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Twin Peaks
1990 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Mark Frost, David Lynch
The body of Laura Palmer is washed up on a beach near the small Washington state town of Twin Peaks. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is called in to investigate her strange demise only to uncover a web of mystery that ultimately leads him deep into the heart of the surrounding woodland and his very own soul.
37 positive7 negative6 mixed47 neutralfrom 97 commenters
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104 comments on Hacker News
I’m of a similar opinion, Lynch created a better depiction of it in twin peaks season 3.
He absolutely was, quite famously. He'd be writing the episodes in the diner week-to-week.
For me it's the pattern for a lot of shows that went off the rails: starts with a strong premise and setting, but gets an indefinite run so the writer(s) can't actually terminate any story arcs and end up floundering badly. It got dramatically better again when he had to wrap it up.
Some shows start off in that state (like Lost - I was familiar enough with the pattern then to avoid getting sucked into that one); some drift into it (Twin Peaks and BSG at least). It usually takes getting cancelled to pull them out of it, which is really sad.
Funnily enough there's a Northern Exposure episode with a brief Twin Peaks parody. I think it was Russian Flu in season one. Joel and Elaine are on a trip, and they're shown around an area with a waterfall and viewing platform, like The Great Northern Hotel/White Tail Falls.
The scene is a pretty funny Twin Peaks parody, with music and visuals inspired by Twin Peaks, and includes a joke about seeing a woman holding a log... :)
Series 2 did overfocus on the characters, but the eccentric characters were there at the beginning. Log Lady was the most outlandish but Pete Martell and Audrey Horne get introduced early on and are quirky. Dale Cooper himself is pretty strange.
I always thought the most boring major character in Twin Peaks was James Hurley, the would be biker.
I never watched the third series. I think I got part way through the first episode and never bothered with the rest.
I'm not so sure about that assessment of Twin Peaks. Look at the back half of season 2, where the "weird and wonderful characters" become the focus of the show. It's barely watchable.
When Lynch came back for the final episode of that season he refocused it on Laura Palmer and brought back characters that hadn't been seen for many episodes, like Laura's mum or Audrey's brother. They weren't much fun, one being wracked by grief and the other mentally disabled. But that's what Twin Peaks is really about and what gave it staying power.
Everyone (including Diane Keaton when she directed an episode) seemed to think it was this kooky place and the weirdness was the point. There's plenty of fun there, but Lynch really understood it: hence Season 3 which gives you all of half an episode of Fun Dale Cooper before pulling the rug out from under you and reminding you that a girl was murdered and we shouldn't move on from that.
That's just basically, "Don't binge watch."
There are shows like "Twin Peaks" that, if you first introduction to them is binge watching, you'll wonder what all the fuss was ever about. (Some shows seem to need some water-cooler time in order to keep you on the edge of your sear, wondering, trying to make the connections yourself.)
This is Twin Peaks season 3
I really don't think that futzing with the audio is going to change the mixed impressions people got of the series.
The show was a mess. Which is exactly what you want from Twin Peaks. I'm sure it's punchier with theatrical sound... but you made a TV show, and you should have designed your art for that medium. Going to the cinema is a different experience.
I'm glad that people will get to see/hear something like what Lynch wanted them to see/hear. But 18 hours of Twin Peaks over two days... woof.
It’s not just David Lynch’s own coffee drinking. Making coffee (“there was a fish in the percolator!”) and drinking coffee was one of the most memorable aspects of the original Twin Peaks TV series.
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
There's a lot to be said for how abuse was portrayed in Twin Peaks. Many survivors of abuse have praised the show and it's film counterpart for their honest portrayal. Sheryl Lee, the actress who portrayed Laura Palmer, has highlighted her positive interactions with survivors in numerous interviews. It's a hard watch, but it's an honest watch, and empathetic at its core.
You're focusing on the fact that such abuse is shown, without digging any deeper into why it's shown, and in what context - context that you are inherently ignorant to by your own admission of never having seen Blue Velvet. I have, so I know of what I speak.
And to your flip response about, "Enjoy your Insta", I don't. I stay far away. Once again you seem to be making assumptions about people (and casting aspersions towards them based on said assumptions) and things based on surface level interactions, the opposite of trying to be compassionate.
Which movies by David Lynch have you seen?
Lynch, by the way, was an outsider in Hollywood and in the wider movie industry. He didn't make large budget movies nor did his movies bring in a lot of money. When he was promoting his last movie, he didn't even have money for proper advertising and had to rely on publicity stunts like sitting in a director's chair next to a live cow in the middle of Los Angeles to draw attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9gVoSiXup0
His struggles were largely due to his refusal to trivialize violence or turn it into something easily digestible. Many of his characters (such as Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks) are highly moral and good-natured people who encounter incredible evil. This evil is depicted in an exceptionally disturbing way to amplify Lynch's message about genuine love, compassion and human connection. Lynch did not exploit or glorify violence. He presented it as something deeply unsettling to highlight its emotional and psychological impact instead of using it for shock value or cheap entertainment.
It seems like you are very angry about something you don't know much about.
The existence of a fictional movie says nothing about how popular conspiracies are. I have seen a lot of dystopian movies and read such books, including cyberpunk. A Scanner Darkly, The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Matrix, Snow Crash, Dune, eXistenz, just name some random ones. I'll mention four series, too: Twin Peaks, X-Files, Utopia, Nikita. That doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, because I am able to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction.
The trouble from 80's is different. We've shifted power vacuum, but whilst doing so the rich have become very much more rich, and [generally] they don't want to take responsibility; they want raw power. Things like bullshit (lies, conspiracies, manipulation), drama (such as creating friction between poor and middle class), obliteration of facts and science, cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions and law, and criminal behavior (including methods to avoid paying tax) are each tools for achieving more of such power.
