TWIN PEAKS--THE RETURN.

After 18 episodes of the new TWIN PEAKS, I have to say that I was underwhelmed. I went into the series with an open mind and knowing that Lynch was not going to tell a traditional story in a traditionally cinematic way. And on that I was right. However, while I was hoping to see something that I would find both artistically pleasing and challenging, I was left with a true mess--a situation in which I was actually hoping that an outside hand had stepped in and filed down the hard edges of Lynch's unsettling vision. 

To give you an example of this--I was thinking that I would like to see a work that might challenge me the way MULLHOLLAND DRIVE did, but without the confusing excesses of INLAND EMPIRE.

That's really about the gist of what I want to say about this series. I'm glad it was produced and I'm happy that a lot of my friends got a big kick out of it, but ultimately I did not enjoy it and I am not completely happy that I invested so much of my leisure time watching it. Maybe that will change, later. There have been works by artists that I initially disliked and later came to enjoy. But I rather doubt that will ever happen with this (hopefully) final series of TWIN PEAKS. 

Lynch does not tell linear stories. Also, he is obsessed with the idea of alternate reality and enjoys plucking at the threads of reality and our perception of consciousness. He is the cinematic equivalent of a jazz musician. He gives you glimpses of notes that your square ass can follow, and then intersperses those lines of notes with a litany of discordant melodies.  Lynch has given us inconceivable puzzles, but he has also failed to give us the keys to solving them. If there is meaning in the stories that he has chosen to tell the past few years, then the explanations for them reside only with him, and he isn't willing to share the answers within the body of those works. He even has told us as much.

You either get it, or you don't.

I get it...but just as I'm not a big jazz fan, I have grown weary of Lynch's shtick. I just doesn't work for me.

The ending was a moment of classic horror, though. I'll give it that much.

"My cow is not pretty, but it's pretty to me."-- David Lych.

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It is better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for someone else." -- David Lynch.

The author of the confusion.

The puppet.

Flying!

When I was a kid I used to dream of flying. In those dreams I'd just leap up and go flying. I'd be up there in the clouds looking down on the street where I lived, on the school I attended, on the house where I lived. All alone up there above it all.

Over the years I would ask other kids if they dreamed of flying. I thought maybe it was because of all of those superhero comics I read. But, no, just about every other kid I asked also had dreams that they could fly, whether they read comics or not.

When I ask women if they had such dreams, they usually look at me funny. "Are you daft?" So I decided to look that up and found that for some reason girls (and women) don't dream that they can fly. It is supposed that it has something to do with self-esteem issues and male-dominated society. That sounds reasonable, but it also may have something to do with the the idea that there are fundamental differences between male and female psyches. I can only shrug. I don't know such stuff.

As I got older I began to dream less and less of flying. I will assume here that as the realities of life are loaded onto adult shoulders one by one, the less likely even the dreaming mind can cut loose enough of those burdens to allow a man to believe he can fly. Not even in dreams. Finally, sometime in my early 20s I stopped having such dreams. They no longer came to me.

However...there are still similar dreams for me. I have them to this very day. Instead of flying, I dream that I can jump. Higher than anyone else. Generally I'll find myself in a building with a vast ceiling twenty or thirty or even one hundred feet high. And I'll brace myself, then bend my knees, and jump high enough to reach up and brush that ceiling with my hands.

No more open skies leading up to space, now. Instead I am greeted by ceilings--but sometimes those ceilings are so high that it's almost like the sky, and I can scrape them with my fingertips. Perhaps there's still hope for me in my old age, I reckon.

Mort Weisnger Superman stories! Every kid's dream!

Light fantasy.


Now it's dark.