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Feb. 15th, 2017 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionTwin Peaks 2.22
When I first saw Mulholland Drive I watched it wrong. I thought after the blue box was opened that people started switching bodies. But this was both wrong and right - the roles of the three leads do shift, and not just because Watts has tried to alter them in her fantasy, but because those are the roles we will all inhabit. Which is why we forgive her. We too have been jealous and alone and desperate and done what we later regretted and tried to forget it and failed. Lynch was saying this, the best thing anyone has ever said:
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce
And dost not know the garment from the man.
Every Harlot was a virgin once,
Nor can'st thou ever change Kate into Nan.
States come and go. Persons persist.
2.22 is sinister, but says this too. Adding, as Lynch always adds, that our face can freeze that way, alas. But frozen or no, we are still what we were.
The zigzag pattern of the floor seems related to how the rooms connect - seems something like the chess knight jump, too, proportionately. A leap. Time, one assumes, as compared to the linearity of space (the special property, and special limitation, of the knight is highlighted in a scene earlier in S2).
In Red Room 1 the dwarf says he will be different the next time he sees him. Dwarf 2 in Room 2. The bad dwarf, who seems to be identified with Earle.
The coffee proves that states of matter are inconsistent here, so an attempt to teach that minds can shift without changing. Thus that the good aren't always good, but also the bad aren't always bad. Leland and Laura show that people can be both made bad (by Bob, by Leland/Bob) while not being essentially bad. Bob tells Earle he cannot ask for Cooper's soul. The giant's revealing he is also the old man may be pointing out something other than the mere plot fact that the old man is his usual host: one's soul can be both one's self and not, is a different state of it. Maddy's appearance suggests how Laura would have been if Bob had not come. We are our own doppelgängers.
The "Wrong way" warning. How Venus de Milo disappears when he goes back one too many times. Go too far and you can't go back. But that doesn't mean you're destroyed, though you may go missing for twenty-five years.
Catherine was different once, Ben was different once, Leland was different once, and all loved or once did (the music and gum from Leland's childhood). Josie and Laura are clearly both bad and good, thus both dangerous and endangered. Are struggling in the Black Lodge, in effect. Josie-in-the-table may counterpoint Laura's final transformation in FWWM.
The Venus de Milo ... sometimes its arms bend backwards, when we mentally complete it? Venus is both love and the beloved, so love can be both heaven or hell, embracing one or withholding that embrace?
But love is gone forever if we go too far. Which is not a matter of just deserts because the "we" in question is our state, not us. The soul is not destroyed if our courage is imperfect - it is lost. And our courage is not under our control, but depends on what has threatened us. Laura has become a vampire, here, which is essentially what she was to Bobby and almost was to Donna and James, proving that the loss of one we love or our betrayal by her can crack our courage. How does this differ from Christianity? Because it says we are not to blame. We react to the spectacle of our lives, after which the memory of that reaction becomes another spectacle. At last can become a fixed one, or one preventing clear sight of the present. The Horne and other scenes in this episode don't just detonate the rest of the plot and character strands, they relate them to the main theme. Shelley and Bobby repeat their initial scene together because they have not learned anything, Ben tries to make things better but makes them worse from lack of practice being good, Richard blows up because of the greed that his his soul had frozen into.
The memory of Caroline makes Cooper try to sacrifice his soul for Annie. It doesn't work, but it does change his state. What reality could this surreal event reflect? She won the pageant that he asked her to enter. Something about her beauty creating possessiveness, or jealousy, or dismissal of the rest of her? Or self-sabotaging disbelief that their love will work out because of the ill-fated earlier relationship with someone she's loved for resembling? Sort of doesn't matter which - enough real life analogues hover near.
Does he make a mistake? Going back too many times? Forgetting which woman is which? Or does he just watch mistakes occurring inside him. Imagine how the Christian system would appear if only states sinned or did good but the passenger, the body or some other sighted presence inside it, were punished for those sins, rewarded for those deeds. There is something we more essentially are, and if we ever get to see this we are blessed, and when we cannot we are cursed. This is Lynch's spectacle of pity. Life is the movie beyond genre, where the worst horrors are always possible but so is everything else.
God appears and God is light
To those who dwell in Endless Night
But does a human form display
To those who live in realms of Day
If we had free will we would freely will well. The one constraint is not knowing - not having seen or not being able to remember what we saw. When we suffer the answer to our suffering seems to be whatever unknown thing there is which might transform our state of abandonment and confusion entirely. When we do not we do not need to change, need no afterlife, no higher being, need only be ourselves. The White Lodge is the community of souls solid enough to be able to help others - agents, policemen, doctors, listeners, friends ... on their better days. The dream house. The Black Lodge is where we strive to find it, we who are lodged within what blocks that light that lets us see our hands and faces.