UFOs are one of such, too. They're a tool to accelerate the distrust in government. For the acronym UFO itself is broad. A meteorite or Starlink satellite could be mistaken for an alien spaceship. Furthermore, drugs, hallucination, psychosis and the power of suggestion alone are strong tools to feed such fables.
I am well aware fans of conspiracies can very well be fans of X-Files but it is fiction first and foremost, plus don't forget Scully's role and background.
> but still uncertain about the substance.
Honestly, I'm really enjoying that uncertainty and I couldn't image how entertaining it'd be. It certainly has a special place in this current "Zeitgeist" where video games are played by various generations and people calling each other "NPC"s as insult. There's this massive scale of contemporary enterprises, they all would like to retain that image of being young and full of empathy, while also standing above the law. Have you ever talked to some superior at a company and left with this empty feeling that made you recognize all of this unwillingness to change? Severence just hits that spot and frames it nicely into humor, yet still doesn't laugh about it. I question a bit the addition of the latest department in episode 3 and just hope they can stick the landing with such decisions.
> The only truly exemplary production I can name in this vein being the sole season of The Prisoner (McGoohan, 1967-68).
I definitely see Twin Peaks in the same realm.
I'd say twin peaks season 1 and first half of season 2 are Lynch's most accessible work
i tried watching Twin Peaks but my GenZ attention-hungy brain got really bored during the first episode. maybe i should give it another shot...
it's not like i'm not used to watching long movies and i would call myself some form of cinephile, but for some reason Twin Peaks felt unbelievably slow.
I have enjoyed pretty much all of David Lynch's work. A particular standout for me is episode 8 of Twin Peaks season 3, titled "Got a Light?" - for my money the greatest TV episode ever, an incredible high cultural landmark. In one breathtaking sequence David Lynch uses Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima", which depicts the Trinity atomic bomb test. The piece, composed in 1961 for 52 string instruments, mirrors the destruction and chaos of the atomic bomb detonation. Lynch used the composition during the startling sequence tracking into the heart of the nuclear test's mushroom cloud. https://youtu.be/vYg8nos8SdA?feature=shared
Loved the Twin Peaks tv series. Also the eighties Dune movie is a gold mine for awesome clips. RIP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4NWOyPp1yg
> I’m not sure if anyone could ever “get” one of his movies completely beyond the experience and the narrative.
I actually found "Mulholland Drive" to be incredibly accessible for a Lynch movie. Twin Peaks remains an absolute (and highly fascinating) enigma to me, especially the third season, but "Mulholland Drive" always felt like an enigma with a satisfying solution.
But he didn't direct all of Twin Peaks episodes and it shows.
If someone is not into art films, to not start with Twin Peaks is absolutely insane to me.
First two seasons of Twin Peaks are his masterpiece IMO and his most watchable.
Those are some of the best characters of any film/tv show ever.
From there I would go to Lost Highway next for a stronger dose of the more out there stuff.
Great movie, but I'm not sure I would've enjoyed it as much if I hadn't already watched Twin Peaks.
I camped out in line on Hollywood Blvd for several hours to be in the first public screening of Dune at the Chinese Theater. So I know I saw the release print and to my then college-aged perceptions, I didn't really connect with it. I didn't think it was bad but I didn't think it was good either.
I blame this on the muddled mess that was the release edit and how misleadingly the film was promoted by the studio. I was a huge fan of pop sci-fi like Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner and the advertising set a very different audience expectation than what the film delivered. Unfortunately, that experience kind of tainted Lynch's Dune for me.
I didn't really begin to appreciate Lynch as a great filmmaker until Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both of which I loved. Someone linked a 'highly-regarded' three hour fan edit of Lynch's Dune which I've bookmarked to check out.
This is an odd coincidence only because I've been stuck on playing https://soundcloud.com/overwerk/beyond today, which culminates in a sample from a Twin Peaks episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_6kDHWsEM (it's the "I've been looking out beyond the edge of the board" scene)
Season 3 Twin Peaks is peak "I don't know what am I looking at".
Dune or Twin Peaks are probably going to be more accessible than anything else.
For Eraserhead, I understand the metaphor of how parenting can be larger-than-life and terrifying and I see how Eraserhead was trying to embody that but I very much didn't appreciate the highly pessimistic ending. It's an early movie that would have benefited immensely from an alternate ending on its DVD.
Aside from, obviously, David Duchovny, more than a handful of the regular Twin Peaks cast showed up in the X Files. Shapes ft. Michael Horse and Humbug ft. Michael J. Anderson are two particularly great early episodes.
Start with "Eraserhead" and then go from there. Surreal is the word I associate with his movies and tv show (Twin Peaks) and I absolutely love watching such movies!
Inland Empire is my favorite film of his, followed by the Twin Peaks movie, but I'm not sure the movie stands on its own without the TV show.
Twin Peaks is the best TV show ever made
One thing I'd really like AI to do (and Ben Afflect touched during his talk) is that once AI is cheap enough to run at home, I'd like to feed it all David Lynch movies/TV shows, and ask it to produce a Twin Peaks season 4.
The Thing and Alien are my two favorite movies. Silence of the Lambs is up there too.
Not movies but I've rewatched X-Files and Twin Peaks repeatedly as well.
If swerving into another lane to avoid a toddler rather than stopping is a “common” scenario, you already sound like a psychopathically reckless driver. In none of those situations should you be swerving into the wrong side of traffic. You should be stopping. And then, if necessary, carefully going into the other lane.
Your examples are comically dangerous
Edit: in fact, specifically you remind me of Richard Horne in twin peaks season 3:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V62BJFn-BTQ
> known for cult films like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Wild at Heart
Really? No, really? Not Twin Peaks? Not Lost Highway? Not Eraserhead, not The Elephant Man? Not Dune?!
