Amph "I'll see you again in 25 years" - The Twin Peaks thread

what year is this ?

 

Yet another argument against revivals...Season 3 started out with good intentions, but the finale...thankfully there's always head canon. I'll keep the ending of FWWM as mine (and I was one of the few people who loved that movie from the beginning).

 

I love his work , but the thing is - with stuff like Lost Highway and Mullholland Drive , altho they're very similar in having bizarre plots and tangents , they're only a couple of hours long and with a small number of characters so you can at least think about it and talk about it within understandable parameters .

but when it's 18 hours and more than 20 characters who come and go and never come back , it's just too much .

"I'm getting too old for this **** ! " as Roger might say

 

I'm happy. After seeing Game of Thrones turn into something more predictable than Lost's final season I'm gleeful to see fan service thrown into a coffee blender.

 

Game of Thrones was always predictable, and not just because it's derived from a series of books. It's fantasy. That's not a sin unto itself.(I'm not a fan of the show for various reasons, but its predictability isn't a problem IMO. Genre writing always suffers from varying degrees of "yes, you've seen this before", but that's just the nature of the beast).

Lost suffered from apathy on the part of the writers. Now *that's* a frigging crime against creativity.

 

I need a "shocked Cooper face" filter for Adobe Premiere.

 

Ah.... brilliant. Exactly what I was hoping for. Looking forward to the "Final Dossier" book!

 

"What the **** you doin'?" from the redneck sums up this amazing season. Not least of all referring to Coop's empty cup of coffee he was sipping from in the Odessa diner.

 

So "What year is it?" is the new "How's Annie?" then?

 

As well as absolutely adoring the title sequence and theme music (you do, right!?), one should also consider this.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-twin-peaks-music-from-the-limited-event-series/

 

The genre versus literary debate is irrelevant to the issue of conclusion; read enough literary fiction short story submissions and you'll know the bifurcation of fiction is an artificial urinating contest. GoT is suffering mainly from Martin not finishing his novels and self-bloat, regardless of what the partisans say in the Song of Ice and Fire thread. Lost suffered from, a quite obvious in hindsight, lack of knowing how to or when the show would end. The original Twin Peaks went through this malaise post-Leland reveal, or I sincerely hope BOB threw Windom Earle's soul into the deep dimension of the Black Lodge where self-parodies suffer forever.

My mind has been throwing the finale over the past few days while I'm reading the reactions online. There is a two prong approach to if the finale gave closure or lack thereof.

Spoiler

I am glad I am not the only person who went "Wow, this is The Dark Tower's ending." Big Ed and Norma are finally marrying, Bobby has grown into respectability, and BOB is smashed into the grown thanks to the Infinity Glove. Many of the supporting are given a degree of closure similar to Susannah and the others jumping off the route to the Dark Tower. Cooper, however, still wants to save Laura, which sends him off into limbo Mirror-Twin Peaks. I read a good article contrasting the Log Lady's acceptance of death versus Cooper's attempt to change the situation. Accept the situation for what it is, or face the consequences of playing God.

Alternatively, this is post-Fire Walks With Me Lynch. Anyone expecting clear cut is fooling themselves. I'm not surprised at the off-ramp onto Mulholland Drive.

 

I think Episode 18 is exactly why the show has poor ratings. To us, this is it. End of the WHOLE show/series! How can it end this way?

Sure, probably half of the Diehards love the fact that the show doesn't answer all the questions, and the show is over. They say that's Lynch's style so they are cool with it.

However, I doubt that's the case with the majority of people who watch movies/TV series.When a movie or TV show doesn't answer show's BIG questions, that's going to earn the show bad ratings, and words of mouth!

It's a method that doesn't usually work well with the mainstream! Recent movies that doesn't answer everything such as Joel Edgerton's "It Comes At Night" is not something the mainstream liked much. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/it_comes_at_night

The show is at it's best, when you get some kind of answers and questions are brought up in discussions by the characters, and very strange. Episode 17 did A LOT of that, but 18 didn't.

If there is a season 4 to deal with the answers, then sure, that would actually not be a bad decision to end it this way. This is a GREAT cliffhanger, but that's all it is in modern standards!

