These related Open Culture articles with videos caught my eye.
As always, my blog is more about my study than my teaching.
First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mind-blowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlaid* on each other. And I highlighted one in-depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site.
So when I finally clicked on the link I balked immediately: Four and a half hours? Are you kidding me? (You might be saying the very thing to yourself now.) But just like the narrator says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30-minute segments, not because it was grueling, but because time is precious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end, I was recommending the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analysis.
So here we are, with me highly encouraging you to invest the time (providing you have watched all three seasons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not wanting to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s theories, which he lays out like a prosecutor, walking us through a general theory of Lynch.
However, I will make a few points:
- In 2019, we posted a video in which Lynch explains both the Unified Field Theory and Transcendental Meditation. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Perfect suggests reflect the Unified Field.
- Lynch’s obsession with electricity and fire is essential to the theory.
- The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” doubles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Perfect does a masterful job showing many, many examples where Lynch is directly explaining his use of metaphor and symbol to us. Sometimes that is straight into the camera.
- We now know why Season Three featured a three-minute shot of a man sweeping up peanuts from a bar floor.
- I’ve always felt that The Return was an exploration of the dangers of nostalgia, and this essay confirmed it for me. There was something missing at the center of the Third Season, indeed.
- Twin Perfect reads all quotes from the director in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wiggly finger gesture).
Twin Perfect puts much more effort into this than most graduate students:
I have been working on this video for two years, writing and researching and editing. I’ve been reading and watching and listening to every creator interview and AMA, every DVD extra and featurette, every TV special, every fan theory, blog, and podcast — any and all Twin Peaks-related posts I could find — trying to hone and polish my script to be the best I thought it could possibly be. I focus-grouped my video with people, challenging them to poke as many holes in my arguments as they could so that I could better illustrate my ideas. I tried my best to create something others would find of value, something that would add to the ongoing mystery and spark new discussions about my favorite series.
Are there some problems with the theory? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he immediately followed it up with something spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Studies.
So brew up some strong coffee and cut yourself a slice of cherry pie, and get stuck in.
Related Content:
David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials
David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)
Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Making & Mythology of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts., You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills.
David Lynch Releases on YouTube Interview Project: 121 Stories of Real America Recorded on a 20,000-Mile Road Trip
Take a sufficiently long road trip across America, and you’re bound to encounter something or someone Lynchian. Whether or not that idea lay behind Interview Project, the undertaking had the endorsement of David Lynch himself. Not coincidentally, it was conceived by his son Austin, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
Interview Project sticks to small-town or rural settings — Camp Hill, Pennsylvania; Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Tuba City, Arizona — but still encounters people who may at first glance strike viewers as disturbing, menacing, saddening, forbidding, or some combination thereof. But they all have compelling stories to tell, and can do so within five minutes.
When Interview Project first went online in 2009, it wasn’t viewable on Youtube. Now, for its fifteenth anniversary, all of its videos have been uploaded to that platform, and in high definition at that. Seen in this new context, Interview Project looks like an antecedent to certain Youtube channels that have risen to popularity in the decade and a half since: Soft White Underbelly, for instance, which devotes itself to interviewees at the extreme margins of society. Extremity isn’t the signal characteristic of Interview Project’s subjects, depart dramatically though their experiences may from the modern middle-class template. One could pity how short their lives fall of the “American Dream” — or one could consider the possibility that they’re all living that dream in their own way.
Related Content:
A Brief History of the Great American Road Trip
Real Interviews with People Who Lived in the 1800s
What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay
David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity — and Why Meditation Is the Solution
David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2410.10 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3386 days ago & DAD = 042 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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