TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #22 w/ Lost Highway: The Fist of Love author Scott Ryan (YouTube & extended PATREON)

The same week that I published my belated April episode, a discussion with the hosts of Twin Peaks Peeks, (and before I posted or was even able to mention the long-delayed Lost in Twin Peaks season three finale coverage yesterday) I caught up with the episode that should have been released in May. Aside from John Thorne (who will make another appearance eventually, wrapping up this podcast run with a bonus), Scott is the first return guest on Twin Peaks Conversations. He's already written another book after his late 2021 appearance (which was to promote Your Laura Disappeared, his study of Fire Walk With Me). This time, the subject is David Lynch's own Twin Peaks follow-up, Lost Highway. Like the previous book, Scott's The Fist of Love offers the author's own experience with the film, picks apart the musical soundtrack, and engages with numerous cast and crew members in lively interviews. In this case, the interviews compose the vast majority of the book because Scott was a relative newbie to the film, engaging deeply with it for the first time unlike with Twin Peaks (which he'd been immersed in since its 1990 debut). Our conversation touches on this surreal introduction, as a middle-aged post-Return viewer in the twenty-first century, to a world that represents his Gen X nineties youth onscreen. The first part of the interview, public on YouTube as always, focuses on his own work...

PART 1 on YouTube

And on the $5/month Patreon tier, another hour and twenty minutes of dialogue (and disagreement!), we continue to debate the pertinence of Twin Peaks to Lost Highway, the flaws of season three, and how younger generations engage with Lynch and the culture in general.

Listen to...

PART 2 on Patreon

While this is "officially" the end of Twin Peaks Conversations (I'm no longer promising the back halves as monthly patron rewards from June onward), I have several bonus episodes in various stages of planning. I've already recorded the first part of that John Thorne conversation, been in talks with Rob King to discuss his "Lynch and the West" book, exchanged messages with other potential guests, and kept in mind some people I'd like to reach out to when Journey Through Twin Peaks is more fully underway or even near conclusion. So, you'll be happy to know, we aren't quite out of those particular woods yet.

Purchase Scott's book Lost Highway: The Fist of Love 

Lost Highway Cast Panel (Natasha Gregson Wagner, Balthazar Getty with Host Scott Ryan) 2023 (video)

Listen to Scott on The Red Room Podcast & subscribe to The Blue Rose Magazine

Scott's appearance on the Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast to discuss The Fist of Love

Lost Highway as Twin Peaks Cinema #24 - Long Road Home (podcast)

This month I'm launching a new three-month theme, "Long Road Home", but this season's subject obviously ties directly into the previous one's. Like Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and Blue Velvet, Lost Highway is part of "The Lynchverse" that includes Twin Peaks. In this case, Highway was Peaks' direct successor in David Lynch's filmography, and it shares many obvious and subtle connections, some birthed directly from the experience of making a TV show and prequel feature (while others crystallized in the film and were echoed twenty years later when Peaks returned). However, I'm linking Lost Highway to upcoming films on this podcast, rather than the prior trilogy, for a couple reasons. A road (or several) runs through all of the spring's topics, routes which the characters either take from one place to another, travel in a circuit, or sit by to watch the world go past. These films are all concerned with the question of going home (or staying there), asking who belongs where and with whom. And finally, most explicitly, all three films are crucial to the career of longtime Lynch collaborator Mary Sweeney (whose work with Lynch I covered in a video essay, sampled on this podcast alongside a bonus discussion of Peaks' Evelyn Marsh storyline and its ties to Highway). In all three of the movies we'll be covering, Sweeney is editor and producer, in two of these she is writer, and in one she is director. That journey begins here, with Lynch very much in the driver's seat but Sweeney's unique sensibilities already transforming our impressions of their cinema.

UPDATE: I initially forgot to include listener feedback from patrons on this subject before adding this section to the episode five days later.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 24

May 2021 Patreon podcasts: belated LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #28 - Season 2 Episode 20 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #79 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Angel Face (+ office culture in 80s/90s film/TV, film capsules, viewer/reader feedback, reading my Citizen Kane essay, new schedule for 2021-22, Twin Peaks Reflections: Evelyn, Jacoby, Windom's cabin, Philadelphia FBI office, Evelyn Marsh saga/Lost Highway & more)

I was shocked by how little I remembered the plot twists and character turns in the great fifties noir Angel Face, even though I watched it only a few years ago. All I recalled was the central plot conceit resembling the much-maligned James/Evelyn storyline of Twin Peaks' second season - as does David Lynch's own feature follow-up to Peaks, Lost Highway. All three concern a seductive, mysterious woman trapped in an unhealthy relationship, who ensnares a moody, handsome mechanic in a murder plot. Yet each work takes this premise in radically different directions, of varying interest. I enjoyed discovering these developments all over again as I re-visited the Otto Preminger film, comparing both it and Lost Highway to the Peaks subplot (another inadvertent connection: David Bowie croons the opening song for the Lynch film and also stars in one of the Peaks locations I highlight this week, the Philadelphia FBI office).

