: - ) ALL All Things Peaks

[krishnanspace]

Bob like human form is better. No more Freddy vs Bob fight scenes though. I really loved the Desmond vs Cable fight scene from the missing pieces. It was shot quite smoothly and you could clearly follow the action. Lynch could have become a good action director

 

[Dom]

Bob like human form is better. No more Freddy vs Bob fight scenes though. I really loved the Desmond vs Cable fight scene from the missing pieces. It was shot quite smoothly and you could clearly follow the action. Lynch could have become a good action director

I've said all along that it's a shame David Lynch never felt able to do the 'one for them, one for me' route. I understand Dune was obviously traumatic and disillusioned him with studio work. I mean, there's stuff I've worked on that's pretty much put me off all television work. And corporate isn't much fun these days either. I just wonder if he'd been able to make, say, a John Grisham adaptation or some such between personal movies if we'd have seen more from him. I respect and admire him so much for doing his own thing thing though. After 25 years churning out so much crap for other people, I want to started making more for myself.

Funnily enough, I suspect that if David Lynch had directed Return of the Jedi, history wouldn't be that different. Richard Marquand was constantly overridden, contradicted and countermanded by George Lucas on the film and the final movie is much more like the prequels than The Empire Strikes Back. I reckon Lynch's Jedi would be practically indistinguishable from Marquand's. So I think a disillusioned David Lynch, post-Jedi, would have ended up making Blue Velvet anyway!

 

[Cappy]

I’d be concerned that any more focus on or continuation of Cooper’s arc would just involve him continuously going back in time to fix everything, but each time a little further back, until he eventually ends up going back too far and sneezing on the primordial goo that served as the genesis of life on Earth, inadvertently retconning humanity from existence.

Like… I like Cooper and all but I’m worried that he isn’t capable of learning any kind of kind of lesson here.

 

[Dom]

I’d be concerned that any more focus on or continuation of Cooper’s arc would just involve him continuously going back in time to fix everything, but each time a little further back, until he eventually ends up going back too far and sneezing on the primordial goo that served as the genesis of life on Earth, inadvertently retconning humanity from existence.

Like… I like Cooper and all but I’m worried that he isn’t capable of learning any kind of kind of lesson here.

The character Kyle was playing at the end of season three seemed quite different: he was a much more ruthless, saturnine character, so it would depend on how he's used.

 

[krishnanspace]

I've said all along that it's a shame David Lynch never felt able to do the 'one for them, one for me' route. I understand Dune was obviously traumatic and disillusioned him with studio work. I mean, there's stuff I've worked on that's pretty much put me off all television work. And corporate isn't much fun these days either. I just wonder if he'd been able to make, say, a John Grisham adaptation or some such between personal movies if we'd have seen more from him. I respect and admire him so much for doing his own thing thing though. After 25 years churning out so much crap for other people, I want to started making more for myself.

Funnily enough, I suspect that if David Lynch had directed Return of the Jedi, history wouldn't be that different. Richard Marquand was constantly overridden, contradicted and countermanded by George Lucas on the film and the final movie is much more like the prequels than The Empire Strikes Back. I reckon Lynch's Jedi would be practically indistinguishable from Marquand's. So I think a disillusioned David Lynch, post-Jedi, would have ended up making Blue Velvet anyway!

He should have taken the Michael bay route of making one studio film and then 1 personal film. Sorry for a Michael bay example but that’s what came to my mind

 

[Dom]

He should have taken the Michael bay route of making one studio film and then 1 personal film. Sorry for a Michael bay example but that’s what came to my mind

Yeah, it's what John Huston did too.

 

[Jordan Cole]

I would love if the monster was in the form of someone like Bob. Having it a literal monster took me away a bit. Kinda felt like watching Stranger Things

Didn't they do this basically by having it be Sarah?

 

[krishnanspace]

Didn't they do this basically by having it be Sarah?

Yes.. but they should have just kept it as Sarah only

 

[AXX°N N.]

I would love if the monster was in the form of someone like Bob. Having it a literal monster took me away a bit. Kinda felt like watching Stranger Things

My mind leapt to Silent Hill, especially the weirdly video-game-esque photo of the NYC characters brutalized. And for that reason I loved those strange aesthetic choices, as Silent Hill is beloved media to me ... and was heavily inspired by Lynch in the first place, so it all feels wonderfully recursive. Stranger Things itself borrows from such things as Silent Hill ... and so is also, probably not just in that sense, somewhat borrowing from Lynch. It's not the first time Lynch has done a monster aesthetic, lest we forget his early shorts and Eraserhead. And when you start going back down that route, we end up recursive to Francis Bacon, Goya and Hieronymous Bosch.

Anyway, all just to say I love looking at the monster and BOrB because it taps into 90s to early 00s gaming for me. OG Peaks was full of weird effects--it just felt right that the standoff, even in a contemporary installment, winds up utilizing a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment of SFX.

