Something moving in the trees

Okay look, Twin Peaks is great and I love it but it's a messy series that has huge continuity issues and that I'm not sure its creators really understand.

And for sure, a hell of a lot of the fans don't understand it and I don't fault them at all for not wanting to delve into twelve supplemental novels.

If you want the bare minimum Twin Peaks experience just watch the original two seasons. That'll do it, that's a totally valid way of consuming the series and it's a warm nostalgia bath of sweetness and horror.

Or you can get fucked up and actually read the books.

The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier go a long way toward making the most recent season of the show comprehensible, but they're also fucking bugshit crazy and have no problem with warping and twisting Original Series canon. (Best example of fucking with canon: the divergence between the book version and the show version of Ed and Nadine's marriage - and Norma's homelife and family get a hasty band-aid that tries really hard to make sense but just kind of doesn't).

Also Secret History is basically all about aliens, which is my least favorite part of the TP lore. It gets better toward the end, but it's a big heavy book full of disparate sources and difficult-to-read pages that's mostly about the alien-filled escapades of a character who gets like five lines in the original series.

The Final Dossier sheds a lot of light on what exactly the fuck was going on in The Return, which I liked and appreciated a lot - though this one got worse toward the end.

Some questions are answered but David Lynch seems to like leaving a lot open-ended. There are still gaps to fill in, there are still mysteries left behind in the wake of reading these novels.

I enjoyed both books to an extent but was also frustrated by both. Only read if you're super obsessively, unhealthily, into Twin Peaks.

Like me.

Gotta Light?

I've been extremely behind on this blog, so we're going to talk about Twin Peaks: The Return even though I started watching it nearly a year ago and haven't re-watched it since the end of its initial run in September.

My sister hated it, and I don't think my parents were fans, but we dutifully sat down and watched each episode as a family, diving into the weirdness of Lynch together.

I loved it, but that's totally in character for me. I liked the journeys we took with the characters we already knew and I liked the places we went with the characters who were novel to us as viewers. I liked the visual textures and sonic assault that threaded through every episode. I loved the rock-slow pace of the thing, drawing and dragging you with it as it went to strange places. I wanted to get up and dance in the netherworld of the Roadhouse.

It didn't make sense because magic doesn't make sense. But in many ways it felt more wholly a part of Twin Peaks than some of the later episodes from season 2.

Anyway, spoilers? Spoilers.

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I kind of wish they hadn't brought Dale back. I kind of wish it had just been a quest for Dale and the realization that he was lost, that some things end.

And I kind of like the way they got there anyway - bringing Dale back didn't matter. He didn't get to go home. Sometimes things don't work. Sometimes evil wins.

However 10000000% I am here for Lucy getting her big hero moment. Lucy fuckin rules.

I want to rewatch the series, I have both of the books associated with this release and have to read them. I want to keep spending time in this world and learning more about it. It's beautiful and sad. It hurts and cleanses.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Take the absurdity and run

So a while back I talked about how much I hated the Mifflin Lowe book I Hate Fun because it was the laziest, crappiest, shittiest, most banal book of humor I'd ever encountered. It always went with the most predictable and boring punchline and held itself in esteem over every stereotype it described.

Max Headroom's Guide To Life is a book written in a very similar style to I Hate Fun but it actually ends up being funny, largely through the virtue of choosing to double-down on the banality and in doing so do the unexpected. The speaker in this book isn't punching down at the people he sees in the clubs, he's giddily and hilariously punching himself in the face all while making subversive and snarky observations about the consumerist culture of the 80s.

I'm not terribly familiar with Max Headroom (I was born after his period of peak popularity and have only seen the Max Headroom movie, not the whole series) so I missed out on some of the in-jokes here: Max's obsession with golf came as a surprise, for instance, but overall I didn't need to be a huge fan to enjoy the fawning Max does on himself and the sneers, slights, and asides that spoke to a snarky 80s audience.

That being said I'm glad I got this book cheap and I probably wouldn't buy it again and I don't recommend that *you* buy it (unless you're a massive Max fan, in which case you can buy it from me for a lot more money than I paid for it).

Anyway, overall Hansen and Owen do a good job of making the vibrant character from the small screen into an interesting presence in a book where you only hear his narration but never see his face after the front cover.

Cheers,
     - Alli

(Buy the book for less than I would sell it to you for here)

Second season blues

So I love the movie Fargo (Marge Gunderson 4eva, if you disagree get out) and I was really extra super impressed with the unexpectedly wonderful first season of Fargo on FX. Season two was okay. Just okay.