The show quotes Shakespeare, Shelley, Yeats and Frost but never Blake, as I recall. But Lynch is clearly his direct disciple. Blake was so into his entities and hierarchies and noplaces that he neglected to ever staple them to a recognizable earth, though. He forgot to tell stories about people. That left quite an opening, and when Lynch found it he realized that the key to dramatizing Blake was thinking of the present moment as a box out of which (or behind which, from out of the corners of which) anything might come. A box that is a stage, a television set, a building, a hotel room, the cone of a flashlight, a human head. Blake suggests there is some work where, once completed, we will see only what we need - the true suffering will vanish from the world. Lynch's lingering Christian qualities - curiously - save him from Blake's salvific obsession, as they put heaven past death. Meaning nothing saves us in this life except what we do when we can see, which stops as soon as we can't: red light, green light. Sometimes the trees are still, sometimes they blow about in the wind, sometimes they burn.
Hard to overstate this: you need an art that can acknowledge both the best and the worst feelings, the best and worst events, or your art is wrong. It will leave the real and become just a thought and not a moment, or will provide a moment that is a lie, or at most a true moment that is maimed or stuck. Art is at last just a lens. Lynch picked one and adjusted it and now just shows us what he sees. His many seemingly throwaway bits are the bits that, thrown away, leave one with nothing. Messages must come from the grain, at worst the manner of assembly, of minute particulars of the actual.
Among filmmakers, Spielberg and Truffaut have this naively, Herzog has it madly, Hitchcock cruelly, Tarkovsky mystically, Polanski darkly. Lynch both knows what Bergman and Kurosawa knew and wishes us to know how one comes to know that. I need to stop thinking of him as a flake - he's to them as Stevens is to Shelley, someone trying to show how to be Shelley without ceasing from being Shelley to do it. Art may look a lot like the everyday, but the hallway between them is nothing like either, since made of both. Bending, folding, mixing, doubling, emptying, replacing are needed.
And improbable amounts of money and others' time, for Lynch. Most amazing thing about him is how he salvages the series in 2.22 and in the movie, salvages the Mulholland Drive pilot in the film. He can do this because he was already adapting, cherry-picking. What in life fits Blake while staying life? What in this jumbled mess of scenes no longer fitting what I pitched to ABC might fit what made me pitch it?
Quite a dude.
When I first saw Mulholland Drive I watched it wrong. I thought after the blue box was opened that people started switching bodies. But this was both wrong and right - the roles of the three leads do shift, and not just because Watts has tried to alter them in her fantasy, but because those are the roles we will all inhabit. Which is why we forgive her. We too have been jealous and alone and desperate and done what we later regretted and tried to forget it and failed. Lynch was saying this, the best thing anyone has ever said:
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce
And dost not know the garment from the man.
Every Harlot was a virgin once,
Nor can'st thou ever change Kate into Nan.
States come and go. Persons persist.
2.22 is sinister, but says this too. Adding, as Lynch always adds, that our face can freeze that way, alas. But frozen or no, we are still what we were.
The zigzag pattern of the floor seems related to how the rooms connect - seems something like the chess knight jump, too, proportionately. A leap. Time, one assumes, as compared to the linearity of space (the special property, and special limitation, of the knight is highlighted in a scene earlier in S2).
In Red Room 1 the dwarf says he will be different the next time he sees him. Dwarf 2 in Room 2. The bad dwarf, who seems to be identified with Earle.
The coffee proves that states of matter are inconsistent here, so an attempt to teach that minds can shift without changing. Thus that the good aren't always good, but also the bad aren't always bad. Leland and Laura show that people can be both made bad (by Bob, by Leland/Bob) while not being essentially bad. Bob tells Earle he cannot ask for Cooper's soul. The giant's revealing he is also the old man may be pointing out something other than the mere plot fact that the old man is his usual host: one's soul can be both one's self and not, is a different state of it. Maddy's appearance suggests how Laura would have been if Bob had not come. We are our own doppelgängers.
The "Wrong way" warning. How Venus de Milo disappears when he goes back one too many times. Go too far and you can't go back. But that doesn't mean you're destroyed, though you may go missing for twenty-five years.
Catherine was different once, Ben was different once, Leland was different once, and all loved or once did (the music and gum from Leland's childhood). Josie and Laura are clearly both bad and good, thus both dangerous and endangered. Are struggling in the Black Lodge, in effect. Josie-in-the-table may counterpoint Laura's final transformation in FWWM.
The Venus de Milo ... sometimes its arms bend backwards, when we mentally complete it? Venus is both love and the beloved, so love can be both heaven or hell, embracing one or withholding that embrace?