I don’t believe that’s true. Lynch uses characters as abstractions — they represent a concept, which when you understand them add up to a ‘statement’:
* Twin Peaks is an meta commentary about the lack of balance on the small screen (our desire for sex and violence). Interestingly this ended up being a meta-meta-commentary when the network forced them to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer prematurely. Laura Palmer is balance, Dale Cooper is the audience, Bob is our desire for sex & violence, …
* Mulholland Drive is about the casting couch and the destruction of the Hollywood dream for women. Rita is the casting couch, the cowboy is Hollywood, …
* Lost Highway appears to be a comment about plagiarism (namely other directors plagiarising David Lynch). But it also has a similar theme to Twin Peaks as a meta commentary about film — the shots of the road are meant to look like film, the vehicles are meant to represent movies, …
etc.
He always talks about being “true to the idea” — so all abstractions and all surreal elements must be true to the underlying concept. It’s up to us to work out what the underlying theme is (that links all of the abstractions together).
Twin Perfect has over five hours of Twin Peaks explanation on YouTube ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM (there are follow on videos too).
As a long time Twin Peaks viewer and Wrapped in Plastic subscriber, it all resonated for me. The thesis there is extremely comprehensive and full of examples and the most compelling version I've found.
It may spoil it for some, and if you prefer to leave mysteries untouched ... don't watch it, but it also enriched my subsequent rewatches of many Lynch films.
> There is a theory that Lynch himself doesn’t always know what is going on in his stories. He shoots this down. “I need to know for myself what things mean and what’s going on. Sometimes I get ideas, and I don’t know exactly what they mean. So I think about it, and try to figure it out, so I have an answer for myself.”
> Audiences, however, must do their own figuring out. “I don’t ever explain it. Because it’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller.” These days he rarely gives interviews, not even during the hugely hyped return of Twin Peaks last year – a show that is still debated as either the best or worst TV of 2017. “When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime,” he explains. “A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/23/david-lynch-gotta-be-selfish-twin-peaks
> Whereas most works seem to have a thesis and then explore them on different levels, Lynch seems to just throw out ideas in different scenes.
Many interpretations come to the exact opposite conclusion: that Lynch starts with a specific idea and then visits it in a different way in each scene. They may seem different, but there is an underlying theme. At least, if those interpretations are right.
Here is an example for Inland Empire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkk9GWonTyg
Try to ignore that person's overconfidence, he does actually make a good case for his interpretation, I think, showing that the film can be seen as boiling down to one clear main message. (I don't agree with all of his points, but I do think he is on to something.)
> I would love to unpack what parts of twin peaks were Lynch’s design and what parts were not
Reading Mark Frost's books can help there, as likely Lynch's influence on them is minimal. But it is still hard to unpack, Twin Peaks was really a joint project.
I like each in their own way, I may be more biased towards Kubrick as I consider the Shining one of my top 3 movies of all time. Lynch may be the ultimate auteur in making a certain type of movie or tv show that really no one else was making or thinking about(Blue Velvet, Mulholland dr. etc). Twin Peaks season 3 might be one of the best tv shows ever made(and also one of the weirdest) and its why I like David Lynch so much. Kubrick touched on that side a bit with 2001(my second favorite of his movies) but his style is much more traditional.
Watch the original series, then the movie Fire Walk With Me. If you need more Fire, watch The Missing Pieces, and if you want more Twin Peaks generally, watch The Return
https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/6sfzkw/comment/dlcfw51/
this is pretty much the defacto guide for twin peaks watching (not including season 3). Personally, I think the season 2 episodes marked in red still have some great stuff in there, but it can be a bit of a slog to get through.
So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism.
(For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)
You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least saw the most popular films one day and vaguely felt like I didn't get them, but there was nothing there I'd identify as bad filmmaking or anything. It just seemed like it was trying to say something and I wasn't getting it.
I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is.
There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.
Honestly detective fiction is perhaps the worst format you could give for your example, because the structure of the story allows you to essentially tell a different short story with different characters every time. Moody Twin Peaks has almost nothing in common with the goofball Psych (except the one tribute episode). Inspector Lewis plots are complex and intellectual, while Castle is fluffy and predictable. Recipes for Love and Murder, Brokenwood, Midsomer Murders, and Murdoch Mysteries are more about life among the varied settings than the murders; the murders give us an excuse to explore the characters around them.
Though maybe the most important point of that is that watching TV from different countries will make your viewing more interesting.
I couldn't find an explanation for why a TV series (Twin Peaks: The Return) is in a Greatest Films of All Time list.
In any case, that's a handy reference list for things to watch.
The TV show Twin Peaks (with a huge cult following) had a "Red Room" scene shot with everyone walking/talking in reverse. The result is pretty amazing in creating a surreal out-of-the-world environment.
https://youtu.be/qkhXHFnu99A
(Note it probably doesn't make a lot sense to just watch this clip alone. If you have time, watch the whole show!)
My experience binge-watching is that it destroys the rhythm of the series, sets the wrong expectations for the viewer. Many shows are as much (or more) about the mood, not so much about "things advancing". But to speed-run from episode to episode to episode you're looking for plot and narrative, not taking in mood.
I haven't binge-watched a series in the 20 years since the one time I ruined "Twin Peaks".
One episode a day or one a week really is a good cadence.
The obvious solution is to wait until series are done before watching them, if lack of narrative closure upsets more than watching with everyone else excites you. E.g one of these days I might get around to The Wire or Breaking Bad, but probably not Lost or Game of Thrones or Twin Peaks, because I'm aware people were annoyed at how they ended. On the other hand I'm perfectly happy with seasons 1-3 of The Office or season 1 of Stranger things, or Season 1 of Severance even though it was a total life hanger, so it's not impossible to make something that's good even if it's not clear how long it'll run.
The NYT comments section is all over the place. Some people don't seem to "get" soundtrack music. "It's boring." "It's nothing without the show." Etc.