Elsewhere on this month's main podcast, I re-iterate my new behind-the-scenes schedule and what it means for upcoming projects, and I celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Citizen Kane by sharing an extensive essay from my own archive, written the year that Kane turned seventy. Orson Welles' masterpiece has been featured many times on my own site, from an ongoing video series I just dipped back into to brief comparisons in reviews of other films, so I gathered all of these mentions into their own bonus podcast; I also decided to publicly share my reading of the great Francois Truffaut essay on the film as another bonus. And earlier in May, I released another four bonus episodes - two on feedback, two on film capsules - finally catching up with material from the past year. Among the many capsules, including several political documentaries and nineties favorites, I went on a digression about Twin Peaks' Dougie sequences and how office workplaces have been depicted in the past several decades of pop culture. There's a lot to dig into this month, frankly more than I expected going in, and I hope you enjoy whatever interests you - and maybe even some things you didn't think would.

Episode 79: Twin Peaks Cinema - Angel Face (+ reading Citizen Kane essay, new schedule for 2021 - 22, Twin Peaks Reflections: Evelyn, Jacoby, Windom's cabin, Philadelphia FBI office, Evelyn Marsh saga/Lost Highway & more)

Episode 79 bonus - Film Capsules (1 of 2): Office Space (& Dougie in Twin Peaks' Las Vegas & 80s/90s office media including Dilbert), Toni Morrison documentary, the Spanish Civil War in The Angel Wore Red, And She Could Be Next, Rick Steves on fascism, Terminator 2, Independence Day: Resurgence & more)

Episode 79 bonus - Film Capsules (2 of 2): Irma Vep, Children of a Lesser God, Trumbo, The Fugitive, JFK, Alien, Back to the Future, Great Expectations, Buck and the Preacher, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project & more)

Episode 79 PUBLIC bonus - Reader/Viewer Feedback: Art Spiegelman & An American Tail, Q2 Fire Walk With Me fanedit, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Mark Frost's narratives, East German "ostalgie", Lynchian identity loss & more)

Episode 79 PUBLIC bonus - Viewer Feedback: "Judy's nightmare", shared dreams, the Lodge as test vs. failure & more)

Episode 79 bonus - My Citizen Kane Archive

Episode 79 bonus - PUBLIC reading: Francois Truffaut on Citizen Kane

belated release (in early June)

Lost in Twin Peaks #28: S2E20 (The Path to the Black Lodge/"Episode 27")

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Twin Peaks Unwrapped - Ultimate Lynch Madness (w/ Mya McBriar, Josh Minton, and John Thorne)

If you haven't listened to the previous four "Madness" podcasts yet, stop reading and check them out now because this episode was determined by those outcomes.

All good things must come to an end. This is true not only of the fun "Madness" exercise of the past two years, where the hosts of Twin Peaks Unwrapped have invited myself and other guests to rank various Peaks and Lynch works in a March Madness-style bracket until only one title remained, but also of Twin Peaks Unwrapped itself. Although Ben and Bryon intended to conclude the show in 2020, the pandemic disrupted their plans. For the past few months they've been working their way through the final community rewatches of season two episodes and will belatedly wrap it all up this month. This will be my last appearance as a guest although not the last time we talk in podcast form (stay tuned).

This was a great way to go out, revisiting our early decisions (all of the guests from previous episodes were supposed to participate, although only four of us could make it) and figuring out which work we wanted to ultimately represent the Lynch canon at its apex: Lost Highway, the season one "Red Room" episode, the season two finale, or the season three finale. I found myself going back and forth so what both we as a group and I individually chose was as much a surprise to me as to the listeners (or viewers, since Unwrapped published the video on YouTube - you can also listen to it here or elsewhere).

The episode was recorded in April and shared in May, but this is the first Thursday I've had open to share it and coincidentally it's the thirtieth anniversary of the episode that ended the original Twin Peaks. Whether or not episode 29 takes the cake (or the cherry pie) I'll leave for you to find out, but if you're a patron - and even if you're not (yet) - keep an eye on my Patreon today...this conversation won't be the only one to highlight that unforgettable finale.

