Archive for February, 2012
Review: The Walking Dead – Season 2, Episode 10: “18 Miles Out”
Posted by Someone in Everything on February 29, 2012
Shane: "Look Rick, I know the world has come to an end and all, but I still feel the need to kill you over a woman". Rick: "Well, that's no good"
There are only three more episodes left on the second season and it has all pretty much taken place on the Farm of Their Discontent and been about Rick, Shane and Lori. That’s pretty bad. I have said this several times with my reviews and I think it is finally dawning on people that this show really is no longer what it started out to be. Gone are the excitement, urgency and somber mood of the first season. Gone is the terrifying setting, the struggle to survive, to find answers, to dig deeper into questions about the human soul and the consequences of days gone by in the zombie apocalypse. The zombies and the apocalypse as such are just purely incidental at this point; a diorama, a facade, a backdrop. They had a perfect angle at the CDC and with Dr. Jenner and they crapped all over it with taking the show in this direction.
The characters have all been facing a slow death, just as the show itself. T-Dog, Daryl, Dale, Carol and Glenn don’t even appear on this episode anymore (that is half the principal cast) which I think is symbolic, more than anything else, as these characters have pretty much stopped mattering a long time ago vis a vis the petty, Lifetime Television for Women problems of the other three. The show has become all about Rick, Shane and Lori and that stagy, soapy love triangle between them.
Rick: "Shane we are not killing him. Let me think about it and we can always execute him later."
Lori: "Andrea, why aren't you doing dishes like the rest of us.", Andrea: "Because I am out there protecting the farm against Walkers...?" Lori: "That's so useless. We don't need that. We got big, strong men for that. A cozy bed your man can come home to is much more important. Isn't it a wonderful world. I get laid on a regular basis and if you did you'd feel as good as me." Andrea: "Um, Lori, you DO realize that the world has come to an end right?" Lori: "I can't think about that right now Andrea; I have several sandwiches to make"
Rick and Shane – in a scene that reeked of Old Spice and balls – pull over on a deserted road 18 miles out (why 18?) where they get to – in a very testosterone loaded way no less – man it up and talk about their feelings and ownership claims over Lori; Lori – an unlikable, selfish and moronic character with no redeeming qualities and someone who has been the cause and source of a lot of misery and grief for a lot of people in this group – especially between Rick and Shane who are willing to kill each other over her. Kill each other.
Rick: "Too bad it isn't Shane lying on top of me. I could totally shoot his brains out from this angle. What's the world come to that two best friends can't even kill each other in peace anymore"
In fact, watching these two beat the living hell out of each other 18 miles outside of the farm in some random location ravaged by the APOCALYPSE, as in END OF THE WORLD, over a woman, made me seriously question whether they both still deserve to live. That and the fact that Rick is actually seriously considering whether he should murder the boy. At this point it wouldn’t of course be murder, but an execution. At least when Shane killed Otis, it was on a whim and not because he planned it, like Rick.
Back at the good old homestead, where women know their place in the kitchen, Lori and Andrea have a profound conversation; the kind of conversation misogynist men imagine women should have with one another in an ideal world, which for the writers of this show seems to be the post apocalypse. That entire conversation Lori and Andrea had in the kitchen was cringe worthy and insulting.
It was like two 8th graders had written that lame, ineffective dialogue. It had no power and did not make any point or evoke any kind of intelligent thought. In fact, it made Andrea look bad, which is ridiculous, and from the way they have portrayed her all throughout the show – you know, as a screw up and rebel – we were apparently to side with that idiot Lori. I couldn’t believe Lori, as a woman of the 21st century, was giving Andrea a hard time for not sticking around the house washing clothes and cooking and thus basically for possessing insufficient skills to be dude property.
And I couldnt believe that the writers had seriously nothing better to write about than reciting outdated, Victorian notions about how as a woman Andrea should basically know her place and let the big, strong MEN take care of the important stuff while she devotes her time to knitting and making a comfortable home for said protectors. Really? I mean no…REALLY? R.E.A.L.L.Y??
With the way these people behave, let’s face it, they are unworthy of being the last survivors and pretty much represent the worst of human kind and – along with the writers – deserve to be gutted already and put out of their misery.
It also seems like they are artificially extending the whole “Shane is the villain” story arc to make up for a lack of direction and originality that’s been plaguing the show since the beginning of season 2.