Soundtrack music isn't meant to stand without the film or TV show or game it's created for. And some, probably most, doesn't. But you can have a real winner if the music stands on its own as well. The Twin Peaks soundtrack album does, for me...and I've never even seen the show. Some composers are better at this than others: John Williams, Howard Shore, Maurice Jarre, Korngold, Badalamenti are among those who can stand alone (IMO). Bear McCreary is one who stands out in my mind as being an excellent composer, but whose music is virtually unlistenable without the visuals to go with it.
You asserted the show had "an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show", which clearly isn't possibly the case for a show whose entire first season was adapted from a novel.
The third season was written as a final season. Regardless of whether the mystery is resolved, the show's plot and character arcs firmly concludes in the finale. Professional tv critics nearly universally view it as one of the best seasons of any television show ever made.
Yes, there are unanswered questions. This is obviously intentional (although the theme song you reference was only used in season 2 and the finale in season 3). Similarly in real life you'll never find out which religion, if any, is correct. Or why the pandemic happened. You can still ask, and writers can still explore these topics, even though no one ever knows.
If you didn't like the show, or ambiguous art/media in general, that's fine, it's not for everyone. That doesn't mean it's all part of the same capitalist formula to produce bad art.
As an interesting counter-point, consider Twin Peaks, a show where the network demanded that the creators promptly resolve the core mystery at the end of the first season -- much to the show's detriment.
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
Well, right, but that's not quite the same thing. Video games also do "show within a show", sometimes taking the form of an actual show (Address Unknown in Max Payne, and that other one that's plainly mimicking Lynch's Invitation to Love from Twin Peaks), or an actual play, as in Midsummer Night's(? I think it has the one with Thisby and such, right?) or Hamlet, which I wanna say at least one Final Fantasy has featured (9?), among other games, or sometimes, matching the medium, taking the form of minigames (dice or card games, or arcade games, say, in games that aren't primarily about those things but just have them in the world—even sports games in non-sports games, like Blitzball from FFX)
The purest form of this specific thing is more like having an entire episode of MASH play on a TV in the background during an episode of Trapper, MD.
Is this an actual saying? It made me think of Twin Peaks (season 3) where one character runs a conspiracy, conservative radio show and sells golden shovels that his listeners proudly display.
For anyone interested: When removing the dialogue audio channel from Twin Peaks episodes, it is nice to discover the rich tapestry of sound design hidden underneath. Listen to the sounds extracts these layers for you personal enjoyment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZMZEaK4lQ
Music streaming doesn’t suffer nearly the fragmentation issues film and television streaming services have, though.
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
Just like anything else David Lynch does, the answer is always "Wtf?!". But I still love his films and Twin Peaks.
Shows on VHS existed. I watched all of Twin Peaks Season 2 that way before it released on DVD.
It sounds to me like you just personally don't care about cinematography. Which is fine, but that makes it surprising to me you open with "I'm a film major", as if that means your view is the "correct" one and everyone else just doesn't know what they're talking about. I'd figure someone who studied film would care about things like this even if we're talking about an ostensibly "bad" TV show.
Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show.
But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible.
And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable.
What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.
Twin Peaks, season 3 is the antithesis of Chekhov’s Gun. So many false starts and seemingly meaningless dead ends. That said, it feels like art, and if your willing to take it as such, it’s a fun ride. Tightly focused narrative is a reasonable default but certainly not a hard and fast rule.
Sure. In the context of Lynch's work things that happen without sense are often intra-textual in his work or hint at some interior sense that is obscure to the characters, audience. Why do characters (dead!) from Twin Peaks show up in Mulholland Drive? Well, that _might_ be touched on in Twin Peaks season 3 or maybe it isn't. Kinda up to you.
Seems to me that's Lynch's point. In daily life we're all willing to accept on some level that we need to make sense of things ourselves so why should we expect art to be direct?
Take Dark City. I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect.
Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-maker (as one would hope over the decades), but he expects that his audience would have kept up with him, introducing a kind of filmic vocabulary. I would say that Mulholland Drive is much, much more comprehensible once you have understood what Lost Highway is on about. In turn, Lost Highway is an extended riff off of the dualism you would see in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. As to the second factor, Lynch is very heavy into TM and he would like to present images, sounds, and such to the viewer, and then find out what the viewer thinks of them. Not in a "this is up to you to puzzle out," rather he is pitching rocks and skipping stones off of what he likely believes is to be a collective unconscious or a shared cultural experience, then being excited about what might pop up. It's a genuine interest, I think.
Thanks for responding! I really hope I didn't come across as too harsh, I definitely made some assumptions and probably straw-manned you.
For Twin peaks, of course the latter half of season two isn't great, but that's because David lynch left after the network made him reveal the killer, which was never a part of the plan.
So then after the incredible 3-4 lynch directed episode of early season 2 and he leaves, it falls down a cliff before what is perhaps my favorite 42 minutes of media ever in the Season 2 finale, where Lynch comes back and delivers such a dizzying and intoxicating episode with so many questions left lingering that I find it genuinely inspiring.
Then I'm guessing you haven't seen Twin Peaks The Return, but that is the thing that cements twin peaks as a masterpiece imo.
And a lot of lynch movies have an amazing second half, Mulholland Drive being the prime example where it's revealed what the film is actually about and it explores the psyche and dreams of a woman unable to live up to what she thought she could.
Of course, there is no objectivity in film and opinions; especially with Lynch. if you don't like his stuff more power to you! But my only issue is feels like you levy that people who like his stuff are pretentious, only liking it because it's 'cool' to pretend to understand his stuff.
And to be honest, I believe that his stuff has a dense internal logic that is fascinating to try to unpack and it does always have a deeper meaning.. but to take what you say I don't see the big deal if he genuinely is fumbling about because the things I draw from his best creations are so deep and inspiring to me. It's like a dream you have, where if you break it down it makes no sense yet still you ascribe meaning to these things. And to be clear, I really believe most great lynch projects are internally cohesive and do have something they are meant to say/explain; understanding what the second half of Mulholland drive actually was and connecting it all together is probably my favorite experience that I've ever had with film, I really felt like a detective finally cracking a hard case!