November 2019 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #10 - Season 2 Episode 2 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #61 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Lost Highway & Updates on Journey Through Twin Peaks (+ Duelle, Twin Peaks Reflections: Ed, James, Hawk, the cemetery, Sparkwood & 21, Cocaine in Twin Peaks/Part 6 & more)

For the first time since January 2018 (when I offered an extended exploration of Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks side by side) my podcast is comparing David Lynch's TV show to one of his films. Lost Highway offers a rich field for this study, both backwards (the use of Bob and the James and Evelyn saga, of all things) and forwards (Part 18's long drives and the Mitchums as all-American gangsters). It also provides an opportunity for me to preview some of the audio from my upcoming Journey Through Twin Peaks video, along with a general update on how that project is going. And because I've covered the film quite a few times before, Lost Highway leads to an extended "Opening the Archive" reading series, covering three reviews (including a comparison with Jacques Rivette's Duelle), clips from video essays and podcasts, and other highlights. There was so much going on this month that I had to delay a few sections until December (the listener feedback and podcast recommendations) and split November's main podcast in two.

Meanwhile, for $5/month patrons, my Lost in Twin Peaks rewatch reaches an intriguing David Lynch/Harley Peyton collaboration, perhaps his most underrated episode which offers a motherlode of mythology...

Lost in Twin Peaks #10 - S2E2 (Coma/"Episode 9")

The first part of the Lost in the Movies podcast is a mini-episode sharing my recent work, both published and upcoming - starting with the general Journey update...

Episode 61A: Updates - Journey Through Twin Peaks, new site, recent & upcoming work

The second part is dominated by Lost Highway, although it also includes "Twin Peaks Reflections" using Laura's funeral episode as a springboard to explore characters, locations, and a subplot (related to an episode of season 3)...

Episode 61B: Twin Peaks cinema - Lost Highway (+ Duelle, Twin Peaks Reflections: Ed, James, Hawk, the cemetery, Sparkwood & 21, Cocaine in Twin Peaks/Part 6 & more)

And here's the Laura funeral itself, the rewatch episode published in May now open to all patrons...

Lost in Twin Peaks #4 - S1E4 (Rest in Pain/"Episode 3")

Added 11/28:

Brief Thanksgiving message

Fear The Double: discussing Lost Highway w/ Fireside Friends podcast (+ "5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" status update)

This weekend I was invited as a guest onto Fireside Friends, hosted by Ryan Persaud and Allen Ibrahim. Under discussion was Lost Highway, a film I'd been meaning to rewatch ever since The Return ended. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and similar cases emerging from Hollywood almost daily, the film felt particularly relevant. We talk about this aspect of the work, as well as Mary Sweeney's editing of the film, its ties to season three of Twin Peaks, its roots in Fire Walk With Me, the convolutions of its narrative, and its relationship to the O.J. Simpson trial and the avant-garde classic Meshes of the Afternoon (referencing my video essay on the subject). And, on a lighter note, Lynch's propensity for absurdly decadent party scenes, with requisite reference to Crazy Clown Time.

Listen to Fireside Friends

In other news, I was not able to keep up with even my back-up schedule for "5 Weeks For Fire Walk With Me." I do plan to continue publishing those pieces, however, although I'm not sure if I'll try to squeeze them all in before the original deadline (releasing two or three in a single week) or spread them out into December, rendering the title of the series as "5 discreet weeks over a long period" rather than "5 weeks in a row." Oh well - stay tuned for those, and also another recently-recorded podcast in the next few days...

Maya Deren & David Lynch: Spend a "lost afternoon" with my video essay MESHES OF LYNCH for Fandor Keyframe

Every month, I will be offering at least one post on Twin Peaks...up until Showtime re-airs the original series. Then I will post extensive coverage of each episode (mixing new reactions with my many older pieces) immediately after they air. Stay tuned.

If I had to pick a favorite among my recent outpouring of video essays, this would probably be it. Requiring a lot of organization, contemplation, and experimentation, my non-narrated split-screen comparison of Maya Deren and David Lynch finally emerged as a video that speaks immediately and directly to the viewer but also contains a lot to unpack if they want to go further with it (to dig into this common ground, I would recommend this collection of quotes I posted to accompany another Deren video essay last summer). I've created videos on both directors before so it was a joy to join them together in this approach.

advisory: I would very much suggest listening to the video with headphones or good speakers. I use Lynch's subtle soundscape in Inland Empire (including his song "The Ghost of Love") as the backdrop and there are connections there too, even though Deren's film is silent. While nothing is explicitly spoiler-y, some of the selected scenes are suggestive and/or surprising. If you want to fly completely blind with his work, including Twin Peaks, be warned. The montage also contains violence and frightening images.