The world has come to an end and Shane and Rick have nothing better to do than drive to an abandoned warehouse, beat the shit out of each other over a woman and draw attention to themselves. I guess they are the reason this extinction event took place
Firing Frank Darabont was a huge mistake. A Hollywood Reporter article was talking about huge budget cuts imposed on the show and how the network repeatedly dumped all over Darabont’s creative vision by imposing things like 50% of the shots occurring outdoors and 50% indoors (indoors being cheaper to film) and another note asked whether or not the audience had to always see the zombies – couldn’t they simply hear them sometimes. It’s been said that Darabont was involved in constant battles with the network to maintain the creative vision that drew so many fans to the series in the first place and that those fights eventually led to him being fired altogether.
Cast members, who were not happy by Darabont’s departure, and especially outraged at the network’s calculated move to fire him right after Comic-con, were also reportedly harassed and warned about making any public comments on this. Afraid to be killed off the show and also pink slipped, they all obliged.
All this would explain why the entire season has taken place on one farm instead of them moving and why there have been a minimal number of new characters – all of which would have greatly contributed to the quality of the show.
Rick "Shane, get out of the bus. I know you tried to kill me just now and want to replace me, but I can't tell the difference between right or wrong anymore and I am totally willing to take you into my warm bosom of brotherly love, until you try to kill me again (why again are we going extinct?)"
Darabont had managed to perfectly convey the mood of a world post apocalypse. The world he imagined, in conjunction with the interesting characters he created and developed, further aided in making that vision a reality, ultimately creating an exciting and thought provoking show. Not so much this season which, for the reasons mentioned, leaves much to be desired.
This season just gives the whole show a bad name, which is a shame because Darabont did an amazing job introducing us into the zombie apocalypse and these characters who were all multidimensional and caught in bad situations when their journey began.
Twin Peaks
Posted by Someone in Everything on February 24, 2012
Laura Palmer
***This article contains major spoilers. If you have not seen Twin Peaks and don’t want to know what happened, do not proceed***
What a mind bender. Twin Peaks is one of the strangest and most innovative TV shows ever made. It is lurid, eerie, surreal, terrifying, quirky and absorbing. It is an odd little saga with odd components, including the usual mundane stuff and the paranormal – along with strong performances that make it all work. It is a genius mix of soap opera, parody, mystery/detective show, and horror film, all thrown together to create something insanely complex, surreal and entirely original. It is symbolic, it is insane and it is tragic.
In an interview David Lynch said “What’s special about it to me is that its a bit of a dream. Its a warm and tender dream, a place you can go to. I love the mood of the place–its based a little bit on the B-Movie.”
…the homecoming queen. The brilliance of this show lies in the fact that it can completely parody and mock its characters at one moment, and take them and their feelings completely serious the next while at the same time creating an unexpectedly terrifying and somber mood.
The tragedy surrounding Laura Palmer’s death is palpable and heart breaking, resulting in the show creating an emotional resonance that reveals that Lynch is not to be taken lightly. This show will make you sit down in amazement, trying to figure out what Lynch was smoking and how you could get some.
I was not sure if this was intentional or purely incidental, but I noticed that all of Laura’s contemporaries in Twin Peaks are brunettes (Shelly Johnson is sort of like a red-head/dirty blonde). This prompted me to research the inspiration Lynch had for Twin Peaks and indeed there is quite a story behind this mysterious lady whose cheerful eyes harbor dark secrets.
Marilyn Monroe
In late 1989, David Lynch and television producer Mark Frost decided to work together on a biopic of singer and actress Marilyn Monroe based upon Anthony Summers’s book, The Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.
Of Monroe, Lynch said: “I always, like ten trillion other people, liked Marilyn Monroe and was fascinated by her life. So when this came along, I was interested, but you know the drill. I got into it carefully… We met with Anthony Summers, who wrote the book. The more we went along, the more it was sort of like UFOs. You’re fascinated by them, but you can’t really prove if they exist. Even if you see pictures, or stories, or people are hypnotized, you never really know. Same thing with Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys and all this. I can’t figure out even now what’s real and what’s a story. It got into the realm of a bio pic and the Kennedys thing and away from this movie actress that was falling. I got cold on it. And when we put in the script who we thought did her in, the studio bailed out real quick.”
Laura Palmer, a teenager harboring dark secrets
No one ever really seemed to know Monroe; she appeared somewhat of a mystery during her lifetime which turned into myth after her death. Similarly, no one really knew who Laura Palmer was when she was alive, and much less after her death which revealed a side of her completely unknown to even her closest friends. In fact, it is not until her death that we find out who she might really have been.
When Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) finds cocaine residue in Laura’s diary, Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) is astounded and tells Cooper that he must be mistaken as Laura was not that kind of a girl.
Yet, as the mystery surrounding Laura’s death unravels we find out that she was so much more than that kind of a girl.