But again, this is not to say Lynch is objectively good, just that I'm insanely biased and really really like his specific brand of shit. My main point is just to say that I don't think the way you phrased your criticisms of him are valid because you took a very objective tone
Author here. I've dug reasonably far into international cinema -- at a glance, about 250 - 300 outside US Cinema, across various time periods: French New Wave, Korean, Iranian, etc.
On David Lynch -- I like stuff that is weird and unusual. I LOVED the first three or four episodes of Twin Peaks. But after that, it was an unbelievable disappointment. You cannot seriously tell me that the latter half of Season Two was good. It was clear that Lynch had drafted the body of a Blue Velvet-style movie that lent itself well to a few hours of material, but once you got past the first three or four episodes, there was no material left. From there on, the attempts to keep the plot together became more and more abstruse.
With a guy like Lynch, these movies do not showcase the "raw power of the human imagination" -- what they showcase is a man who is deeply disorganized.
To the extent that his films are flawed, they are always flawed in the same way: execution of the latter half. Premise and first half is always fine. That pattern speaks volumes.
>He finds beauty in the subconscious and dreams and connects things together that don't have an immediately obvious connection.
Lynch has obsessions with domestic relationships that get predictable, and are immediately obvious. I still like twin peaks but its dumb to assume he "doesn't get it" just because he doesn't care for it. If he's watched 600+ movies he probably gets it. And the show WAS a disaster if only for the 100 loose ends it never tied up before being canceled.
This is a very frustrating article because, and I'm making assumptions here, it seems like the author hasn't tried that much to go beyond canonical american cinema. If I'm wrong, then my mistake, but the only films mentioned here are hollywood productions and it seems like the movies they're dissapointed by browsing Amazon Prime are the latest big-budget Hollywood production that doesn't have much special going on
Also, the #5 footnote says a lot. I'm a huge David Lynch fan, so understand I'm speaking with bias here, but to fully dismiss movies that are loved by many as "objectively bad" speaks to a small imagination of what films can be. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean the director is "shooting from the hip and doesn't know anything"... and so what if Lynch is? He finds beauty in the subconscious and dreams and connects things together that don't have an immediately obvious connection. To dismiss Twin Peaks (something which is awe-inspiring in the way it displays the raw power of human imagination) as "a disaster" to me means that the author has not really pushed themselves to expand their horizons.
International cinema constantly amazes and inspires me. I've been logging 50+ movies a year for 7-8 years now and all the time am enjoying and finding more enrichment in it. That's not to say it's not valid for someone to not experience things the way I experience them, but this author speaks with an objectivity that really frustrates me.
This article says more about the author than about the series. They can't keep attention on what they're watching and think that silly tv series are a new thing.
Alternative take: Emily in Paris is a tv series where you shouldn't expect a lot of thinking, you'll find a new character introduced once in a while when you need new content, everything is obvious and striped to the core of the conveyed idea, and there are love stories and nice shots of France. That's it - you may enjoy it or not. If you get distracted with Instagram in the meantime, maybe you're just not that interested. The core is really not that different from Friends, for example. Or any of the 10+ season series. (I wouldn't go as far as the classic soaps - those had their own specific fake-dramatic style)
I get that the author may just not like the format. They'd be bored by Jiro, they'd sleep during Helvetica, and they'd probably die watching Herzog movies. But they should acknowledge their biases rather than pretend they stumbled upon some shift in tv.
(Ftr, I enjoyed Emily in Paris as silly entertainment, but I also find slow burn movies really fun. Jim Jarmusch makes me more engaged than most action movies)
Added: for the entertainment value, I'd pay to read their review of Twin Peaks...
Twin Peaks is (or, was) exactly this: "A 2 season show that was canned on a cliffhanger". The third season went in to production 25 years after the cliffhanger ending. The show was very much still worth watching even before season 3 became reality. A cliffhanger ending is still a kind of resolution and is not inherently bad.
There are 2-season shows with no ending or clearly rushed endings that are still worth watching: check out Party Down.
Does any kind of sloppy ending make an entire show worthless or is there some cutoff screen-time that makes it acceptable? Consider Game of Thrones. Are seasons 1-3 still worth watching even though 4-6 are mediocre and 7-8 are dumpster fires?
I’m also a huge fan of Lynch’s Dune. Lynch, I would say, probably hates the movie because of memories of industry drama and studio pressure- more to do with having had a bad experience than the movie being actually terrible. It also almost killed his career in a way. I wonder if he had a desire to work on more big budget films in the mainstream like Spielberg throughout his career and perhaps Dune was the film which ended those dreams. Guy has like three of four legit towering masterpieces (not including twin Peaks)so his career was great despite things but I do wonder what kinds of movies he’d have ended up making if Dune was a success or if he never made Dune after The (very nearly perfect film) Elephant Man.
High concept sci-fi is consistent box office poison and while this new version of Dune looks good, and I want to see it, I don’t think it will set the world on fire. It seems to feel like YA fiction more than I’d like it to be and borrows heavily, stylistically, from Lynch’s Dune but doesn’t seem to have the same design impact as the original. The YA tone in the trailer for me feels like studio meddling. But we’ll see how good the actual movie is. Blade Runner 2 was a fine film but not quite a home run and I expect the same from Dune.
What do you expect to understand exactly? In the first one he progressively sucks the drama out of a myth by taking the concept of eternity seriously. The second one is about being in possession of something that you can't have. The third one is a joke about a man talking to a dog about his family problems. The last one is about two approaches to take when there's nothing you can do, not that it makes a difference.
Do i understand these stories? I don't know. They're interesting. I just read them tonight though. Maybe in a year i will have forgotten them, or maybe i'll bump into them in my thoughts every so often, be reminded of them, draw parallels between them and other things.
