Every Day Is Halloween 7: Lost Bronson

From the Obliteration Frontier forums . . . posted under user name LostBronSon . . .

Against my better judgment,
I decided to marathon all of the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies,
all five of 'em,
over the course of one day.

I felt so filthy and corrupted by this experience
that I had to do it again,
day after day,
week after week,
for a year,
and,
of course,
I lost everything.

Job.
Friends . . . I only had three.
But they were cool dudes.
Not as cool as Charles Bronson.
But they were a'ight.

Girlfriend . . . which hurt a bit. But I would argue that ours was a mostly notional relationship anyways. Iris and I mostly connected through the realms of a MMORPG called Obliteration Frontier,
and to look at us in real life,
out-of-shape, bad haircuts, conversations which mostly focus on the minutiae of Obliteration Frontier lore,-

-Hey.
I get it.
The jokes write themselves.

But you must consider: some of us in this world don't feel wholly comfortable in our own bodies.
Yes, we should exercise daily.
Yes, we should eat better.
No, we do neither of those things, nor do we care to, nor are we over concerned about our own early mortality.
I could tell you in great detail about how there's no free will, and we are all in thrall to hardwired "central tendencies" and "forces of history,"
but you would find me tedious. And unconvincing.
Just as I find myself
tedious
and unconvincing.
Yet,
that magical Free Will
never manifests.
And I am locked into a spiral of increasing habit, self-loathing, and cosmically recursive guilt that drives me faster and harder in a circle 'round the drain.

I could go on and on.
But I have concluded I am just a survival meat-bot, executing program over and over,
ingesting food,
ingesting liquids,
showing up to job to earn money
to purchase food, liquids, escapism, clothes.

Until I began asking myself, "What if I just unplugged?"
But this was too scary.
I fantasized escape every day, night, in dreams, awake,
but I'm no survivalist.
I could never go off the grid.
I am the Grid . . . but that's a tale for another time.

Occasionally,
I'll watch a movie. Usually something weird and violent.
Iris hates movies,
she sees them as an outmoded medium,
and I largely agree.
But movies from long ago,
with physical special effects,
and actual stunt performers
give me a charge that high-end CG animated avatars cannot contain.
Wuxia. HK heroic bloodshed. Arnold. John Carpenter's The Thing. That grisly 1980's remake of The Blob.
Bronson.
I'd always meant to watch the Charles Bronson movies.
Especially the legendarily trashy and exploitative Death Wish franchise.
And so I set aside a single day to do it.
That was my habit.
Take a day out of the week to watch a bunch of old, sleazy movies.
Iris leaves me alone to do this. I just let her know a couple days ahead of time,
"Think I'm going to take a movie day."
I already had a hard drive full of Charles Bronson movies I'd been collecting through file sharing and torrents over the years.
Just had to go in, cue up the five Death Wish flicks,
ready to rock-and-sit.

Have you seen the Bronson vigilante movies?
I'm tempted to say if you've seen one you've seen them all . . . but this isn't strictly true.
But they are similar enough, that if you watched one you sort of get the gist.
You'll know if you want to watch more once you've seen one.
Many watch one
and feel totally repulsed by the copious amounts of sexual violence, rape, shootings, stabbings, and not so subtle overtones of racism and misogyny,
and if you are repulsed,
then good: you are free to turn away, and embrace life.
But if you are drawn to it,
as I am,
then you realize you are in search of something in the vortex of madness.
I found that something.

I should tell you at this point,
that I have innovated a superior method of watching movies and television and other passive forms of media (music videos, online video essays, etc.).
I see no point in consuming media according to official dictates.
I'll download, re-edit, re-score, re-arrange, and even re-voice the scenes as I see fit.
Sometimes my tinkering comes about as a result of dissatisfaction:
a movie is too long; actors' performances are poor; a film needs new scenes to be properly finished, and so I'll insert appropriate scenes from other media, or I'll compose crude animatics to fill the lack.
This is an engaged, serious-minded approach to media consumption.
Not riffs. Not parodies. Not swilling beers, and cracking jokes with the gang.
These are modifications made to satisfy certain, serious aesthetic desires,
and these recut versions do not circulate outside of my own secure, offline system.
My own private cinema.

