River's Edge (TWIN PEAKS CINEMA podcast #3/LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #14)

Several months ago, I shared my first "Twin Peaks Cinema" episode, exploring four films by directors of Twin Peaks episodes. The theme continues here with work by Tim Hunter (who directed three episodes), but this time - as I did for co-creator Mark Frost's Storyville - I set aside a full segment for one film; while the previous titles had intriguing whispers of Twin Peaks about them, River's Edge - starring Lynch actors like Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover - is more deeply tied to the series that followed it four years later. The 1986 film even has the same exact hook as the TV pilot: a teenage girl's dead body appears on the shore of a small town, serving as a narrative gateway to meet eccentric characters, a totem around which the community confronts long-lingering traumas, and a haunting presence for her own friends consumed by an eerie mix of guilt and fascination - although in River's Edge the grief that saturates Lynch's work is far more muted. Indeed, the killer is revealed right away in this film (he's the one who freely shows everyone else the body), and the point is how little everyone seems to care rather than how much. If Twin Peaks roots itself in an out-of-time fifties sensibility, River's Edge is very much an eighties film, catching the already jaded Generation X on the cusp of their rise to cultural centrality.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 14

Crispin Glover on Letterman - 1st Appearance - Full clip, good quality / Crispin Glover on Letterman, 8/21/87 (video)

'River's Edge' Not Quite As He Recalls: Commentary by Glenn F. Bunting (Los Angeles Times) - the reporter of the actual murder case that inspired the film criticizes River's Edge

PODCAST: The Signal Watch PodCast 032: "Twin Peaks" ('90) & "River's Edge" ('86) - High School Movies 03 - w/ Maxwell & Ryan

(discovered while researching but did not listen until after recording)

MY RECENT WORK

New on the site

A TWIN PEAKS Character Series announcement & a clip from Journey Through Twin Peaks (status update)

New on Vimeo

Chapter 35 Preview

New on Patreon

(for $1/month)

Lost in Twin Peaks #18: S2E10 (Dispute Between Brothers/"Episode 17")

A TWIN PEAKS Character Series announcement & a clip from Journey Through Twin Peaks (status update)

Just a few days ago I discovered that a draft post had accidentally been published on this site. It announced, in great detail, the debut of a Revised TWIN PEAKS Character Series, laying out a schedule for 2021 and promising that the entire project - with entries on every major and many minor Peaks characters - was already complete and would go up on a guaranteed schedule throughout the year.

Oops.

This post was actually written several years ago and was never intended to be made public since the project it announced won't be ready until at least 2022. I'd simply scheduled it long ago and forgotten to revert to draft mode after deciding to put the work on hold. I apologize for this embarrassing confusion, especially given how confident the proclamations in the introduction were. While I never promoted the post (either on social media or on the front page or "blogroll" page of this site), it still garnered dozens of views, which means there are probably a handful of confused readers out there who were anticipating further material which never arrived (although I think another post or two may have gone up for a short period as well, even before I fixed the introductory piece which was up for the longest).

The good news is I'm almost exclusively focusing on my Mark Frost video essay at the moment, and it should finally be ready in a week or two. I won't predict this with full certainty (I originally thought the whole thing would take about a week, and it's dragged out over two months), but there isn't a whole lot left to do on this, the most ambitious and time-consuming standalone video I've ever assembled. Due to the wealth of source material and the need to illustrate nonvisual texts, it's been challenging on many different fronts - I look forward to finally sharing it with all of you. For now, here's a preview. This two-minute clip explores some of Frost's novels, highlighting how they relate to Twin Peaks. Next week I'll have my regularly scheduled public podcast up. I'm hoping that the new Journey chapter will be ready the week after that. Stay tuned.

Spirited Away (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #13)

The whimsical, sometimes unnerving but still soothing mood of Spirited Away feels like a good way to kick off 2021 as my podcast returns from its holiday break...plus it was Hayao Miyazaki's eightieth birthday last week. With the Ethan Hawke series over, I will now be discussing random films every couple weeks, with Lost in the Movies continuing to be interspersed with Twin Peaks Cinema and Left of the Movies entries every three months; the details are discussed on this episode. In the fall I will take a new approach, beginning to open up Lost in Twin Peaks on a daily/weekly basis (the long patron episodes will be divided up into more bite-size segments) and spinning Twin Peaks Cinema and Left of the Movies into their own monthly feeds. I also hope to start covering a new release every month, and I already have a theme in mind for the non-new release Lost in the Movies episodes throughout 2022 (think of which film celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary that year for a clue - no, not Eraserhead, although I do plan to release an episode on that '77 classic this year). As for Miyazaki's masterpiece, this is a shorter review than usual - a light meditation on the themes and atmosphere of the movie (another review, based on my first-time viewing, is linked below). I hope this encourages you to send in your own thoughts on Spirited Away, so that I can share them in future episodes.

