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Jan. 27th, 2017 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionReached 2.2 in Twin Peaks.
I don't know if I'll get through this: the Lynch episodes are amazing and the non-Lynch episodes are terrible, and I've blown through 4.5 of the 6 Lynch hours already. This lopsidedness alone is why people remember the first season fondly, I suspect. 50 percent of the screentime in the first ten episodes is Lynch's, since he helms both the double-length ones.
He doubtless had some sort of hand in most of the rest, but except when actually on the tiller it isn't enough. The first Tim Hunter episode is well enough directed and the Mark Frost one is at least a string of fairly exciting season wrap-up / cliffhanger scenes, but neither can hide that this is a universe only Lynch can hold together. There's nothing really there except his vision. The show is his sandbox.
Makes one realize he is not at all a plot guy - his own screenplays are really all about the disintegration and then salvation of a character for no reason at all, or just because life is like that: much worse than you think and much better. Blue Velvet borrows some scaffolding from Rear Window and Vertigo, and as we learn from Inland Empire some scaffolding goddamn helps, but the type doesn't really matter. Frost was presumably going for a vaguely Saint Elsewhered Peyton Place - I think of Norma and Ed and Nadine as his character cluster, and maybe Horne. But the plot throughlines, the on-paper character arcs are mostly his too, I imagine. Lynch is invading a boring-ass network show the same way he invaded Hitchcock, or the Sailor and Lula books, or Dune for that matter. His contribution is additive, an opening out of scenes to accommodate what they normally leave out. What they exist to leave out, one could almost say. The first thirty minutes of the pilot don't show you what real grief is like, but they show you much more of it than tv had ever permitted. Lynch is all about how reality will writhe before you if you stay in your room. I guess strictly speaking he depicts mental illness, but it's a sort of mental illness we've all experienced, or brushed, in our dreams, deja vus, mistaken impressions, threatened moments, alone moments, moments where we feel alone in crowds, rages, sorrows, drunk or drugged states, experiences with music, with art, when we're injured, when we've made strange or unclear connections, when the world eludes our predictions so much that we suspect a deity or conspiracy, when we're in love. When life itself becomes personal, the aspect of art that motion cameras would seem least fit to convey, is all he cares about.
Very interesting thinking about that in relation to Tarantino, whose bitter rejection of Fire Walk With Me clarifies that Lynch is his true master. Lynch pulls scenes away from both plot-furthering and character-establishing moments, to which the nature of screenwriting usually binds them extremely tightly, except where indulgence of some basic satisfaction's permitted (voyeurism, violence, romance, jokes, spectacles). Lynch gets away with this because he believes there is something in the moment, so when a shot goes "quiet" (somehow cues us that it is no longer on cue) we're listening because he is. Lynchian horror is about finding out that something that should not be there has always been there: the danger came with the house. Tarantino delays, horrors are just about how the bullet or knife cut might come this second or this second or this second. His opened up moments are mostly just emptied ones, or anyway emptied of everything but movie-ness, which he loves. Props, sets, costumes, makeup, actors - his dead air resembles sitting around between takes. Getting to be in Hollywood with the people who were in this movie, in that movie, maybe. That's his vision, his prized state. Everyone is going to be so cool. But they never are, they just show all the signs of it. What they actually say is very dorky, what he himself might say or that some mere actor would. He must know this. This must be about bridging his own existence and the one he once sought escape in. It's, like, pathological.
Interests me also that Tarantino took up with the even more egregious Eli Roth, who'd started out as a Lynch protegé. Did Roth use it to get close to him? Roth, Tarantino and Lynch's daughter all swerve from Lynch into sadistic violence. It's understandable to think that this is his amazing secret because he does contain those moments, but they don't establish one pole of his world so much as its ragged edge - are both an explanation of why there is always some menace to the present's wandering away from our expectations and examples of how far beyond any human decorum such wanderings can and sometimes, somewhere do reach. Tarantino sees the ear in Blue Velvet and chops off an ear in Pulp Fiction, sees the hand in Wild at Heart and chops off a hand in Four Rooms. But in Lynch we don't zoom in on, if we even see, the chopping, we instead see an ear grow out of the ground, watch a hand hang from a trotting dog's mouth. The ripple does not stop at our skin, so we must be a part of whatever it is that's rippling.
I don't know if I'll get through this: the Lynch episodes are amazing and the non-Lynch episodes are terrible, and I've blown through 4.5 of the 6 Lynch hours already. This lopsidedness alone is why people remember the first season fondly, I suspect. 50 percent of the screentime in the first ten episodes is Lynch's, since he helms both the double-length ones.