But I do watch the movies in their original forms at least once, the first time through.
But even during the first watch,
I'm looking for that new vision, that new cut,
but it doesn't just come from my own imagination
or caprice;
rather,
the feeling is that there are other possible films lurking within a given film,
or series of films,
or maybe it's more like each shot
is a unit of communication within the totality of global cinema.
Each film is an imperfect,
often times confused
expression of this global cinema emanating from individual, seemingly isolated production,
and it is this global cinema
that I'm seeking to articulate.

But even I am an imperfect vehicle for this expression.
I tend towards my own tastes, fantasies, preferences.
I scorn CG animated movies, even if I largely relate to Iris and others through an online video game,
I strictly prefer my cinema to be as physical and celluloid as possible.
So,
I do not hold out hope of becoming the perfect vehicle, a kind of prophet.
Maybe I'll transcend my own limitations if I keep at it diligently.

From my first marathon watch of the Death Wish franchise,
I saw the untapped potentialities.
But they were all strictly in the realm of satire, making jokes, swilling beer with the gang.
No, on a private level, I'm not above such foolishness.
But I refuse to allow my public persona to be that of the comedian.
And so, the following weekend,
I took another movie day to watch the five Death Wish movies again.
I noticed the use of squibs-small triggered explosions of fake blood to simulate bullet hits-in the first movie and compared them to how they were used in the subsequent four movies.
The squib work is low key, and somewhat grisly at times,
yet I sensed that there could've been a higher outrageousness to the bloodshed,
particularly in the third installment which lapses into meta-cinematic self-parody
as an enraged citizenry follow the example of their vigilante Christ
and take to the streets to gleefully fire off their guns and kill, kill, kill.
I began to see this mode of madness
as the secret heart of the Bronson Death Wish cycle.

In Death Wish 3, the filmmakers decided to flaunt the fascist power fantasy of vigilantism, and confront the audience with its own twisted desires to see an emotionless, near-silent Charles Bronson kill scores of people in the name of law and order no matter the ethics, the collateral damage, or even logic of such actions. "Here it is, gorehounds, eat your fucking fill!"

And so I set to work pulling apart the scenes,
re-suturing them in a highly disjunctive style,
mixing and matching past/present/future,
having middle-aged Bronson/old Bronson/elderly Bronson shoot at himself,
I even manipulated the audio to make it seem like the squibs were the firing guns,
and the discharging guns the wounds.

I looked deep into Bronson's sad, wrinkle entombed eyes,
and I knew I had to free him,
and all the other actors,
from the fascist idiocy,
from my own idiocy,
and so I created . . . a kind of sixth Death Wish film . . . in which the actors do not fire off their guns . . . they wander a vast empty city . . . a cheap backlot set . . . and when they encounter one another . . . they do not draw their pistols . . . their bodies writhe and burst and spray each other with bright red, viscous syrups and chunks of raw hamburger meat . . . and they do a little dance like they're playing a typically exaggerated shooting death scene in a violent action flick . . . everybody's just squibbing all over each other . . . this was the secret film I unlocked within the official franchise . . . the Lost Bronson Classic . . . this new movie accesses random selections of scenes based on complex algorithms within the code . . . yes, I had to draw new scenes completely from scratch . . . most of it, as of this post, has yet to be properly finished . . . it's all in my all-too-sad head . . . because this movie doesn't need to exist outside of my mind . . . it's too good for this world. People would see it, and would have no choice but to start squibbing all over themselves and each other uncontrollably, until the world drowned in fake blood and chunks of raw hamburger meat.

The secret of the Lost Bronson Classic will die with the final deactivation of my idiotic brain functions.

. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .

. . .

But I got weak.
I just had to share the secret of the Lost Bronson Classic.

I'm living with my cousin, Mike, typing these words over WiFi I cannot afford. I sacrificed my old life to realize this vision. I'm not sure it was worth it. I'm not sure I can forgive myself for ditching Iris like I did . . . but that is a story for another time-one that will never come around, a story I'll never be able to tell . . . or, you know, I want it to be like that. I want the dramatic end of self-destruction.

But I lack the free will to execute such drama.
I'm a survival meat-bot, faithfully operating according to program,
day-in, day-out.
Neither wholly convincing nor wholly fanciful,
not quite a full-on filmmaker, not quite a sarcastic piss-taker,
I work in retail,
and am grateful that my cousin Mike took me in despite my madness, my malfunction,
my momentary eruption of free will.

