David Lynch

[davertfnewman]

Who's the everyman, or most normal at least, in Twin Peaks? Gotta be Pete Martell, right? Or Harry Truman.

[Merzbow]

50 minutes ago, davertfnewman said:

Who's the everyman, or most normal at least, in Twin Peaks? Gotta be Pete Martell, right? Or Harry Truman.

Big Ed.

Ed-it: I just learnt that Robin Guthrie and Liz Frazer were asked to be in Blue Velvet via This Mortal Coil but Ivo at 4AD asked for far too much money.

Edited January 21, 2025 by Merzbow

[Chili]

Yeah Big Ed for me, though Pete Martell was superb for his wonderful pronunciation of certain words. Jack Nance had a bit of a mysterious death himself.

[davertfnewman]

Yeah, seemingly took a punch in a drunken brawl, took a few hours to die of it. Seemingly the guy who threw the shot never got identified.

[organizedkaos]

DJs extraordinaire Optimo did a hour tribute to Lynch on their NTS radio show yesterday https://www.nts.live/shows/optimo/episodes/optimo-21st-january-2025

Somewhat mostly hits the obvious points but it's a well considered mixtape with a nice progression and, you know, the obvious points are wonderful pieces of music

[SuperBacon]

Thought this might be of interest to some of you who reside that way in "that there London"

Fire Walk With Me and some curated shorts.

https://www.riocinema.org.uk/movie/celebrating-david-lynch-fire-walk-with-me-shorts

[Gus Mears]

Big Ed is a lovely lad and I'd like to go to the diner with him for a slice of pie and a root float.

Think I might start a chronological Lynch rewatch tomorrow, for the films at least. I'll probably start blubbing when Lady in the Radiator comes on.

[Mr_Danger]

Having only ever experienced Big Ed (and Nadine for that matter) from The People Under The Stairs I was jarred by how lovely  he was in Twin Peaks.

[BomberPat]

our Twin Peaks rewatch got as far as Fire Walk With Me last night, which means the next couple of weeks will fit in The Missing Pieces, and possibly the first of the two books, before getting into The Return. I might try and fit in Mulholland Drive before The Return, too. I used to also own the tie-in books from the first series - Laura Palmer's Diary, and the Autobiography of Dale Cooper - but I'm not going to go as far as to track down copies of them, as I don't think we're particularly missing out by not including them.

It was my first time watching Fire Walk With Me for years - since well before the Return came out, and we think probably my partner's first time watching it. I can see why a lot of people disliked it on release, but also why it's rightly come to be seen as one of Lynch's most important works. It's an all-timer of a contrarian move to follow up the cliffhanger ending of your TV show with a prequel showing what everyone already knows happened, and anyone watching hoping to see more goofy soap opera stuff, fish in percolators, and Catherine dressed up as a Japanese businessman, would have been absolutely devastated.

But that's the point, and I think it's a singularly brilliant film for pulling it off. The story of Twin Peaks is about how much abuse and evil is lurking beneath the surface of respectable middle America, and FWWM is all about exposing that horror - by taking away all the fun and silly side of Twin Peaks and just relentlessly forcing you to watch what Laura went through, it almost makes you feel complicit, like you're part of the society that ignored the abuse, and then moved on from it as if nothing happened, because you'd rather laugh at all the funny characters and side-stories. It shows you nothing that you didn't already know happened, but it forces you to actually confront it. I felt completely on edge for the entire film, just completely uncomfortable, hating every minute of it, and it was brilliant for that.

[BomberPat]

not technically Lynch, but still fits here.

I read Mark Frost's Secret History of Twin Peaks yesterday. I gave it two stars on Goodreads first time around, and I think I'm being generous by bumping that up to a three now.

It's just an odd choice. If you haven't read it, the book is presented as a dossier in the possession of the FBI, which Gordon Cole has assigned to an agent with no familiarity with Twin Peaks. More than half of is only tangentially about Twin Peaks - it's about government conspiracies, UFO sightings, and 19th century American mysteries. All very odd, and the side of Twin Peaks that I'm not really interested in.