I think part of what I like most about Fargo as a film and in the first season are the representation and subversion of expectations - when's the last time you saw a heavily pregnant woman pull a gun on a suspect in a major film? When's the last time you saw a Deaf hitman portrayed as simultaneously intelligent and imposing in a way that had nothing to do with his Deafness in any form of media? And that was also in a show that starred a fat woman as the main character (and supreme badass). And both the original film and first season were written brilliantly; the pacing created a perfect surreality and underscored some bitingly minimalist humor.

Season two was okay. The inclusion of two non-white lead characters was a pleasant surprise that brought up some fascinating conflicts (though the fact that both characters were extremely violent gangsters is troubling). Marital strain was a theme, as were toxic masculinity and police corruption. But there was too much pointlessly bizarre crap clogging up the background. The whole side story with Regan was overdeveloped and did nothing to further the humor, mood, or plot. And then there was the other thing. The really stupid thing. (Spoilers - next sentence) Why the fuck did they feel the need to add aliens who never did anything to this season? (End Spoilers)

So. Anyway. I will say that every single actor in the whole season did a top-notch job. Everyone was just perfect. There were some moments of tremendous humor, and a few instances of human tenderness that were touching.

So it was okay. But not as great as I wished it could be.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Due process? What's that?

So Justified is over. The show has been an integral part of my family hang-out time for five years now, but it's gone.

SPOILERS FOR ALL SEASONS BELOW

I really enjoyed the first season, and this final season is much better than the intervening years have been, but I'm still not sure that I can call it a good show. Part of the major appeal in the early seasons was that it didn't focus too much on a single epic conflict but had a nice battle-of-the-week conflict going from time to time that brought in great character actors and let the mains display more of their personality. That format was largely abandoned by the third season and everything came down to Raylan, Boyd, and Ava. Screw that - I wanted more Tim, Rachel, and Art. The Crowes popped up and nastied around for a season, and that was fun, but watching Raylan and Boyd butt heads got to be a little boring for me without the long, tall, lawman occasionally leaving town to chase down a mob accountant or seize a crime scene for the Marshal Service (not that I think civil asset forfeiture is a good thing, but I'm not going to deny that it's a compelling plot device).

I guess I got bothered because as the seasons passed and characters around Raylan kept accusing him of corruption and behavior unbefitting an officer of the law, and those accusations kept ringing more true to me instead of standing out as unjust libel. Raylan broke into an evidence locker - I don't care that it was to put money back, he shouldn't have broken in. Raylan took his criminal coaldigging buddy to an OK Corral style shootout to kill Boyd's dad. Raylan completely mishandled Ava as a CI and he never should have been working the Crowder case in the first place because he WAS too involved with it - with Ava, with Boyd, and with Harlan as a whole. Justified is a very watchable and entertaining TV show about an old-west style lawman in the modern world; unfortunately that means that Justified is a very watchable and entertaining TV show about someone who doesn't give shit one for due process and that's kind of scary. Raylan IS corrupt. He hides his crimes behind a badge and even if he isn't personally, directly making money off them he sure is using those rule-bending habits to make his life easier. Even the last episode of the last season ends with Raylan concealing his knowledge that an escaped felon is at large and could be apprehended. It's fucking fantastic that Ava appears to have turned over a new leaf, but that doesn't mean he should let her go free; or has he forgotten that she's killed a bunch of people, been a pimp, a thief, and drug dealer? Sure, maybe Ava will never kill again - but then maybe Ava will run into Ellen May and decide to finish her assassination plot to keep the information about her whereabouts from getting out.

So, yeah. The show is over. And it's a lot of fun. But I'm deeply troubled about how much fun it is to watch a man get away with murder just because he's got a fucking badge.

