: - ) ALL Appreciation thread

[Metalane]

(This type of thread may have been created before, so a mod can feel free to remove this)

Now, I assume most of us fans can agree that the Twin Peaks universe has given us many incredible moments in it's 44 hour run (including FWWM). What I want to ask is, what moments/scenes/sequences specifically, and how specifically, capture you the most? Meaning why do you think said moment is so amazingly well done, or what makes it so unique in your eyes from an artistic perspective?

Was it a scene of potent realism, a great marriage of sight and sound, or anything in between. I'm so curious because the series in it's entirety is so subject to a near infinite amount on interpretations and viewing styles, it's astonishing. It can be a soap opera parody for some, a heavy-hearted murder mystery for others, and even a collection of esoteric symbols (I referenced that in a different thread).

While Twin Peaks as a whole is not flawless in my eyes, it's still the most breathtaking piece of art I've ever experienced. I could write a 50,000 word essay cross-analyzing all the different aspects.

 

[Tulpa]

This scene is possibly my favorite of the whole series. Just perfectly encapsulates so many different emotions and feelings. Says so much in so few words.

 

[Metalane]

This scene is possibly my favorite of the whole series. Just perfectly encapsulates so many different emotions and feelings. Says so much in so few words.

Ooh, yes, and very surreal too. And that's in the infamous section of season 2 as well. Even though mid-season 2 is the worst of the series imo, it occasionally had some stellar moments.

This scene could be viewed as microcosm for many aspects of the show in general perhaps.

Also, is there a way to edit the thread title? I accidentally wrote "appreciate" instead of "appreciation" haha.

Edit: Oh it seems it changed! Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, thank you for changing it.

 

[Dom]

Just rewatched FWWM. First time since before The Return went out. I bought the Criterion edition. Just... beyond glorious! The film never fails to hit me hard. This time it hit me harder still.

In 2017 when season three was going out, strangely enough, I met a got together with a seemingly wonderful girl some years younger than me (she was in her late 20s, I was early 40s) and we became very close. She was a cocaine addict, as it subsequently turned out. I got sucked into her world for a time - one of wealthy young men and women with drug habits - I'm not from money and my worst habit was heavy boozing and cigarettes. Our relationship fell apart after a few months, a lot of it because she was deceiving me about the level of her drug abuse, which she was supposed to have kicked. Looking back, she was always using coke when she was with me.

I had one last dreadful weekend with her after she'd moved to another town (I'd been planning to move there a few months later.) She was awful to me all weekend, acting crazy - it became obvious that she'd moved and not got herself a dealer so was in withdrawal. A couple of hours before I was due to leave and get the dawn train by to go back to where I lived, I got up to go to the bathroom and when I walked out, she was standing there sobbing and threw her arms around me, holding me tight, saying 'I'm sorry! I love you! I'm so sorry.' (That scene on the bike in FWWM really hits me hard now!) I told her I loved her too. I took the train, because I had a job to get to and that was that. She ignored me for a couple of weeks, before dumping me over the phone. She pretended not to remember the events of that night. Six months later, I finally managed to pick up my belongings from her and when I met her, she was clearly back on the drugs. By all accounts, so was her new boyfriend. I never saw her again and I've never heard from her again either. Probably for the best.

I cleaned myself up after I got my belongings back. I'm in my fifth year not drinking, smoking or touching any other kind of drug. When you see real darkness and desperation, it shakes you up. I fled from it and I'll be running for the rest of my life!

I feel like I found myself in the dark side of Twin Peaks, in a (not 'ha ha!') funny way, and that I brushed past some element of Laura in real life. For all its fantasy scenes, FWWM really, really understands that dreadful whirlpool people get sucked into. I've fought my demons and, for the most part, won. I don't know how much actual life experience went into the writing of the film, but it's raw and insightful. I wonder how many of those critics who enthusiastically lambasted the film were drinking too much alcohol and using cocaine themselves. Given I work in the media and have seen a lot, I reckon a few! Guilty consciences?