But Marilyn Monroe and Laura Palmer were also empowered women in a sense. Monroe radiated a sex appeal and vulnerability that rendered her extremely attractive and desirable to the opposite sex and she was quite aware of her power in that regard and she used it to get out of Hollywood what she wanted.
Similarly, Laura exhumed a certain kind of mesmerizing and relentless sexual power over men without much effort. As she said in one of her recordings to Dr. Jacoby: “why is it so easy to make men like me? And I don’t even have to try very hard.“
As we are to find out while looking deeper within the life and death of Laura Palmer, Laura was not quite the victim everyone believed she was. She was a fighter as she opposed Bob’s attempts to posses her and bend her, as he had done with her father; an opposition that cost her her life and sanity as she tried to escape Bob’s influence but which is still a testament to her inner strength and determination.
Audrey (Sherilynn Fenn) and Laura (Sheryl Lee)
It was interesting to see that Laura had a dark side to her; a deviant, mischievous side; with desires that most people wouldn’t think a precious teen like her, the prom queen, does or should not have. Was she forced into kinky threesomes with strange men in the woods or did she in fact enjoy it? The scene in Fire Walk With Me where she dances topless in the bar and has a man give her oral sex while sitting at a booth show us a side of her completely unbeknownst to everyone else, including the viewer. Her secret diary further reveals a side of Laura rather foreign to everyone, including her very best friend Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle).
Ultimately, the dark secrets she was harboring and the agony she was enduring drove her to seek out peoples’ weaknesses and prey on them, tempt them and break them down, making them do terrible, degrading things. She corrupted people because that is how she felt about herself.
In the end both Marilyn and Laura were broken women, haunted women, chained by their demons and lost. And as much as both drew the admiration and lust of every man they met, they were never able to overcome their profound loneliness, ultimately facing an untimely and tragic demise under mysterious circumstances that drew an equally mysterious aura around them long after they were gone.
Origins of Twin Peaks and the Story of Laura Palmer
When Lynch’s project based on Summer’s book fell through due to lack of studio support, Lynch’s agent suggested that he should do a show about real life in America, similar to Blue Velvet. Even though Lynch and Frost did not immediately love the idea, talks with studio execs convinced them to give it a try. It was whilst Frost and Lynch were talking in a coffee shop that they both had the idea of a corpse washing up on the shore of a lake, an image they began using as the basis for their next project Twin Peaks. They watched Peyton Place (1957) as the inspiration for the town of Twin Peaks and its inhabitants.
As they thought about their story and began mapping it out (they even knew there would be a lumber mill, just as in Peyton Place), they realized that a lot of the elements of Summer’s book Goddess and their planned Marilyn Monroe which they had wanted to use before but which never came to fruition, could be salvaged and used in this show. Frost and Lynch came up with the idea of the girl next door who had a sweet tooth for nose candy and prostituted herself in order to finance her habit, thus leading a double life that would end in murder and the gradual exposing of dysfunction and terror in sleepy small-town America.
The feature-length pilot’s screenplay for Twin Peaks was finished in only nine days and ABC Entertainment’s President, Brandon Stoddard, ordered the pilot to go into production. Seriously worried that the pilot would never actually hit te airways given network television’s constraints, ABC asked Lynch and Frost to film a “closed ending” to the pilot (now available as alternate ending/European release on the DVD) for direct to video release in Europe to help recoup losses on the $4 million investment in case the pilot never made it in the United States.
Opening Shot of Twin Peaks
Robert Iger, who had become the show’s new advocate at the network fought hard for the show to be picked up after the pilot and after Stoddard’s departure. However, because of the show’s risky thematic, Iger could only secure seven hour-long episodes that would form the first season.
David Lynch filmed the pilot in only 23 days, but in spite of this accelerated schedule he remarked, “I didn’t feel we compromised, and I felt good.” And he later added, “We lucked out on the pilot, and everything fit just right. But any time limit is arbitrary and absurd.”
Lynch and Frost wanted to mix a murder mystery in the form of a police investigation with soap opera elements in order to create a series that was scary and sexy, funny and decadent, mundane and surreal. The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was going to be the main plot element which – over time – was to gradually recede to the background as other townsfolk and their stories were unfolding. In fact, the murder was never really supposed to be solved, as was actually done half-way through season 2, and the aim for Twin Peaks was to expose the gruesome underbelly of the Leave it to Beaver and apple-pie America. Thus, Twin Peaks was born and the rest, as they say, is TV making legend.
Unraveling the Mystery
Laura’s evil doppelgaenger in the Black Lodge (Episode: Beyond Life and Death)
Laura had secrets and around those secrets she built a fortress that no one seemed able to penetrate. Everytime she tried to make the world a better place, something terrible came up inside her and pulled her back down into hell, taking her deeper and deeper into the darkest nightmare and everytime it got harder to go back up to the light.
As FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), with the help of Sheriff Harry S. Truman (!) (Michael Ontkean) and his local law enforcement team set out to solve Laura Palmer’s murder and get to the bottom of those secrets, they also tap into the lives of these seemingly ordinary townsfolk who each harbor not only great secrets of their own but also entertain severe dysfunctions on a multitude of levels.
There appears to be a whole layer of subtext underneath the surface of this simple town and its inhabitants; a dark, ugly subtext with sinister undertones that slowly creep to the surface as Cooper investigates. As Lynch explained: “I didn’t try to make ‘Twin Peaks’ realistic – it’s sort of a mythical town and it’s a desire town. It’s where you’d want to go at 10 at night to just float and see what was gonna happen. The story revolves around what happens when the most popular girl in high school is mysteriously murdered – she’s found floating face down at the Packard Sawmill. We then get to know the secret lives of all the people in the town as an FBI agent attempts to unravel the crime.”
The Ugly Face of Small Town America and Owning One’s Shadow
When Cooper – quite early in his investigation – tells Special Agent Albert Rosenfeld (Miguel Ferrer) that in his short time in Twin Peaks he has seen “decency, honor and dignity” it is quite ironic because this town is filled with everything but decent, honorable people who posses dignity.
Ben and Jerry Horne at One Eyed Jack’s
This brings us to an important theme of Twin Peaks, which is that of double lives that lead to the concept of Doppelgängers: paranormal doubles of a living person, typically representing insidious alter egos. A concept that itself is similar to Carl Jung’s concept of the “shadow”, which personifies in the subconscious everything that a person refuses to acknowledge about himself and represents “a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well” (Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 284 and p. 21).
If and when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself.
In Jung’s assertion, the unwanted and repressed desires of our subconscious always follow us like a shadow and the more we suppress them in our conscious lives, the more overwhelming they become and cross over into that conscious mind. The conscious personality has to integrate the shadow and not vice versa. Otherwise the conscious becomes the slave of the autonomous shadow.
Confrontation with the shadow, during what Jung called the “time of descent”, genuine courage and strength are required with no certainty of emergence. Such descent, while dangerous, Jung believed would eventually be followed by an ascent – enantiodromia – and assimilation of, rather than possession by, the shadow becomes at last a real possibility. In other words, one has to own one’s shadow – acknowledge and let it in – otherwise it will overwhelm the conscious mind making ascent impossible.
We see that duality, that doubleness everywhere in Twin Peaks – from the actual twin peaks of the mountains to the duality present in the characters of Twin Peaks and the shadows that inhabit them.
Twin Peaks quite expertedly explores the concept of shadow selves to varying degrees. This dichotomy can be comedic, like the two Horne brothers being named Ben and Jerry, or nightmarishly terrifying, such as Laura’s outward appearance as the homecoming queen and straight girl vis a vis the dark slide into Jung’s “descent” in the form of a desperate double life in which she is caught in a vortex of drugs, sex, incest and crime dragging her down.
As the story of Laura Palmer unfolds and as we get to know each and every character in the seemingly Norman Rockwellian town of Twin Peaks, we become gradually acquainted with these characters and their shadows, their Doppelgängers.
Leland Palmer and BOB. Or Leland Palmer and his shadow?
Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), the town’s richest and most powerful citizen who has everyone’s respect, runs a drug trafficking scheme and brothel on the other side of the Canadian border, the latter of which he frequently employs with young teenage girls he hired for the perfume counter of his department store (Laura and Ronnette Pulaski both worked there); he cheats on his wife with those teenage prostitutes, he even had sexual relations with Laura Palmer and he sleeps with Catherine Martell (Pipe Laurie), who is married and whom he later orders to be murdered just to get the land she owns. He isn’t much of a father to his mentally incapacitated son and ignores his daughter Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) to the point where she puts (herself in harm’s way just so he notices her.
Leo Johnson (Eric Da Ra), who helps smuggle drugs across the border and engages in various criminal activities for Benjamin Horne, gruesomely beats and abuses his wife Shelly (Madchen Amick), a young high school drop out whom he married only because it was cheaper than hiring a maid. Shelley, in turn, cheats on Leo with Bobby Briggs, who used to date Laura Palmer and whom he in turn was cheating on with Shelley.
Laura’s popular quarterback boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) is a drug pusher who also leads a shady double life vis a vis his law-abiding, Army General of a father who always appears to speak in sermons.
