Back to the Future Part II as Twin Peaks Cinema #18 - Disordered Stories (podcast) + Back to the Future capsule

Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the future - the day that Marty McFly stepped into the 2015 version of Hill Valley as envisioned by the creators of Back to the Future Part II in 1989. The same year that Lynch/Frost Productions descended upon the Seattle area to establish Twin Peaks, Robert Zemeckis released the ambitious sequel to his 1985 hit Back to the Future. After spending all of his time travel in 1955 for the original film, Marty zips back and forth across the space/time continuum in this follow-up. He rescues his own son from catastrophe, returns to an alternate version of '85 run by a distinctly Trumpian Biff Tanner and finally winds up returning to the site of the first movie: spying on past events while trying to retrieve an item from the future which could threaten his own present. Got that? If Peaks can be perplexing and maddening due to its ambiguity and surrealism, Part II poses the opposite challenge. Its intricate interplay of meta-narratives and sci-fi concepts may make you either giddy or dizzy depending on your mood. While Marty initially travels to the year that David Lynch would film The Return, and his return to the Potterville-like alt-'85 resonates with Cooper's and Carrie's nocturnal sojourn in the season three finale, it's the third part of Back to the Future Part II that connects with Twin Peaks most strongly: a hero attempts to both alter and maintain the past and a filmmaker returns to his own earlier work, incorporating new and old footage into a new context, presenting the familiar from a skewed perspective.

After exploring the film in its own right as well as its Peaks connections, this podcast also incorporates some bonus material from my Patreon archives: a two-minute quickie capsule review of the original Back to the Future, a clip from my video essay comparing different eras in the town, an early tease for this eventual recording, and some memorable listener feedback which, unusually, scorns rather than praises the subject matter. This episode kicks off a new themed mini-season: "Disordered Stories", in which chronologically skewed films echo, amplify, and contrast with Twin Peaks' own narrative games.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 18

The Shanghai Gesture (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #46)

In an interlude between two omnibus film capsule episodes, I'm focusing on a single film for my October podcast: Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture. Recommended by a patron back in 2018, in part for its Twin Peaks connections (which I touch on briefly), the film is an odd, fascinating fusion of Sternberg's precise, even ponderous direction and an eclectic, bustling scenario similar to Casablanca. Based on a scandalous play and set in a brothel barely disguised as a casino and featuring a tangled web of interracial romances, the film presented a challenge for the censors - contributing to the film's messy feel. Starring Gene Tierney, Victor Mature, Walter Huston, and Ona Munson, with scene-stealing supporting work by Phyllis Brooks and Maria Ouspenskaya, the ensemble offers so much to discuss that I didn't even find time to mention Eric Blore, one of my favorites from the Astaire/Rogers stable. This review forms a bridge between the prior and upcoming podcasts, as has been a consistent pattern all season. September's anthology ended with a discussion of The Angel Wore Red, about a prostitute in a tumultuous early twentieth century society, and November's round-up will begin by covering The Bitter Tea of General Yen (sampled at the end of this episode) which sets a disoriented Westerner against a Chinese culture she's both at home and at odds in, just as in The Shanghai Gesture.

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LINKS

The Shanghai Gesture (1941) by Sheila O'Malley (Film Noir of the Month)

MY RECENT WORK

New on other podcasts

Twin Peaks Cinema - Bigger Than Life (Ray's Haunted Fifties)

New on YouTube

Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Ominous Whoosh author John Thorne, part 1

New on Patreon

(for $5/month)

Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Ominous Whoosh author John Thorne, part 2

(for $1/month)

Episode 95, part 1: Concluding the 80s... Red Dawn, Do the Right Thing & Hail Mary (capsules on Stranger Things, Top Gun: Maverick, The Goonies, Gremlins, Midnight Run, Scarface + feedback/media/work updates including Encanto & more)

+ EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #74, 73 & 71

TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #14 w/ Ominous Whoosh author John Thorne (YouTube & extended PATREON)