Each story has one thing following another in a logical progression that i'm sure you can discern, so what more understanding are you asking for? I could tell you all about the movie Toy Story, but do i understand it? I don't know. It's interesting, and i bump into it every so often in my thoughts and all that.
If i understood it, i guess i wouldn't ever need to think of it again. Which reminds me of Twin Peaks, which i definitely don't understand.
Apt user name. TIL, thank you:
> Making The Shining, Stanley Kubrick announced Eraserhead was his favourite film and showed it to his cast and crew, “to put them in the mood”.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead
So I was actually thinking of Lynch's later works (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks) that definitely came after "The Shining" But yeah, they share things big and small, from tone to camera angles.
There's a scene in The Shining, about 3 /4 of the way through, where Jack is walking down a corridor in a rage, and it's _just weird_ (1), so reminiscent of The Man from Another Place in Twin peaks, and it's hard to say what's wrong, to unpick what's going on technically.
I only noticed this on the rewatch last week. I'd guess it's a combination of the acting and sound, camera angle and framing, lens choice, and the camera moving with him over the patterned carpet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzZP-OXA-zY
> It’s the tomato sauce choice fallacy
I strongly disagree with this.
Netflix previously had much more diverse content. It's currently (as of the last few years) banking on that their own content will substitute the licensed content disappearing on their platform. That The Witcher will satiate your Game of Thrones itch, that "superhero show #1" will be good enough over whatever Disney/Marvel puts on Disney+.
This might work for a few people, but I believe/hope it won't work for most. Chatting about the latest episode of Twin Peaks or the new Nolan movie by the water cooler doesn't work with a pale substitute.
The entire premise of the linked article is based on that cable packages survived and thrived as more players entered the market, and so should streaming services. What it ignores is that "alternative sources"/piracy didn't exist at the time, and does now. People will pay for as many services as they're comfortable with and with as much hassle as they can handle switching apps, and no more.
They should take a hint from music streaming platforms, and let the services compete, and spread the content over all of them, otherwise they will face the reality that people will pirate their service while paying for others.
Sorry for the long rant
Signed
/ Multiple service subscriber
Twin Peaks season 1 for part of it. Season 2 of TP Lynch was mostly out of the project. Season 3 had some very, very good moments (gotta light, but also the coin flipping scene), but I am still on the fence on how good it was to close the series.
I still remember the vivid and strange experience when I watched Lynch's masterpiece TV show 'Twin Peaks'. Just an amazing experience! I have also enjoyed his films such as 'Blue Velvet' and 'Mulholland Drive'. When watching Lynch's shows and movies I feel his creations are similar to that of Stanley Kubrick.
The "Parisienne cigarettes" ad is near identical to parts of Twin Peaks Season 3, "got a light?"
- The "Esper Edition" of the Blade Runner soundtrack, by Vangelis et al., is a must: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQFRtbDK9Yk
- The classic horror movies made by Hammer Films had terrific soundtracks, James bernard's being my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isG3-rQqxZA&list=PLs3T-t417YhSZSUSAIDgcLjvhE4h2n1Vl
- David Lynch's Twin Peaks, by Angelo Badalamenti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDbSYAJ9Tvw
- Everything and anything by Bernard Hermann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owm8RkA3FtA
- I'm not sure if it ever received a proper release but the Hannibal TV show's soundtrack, by Brian Reitzell, is highly regarded for, IMO, good reasons.
- David Lynch's Dune, by Toto and Brian Eno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMnM1Qww2xs
- Goblin's horror soundtracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQejiArD608
- John Carpenter wrote the soundtrack of most of his films himself. My personal favorites are The Fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKGzUxH9GyQ and Christine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEwN1-Gaj5s
- John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, by Michael small: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh8osZAYTjo
- Classic Godzilla soundtracks by Akira Ifukube et al.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3FnS6lx-Ds
- David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch, by Howard Shore with Ornette Coleman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBh_4_i2zLk
Wow. An interesting nod to the incredibly fascinating third season of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks', whose brilliant eighth episode and the accompanying Secret History of Twin Peaks and Final Dossier novels were astounding examples of historical fiction. I was quite impressed as to just how deep that rabbit-hole went.
Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.
This is definitely real.
This was quite noticeable to a trained eye in the finale episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks returns season.
As I was watching it, somewhere mid episode where the story moves between two realms of reality, I noticed the image suddenly had a much more real (or “cheap”) appearance.
I was in awe. That was a super nice touch done a technical level which really helped elevate the story itself.
Not a film (though there is one too) but: Twin Peaks.
Hot Fuzz, U-Turn, Dogville (others already mentioned them).
Deliverance (of course)
The Lottery ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116924/ tv movie, based on a great short story)
The Wicker Man
Twin Peaks
Cold in July
> Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
Is this really true?
I know I watched random episodes (Malcolm/Seinfeld/Friends/etc..) and enjoyed it. But re-watching them in the proper order is magnitudes better and clearly the way it was supposed to be watched.
I wonder if the same is true for modern TV shows, e.g. the big bang theory - it can be watched and enjoyed by picking a random TV show. Even longer form, say Firefly/Dark Angel/Twin Peaks require you to watch it in order - yet they could be enjoyed on their own as well (you had basically no choice anyway..).
> AFAIK, J. Michael Straczynski was the first person to get a successful arc-based television series on TV, with _Babylon 5_ - the pilot aired in 1993.
Would you consider Twin Peaks (1990) to be arc-based?
FWIW, there is a third season of Twin Peaks currently running (well, it's almost over... the finale will air on Sunday).
I think it appeals to David Lynch fans more than Twin Peaks fans, but so far I loved every single episode.
I wonder what an RNN could generate for an episode of Twin Peaks.
