Going to share my own Twin Peaks experiences here. For most of high school and onwards, I kind of hated Lynch, and his world, and the more people liked it, especially Twin Peaks, the colder it left me, the whole, get this, she's the prom queen, but also an underage prostitute thing. I didn't feel like the projects really gained by all the withholding and obscuring that they did, and that there was a kind of cheapness and forced character to the surrealism. Plus all kinds of (to me) awful stylistic missteps, like the presence of Marilyn Manson in Lost Highway.
I think the year after The Return I watched all of Twin Peaks with my girlfriend, and then The Return, and I don't know, man, it really did something to me, and it really captured something I was feeling. There was something so overwhelmingly desolate about it, the characters seemed so hopelessly overmatched, so many miles and years away from what they needed to do and be, all of which weirdly turned it into a work of realism, about the desolation and hopelessness of our world. I think The Return and The Sopranos are the only two shows that really capture what it's like to live in American, minute by minute, day by day, just wandering through this purgatory stretching out miles and miles in every direction, waiting for grace--like Beckett's End Game. The settings are so sharp, the corporate stuff, the developments, the way he downgrades Twin Peaks to a pill-swamped hell hole, there's the awful freakishness on the one hand, but on the other hand, everything is so crisp and sharp. (Lynch and Mann maybe the only two directors who successfully made the jump to digital?) There's lots of stuff in The Return that doesn't exactly work, or contribute, or that's just there for effect, rather than thematic resonance. And I kind of hate Lynch the character, too. But I love The Return for scrubbing all the shiny happy stuff out of the original series and just leaving this awful, terrible void, with all the characters left, and even Cooper, tottering at the precipice, trying to hang on.
I was thinking about doing a rewatch but, man, that second season… We need a fan edit to cut both seasons down to like 12 hours total. And if I don’t see one minute of Nadine or James, I’m ok with that.
Re Dune, I was 9 or 10 when I saw it in the theatre and 35 years later about all I could remember was the fact that I’d seen it. But then watching Villeneuve’s first film all these vivid images from 1984 came back to me. The plot may have been a mess (I’ve got the Arrow 4K disc waiting for me now to remind me) but it certainly made an impression.
I have come, on my current rewatch, to greatly appreciate what Wendy Robie is doing as Nadine. On the other hand, I don't know why I ever shipped Donna with James. Go away, James.
I have to say, on my last rewatch (right before The Return) I was much more generous to the second season. There are really only 2-3 episodes that have no redeeming value. Every other one has a scene or several that I would never cut.
I never really got into TWIN PEAKS but have some friends who certainly were, and like everyone were very disappointed by the second season. I remember in particular the fate of Josie, who ends up in a wooden knob, being described to me in detail with the addition that this was apparently due to an offhand remark by Lynch (who had left the show by this point). For a while after that "Let's put her in the knob!" was our go-to phrase for any baffling plot point in media.
Beautiful read. Big fan of Lynch and TP. WAS recently in SEA, and took the train ti the airport to rent a car for the day just to visit the haunts (Snowqualmie Falls, North Bend, etc)
Just wanted to say, on an aside, that I finally got the voices down. You’re both so great, but after about 200 words, I noted ‘This sounds like Keith’. Had to scroll up to confirm
Audrey's fate is still maybe the most upsetting thing in the finale, partly because it's profoundly sad but also basically a minor subplot. (She was also possibly the character most ill-served by season 2? But I haven't seen it since 2017 so maybe I'm wrong about that.)
(OK yes some of this just stems from my massive crush on Audrey/Sherilyn Fenn back in 1990.)
If memory serves: she carried evil Cooper's child who grew up just as rotten. Evil Cooper mistreated her pretty badly and it broke her psyche. In the end her whole subplot is revealed to be all in her head, a coping mechanism to address her institutionalization at a mental ward.
