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Alan Smithee wrote:So supposedly Lynch is working on Twin Peaks season 3 but this is wildly speculative from an entirely unsubstantiated source.

Matt wrote:That's several years old, from the Inland Empire DVD.

It's not hard to understand the enduring distaste. Fire Walk With Me is deliberately oblique, even by Lynch standards, asking questions without answers and providing clues to no mystery. Its narrative is split in two, seemingly without reason, a division introduced when our hero is apparently swallowed up by a gaping hole in the center of the picture (a hole he finds beneath a parked RV in America's least inviting trailer park, naturally).

Most gallingly, especially for audiences circa '92, the film purports to be a prequel to perhaps the most beloved cult television series of the decade, though in truth it's more interested in systematically dismantling the mythos and iconography of Twin Peaks than in pandering to the show's fanbase with some feature-length trip down TV-memory lane. The film is alarmingly dark. It isn't especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch's masterpiece.

It helps to think about genre. Like the series, the film plays in pastiche. Adopting conventions from the police procedural, daytime soap operas, post-war noir, and 1950s melodrama, Fire Walk With Me is a postmodern hybrid in flux, its style ever-drifting and its formal makeup a composite of self-conscious clichés. The purpose of all this appropriation, however, isn't merely to ironize outmoded forms or tropes—as it often is in the work of the Coen brothers—but to embrace those antiquated modes and deploy those old-fashioned tropes in earnest. The film uses melodrama, in particular, to replicate the function and goal of the genre: targeting the veneer of sanctity in the middle-class American home and exposing its hypocrisy and corruption.

If Fire Walk With Me seems like a nightmare, it's the same one reflected in James Mason's descent into suburban madness in Nicholas Ray's classic melodrama Bigger Than Life. And what's scary is that the nightmare is real. Fantasy was always a central, if only implied, component of the classical melodrama, animating the social aspirations and wish-fulfillment of a rising class founded on subjugation and fear. The melodrama sought to undermine the contradictions inherent in an imagined good life, its stories essentially bourgeois dreams inflated to grotesque proportions.

Ibnezra wrote:I'm seeing a lot of Lynch's short films on Criterion's Hulu page, which is a great thing, but where's, "The Cowboy & The Frenchman"?

Ibnezra wrote:Well, I'm just hoping if his short films get a Blu-Ray Criterion release, they won't leave it off. It may seem odd, but it's my favorite thing he's done.

jindianajonz wrote:Ironically enough, he's never seen a David Lynch movie, and given his taste (he loves Remember the Titans, United 93, and everything that falls strictly in between) I really don't think he would care for any of them.