-December 2018

Copyright 2018 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. 

Every Day Is Halloween 6: Fade Into Flesh

Every Day Is Halloween 6: Fade Into Flesh
by William D. Tucker

dimly remembered trailer from the early 1990s
logo for an independent distributor zaps in from four corners of the frame
something like 'Montage Sunset' or 'Sunkissed Pictures' or something to that effect
eerie electronic drumbeat as we zoom in on a bewildered teenage boy's face amidst drawing room settings
a middle aged man-the teen's father?-reaches out to the camera as uniformed men drag him away
a flash of light
the teenage boy grabs the sides of his head
a silhouette is seen outlined against a blazing light
electronic roaring sneaks up on the drumbeat
a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft
a movie detective puts his feet up on a desk as he takes a drag on a cigarette indoors
an angry mob of suburban husbands and wives jeer and shout into the camera from above
the teen's father lies on the ground bruised and beaten
a respectable looking man in an ultramodern home reels from an unseen assailant knocking over an abstract sculpture as he stumbles
a psycho set of black-gloved hands caresses a shining blade
the light from the blade hits the stumbling man right in the eyes
the teen's father begs up at the camera
a yuppie bastard laughs as he splashes gasoline from a red can onto the camera
freeze frame on a cruel laughing face through the twisting fall of fuel
a rising electronic howl
as we cut to a zoom into the face of the teen holding his hands to his ears
movie detective stalks the labyrinthine darkness of an abandoned mannequin factory, service revolver in his fist
movie detective stands with his hands in his pockets as a lingerie clad informant makes eyes at the cop from a chaise lounge
a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft, catching the light just so
the lingerie clad informant gets a blast of blade light in the eyes
movie detective aims his service revolver directly into the camera
zoom into a hateful obsessive eye peering at us from the unzipped eyehole of a fetish leather mask
the hateful eye flashes solar
horribly burnt hands close themselves into gory fists
teen holds hands to ears
the hateful eye flashes solar
movie detective catches the lightblast right in the eyes as he fires his service revolver directly into the camera
the gunshot echoes and echoes
the electronic roar howls and howls
we see the back of the teenage boy as he stands before a blazing fire somewhere in suburbia
cruel neighbor faces stare back at him from across the fire
title card zooms into us with a metallic crash
FADE INTO FLESH
movie detective takes a puff on his cigarette,
smiles,
says,
"It was such a lovely little neighborhood, you know?"
quick burst of credits
month
day
Rated R
-October 2018

Copyright 2018 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. 

The Lynch Meditations 19: Lost Highway (1997)

WARNING: Spoilers . . . I guess? I'm not sure Lost Highway is spoil-a-ble, in the usual sense. The structure of the film is a kind of crazy loop . . .  and telling you that is the biggest spoiler of all, so, like, there you have it. I actually think the movie becomes more interesting once you've seen it once, because then you're aware of its circular, cyclical nature, and that's when the movie starts to become structurally and thematically meaningful. The characters aren't that complex or deep, consisting mostly of stock types derived from old crime novels and classic film noir and slightly tweaked to conform to the post-Tarantino late 1990s regime of edginess that many filmmakers were chasing once upon a time. Overall, Lost Highway is a film I admire for its thematic, visual, sonic,  and structural qualities, but it is not a film I can truly love. It's much too cruel for the softer, sadder 2018 version of myself.


"I don't need anything. I want."
-Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)


In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays a dual role as both the dark-haired victim of a jealous, psychopathic husband (played by Bill Pullman) and as a vengeful blonde femme fatale who manipulates a young and horny auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty) into seeking vengeance against a vicious Los Angeles gangster-pornographer (Robert Loggia). The Loggia character raped the future femme fatale at gunpoint when she was an aspiring actress and forced her into a career of sexual slavery which involved the production of pornographic films.

Back in '97, I perceived much of this as trashy neo-noir hyperbole emanating from the fevered imaginations of Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford-both known aficionados of classic film noir.

