(no subject)
Twin Peaks 3.8
Took a Film/English class way back in the day taught by a professor who summarized the argument of her recent book when teaching Cabaret, which was that each new iteration of the Bowles story (Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera (play), I Am a Camera (film), Cabaret (musical?), Cabaret (film)) came closer to representing Sally Bowles as an instance of unregulated female sexuality and unregulated female sexuality as the root cause of Nazism.
I don't know that that's true except in the very broad sense that Broadway and Hollywood cater to less enlightened audiences than Isherwood's readership. I.e. probably Cabaret's been made into a ballet by this point, somewhere or other, and probably in that ballet Sally Bowles is not blamed for Hitler, as creators and viewers of ballets nowadays aren't really on that page. The popular mind of a few decades ago probably didn't need Nazis and naughty ladies tied together to disapprove of either, anyway, so anything associating them in Fosse's film is likely gratuitous, more the result of his personal demons than tractor-beam-like audience demand.
But her argument interested me because it made me think about what happens with copies of copies, how increasingly they become platonic products (or even pictures) of the copying machine. How this works with sequels and remakes, and especially informs the retconning phenomenon. Lynch is responding to people's responses to his story more than to his own story ... and had already been doing that in the movie, and presumably at every earlier point since clearly the show was written in stages. There are cracks, and the more of these there are the more chances extraauthorial forces like the culture at large, precursor texts, and/or the unexamined grain of the chosen premise have to push in and wrest control.
Not that Lynch is out of control here, or anyway more so than he ever is, but I don't think Laura Palmer was supposed to be a counterforce to a nuclear Bob breathed forth by electric Elohim when she first showed up dead. She's become more of a symbol over time, the way pictures become words. This can be dangerous - one reason shows eventually die is that the visual is crowded out by the semantic. The madness of the presentation distracts from the fact that the premise of the show is being explained much more clearly than Lynch and Frost were likely able to explain it to one another in 1990. Copies of copies eventually high-contrast themselves into Manicheanism, one could say, but Twin Peaks was already a copy (a fused copy of Peyton Place, of The Fugitive, of Rebel Without a Cause, of Vertigo) that was already bringing that phenomenon out. It's not so much an impression of midcentury America created by watching too many of its movies as a record of what changes, what new or ancient thing emerges, as such an impression develops. Lynch understands the revising forces because he is one himself. He's steered into the spin to regain control.
The revised, overdeveloped version of the story is that the original nuclear explosion had delayed effects on the American psyche, which gradually became less able to believe in human goodness, more able to believe that at our core we have, or are, destructive and self-destructive appetites. What seemed like it had been a world of either no or geologically slow change turned out to have secretly been something writhing, in free fall, on fire.
The giant's breath accepts and blesses this jarring atomic revelation, shows that the fires that stars are are themselves made of stars. Fire disrupts the settled, black and white world, seems to threaten to destroy its sorts of good (the quiet '30s theater, ball gown, social norms, innocence), until its own sort of good is recognized. The black-faced hobo sorts are ghosts because they're fears. "Got a light" refers to the fire inside - the one that has burned these people out, that they seek to set in others to burn them too - but the repeated question highlights the fact that no one is giving a light to this sort of person the way they once might have. The appearances of the white horse on the show, then, are supposed to accompany accesses of belief in the innocence of others, of ourselves, of life. The lesson of Laura is the innocence of the guilty. No Kate is ever the Nan she seems to be. Fire Walk With Me's point was that the apparently innocent but secretly guilty prom queen was double-secretly innocent. Just like fire is.
The nuclear montage was about that same fact - the energy released by the split atom is the seething ocean, the melee of radio waves, the infusion of ink, the Brownian pinball of bubbles, the fall of snow and of rain, the rush of blood platelets, the race of sperm. It's what matter had always been anyway, just at a speed and on a scale not yet recognized. Lynch's visual equivalent of DJ-scratching seems to almost be a literalizing misreading of Hamlet's "time is out of joint," and this phenomenon is what has knocked it out.
What's essential to the story of 1990 Twin Peaks, Lynch is saying, IS this other one: this is what we in fact liked about it, what connected the apparently disparate matters of its decades-bridging aesthetic, multidimensional Neoplatonic chess, baseline fusion of soap opera and murder mystery, firm conviction that the songs sung by musicians in this sort of town must be part of its story. Style is itself allegory.
Not that he even means the post-Nuclear thing. But he needs an origin point for the moment when settled becomes jostled. For our sense that there was such a moment behind, if never quite among, those that tick. There are people in the walls, in Lynch's world, or semi-people, because the happenings behind our own walls are still made of what we're made of. Heaven and hell are already allegories, was the possibly inadvertant lesson of Dante, Lynch's ultimate precursor (obviously via Spenser then Blake/Shelley then Kafka then Fellini/Bergman etc.). Eraserhead is basically a sinister version of Inside Out, and Twin Peaks: The Return is going full Eraserhead.