He doubtless had some sort of hand in most of the rest, but except when actually on the tiller it isn't enough. The first Tim Hunter episode is well enough directed and the Mark Frost one is at least a string of fairly exciting season wrap-up / cliffhanger scenes, but neither can hide that this is a universe only Lynch can hold together. There's nothing really there except his vision. The show is his sandbox.
Makes one realize he is not at all a plot guy - his own screenplays are really all about the disintegration and then salvation of a character for no reason at all, or just because life is like that: much worse than you think and much better. Blue Velvet borrows some scaffolding from Rear Window and Vertigo, and as we learn from Inland Empire some scaffolding goddamn helps, but the type doesn't really matter. Frost was presumably going for a vaguely Saint Elsewhered Peyton Place - I think of Norma and Ed and Nadine as his character cluster, and maybe Horne. But the plot throughlines, the on-paper character arcs are mostly his too, I imagine. Lynch is invading a boring-ass network show the same way he invaded Hitchcock, or the Sailor and Lula books, or Dune for that matter. His contribution is additive, an opening out of scenes to accommodate what they normally leave out. What they exist to leave out, one could almost say. The first thirty minutes of the pilot don't show you what real grief is like, but they show you much more of it than tv had ever permitted. Lynch is all about how reality will writhe before you if you stay in your room. I guess strictly speaking he depicts mental illness, but it's a sort of mental illness we've all experienced, or brushed, in our dreams, deja vus, mistaken impressions, threatened moments, alone moments, moments where we feel alone in crowds, rages, sorrows, drunk or drugged states, experiences with music, with art, when we're injured, when we've made strange or unclear connections, when the world eludes our predictions so much that we suspect a deity or conspiracy, when we're in love. When life itself becomes personal, the aspect of art that motion cameras would seem least fit to convey, is all he cares about.
Very interesting thinking about that in relation to Tarantino, whose bitter rejection of Fire Walk With Me clarifies that Lynch is his true master. Lynch pulls scenes away from both plot-furthering and character-establishing moments, to which the nature of screenwriting usually binds them extremely tightly, except where indulgence of some basic satisfaction's permitted (voyeurism, violence, romance, jokes, spectacles). Lynch gets away with this because he believes there is something in the moment, so when a shot goes "quiet" (somehow cues us that it is no longer on cue) we're listening because he is. Lynchian horror is about finding out that something that should not be there has always been there: the danger came with the house. Tarantino delays, horrors are just about how the bullet or knife cut might come this second or this second or this second. His opened up moments are mostly just emptied ones, or anyway emptied of everything but movie-ness, which he loves. Props, sets, costumes, makeup, actors - his dead air resembles sitting around between takes. Getting to be in Hollywood with the people who were in this movie, in that movie, maybe. That's his vision, his prized state. Everyone is going to be so cool. But they never are, they just show all the signs of it. What they actually say is very dorky, what he himself might say or that some mere actor would. He must know this. This must be about bridging his own existence and the one he once sought escape in. It's, like, pathological.
Interests me also that Tarantino took up with the even more egregious Eli Roth, who'd started out as a Lynch protegé. Did Roth use it to get close to him? Roth, Tarantino and Lynch's daughter all swerve from Lynch into sadistic violence. It's understandable to think that this is his amazing secret because he does contain those moments, but they don't establish one pole of his world so much as its ragged edge - are both an explanation of why there is always some menace to the present's wandering away from our expectations and examples of how far beyond any human decorum such wanderings can and sometimes, somewhere do reach. Tarantino sees the ear in Blue Velvet and chops off an ear in Pulp Fiction, sees the hand in Wild at Heart and chops off a hand in Four Rooms. But in Lynch we don't zoom in on, if we even see, the chopping, we instead see an ear grow out of the ground, watch a hand hang from a trotting dog's mouth. The ripple does not stop at our skin, so we must be a part of whatever it is that's rippling.
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no subject
Date: 2017-01-27 06:17 pm (UTC)May have asked this before: are you hopeful about the new episodes?
no subject
Date: 2017-01-27 06:48 pm (UTC)2. Not entirely written by Lynch, thus scaffolded.
3. Long-gestated scripts.
4. No real network interference.
5. A core audience mostly wishing to be challenged.
6. TV quality ante raised considerably.
7. Lots of time and money to film it, sounds like.
8. Opportunity to correct something marred in the past.
9. Directed nothing in years so must think this his legacy.
All good signs. Hopefully enough to overcome relaunch necrosis.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-28 05:23 pm (UTC)