Twin Peaks S3 beginning

Oof, if I wasn't somewhat Lynchianly experienced I would write this off. It's pretty poor. Even being somewhat Lynchianly experienced, I can only spot a couple of compelling features amid the muck. Full slice of bleh with just a dollop of intrigue on top. I watched the first episode and a half and it's hard to see how this can pay off. There are lots of new storylines, which are disappointing to have to begin, while the old stuff e.g. Red Room seems to have a low ceiling. Now, the new storylines could turn out great, and the old stuff probably has lots of untapped potential, otherwise why was this made, but it's just a little hard to see. For example, how many more hours can we endure Cooper staring silently at various cryptic figures? It needs to either get more stimulating (the wonder of the Red Room wears off, or maybe that's just because I watched the old series and the new one back to back, no decades in between) or get more coherent. Okay, it's early in the season, it's fine to kick off some stuff without explanation, I'm just a little weary immediately after going through the older material. I'm already impatient for some escalation, I guess. It's hard to see how the Red Room can escalate, but I bet it can. Also, come on, you just have to admit that Lynch is almost intolerable sometimes, with his corny dialogue that always prefaces the action. It's like when I showed someone Mulholland Drive, they commented "this is so bad!" halfway through, and then ended up getting their mind blown off -- Lynch is easily mistaken for poor filmmaking, at least in his rising action. Even by the end, in an alternate universe, you can imagine everyone agreeing he produces crap -- he sets the stage with some cheesy junk and then spins it into self-indulgent incoherence masquerading as originality. Ultimately, I like Lynch, and he's notable, though I'm not gaga like many folks.

I figured finishing FWWM and starting The Return in the same night was a bad idea, but I did it anyway, and this is what I get. I figured there belongs some volume of space in between. It's almost part of the show, that empty space, like John Cage's 4'33" or the forgone resolutions in a jazz solo. The negative space in a painting. Sometimes it's about what you don't say. And the emotional arc of the Twin Peaks fan in those intervening decades, in which Lynch said nothing of Dale Cooper, Laura Palmer, the town, or anything related, is as much a part of The Return as the shuffling and coughing of the audience in 4'33". I skipped those introspective decades, rushing from the climax of brutality and surrealism that is the end of FWWM to the patient unfolding of S3. If it's anything like his other work, it's a thickly folded piece of paper with something written inside that takes painstaking hours to reveal. Typically what it says inside is just where to find the next brutal bit of origami, and so on, until Lynch dies, which has now happened, so I guess we never find where this all leads. The point is probably just the process of the unfolding, not the message inside.