Here is the description I wrote for Fandor Keyframe, followed by screencaps of sixty-one comparisons from the video, going film by film.

"As viewers of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive have frequently recognized, there are many similarities between these two filmmakers (Meshes' innovative co-director Alexander Hammid carried on with a documentary career while Deren's later work continued with her themes and style in Meshes). An ordinary key charged with dangerous supernatural power; characters who multiply, bending space and time; an Angelino atmosphere in which daydream becomes nightmare...these are just a few of Meshes' and Mulholland's common touchstones. Others have compared Meshes to Lost Highway, with characters in high windows nearly or actually viewing themselves on the street below, or Inland Empire, which escalates Mulholland's fragmented identities in a suburban home that serves as a multidimensional portal. In fact these threads - or meshes, if you will - extend to almost all of Lynch's work in the second half of his career, from the moment Twin Peaks took a particularly dark turn in 1990 through Inland Empire's climax sixteen years later.

This video essay holds the two worlds side by side, allowing the correspondences (and there are dozens of them) to emerge without commentary so that you can draw your own conclusions. Mysterious figures recede into the distance. Ordinary living rooms are transformed into ominous, uncertain spaces. Monsters pop out in the middle of the bedroom, and, even worse, familiar faces take on a monstrous quality - suggesting that perhaps these visions of mind or magic have their roots in everyday reality. Some visual links are obviously designed and composed exactly the same but others are more poetic and suggestive, relating ideas as well as images. Are all these connections merely coincidental? Lynch was a student at the AFI in the early seventies, and even back then screenings of Deren's work were staples of such programs. However, when asked by biographer Greg Olson (Beautiful Dark, 2008) if he had seen or even knew of Maya Deren, the avowed non-cinephile Lynch said "No." (Lynch also professed ignorance when early works were compared to Luis Bunuel.)

It's entirely possible that Lynch and Deren (who passed away in 1961, when Lynch was still a teenager) are simply drawing from the same psychic well. It's also possible that Lynch was impacted by her work long ago and forgot the encounter. But does it matter? I think what's important is how the works themselves speak to one another across the decades. Watching them together, especially enveloped by the eerie soundscape of Lynch's Inland Empire, uncanny sensations and euphoric epiphanies course through my nerves and imagination. Maya Deren and David Lynch are brilliant directors not merely because of their vivid images or ability to tell a story without precisely telling a story. They are attuned to something that runs much deeper than pure cinema or pure art, something that strikes a chord deep within. They have the ability to manifest our dream lives onscreen. I hope spending this "lost afternoon" with the two masters inspires you to view these films with renewed attention and appreciation."

For the third and final time in a row, I will be posting every weekday this week.

It's a Strange World: A David Lynch retrospective, 1967 - 2013 (part two: the forest)

This is my fifth and final entry in David Lynch Month, an essay examining long-term changes in Lynch's work. You don't necessarily need to read "part one" first, particularly if you're already familiar with Lynch. There are spoilers for all of his films.

This week's "Question in a World of Blue" is: What does the term "Lynchian" mean to you? You can respond in the comments below or on your own blog (please tag this entry in your response).

David Lynch has been making films for almost half a century. Because it took him another ten years to release his first feature, and nearly another decade to achieve his full-on "Lynchian" breakthrough into the mainstream, we tend to forget he's been around for so long. But Lynch's work stretches from the avant-garde cinematic renaissance of the late sixties (with its reliance on celluloid and aesthetic discipline) to the digital free-for-all of the twenty-first century teens (unmoored and immersed in its own video hyperactivity). He has both shaped his times and been shaped by them, but he's also stood apart - a one-man band beating his own crazy clown drum, sometimes celebrated as a true and timeless American original, sometimes scorned as a self-indulgent sideshow to the larger world, societal and cinematic.

From my recent Lynch marathon, two distinct and somewhat paradoxical observations emerged: a sense of unpredictability alongside an awareness of trajectory. On the one hand, Lynch's body of work is more wildly diverse than is usually credited: yes, there is a special "Lynchian" mood, style, and sensibility, but within that world there is incredible flexibility, ranging from the gentle, G-rated sincerity of The Straight Story (1999) to the raw, hallucinatory terror of Inland Empire (2006). Not only does Lynch's oeuvre feature wild fluctuations in tone, look, and subject matter, these wild fluctuations often occur from one project to the next. This marathon reminded me that the wacky, light-hearted TV pilot On the Air (1992) premiered a mere month after the intensely dark and emotional Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), while Lynch's tragic, stylish Mulholland Drive (2001) was shot around the time he recorded the gleefully juvenile Thank You Judge (2002).

