losthighway wrote: Mon Nov 22, 2021 3:19 pm

biscuitdough wrote: Mon Nov 22, 2021 9:17 am But he’s steadily become a crap filmmaker despite those waffles. With the exception of The Straight Story, which is unremarkable, everything he does and has done for decades is unfinished and has a “fuck it, it’s good enough”

I suppose that's a challenge to making "It means what you want", dream logic films. The traditional tropes of story arc, character development, pacing and resolution aren't always there to drive decision making. I imagine it's more like making an abstract painting where the already challenging reach for "done" is made even more abstract and intuition-driven.

His other surreal works lack that. Lynch gives up on having a world or at least a scenario with its own hidden laws and meanings, and starts tossing in random stuff. The glove and the meat tree in The Return are probably the best examples of this.

biscuitdough wrote: Mon Nov 22, 2021 9:17 am I have nostalgia for them as an early exposure to weirdness in cinema, and still consider his Dune, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Elephant Man to be good films. But he’s steadily become a crap filmmaker despite those waffles. With the exception of The Straight Story, which is unremarkable, everything he does and has done for decades is unfinished and has a “fuck it, it’s good enough” vibe, going back to Fire Walk With Me and Wild At Heart.

Anthony Flack wrote: Fri Dec 03, 2021 4:58 pm

His other surreal works lack that. Lynch gives up on having a world or at least a scenario with its own hidden laws and meanings, and starts tossing in random stuff. The glove and the meat tree in The Return are probably the best examples of this.

So Mark Frost has got this thing about creating an all-American mythology which is free from all the usual influences from European mythology. Twin Peaks is basically Blue Velvet with supernatural elements, and Frost has got this whole intricate mythos going on connecting all the supernatural elements together. That seems to be his big thing. I get the feeling that a lot of the weirdest stuff is actually just a literal visual depiction of weird source material from Frost and trying to find ways to depict the uncanny while avoiding cliches (or, it may be that a certain actor lost his marbles and started calling you a pedophile and had to be replaced by a meat tree).

While Mark Frost was busy weaving the hidden laws and meanings of his American supernatural mythos, Lynch was weaving in the story of his own life in art. I think pretty much everything he's ever done is referenced in The Return somewhere - he even draws a cartoon at one point. That sort of thing might be regarded as self-indulgent, except that it was such a constant subtext I think it should be understood as a major theme. This is David Lynch doing his own career retrospective.

It's unusual because it's not an abstract narrative theme, it is straight-up personal. But it wasn't a purely narcissistic exercise, a lot of it was David Lynch expressing heartfelt gratitude to his dear friends, many of whom were right at the very end of their lives. When we see Harry Dean Stanton playing Red River Valley on the guitar, it's not just his character in the story we see, it's Lynch's portrait of Harry Dean Stanton. The Log Lady's dying words also stand for Catherine Coulson's. An awful lot of Twin Peaks: The Return concerns the real deaths of Lynch's real friends.

On the other hand I also thought he wasn't above giving a little fuck you to Tarantino along the way, either. He was certainly playing through the fourth wall a LOT. Referencing things outside the frame of the story. Maybe that doesn't work for everyone but the sincerity of the tributes to his collaborators and friends was one of the more touching aspects of it for me. It certainly makes for a unique piece of work.