Took a Film/English class way back in the day taught by a professor who summarized the argument of her recent book when teaching Cabaret, which was that each new iteration of the Bowles story (Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera (play), I Am a Camera (film), Cabaret (musical?), Cabaret (film)) came closer to representing Sally Bowles as an instance of unregulated female sexuality and unregulated female sexuality as the root cause of Nazism.
I don't know that that's true except in the very broad sense that Broadway and Hollywood cater to less enlightened audiences than Isherwood's readership. I.e. probably Cabaret's been made into a ballet by this point, somewhere or other, and probably in that ballet Sally Bowles is not blamed for Hitler, as creators and viewers of ballets nowadays aren't really on that page. The popular mind of a few decades ago probably didn't need Nazis and naughty ladies tied together to disapprove of either, anyway, so anything associating them in Fosse's film is likely gratuitous, more the result of his personal demons than tractor-beam-like audience demand.
But her argument interested me because it made me think about what happens with copies of copies, how increasingly they become platonic products (or even pictures) of the copying machine. How this works with sequels and remakes, and especially informs the retconning phenomenon. Lynch is responding to people's responses to his story more than to his own story ... and had already been doing that in the movie, and presumably at every earlier point since clearly the show was written in stages. There are cracks, and the more of these there are the more chances extraauthorial forces like the culture at large, precursor texts, and/or the unexamined grain of the chosen premise have to push in and wrest control.
Not that Lynch is out of control here, or anyway more so than he ever is, but I don't think Laura Palmer was supposed to be a counterforce to a nuclear Bob breathed forth by electric Elohim when she first showed up dead. She's become more of a symbol over time, the way pictures become words. This can be dangerous - one reason shows eventually die is that the visual is crowded out by the semantic. The madness of the presentation distracts from the fact that the premise of the show is being explained much more clearly than Lynch and Frost were likely able to explain it to one another in 1990. Copies of copies eventually high-contrast themselves into Manicheanism, one could say, but Twin Peaks was already a copy (a fused copy of Peyton Place, of The Fugitive, of Rebel Without a Cause, of Vertigo) that was already bringing that phenomenon out. It's not so much an impression of midcentury America created by watching too many of its movies as a record of what changes, what new or ancient thing emerges, as such an impression develops. Lynch understands the revising forces because he is one himself. He's steered into the spin to regain control.
The revised, overdeveloped version of the story is that the original nuclear explosion had delayed effects on the American psyche, which gradually became less able to believe in human goodness, more able to believe that at our core we have, or are, destructive and self-destructive appetites. What seemed like it had been a world of either no or geologically slow change turned out to have secretly been something writhing, in free fall, on fire.
The giant's breath accepts and blesses this jarring atomic revelation, shows that the fires that stars are are themselves made of stars. Fire disrupts the settled, black and white world, seems to threaten to destroy its sorts of good (the quiet '30s theater, ball gown, social norms, innocence), until its own sort of good is recognized. The black-faced hobo sorts are ghosts because they're fears. "Got a light" refers to the fire inside - the one that has burned these people out, that they seek to set in others to burn them too - but the repeated question highlights the fact that no one is giving a light to this sort of person the way they once might have. The appearances of the white horse on the show, then, are supposed to accompany accesses of belief in the innocence of others, of ourselves, of life. The lesson of Laura is the innocence of the guilty. No Kate is ever the Nan she seems to be. Fire Walk With Me's point was that the apparently innocent but secretly guilty prom queen was double-secretly innocent. Just like fire is.
The nuclear montage was about that same fact - the energy released by the split atom is the seething ocean, the melee of radio waves, the infusion of ink, the Brownian pinball of bubbles, the fall of snow and of rain, the rush of blood platelets, the race of sperm. It's what matter had always been anyway, just at a speed and on a scale not yet recognized. Lynch's visual equivalent of DJ-scratching seems to almost be a literalizing misreading of Hamlet's "time is out of joint," and this phenomenon is what has knocked it out.
What's essential to the story of 1990 Twin Peaks, Lynch is saying, IS this other one: this is what we in fact liked about it, what connected the apparently disparate matters of its decades-bridging aesthetic, multidimensional Neoplatonic chess, baseline fusion of soap opera and murder mystery, firm conviction that the songs sung by musicians in this sort of town must be part of its story. Style is itself allegory.
Not that he even means the post-Nuclear thing. But he needs an origin point for the moment when settled becomes jostled. For our sense that there was such a moment behind, if never quite among, those that tick. There are people in the walls, in Lynch's world, or semi-people, because the happenings behind our own walls are still made of what we're made of. Heaven and hell are already allegories, was the possibly inadvertant lesson of Dante, Lynch's ultimate precursor (obviously via Spenser then Blake/Shelley then Kafka then Fellini/Bergman etc.). Eraserhead is basically a sinister version of Inside Out, and Twin Peaks: The Return is going full Eraserhead.