 

Speak a little louder, Jedi Dragon D. The hearing has long gone out.

David Lynch.

Why do you think Lynch projects have low budgets?

Stuff like Twin Peaks turns a lot of people off. I mean a lot. Always has, always will.

I also believe the correct idiom is word of mouth.

I was unaware that the CBS Corporation expected the Twin Peaks audience to overlap with the NCIS demographic, Miguel Ferrer's appearances aside.

Grammatical digressions aside, your first sentence is a non-sequitur. My assumption, based upon the reading of the overarching thesis of your post, is that Twin Peaks: The Return is defective based upon the lack of concrete resolutions. However, the final clause suggests the show is concurrently at top form when the show is very strange. Revealing the rationale behind the magic trick pulls the trick of the strange to the mundane. These are opposing contentions. Color me baffled.

Twin Peaks created the modern standard, and Twin Peaks is here to kill it.

 

Find time for this (the whole podcast I mean).

http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/05/kyle-maclachlan-twin-peaks-final-scene/

 

Did they really, though? I know I'm reaching, but given the way everyone behaved regarding Evil Coop, isn't it possible that 'Diane' turned up 25 years earlier as a sort of offshoot of Cooper's tulpa emerging from the Black Lodge, and when Gordon and Albert were made aware of her existence, they simply kept her/it under observation - then made contact with her as if she was a real person? Humoured this being (who mightn't have been aware that she was a double of someone who never existed) in order to get some answers?

And yes, I know that Gordon says something to Diane about how they used to share a smoke now and then, but that fits in with my theory of them humouring her.

As for the 'real Diane' finally turning up in the finale - the whole damned finale is wobbly when it comes down to what's real and what isn't. Pretty much everything that the supposedly real Diane does after she finally reveals herself seems more like a fantasy of Cooper's than anything going on in the real world. Their sudden reunion as long-lost lovers? That motel sex scene straight out of Wild at Heart?

This whole series needs a thorough rewatch, but I thought it was terrific from start to finish, right down to that ending that's infuriating everyone. It's made me re-think the ending to The Sopranos - the show's done and dusted, but it'll hang around in the back of your mind for a lot longer than something that just winds up neatly.

That said, I wasn't too impressed with the evilest-of-the-evil psychopathic otherworldly beings BOB meeting his end at the literal hand of some British backpacker who happened to have something like the Hulk's hand grafted onto his arm for no reason a few years earlier. Just silly.
If Lynch really wanted to include James Hurley in BOB's demise, he could have just had him pull out his guitar and sing, not drag along some comic-book character. Satan himself would retreat when confronted by James' hideous falsetto.

 

Y'know, I thought it was a satisfying and happy ending! Why? Bob got punched down to hell and Laura Palmer is alive again!

One thing the show did really well, hell back to the opening scenes of the very first episode, is that Laura Palmer's death was wrong. It ripped a hole in the universe. It was the work of a demon from another dimension and it made people randomly cry and it flat-out shouldn't have happened. So Cooper travels back in time and changes it (how / why he traveled back in time, eh, dude hung out in the Black Lodge for 25 years, freaky things are going to happen). And Bob is vanquished in a very squishy way. Like I said, down right to Hell. Flames were shooting out of the floor! Various everything is up to interpretation on this show so might as well go with that.

While "I am the FBI!" may go down as the most satisfying and dramatic moment of the season, and I do feel that way, I also got a literal jaw-dropper as Coop appears in Fire Walk With Me for Laura's final moments, it provides some context to her random scream, and I loved that moment when Cooper met Laura who she saw from her dream. Having her reach out to him and take his hand was just super heartfelt and when we see her dead body disappear from that beach as she's saved it's downright cathartic. (No idea how they got freakin' 1991 Sheryl Lee to share a scene with 2017 Kyle MacLauchlan but it was kind of amazing). Coop finally solved the murder of Laura Palmer by making it not happen in the first place.