Now, with all the revelations about systemic oppression of women in Hollywood through means involving enforced inequality of pay and opportunity, intimidation, organized surveillance campaigns, sexual harassment, and rape several scenes in Lost Highway play like stylized historical docudrama, as opposed to the hard-boiled surrealism I previously saw this film as embodying. Lost Highway now seems-in 2018-at least as far as the vengeance plot elements in which the second Patricia Arquette character plays a significant role-to have much more to do with reality than I would have guessed. Robert Loggia's character even seems closer to the role of a jealous, violent, and controlling movie studio head than the throwback 1940s gangster I used to see him as, with his entire porno empire acting as the expression of his overwhelming sense of misogynist entitlement to total control over women's minds, bodies, and images. The idea of Hollywood as a machine that chews up and spits out women aspiring to be on the silver screen would later resurface in Lynch's Mulholland Dr. albeit in a more dramatically coherent form.

Lost Highway doesn't do much with the femme fatale plot thread, basically reducing the dual Arquette roles to secondary status since the point of view is mainly from the Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty characters, who seem to be doppelgangers of each other, or maybe protagonists from different noirish psycho-thrillers whose fates have been spliced together to serve the twisted desires of the Dracula-looking Mystery Man (played by a bug-eyed and cackling mad Robert Blake). The Mystery Man seems to be purposefully interdicting the reality of the film in order to trap the characters in an eternal, nightmarish loop of recurring psychosis and misery. The Mystery Man may also be a demon from the Black Lodge of the Twin Peaks Universe, and, therefore, his motivation in creating the eternal loop of the Lost Highway might be to use that loop as a kind of mystical superconducting super collider to produce quantities of garmonbozia ("pain and sorrow") to feed his own endless hunger by crashing the characters against each other over and over again until the end of time.

The Mystery Man is often seen with a camcorder in his hand, and videotape is a format associated in this film with pornography, exploitation, and bondage. The Mystery Man seems to be recording this hellscape of trapped souls for at home, masturbatory use thereby suggesting how ensnared this all-powerful demon is in his own appetites. Unlike the rest of the characters, though, the Mystery Man seems to relish his prison of eternal recurrence.

So, have a care, viewers: watch Lost Highway, if you're curious, if you're a Lynch completist. Just don't get caught in the loop of garmonbozia . . .

NEXT: 8/10/2099 or 3/26/19: The Straight Story (1999)

The Lynch Meditations -19

Lost Highway on pan-and-scan VHS in the late 1990s . . . it almost felt like an elaborate, deeply sick prank on the home viewing audience. The widescreen compositions totally obliterated. The already dark cinematography downgraded into absolute murk. Whispered dialogue overpowered by a burst of violently blaring buddy-cop flick saxophone. A circular structure that renders the movie either utterly pointless or filled to overflowing with metaphysical significance-you decide! I honestly couldn't decide at the time if this movie was incomprehensible garbage, or if it was brilliant big-screen art ruined by a shitass VHS release. In fact, watching this movie on tape pretty much turned me against the VHS format. VHS tapes within the plot of this film seem to be symbols of evil, sinister distortions of reality, and murderous madness. Anyone who professes a hipsterish affinity for the rightly bygone format should be made to watch the pan-and-scan Lost Highway on tape-that'll straighten their pretentious ass out!

So motherfuck VHS into a molten puddle of plastic with a thousand blowtorches.

Some years after I first watched the movie, I bought the soundtrack on used CD, and Lost Highway became one of those movies-like Conan the Barbarian and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-where I listened to the soundtrack many more times than I actually watched the movie. It was the kind of CD I could just put on and listen to straight through without having to skip any boring or grating tracks. The soundtrack became a kind of condensation of a version of the original movie that somewhat existed in my memory-a highlights reel of the parts that made the strongest impression: Robert Blake's bug-eyed vampire mystery man; Robert Loggia's comically macho gangster; a man impaled through the forehead on the corner of a coffee table; David Bowie's sepulchral voice singing over a first person camera POV racing down the road in the middle of the night; the usually bland and non-threatening Bill Pullman transforming through flashing lights and Jacob's Ladder-style head vibrations into . . . Balthazar Getty of all things.

Lost Highway never worked on my mind as a complete movie. It hit me as a kind of fragmented, postmodern multimedia experience. Here's some images, here's some bursts of spoken word performance, there's the curated soundtrack, it's all kind of connected, but not so much for me. Overall, Lost Highway seemed like it was either much smarter than me as an audience, or that an hour of footage had been left out that might have made it work better as a narrative. I always assumed-wrongly-that there was a more expansive director's cut lurking within some unauthorized dub no doubt recorded in Extended Play Mode-maybe it would turn up in a Luminous Film Works catalog someday . . .

