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TWIN PEAKS 2017


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Anyone here watch this series? What did you think of it? I watched it all on dvd and now I need counselling! :o I'll be in therapy for years :lol:. 10hrs in and I still had absolutely NO idea what was going on. It couldn't be more different from the original series. It's relentlessly grim, no one behaves normally, the blood gore and violence are ridiculous ....... that's 18hrs of my life I won't get back! I feel as if I've been through an initiation ceremony to join some very, very dark gang.

The only good thing about it is the live music at the end of a lot of the episodes; example below. David Lynch's son is in the band Trouble.

I suppose there were some nice arty bits, too ..... very quirky and eccentric ..... but mostly making no sense.

I'd be interested to hear what others think about it.

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Goddess of the Mist said:

No, only saw the original and loved it. So would you not recommend the new?

If you enjoyed the original series then no, I wouldn't recommend it unless you approached it as a completely different programme with no connection to the first one. Be warned that it's very violent, episode after episode after episode ..... not just little bits here and there.

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Plus, the ending is pathetic and lame! :hmm:

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    I’m writing this after commuting to work along a Lynch-trademarked night-time highway…

   My immediate thoughts are: David Bowie is dead. Mark E Smith is dead. David Lynch is still alive: if you like him, do whatever you can to celebrate him, using whatever superlatives you like. If you haven’t yet bought his back-catalogue on swanky blu-ray, get it now. Get his soundtracks, and his book, ‘Room to dream’. Declare a hashtag-David-Lynch-day. These people are giants, and they’re vital; once they’re dead, it’s all just lip service.

   And when I say ‘vital’, I’m not kidding around. Twin Peaks was always a big deal, but it was hard to say exactly _why_ it was a big deal.  When it was first on TV in the 90’s, I watched it religiously, but more than that -- in secondary school, we had a 6th form communal lounge just for lazing around. There was a big mahogany-style table filled with magazines. I remember picking up a copy of Smash Hits --which had a free Twin Peaks ‘Doughnuts’  badge taped to the cover, also containing a reasonably-sized article.  Smash Hits!  I remember writing  an English assignment about  the friendship between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, and my English teacher Mr Butterworth letting me get away with it because he watched the show, too –which struck me as weird, because…

    What _were_ those first two seasons of Twin Peaks?  At best, you could describe them as a sophisticated homage to the ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’-style melodramas of the 80’s, but, then …why the ultra-arcane demonic-possession aspect?  Why on Earth would you expect the people who tuned in for the All-American teenage love-triangles, the JR-style corporate stuff in the Sawmills, the comic relief of Andy and Lucy to _also_ be interested in quite such a non-human subplot? This wasn’t like the Exorcist.  Bob (the demon of Twin Peaks), had no interest in scaring people or discrediting Christianity. He was simply_there,_ lurking just outside human perception in the deepest, darkest pine woods. The closest cultural reference at the time was probably Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics, or maybe the odd Dennis Potter play, but neither of those were mainstream. Twin Peaks was an entirely new kind of genre, which asked nothing from the viewer except a very regular love of soap opera mixed with a very _irregular_ love of the darkly surreal.

   And from a personal point of view, I can say whole-heartedly that Twin Peaks means something unutterably profound. I remember thinking, as a prepubescent (though not in as many words), ‘I wonder if the ultimate meaning of reality is something  _simple_ or something _complicated_?”

     Not, you understand, ‘I wonder whether God exists’, or, ‘I wonder if there’s an afterlife’, more ‘The truth of consciousness: is it simple or complicated?’. On some days, I would think, ‘Well, it’s a binary choice between existence or non-existence, therefore it’s simple’. But that mode of reasoning never quite rang true.  I’d go through periods of believing that everything that happened in life was a metaphor for something happening on a more elemental plane of reality. A pretty cool way of looking at it, but again, not quite satisfying on an emotional level.

   And then Twin Peaks came along. _Of course_ the ultimate meaning of reality is something complicated. It’s multifaceted. How could it not be? Our neuroses need to be either absorbed or deflected through the complexity and fascination of dreams, just so we can survive. You could almost call it art, if that wasn’t for the sense of consciousness-annihilating pain.

   And just as Twin Peaks came through for me as a kid, it’s come through for me again now. I’ve re-watched the whole three series (concluding last night, with the latest ‘Event’ season, which I’d never seen before). I say ‘profound’ in the truest sense of the word -- it’s a coincidence-magnet. Maybe even the next step up from coincidence (whatever that is). Get this: I finished watching season 2 on DVD. I was aware that Twin Peaks: The Event existed, but was prejudiced against ever watching it, fearing a cynical cash-in in the style of The Force Awakens, Prison Break Season 5, etc. Then again, I was fascinated about the controversy of Sight and Sound classifying it as a film instead of a TV series (I guess because, as a film review magazine, they just wanted to a piece of the action).  I bit the bullet and ordered it from Zavvi.

