of an emotional impact for me as it did people I know who had been watching the show since day one. I fear some aspects of it might depress me as well, such as certain actors not being around anymore due to the inconvenience of death.