All of that said, spoilers in case you ever intend to read it:

Spoiler

I still think the balance of the material is wrong, and overstretches things a little by bringing in too many outside factors that move things away from Twin Peaks being a small, weird place in its own unique way - once it ties in to Roswell, and the JFK assassination, and Watergate, it stops being a story about small towns. 

There's an aspect of series 2 that I never liked, which this really goes deep into, which is the mention of Project Blue Book, and Major Briggs' job being to monitor for signals from outer space - the idea that any of the supernatural/weird elements of Twin Peaks would have extra-terrestrial origins thankfully doesn't really go anywhere beyond that, because I think it might be the worst possible direction the show could have taken.

The book effectively is a history of that story, and I struggled to care because I find UFO stuff extremely dull. I can rationalise why it's that - the book is from the perspective of The Archivist and the FBI trying to figure out what was going on, and they spend a lot of it chasing the wrong leads. But the Twin Peaks connection, ultimately, is that Dougie Milford was wrapped up in multiple famous conspiracies and in almost every government project involving UFOs, and when he returned to Twin Peaks, he set up a radar viewing station in the mountains and brought Major Briggs to Twin Peaks to operate it. There's a point where he's shown something by Richard Nixon, which seems like a foreshadowing of the weird thing in the box at the start of The Return.

There's bits of Twin Peaks history in there that are good fun, and fill in some blanks - there's the story of Big Ed, Norma and Nadine, Josie's Interpol file, some great backstory for the Log Lady, and updates on what happened to Dr Jacobi, and the aftermath of the bank explosion. The ending, which effectively shows Major Briggs realising that they've been making a mistake by watching the skies rather than looking for weird things on Earth, is very well handled. And there's some good easter eggs of the jade ring with the owl insignia popping up throughout history, and where it might have come from, but there's just a lot of fluff and filler, and makes you think that Frost saw Twin Peaks as a kind of proto-X-Files. 

 

[Chris B]

11 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I read Mark Frost's Secret History of Twin Peaks yesterday. I gave it two stars on Goodreads first time around, and I think I'm being generous by bumping that up to a three now.

  Hide contents

Frost saw Twin Peaks as a kind of proto-X-Files. 

 

(Just referencing one line in that spoiler section)

My partner and I are doing a rewatch of Twin Peaks at the moment (coming up to the end of S1), and we talked about how much it clearly influenced The X-Files.

It's weird thinking how close these things were. I think of them as being entirely different eras, but there's only three years between them. It's also odd thinking that the entirety of the original Twin Peaks run, including the movie, was only two years.

[Carbomb]

I read the spoiler, and I have to say, I'm glad - I don't intend to read that book and incorporate its contents into my personal framing of the Twin Peaks mythos. I appreciate the adjacency of the series to that sort of thing, but to actually make it part of the story is just the most obvious, un-Lynchian thing I can think of.

[BomberPat]

33 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I read the spoiler, and I have to say, I'm glad - I don't intend to read that book and incorporate its contents into my personal framing of the Twin Peaks mythos. I appreciate the adjacency of the series to that sort of thing, but to actually make it part of the story is just the most obvious, un-Lynchian thing I can think of.

I think...

Spoiler

The generous reading I would give it is that Twin Peaks isn't about any of those things, but they were the hypotheses that the FBI and Major Briggs were working with before discovering the Black Lodge.

It's still a strange choice either way to give so much of the book over to a fairly dry recounting of 1950s UFO panics, with the only effort to tie any of it to Twin Peaks being the character of Dougie Milford, who was barely a character in the first place, and never at all in that kind of capacity.

 

[LaGoosh]

There's this thing you see in articles/reviews quite often where whenever any show or movie does something scary and weird they will label it as "Lynchian"but I think they usually miss the true essence of Lynch which is a deep earnestness mixed with something strange and threatening. Obviously Lynch has had a huge effect on TV and film makers, to me the only thing to really capture the closest thing to the vibe of Lynch's work is Atlanta - there are definitely a lot of moments across the four seasons that I think feel almost straight out of a Lynch piece. 

Can anyone think of anything else that comes close to capturing the spirit of Lynch's work?

[BomberPat]

Something I've seen said a lot about Lynch's work, and especially Twin Peaks, since he died, that sets it apart from all of his imitators, is that it is almost entirely without irony.