    While awaiting the boxset’s arrival, the following happened. I awoke in the dead of night with my heart racing. Outside my bedroom window is the uppermost branches of a large, dense tree. I look out and see what can only be described as a glowing whirlpool distorting reality itself through the leaves. The shape and colour of the trees can just about be discerned even as the whirlpool spins away to a vanishing point. At no point does reality 'right itself' by spinning in the opposite direction; it just becomes less distinct. Throughout the thirty or forty seconds this is happening, I analyse the beating of my heart, my angle in the bed. I convince myself I’m not dreaming. Afterwards, I stay in the same upright position simply saying, ‘What the?’

    The Twin Peaks boxset arrives. ‘With quite some interest’ I see the same energy-vortex-in-tree-branches is seen by several of the characters undergoing their own transcendental  experiences. Weird. huh?

    My thoughts, ‘I want to boast about this to everyone’ versus ‘I can never tell anyone about this because I’ll sound like a spaced-out bellend’ (at the close of play, I’ve only told this to one other special person, plus you, now, the good people of Unexplained Mysteries.com).

    There’s that famous quotation that says, ‘Everything was said and done by the year 1870’. I don’t think that’s quite true, but I can see why people would think it. In TV, there’s only recently been two genuinely innovative,  zeitgeisty ideas. The first is ‘The Leftovers’, the End of the World drama starring Justin Theroux (himself a David Lynch discovery). The second is this latest series of Twin Peaks.  Much has been written about ‘True Detective’ being the best, most unusual ‘gnostic’ drama of recent years –but Twin Peaks beats it on tone. True Detective was brilliant but bleak. Twin Peaks is happy, sad, but most of all just …satisfying, like a well-remembered dream.

   I, for one, wonder how quantum super-positioning and ‘spooky action at a distance’ might apply, macrocosmically, to our ‘holographic universe’ (as people like Michael Talbot and Dean Radin have taken to calling it).  I wonder about making ‘tulpas’, psychic lifeforms made flesh, observable by other people. Could you, for instance, conjure an entity from thin air, fool the collective unconscious into believing it’s a real person, insert into it a personality –say, a snarky femme fatale—and then simply sit back and let it run like an algorithm?  If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that the bulk-transmission of huge quantities of information is actually one of the _easier_ feats we can accomplish. The mass hypnosis and fusing of high energy into human form –that’s probably more difficult.  Twin Peaks suggests, yeah, it probably _is_ difficult, but it’s still possible, and what’s more, happening abundantly.

   Agent Cooper (and later on, spoiler-alert, some other characters) are ‘sidequelled’ or ‘quantum-leaped’ into very elaborate alternate lives. I’ll grant you, this sometimes happens in other sci-fi shows:  I remember an episode of Deep Space Nine where the characters  inexplicably found themselves as nineteen-thirties pulp writers.  I think  it also happened in Dr Who, with Tennant unexpectedly finding himself as a public school teacher (ugh, bourgeois, much?) with no memory of being a Timelord.  What makes the Twin Peaks approach different is the sheer randomness of having a manhunting FBI agent transposed into the already convoluted, intrigue-ridden life of a Las Vegas insurance salesman. Seemingly, there was a dozen things in the life of ‘Dougie Jones’ that could have pulled Cooper even _further_ from his original incarnation. Lynch took a sci-fi trope and made it fun-but-deep, free from all rules …expect for the complex logic of dreams.

   This latest series of Twin Peaks is an entirely different beast to the original series. Gone are the soap-operatic sub-plots (though all the characters return,  bar Donna and the original Sheriff Truman), replaced by …well, I want to call them red-herrings, but that doesn’t do them justice. Scenes of high-drama which just …hang in the air… and to which you never get a full resolution. The pulp-criminal Bonnie-and-Clyde on the verge of committing suicide in the backwoods. Harry Dean Stanton’s character observing the death of a small boy in a car accident. Plus, my favourite, which is actually a red-herring _within_ a red-herring (genius!).  During an already dramatic scene, Bobby is disturbed when the diner windows  are shot-out.  It transpires that, far from being the work of the town’s resident gangsters, a small boy has accidentally discharged a gun from the backseat of his parents car. But on top of_ that_ drama –one of the backed-up cars contains a screaming housewife transporting a zombified child who suddenly awakens. The scene cuts.

   No explanation is ever given.

   Much has been written about the unsatisfactory ending of JJ Abram’s LOST, versus the universally acclaimed last episode of Patrick Magoohan’s The Prisoner. It’s my theory that, providing a show is sufficiently well-written and atmospheric, the audience actually doesn’t care about loose-ends being tied-up and explained.  Go as surreal and abstract as you like.  But at the same time, a show like Twin Peaks could only _ever_ be made by David Lynch. Would the producers ever  trust such a leisurely, surreal story to anyone else? If Samuel Beckett was alive today, and he submitted, say, ‘The Unnamable’ to any publisher anywhere, would they accept it, or would they laugh him out of Dodge? I think we all know the answer to that. Twin Peaks means something, right now, at just this moment in history. It’ll never be recreated.