I admit I have always wanted to like David Lynch's works more than I actually did. But I surely, 100% loved Mulholland Drive. For me it was his greatest movie, one that moved me but also made me feel fear and dread and beauty, too.
There will never be anybody quite like him. So it's a good thing he's still around after his death. ❤️
> This was me as an 18-year-old Twin Peaks fan, the beginning of a long tradition of not liking David Lynch projects I’d later regard as extraordinary, if not outright masterpieces.
Lynch's work has aged very well. I remember a point where Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway were two of the lowest rated films of the 90s. Hell, Lost Highway had no good reviews to speak of so they used blatantly negative quotes on the theatrical poster.
I think we all want to not be the person who disparages the current Kubrick whose work will far outlive anything we ever say, critical or not. It really seems like Lynch is destined to be one of those directors. I wish I was better in the moment of identifying who they were going to be.
I don't know if I want to test this theory with Inland Empire but I'd love to take the opportunity to revisit Twin Peaks: The Return one day.
Yeah, and it's this that really set him apart from his grindhouse, midnight-movie contemporaries. Lynch had the chops. It wasn't just freak outs or weirdness for weirdness sake. He could go full Hitchcock, or sentimental Spielberg at the drop of a hat.
Everyone treated Lynch like a painter who shot film instead of a filmmaker, and he played this up himself. I've seen and read my share of Lynch biographies and they all emphasize his art schooling, the influence of Bushnell Keeler but toward filmmaking he's presented like an idiot savant. That may have been a bit of expectation managing. Lynch had a deep love of film that could only come from a lifetime of careful study, evidenced by all the little easter eggs throughout his work, references to past actors and their roles.
I was definitely not quite well-versed enough in Hitchcock in 1986 to take in just how much Lynch was influenced by him, but it's become very clear since. Not just in that movie, of course.
I know I tuned in religiously at the beginning but do not remember how much I stuck with season two. But I definitely remember watching the finale as it aired, me and all the other weirdos in my high school. Had such a huge impact, I read "Secret Diary" (and kept it hidden from my parents because it felt dirty or cursed)...and then kind of bailed. Didn't see Fire Walk With Me until the 2000s -- I think it came out right as I'd left for freshman college and I didn't yet know where local movie theaters were or had any friends who could drive.
In our big rewatch coming up to season 3 a few years back, we skipped the middle part of season 2. I keep telling myself I want to go back and do a FULL rewatch, but there are so many other things I haven't seen.
On a completely different note, "Morris the Cat Salutes Hollywood Pets" is the most Troy McClure-sounding thing I've ever heard that wasn't an actual Troy McClure gag.
Having very, very briefly worked with the man, it behooves me to issue a correction—it's Kenneth Welsh, not Welch, a lovely person and talented actor of good Canadian stock who passed away in 2022. And if you want to see him turn up in another lodge of less villainous repute, I'd highly recommend the AMC series LODGE 49.
I've been rewatching the show along with a podcast hosted by Stacie Ponder (my SHOCKtober queen) and her friend Mike Muncer. Mike's a superfan, but Stacie knew barely anything about the show, so that's been a fun dynamic. It's my fourth watch of the original material, and will be just my second watch of The Return. Though, since I'm watching on my newly acquired BDs, and because all my prior watches were on very low-def copies, it's often like seeing it for the first time.
And the day before Lynch's death was announced, I watched the S2 finale, so it's very fresh in my mind.
Like Keith, I had trouble with Lynch early on. I think The Straight Story was the first thing I saw, knowing nothing about the guy. I saw that and Mulholland Drive in the theater with my college friends, and we all loved that. Later I'd watch Blue Velvet, and nod along to Roger Ebert's pan afterwards. Giving it another shot more recently, I liked it better, but I still think everything he does there he does better later, especially in Twin Peaks. I liked Eraserhead and The Elephant Man right away, and Lost Highway and Wild At Heart too, though my one watch of Inland Empire didn't do it for me. Lately I've been checking out his shorts. Don't miss David Lynch teaching you the alphabet!