Yet if Lynch can't be simplistically pigeonholed, he can - with caution and qualification - be placed. Over nearly fifty years his work, and the voice expressed in that work, has undergone gradual and long-lasting transformations: despite the variations film to film, strong patterns and an overall evolution emerge when looking at the big picture. This means not only recognizing links and echoes between far-flung films (say, the mirrored endings of Eraserhead (1977) and Fire Walk With Me) but also observing a tidal flow to the themes and styles presented onscreen. There is a chronological march in which claustrophobic panic gives way to rootless wandering, classical restraint dissolves into multilayered impressionism, and recognition of corruption from within slowly overtakes the quest against external evil. Just as in Lynch's films random experimentation and apparent non sequiturs coalesce into powerful, perhaps unintentionally resonant psychodramas, so several narrative arcs emerge when examining the totality of Lynch's expression.

The Eye of the Duck: A David Lynch retrospective, 1967 - 2013 (part one: the trees)

This is my fourth entry in David Lynch Month. It is a chronological overview of his career, including full reviews of every single feature and capsules on every available short.

This week's "Question in a World of Blue" is: Do you see particularly important turning points in David Lynch's career? You can respond in the comments below or on your own blog (please tag this entry in your response).

Over three days, I watched almost every single film Lynch has created since 1967, and as "film" I include not just features or shorts, but commercials, music videos, TV pilots, even the occasional promo tag. Next week I will examine the overall evolution of his career, in theme, storytelling, and visual style. Today I'm going to focus more on the nitty-gritty, the "trees" that make up the Lynchian "forest" (if you want to avoid spoilers, just read about the films you've seen - the only entry that contains a spoiler for a separate film is Inland Empire, which discusses the end of Eraserhead in its last paragraph). I will examine each of his works in turn, starting with Six Figures Getting Sick, a painting-in-motion installation he created as an art student in the late sixties, and concluding with Came Back Haunted, a Nine Inch Nails video so rapid-fire it contains a health disclaimer. Thus his filmmaking work begins and (for now) ends in the service of other arts - painting and music - but along the way he emerged as one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century, his work appearing in cinemas, on television, and eventually streaming over the internet. He's bridged all motion-picture mediums and approaches, told stories and immersed himself in irrational imagery, accomplished himself as a humanist director of sensitive performance and a formalist photographer of abstract images.

Despite his surprising range, there is a distinctly "Lynchian" flavor to all of his films, which we'll discover as we move through them one by one. Each feature film is covered in five paragraphs (except for Blue Velvet, Fire Walk With Me, and Inland Empire, which get six, and Mulholland Drive, which gets ten), his seven TV episodes are covered in three, particularly distinctive short projects in two, and the rest of his work in single short paragraphs (often a couple commercials are discussed together). Here's what I couldn't see: a fictitious Anacin commercial (1967), the "Champions" episode of the Lynch-Frost American Chronicles (1990), a low budget video for his song "A Real Indication" (1993), HBO's Hotel Room sketch Blackout (1993), advertisements for Alka-Seltzer and American Cancer Society (both 1993), video documentary Lamp (2007), the Wild at Heart deleted-scenes "sidequel" (2008), playful greetings to the 2008 Hollyshorts awards and the 2010 Twin Peaks festival, a concert film for Duran Duran (2011), and probably dozens or even hundreds of short clips from DavidLynch.com, which aren't listed in online filmographies unless they also appeared on DVD (all I can verify missing are two episodes of his goofy Over Yonder web series, but there must be plenty more where that came from). Even with those exclusions, I covered sixty-seven titles below. For a filmmaker with only ten features under his belt, Lynch has been shockingly prolific.

Feel free to browse for the projects that interest you (it may be best to bookmark the post and return for several visits) or follow the entire overview chronologically - this retrospective can be read either way. Indeed, one could say the same of many of his films...

Lost Highway

Several minutes into Lost Highway, I had to get up for a drink of water. I fidgeted. I decided I'd rather watch the disc on my TV than on my computer, where the chair is somewhat uncomfortable; but then I moved back to the computer so I could sit closer to the screen. I took off my glasses and put my contacts back in. With all I'd heard about Lost Highway's difficulty I didn't want to shortchange the film. Perhaps I should watch it another night, when I'm less restless, more in the mood? Instead, I cued it up to the beginning and started over. Funny - I had no clue that my stops, starts, and restarts would eventually be mirrored in the movie itself. Which, incidentally, I ended up really, really liking.