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You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

LINKS FOR EPISODE 12

Spirited Away (2008 essay), by Joel Bocko (Lost in the Movies)

MY RECENT WORK

New on the site

A Tale of Two Expectations: visual tribute to Great Expectations & images from a return to Twin Peaks (1 of 2): The In-Between Years and a Detour into Lynchland

New on Patreon

(for $1/month)

Episode 74: Twin Peaks cinema - Rashomon (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Leland, Albert, Donna, Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow sheriff's stations, The One-Armed Man/Season 3 Part 17 & more)

(for $5/month)

Lost in Twin Peaks #23: S2E15 (Slaves and Masters/"Episode 22") & Lost in Twin Peaks #24: S2E16 (The Condemned Woman/"Episode 23"), Part 1 & Part 2

A Tale of Two Expectations (visual tribute)

A visual tribute to David Lean's Great Expectations (1946) & Alfonso Cuaron's Great Expectations (1998)

belated December 2020 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #23 - Season 2 Episode 15 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #74 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Rashomon (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Leland, Albert, Donna, Twin Peaks & Deer Meadow sheriff stations, One-Armed Man/Season 3 Part 17 & more)

UPDATE 1/2: The "Twin Peaks Cinema: RASHOMON" episode of Lost in the Movies was just published.

As the Lost in Twin Peaks podcast reaches the infamous Diane Keaton episode, there's a lot to discuss both onscreen (many people, including myself, have much to say about Keaton's unusual approach to the series) and off. The height of the Gulf War leads to one of my longer "historical context" sections taking a detour not just through 1991's war on the Arabian peninsula but also America's ambivalent relationship to the conflict between the Provisional IRA and the British government. That's for the top tier; for $1/month patrons, six months behind, I'm finally unveiling my coverage of the episode where Laura's killer is captured. That podcast is split into two parts and was opened up on the first day of the month, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the episode's airing in 1990. On the other end of the month, my main monthly episode of Lost in the Movies (patron edition) is not quite ready for New Year's Eve though it should be available sometime this weekend; watch this space...

There's been a diverse array of "Twin Peaks Cinema" selections this year, and this month is no exception, switching gears from a surreal Robert Altman slice of New Hollywood to a blockbuster time travel comedy to an anime art/exploitation musical to, now, an iconic classic of world art cinema. On the other hand there's some continuity between last month's and this month's films: both Belladonna of Sadness and Rashomon are conceptually bold Japanese films set in medieval times, depicting sexual violence with a tinge of the supernatural (one of several commonalities with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in particular). Akira Kurosawa's international breakthrough is most famous for presenting multiple viewpoints on the same event, and in that sense it also anticipates the work of David Lynch; in an archive reading of a review from nearly a decade ago, I lay out how its scenario may be less "who's to say" than its reputation generally holds. Elsewhere in the podcast I cover characters, locations, and storylines tied to the conclusion of Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer arc; the long-promised film capsules, podcast recommendations, political reflections, and feedback readings will have to wait until January since my work on the most ambitious Journey Through Twin Peaks chapter yet has taken me right up to this month's deadline (and a bit past, in the case of this main podcast). See you in 2021.

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #17 - S2E9 (Arbitrary Law/"Episode 16")

Lost in Twin Peaks #23: S2E15 (Slaves and Masters/"Episode 22")

Lost in the Movies patron edition #74: Twin Peaks Cinema - Rashomon (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Leland, Albert, Donna, Twin Peaks & Deer Meadow sheriff stations, One Armed Man/Season 3 Part 17 & more)

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Images from a return to Twin Peaks (1 of 2): The In-Between Years and a Detour into Lynchland

The second collection, to be published here in March, will feature many other screenshots from Part 5

Here are screenshots of all the juxtapositions, superimpositions, titles, collage-like mosaics or other visual manipulations from the first half of my video essay series Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass". I included (far fewer) image highlights with the cross-posts for Parts 1, 2, and 3; for Part 4 I needed a whole separate post full of screenshots and now I obviously need double that for Part 5! I'll share the second half in a week or two (update: postponed by several months), depending on when I finish the last of these videos. You can see these images in their original video context in my cross-posts for chapters 29, 30, and 31-33. However, these images aren't simply teasers for the videos - I hope in this format, where they can be lingered over, they fuel new contemplation and enjoyment.