Kids aren't the only ones. Most of us in the wealthy West now have so many entertainment options that we ignore even many of the ones we've already paid for, or are continuing to pay for. Half the time I forget I have Prime Video at all, and I've temporarily got Showtime for Twin Peaks but despite knowing there are probably tons of other shows and movies on it (and not on Netflix/Prime) that I'd enjoy I've not even looked at the rest of their catalog aside from ~5min scanning through it when I first signed up.
I have a total of probably 60+ entirely unplayed games for the PS2, PS3, Xbox360, Gamecube, and Wii, picked up cheap used or in digital PS+ freebies or sales but not touched since. Hundreds of hours of entertainment which I'd probably enjoy and many of which have at least some artistic merit but they sit unused. We recently picked up a PS4, so now games are accumulating for that too. Don't get me started on Steam/GoG. My to-read list of just books I own is solidly in the 3 digits. We've still got a couple DVDs kicking around that we bought over a decade ago for next to nothing used, never watched.
I've never found time to catch up on all the music I pirated 10+ years ago, sometimes in large dumps of material from friends who were more into tracking down The Good Stuff than I was (keeping up with all that meta-reading to learn what's worth your time itself takes tons of time) let alone listen to much new music aside from a handful of CDs purchased and listened-to after live shows over the years. Spotify and such can go to hell, I don't got time and the last thing I need is another way to find things I like but won't have time to pursue.
I end up seeing a more-or-less random 25-50% of the movies that are probably excellent and I'd likely really enjoy that come out every year. There are hundreds of culturally and artistically important movies from the last 100+ years still on my to-watch list, but the ones I miss each year keep making the list longer rather than shorter. Most are easily available. Some of them I could go watch right now (Netflix, et c.)
I'm still meaning to read Sandman and a dozen other acclaimed, important comics, to say nothing of all the ones I'd probably enjoy as pure bubble-gum entertainment. I've barely scratched the surface on that entire format.
Plus I've got all that stuff in life that's not just "consuming" media.
I've truly got more excellent art/entertainment readily available than I have time for, by a large margin. We live in strange times.
[EDIT] Oh, and let's not forget the ~a billion hours of free entertainment on Youtube, podcasts, archive.org, and so on, much of it good. I'm not much into that stuff because wow do I ever not have time to sort wheat from chaff let alone enjoy said wheat, but it's all right there and I could seek it out any time I please.
The story from Netflix seems to be that there is still enormous room to expand in the content side and in fact their business model is to make even more room, by having more niche programming as well as the binge-watching thing.
Also it was interesting to hear Reed Hastings basically say that as a tech company Netflix might not have too long an independent life but if you look at it as a rival to Disney it could be a hugely successful independent company basically forever -- and that he himself likes that idea. IIRC that was in an A16Z interview but I'm not sure.
Anecdotally: I don't watch "regular TV" but I do subscribe to Netflix, and I buy a lot of shows on my Apple TV (quality and reliability beat cost, for me). I recently subscribed to ShowTime just to watch the new Twin Peaks; maybe I'll stay after that, maybe not. I've thought about ditching my Netflix account because where I am it's sloooow, but every so often they have some awesome original content I can't find elsewhere, and I stay.
I'm sure I overspend, but I probably spend $100/mo on "stuff on TV." I'm sure a lot of other people do too. And my commitment to spending it on one thing versus another is really minimal.
I don't know if Snapchat will be good at the TV game, but I do know that just like Valley companies tend to "get" software more than LA companies do, the opposite is true of entertainment; and Snapchat has shown they have at least some clue what "the kids" want, which is a pretty huge deal.
If I were a media exec I would definitely want some kind of deal with Snapchat, if only to hedge my bets against the (to me, as a grownup) unknown.
Studio 360's latest episode is about Twin Peaks http://www.wnyc.org/shows/studio/
I do remember watching Twin Peaks, it was certainly odd. Quite a few X-Files episodes had this same oddness as well. I think X-Files also made the whole supernatural thing popular in the 90's and I remember that by the time Buffy came along it was pretty much hyping.
I think the first artistically ambitious TV show I remember coming out of the US was 'Twin Peaks'.
I've watched GBH a few times since it aired and I think it still holds up. Certainly give it a go if you get the chance. The original UK TV version of 'Edge of Darkness' is also still very, very watchable. Some remarkable scenes and performances.
> But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value
Human cultural value != market-value. This is what I'm getting at.
What was the incremental cost to you to watch each episode?
How much did you pay to watch ET? Buy a Twin Peaks box-set?
> The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
You can find free life-experiences (Medium, Twitter), knowledge and expertise (Github, Wikipedia, Quora) all over the internet.
I'm not saying that people don't need money to exist, or that as we're able to produce more, cultural exhanges are worth subjectively less to other humans (quite the opposite).
I'm saying that the costs of people producing things is decreasing rapidly. What is increasing is the net share of value which is captured by distribution platforms.
It's relevant that you can only watch Stranger Things on Netflix --- you can't 'buy it', you need to pay a rent in perpetuity to watch your favorite shows at your own discretion. This is only possible due to the power which the distribution platform (Netflix) has accumulated.
A while back I decided it wasn't worth trusting any online service - netflix or otherwise - for my personal favorite content (whatever that may be). For that reason I invested in a nice NAS that can stream to my ps3/ps4, phones/tablets etc and to just rip my own content. Otherwise you may suddenly find Twin Peaks is not available to you (it's on Amazon Prime now btw), or some other such lost classic film or tv show.
It would have been amazing if Jodorowsky's Dune actually got made and released. He really was too far ahead of his time for the studio.
I feel that in order to make a roughly 2-hour long film on as complex a subject as what the novel portrays, the only way to illustrate that complexity properly is to ascribe to surrealist elements. That is the only form that can provide the necessary density, if done properly. Lynch knew this, which is why he took on the project, but was later pressured by the studio and his vision was lost. He did a pretty admirable job considering.
Lynch's pedigree speaks for itself:
Blue Velvet: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23 Lost Highway: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16 Mulholland Drive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14 Twin Peaks... etc...