With the publication of his new book Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks - whose concepts we've been discussing as far back as three and a half years ago (and which the author himself has been cultivating since the third season aired) - John Thorne becomes the first repeat guest on my Twin Peaks Conversations podcast. In the previous episode from Halloween 2021 we dove deeply into questions about Cooper's and Diane's identity and the purpose of Cooper's "mission" in the finale. We continue to trace some of those themes in this installment but also sketch out his approach to this book, in which he interspersed episode-by-episode breakdowns with meaty "interlude" essays exploring discrete topics like the Palmer house, the nature of Judy, and Audrey's unique storyline. I debuted this conversation last week, and there was also - unusually - a lively live chat accompanying the video premiere so check out that chat archive, as well as in-depth comments, on the YouTube page for more discussion (jump to the end of the video to see the full chat). And let me know what you think of these or other Peaks subjects and our interpretations thereof. John's ideas are often as challenging as they are illuminating, and I've long enjoyed grappling with the questions they raise and seeing how my own answers both overlap with and diverge from his own.

We begin by outlining the structure and style of what's on the pages of Ominous Whoosh (which is, of course, a fantastic title taken from the series' evocative closed captioning, alongside other parts of John's text...)

PART 1 on YouTube

Another hour-plus of discussion is exclusive to the $5/month tier on my Patreon, diving deeper into questions about the endings of season three and Fire Walk With Me, and following the curious thread of Sarah/Judy/Experiment (among other topics)...

Listen to...

PART 2 on Patreon

Purchase John's book Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks

Prior to our Twin Peaks Conversations episodes, I spoke to John over three print interviews in 2014 (about Wrapped in Plastic, The Missing Pieces, and the announcement of The Return), again when he published his 2016 book, and then over four Patreon podcasts in 2019 (first, second, third, and fourth).

Purchase John's earlier book The Essential Wrapped in Plastic: Pathways to Twin Peaks

Listen to his podcast In Our House Now

Check out his current magazine The Blue Rose

John's lecture & panel discussion in Twin Peaks | The Return Online Conference | Part V

Bigger Than Life as Twin Peaks Cinema #17 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

The conclusion to my three-month "Ray's Haunted Fifties" season, Bigger Than Life may have encouraged more Twin Peaks comparisons than any other Nicholas Ray film (except perhaps last month's entry, Rebel Without a Cause - whose direct influences are more on the surfaces and whose indirect connections are more subtle). Like the title that kicked off this season, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger Than Life centers an angry, violent father, but in this case the father's wrath is directed at his family rather than on its behalf; or rather, he convinces himself that his patriarchal rage is meant for the benefit of his wife and son...even it costs them their lives. As a mild-mannered schoolteacher turned by addiction to Cortisone into a psychopathic abuser, James Mason's Ed Avery runs a similar gamut to Leland Palmer in Fire Walk With Me (or, for that matter, to Walter White in Breaking Bad, which also comes up in this discussion). Tackling one of the most common fifties motifs, familial domesticity in suburbia, Bigger Than Life offers an early subversion of its tropes in ways both obvious - Avery's controlling mania undercutting the idea that "father knows best" - and more subtle (there's even a cameo from the star of Leave It to Beaver himself in a bit of black comedy). The film's portrayal of the family's financial precarity and spiritual ennui, even before Avery goes mad, evokes a broader societal malaise behind his own personal drama.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 17

Melodrama, Crime, Fantasy, and War: 17 Classic Capsules (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #45) - brief reflections on Ah, Wilderness!, A Letter to Three Wives, Invitation, Morning Glory, Parnell, Little Caesar, Dick Tracy, Nightmare Alley, Gilda, The Woman in White, It Came From Outer Space, Pinocchio, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover, The Fallen Sparrow & The Angel Wore Red