Though most of this line-up appears in the order of the videos, it begins with one of the most fun passages to create, in which I juxtapose Lynch's stylistic evolution over the course of his film career from 1977 to 2006 with the six Twin Peaks episodes he directed in 1990 and 1991. It's amazing how they serve as a microcosm of that larger pattern.

First Reformed (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #12)

My Ethan Hawke retrospective ends here after eight films - and this is both the most recent and easily my favorite of the bunch. The wintry, spare nature of Paul Schrader's vision might suggest this is a minimalist movie but that description doesn't nearly suffice for a work of art so achingly bursting with ideas, moods, and strange yet familiar associations. Most of that will have to be saved for later analyses; I can only barely scratch the surface in a short podcast review. This is essentially a preliminary reaction to an extraordinary movie...First Reformed, the vivid, crazy, gorgeous 2017 story of a Protestant pastor's crisis of faith (in the world rather than his religion) is a subject I hope to write, create videos, and otherwise talk about for years to come. But I wanted to record my first reaction, a few months after a single viewing. Listeners wrote in when I originally shared this on my patron podcast, and I've included their feedback at the end of this public episode. I see this as the beginning of a discussion, and hope anyone reading this who has thoughts and feelings about this film - and how could you not? - will send them my way. Let's keep that discussion going.

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You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

This will probably be the last public podcast of the year although I may, but probably won't, produce a bonus episode around New Year's. A new season beginning on January 13 - to be collected from random reviews rather than a thematic grouping (I'll save another of those for next fall).

November 2020 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #22 - Season 2 Episode 14 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #73 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Belladonna of Sadness (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Norma, Vivian, Ernie, Red Diamond City Motel, Golf course, MT Wentz/The Final Dossier, The Devil's Bride & more)

In a radical departure from the cheeky, if at times apocalyptic, fun of Back to the Future Part II last month, November's "Twin Peaks Cinema" hones in on the dark psychological and avant-garde experimental aspects of Twin Peaks. When I selected it based purely on the Turner Classic Movies description, I was completely unfamiliar with Belladonna of Sadness, an explicit Japanenese mytho-psychodrama anime from the early seventies. The film tells the tragic story of a young peasant woman in France who survives a traumatic gang rape at the lord's castle, and the subsequent demonic visitations of a phallic creature who may be her own Id or Satan himself, in order to become a witch with healing powers. Full of psychedelic imagery and music evoking both earlier and later productions like Faust, Yellow Submarine, End of Evangelion, and The Witch, the film's biggest tie-in to Twin Peaks turned out to be literary, evoking Laura's struggles with BOB on the pages of Jennifer Lynch's Secret Diary.

Although I use the witch theme to connect to the archive reading of my Devil's Bride review, elsewhere the podcast tackles some relatively lighter fare - Norma Jennings' fraught relationship with her stepfather and (step?)mother, as well as how Mark Frost's later books further complicate this dynamic. In the Twin Peaks Reflections location studies, Twin Peaks' golf course and the Red Diamond City Motel (although I forgot to include that enticing "city" in the recording!) provide dual lens through which to view Leland's troubled consciousness, a theme I explore more deeply in another of this month's podcasts - my episode 15 coverage for Lost in Twin Peaks, opened to all patrons on the thirtieth anniversary of its airing. Meanwhile, the spear's tip of that rewatch (for $5/month patrons) advances to episode 21, which includes reflections not just on the troubled midseason material but also random tangents such as the American public's reaction to the ongoing Gulf War, a German left-wing terrorist group's idiomatic influence, and an abandoned cop show starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura. It's always fun to see where a particular episode leads us...