But it was giving Twin Peaks a shot that really turned me into a fan.
And even where I didn't always like what he made, he always seemed like a genuinely good and interesting person, as the outpouring from his collaborators has confirmed.
The first season of Twin Peaks was a revelation to me and my friends in our senior year of high school. We would discuss the show breathlessly the day after it aired, cracking each other up by imitating our favorite parts and coming up with theories on what was happening. It really sounded and looked like nothing else on TV.
I was a freshman in college for the second season premiere, about 25 people crammed into a tiny common TV area that could comfortably fit around 10. We were interrupted constantly for the first 10 minutes by students running in, trying to find a TV that was showing the concurrent Simpsons season premiere.
If I remember right, the first 20 minutes or so had a lot of Cooper lying down on the ground, unable to get up. By the end of the episode, I realized that Lynch did not really care about who murdered Laura Palmer, and I had been watching the show to find out the answer to that question. I tapped out on the show, and never watched another minute of the show or the movie.
I'm days late on this and probably won't get any attention, but....
I loved the The Return, but I've been struggling to want to watch it a second time because I felt it was just..... nihilistic? Is there none of Lynch's optimism in there? can someone bring me around?
Well, there's plenty of humour. And there's some positivity, like Ed and Norma getting together. But yeah, lots of darkness. Maybe start a rewatch and give yourself permission to stop.
Going to share my own Twin Peaks experiences here. For most of high school and onwards, I kind of hated Lynch, and his world, and the more people liked it, especially Twin Peaks, the colder it left me, the whole, get this, she's the prom queen, but also an underage prostitute thing. I didn't feel like the projects really gained by all the withholding and obscuring that they did, and that there was a kind of cheapness and forced character to the surrealism. Plus all kinds of (to me) awful stylistic missteps, like the presence of Marilyn Manson in Lost Highway.
I think the year after The Return I watched all of Twin Peaks with my girlfriend, and then The Return, and I don't know, man, it really did something to me, and it really captured something I was feeling. There was something so overwhelmingly desolate about it, the characters seemed so hopelessly overmatched, so many miles and years away from what they needed to do and be, all of which weirdly turned it into a work of realism, about the desolation and hopelessness of our world. I think The Return and The Sopranos are the only two shows that really capture what it's like to live in American, minute by minute, day by day, just wandering through this purgatory stretching out miles and miles in every direction, waiting for grace--like Beckett's End Game. The settings are so sharp, the corporate stuff, the developments, the way he downgrades Twin Peaks to a pill-swamped hell hole, there's the awful freakishness on the one hand, but on the other hand, everything is so crisp and sharp. (Lynch and Mann maybe the only two directors who successfully made the jump to digital?) There's lots of stuff in The Return that doesn't exactly work, or contribute, or that's just there for effect, rather than thematic resonance. And I kind of hate Lynch the character, too. But I love The Return for scrubbing all the shiny happy stuff out of the original series and just leaving this awful, terrible void, with all the characters left, and even Cooper, tottering at the precipice, trying to hang on.
Hey it's not all wasteland - Big Ed finally really makes his MOVE.
What's wrong with Lynch the character?
I was thinking about doing a rewatch but, man, that second season… We need a fan edit to cut both seasons down to like 12 hours total. And if I don’t see one minute of Nadine or James, I’m ok with that.
Re Dune, I was 9 or 10 when I saw it in the theatre and 35 years later about all I could remember was the fact that I’d seen it. But then watching Villeneuve’s first film all these vivid images from 1984 came back to me. The plot may have been a mess (I’ve got the Arrow 4K disc waiting for me now to remind me) but it certainly made an impression.
I have come, on my current rewatch, to greatly appreciate what Wendy Robie is doing as Nadine. On the other hand, I don't know why I ever shipped Donna with James. Go away, James.