This podcast season of "Hollywood Classics" reaches a crescendo as I pack over a dozen "capsules" from my Patreon into one episode. Some of these reflections run close to half the length of a normal review while others are just over a minute. As such, they range from tight but comprehensive overviews of a film to very quick riffs on a single element of an otherwise undiscussed movie. Topics include The Angel Wore Red's and The Fallen Sparrow's interpretations of the Spanish Civil War, Little Caesar's spot on the very cusp of the gangster genre, colorful side characters in The Woman in White, the way that everyday forties life is depicted in productions ranging from A Letter to Three Wives to an early version of Dick Tracy, the ability of Hollywood to capture current events alongside more escapist elements in films like The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover's sympathies with British aristocracy from a down-to-earth American perspective, The Devil and Daniel Webster as a rare cinematic look at New Hampshire, and Pinocchio's proto-Disneyland quality (an idea I've also explored as a visual tribute). Stars like Katharine Hepburn (Morning Glory), Clark Gable (Parnell), and Rita Hayworth (Gilda, of course) appear throughout, and connections casual and arresting alike are made between several of these titles and Twin Peaks itself; for example, It Came From Outer Space anticipates the woodsmen of The Return in a similar location and situation. These topics are organized roughly along a snaking line of occasionally interconnected genres, including poignant melodramas like Invitation (in which a woman realizes her husband may not really love her) to noirish crime pictures like Nightmare Alley (in which a carnival mentalist rises to high society charlatan but risks falling to sideshow geek). Eventually a wide range of fantastical topics - sci-fi, fairy tales, supernatural allegories - bleed into meditations on the legacies of mid-twentieth century wars.

One of the longer discussions, which kicks off the episode, focuses on the many charms of Ah, Wilderness!, a 1935 adaptation of Eugene O'Neil's play set in a 1906 New England town. In addition to leading off from the last couple months of Lost in the Movies subjects - the similarly comic Swing Time and Monkey Business - this bemused but still sincere portrait allows for an obvious comparison to (and contrast with) Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Since I covered that less comedic, more ethereal tribute to small town Americana at the turn of the century in my Twin Peaks Cinema podcast (alongside other underbelly-of-the-pastoral tales Peyton Place and Kings Row), I was eager to tease out those connections as well as exploring how later decades remembered this earlier, ostensibly more innocent zeitgeist.

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tfw you glimpse where your son’s vaguely uplifting graduation speech is about to go pic.twitter.com/hHrLaflDW8

— Joel Bocko (@LostInTheMovies) August 20, 2019

THE LINE-UP

(added in the afternoon)

August 2022 Patreon round-up • LOST IN THE MOVIES patron podcast #94: The 80s in August... Desperately Seeking Susan & Top Gun (capsules on Stranger Things, Poltergeist, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, The Breakfast Club, Wall Street, Twins, The Hunger, archive readings on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, E.T., Muppet Babies, An American Tail, Brave Little Toaster, The Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn + feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: Civil War & more) + 3 TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances & Twin Peaks Conversations podcast

Listen to Episode 94: The 80s in August... Desperately Seeking Susan & Top Gun (capsules on Stranger Things, Poltergeist, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, The Breakfast Club, Wall Street, Twins, The Hunger, archive reading of Fast Times at Ridgemont High + feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: Civil War & more)

& PUBLIC Episode 94 bonus - Opening the Archive: The 80s Imagination

I stumbled across a theme for this podcast, and by extension the next several months, only when I watched Top Gun about halfway through August. Then the idea kept getting reinforced by the outside world: what was playing in theaters, showing on TV, trending on social media, and even being given as gifts at a cousin's birthday party (a vinyl record player accompanied by an LP of the Top Gun soundtrack provided the score for that evening). Having bought a Top Gun blu-ray on a whim this past spring, I only found time to watch it after catching up with various other projects and was inspired to keep exploring eighties films as the month went along. I pulled some DVDs from my own collection and ordered others from Netflix; Top Gun itself was initially only meant to be a brief capsule discussion, so for my longer film in focus section I found (free on YouTube), watched, researched, and reviewed the wry, whimsical Desperately Seeking Susan. That choice may have been inspired by the Madonna-scored montage from the third season of Stranger Things which I also talk about on this podcast, finally catching up years after I watched the first episode. And as it turned out, there was so much to dig into with not just Top Gun but its production and tangential themes (the USSR as an implicit enemy, the totalizing eighties aesthetic) that the Tom Cruise action flick became my second film in focus for the month, the first time I've doubled up in years.