So what will I make of Lost Highway now that I'm older, wiser, more experienced?
Yes, this is the question that must be answered . . .

Once the post-desire economy picked up, my sibling was able to afford to move into a new body.

Preliminary design for the dust jacket art . . .

. . . for Endless Hunger: The Myth of the Post-Desire Era by Douglas Macross.

The New Lost Generation

The Last Stander 3: The Last Stander in Heaven 2

New Era, New Appetites

DLC Canon Ending: Desire is Dancin'!

I got the Light of Victory between two fingers . . .

Preliminary design for the dust jacket art . . .

. . . for H.H. Brill's The Collectors: Rise of the Tchotchke Traders in the Post-Desire Era.

The New Scavengers of the Post-Desire Economy

When the post-war economy collapsed, my sibling and I had to move back into the same body again for our scavenging business. 

The Last Stander 2: The Last Stander in Heaven

Linked by Shadowspeak . . .

Toys of Empire (blister pack of three)

Let your comrade be your weapon . . .

The Last Stander

The Post-Desire Era/The Long Road Home

Stash Guardian

Emergency landing in the commercial wasteland . . .

Shit, I actually had to leave the house . . .

Peak Desire/The Product Becomes the Master

Indigestion

Employee of the Month: The Guardian of Desire's Birthplace

Abandoned defense labyrinth leftover from the Age of Desire . . .

As my mind unspooled, I felt my bitterness leave me . . .

The Lynch Meditations 18: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)

This one's like a rogue transmission from an unauthorized future. Made me think of the eerie future dreams from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness just a little bit. Seems to be riffing on the paranoia induced by the presence of uniformed police assets, deadly secrets concealed by cheery home facades, and grotesque alien abduction scenarios. It's so short that it's easy to watch over and over again and pick it apart, but I almost think it should be seen once, and then never watched again, except within one's memory where it will be inevitably distorted, expanded, and transformed into some other wholly unauthorized thing. Kinda like how the creator of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound supposedly saw a scary scene from an obscure old film as a child and then spent a lifetime haunted by a memory of that scene which he had wholly concocted within his imagination.

Say . . . is it copyright infringement if I intentionally choose to distort someone's film within my imagination, and put together my own fan-edit/remix of a film inside my brain studio? I sure hope not.

But if it is . . . think about how exciting it would be to live in such a dystopian future where copyright lawyers become ultra-tech brain-vivisectionists to cut out and destroy unauthorized "Brain Cuts" of films.

Holy shit . . . I want to be on the run in such a hellish future. I could have elaborate martial arts battles with all the copyright lawyer brain-vivisectionists. A dystopian hellscape fugitive routine is also good cardio.

But, um, as for Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . it's a sharp little nightmare of stylish black-and-white micro-cinema. Dig on it to the max!

NEXT: 6/1/18: Lost Highway (1997)

The Lynch Meditations -18

Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . 1995 . . . never seen it.

Not sure I've ever even heard of it.

Maybe, when I watch it, I'll remember it, but I don't think so.

I'm just about certain I've never seen this one before.

But maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself that I've seen it, and then reconstruct a fake version of the memory of my having seen it . . . and maybe, by some serendipity, it will be a perfect recollection of a movie I've never even seen.

Maybe . . . if I can get fifty million other people on this planet who've never actually seen this movie to try "remembering" it, then out of those millions of make-believe memories we'll somehow get it right-that whole fifty million monkeys with fifty million typewriters spontaneously coming up with Shakespeare type of deal.

Hmm . . . or I could just watch the fucking thing, blog about the thing itself.

Some god-hump fills the world with desire . . . just making trouble for regular folk down the road . . .

A memory from the age of abundance . . .

FOMO-Spasm: Invite Tunnel Insurgency

My new bedtime mask . . .

A Jealous Face

Beware the man with a decent pair of walking shoes!

Turf War 2

Vortex of Desire

My sibling and I were so poor growing up we had to share the same body.

Turf War

My third eye grew in, and I've been doubling up on my unholy appetites and desires-i.e. twinkies and ho-hos dipped in gasoline-ever since!

My third eye grew in, and I've been picking nothing but winners on the stock market ever since!

Appetites at Depth

 

My Bedtime Mask

My buddy's third eye finally grew into place. Now he only picks the winners down at the greyhound track.