I have to say, on my last rewatch (right before The Return) I was much more generous to the second season. There are really only 2-3 episodes that have no redeeming value. Every other one has a scene or several that I would never cut.
I never really got into TWIN PEAKS but have some friends who certainly were, and like everyone were very disappointed by the second season. I remember in particular the fate of Josie, who ends up in a wooden knob, being described to me in detail with the addition that this was apparently due to an offhand remark by Lynch (who had left the show by this point). For a while after that "Let's put her in the knob!" was our go-to phrase for any baffling plot point in media.
Beautiful read. Big fan of Lynch and TP. WAS recently in SEA, and took the train ti the airport to rent a car for the day just to visit the haunts (Snowqualmie Falls, North Bend, etc)
Just wanted to say, on an aside, that I finally got the voices down. You’re both so great, but after about 200 words, I noted ‘This sounds like Keith’. Had to scroll up to confirm
I also play the Scott or Keith game! I think I can get it right about 80% of the time.
I'm really good at this game.
Audrey's fate is still maybe the most upsetting thing in the finale, partly because it's profoundly sad but also basically a minor subplot. (She was also possibly the character most ill-served by season 2? But I haven't seen it since 2017 so maybe I'm wrong about that.)
(OK yes some of this just stems from my massive crush on Audrey/Sherilyn Fenn back in 1990.)
So wait, what IS her fate? I've watched all of the Return 3 times now and I still do not understand what is going on with Audrey.
If memory serves: she carried evil Cooper's child who grew up just as rotten. Evil Cooper mistreated her pretty badly and it broke her psyche. In the end her whole subplot is revealed to be all in her head, a coping mechanism to address her institutionalization at a mental ward.
Raped by evil Cooper while in a coma, birthed the also evil Richard.
I always assumed she was in a coma until her last moment in the show but apparently (unsurprisingly) there are other interpretations.
I admit I have always wanted to like David Lynch's works more than I actually did. But I surely, 100% loved Mulholland Drive. For me it was his greatest movie, one that moved me but also made me feel fear and dread and beauty, too.
There will never be anybody quite like him. So it's a good thing he's still around after his death. ❤️
Wow what a great writeup - thanks
> This was me as an 18-year-old Twin Peaks fan, the beginning of a long tradition of not liking David Lynch projects I’d later regard as extraordinary, if not outright masterpieces.
Lynch's work has aged very well. I remember a point where Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway were two of the lowest rated films of the 90s. Hell, Lost Highway had no good reviews to speak of so they used blatantly negative quotes on the theatrical poster.
I think we all want to not be the person who disparages the current Kubrick whose work will far outlive anything we ever say, critical or not. It really seems like Lynch is destined to be one of those directors. I wish I was better in the moment of identifying who they were going to be.
I don't know if I want to test this theory with Inland Empire but I'd love to take the opportunity to revisit Twin Peaks: The Return one day.
The thing about Lynch is even in his films that I don't think really work, there are always a few amazing scenes or sequences or images.
I'm still decidedly 3-star on Lost Highway, for example, yet the phone call with the Mystery Man is an all-timer of an unsettling scene.
Yeah, and it's this that really set him apart from his grindhouse, midnight-movie contemporaries. Lynch had the chops. It wasn't just freak outs or weirdness for weirdness sake. He could go full Hitchcock, or sentimental Spielberg at the drop of a hat.
Everyone treated Lynch like a painter who shot film instead of a filmmaker, and he played this up himself. I've seen and read my share of Lynch biographies and they all emphasize his art schooling, the influence of Bushnell Keeler but toward filmmaking he's presented like an idiot savant. That may have been a bit of expectation managing. Lynch had a deep love of film that could only come from a lifetime of careful study, evidenced by all the little easter eggs throughout his work, references to past actors and their roles.
I was definitely not quite well-versed enough in Hitchcock in 1986 to take in just how much Lynch was influenced by him, but it's become very clear since. Not just in that movie, of course.