I didn't make it to 2022's Top Gun sequel on the big screen, as initially planned, nor was I able to finish watching the newer fourth season of Stranger Things by month's end - those capsules will have to wait till September. However, I did get to reflect - often for longer-than-usual capsules - on a couple first-time viewings (The Hunger and Witness) and return to some classics I'd already seen (Wall Street, Poltergeist, The Breakfast Club, Beverly Hills Cop, and Twins). Twins, I'm pretty sure, was the first live-action film I ever saw in a theater, as a five-year-old in 1988. It's kind of amazing to consider that my college rewatch in 2005 (when the seventeen-year-old movie and my childhood viewing of it seemed like ancient history) is in fact exactly halfway between the present and '88, a generation's length in either direction.

Speaking of generations, that favorite subject comes up not only in some of these capsules (particularly The Breakfast Club) but also the archive reading of my 2012 Fast Times at Ridgemont High review, and the 2022 reflection which follows now that another ten years has passed since I wrote that retrospective. (There were so many potential Opening the Archive picks this month that, in addition to an excerpt on the '84 Olympics in my main episode, I also published an entire bonus episode of readings: reviews of E.T., Brave Little Toaster, An American Tail, The Last Unicorn, and The Secrets of NIMH, plus an essay on meta cultural references in Muppet Babies and other cartoons.) The topic of generations appears first in my behind-the-scenes work update in the non-eighties part of the podcast, which also includes another Marvel capsule for Civil War.

Next month there will probably be more non-decade-themed capsules but also probably even more hailing from that particular decade. But which decade will that be? Should I move backward to the seventies, or forward to the nineties (and onto the zeroes and teens, catching up with many recent acclaimed and popular movies I missed in my lost decade of cinephilia)? I'm leaning toward the latter, but perhaps I'll make some room for at least a sample of the former as well.

As for other Patreon rewards, after falling behind in the mid-summer I was able to publish all three character advances for August well before the end of the month. These entries provided a particular challenge since a couple of them actually covered more than one character, entailing research into multiple actors...

EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #77 - 75

(become a patron to discover their identities)

I already cross-posted the full conversation a week ago, but specifically on Patreon I published almost an hour of extra discussion with author Lindsay Hallam for the $5/month tier. The occasion that night was the thirtieth anniversary of Fire Walk With Me...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Lindsay Hallam

Podcast Line-Ups for...

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...

PART 2 on Patreon

Purchase Lindsay's book Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (Devil's Advocates)

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

Read her essays "May the Giant Be With You: Twin Peaks Season Two, Episode One and the Television Auteur" (Senses of Cinema) & "Drink Full and Descend: The Horror of Twin Peaks: The Return" (New American Notes Online)

Wikipedia entry on Grace Zabriskie's early life in New Orleans

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

My essay "4 Ways to Watch Fire Walk With Me"

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

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 & Twin Peaks Conversations podcast

Listen to Episode 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)

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...

EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #80 - 78

(#83 - 81 already published)

(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...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Jubel Brosseau & Karl Eckler

Podcast Line-Ups for...

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...

