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Rating: Some thoughts on the plot: Twin Peaks in 2017 is David Lynch's take on The Cloven Viscount. A morbid and postmodern interpretation in terms of setting and tone, during which the procedures that can lead a split soul to survive in its two moral extremes are progressively described. The Cloven Viscount with less bloodshed, but with many more concerns.
Has Cooper come out of the lodge? It's still uncertain, perhaps not completely. But there's an amoeba in the shape of Cooper that seems to be guided by the lodge, and while advancing with very comical inertia in the daily life of a mediocre man named Dougie Jones, it retains some of our guy's fetishes: if you're an aficionado, you're obliged to witness Cooper finally drinking a cup of coffee after twenty-five years of isolation beyond life and death (lately it even seems beyond time and space, but it's controversial); you understand. Ah, so he's out of the lodge? It's still not quite clear. There's a dwarf who runs and wants to stab him.
The other Cooper, theoretically, is the official Cooper. But it seems his soul is completely subservient to the darkness of BOB, and his actions are aimed at preserving evil in the real world, outside of the lodge. Gordon and Albert, both just as we left them, don't see it clearly.
Major Briggs? You see him, perhaps, in a purple sea saying «blue rose». Maybe he's a murderer. Perhaps they've found his body attached to the head of a woman?
What happened to Annie? Who knows.
How's Audrie? No idea.
What's in the lodge now? The evolution of the arm.
Who owns the super-technological place with the hypercube we see at the beginning? Nobody knows.
The guy who runs over the guy in Twin Peaks, who is he and what does he do? It's still not clear.
The son of Andy and Lucy? He's the perfect son for Andy and Lucy.
The photography? It's beautiful, tranquil.
Who was Diane in the end? A jerk who seems to have come out of a contemporary BDSM art gallery, who suffered for Cooper and hasn't gotten over it.
How's the Log Lady? Good: the log told her that Hawk must find something that's missing, and that the way to find it has to do with his heritage.
With a good 20% of the plot, I'd say we're there. For everything else, blogs are teeming with Freudian-Taoist-Catholic-Stalinist hypotheses and interpretations, so if you're interested, you've got plenty to read.
We're at the eighth episode of the eighteen total planned, and Lynch decides it's time to go overboard. He cuts all narrative lines (about twenty or so), jumps back to the atomic drop on Hiroshima and, in a moment of contemplative relaxation, finally decides to explain everything thoroughly.
But everything what? It's not clear.
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In the end, it doesn't matter if you catch on to the aesthetics of skulls shattered by heavy hand impositions.
Because even if at that point you felt like looking elsewhere, you would at the same time be enjoying
This is the water and this is the well,
drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eye
and dark within.
therefore the fact that the poetic insert in the filmic diegesis, for once, is neither a hodgepodge nor a third-party citation. That it is, perhaps, intimately connected to the context and stands strong even outside of it. It's a rare occurrence: Jarmusch tried it in Paterson, and his was a noble and partially successful attempt, although the compositions of the driver/poet pay heavy homage to William Carlos Williams («Carlo Williams Carlos») and are too much the main characters of the film to transcend it.
The dark and obscure verses of Lynch - if you hear them, you die (perhaps) - don't explain themselves, yet they stand: strengthened by a superhuman reading and the violence on scene, they throw the viewer into a Dionysian contemplative despair.
All this. Or maybe it just seems beautiful to us because we feel, stronger than ever, the need for all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
So, meanwhile, there's this.
Then there are long sequences of powders and shimmering lights in journeys inside the atomic mushroom, there's the genesis of evil and the genesis of good, or their entrance into the real world; ghostly hooded figures extracting gleaming spheres from supposed cadavers of semi-humans. There's Lynch's black and white. There are metaphysical places made of huge brass and steampunk suggestions, with giants and cannon-women. There's the sound of the forties.
Lynch moves more comfortably than ever in the fictional world he created, like a snow globe, in the early '90s. And when you look inside this snow globe, you don't suspend disbelief: you outright suppress it.
That fictional world is realistic and draws you in because it has its own alternative theology and linear, readable stories, but most importantly because it's real but has no footholds in the real real: like in a parallel dimension where our cultural products don't exist.
So it seems not strange, then, that at the Roadhouse in a remote village in the woods, a band like the one that's playing in this episode could perform. You’re surprised, yes, you get wet or harden, but then you think for a moment and realize that Lynch has created a world where everything is perfect, possible, normal. But nope, I'm not telling you who’s playing, because then I'd be accused of spoilers, and I can't stand people who cry over spoilers because, damn, if you have eyes to read, you also have them to watch stuff, and anyway you don't watch stuff for the plot alone.
All this to say: please, watch the new season of Twin Peaks. I need more people to talk about it with.
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