Lost in the Movies: August 2022

TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #13 w/ Devil's Advocates - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me author Lindsay Hallam (YouTube & extended PATREON) premieres tonight


This has been a year of Fire Walk With Me commemorations as the film turns thirty. In May, I published my extensive podcast series on the Twin Peaks movie, two weeks' worth of episodes on various aspects timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Cannes premiere. At the same time, I shared a particularly relevant Twin Peaks Cinema episode on The Sweet Hereafter (coincidentally celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its own Cannes debut). And now, today is the anniversary of the U.S. wide release and I've timed the latest conversation for this occasion. I last spoke to Lindsay Hallam, author of the "Devil's Advocate" series book Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in 2018 when her study was published (in fact this was the last written interview to be published on my site before I switched over entirely to audio conversations). We dig into that project again in this discussion - her book views Fire Walk With Me as a horror film, trauma film, Twin Peaks entry, and David Lynch film - but I also wanted to discuss a broader range of subjects, some of which were not included in her book (or touched upon only briefly). Chief among these was her fascination with both Fire Walk With Me and the Lynch filmography in general as forms of melodrama, linking the surrealist auteur to the great filmmakers of the fifties like Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray. Between my "Small Town Blues" series on Twin Peaks Cinema this past winter and my current "Ray's Haunted Fifties" coverage on the same podcast (which will soon make my Patreon episode on Bigger Than Life public), this is obviously a terrain I like to explore so the second part of our talk particularly hones in on it. We also focus on the horror genre, the analysis of "affect" in cinema, and meta-questions about season three and possible future Peaks that my guests and I always seem to circle back to.

The public discussion begins by tracing her journey toward writing the book, and the form it took...

PART 1 on YouTube
(premieres at 8 pm tonight, August 28)

After that half hour, another fifty-plus minutes are exclusive to the $5/month tier on my Patreon, casting the net wider while teasing out those melodrama connections...

Listen to...




Purchase her commentary on Martyrs, video essay on the Gothic Fantastico boxset & essay in the book Women of Lynch


(her connection to Lee Harvey Oswald may have been one degree more removed than I remembered)

(overlapping w/ most of Lindsay's categories of analysis)



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belated July 2022 Patreon round-up: LOST IN THE MOVIES patron podcast #93: Coffee and Cigarettes (+ feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Russian Revolution, failures of the decadent right, history of malls, archive reading: Lady and the Tramp & more) + 3 TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances



Once again, a fairly random viewing - one of just two movies I watched in July - provides the film in focus to anchor this month's podcast. I happened to see Jim Jarmusch's quirky Coffee and Cigarettes because I was visiting someone who had an old DVD of it onhand and was intrigued by the title. Reflecting on both its seventeen-year production (assembled into an anthology from disparately shot but aesthetically similar short films) and the nineteen years since its release, I'm able to explore themes that always interest me regarding the passage of time - alongside other threads working their way through these blackout sketches of (usually) two actors playing themselves in a fictional, often contentious, conversation.

There were a lot of political topics dredged up by this month's podcast recommendations, including the legacy of revolutions, what Boris Johnson's resignation tells us about the state of the right and its appeal, and how shopping malls have evolved as cultural touchstones. There's a bit more feedback this time than last time (all from YouTube), another Marvel movie to discuss in brief capsule form, and for the second month in a row I have an essay on a fifties classic to share from my archive.

Meanwhile, having finally caught up to June's Twin Peaks character studies in late July, I caught up to July's just a few days into August. That's an improvement at least, and now I'm on pace to provide three advance entries to patrons every month going forward. This trio was particularly striking despite the low ranking, not only for the characters' onscreen antics but also the performers' offscreen lives...

(become a patron to discover their identities)


I introduced and cross-posted the full conversation on the site last week but actually the one post to make it up on schedule in July was Part 2 of this exchange with the hosts of the weird fiction podcast Counter Esperanto for the $5/month tier's reward...



