--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], turquoiseb <no_reply@> wrote: > <snip> > > However, a decade or so from now, while y'all are > > still trying to distance yourselves from ever having > > confessed to having liked "Twin Peaks," > > Who has been trying to distance themselves from having > asserted that they liked "Twin Peaks"? Did I miss > something? Or is Barry just confused again?
Well, I would say that you missed the phrase "a decade or so from now." "Still" refers to the idea that they'll still be claiming to find depth in the series then, all those years on, not that they're distancing themselves from it now. Pretty astounding oopsie from someone who claims to be a professional editor and spends much of her time berating others on this form for their inability to read. :-) My point -- although speculative -- was that in a decade or so I think *most* people will find "Twin Peaks" a laughable exercise in pretense and, as I suggested by reposting Alex's video clip, a classic example of "being weird just to be weird." It's the same realization that many of us who liked Jean-Luc Godard's films in our youth come to when re-watching them these days. They're so bad as to be laughable. Nothing but youthful posturing and the use of incomprehensible (or non-existent) plots and one-dimensional characters to make it *seem* as if they're full of deep, symbolic, cosmic meaning. That's what I suspect will happen with "Twin Peaks" and many of Lynch's movies. There's an "artsy" trap that many critics and moviegoers fall prey to in that they feel that films *with* strong plotlines and strong, believable characters can't really be full of deep meaning. They write off these films to some extent and put down the filmmakers as creators of "popular entertainment." You hear this said all the time about Steven Spielberg. My reaction is, "Excuse me? Shakespeare was a creator of popular entertainment. That doesn't mean that his works were devoid of depth or that they didn't explore interesting topics." I have an admitted prejudice towards Joss Whedon because I think he creates (in his TV work, anyway...I'm not as impressed by his recent blockbuster movies) some of the most tightly-plotted stories going, full of strong, interesting characters who would be memorable on their own, but who become much more so because of their interactions with other characters, just as strong and just as interesting as they are. There is no such thing as an "extra" in a Joss Whedon story; everyone has a strong role to play, and without any one of them the whole wouldn't be whole. You could remove an enigmatic dwarf of three from any of David Lynch's movies, and no one would even notice. They were there in the first place only to throw an element of weirdness into the mix, and lure people who fall for that stuff into thinking he had deep things to say. I don't think he did. Although I think he's done acceptable work in the past, I don't hold "Twin Peaks" or most of his recent films among them. They are pretty much the film counterpart of the cartoon series he "penned" for the L.A. Weekly for many years. "Penned" is in quotes because he drew it ONCE, and never changed it in all the succeeding years. All he had to do was send the editors new words to insert into the word balloons each week: That's how I think he makes movies. He just recycles the same images from his nightmares, going for weirdness to distract people from the fact that he doesn't have any creative ideas any more, if he ever did. YMMV.