Ed Hurley himself is the stand up guy who – as a member of the secret society the Bookhoue Boys helps apprehend dangerous criminals and fight the evil forces believed to be lurking in the woods, yet he is scared of his wife, Nadine, almost turning to a frightened adolescent boy when she is around. What’s more, while he acts obedient and faithful to his wife, he is cheating on her with Norma Jennings and deep down holds Nadine in deep contempt, resulting in him to lead a double life.
James (James Marshall), Laura’s secret boyfriend first tells his uncle Ed Hurley that Laura was “the one” and next evening is seen kissing Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), telling her that he had been in love with her all along, even when he was with Laura.
Finally, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) – Laura’s father – as we find out in Fire Walk With Me – while on the outside portraying the loving husband to his wife Sarah and an upstanding member of the community as the attorney for the Horne’s, cheats on his wife with girls looking like his daughter and is involved in a incestuous relationship with Laura, not to mention the ultimate duality within him, namely possession by BOB.
All this poo-poo platter of intercoiled relationships sound soap operaish? Yes, because that was the intention. While on the one hand Lynch shows the deep psychological chasms that exist within the characters, he also touches upon them in a lighter way, such parodying the soap opera theme he introduced into Twin Peaks with Invitation to Love, which was a “series-within-a-series” popping up in nearly every episode of the first season, acting as some kind of a commentary on events unfolding in Twin Peaks itself.
It is interesting how Lynch took that picture of the prom queen with the perfect smile and the small, sleepy town she was living in and painted all black over it. As the audience gets to know the people of Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer, it becomes clear that there were terrible secrets and a dark facade hidden underneath that perfect smile and those sad, haunting eyes.
Twin Peaks is as much about the mystery of this surreal, secluded town, its eerie, mysterious woods and its lurid characters as it is about the life of an American teenager having lost her bearings, entangled in a web of deceit, drugs, promiscuity, crime and sheer terror.
Twin Peaks. Population 51,201
Twin Peaks
By creating Twin Peaks, Lynch ventured into creating a soap opera but of nightmarish proportions. At times it is light as air and mundane, at other times it is terrifying and sinister. We are introduced into a beautiful and sleepy small American town that has, beneath the surface, crossed over into a very real nightmare.
As the narrative of Twin Peaks unfolds, we become intensely drawn into the lives and drama of its multifaceted characters and realize that while there is an element of terror in there, there is also familiarity; a bizarre kind of reality that cannot be described easily but can always be felt when entering the world of Twin Peaks.
View from the RR Diner
Unsatisfactory Developments
Unfortunately, with the revelation of Laura’s murderer and the resolving of the main story arc less than halfway through Season 2, the pace changed and the series seemed to drag on a bit only to meet an unsatisfactory cliffhanger ending.
Some of the characters began behaving in a way designed to service an extended plot instead of the plot responding to the characters. It was like they let out all the air at once and then suddenly they had about 12 episodes to go with nothing to do, since, after all, the show was mainly about Laura’s death and the mysterious circumstances under which she died.
The truth about who killed Laura should really have come last, not half way through. The connection Lynch drew between the evil that is lurking in this town and its woods, Laura’s death, the concept of the Black and White Lodge and Cooper eventually being inhabited by Bob at the end of the series, were brilliant and everything fell together, but the order should have been reversed and the revelation of who murdered Laura and the demise of Cooper should together have made for an explosive finale. Lynch blamed network pressure for the decision to resolve the Palmer storyline prematurely.
Clockwise from top: James (James Marshall), Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) and Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle)
The final episode was terrifying and it makes you wonder just how far down the rabbit hole Lynch would have taken us in subsequent seasons had he been given more creative control.
The possible romantic relationship between Cooper and Audrey was also never resolved and instead they had him more than half way through season 2 fall in love with a random girl named Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), Norma Jenning’s (Peggy Lipton) sister. It was an abrupt deviation from a story arc that had so naturally developed over time and was just awaiting its conclusion.
Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn)
The official story for why they did not pursue the romantic storyline between Cooper and Audrey was that MacLachlan himself had objected to the idea because he believed it would have been out of character for Cooper to be falling for a teenager.
But the reality seemed to have looked differently, as reportedly Lara Flynn Boyle (Twin Peaks’ Donna Hayward), who was dating Kyle MacLachlan at the time, objected to co-star Sherilyn Fenn being paired together with MacLachlan in a series of romantic scenes, especially considering their considerable on-screen chemistry. Boyle seemed to have been further irritated by the fact that Fenn’s character Audrey was gaining prominence in the storyline while Boyle’s character Donna was given little to work with and had gradually been moved to the background.
