The first season of Twin Peaks is one of the greatest things that has ever been on TV. The second season, as everyone says, wasn’t nearly as good.
There’s also a movie version that was released in Europe that wraps the story up in one film with a different ending. It’s on the DVD’s.
As for other shows, Six Feet Under is one of my favorites.
I think your interpretation is very valid, but I doubt it was the one Lynch intended. David Lynch does quite literally believe in a sort of magic: David Lynch - Wikipedia
While there’s no direct connection between TM and the whole supernatural backstory to Twin Peaks, Lynch does believe there exist mysterious unexplained forces in the universe that affects the moral condition and behavior of humans.
He does usually leave the more supernatural or surrealistic elements of his work ambiguous, but I think that’s more to do with his conception of the cosmos as a mysterious place than being because he wants those elements to serve as a parable or metaphor of a materialist world. The ambiguity makes it possible to interpret his work in that light, but I don’t think that’s what Lynch himself is intending.
If you do like it, good news: That show you like is going to come back in style.
They’re spies of some sort for the Black Lodge.
It’s pretty apparent that when writing the first series Lynch and Frost had no clear backstory that explained the depicted events. It was all meant to be completely mystifying and literally inexplicable.
It was a TV series version of “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” A shaggy dog story.
Personally I thought the first series was fantastic. Compelling characters, amusing scenarios etc and it was best if you just let that flow over you without troubling yourself too much about whether any of it actually made sense.
Lynch has confirmed he never meant to reveal who killed Laura Palmer, and he was pressured into doing so by ABC when ratings began to fall. This meant Lynch had to cobble together a backstory that never existed and it shows.
Also, extremely-weird-but-cool-and-entertaining is hard to do. Lynch has a real knack for it but you can tell (IMHO) that in the second series the writers were trying desperately for that weirdness factor but were instead just achieving clunky and uncomfortable.
The series as a whole is sort of like being shown a movie set by a an experienced guide who allows you only to see it from afar and it seems delightful and mystifying and wildly entertaining. But instead of leaving it at that, instead the guide’s boss insists on him showing you the set up close, at which point you realise its a cobbled together pile of painted cloth and hastily nailed together two by fours.
In short, the first series gave me some of my most enthralled and delighted TV watching moments, but then it just became a matter of hanging in there as it all went to shit, hoping in vain that the series would come up with more of those moments.
I’m kinda hoping that Lynch and Frost will give the upcoming re-boot their full attention and that the producers will give them some freedom and it will be good. But I have to say it’s a very rare thing to be able to go back and re-create something like that.
I liked it initially but gave up around the reveal of the killer. I’d been excited that Lynch got a series. I knew what I was getting at the start. As the series continued, I started to feel like he’d given up ambiguous for cryptic, incoherent and blatantly contradictory. I wasn’t sure if it was the pressures of TV versus film or an intentional thing. I knew I’d had enough.
Now I see in this thread the idea that Firewalk tied it together. Great. Now I’m tempted again. I also worry I’m going to lose the relatively fond memories of the start if I get annoyed again. Fool me once…
Maybe I’ll ease in to it by revisiting Blue Velvet first. It’s been years since I saw that.
I think muddling through the second half of season 2 is worth it for the final episode, which I’d probably nominate for the best part of Twin Peaks. It just devolves into pure surrealism.
The Civil War delusions were for me the dreariest aspect of season 2. That and flat-affect James riding his motorcycle up and down the state routes to the tune of slow 1950s guitar arpeggios—way too much footage devoted to too little. It was hard for me to appreciate the sinister intrigue of Windom Earle; I don’t know why, but it wasn’t as gripping as it was supposed to be. Nadine’s return to high school was basically filler, Lucy’s paternity issues didn’t amount to much, and Catherine’s yellowface drag was just embarrassing. Cole’s constant deaf-guy hollering got old really fast.