As for unresolved stuff, to be honest, I don't see much unresolved. Well, okay, I guess Poor Annie is still in her coma forever. Eyeless lady I kind of assumed with Josie, which is as good an answer as any. Audrey is in some weird fluid reality but the gal got blown up at a bank and was in a coma and gave birth to Bob/Coop's kid. She has had some bad things happen to her. I still don't know who Maddie is but I'm still going with dopelganger / manufactured for Laura the way that Dougie was manufactured for Cooper. But I think more is wrapped up than not, I mean, Big Ed finally got with the love of his life after decades, that's kinda huge.

The only stylistic thing that irked me in the final episodes was I felt the superimposed shot of Cooper's face got in the way of the righteous Bob punching. And there were a wee bit too many shots of highway driving but, like I said, I was just flabbergasted that Laura was alive again that it's kind of awesome to see her just ... being alive and sitting in a car.

But, y'know, the moral of the final episode seems to be don't muck about with time travel because the reality Coop ended up in was all screwy. And Laura is Carrie Page. (Maybe, mostly, the final "Laura!" voice and her scream seems to confirm it's really her). But Carrie Page still had a bit of a criminal lifestyle it seems the one Laura was heading towards. So with the "Yay, Laura is alive" ending, but if Coop changed time, that probably means Bob is still out there (no dead Laura, no Coop in Twin Peaks and no Bob/Coop). And things are wrong. And Coop in the new timeline still has some brutal Bob/Coop tendencies (as he was disarming the goons). And it ends with Coop realizing things have gone very wrong with "What year is this?" and Carrie reality crashes into Laura's reality (Maybe it's Carrie getting a full bore dose of Laura Palmer's life and death all at once.) and she screams her freakin' terrified, possessed head off. And the lights go out and it ends.

At least that's my interpretation. You get to connect a few dots on your own watching this show. But it was really cool and freaky final scene. But it's actually more closure, to me, than the "How's Annie?" cliffhanger. Like I said, yay Laura is alive. But the world you get with her being alive is unknown and frightening.

 

Fantastic article on Lynch and Twin Peaks The Return. .

https://thebaffler.com/latest/tears-of-a-crazy-clown-berman

 

Lynch on the finale, basically saying it's sorta choose your own adventure ending

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/david-lynch-twin-peaks-finale-season-4-details-1201876433/

“What matters is what you believe happened,” Lynch said. “Many things in life just happen and we have to come to our own conclusions. You can, for example, read a book that raises a series of questions, and you want to talk to the author, but he died a hundred years ago. That’s why everything is up to you.”

Also I love this video which makes about much given sense as any episdoe

 

Welp...

https://www.avclub.com/mark-frosts-new-twin-peaks-book-actually-explains-the-e-1820050829

 

Dahhh!! should I read it? I kind of like how odd it was.... and I probably won't pick up the book anyway.... so this is my only chance at closure....

Oh, hell....

Spoiler

Ohhh, okay, that's barely a spoiler, actually, doesn't spoil the "What year is this?" closing seconds. But Laura's body was never found (because Cooper went back in time and saved her, yay!) nice to have that confirmed. Like I said, it's kind of a happy ending, Cooper finally saved Laura Palmer. But reality went sideways. Don't mess with time travel!

 

I just finished reading Mark Frost's The Final Dossier. It gives some more context / confirms certain fan theories about Season 3.

Season 3 was brilliant TV--particularly the 8th episode. I'm so glad Showtime allowed all of this to happen and to unleash Lynch

 

I actually do think there's a definitive ending to the series--it's just out of sequence.

Remember the final scene in Fire Walk With Me? Notice how Laura is distinctly older in appearance?

My guess is that following Episode 18, Season 3, Cooper endured a near-endless cycle of rescue missions, falling deeper and deeper into the Lodge's rabbit hole of private, altered realities, ending, each time, with his failure to prevent Laura's murder. At some point, he comes to the epiphany that, no matter what the timeline, Laura can't be saved. That it's not his place to save her, but rather to bear witness and usher her tortured soul into a peaceful afterlife. And he does. In the capper to FWWM, Laura rouses from her grisly death, sees the angel hovering above, finds Cooper beside her, and weeps in ecstasy.

Thus, Laura ascends into Heaven. Cooper attains enlightenment. And the tale of Twin Peaks ends.