Audrey and Cooper
In a recent interview Finn recalls that David Lynch, by creating Audrey, had “made a character that got bigger than his original characters that were the important characters [in the show]. And those girls were not happy about it […] this was supposed to be the Lara Flynn Boyle show.“
Finn’s increasing popularity on and especially off screen as well as the immense chemistry she and McLachlan had were apparently too much for Boyle to handle and so it is believed that she pressured McLachlan to convince the writers that a romantic relationship between Cooper and Audrey was out of the question.
Of course, it would not have been out of character for Cooper to have fallen for Audrey; he was only a few years older and it was obvious that he had already fallen for her throughout the show, so following through would have just followed the natural course of how things had been set up.
Whatever the reason for it, the abrupt ending of Audrey and Cooper’s romantic relationship and the introduction of random love interests for both was probably the worst misstep of the series, creating a disconnect.
Michael Ontkean, Frank Silva (BOB) and David Lynch discussing a scene
Twin Peaks – After 20 years
Twin Peaks still stands the test of time, however, and in fact rivals, if not supersedes, a lot of the even “smart” network TV shows out there today. Lynch truly is a master. Every character he created truly inhabits their role and I don’t think they could have picked anyone better than Kyle McLachlan for the part of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.
In fact, one can clearly see the template of the The X File’s Agent Fox Moulder (David Duchovny, who also had a guest role in the show) in Agent Cooper. In many, ways Twin Peaks paved the way for a lot of the detective/mystery shows to come later and set a new standard for television shows in that regard.
The ultimate question Twin Peaks poses, and never answers because that is not Lynch’s style, is what is that mysterious, evil that lurks in the woods, or the soul of men; is it insanity or evil? What even is insanity, what is evil? When we say someone is a schizophrenic, like the One Armed Man in Twin Peaks, what does that really mean? What is schizophrenia and mental illness? Chemical imbalances? Possession by evil?
Did people imagine BOB? Can anyone believe BOB existed given how fantastic the circumstances surrounding his presence seem? As Agent Cooper said “is it easier to believe a man would rape and murder his own daughter?” Is it more comforting calling it that and expressing it in terms we understand?
“How is Annie? How is Annie? How is Annie?” – BOB finally inhabits Coop
Twin Peaks is all about that little space – the line between insanity, evil and the surreal – the very fabric of which things are made, secrets kept, actions towards each other informed. because what really is the definition of evil in relation to the human condition? When someone commits an evil act, while others never break the law their entire lives, you wonder what separates the latter from the former. Is BOB, as Major Briggs suggests, just the evil men do?
In this saga David Lynch is showing us – in his very own peculiar way – that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy…
Review: The Walking Dead – Season 2, Episode 9: “Triggerfinger”
Posted by Someone in Everything on February 20, 2012
Rick (Andrew Lincoln) protecting what is his
With this episode, it becomes clear that Shane’s mask of sanity is lowly slipping and that he has turned almost delusional with regard to Lori and the baby that he thinks is his. Delusional in the Fatal Attraction sort of way. He is starting to think that he and Lori really had something deep and meaningful going on during those couple of weeks where they thought Rick was dead and it looks like confrontation with Rick is going to be inevitable as Shane is slowly losing it. In fact, it looks like Shane is going to mix it up with someone soon and pull the trigger again.
Lori stuck in the car
Maybe it is the trauma that ensues from living in a world post apocalypse where everything you have ever known is gone or maybe it is because Shane has always been kind of an unstable, violent asshole and it is all surfacing just now that this thin veneer we call civilization has vanished. Whatever it is, Shane is “falling down” and it becomes increasingly more clear to everyone that they’re gonna have to worry about him just as they have to worry about Walkers. I used to root for Shane because what he said made sense and he had guts, but he has pretty much crossed the line into instability and psychosis and he will be dangerous.
As I write this, I realize how truly ridiculous and boring this show has turned otherwise. I mean, the main point of contention seems to be the love triangle and the otherwise petty quarrels of a bunch of people who seem to have missed the memo that the world has come to an end. As a result, the show has taken on a whiny, cranky soapy tone with zombies thrown in to appear original as soap operas are generally associated with a negative stigma of lameness and chick flick. The apocalypse and asking the tough questions have become secondary, if they haven’t disappeared altogether, to accommodate the Rick, Lori, Shane, Maggie and Glenn’s relationship problems.
At the same time, the remaining characters and their personalities have been moved to the background as we hardly ever hear anything from them anymore. At this point they all seem to be serving in a merely ornamental capacity or to move the storyline along, such as Dale who every now and then serves as a voice of caution to warn others against Shane, just so he can go back to what he was doing (whatever that might be), or T-Dog whose role has been reduced to that of scene filler at this point. Or Andrea whose character and its agony, which had been so beautifully initiated, have been reduced to some one dimensional “extra” almost, loading dead bodies into trucks or running errands.