He's a great visual artist, but I always contend that his secret sauce was his mastery of sound.
I know I tuned in religiously at the beginning but do not remember how much I stuck with season two. But I definitely remember watching the finale as it aired, me and all the other weirdos in my high school. Had such a huge impact, I read "Secret Diary" (and kept it hidden from my parents because it felt dirty or cursed)...and then kind of bailed. Didn't see Fire Walk With Me until the 2000s -- I think it came out right as I'd left for freshman college and I didn't yet know where local movie theaters were or had any friends who could drive.
In our big rewatch coming up to season 3 a few years back, we skipped the middle part of season 2. I keep telling myself I want to go back and do a FULL rewatch, but there are so many other things I haven't seen.
On a completely different note, "Morris the Cat Salutes Hollywood Pets" is the most Troy McClure-sounding thing I've ever heard that wasn't an actual Troy McClure gag.
And Alex Trebek's participation makes the gag even sweeter, like Norman Fell starring in The Erotic Adventures Of Hercules.
Having very, very briefly worked with the man, it behooves me to issue a correction—it's Kenneth Welsh, not Welch, a lovely person and talented actor of good Canadian stock who passed away in 2022. And if you want to see him turn up in another lodge of less villainous repute, I'd highly recommend the AMC series LODGE 49.
Oh, man, what an underrated series that was! I second your recommendation.
I've been rewatching the show along with a podcast hosted by Stacie Ponder (my SHOCKtober queen) and her friend Mike Muncer. Mike's a superfan, but Stacie knew barely anything about the show, so that's been a fun dynamic. It's my fourth watch of the original material, and will be just my second watch of The Return. Though, since I'm watching on my newly acquired BDs, and because all my prior watches were on very low-def copies, it's often like seeing it for the first time.
And the day before Lynch's death was announced, I watched the S2 finale, so it's very fresh in my mind.
Like Keith, I had trouble with Lynch early on. I think The Straight Story was the first thing I saw, knowing nothing about the guy. I saw that and Mulholland Drive in the theater with my college friends, and we all loved that. Later I'd watch Blue Velvet, and nod along to Roger Ebert's pan afterwards. Giving it another shot more recently, I liked it better, but I still think everything he does there he does better later, especially in Twin Peaks. I liked Eraserhead and The Elephant Man right away, and Lost Highway and Wild At Heart too, though my one watch of Inland Empire didn't do it for me. Lately I've been checking out his shorts. Don't miss David Lynch teaching you the alphabet!
But it was giving Twin Peaks a shot that really turned me into a fan.
And even where I didn't always like what he made, he always seemed like a genuinely good and interesting person, as the outpouring from his collaborators has confirmed.
The first season of Twin Peaks was a revelation to me and my friends in our senior year of high school. We would discuss the show breathlessly the day after it aired, cracking each other up by imitating our favorite parts and coming up with theories on what was happening. It really sounded and looked like nothing else on TV.
I was a freshman in college for the second season premiere, about 25 people crammed into a tiny common TV area that could comfortably fit around 10. We were interrupted constantly for the first 10 minutes by students running in, trying to find a TV that was showing the concurrent Simpsons season premiere.
If I remember right, the first 20 minutes or so had a lot of Cooper lying down on the ground, unable to get up. By the end of the episode, I realized that Lynch did not really care about who murdered Laura Palmer, and I had been watching the show to find out the answer to that question. I tapped out on the show, and never watched another minute of the show or the movie.
How you thought about revisiting it?
I'm days late on this and probably won't get any attention, but....
I loved the The Return, but I've been struggling to want to watch it a second time because I felt it was just..... nihilistic? Is there none of Lynch's optimism in there? can someone bring me around?
Well, there's plenty of humour. And there's some positivity, like Ed and Norma getting together. But yeah, lots of darkness. Maybe start a rewatch and give yourself permission to stop.