By the way: A note on the title of the show. If you or I, Jo(e) average citizen, said to another person "you have 24 hours to get out of town" then showed up to that person's residence with a gun and threatened them they would ABSOLUTELY (at least in Florida, where the scene was set) have a right to stand their ground and defend themselves but you or I would NOT have the right to threaten them, threaten them some more, and essentially force them into a gunfight. The force of the law would be all on the other person's side, the person who you or I would have harassed and threatened. So Raylan's "Justified" killing was NOT justifiable self-defense, it was premeditated murder against someone who was legitimately defending himself from a corrupt police official. Even terrible people have rights, even drug dealers and murderers, and using a badge to deny someone's rights is a lot of what's currently wrong with the world.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Rockin' back inside your heart

I have been on a self-imposed break with Twin Peaks for two years. I love the series, I want to watch it all the time, and if I don't stop myself I let it consume me and I do actually watch it all the time; neglecting friends, family, my dog, reading, sleep, and food to watch and rewatch the show. I've allowed myself to rewatch the series this week and think I should make it an annual thing. The series is short, with only 30 episodes, and a good way to not go mad with boredom over a long weekend.

That being said, I guess it might be better to be bored than to be obsessed but I don't think anyone can have anything other than those two emotional reactions to Twin Peaks. It is bizarre and brilliant and banal and vapid and sexy and so much fun to get sucked into.

The first, shorter, season is clearly superior and avoided many of the goofy side-story traps that bogged down the second season. The first season is clean and sharp, as slick as Agent Cooper's hairstyle and as rough as Leo Johnson's living room. I love that there are creases in the story and you can see so well how some things were planned and filled out while other things were never meant to be explained.

The second season isn't terrible but there are two things about it that I strongly dislike and, sadly, they make up much of the airtime: James' incredibly dull and predictable interlude with the Marshes and everything having to do with Windom Earle.

People say that finding out who killed Laura Palmer is what killed the series, I think that the revelation of Earle did a lot more to put a stake in the show's heart. Earle's actions and character are out of step with the tone the show tried so hard to establish during the first season and the first half of the second season and everything he touches suffers from it. He is too screechingly evil while being too prosaic to fit into the woods around Twin Peaks; if he were less evil he'd fit in okay with the town, if he were more supernatural or more strange he'd fit in okay with the Black Lodge. It's the combination of him showing "the evil that men do" while not being anything more than a power-hungry man that makes him so frustrating to watch. He even makes Dale look bad - if this is what Cooper's so afraid of maybe he's not all that good at his job.

But the Marshes and Earle aren't enough to ruin the series for me. There are still enough little idiosyncrasies that I can make a home out of the niches they cut into the world. Andy's head injuries, Nadine's reversion to high school, Cooper's non sequiturs, and all that coffee makes it a place that I want to go back to again and again. And it doesn't hurt that the show was filmed in a real place that I want to go back to again and again - the visuals are beautiful and it always makes my heart hurt and long for cherry pie.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Good TV is hard to come by

I don't watch a hell of a lot of television. Once a week I go over to my parents' house and I'll watch a show with them but other than that I just don't really do TV; in my opinion a TV is a convenient thing to watch movies on, not something that people generally make good shows for.

That's changed quite a bit recently - improved technology means that there are fewer limitations to TV than there used to be; huge screens and HD mean that audiences won't lose picture quality and so new shows have made a mind boggling jump in technical quality - hell, just look at the improvements in image quality over the course of the last twenty years:

Those are all stills from CBS sitcoms with similar budgets each ten years apart; when even the crappy, relatively cheap shows are seeing technical improvements like this it comes as no surprise that interesting, experimental ventures are improving in all areas.

Now, back to what I actually want to talk about, which is this gloriousness:

The FX run of Fargo is easily the best thing I've seen on television this decade and possibly ever (Twin Peaks doesn't count because I've only watched it on DVD). The show is beautiful, incredibly well written, and full of darkness and fascinating characters. I know people are all super stoked about Malvo, but I'm a much bigger fan of Lester and Molly. Lester's transformation from the pilot to the finale is really well done and actually made me a little scared of Martin Freeman - he's a terrifyingly good actor. And Molly. Oh, man, Molly. Allison Tolman is amazing and I want to be Molly when I grow up. She's SUCH a great character and avoids so many of the tropes associated with Strong Female Characters (she's not perfect, mind, but she's the best that's been put on TV for a long damn time). Molly is just so wonderful I want to hug her and watch her be a complete badass for hours on end.

The show is technically fantastic; there are beautiful shots full of beautiful light and balance, crisp, clean visuals all around. The music is brilliant and unsettling, the writing is sharp (if occasionally heavy-handed) and so gloomily funny that I spent at least a few minutes of each episode laughing at horrible murders.

Fargo is a great movie and Fargo the show lives up to the film. The run is over for the moment but I really recommend picking this up and watching it if you've got about ten hours to spare - it will be time well and easily spent.

Cheers,
     - Alli