April 2020 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #15 - Season 2 Episode 7 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #66 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Laura (+ the Bernie campaign, listener feedback, podcast recommendations, film capsules: David Lynch shorts, John Carpenter "alien" films including The Thing & They Live, Hotel Room, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Twin Peaks Reflections: Waiter, Gersten, Diane, the hospital, Ronette's bridge, Audrey at One Eyed Jack's/Part 18 & much more)

I thought April's main podcast episode would be a quickie; instead it transformed into either my second or third-longest monthly entry. It's been a busy three months, so there was a lot to cover: films watched, podcasts listened to, projects and plans to update, and - perhaps especially - a monumental political moment to discuss. That episode is divided into three separate parts: one Twin Peaks-themed, one politics-themed, one film-themed. And both of my Lost in Twin Peaks episodes are split up too: each covers a major Lynch episode of season two and I had too much to say to fit it all into a three-hour audio file (not to mention the convenience of giving listeners space between them).

Both coincidentally and by design, some of my major Twin Peaks-related coverage arrives at the same time I'm renewing my Journey Through Twin Peaks video series. This includes one of the key "Twin Peaks Cinema" entries, on the 1944 noir Laura (I'll follow with the perhaps equally important Vertigo next month). Most famously, this film lent several character names to the series but its core idea is also poetically echoed in Twin Peaks - including in season three (which I've never really had the opportunity to discuss before, despite touching on the two works' relationships in the past). For good measure, I include my 2011 review in the "Opening the Archive" reading series.

As for Lost in Twin Peaks, this month we reach the exact halfway point of the series and perhaps the most important episode of any: the killer's reveal...

Lost in Twin Peaks #15A: S2E7, Part 1 (Lonely Souls/"Episode 14")

Lost in Twin Peaks #15B: S2E7, Part 2 (Lonely Souls/"Episode 14")

Lost in the Movies #66A
(Path through Journey Through Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks Listener Feedback: The Big Sleep, Mark Frost interview book, Windom/Mr. C and tulpas, "Twin Peaks Reflections": Waiter, Gersten, Diane, hospital, Ronette's bridge, Audrey at One Eyed Jack's/Part 18 & more)

Lost in the Movies #66B
The Bernie campaign & the populist left (+ podcast recommendations)

Lost in the Movies #66C
"Twin Peaks Cinema" - Laura (+ capsules on David Lynch's shorts and Hotel Room, Frank Capra's dark side and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, John Carpenter "alien" films: They Live, Village of the Damned, The Thing, the Spanish Civil War in The Silence of Others and The Fallen Sparrow, Federico Fellini's Il Bidone, 3 "Disneylands" in Pinocchio, Ken Burns' The Congress & more)

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #9 - Season 2 Finale/S2E1 (May the Giant Be With You/"Episode 8") open to all patrons

Podcast Line-Ups for:

An American Tail

My interest in An American Tail, the 1986 animated immigrant's tale which I probably hadn't seen since childhood, was reawakened by Molly Haskell's recent biography of Steven Spielberg. She spends several pages analyzing this film and its sequel (obviously objects of deep fascination for her, particularly given this study's place in a series called "Jewish Lives"), whereas some of the director's later movies are lucky to garner a paragraph. This despite the fact that Spielberg didn't even direct An American Tail; the project results at least as much Don Bluth's distinctive vision as anyone's. Still, Spielberg contributed to the writing and was a very active producer; Haskell rightly points out how personal the story is by drawing connections to other Spielberg films. The main character, a curious, guileless little mouse (Phillip Glassner) who wanders the dangerous streets of nineteenth century Manhattan after being separated from his Russian Jewish family during a transatlantic voyage, is even named after Spielberg's grandfather Fievel. When Bluth pushed for a more Americanized name, Spielberg held his ground. Seven years before Schindler's List (and arguably, more explicitly given the Holocaust film's ambiguous point of view) this may be the first time that Spielberg - so eager, by his own admission, to be the all-American filmmaker from the twentieth century suburbs - foregrounded his Jewish identity as an act of storytelling.

The path through Journey Through Twin Peaks

This post is no longer active and has been superseded by

"NEW PATH THROUGH JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS"

UPDATE April 2021: that schedule will also soon be expanded and adapted through 2022

If you enjoy this work, please consider becoming a PATRON to support it (which comes with exclusive monthly podcasts)

INTRODUCTION

Over the past year, I documented my path to these videos, a resumption of my 2014-15 video series Journey Through Twin Peaks - this ended when I published the first chapter a week ago. Here now is the path through the series, ensuring that it can be released over the spring and summer while I take care of a few other things as well. These steps are pretty self-explanatory; most are directly related to the creation of Journey but I also need to keep up with my monthly patron rewards, and I've decided to take a few weeks "off" before fully diving into Part 6 of the videos. During that time, I will build up a small backlog to carry me through the summer - another Mad Men viewing diary, plus repackaging some of my "Film in Focus" and/or "Twin Peaks Cinema" Patreon segments from the past two years as a brand new public podcast. Additionally, I'll take at least a week to do some behind-the-scenes work on my rebooted Twin Peaks character series, a project which will mostly be developed after these videos conclude.