 

[LateReg]

My mind leapt to Silent Hill, especially the weirdly video-game-esque photo of the NYC characters brutalized. And for that reason I loved those strange aesthetic choices, as Silent Hill is beloved media to me ... and was heavily inspired by Lynch in the first place, so it all feels wonderfully recursive. Stranger Things itself borrows from such things as Silent Hill ... and so is also, probably not just in that sense, somewhat borrowing from Lynch. It's not the first time Lynch has done a monster aesthetic, lest we forget his early shorts and Eraserhead. And when you start going back down that route, we end up recursive to Francis Bacon, Goya and Hieronymous Bosch.

Anyway, all just to say I love looking at the monster and BOrB because it taps into 90s to early 00s gaming for me. OG Peaks was full of weird effects--it just felt right that the standoff, even in a contemporary installment, winds up utilizing a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment of SFX.

Very true.

The "monster" in the glass box is also wonderfully in-theme. It's such a digital moment that fits the passing time and its aesthetic change, the digital in the machine, on our screens, in our house now, etc. Digital's revenge. Axxon, I think I've asked you this before, but was it you who once shared or hinted at a digital-based Twin Peaks: The Return theory regarding its overarching feeling/meaning?

 

[AXX°N N.]

I understand the comparison to Stranger Things was probably meant less literally than this, but it's also worth noting that the design for the monster predates Stranger Things by two years, as it's a design Lynch has been painting here and there starting from his website era--actually, not just painting, but digitally engineering. Starting with Distorted Nudes, which was an early experiment in then-new Photoshop, this particular design has always been explored through digital means. Perhaps this design, a faceless, amorphous woman, is some kind of expression wedded to the tech?

Axxon, I think I've asked you this before, but was it you who once shared or hinted at a digital-based Twin Peaks: The Return theory regarding its overarching feeling/meaning?

It's something I've toyed around with but my memory is that it was part of a conversation where others were also speculating on that ... I don't think I've forwarded a thesis on it or anything. But that's just my memory.

I think it's an interesting angle to take, and the mere existence of the strange editing when Cooper meets Naido grants it huge, instant credibility in my mind. If it's not a major factor in what TP, or at least the new season is "about" in a broad sense, it's at least true to my mind that there are very pointed, deliberate uses of digital effects in ways that aren't just servicing ideas, but are themselves ideas--like the presence of uniquely digital things is having attention drawn to itself for its own sake.

 

[Jordan Cole]

Yes.. but they should have just kept it as Sarah only

Oh, I disagree, the image of the woman with the scary face thing and bumps on her head will haunt me forever. Fantastic design, and I would think still humanoid enough to fit what you're saying. It's not like it's some CGI Marvel movie alien thing. It's a woman.

 

[krishnanspace]

The glass box scene was amazing. For me it was amazing since I had no idea was it was. It reminded me of th black smoke from lost. I thought it was going to be somewhat abstract. Even the part where Sarah removed her face was scary and very Lynchian. It was just the part where they show the experiment birthing BoB and Cole giving the audience the exposition about Judy being an ancient evil being was a bit MCUish. These are my 2 cents

 

[Dom]

The glass box scene was amazing. For me it was amazing since I had no idea was it was. It reminded me of th black smoke from lost. I thought it was going to be somewhat abstract.

It's one of many elements I wanted to see more of. I mean, that's an individual horror film in its own right!! What happened to it?

Even the part where Sarah removed her face was scary and very Lynchian.

I mean this in no way disparagingly, but I was reminded of this



from Scooby Doo. Those scary eyes freaked me out as a child. I love the way the face sort of moves into the space where Sarah's face was, as if it's lurking in an entire room behind there!

 

[Jordan Cole]

The glass box scene was amazing. For me it was amazing since I had no idea was it was. It reminded me of th black smoke from lost. I thought it was going to be somewhat abstract. Even the part where Sarah removed her face was scary and very Lynchian. It was just the part where they show the experiment birthing BoB and Cole giving the audience the exposition about Judy being an ancient evil being was a bit MCUish. These are my 2 cents

But it was still just a woman in that scene though, not some big monster.

 

[LateReg]

The glass box scene was amazing. For me it was amazing since I had no idea was it was. It reminded me of th black smoke from lost. I thought it was going to be somewhat abstract. Even the part where Sarah removed her face was scary and very Lynchian. It was just the part where they show the experiment birthing BoB and Cole giving the audience the exposition about Judy being an ancient evil being was a bit MCUish. These are my 2 cents

Personally, I think the Experiment puking/birthing BOB scene is such an impressionistic, rather than literal, moment; it's somewhat straightforward, but it can be read/felt many ways and I've never settled on one that was too literally origin-story-ish. There's a lot being spewed there!

This has been mentioned before, but there's just something so disorienting about Cole/Lynch--the notoriously tight-lipped director of both the FBI and the series--giving a sudden info dump that explains it all via a retcon that clarifies as much as it confuses nearly 17 hours into a story that's been anything but straightforward. In most other films or series, such a moment might indeed come across as poor storytelling. But here, as set-up to an intensely disorienting final two hours, I think it's something entirely more playful, subversive and disruptive.

 

[AXX°N N.]

