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The thread for discussion of David Lynch media

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KvP:
So I just watched the Twin Peaks series finale.

Holy shit, is what I have to say about that.

bryanthelion:
I didnt like Inland Empire, like at all.

Loved eraserhead though.

KharBevNor:
Man, the thing about Lynch is, he's a shit film-maker. It's important to remember that he trained as a painter. Eraserhead is his best work, and that's something more like some surrealist installation/painting on the screen. Very unique, very rich, very imaginative. A firm favourite of mine.Then it's pretty much downhill in chronological order. I tend to think that The Elephant Man was almost good in spite of Lynch: the high level of creative input of other people on his first 'proper' film seems to have reigned in his worst tendencies, and a good film was produced. Dune, well, we all know about Dune. Then, he started writing his own stuff, and shit hit the fan. Blue Velvet is a perfect example of what Lynch does well, and where he falls down. Visual set-pieces (like the opening) are brilliant, pretty much all the scenes with Dennis Hopper are awesome, but a lot of the rest of the film is just excruciating, like it was chopped together from some Made for TV movie. After this it gets worse, in my mind, with the possible exception of Lost Highway, which has more good points than, say, Mulholland Drive, which was a dreadful film. The thing about Lynch is, there are certain aspects of his work that are brilliant, auteur genius level: his use of sound and music, and certain of the metaphorical, bizarre visual setpieces in his films are astounding. Unfortunately, he shows a recurring inability, to my mind, to wrap these elements together into a decent film. It's not even that his plots are bad, it's just that he has almost no grasp whatsoever of dramatic tension or pacing.  By Mulholland Drive he's just throwing in plot twists because it's his style. As he's continued, and creative controls of him have relaxed, he's become more and more fascinated with his own cleverness and seems to have forgot what made his films good in the first place.

Twin Peaks is pretty good, but the majority of Twin Peaks was written and directed by people who were not David Lynch. Once again, his worst tendencies were contained, his deficiencies masked.

Alex C:
I've seen roughly 60% of Lynch's stuff, and by that I mean that I have seen every movie he's released, but only 2 all the way through to the end; I always end up losing interest and finding something better to do. So basically, what Khar said, with an even greater emphasis on "learn2pace moar."

KvP:
I don't disagree with what you write here, Khar, but

--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 02 Mar 2008, 19:55 ---Twin Peaks is pretty good, but the majority of Twin Peaks was written and directed by people who were not David Lynch. Once again, his worst tendencies were contained, his deficiencies masked.
--- End quote ---
This is wrong. Going through Twin Peaks it's readily apparent that, while Lynch was never a permanent fixture on set even when he was involved with the show, he was the guy who made the show good. When Lynch left in the second season the show became really awful, even when Mark Frost and Robert Engels and all the show regulars were still on. All the things that people think about when they think about Twin Peaks - the hallucinations and dream sequences, the disjointed dialogue, the White Lodge / Black Lodge mythology - Lynch was responsible for. When he left, it wasn't the same. When he came back to direct the final episode he managed to mostly redeem the show despite the mediocre (Windom Earle) and outright terrible (James' out-of-state romance, Billy fucking Zane, Andy's daddy drama, Jean Renoit) plot threads that had pretty much killed it following the resolution of the Laura Palmer storyline and Lynch's departure. I don't buy that the show was good in spite of him at all.

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