Finally got my new body installed. Low mileage, light psychic scarring, plenty of room.

The Lynch Meditations 17: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD . . .

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me goes backwards in the timeline of Twin Peaks to tell the story of Laura Palmer's last week alive on Earth. The movie is both prequel and sequel to the television series, due to some strange space-time effects of the extradimensional salon known as the Black Lodge, but it is mostly a prequel, with just a little bit of sequel in the mix. What you get has mostly to do with the prehistory of the overall saga, but there are small moments here and there that address the fates of characters towards the end of the series.

Fire Walk With Me is so bizarre that when I first watched it, I assumed it to be about Laura Palmer's point of view more than anything else: a series of grotesque hallucinations brought on by the trauma of violence, abuse, incest, and manipulation, and further complicated by cocaine, booze, and escapist fantasies of salvation, but the first half hour establishes a world outside of Laura Palmer's experience with two FBI agents investigating the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks who ends up having a connection with Laura.

When we are first introduced to Laura, she is walking down a sidewalk, the very picture of normalcy, someone that if you saw them on the street, and knew nothing of their life, you would not be likely to speculate about the horrors of their existence. As the movie goes on, Laura's life is revealed to be a nightmare of rape, sexual exploitation, and supernatural attacks on her very soul. It is important to keep in mind that Laura is a teenager-we are dealing with the destruction of a child. The world of Twin Peaks, despite its surface quirkiness and charm and damn fine coffee, also consumes its youth without mercy.

I saw this movie a couple years before I watched the television series in full, which is not how you should watch it, but I don't regret it. Fire Walk With Me isn't about mystery, so much as it is about the nature of human evil. From the moment we enter Laura Palmer's narrative, it is very quickly established that Laura's father, Leland, is a manipulative, abusive, overbearing presence in Laura's life. It is also quickly established that he is a rapist, and that his victim is his own daughter. Later, Leland is revealed to be the murderer of Teresa Banks, a sex worker whom he had patronized and confided in about his fantasies about Laura. Leland is clearly a predator who murders both Teresa and Laura and attempts to murder another young woman, Ronette Pulaski, in order to maintain the facade of 1950s patriarchal normalcy. This is somewhat different from the way Leland is presented in the TV series, where his crimes are largely blamed on his possession by a demonic spirit known as Killer Bob.

Killer Bob is a presence within Fire Walk With Me as well, but when I first watched it, he came across as a kind of fantasy scapegoat created by Laura to avoid dealing directly with the fact that her own father is the one creeping into her bedroom at night. Bob, along with other bizarre supernatural entities, are present within this movie, but they are not allowed to take the blame for Leland's actions as much as they are in the TV series. In Fire Walk With Me, Leland is a monster whose actions result in him losing his soul, as opposed to a man who is possessed against his will.

Laura has to deal with the crimes committed against her essentially on her own. Every male presence in her life contributes to her suffering: her high school boyfriends James and Bobby are too selfish to inquire about her obvious pain and distress; her psychologist exploits their intimacy to fulfill his own desire; and the Canadian-American gangsters use her and other teenagers as both a drug mule and a sex slave.  Laura is totally consumed by the underworld of the idyllic-seeming Twin Peaks. Fire Walk With Me drags you into an abyss of horror with only tiny spikes of the quirky humor and sugary earnestness of the TV version.

This unrelenting hellscape, I think, is best experienced before watching the TV series. Remember, the TV show wasn't planned out in every detail from the beginning. The writers and directors found the story as they worked on it for a few years, so the mystery, as it unfolds, is rather thrown together. And you can tell, as you watch, that the shaggy dog approach to characters, story, and plot goes down some slow roads here and there. But if you watch Fire Walk With Me first, the series becomes a totally different beast: we see Leland Palmer putting on a truly sickening and desperate show-at times, a literal song and dance number-of his innocence and grief. It makes the TV version unbearably tense and unnerving to see the monster hiding in plain sight episode after episode.

As for Laura, she is left to fend for herself on earth and in the Black Lodge, which is also a kind of bizarre afterlife, Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory all in one. At the very end of the movie, she is comforted by a psychic projection of a noble FBI agent who was not able to save her; and she is brought peace by an angel seemingly derived from a painting which hung on her bedroom wall all those years she was preyed upon by Leland. The angel didn't protect her in life, but in the Black Lodge it manifests as a kind of giant, living Christmas ornament. All this seems to be a hallucination brought on by a cascade of neurochemistry at the moment of death. Her mind takes mercy on Laura, and gives her comforting visions of angels and a cinematic FBI agent to make the plunge into oblivion less agonizing.