But love is gone forever if we go too far. Which is not a matter of just deserts because the "we" in question is our state, not us. The soul is not destroyed if our courage is imperfect - it is lost. And our courage is not under our control, but depends on what has threatened us. Laura has become a vampire, here, which is essentially what she was to Bobby and almost was to Donna and James, proving that the loss of one we love or our betrayal by her can crack our courage. How does this differ from Christianity? Because it says we are not to blame. We react to the spectacle of our lives, after which the memory of that reaction becomes another spectacle. At last can become a fixed one, or one preventing clear sight of the present. The Horne and other scenes in this episode don't just detonate the rest of the plot and character strands, they relate them to the main theme. Shelley and Bobby repeat their initial scene together because they have not learned anything, Ben tries to make things better but makes them worse from lack of practice being good, Richard blows up because of the greed that his his soul had frozen into.
The memory of Caroline makes Cooper try to sacrifice his soul for Annie. It doesn't work, but it does change his state. What reality could this surreal event reflect? She won the pageant that he asked her to enter. Something about her beauty creating possessiveness, or jealousy, or dismissal of the rest of her? Or self-sabotaging disbelief that their love will work out because of the ill-fated earlier relationship with someone she's loved for resembling? Sort of doesn't matter which - enough real life analogues hover near.
Does he make a mistake? Going back too many times? Forgetting which woman is which? Or does he just watch mistakes occurring inside him. Imagine how the Christian system would appear if only states sinned or did good but the passenger, the body or some other sighted presence inside it, were punished for those sins, rewarded for those deeds. There is something we more essentially are, and if we ever get to see this we are blessed, and when we cannot we are cursed. This is Lynch's spectacle of pity. Life is the movie beyond genre, where the worst horrors are always possible but so is everything else.
God appears and God is light
To those who dwell in Endless Night
But does a human form display
To those who live in realms of Day
If we had free will we would freely will well. The one constraint is not knowing - not having seen or not being able to remember what we saw. When we suffer the answer to our suffering seems to be whatever unknown thing there is which might transform our state of abandonment and confusion entirely. When we do not we do not need to change, need no afterlife, no higher being, need only be ourselves. The White Lodge is the community of souls solid enough to be able to help others - agents, policemen, doctors, listeners, friends ... on their better days. The dream house. The Black Lodge is where we strive to find it, we who are lodged within what blocks that light that lets us see our hands and faces.
The show quotes Shakespeare, Shelley, Yeats and Frost but never Blake, as I recall. But Lynch is clearly his direct disciple. Blake was so into his entities and hierarchies and noplaces that he neglected to ever staple them to a recognizable earth, though. He forgot to tell stories about people. That left quite an opening, and when Lynch found it he realized that the key to dramatizing Blake was thinking of the present moment as a box out of which (or behind which, from out of the corners of which) anything might come. A box that is a stage, a television set, a building, a hotel room, the cone of a flashlight, a human head. Blake suggests there is some work where, once completed, we will see only what we need - the true suffering will vanish from the world. Lynch's lingering Christian qualities - curiously - save him from Blake's salvific obsession, as they put heaven past death. Meaning nothing saves us in this life except what we do when we can see, which stops as soon as we can't: red light, green light. Sometimes the trees are still, sometimes they blow about in the wind, sometimes they burn.
Hard to overstate this: you need an art that can acknowledge both the best and the worst feelings, the best and worst events, or your art is wrong. It will leave the real and become just a thought and not a moment, or will provide a moment that is a lie, or at most a true moment that is maimed or stuck. Art is at last just a lens. Lynch picked one and adjusted it and now just shows us what he sees. His many seemingly throwaway bits are the bits that, thrown away, leave one with nothing. Messages must come from the grain, at worst the manner of assembly, of minute particulars of the actual.
Among filmmakers, Spielberg and Truffaut have this naively, Herzog has it madly, Hitchcock cruelly, Tarkovsky mystically, Polanski darkly. Lynch both knows what Bergman and Kurosawa knew and wishes us to know how one comes to know that. I need to stop thinking of him as a flake - he's to them as Stevens is to Shelley, someone trying to show how to be Shelley without ceasing from being Shelley to do it. Art may look a lot like the everyday, but the hallway between them is nothing like either, since made of both. Bending, folding, mixing, doubling, emptying, replacing are needed.
And improbable amounts of money and others' time, for Lynch. Most amazing thing about him is how he salvages the series in 2.22 and in the movie, salvages the Mulholland Drive pilot in the film. He can do this because he was already adapting, cherry-picking. What in life fits Blake while staying life? What in this jumbled mess of scenes no longer fitting what I pitched to ABC might fit what made me pitch it?
Quite a dude.
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no subject
Date: 2017-02-15 07:15 pm (UTC)This is just amazing. Wow.
no subject
Date: 2017-02-18 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-19 02:05 am (UTC)