Meanwhile, I will be publishing new posts at least once a week on this site. At first, these will go up every Wednesday and consist of either a video update of whatever chapters went up in the past week, my monthly patron podcast round-up, or a film review from my backlog. The Wednesday after Part 5 is fully published, I will post a full directory of all the videos in that part, as I did for the previous ones in 2014-15. When my Mad Men viewing diary is ready, I will publish a new episode write-up each Monday; at that point there will only be a Wednesday post when I need to round-up videos or podcasts. And after the viewing diary concludes, I'll return to the regular Wednesday schedule, at that point probably dominated by video updates (concluding, again, with a full round-up of Part 6 as well as perhaps a directory of both parts). (update 6/23: I've revised my approach to the weekly schedule, and also eliminated deadline dates from the following "Path")

In this Twitter thread, I will document the following steps even more closely, breaking down completion of tasks inside of the step as well. You can bookmark this post to check back periodically too. I will update each step to note when it is completed along the way. My hope is to wrap by the beginning of fall, but I won't be surprised if this takes longer. Enjoy the ride!

THE STEPS ON THE PATH

JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS is back, starting today (video)

Tonight is the 30th anniversary of the Twin Peaks pilot in 1990. For a long time, this has been my target date to finally renew my Journey Through Twin Peaks video series, and I'm happy to announce that I've met that target. I just published the first new chapter in five years, "The Dance Resumes" (about the status of the series just before it began its comeback that would lead to season three), and you can watch it above.

Twin Peaks: "Dark Dreams on the Radio" (video)

While creating the first Journey Through Twin Peaks video series in 2014, I decided to preview one clip a week ahead of time. I was excited by the juxtaposition I'd found between the killer's reveal in Twin Peaks and W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming", and I knew that the video containing it wouldn't be ready for release as early as expected - so I posted it early. Now I'm taking a similar step even further ahead of time, for a few reasons.

"Dark Dreams on the Radio" is a non-narrated montage of clips from Twin Peaks' third season (and Blue Velvet) cut to This Mortal Coil's cover of "Song to the Siren" (as incorporated into the sound mix of David Lynch's Lost Highway). There are a number of compelling rhymes between soundtrack and image, as well as between images from different works (or different parts of the same work). I first conceived of this idea - believe it or not - before the incredibly well-suited Part 17/18 aired and afterwards I was even more determined to launch the new Journey this way.

Ultimately, however, I decided that this would be a better beginning for Part 6, which will premiere in late May or June, rather than Part 5 (which is going up in a few days). But I still wanted to find a way for this montage to not only kick off Journey but conclude a month of shorter video essays that began in mid-March with (not accidentally) a montage, Far Away Music, scored to another version of "Song to the Siren," this one by its author Tim Buckley. That the images in that montage came from the work of Federico Fellini, a major inspiration for Lynch, only added another level of symmetry - as did last week's Side by Side video essay on Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, covering two of the films from that montage.

So here is a full-circle conclusion to my March cycle and a teaser for the new series. That's it for the run-up to Journey Through Twin Peaks. As I tweeted last week while preparing a season three marathon, and in the spirit of that season's finale...see you on the other side.

Side by Side: Nights of Cabiria & La Dolce Vita (video)

This video concludes both my five-entry Side by Side series and my run of new video essays this past month - which itself began with a tribute to Federico Fellini ("Far Away Shores" in my Montage series, joining La Strada with the two films featured here). This was the last subject I settled on after all the other videos were conceived, and the very last I edited (I'm writing these words on March 14, after beginning work on the Montage video way back in early 2018). I'm excited to dive into these two films here; the whole point of the Side by Side series is to create a dance between two works' similarities and differences, using each quality to emphasize the other, and Fellini's back-to-back masterpieces provide perfect fodder for this approach. Both chronicle their protagonists' journeys through Roman nights but the two characters begin and end up in very different places. Describing this is one thing; illustrating it was truly a joy. (A poignant one, at that; I had forgotten how profoundly moving the ending of Nights of Cabiria is in particular.)

I reviewed Nights of Cabiria as part of my Favorites series in 2016, reviewed La Dolce Vita as part of my Big Ones series in 2011, and compared La Dolce Vita with Twin Peaks, mostly to the similarly structured seven-days-and-seven-nights film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, on my Patreon podcast in 2019. That discussion built on a brief juxtaposition (one of my original "side by side" ventures) in "The Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer", a chapter in my Journey Through Twin Peaks series. Speaking of Journey, the next time I post a video essay - in a week to be precise, on the thirtieth anniversary of a certain show's pilot - will be my first entry in that series in five years. Something else (also related to Journey, though not officially a chapter) may post in the meantime, but we'll see. Schedules are welcome, but so are surprises, and there will be plenty of those in the months to come - for better or worse. Let's try to provide some of the better ones.

also available on Vimeo: