TWIN PEAKS Character Series previews begin on Patreon

Update June 2022: As the public debut was postponed, these patron advances will now be published three times a month rather than every week.

My TWIN PEAKS Character Series (which paused short of the twenty most prominent characters in the spring of 2017) will reboot on this site on May 23. Entries will be expanded and new ones will be added to incorporate the season three ensemble as well as fresh material for old characters. And I'm adding a new perk for patrons too: every week on Patreon I'll publish a round-up of these entries a month ahead of time. Right now, that includes the lengthy, detailed introduction to the series and its approach; screenshots of extremely minor characters; and short capsules on dozens and dozens of slightly more significant individuals...

TWIN PEAKS Character Series intro & minor characters (exclusive advance)

If you tried to access them last weekend and ran into trouble please note that the blog settings have been fixed and all of the material should now be open to patrons. I won't be cross-posting preview entries on here going forward (since these private posts will delete as soon as they've been made public, sharing them would quickly become redundant in the archive). However, in every public character entry I'll include reminders, links, and whatever number I'm up to on Patreon.

Hope you enjoy the series, and consider becoming a patron if you want to leap ahead and explore upcoming entries ahead of time!

Belladonna of Sadness as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #12 (podcast)

An appropriate tie-in to my recent listener feedback episode of the Patreon podcast, which included a passage on the dark fairy tales themes coursing through Twin Peaks (specifically emphasizing Sleeping Beauty and the work of Anne Sexton), the Japanese proto-anime Belladonna of Sadness also kicks off the new three-month season of Twin Peaks Cinema. I'm calling this season's theme "Traumatic Transformations". These films all begin with characters haunted by trauma: loss of loved ones, abuse by powerful men, sometimes both. These traumas become wrapped up in fantasies of various kinds, some casually poetic (a fairy tale read to children when babysitting), some obsessively escapist (a UFO special sparking both avoidance of and a search for the more disturbing truth), and some literally manifesting in supernatural powers (an impoverished peasant evolving into a hypnotic witch whose magic threatens the very lord who raped her). Even the more realistic films suggest, in an offhand way much like Twin Peaks, that the tragedies unfolding across their communities may be connected on some deep, fundamental level with an individual's private crisis. This is certainly true of Belladonna of Sadness, a fascinating project mixing fable with social history, psychology with pornography, and static illustration with pulsating psychedelic montage. Connections to Peaks abound, perhaps most directly to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer as our heroine Jeanne struggles with a BOB-like demon who is both a manifestation of her own personal defiance and a product of the assault which has become intertwined with her own identity.

Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts

You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

(and most places podcasts are found)

April 2022 Patreon podcast LOST IN THE MOVIES #90 - Listener Feedback (Twin Peaks subjects include Sleeping Beauty connections, was The Return a passion project?, Fire Walk With Me's subversion of intent, ironic vs. sincere responses, Cooper's identity in flux & more + Snow White & Sleeping Beauty archive reading)

With this podcast - reading and sometimes responding to feedback I've received from my audience on Patreon, YouTube, and this site since last August - I'm finally caught up with the commitments of last summer (aside from the longer-term project of making the Lost in Twin Peaks podcast public). There was a lot to dig into from these responses - topics are listed below - but I especially wanted to highlight my patron Laurence's fascinating connections between Sleeping Beauty and Twin Peaks, which spurred larger digressions into Walt Disney vs. David Lynch, Anne Sexton's Transformations, and the explicit, experimental proto-anime Belladonna of Sadness (which I'll be covering in a public Twin Peaks Cinema podcast in a few days). This feedback also inspired an inordinate amount of time spent crafting a "Twin Peaks" font for the image above - sometimes the most ridiculous effort goes into the littlest things - as well as an archive selection in which I compared Sleeping Beauty to another work (in this case, Disney's own Snow White). Incidentally, "Opening the Archive" will continue month-to-month but aside from that, changes are on the way. I'm not exactly sure what my approach will be to patron podcasts in the coming months; my "Twin Peaks Reflections" approach to characters, locations, and storylines is complete, and my patron-exclusive "Twin Peaks Cinema" entries are done for the time being. Aside from keeping up monthly with brief comments on what I've been watching, reading, or listening to (as well as more consistently fielding feedback), I may offer a longer review in each episode, returning to the "Film in Focus" format. Above all, though, my main priority is to give myself the time for the three big Twin Peaks projects: the aforementioned public Lost in Twin Peaks; the long, long-delayed character series; and finally the last set of Journey Through Twin Peaks video essays.

See you in May...

TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #9 w/ Twin Peaks Fanatic creator Mya McBriar (YouTube & extended PATREON)

While this is Mya McBriar's debut as guest in the extended Lost in the Movies universe, she and I have crossed paths many times before beginning in the heady days of 2014 - 17 on the dugpa World of Blue forum where we and other fans shared theories and speculation about the upcoming series. She started her blog Twin Peaks Fanatic around that time, soon moving from quick posts on various aspects of the show to longer, more personal essays on the elements of Peaks or David Lynch's work that most moved her, all while plugging away at recaps and reactions to every episode. We appeared, together and apart, on Twin Peaks Unwrapped episodes too - most famously (at least in Unwrapped's own lore) to rank Lynch fims, with some unexpected results. On the anniversary of the Twin Peaks pilot this weekend, we discussed this era of fandom - its new discoveries and layers of nostalgia (and nostalgia-for-nostalgia) - in our first one-on-one interview, along with an eclectic array of topics. These include the highs and lows of season three after all that anticipation: experimentation in Parts 3 and 8; Sarah, Judy, and the frogbug; Dougie's world; Richard Horne's place after abandoning the original Audrey story; and - as always - where the finale leaves us going forward. We also talk about the power of Laura Palmer, Lynch's possible jabs at Quentin Tarantino from the nineties to the teens, Mya's discovery of the original show as a preteen Gen Xer in one of the more remote and offbeat parts of New Jersey ("Shades of Death Road", anyone?), and her own creative writing which combines Lynch analysis with original fictional material. Some of this is featured in the public part of the conversation on YouTube...