Fire Walk With Me is a film I genuinely love. I know it's dark, but I don't find it as bleak and nihilistic as many claim it to be. Ultimately, I find it uplifting. In part, it's why I was so disappointed at Laura's angelic redemption being unpicked in The Return. I find FWWM hypnotic: I never tire of watching it. No matter how many years go by or how long I go without seeing the TV show, I remember enough of the series that I can watch the film happily on its own. In an era where Hollywood wastes millions on expensive CGI space battles and loud explosions, here's a film that has set pieces just as exciting, showing a nightclub from Hell or a girl wandering into a picture in a dream or a bearded man in a camper van shouting out of the driver's window while another man revs his car engine!

And this time, age 47, worn down somewhat by actual life experience, the film kind of breaks my heart too.

PS. Favourite feelgood scene in the original TV show: Hook Rug Dance in the RR Diner, as Gordon discovers he can hear Shelly and Cooper makes jokes about penguins to Annie.

PPS. Sorry if that all got a bit 'confessional'. It's just strange how I found myself crossing paths in real life with aspects of my favourite TV show.

 

[AXX°N N.]

That brought a lot of my personal feelings about TP swirling up. I have more personal associations to it than anything else I can name. Principally, I'm from the Pacific northwest, and there's a certain nostalgia it evokes in me seeing as I haven't seen an evergreen or had an occasion to wear a thick sweater since moving south. This might seem satirical, but it's not, and it speaks to a flavor of the area that TP (and further in Frost's books) ended up capturing: everyone back home seemed universally fixated on the strange and supernatural. People I wouldn't expect to begin sharing impossible living daydreams would do so at length, my mother was convinced she was psychic, and everyone had a ghost and/or bigfoot encounter to share. I'm a sceptic and agnostic now, but when I was a child I had convincing encounters with ghost sightings and believed myself to have been possessed one thunderous night. Maybe the arid landscape and heat are natural antidotes to this, but I've yet to hear a single person profess anything of the sort down here.

I had my own shocking, everything-gets-inverted, "everything is a lie" experience in adolescence when I discovered my father was a cocaine addict. It brought a spotlight onto my life and revealed it to be a straw house, and left me with an involuntary traumatic lens over everything. My parent's friends all of a sudden were very obviously drug addicts and criminals. I discovered sexual abuses within my family, histories of violence and crime both organized and un-. New violence then, mysteriously, began to occur. Overnight it felt like innocence wasn't just removed, but had never existed. The kinds of addiction and abuse in TP don't just make me think back to where I came from, it's almost like memories fed through a projector. I never myself fell into that whirlpool or, really, was affected by it much other than via osmosis, and as an effect I've never had a single smoke, glass of beer, needle, tablet, nothing.

I first watched TP around the time everything came into view and it was oddly therapeutic. I've only recently realized that my parents were around the adult character's ages when I first watched, and that Cooper's optimism and presentation as a sort of role model for the human being filled some hole that had been cigarette-burned into me, and TP even still has an uplifting effect on me despite airing my traumas so effectively; come to think of it, my obsession with Lynch as a filmmaker, as my obsession with art of any kind, verges on father replacement. Now that I'm older my relationship with the show is changing--it's odd to be the age of the "old" characters now. Incidentally, I only recently found out that my parents knew Kyle MacLachlan growing up and that my mother allegedly danced with him once in high school. I have to admit that, unlike the couple degrees of separation excitement this should have elicited in me, I found it eerie. As for my father, Frost's books happened to inform me on his thematic relation to this fiction, and educated me more about his profession than knowing the man my entire life. He worked at a nuclear facility that was mentioned specifically in TSHOTP, in a role which I didn't know was/is mainly tasked with dealing with the material containment of the byproduct of manufacturing the plutonium used in the bomb we tested for use on Japan and features so prominently in Part 8. Not only do I get transported back to the trees and feel of my hometown when I watch, but I look at my father and see a direct connection between my life and that nuclear blast in the most uncomfortably quotidian fashion. This was unexpected and eye-opening, but sort of expected; TP creeps eerily into my life.

In a similar way, S3 had a huge emotional effect on me that's pretty specific to geography. I had moved to Texas, and at that a pretty crummy small town not unlike Odessa. My hometown back in the northwest has fermented in my memory into some kind of dismal, dark, nowhere kind of presence not without hints of unnatural, demonic sentience. So when Texas of all places showed up as a locale, and Cooper not only found Laura there, a character who's trauma and anguish I deeply related to by way of FWWM, but began to ferry her via an excruciatingly tense, sparse drive back into this empty, nebulous, darkness-drenched version of the town ... I felt like I was being driven back myself, to the one place I swear to this day to never set foot. I was a mess for the rest of the night and when I rewatch or even just think back to it, my stomach gets into knots. There's something profoundly wrong, existentially, about the town and about the house in that final scene. That house is my house.

There's something frankly unique and special about the joy and terror TP captures. I felt like Dougie and the distilled form of celebration-of-life he embodied was exactly what I needed at the moment S3 aired--and I feel equally like the ending was exactly what I needed to destroy me.

 

[Dom]

Actually, my biggest takeaway watching The Missing Pieces was in the sequence with the Hayward family. When Laura leaves the room, I'm struck by the way Dr and Mrs Hayward look at each other. I'll always remember the moment I suddenly realised 'THEY KNEW!!!' Whether they had evidence for it or had simply worked it out for themselves, I think they knew about Leland and I think they knew about Laura's drug problems.

 

[Mr. Reindeer]

So, a few weeks ago, I did the thing that I’ve always meant to do but kind of dreaded: a one-day straight-through binge rewatch of The Return. It was a mixed bag for sure; something I’m really glad I did once for the experience, but something I’ll probably never do again unless it’s in a theater full of like-minded fans, which could be an amazing experience. I felt like my attention was inevitably waxing and waning as the day went on, which is my general experience with binges, and it made me want to immediately watch the show again in some different way where I could better appreciate it. So I’m now rewatching The Return at a super slow casual pace, scene by scene, in (subjective) chronological order following the timeline I made, trying to see if I can find any improvements in terms of the placement of scenes. It’s really fun for me, given the weird time-shifts that go on in the editing, to try to pin down what characters in Las Vegas and Buckhorn and Twin Peaks were doing on the same night. One thing I find I have experienced on every rewatch of The Return (including the binge as well as this most current one) is that every time, I connect emotionally with Dale/Dougie’s arc moreso than the last. Even on the initial airing, I caught on fairly early on that the Dougie arc kept talking about the idea of “home” and was on some level about Cooper briefly experiencing an aspect of life he had foregone, but the way that sense of heartbreak and loss seeps through every moment of the Dougie/Las Vegas scenes just becomes clearer to me every time I watch them, and this time around, I am really just savoring every moment of Cooper getting to live this double life, and all the joy and heartbreak that comes through in Kyle’s performance. Particularly given how Part 18 pays off the idea of how Laura Palmer felt completely unsafe in her own home, and the richness of how that one word “home” runs through the entire third season and pays off so much of both Dale and Laura’s arcs from the original series and movie, and even the books. I think the biggest bond between the two of them is that neither ever had a home, for vastly different reasons.

 

[AXX°N N.]

I think the biggest bond between the two of them is that neither ever had a home, for vastly different reasons.

This speaks to one of TP's main strengths, the fact that the archetypes at play are so complicated. There's inversions and paradoxes in what are usually straightforward Hero's Journey roles. It's a bit simplified, but you could say that Laura's victimhood was heroic, and on the flip-side, that Cooper was victimized by his heroism.

 

[Mr. Reindeer]

This speaks to one of TP's main strengths, the fact that the archetypes at play are so complicated. There's inversions and paradoxes in what are usually straightforward Hero's Journey roles. It's a bit simplified, but you could say that Laura's victimhood was heroic, and on the flip-side, that Cooper was victimized by his heroism.

This is really interesting in light of one of those contradictions that seems to exist in FWWM, when Cooper with the best of intentions tells Laura not to take the ring, but she does and it seems to be her salvation.

 

[tudwell]

This scene is possibly my favorite of the whole series. Just perfectly encapsulates so many different emotions and feelings. Says so much in so few words.

I love how long they keep the hook rug dance going too. Really lets it breathe. THIS is how you you do Lynchian in a non-Lynch-directed episode.