Meanwhile, spiritual parasites fight and barter over their scraps of pain and sorrow, operating according to codes and norms and laws totally alien to humankind, neither saving us nor damning us.

Laura Palmer, in the end, faced unimaginable suffering and death on her own with only fantasies and hallucinations to comfort her.

NEXT: 5/8/18 Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)

The Lynch Meditations -17

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was my first taste of Twin Peaks.

Yeah, I did it all wrong. Fire Walk With Me gives it all away, but I didn't care at the time. Even though I was a fan of David Lynch from Blue Velvet, Dune, and The Elephant Man, I had no interest in sitting through hours of television even if it was something with the vaunted cult reputation of Twin Peaks. So, I purchased a VHS copy of Fire Walk With Me, watched it almost as many times as I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, and loved every minute of it.

Weirdo FBI agents investigate crimes with no earthly solutions. 

Hey, that's David Bowie! Oh . . . now he's gone. 

A gang of demons hang out in a ratty apartment wheeling and dealing for creamed corn shares of garmonbozia ("Pain and Sorrow"). 

A bizarre, curtained-off salon represents some kind of hellspace of judgment (?). 

A one-armed man bellows a mortal warning to a young woman in danger, his face burning with emotion, fighting to have his voice heard above revving engines. 

An out of control drugs-and-booze orgy in an after hours club features subtitles to render dialogue understandable above the punishingly loud music.

A tracking shot across a wasteland of crushed-out cigarette butts,
the ruins of addiction,
of pain unceasing,
desire unending,
no cure, no magic pill in sight . . .  


I loved every minute, even if I didn't understand all those minutes. My take on it was that it was a plunge into a hell of murder, rape, incest, hallucinations, small town conspiracies, extra-dimensional influences, and ultimately, absurdly, inevitably hope. Sure, it's a hope found in the final traumatic moments of death as a broken mind unleashes a cascade of uplifting electrochemical sensations to give you a gentle glide into the abyss. But you take hope where you can find it in this life, right?

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a detective story, a teenage romance (featuring twenty-six year old teenagers, of course, but that's probably for the best), it's a character study featuring magnificent dialogue and engaging performances, and it is most definitely a kind of horror film. It transcends easy genre categories, and, at the time when I watched it, I saw it as an extension of the approach Lynch took with Blue Velvet. I still think this, but now I also see Fire Walk With Me in the context of the Twin Peaks TV series. It might also be my favorite Lynch work after Twin Peaks: The Return/Season Three. 

Hmm . . . how will it hold up after another watch?

The Lynch Meditations 16: Twin Peaks Episode 29 (1991)

In the year 1991 . . .

Episode 29 . . . 

Until 2017, this was the farthest along in the saga of Twin Peaks we were able to get. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me actually took us all back in time to explicitly tell the story of the last week of Laura Palmer's life. So we had the complete backstory, but for many years we didn't know what happened next. In fact, Episode 29 strongly suggested there was no next.

Hmmm . . . my decision to not do spoilers when discussing Twin Peaks has become onerous. I think I'm going to go heavy into spoilers starting with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After all it is the chronological beginning of the whole saga, and it was the first thing I watched before I ever saw the television series.

But about Episode 29: I recall the excitement I felt as I watched this episode so many years ago. I realized just how monumentally fucked-up the very last episode was going to be, and how I had never watched every episode of a television series from beginning to end before Twin Peaks. This was my first complete watch.

Episode 29 represents the triumph of mystery. The original premise of the show involved the murder of Laura Palmer never being solved. Well, her murder got solved. New mysteries were uncovered. Mysteries so powerful they well up and swallow what's left of hope and truth and love . . . yeah, it gets dark at the end. I dug it back in the day, I dig it even more, now.

Okay, next up is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I'll be doing spoilers from here on out.
And I will definitely be coming back to Twin Peaks as a whole,
Enemy Time permitting . . .