Podcast Line-Ups for...
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Rebel Without a Cause as Twin Peaks Cinema #16 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)



The title of this summer season, "Ray's Haunted Fifties," evokes Rebel Without a Cause probably more than any other film. This is by far Nicholas Ray's most famous work, so famous indeed that it transcends his own reputation as a director to become an indelible piece of American pop culture mythology. If all of the director's films are haunted, Rebel feels particularly so given not just its own wounded characters but the tragically young deaths of all three leads, most famously James Dean himself (the star died, still in his twenties, before the movie was even released). And if you were to select a handful of Hollywood classics to represent the fifties, Rebel would be up there; it defines our image of that decade to the present day as surely as Elvis Presley records on the jukebox, Leave it to Beaver episodes on the black-and-white living room set, or posters of Marilyn Monroe below movie theater marquees. That aspect of Rebel - the almost intuitively iconographic - is what first leaps to mind when connecting it to Twin Peaks, which calls back several decades (to Lynch's own childhood) for its touchstones of teen culture. James Hurley is obviously derivative, as is Bobby Briggs in his own way, and the way the adolescent characters congregate with one another to take refuge from and figure out the adult world is quite reminiscent of Rebel's second half in particular. All of that occurs in the pilot and much of it is lost as the series progresses and loses touch with its high school roots. But Fire Walk With Me indicates deeper, richer thematic connections to Rebel Without a Cause, linking Laura Palmer to James Dean and Natalie Wood alike - both the characters they play, and the actors themselves.



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TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #12 w/ Counter Esperanto hosts Jubel Brosseau & Karl Eckler (YouTube & extended PATREON)


Numerous Twin Peaks podcasts have popped up in the past decade, most (including one of my own) following the episode-by-episode format - but few have taken as unique an approach as Counter Esperanto. Jubel Brosseau and Karl Eckler bring to their discussions a deep fascination with and knowledge of both weird fiction and local Pacific Northwest lore. This plus their evocative radio voices, eerie and transporting soundscapes, and penchant for reading haunting short stories by H.P. Lovecraft and other authors makes for one of the most atmospheric podcasts I've listened to, Twin Peaks or otherwise. Though they took several years off of their initial Peaks focus to cover a broader range of subjects, they've recently returned to The Return: hosting guests like John Thorne for retrospectives of different season three sections (although their musings tend to wander across the whole series). With that in mind, this seemed like a perfect time to finally contact them directly - after years of corresponding on Twitter and as guests and feedback-writers to the Sparkwood & 21 podcast in the mid-teens. In both the public and patron-exclusive parts of this conversation, we explore some familiar themes like the passage of time both before and since the new season, where that material fits in with the original series and Fire Walk With Me, and whether or not there will be (or should be) more Peaks. And given their specialty, we also explore topics that have not come up on Twin Peaks Conversations before, including their upbringing on the eastern side of Washington (where the pilot takes place, but not where it was shot) and how the visions of David Lynch - and Mark Frost - both complement and depart from literary concepts of "the Weird."

That question is particularly emphasized in the first half-hour of the podcast, up for free on YouTube...

PART 1 on YouTube

And we continue exploring Peaks and related subjects for another fifty-three minutes, exclusive to the $5/month tier...

Listen to...



The intro/outro music/soundscape comes from their episode




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Monkey Business (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #44)



My fifth season focus on "Hollywood Classics" continues after last month's Swing Time with another, quite different Ginger Rogers vehicle. This time she shares the screen not with Fred Astaire but with Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, and a mischievous chimpanzee. Grant plays a bumbling scientist who concocts a formula for renewed youth which both he and his wife end up consuming. Howard Hawks directed this zany comedy in the early fifties, at a time when the film could recall the antic energy of thirties screwballs (which Grant himself had starred in) while also passing the torch to a new generation of movie stars, represented by Monroe. It's interesting to consider that, thanks to the industrial disruptions of the shift to sound in the late twenties (which sent many actors to pasture long before they could have expected), these Golden Age icons were among the first to truly age onscreen. How appropriate that, in this case at least, they do so in a story about characters aging down as well as up.

This is the rare episode of Lost in the Movies to be delayed several days (usually I publish a new podcast on the first Wednesday of each month); I was catching up with several different deadlines simultaneously and this got bogged down in the process. These projects were the last of a long line, however, and now I'm on the clear for a mid-August breather. With these words, I finally end three and a half months of endlessly imminent deadlines. What a relief!


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