As I mentioned, I've been watching the new Twin Peaks...but very slowly. The PVR has been a boon in allowing us to slack off on watching things, and sometimes we go a little overboard on it, but who cares, right? (Spoilers probably follow for the new series, if you care...)
I watched the original Twin Peaks when it first came out. Well, I caught the second half of the first season in reruns in the summer, and was hooked and had to watch the second season. It was a few years before I even saw the pilot and the other first season episodes. I had recorded a bunch of them on tape at some point, too, and eventually got the full series on DVD, and rewatched them over the last couple of years.
The new series is not like the original series at all. Well, hardly at all.
The original series was quirky, sometimes brutal, a number of disagreeable characters, but with the axis of Cooper, Truman and even James, Donna and Audrey to show that there were people with, at least, good intentions. There were the occasional surreal episodes--the dreams, and the excellent Black Lodge finale--but there was always some sense that people with discernible motivations were doing things.
The new series is a mess. We're nine episodes in now, and the last few we've been watching with a gap of a month or more in between. Episode 7 was particularly off-putting, with its extensive section in the middle dedicated to nuclear bomb footage and cacophonous music. Plotting is barely coherent, with scenes from the first frickin' episode still incomprehensible.
I've watched some, but not all, David Lynch movies. I enjoyed Mulholland Drive, and I like the "most of it is a dream" theory. "Fire Walk With Me" was at times a bit off-putting, but it made a decent prequel/coda to the series, and it had a certain unity of place and time going for it. "Blue Velvet" was...fine, I don't remember it much. "Dune"...well, it was Dune. "Wild At Heart" I don't remember much either, but I don't recall caring for it that much.
"Inland Empire" was a mess too. I gather that he was writing scenes as they went, so it's no wonder it was incoherent. There are sequences I remember, mostly near the beginning and near the end, but I couldn't tell you what happened in the middle. And that's what the new Twin Peaks is like.
My theory is that David Lynch doesn't give a crap anymore, and is trolling the people who clamoured for a new Twin Peaks series. He puts in as many of the old actors as he can (or will agree to it), but doesn't always give them much to do--Jacoby just gets to swear a lot on Youtube while Nadine watches his videos, Jerry gets lost in the woods... His own character, Gordon Cole, is central to the closest thing we have to a plot. There's what looks like occasional stunt-casting--Amanda Seyfried is wasted, Michael Cera's appearance as Andy & Lucy's son is excruciatingly painful.
And the best thing about the original series, the consistent throughline, the backbone, was Agent Cooper. So what does the new series have? First, we have the "bad Cooper", the evil version from the plot-twist ending of the origial series, who's grown his hair long and is now an amoral criminal and killer, who seems to have some weird abilities. And then there's the "good Cooper" trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years, who escapes through a sequence which is expectedly surreal, but generally good, and ends up replacing the hapless Dougie Jones. And seems to have suffered a lot of brain damage in the process, because he's spent half a dozen episodes as someone who only repeats what you say to him, an "idiot savant" who can spot slot machines about to pay off and, somehow, insurance fraud. Maybe he'll "snap out of it" and return to the old Cooper before the end of the series, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.
Lynch is screwing with us. He's showing us that we really didn't want a new Twin Peaks series at all. I'm used to, say, 80's bands getting back together and recording new material, and generally what happens is new music which is not like the music of their heyday that everybody loved, but like the latter-day stuff that they coasted on for a little while. I would have been happy with a new Twin Peaks series that was up to the level of the second half of the second season, where they floundered a bit, but it was watchable and often funny. Instead we get Twin Peaks filtered through Inland Empire, and it's kind of crappy.
Last episode we watched, #9, was full of angry white men beating women around and/or swearing vociferously. I'm not the biggest fan of profanity myself, but it has its uses...and it was way overused. I'm only really interested in about 25% of what's going on in the average episode (closer to 10% in episode #7), so why am I watching this? In the vain hope that maybe it gets better. But it's feeling like a goddamn abusive relationship at the moment, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through.
Make Stuff 2018 - 3
1/18 '18