The full ramifications of the lodge space and its atemporality are often glossed over, I think. FWWM already demonstrated that using the lodge as a conduit, time can be entered at one point and influenced at another. It's not so much time travel, but that the lodge is exempt from the way that reality operates. I really love theories that lean into the direction of the lodge being a place of permanent consequence, and so the ending of S3 resonated with me immediately; the idea that once you enter, owing to the time qualities of the lodge, it's immediately the case that you have always, or already, entered. You entered there before you were born in reality, and so you are required, in reality, to eventually enter.

In an ordinary time travel schema, the past is subverted if a change is made by a future traveler; but the lodge space seems to do far more than over-write reality at a branching point, it seems to have fittingly abstract consequences.

So I personally have always viewed the birthing scene as something that shouldn't be taken in any chronological sense--it could even be a rebirthing scene. When the BOrB is shattered, it doesn't disintegrate--the shards float up and spectrally phase past the ceiling. Perhaps what we see here is an ending leading to a beginning, or more like the beginning of BOB is always the same. When we see the BOrB emerge from the Experiment, it has just gone through its destruction.

I was elated when Frost liked a theory via Twitter the other day where someone was postulating at this angle, saying that the Laura orb creation is actually Carrie, and so the workings of the Fireman in this scene aren't a direct chronological response to what was happening around the bomb detonation, but was a reaction that begins to take form all the way forward in Part 17, when Laura is removed from Cooper's hands.

 

[Cappy]

The full ramifications of the lodge space and its atemporality are often glossed over, I think. FWWM already demonstrated that using the lodge as a conduit, time can be entered at one point and influenced at another. It's not so much time travel, but that the lodge is exempt from the way that reality operates. I really love theories that lean into the direction of the lodge being a place of permanent consequence, and so the ending of S3 resonated with me immediately; the idea that once you enter, owing to the time qualities of the lodge, it's immediately the case that you have always, or already, entered. You entered there before you were born in reality, and so you are required, in reality, to eventually enter.

In an ordinary time travel schema, the past is subverted if a change is made by a future traveler; but the lodge space seems to do far more than over-write reality at a branching point, it seems to have fittingly abstract consequences.

So I personally have always viewed the birthing scene as something that shouldn't be taken in any chronological sense--it could even be a rebirthing scene. When the BOrB is shattered, it doesn't disintegrate--the shards float up and spectrally phase past the ceiling. Perhaps what we see here is an ending leading to a beginning, or more like the beginning of BOB is always the same. When we see the BOrB emerge from the Experiment, it has just gone through its destruction.

I was elated when Frost liked a theory via Twitter the other day where someone was postulating at this angle, saying that the Laura orb creation is actually Carrie, and so the workings of the Fireman in this scene aren't a direct chronological response to what was happening around the bomb detonation, but was a reaction that begins to take form all the way forward in Part 17, when Laura is removed from Cooper's hands.

Yeah I’ve wondered about that last point myself — the Laura orb appears to maybe settle somewhere in the American Southwest, setting up her existence as Carrie Page in Part 18.

I also suspect that Laura’s dramatic disappearance from the waiting room (Black Lodge?) in part 2 is precisely due to Coop preventing her death in Part 17.

 

[LateReg]

I also suspect that Laura’s dramatic disappearance from the waiting room (Black Lodge?) in part 2 is precisely due to Coop preventing her death in Part 17.

Yes, I think this is one of the more textually supported abstractions in the series due to the texture of her scream being the exact same in Part 2 and 17. She is being pulled out of her peaceful existence in at least two places/moments all at once: the waiting room and from Cooper's hand after she is saved. Some might say that her scream at the very end is also the same scream, minus the added texture. I don't think that it is, but I could be wrong.

I like the theory from Twitter that Axxon refers to and totally agree on the reading of the lodge atemporality, but what trips me up a bit as far as it being not directly related to the bomb, is why the Fireman accesses the footage of the bomb directly after his alarm bell siren alerts him of trouble. If his actions of creating the Laura orb weren't directly related to the bomb but indeed triggered by Laura's disappearance, then wouldn't he see something else projected onto his screen? If they didn't want to spoil anything, the foliage from Part 17 could have been shown, but only events from Part 8 are seen. This is not to discount the relation between the creation of the Laura orb as being closely linked to her being sucked out of existence in Part 17, just to question how the creation of the Laura orb would not be most directly tied to the bomb since that is the first thing the Fireman sees on his screen. I can wrap my head around it in a circular sense of Laura disappearing and then the Fireman/audience seeing where it all began, and I like that. But the visual information strongly supports the bomb being the direct chronological cause of the Laura orb.

For the record, I don't think we can definitely state where the Laura orb is going. I've thought at times, mostly early on, that it was Texas, but I ultimately settled on thinking it was indeed Washington, as far as I could tell, over and over again for the past several years. But again, I think it's impossible to say.

 

[Mr. Reindeer]

I agree that it’s impossible to say for sure where the orb is going, due to the disproportionate sizes of orb and globe, as well as the distortion of the globe. I think that Lynch quite likely meant for us to theorize that it was going to Texas, but chose to leave it ambiguous, especially given that he ends the scene in a wide shot and a fadeout that make it impossible to determine the final destination with certainty.