PART 1 on YouTube

...while the other half of the discussion, available to $5/month patrons, incorporates the rest of these subjects and casts the net even wider.

Listen to...

PART 2 on Patreon

Read Mya's other work on 25 Years Later/TV Obsessive as well as in The Blue Rose magazine & the book Women of Lynch (for her piece "Impressions of Lynch: Journaling a Requiem")

Highlights from Twin Peaks Fanatic include Laura Walked With Me amp; Pinky's Dream: The Story of Crazy Clown Time

The Hunter S. Thompson quote was used in 25 Years Later - Happy Anniversary Twin Peaks!

Mya's appearance on Twin Peaks Unwrapped to discuss Lost Highway

My piece SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS:

zoomers, millennials, X, boomers, silent, greatest, and lost

Julius Kassendorf's article suggesting Fire Walk With Me-after-reveal viewing order

The Wrestler (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #40)

Perhaps someday I'll cover Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a controversial grand folly which divides most viewers into love/hate camps. I saw it once, years ago, and didn't care for it although I have friends who swear by it as a misunderstood masterpiece. For now, I'm ending my mini-Aronofsky series (part of a larger season in which I cover small groups of films by different directors) with his fourth film, The Wrestler, which was viewed as a comeback by many who disliked The Fountain and as a disappointingly conventional follow-up by many who hungered for that sweeping vision. There's also some thematic irony, as The Wrestler is about as far from a "fountain of youth" as you can get. Just as the sharp, slick bombardment of Requiem for a Dream captures a certain restless, desperate early 2000s zeitgeist, the wildly different aesthetic of The Wrestler ably conveys the numb, weary tail end of the Bush years. If the earlier movie shows the door slamming shut on a generation's youth, this film offers the melancholy cold comforts of middle age. Although the main character is a bit older than the Requiem gang, the world he represents - garish pro wrestling, hair metal, and Nintendo video games pitting his avatar against an evil Iranian - very much provided a backdrop for Gen X's coming of age. In keeping with larger cinematic trends, the generational spotlight also begins to fall on millennials, here represented by the wrestler's daughter who is entering into adulthood while grappling with the traumas and shortcomings of those who preceded her. This period is also evoked by the film's grungy look and handheld camerawork, reflecting the "neo-neorealist" trend in independent art cinema, while its themes and setting (and perhaps even the nature of its ending) recall The Sopranos - itself a quintessential artifact of the era. As a fun bonus, I've included a listener's commentary on connections between Twin Peaks and the WWE storyline from the late nineties; if you too have any feedback on either wrestling or The Wrestler, please let me know.

Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts

You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

(and most places podcasts are found)

LINKS

Following (a video essay) by Matt Zoller Seitz

(montage of back-of-the-head tracking shots)

The Wrestler (no 93) by Allan Fish (Wonders in the Dark)

MY RECENT WORK

New on YouTube

New Schedule: Journey Through Twin Peaks 2023 & much more

New on the site

Spring Update: Schedule for 2022 & 2023 (video)

Fully updated picture gallery & Top Posts

Previous Darren Aronofsky episodes on Lost in the Movies

Pi & Requiem for a Dream

Spring Update: Schedule for 2022 & 2023 (video)

This is my prospective schedule for everything I'll publish in the next year and a half. As explained in the video below, the top priorities - aside from maintaining my four monthly podcasts (much of which will be based on pre-existing material) - are re-packaging my Lost in Twin Peaks podcast for Fire Walk With Me, The Return, and season two (in that order) and rebooting my TWIN PEAKS Character Series last seen in 2017. The "Unseen" series and miscellaneous work will be pursued only if the big stuff is going well. And it all leads toward resuming Journey Through Twin Peaks next summer, which means those videos will have to be my exclusive focus (in terms of behind the scenes work) by early 2023, hopefully even by late 2022.

Meanwhile, I continue to track my work on my backlog here (and in a new Twitter thread). Finishing this announcement today - plus recently bringing my Top Posts and picture gallery pages up to date - puts me in a spot where I'm a full month ahead on everything I'll publish on any platform. That means I can spend April building up a backlog for Lost in Twin Peaks and the character entries, to avoid falling behind as I so often have before. If I do get bogged down (certainly possible especially as a busy period of offline work will pick up soon), I'll stick to the priorities and give up some projects if I have to. But it feels like the year is off to a good start; the Olympic Series in particular was a nice way to build up some momentum after autumn burnout.

Thanks as always for your interest and support. This looks to be one of the most crucial periods in my site's history, perhaps the most important of all, as I reach the climax of a decade-long focus on Twin Peaks.