   It’s also true that Twin Peaks 2017 could only have been made by Lynch because of his huge pool of actor-friends; it’s all-star, in a way that’s more than just Hollywood-glitzy. Laura Dern. Naomi Watts. Harry Dean Stanton. Also, famous-but-unappreciated actors appear in their troves: Tom Sizemore, Robert Knepper, James Morrison (from my beloved ‘Space: Above and Beyond’). Plus, of course, the main man himself, Kyle MacLachlan –the question is, could anyone conjure Agent Cooper’s (almost supernatural) sense of caring and warmth better than him? I don’t think so.

    Really, the only bummer is this:  having completed Twin Peaks and already knowing Lynch’s films off by heart, what do I watch now? I don’t want to go back to regular boxsets, with their regular narratives that always hang around explicable, conceptual reality. One possibility is this: I was so impressed by Jim Belushi’s performance (as one of the Las Vegas crime lords shadowing Dougie), I might start watching Oliver Stone’s ‘Wild Palms’ –which was shown on TV at the same time as the original Twin Peaks and was accused of being a blatant rip-off. I don’t remember anything about it, except Jim Belushi looking grumpy and Kim Cattral’s dress (hell,  I was hormonal teenager).

   Do I wish there’ll be another season of Twin Peaks?  Yes, sir.

   In conclusion,

 

DAMN.jpg

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@Carlos Allende: Thank you for your magnificent post! :tsu: I'm not sure where to start with my reply, obviously you're a big fan of David Lynch whereas I don't know anything about him(I may or may not have seen other examples of his work .... I just don't know). I've just googled a list of his work and the only thing I've seen is the music video for Chris Isaak's 'Wicked Game'! :lol:

I've been watching the original 'Twin Peaks' again to try and make sense of this latest series, and you're absolutely right, it is a big deal .... it's a huge deal ..... but I'm not sure why it is. The best I can come up with is this: he manages to keep every member of the Twin Peaks community(and their story), believable and equal ...... all the stories mesh together. But the magic ingredient is the atmosphere of 'other worldliness' that runs through every episode .... I love that! Plus, of course, the surreal moments, the quirky moments and the downright odd moments that lifted it a million miles above 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas'.

You mention that 'Sight & Sound' classified 'The Limited Event' as a film and I can understand that because it doesn't split comfortably into episodes. For me it is a collage of images and events that only have a very tenuous connection to the original series. It's more 'Fantasy on the Twin Peak Theme' than a continuation of the original series, and I'll admit to feeling a little tricked because of that. Plus the excessive violence ..... what the heck was that all about?!! I'd love to hear Lynch's explanation for it. My impression is that he wasn't trying to shock, but simply revelling in violence, which made for uncomfortable viewing. I'd like to hear your views on this.

With regard to your energy-vortex-in-tree-branches experience(very unsettling, I'm sure!), have you had premonitions in the past?

I agree that a film/tv series doesn't necessarily have to have all the loose ends sorted out by the time the credits roll, but ....... the ending felt lazy to me; everything just fell in a heap ... fell flat. I was very disappointed with it.

I think I interpreted the Dougie/Agent Cooper/long-haired Dougie situation differently to you. I understood Agent Cooper to have been sort of side-lined .... in Limbo, so to speak .... while his 'soul'(not sure if that's the word I want), is wrestled over by Dougie and the evil long-haired Dougie. I felt that as long as the long-haired one had the upper hand, Dougie the insurance salesman was weak(couldn't even speak). Each was fighting to possess his soul completely so that the other would die. At one point I thought that Agent Cooper had accidently stumbled into long-haired Dougie's life whilst evil Dougie was away from home, because his wife said something about him having his hair cut in a different style.

The Log Lady actress died during the making of 'Limited Event' :cry: She was one of my favourite characters.

p.s. I noticed in the Dr Who thread that you said: "James Corden, surely the biggest bellend in England?" :lol: I was beginning to think I was the only person who thought that!       

 

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Okay, I confess to a biggish crush on this guy, actor Eamon Farren. :wub:

image.png.f4b98d6038010198adb61e0211d4a4ac.png

 

:blush:

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9 minutes ago, ouija ouija said:

have you had premonitions in the past?

...I've been toying with the idea of uploading my coincidences and premonitions onto Unexplained Mysteries.com (I take it you guys have a 'Coincidences' page somewhere on the website?) I have a chronological list, currently on my work PC situated twenty miles away, but I'm seriously thinking about doing it, even if it blows everyone's minds and I have to clear up the mess afterwards. 

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I'm not sure about a 'Coincidences' page but there's a section about 'Experiences'. Maybe a blog would be the best place? Be prepared for the sceptics to challenge you! :hmm: My advice would be to list your experiences and then just leave it at that. There's no point in trying to defend yourself when there's no way of proving what you say. You know what happened and that's all that matters. :)

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10 hours ago, ouija ouija said:

You know what happened and that's all that matters. :)

Good advice, but these are the ultimate coincidences.  _Everyone_ will go nuts for them. Pretty sure even ultraskeptics like danydandan and XenoFish will grapple their hats like Oliver hardy when he's astonished.

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