Looking at your HN handle, I guess you've discovered the film at the time of Twin Peaks, if it was at the time it was premiered, you've had a hard childhood.
Hey cool thanks, that's great! I haven't seen many of those, but I liked Firefly, BSG, GoT, and VM S1-2 (haven't seen S3). I've seen Buffy S1 and the musical episode, I probably should revisit it.
My top recommendations would be Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Sports Night, and Arrested Development. I like a lot of shows that get cancelled "early".
The "myth arc" episodes of the X-Files are worth it, but don't try to sit through all 9 seasons. Recently, Better Call Saul is awesome for the emotional depth and film noir aspects, and the previous Breaking Bad to which it's a prequel is still a masterpiece even though I find the premise implausible. The Walking Dead is seriously addictive too.
Reminds me of the first episode of Twin Peaks where there is reflection of key evidence in the eyes of a character in a video recording...
And David Lynch will direct all episodes :)
Looks like Laura Palmer was right when she said she'd be back in 25 years: http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/6/6919641/twin-peaks-prophecy-foretold-2016-return
Oh my, I could spend hours with this!
'Sopranos' has the same 'Season 4' problem as 'Shield':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0141842
The massive drop in Twin Peaks after the murderer is revealed:
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098936
The awful last season of 'Dexter':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0773262
And that's how you do a last season (Six feet under):
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0248654
Classic Hollywood movies with English subtitles?)
The first few seasons of The X-Files and Twin Peaks together with Scorsese movies (in which characters talk a lot) were my choices.)
Right, if you mean to watch in one sitting, that wasn't something you could do in the '60s. But it's something that seems like it's been common since the '90s, since the advent of the "DVD Box Set". People would get box sets and watch these long-narrative-arc series in marathon weekends, or socially in parties. There was a period in the 1990s when seemingly everyone I knew was organizing Twin Peaks parties, and it seems like it fits the description of long-running experimental novel. People did that with the X-Files too, though admittedly it was a more coherent experience if you cut the "monster-of-the-week" episodes from the sequence (but hey, leave them in, and make it a gigantic, sprawling novel with disconnected subplots, of the Alexandre Dumas variety). Or Dawson's Creek, for that matter, or Buffy as you mentioned. In my circle of friends it seemed everyone was gorging themselves on Babylon 5, Star Trek, Black Adder, and Monty Python box sets as well; I don't know if I'd describe those as narratively complex, but there are lighter novels, too.
But in any case, I could believe the numbers are different. Perhaps box sets were not as major a part of 1990s/2000s TV-watching as I had thought?
I had a client who used to call me up and ask me to come up and meet them for a "very important meeting", wherein I'd arrive and they'd go to a strip club. They did this several times, and I was never particularly comfortable with it.
They were the opposite of a startup, but at the time I worked for a small company (who didn't want to risk alienating them). My salesperson (who was a woman) was very adamant that I attend these meetings, as they were an important customer.
After my company got acquired, the new, enormous company that I worked for rather sensibly freaked the hell out about those sorts of things (one of the few benefits to working at a large company).
And as an aside, I'm incredibly disappointed to learn that "Twin Peaks" isn't a restaurant themed after the TV show. I'd totally hang out in that place.
Seconded. Lynch's every movie is pretty twisted. Even Twin Peaks was bizarre.
Are you somehow saying that a band is in some way equivalent to a book?
A songwriter and a novelist are both instances of artists. Such is my point: there are more levels of entry for writers nowadays.
Songs are just emotional, they don't transfer any information.
Several bands I listen to weave complex narratives into their music. Similarly, several novelists I read transfer very little information through their novels. Your statement is not entirely accurate.
You can absorb ideas by reading that you cannot by watching movies.
Of course! But you must remember that the opposite is true as well. Movies can convey things that books can't possibly attempt to show. The same with music, for that matter.
Movies run at their own pace, books run at your pace.
Of course. But that's irrelevant to my argument, which is that the book is no longer the only place to which writers flock. If you're young and want to write, a novel isn't the only thing you can write anymore. Just as people with ideas for scenes sometimes write movie scripts now rather than plays. A friend of mine is like that: I write play scripts, he writes movie scripts. If movies didn't exist, he might have become a playwright instead. Similarly, somebody who would have been a blogger 5 years ago might subsist entirely on Twitter or even Facebook Notes now.
I would also mention the TV show as a counterpoint to what you said, wherein episodes become almost chapters. You can either watch slowly, once a week, or you can watch it in massive doses when the DVD comes out. I just watched Twin Peaks like that last week.
It's NOT easier to make a movie. A movie is a masive logistical effort
I never said it was easier, I said it was an option. And it's easier for movies to convey certain types of information.
Forming bands is just a trendy thing, but most bands I know produce silly music. They say banal things.
Look at Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields as a perfect example of somebody who uses the lyric to greatest advantage. But either way, that's not my point. People who want to write nowadays very often write lyrics. I'd say more write lyrics nowadays than write novels, or poetry. That means that the pool of poets and novelists is less, because people have more venues to follow through.
Writing is still the backbone of human thought. In whatever form it comes - the well thought out written word will always accompany human civilisation.
Of course. I never said it wasn't, or that it wouldn't. But words appear in multiple mediums. David Foster Wallace said in interviews that he thought the best-written thing of this last decade was The Wire. I think the best-written thing I've read was either Achewood, which is a comic, or House of Leaves, which borders on visual art. Things branch out, and that's the point I wanted to make.
But Netflix does say that. e.g.:
Twin Peaks: Season 1 (3-Disc Series)
Because you enjoyed: Mulholland Drive Brazil Videodrome
So right away I know that Twin Peaks is pretty freaky.
No - haven't owned one for many years. Occasionally I download or get DVDs of very good TV shows - I watched the Sopranos, for example, and made myself a re-run of Twin Peaks.