Carol and Darrell also always seem to be having the same “conversation” – and with that I mean Darrell throwing a hissy fit like a child who lost his puppy after a week’s search and don’t want loving nobody no more, calling everyone a “bitch” – while Carol gives him teary eyed looks or throws a line at him and walks away, just so they can resume where they left off the next time.
Yes I understand Darrell is hurt that the search for Sofia ended so tragically, but he’s been just grunting into the camera for the past three episodes. There is no development in his character.
Carol lost her husband and her daughter and is still seen just lurking around the camp, washing clothes and tidying up or alternately taking Darrell’s abuse. I mean we just saw her daughter turn into a Walker and have her brains blown out in front of her by Rick, and she is going about her business as usual. For whatever reason, she now has made Darrell her project and I still can’t figure out if she is after him in a motherly or romantic way.
“Triggerfinger” is 2 stars tops, mainly because it no longer really seems to be about the undead and a world ravaged by illness and thus the apocalypse. It is about peoples’ petty interpersonal quarrels; short sighted people who fight each other even after the world has gone down, over concepts that don’t mean anything anymore in this new world order (maybe that is the point?). I mean what happened to being worried about survival and finding some answers; what happened to driving through desolate landscapes marred from the apocalypse, encountering the destitution and horror in the aftermath of days gone by?
Glenn and Rick
Whereas season 1 and even the beginning of season 2 (i.e. before they landed on the “Farm of our Discontent”) were looking at the problem of a world ravaged by disease and having come to an end (note the flashbacks they had about how it all started), most of season 2 has unfortunately been about the marital problems of Rick and Lori and Shane’s insanity. How the apocalypse began, what Jenner said, the discussions they had about the human soul vis a vis such a horrific disaster, wondering whether this is even a world worth living in or whether there are any last outposts left and just the setting, which after all is one of zombies, have been muted. The show has lost its sinister, mysterious tone and zombie encounters are thrown in in a strategic manner, as if they were fulfilling a requirement and had to run down a checklist of necessary genre elements to put in before they can resume with their melodrama.
Where is the journey, the adventure, the terror, where is the desolate landscape or walking into other people (such as Vatos in season 1), human interaction, tragedy (Amy’s death, leaving Jim behind, Dale talking about his wife), finding abandoned buildings and landmarks.; making a connection with people and each other. I am interested in looking into this disease, asking the tough questions (see Jenner and CDC), not watch people engage in petty personal quarrels amid the damn fucking apocalypse. It’s like these people just don’t get that the world is over and that it really doesn’t matter anymore who is doing whom or who said what and when.
This show was phenomenal in the beginning, because it looked at the theme of the zombie apocalypse in a smart way that was never done before. It balanced drama with action, originality with believable writing and multi dimensional characters; it was tragic but without venturing into soap territory. It was great during season 1 because it struck the perfect balance between the interpersonal (i.e. the characters) and the bigger picture (i.e zombie apocalypse), thus illuminating the grander canvas if their tragedy, instead of looking st it from this narrow lens of interpersonal struggles of the characters. Now it is all just about these people and their feelings. At this point you could easily replace zombies with the ebola virus or WWIII or a natural disaster or hey, even Melrose Place and nothing would change.
When you reach a point in your story where one of its main premises (i.e. zombie apocalypse) can be easily exchanged with something else (like viral outbreak or flood or nuclear blast) and nothing about the story and the characters within would change, you know you have met a dead end in terms of originality.
People who enjoy this kind of thematic of the Days of our Zombie Lives kind will be just fine and really like where the show has gone. But if you are looking for more depth and originality instead of cliches and predictable story lines, I am afraid you will be disappointed. I don’t care for Lifetime Television for women.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at the Sarajevo premiere of “In the Land of Honey and Blood”
Posted by Someone in Everything on February 15, 2012
Angelina Jolie having a moment at the premiere of her movie in Sarajevo
Whenever I think of Angelina Jolie, I think of a spoiled, pampered incredibly wealthy young woman who dabbles in good deeds to fill the time between shopping sprees, world tours and endless parties. At the Sarajevo premiere of her movie In the Land of Honey and Blood, Angelina Jolie was right on track with that mantra when she got all emotional talking about her movie and her hope that it would be a wake-up call and inspiration for politicians and leaders around the world to do something about what is happening in Syria right now.