Lost in the Movies patron edition #73: Twin Peaks Cinema - Belladonna of Sadness (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Norma, Vivian, Ernie, Red Diamond City Motel, Golf course, MT Wentz/The Final Dossier, The Devil's Bride & more)

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #16 - S2E8 (Drive With a Dead Girl/"Episode 15")

Lost in Twin Peaks #22: S2E14 (Double Play/"Episode 21")

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Mark Frost's Storyville (TWIN PEAKS CINEMA podcast #2/LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #11)

I originally planned to conclude my Ethan Hawke retrospective this week with a podcast on First Reformed. However, I've decided to postpone this until mid-December (it will be the next episode, in two weeks) because the timing of my upcoming video essay on Mark Frost provided a better tie-in for this moment. Storyville is a political thriller set in New Orleans and depicting the young scion of a grand political dynasty whose troubled Congressional campaign leads him into murder, blackmail, sexual trafficking, corruption, and his own dark family history. Starring James Spader, Joanne Whalley-Killmer, Jason Robards, Charles Haid, Michael Warren, and Twin Peaks alumni like Piper Laurie and Michael Parks, this was Frost's first - and only - cinematic feature film as a director and it's an absorbing tale that never got its due at the time due to behind-the-scenes shenanigans. As the second entry in my public "Twin Peaks Cinema" series (the first covered four films by Peaks episode directors), this episode discusses Storyville's relationship to the show Frost created, from characters to storylines to cast and crew to its role in Frost's own career trajectory. That last topic, by the way, will be explored visually as well as aurally within the next week or two so stay tuned. The final "missing" chapter of Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 is underway right now.

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You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

LINKS FOR EPISODE 11

PODCAST: Bickering Peaks - Mark Frost - Storyville

"Actress: Grace Zabriskie" bio featured in my Sarah Palmer character study

New guest appearance

Twin Peaks Unwrapped - Episode 14 Community Rewatch, part 2 (w/ John Thorne & Josh Minton)

follow-up to

Twin Peaks Unwrapped - Episode 14 Community Rewatch, part 1 (w/ John Thorne & Josh Minton)

(from a few weeks ago)

New on Patreon

(for $1/month)

Lost in Twin Peaks #17: S2E9 (Arbitrary Law/"Episode 16"), part 1 & part 2

Moving near the edge at night... • discussing the killer's reveal episode w/ Twin Peaks Unwrapped (+ John Thorne & Josh Minton)

A year after my last visit to the Twin Peaks Unwrapped community rewatch series (for the first season finale), I'm back to mark another milestone: the killer's reveal in episode 14. I've discussed this arc with hosts Ben and Bryon before, but this time we hone in on the particular episode, joined by fellow guests John Thorne and Josh Minton - who have recently launched their own freeform Twin Peaks podcast, In Our House Now. The discussion is divided into two parts, interspersed with Schäffer the Darklord's re-enactments of the original teleplay (with some intriguing differences from the broadcast version). Topics include Lynch's bold aesthetic transgressions of TV style, whether or not Leland (not Bob) has a motive to kill his niece, the missing "Ben killed Maddy" footage, critics who avoided and confronted the reveal's troubling nature, the appropriateness of "dead Laura" merchandise, and how all of us responded to the shocking climactic moment on our first viewing. It was a great conversation on an iconic moment of television that just celebrated its 30th anniversary.

References: the "Laura Palmer Funko Pop doll" Twitter thread by findom earle (@coherentstates) • excerpts in my Gone Fishin' media round-up: scroll down to December 21, 1990 for the "Incest for the Millions" essay & September 6, 1992 for Jeff Simon's Fire Walk With Me review • my "Dream Souls" video essay on David Lynch & Mary Sweeney • my Patreon coverage of episode 14 (now available for all tiers of patrons)

PART 1

PART 2

Class violence in 4 films: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman, Joker, Parasite (LEFT OF THE MOVIES podcast #2/LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #10)

For the second time (I previously covered Medium Cool in August, in light of the Democratic convention), I am turning my public platform over to Left of the Movies, my nascent political cinema podcast. The episode offers five-to-ten minute capsules of some of the most hyped films of 2019: Quentin Tarantino's reimagining-Manson late sixties dream Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Martin Scorsese's possibly apocryphal Hoffa portrait The Irishman, Todd Phillips' controversial DC-meets-gritty-seventies-crime-film reboot of Joker, and Bong Joon-ho's Best Picture-winning architectural horror portrait of inequality Parasite. All four films climax with violence that can be viewed through a class-based lens - destruction as an almost ritualistic way to either destablize or reinforce the social order. My discussion focuses on how these climaxes express their respective films' political visions.