But apart from those lackluster aspects, I thought Season 2 was still pretty entertaining. The general tone of the thing was improved once Annie showed up for the final episodes. Oh, by the way:
How’s Annie?
If you guys never watched it, you might want to watch the Twin Peaks episode of Pysch. They brought back a good chunk of the cast (one or two were on the show to begin with), but put them all in different roles and did a Twin Peaks themed episode. It was interesting in that if you’ve seen Twin Peaks, you could follow right along, if you’ve never watched the show, it totally followed the Pysch storyline so you wouldn’t even know they were doing anything out of the ordinary.
Let’s not forget to praise Angelo Badalamenti for the best music ever in the history of television.
It was such a great ride, so many wonderful moments. Nadine coming to life after her suicide attempt and breaking into a high school cheer. The creepy kid doing a bit of magic with creamed corn. The giant saying “It…is…happening…again”. Leland singing “Mairsy Doats” after his hair turns white. Ronette having the flashback on her hospital bed. Still in my opinion, THE groundbreaking show in history.
Yeah, the finale is one of the truly great episodes in television history. I watched it when it aired and was freaked out. I was 12 years old and remember it well.
Princhester, your post sums it up pretty good.
The show had all these cool and clever and mysterious bits (why WAS there a fish in the percolator?), and while they were floating out there, we the audience were intrigued. We wanted it all to fit together somehow. We knew it would make sense eventually.
But then, it never did. And then we realized that there never was a “there” there. And we feel cheated. I am reluctant to rewatch it, because now I’ll know right away that these clever clues never went anywhere. Best to leave my fond memories intact. So I can still go around quoting “newshoes” or “sometimes my arms bend back” and still enjoy them.
I have the exact same opinion of The X-Files. It is because of getting “burned” by both of these shows that I never watched Lost. I didn’t think they had a plan, and I didn’t want to spend all the time watching and have no payoff.
What do people here think of Mulholland Drive? I like the movie, it definitely has the Lynchian mindset. Mysteries and strange people, weird scenes. And it more or less works.
But it was conceived as a TV series. Lynch had to do some serious work to get a (reasonably) coherent final product. So what would have happened if it had been a series? Since it could not have had the fight club ending where the two women are the same person and the whole thing is a dying fantasy of the main character what could it have done? It likely would have ended up more muddled than TP.
MD might very well be my favorite movie, or at least it’s in a category by itself that does what it does better than anything I know. I think it works so brilliantly on so many levels that I’m just simply in awe of how David Lynch accomplished it. No idea how it would have worked as a series, but I tend to think it would have been a lot tighter than TP simply because I think Lynch himself got better. And Mulholland Drive specifically was a more evolved expression of the same conceptual idea in Lost Highway.
Did anyone here crack Inland Empire? Because I sure didn’t 
Well, if Mulholland Drive was a TV series, the only redeeming scene wouldn’t have made it to the screen. 
Agree. Second season got really rough after the killer’s reveal, but even before the finale it picked up a little of its old steam once they got off the ridiculous James storyline and started the Windom Earl stuff.
Did you catch David Duchovny?
Have you ever seen the video about how he composed Laura Palmer’s theme? It’s amazing.
I actually remember him from that show before X-files. I didn’t really put it together until…oh…about 15 years later. I remember his character, but didn’t realize it was him since I didn’t rewatch Twin Peaks until 2005-2006 or so.
So tell me Mahaloth, was that AH-HA! moment a kick in the head for you as it was for me?
I took a break from the cinema after Inland Empire, because realistically nothing is going to top that. It felt like putting down King Lear or something - just pointless to read any more plays after it.
Loved Twin Peaks, even the latter series - was quite young at the time, though, so less aware of the weak spots. The ensemble cast of sycamores, oaks and beech trees is classic Lynch - he can get great performances out of actors outside the mainstream of ‘good acting’, and effective performances out of some pretty limited players.
Prob the Elephant man the only time he’s worked with A-grade acting?