I am all for giving, humanitarian aide and just doing things for others; we need more of that in this world driven by selfish, narcissistic people posing as human beings, but there is just something so insincere about these two assholes. I am tired of their self righteous, sanctimonious crap and this pretending that they are not overpaid actors who shot to fame based on their looks, addictions and the number and nature of their sex partners, rather than because of their talent, intelligence and hard work.
On the one hand they want to keep it all private, on the other hand they flaunt it every opportunity they can, such as making out on the red carpet or inviting camera crews over to their house so they can photograph Jolie nursing one of her babies. Angelina goes to an African village talking about the plight of the people and then three days later is seen carrying a $5,000 Louis Vuitton bag that could feed the village for a couple of months.
The holy couple taking it all in
It almost feels like they get a kick out of going to impoverished countries and “helping” out (i.e. self promoting); like it was a sexual arousal thing that gets them both off. It honestly woudn’t surprise me given Angelina’s sordid past and her fucked up habits like carrying a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck. Sort of like in The Postman Always Rings Twice, where Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson fuck right at the scene of the crash where her husband is bleeding to death and dying. I really think these two get some kind of a pleasure or arousal from this adopting children from some third world shit hole thing and going to deeply troubled and impoverished countries with their luxury handbags, designer clothes and half a dozen mansions, chalets and estates around the world to their name. It is almost like the more impoverished and destitute the country, the higher the arousal and appeal factor for this pair of assholes.
They say that “sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy.” I must say it is quite ironic that these two, despite their alleged tremendous acting skills, have not been able to fake that at least so that when they do take the high ground, it is believable. How in touch with reality can two millionaires a hundred times over with egos the size of entire nations really be? Exactly…
Review: The Walking Dead – Season 2, Episode 8: “Nebraska”
Posted by Someone in Everything on February 13, 2012
Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Hershel (Scott Wilson) debating the point of going on
With this episode, The Walking Dead has finally picked up in intensity. “Nebraska” is reminiscent of the kind of breathtaking and gripping episodes we got to see in the first season as it was intelligent, thought provoking and tackled some of the tough issues from the inside out. It also finally got off that sanctimonious tone we had to endure for the most part of the second season where everyone sort of agreed that Shane was wrong and the bad guy and Hershel had a valid point. Rick also finally gets some things about the reality of their situation into his head and reaches a pivotal moment.
Burying loved ones
The line of who is good and bad and what is wrong and what is right is a thin one, at least in this show. Dale walks around warning everyone that Shane is dangerous and that he murdered Otis, but the bar scene with those two shady guys with a murderous agenda showed us that they were going to need someone of Shane’s attitude to handle the situation; Rick had to do what needed to be done. Simple as that. For the first time he stood on the other side of the fence where Shane usually stands, where tough decisions have to be made. It was clear from the way the two guys behaved that they were going to be worse than the Walkers: the fat dude was already talking about pretty much raping women if he got his fingers on some and the other one gave off a creepy, dangerous vibe and pulled the gun on Rick. Rick had to act in a split second and make that call and he made the right call. The question now is: is Shane really a bad guy? What is good and bad anymore in this world? In this reality? Had Shane not sacrificed Otis, Carl would have died just as Rick, Hershel and Glenn would have died had Rick not killed the two intruders.
Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) trucking a load of Walkers to burn
This show is great at showing us how humans behave, on the deepest level, when their existence is threatened. It was very realistic and it begs the question of whether you can afford to still live by the old rule book in a world that has no rules anymore; no societal ones at least (hence that guy pissing right in the corner of the restaurant, like an animal in the wild, and not even bothering to step out. He doesnt need to. Who is going to stop him? The owner? The cops?)
Rick (Andrew Lincoln) fights back
Shane was a man of the law before the fall, yet after the world came to an end, he just had to make some tough decisions – first small ones, then big ones, such as sacrificing Otis to make it out; he did things he would never have done before. This show is doing a great job at getting to the bottom of that pit and digging through what is the human aspect; the human heart. The desperation and existential desolation these people are facing in a world gone under and ravaged by disease is palpable, especially during the conversation Rick and Hershel have in the bar about hope and what to live for anymore in the face of such apocalyptic devastation. I mean heck, even Hershel finally got the desperation of their situation and understood the sheer ignorance in his views.
Bada Bing Bada Boom
Lastly, I loved that hopefully with Lori’s accident, they might actually put an end to this stupid and ridiculous pregnancy story line that’s just degraded the show to soap opera level. The only misgiving I have is more of an afterthought really, which is that I hope they really will NOT stay on little house in the prairie much longer. I dont think most people would want to see another 12 episodes of these people working through their feelings and emotions with zombies thrown in for fun. I don’t expect action but I also dont expect intimate mental exposés.
Walking Upright Citizen's Brigade 