The bulk of this episode was originally recorded in January 2020 but in the wake of Donald Trump's contentious loss, the Black Lives Matters protests and left-right clashes in the street, the coronavirus pandemic and its unequal economic fallout, and the electoral defeat of Bernie Sanders' populist movement in the Democratic primaries, it seemed like a good idea to revisit these films again in the light of such a world-historic ten months. So I recorded an extra ten or so minutes extending the previous discussion, including Trump supporters' image of him (vis a vis Hoffa and the Mafia in The Irishman), the irony of "white male rage" Joker anticipating the BLM protests six months later, and especially the way that all of these films explore individual outbursts rather than collective action. There's still much to dig into, so I hope some of the listeners will offer feedback that I can further engage in upcoming episodes.

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You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

LINKS FOR EPISODE 10

Debunking Quentin Tarantino's 'Mockery' of Bruce Lee by Eugene S. Robinson (OZY)

'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood' Review: We Lost It at the Movies by A.O. Scott (New York Times)

SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS: iGen, millennials, X, boomers, silent, greatest and lost by Joel Bocko (Lost in the Movies)

Boomer Reunion: The Big Chill vs Return of the Secaucus Seven (video) by Joel Bocko (Lost in the Movies)

New on Patreon

(for $1/month)

Episode 73: Twin Peaks cinema - Belladonna of Sadness (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Norma, Vivian, Ernie, Red Diamond Motel, Golf course, MT Wentz/The Final Dossier, The Devil's Bride & more) & Lost in Twin Peaks #16: S2E8 (Drive With a Dead Girl/"Episode 15")

(for $5/month)

Lost in Twin Peaks #17: S2E9 (Double Play/"Episode 21")

New on my site

(accidentally mentioned in previous episode too)

Post-election status update & explore the directory pages linked on my home page for new, sharp images on mobile

Training Day (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #9) ... + a quick election/Journey Through Twin Peaks status update

First, since this podcast was scheduled to go up last week, some housekeeping is in order. I've been trying to keep up with the new "Path through Journey Through Twin Peaks" schedule I created a month ago, even to the point where I fell behind on podcast deadlines, but eventually it became clear that between holiday travel and news distractions, November was going to set me pretty far back if I kept going that way. So the next Journey video chapter, on Mark Frost, will wait until December; in the mean time I'll be focusing on November and early December podcasts, be they for patrons or the public. I've updated the "Path" post and thread to reflect this.

Also, I obviously decided not to do the election night week tweet round-up that I was considering in last week's status update. If you're curious what I had to say about all of it, here are my tweets from those five days - scroll to the bottom to start on Election Day (here are my retweets from that period...and to go full circle, my last tweet on the day the race was decided was a reply to my last tweet from Election Night 2016).

Onto Training Day. Although covered as part of my ongoing Ethan Hawke survey (one more film remains for December, probably my favorite of the bunch), Denzel Washington is obviously the big draw here as the diabolically clever corrupt cop taking Hawke's rookie for a ride. Nonetheless, I found that more subdued character fascinating to tease out as well. To what extent are his reactions driven by morality vs. fear of getting into trouble? I love how the film plays with our conceptions of what is and is not acceptable based on social context. I also discuss how director Antoine Fuqua seems less interested in judgement than understanding even within the genre constraints he's operating under.

And as I mention in the episode itself, next week I will be discussing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, and The Irishman - if you have thoughts on any of these, please send them my way via comment, tweet, DM, email or whatever form suits you. I’ll share any feedback on that episode itself if I receive it in the next few days.

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You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

LINKS FOR EPISODE 9

clip from Training Day in "The Millennial Mood", a chapter of my film clip series

+ inclusion of Alonzo/Denzel Washington in my favorite characters & alternate Oscars lists

New on my site

Post-election status update

New guest appearance

Twin Peaks Unwrapped - Episode 14 Community Rewatch, part 1 (w/ John Thorne & Josh Minton)

New on Patreon

(for $1/month)

Episode 72: Twin Peaks cinema - Back to the Future Part II (+ Laura Palmer & other Twin Peaks Reflections: The Singer, Maddy, Palmer house, Roadhouse, Palmer family breakdown/Season 3 Part 2, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, other Robert Zemeckis films & more) & Lost in Twin Peaks #15: S2E7 (Lonely Souls/"Episode 14"), part 1 & part 2