The highlight of the new Twin Peaks season so far is still Albert bringing along a photo of Mount Rushmore for Gordon because he KNEW HE WAS GOING TO SAY THAT
Also, Gordon’s A+ observational skills
The Narrowing Divide
Paper collage by Annalynn Hammond
wait what the heck, real-time update from my evening:
Drawing by David Lynch in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 10
MZS gets me.
I think Lynch is right that cable/streaming is currently the new art house. It wasn’t true a couple of years ago, when everyone began heralding a renewed Golden Age of TV. That stuff - Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones - certainly seems like excellent TV, but I have no more interest in it than I have in Updike novels; in a real way, I’m not a TV watcher. ^_^;
Now, though, what seems to have happened is that some writer-director types are pulling together a form of funding that allows them to do what they do for 6-12 hours with a built-in distribution deal, instead of 2 ½ hours with no built-in distribution. The former is called “TV” by default, instead of “independent film,” but in purpose they’re the latter, just longer. The Young Pope is the new Paolo Sorrentino, The Get Down is the new Baz Luhrmann, and so on. (Per personal experience, I suspect Netflix did not make enough people understand that The Get Down was the new Baz Luhrmann.)
So there’s a bit of sleight of hand with Twin Peaks: The Return, which several critics predicted in advance, though I didn’t consider it until I literally sat down to watch the first ep on Showtime in my friend Ced’s NYC apartment: the original series was a 24-episode TV show where Lynch and Frost were the creator-showrunners. The new series is an 18-hour David Lynch movie with Frost as co-writer.** If Lynch had popped in 2k17 like “I made this 18-hour long movie and it’s going to play a limited engagement of special screenings in movie theatres,” who would have turned up for that after Inland Empire? It’s not a rhetorical question - to some extent, the person who would have turned up is the person the thing was made for, because the thing is the thing.
(I will note that I absolutely turned up for the Director’s Cut of Nymphomaniac, Vols. I-II in theaters, after which I thought: rather than being aggressively hipster, isn’t this just like… binging a limited TV series? In any case, Von Trier is currently remaking Hannibal, good times, can’t wait for that not to be terrible about to release a film that he started developing as a TV series, but then figured it wasn’t 5 ½ hours long.)
** Frost is why the new show’s plot is, in fact, perfectly intelligible, even over-determined, with loads of interlocked moving pieces. It would come off clockwork-orrery in any other director’s hands (i.e. first season of Fargo), but Lynch is imposing his rhythm and tempo on the thing. Frost’s weird is Lore weird, “you Americans are always liminal this, cryptid that” weird: he’s the “what if Jack Parsons used nuclear tests to open a portal to spiritual dimensions known to Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest” guy. Lynch is the “what if a soot-covered hobo crushed skulls while reciting a creepy poem and a frog-bug crawled into your mouth” guy. The beauty is that these two dudes’ approaches complement instead of them talking straight past each other.
In the heat of the investigative pursuit the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.
“Don’t search for all the answers at once. A path is formed by laying one stone at a time.”