Joe Dante

[ford]

Also, Twin Peaks is too insistent in locating the rot in the heart of the nuclear family to ever be nostalgic for that 50s American ideal. It's a show where the clean cut, fresh-faced popular crowd are the drug dealers and monsters, while the bikers for instance are sensitive and upright. That's also why all the kitschy Americana in the show (and Lynch's films) feels so surreal and fantastic: it's not an actual social ideal, so it holds no social or historical weight. Anyone who'd read Lynch's work as nostalgic or backward looking are badly misreading him.

Oh, I think he's definitely nostalgic for the early postwar era! No question about it. The music, films, etc were clearly of great inspiration to him, every bit as much as Francis Bacon. And, yes, the idea of Americana innocence under threat -- Twin Peaks season 3 is essentially a long rant about its total collapse. Ever seen that video where he drives around LA ranting about graffiti?

There is enormous question about it. The opening scene of Blue Velvet says it all: an impossibly magical 50s American landscape of happiness and innocence hiding horror and perversity right inside of it. Not being invade by it. Housing it, masking it, hiding it from view. A preppy, wholesome, babyfaced golden child discovering an abyss of sexual perversity latent inside him; a 50s beauty, all charm and grace, powerless to stop herself from enjoying her own abuse; a gang of sadists and criminals, all of whom are drenched in 50s culture, who exemplify it more than any other character to the point of being played by actors from that era. Or Twin Peaks, where the villains are not modernity but powerful men like fathers and Reagan-ite business men; where wholesome exteriors hide horrible secrets.

Not one single Lynch movie or tv series is set in the 1950s. His kitschy Americana is never granted any social weight--it's mainly iconography. If Lynch is nostalgic, he may well be nostalgic for the products of the 50s, like the music or the movies or the fashion. But he does not mistake that for a nostalgia for 50s American society. Hence how many of his movies locate evil within 50s Americana; how indifferent or outright critical they are towards central 50s institutions.

I think that's right. But only to an extent: the FBI is certainly a 1950s institution and here they're portrayed as benevolent men quoting the Dalai Lama.

It's not much different than, at the same time, Pee-wee's Playhouse which reimagined Eisenhower era pop culture and kitsch with black cowboys, camp and gay inside jokes.

[Mr Sausage]

Oh, I think he's definitely nostalgic for the early postwar era! No question about it. The music, films, etc were clearly of great inspiration to him, every bit as much as Francis Bacon. And, yes, the idea of Americana innocence under threat -- Twin Peaks season 3 is essentially a long rant about its total collapse. Ever seen that video where he drives around LA ranting about graffiti?

There is enormous question about it. The opening scene of Blue Velvet says it all: an impossibly magical 50s American landscape of happiness and innocence hiding horror and perversity right inside of it. Not being invade by it. Housing it, masking it, hiding it from view. A preppy, wholesome, babyfaced golden child discovering an abyss of sexual perversity latent inside him; a 50s beauty, all charm and grace, powerless to stop herself from enjoying her own abuse; a gang of sadists and criminals, all of whom are drenched in 50s culture, who exemplify it more than any other character to the point of being played by actors from that era. Or Twin Peaks, where the villains are not modernity but powerful men like fathers and Reagan-ite business men; where wholesome exteriors hide horrible secrets.

Not one single Lynch movie or tv series is set in the 1950s. His kitschy Americana is never granted any social weight--it's mainly iconography. If Lynch is nostalgic, he may well be nostalgic for the products of the 50s, like the music or the movies or the fashion. But he does not mistake that for a nostalgia for 50s American society. Hence how many of his movies locate evil within 50s Americana; how indifferent or outright critical they are towards central 50s institutions.

I think that's right. But only to an extent: the FBI is certainly a 1950s institution and here they're portrayed as benevolent men quoting the Dalai Lama.

It's not much different than, at the same time, Pee-wee's Playhouse which reimagined Eisenhower era pop culture and kitsch with black cowboys, camp and gay inside jokes.

Yeah, misleading of me to not address it. It does use something like Hoover’s official image of the typical FBI agent as a clean cut, upright boyscout. But, at the same time, the FBI as an institution barely exists in the show. And when this or that figure from it does appear, like Gordon Cole, it’s absurdist. So I’d say it all functions more as iconography than a genuine love for the institution, given how uninterested the show is in how the FBI actually works.

[swo17]

Have you seen The Hole in 3D? I've been curious about this. I have yet to see it in any format.

I finally got around to watching the UK 3D Blu-ray. I'm not sure the film is one I'd be inclined to revisit in 2D, but Dante has a lot of fun with the 3D format. It might actually be one of the best films to use to show that off--there's a lot of room for extreme perspectives when your film's main set piece is a bottomless pit, for instance. But he even gets a lot out of more mundane views, such as a lingering shot of a doorknob. Some of the story's a little creaky, but the spectacle of it all makes any shortcomings easy to overlook

[Maltic]

Sounds great!