PART 2 on Patreon

Listen to Counter Esperanto

The intro/outro music/soundscape comes from their episode

"No. 37 Yule Horror by H.P. Lovecraft"

Sparkwood and 21 episode featuring Jubel's feedback

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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(and most places podcasts are found)

LINKS

My podcast Class violence in 4 films: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman, Joker, Parasite

MY RECENT WORK

New on other podcasts

Twin Peaks Cinema - On Dangerous Ground (Ray's Haunted Fifties) / Illustrated companions (w/ individual podcast links) for Lost in Twin Peaks #38 on Season 3 Part 9 & #39 on Part 10 / Guest appearances on Uncut Gems for Fire Walk With Me, Obnoxious and Anonymous & as part of a podcast panel on Windom's Cabin: A Virtual Twin Peaks Experience

New on YouTube

Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Counter Esperanto hosts Jubel Brosseau & Karl Eckler, part 1

New on Patreon

(for $5/month)

Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Counter Esperanto hosts Jubel Brosseau & Karl Eckler, part 2

(for $1/month)

Episode 93 podcast: 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: making my movie Lady and the Tramp & more)

EXCLUSIVE advances: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #86, #85 & 84 & #80 - 78 (#83 - 81 already published)

New on the site

Status update: Announcement: Considering the "Generations" video (& series) for the end of 2022 / Status update: Pausing Lost in Twin Peaks again (+ my plans going forward)

belated June 2022 Patreon round-up: LOST IN THE MOVIES patron podcast #92 - The Power of Nightmares (+ feedback/media/work updates: King Kong vs. Godzilla, In the Line of Fire, political shifts, the Iraq War, archive reading: An American in Paris & more) + 3 TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances & Twin Peaks Conversations podcast

Listen to Episode 92: The Power of Nightmares (+ feedback/media/work updates: King Kong vs. Godzilla, In the Line of Fire, political shifts, the Iraq War, archive reading: An American in Paris & more)

Just a few weeks after my last (belated) monthly podcast, there wasn't much to update in terms of viewing, listening, or behind-the-scenes work, but I did have one film/series I wanted to zoom in on. Adam Curtis' eccentric 2004 BBC program The Power of Nightmares offers a cutting, hypnotic audiovisual analysis of the dance between American neoconservatives and Middle Eastern Islamists which eventually led to the War on Terror. I'd seen, and never forgotten, the first chapter not long after it was first released. This time I watched the whole thing and reflected on it from a different standpoint than I had at the time, further to the left and more deeply skeptical of the government line on Al Qaeda (even so, some of the wild discrepancies and overreaches that the film highlights remain astounding). Hopefully I can watch more Curtis films in the near future; I've been fascinated by his style for a long time but never really explored his work. A year ago, my all too ambitious plans included a chapter-by-chapter reaction to the director's recent analysis of the left's ambitions and failures, Can't Get You Out of My Head. Perhaps that will be next in my exploration - when I finally find some time in my schedule.

Elsewhere, I offer some capsules on a handful of films I watched in June, riff on similar Bush era themes based on some podcasts I listened to (touching on my own political evolution - or evolutions), and end the podcast on a lighter note with a reading from my past work on a Gene Kelly musical, albeit one that also toys with issues of war, loss, and wistful regrets.

As I struggled to keep up with various projects, particularly Lost in Twin Peaks, I fell behind on the latest patron reward: the presentation of three character studies each month. Only several weeks after the month ended could I finally share the first one (the other two followed the next week, and I'm already moving ahead on July's advances so they won't suffer the same fate). Despite the delay, this represents a major breakthrough. Remarkably, I never wrote a single character study in all the years since The Return - despite my oft-stated goals. That half-decade was spent, when I focused on this work at all, slowly putting together the posts on minor characters and the like. Hopefully from now on I can move forward at a much quicker pace (on a positive note, when I finally got down to writing it, the first piece didn't take very long at all). (This cross-post accidentally went up last week with most of what you see here, and the reason I removed it and re-publushed today was because two these character studies were not yet ready.)

I won't discuss who these entries cover - the public gets to find that out if/when the series begins official publication in early 2023. But here's where you can find out, and read them ahead of time...

TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance entries for June: #86 / #85 & #84

(become a patron to discover their identities)

following the announcement of

Update: June character entries delayed, should be coming soon

I've already cross-posted both parts of my conversation with Cameron Cloutier in a separate entry, but just to be thorough, here's the $5/month exclusive that went up in June...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Cameron Cloutier

Podcast Line-Ups for...