NEXT: 4/24/18: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

The Lynch Meditations -16

The last episode of Twin Peaks Season Two is up there with my favorite last episodes: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Wire-it brings the hammer down. Whatever the flaws of Season Two-which is widely regarded as deeply flawed, as missing a step, losing the plot-the very last episode brings the threads together, reminds the loyal superfans why they got hooked in the first place.

By the way, I've never agreed with the negative critical assessment of Season Two. I have only one explicit criticism, which I'll try to convey without spoiling anything: a character impersonates another . . . and that twist has not aged well. Not so much the idea of a character disguising themselves, but rather the uncomfortable representational politics of it . . . more I will not say. If you take the time to watch the entire series you will immediately know what I'm talking about. Aside from this one element, Season Two has never been a deal breaker for me.

Oh, yes . . . I will have to come back to this show in full . . .

My Neighbor Came 'Round, Needed Their Lawnmower Back . . .

Heading Out

Greed Body 2: Never Enough

Triune Dislocation of Being . . .

. . . I blame it on the seventy-six hour Tetris session. 

The Lynch Meditations 15: Twin Peaks Episode 14 (1990)

Episode 14 . . .

"It is happening again."

I'll try not to spoil too much . . . but this episode contains a startling depiction of profound metaphysical defeat. 

Agent Coop's sitting in the Roadhouse, taking in a live music show when a giant of prophecy manifests upon the stage, displacing the band to some other space-time reality for a moment or two. The giant tells Coop,

"It is happening again."

And then there's the look on Coop's face . . . he's staring into the very abyss. For he realizes he has failed to save a life. Again. 

This is a mysterious, yet devastating scene, one that strikes me with more force now than whenever I first watched it back in the day. 

NEXT: 4/19/18: Twin Peaks Episode 29

The Lynch Meditations -15

Episode 14 . . .

"It is happening again."

Killer Bob claims another victim . . . how in the fuck did they air this horrific scene of rape and murder on mainstream television in 1990? This scene-which I will not spoil, I guess-has always scared the living shit out of me. It is absolutely nightmarish.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that some of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen in TV or film come from Twin Peaks. Most of Twin Peaks isn't like this, though, and so, until recently, I tended to remember Twin Peaks as a show filled with brilliant dialogue, excellent acting, and memorable characterizations. But there is some horrific shit in this show.

Even my recent watch of Twin Peaks: The Return/Season Three, which has some memorably horrifying sequences, didn't remind me of the disturbing scenes from Seasons One and Two. Season Three might be my favorite stretch of live action television next to Ultra-Q and The Wire. My memory of the first two seasons, until recently, was of a quirky, talky, somewhat fantasy oriented drama-comedy. It is also, in certain sequences, pure depravity and horror. So, what I'm saying, is that the third season has largely eclipsed what has come before, but I am starting to realize I really need to carve out the time to revisit Seasons One and Two in full.

Enemy Time . . . working against my ass . . .

Self-Portrait Under Duress

The Lynch Meditations 14: Twin Peaks Episode 9 (1990)

Oh, man is this a thankless episode. It really doesn't stand on its own as a piece of "cinema for television." It's even more transitional and incremental than Episode Eight. It is well done for what it is, full of terrific acting and clever dialogue, but unless you watch it in the context of the full series, you're likely to be lost.

Highlights:
Windom Earle is set into play . . .

The Horne Brothers try to figure out which piece of evidence to destroy . . .

Teleporting creamed corn . . .

Deputy Andy gets all fucked-up with the scotch tape . . .

THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM . . .

Major Briggs's anomalous intergalactic messages . . .

Thirty year old teenagers in love . . . "Just You and I" . . .

And the most memorable scene: Cousin Maddie's terrifying vision of Bob who comes crawling over a couch after her. Every scene with Bob in Twin Peaks is way more frightening than I would expect anything on network television to be-how did they get away with this shit?

Yeah, I'm going to have to come back to this series and consider as a whole at some point.

NEXT: 4/17/18: Twin Peaks Episode 14 (1990)

The Lynch Meditations -14

Hmmm . . . watching only the David Lynch directed episodes of Twin Peaks is interesting, but doesn't really do justice to the overall series. This show was the result of a unique team of directors, writers, actors, crew, and musicians and not just the vision of one director.

For now, I'll continue with just the Lynch-directed episodes, but at some point, I will need to consider the series as a whole overall.

Falling Angel

Solar Appetite

The Endless Hunger of Jim Jones

Some Guy