Was on pace to watch
the new season after finishing the original run and Fire Walk With
Me but the female companion expressed interest so by all means.
Time to restart. Sure I can wait on the new stuff. We made it through
part of the second season but not far enough where she knows Leland
killed Laura (shhh, don't tell her). Then the show came out and there
it was clawing at me. I made it a few days. Then I was just the
tipping it, “just gonna watch the intro, just gonna see that
theme,” and there I am, midway through the second episode when
Rachel comes home. Busted. Caught in the act. You don't miss much by
not watching the other stuff, I lied, you'll get the gist. Evil, I
know. This might be the most selfish thing I have ever done. I can't
fucking control it any longer. I binged the fuck out of that shit.
If you don't watch the
show and haven't seen these episodes, then the rest of this probably
isn't worth your time. This is basically a stream of consciousness
rant about stuff I took notes on assembled in something of a readable
form. That is my disclaimer.
To begin, I've loved
every second of this. Other TV shows are now unwatchable. American
Gods is such shit compared to something 26 years in the making
made by a fucking master. This is someone's purest vision here. It is
intensely beautiful and well done. For all this time we've had what
we've had and the project was “dead as a doornail.” Now it is
fucking back and we are getting new shit. It's fucking insane. Don't
complain about this shit. Stuff like this doesn't come back a
generation later. Kick back and savor that shit. Wheels up.
We get a lot of the
esoteric stuff from the last season magnified ten fold. Coop is in
the Black Lodge sort of frozen in time at the start. Same as we left,
in the red room. Music intro is the same but much more Lynchian,
somehow. Cooper has been there all these years with the tall man. So
far so good. Then we also get a brain tree. What? And an evil brain
tree. Wah? And eyeless mutant ladies out of nowhere. And three
Coopers. It's Lynch we are talking about here. Plot is not really the
issue here. More like rolling themes. It's also a much bleaker show
in the age of Trump. There are no heroes, nothing matters, there is
no moral compass. Get by however you can. That's we're all at. Fuck.
Get a little bit of
some of the older characters. Basically, we get a lot of the same
faces and same places, like the briefing room. All the people have
been ravaged by time but the place is more or less the same,
resistant to change (we get a dumb scene later on when Lucy freaks
out over cellular phone technology). The new season starts with Dr. Jacoby
living the isolated, hippy, trailer, probably growing weed lifestyle.
Pleasant. My favorite one of these is the exchange between Ben and
Jerry Horne at the Great Northern which is exactly the same. Ben
introduces Jerry to his new secretary, Ashley Judd. Ben is the same,
but we get this hippy Jerry that is noice. Ben is like “what is on
your mind, Jer?” His reply is amazing: “ Swimming in my mind at
this time, literally, is my new hydroponic indica-sativa hybrid, a
touch of the mythic AK-47 by way of the Amsterdam express. It's baked
into this banana bread and infused in this potent spreadable jam
that's ideal for creative sojourns of a solitary nature. Wheels up.”
Wheels up, indeed.
The most moving of
these are the ones with Log Lady, when James and Shelley see each
other at The Roadhouse, and Bobby seeing Laura's case file. The Log
Lady scenes are fucking brutal. We see her on the literal verge of
death, the actor went not long after, in the latest stages of cancer.
She has basically no hair and is on oxygen. Feel fucking horrible for
what she is obviously going through. This is basically someone's
goodbye. That was clearly the heaviest. I was not prepared to be
moved like that. The scene where we see Shelly and James is sort of
painful, too. James looks gaunt and broken, yet he smiles, like
someone with a few years sobriety under his belt who had previously
been through some shit. He looks surprisingly cool. “James is still
cool,” Shelly tells us while some fucking dope band plays dreamy,
lo-fi electronica in the background (the Chromatics playing
“Shadow”), “he's always been cool.” And he is fucking cool.
He was not cool in the show. But here he is godly. I can't say enough
about this scene. The last one on the list, when Bobby, hilariously a
cop, sees the picture of Laura Palmer out in the briefing room after
all this time, and loses it with grief and we get the LP theme. It
couldn't be cheesier. It is stunning. It's so extreme out of nowhere.
He like can't speak he so overcome and we hear him in real time
babble like an idiot. I throw around terms like “insane” and
“bananas” around a lot. This is genuinely both of those things.
Meanwhile Robert Forster, the new Sherriff Truman, is there being
like “what the hell is happening here.” It's hilarious.
 |
| James is now cool |
Speaking of Forster, a
lot of weird shit with the new characters. I'll get to him and
Michael Cera last. First, there is a woman in this hotel that talks
to police that I feel like I talk to every day. Painfully stupid and
self-involved. I shan't waste time on her. But she leads us to Mathew
Lillard's storyline. He is accused of murdering a librarian he is
having an affair with. There is maybe a demon possessing him. There
is so much going on here it is best not even to get into it. I think
the place is the most important thing here, though. DoppleCooper, the
evil one, also ends up in the area. Everything about him is
disturbing. The gist of this I think is we are supposed to sort of
see that shit is converging in this area of South Dakota. Like Twin
Peaks was, maybe.
Back to Forster and
Cera. First off, Cera's baby chin is always freaky. Also of note here
is Cera's parents, Lucy and Andy from the sheriff's department. These
two. Andy doubles down on idiocy. It rubs off on Lucy as she can't
grasp the concept of cellular telephones. Seeing someone walking
around she was just on the phone with almost kills her. As the
receptionist that answers the phones, she only exists in a POTS line
world. Anyway, what unfolds when Cera shows up is absurd. I couldn't
stop laughing. Throughout his scene he impersonates Marlon Brando,
his character's name is Wally Brando and is dressed like Marlon in
The Wild Ones, in the way he is collectively seen. This is
done for god knows what purpose but is nonetheless amazing. It just
kept going on and Forster is so straight and sincerer, standing there
like, “what the hell is happening?” When Cera refers to his
folks, as “these fine people, my parents, who I love so dearly,”
I totally lost my shit. After a long pause, he announces, in dramatic
form that his parents can use his childhood bedroom as their study
and drones on like “I think about Lewis and his friend Clark the
first caucasians to set foot in this part of the world,” and I lost
it again. Forster is like, “great to see you again, kid, okay,
then,” and says something about letting the road guide him or some
such nonsense cliche. “Such a lovely turn of phrase. My dharma is
the road. Your dharma,” and then gestures that it is Twin Peaks or
the universe or whatever. Forster has clearly had enough of that.
My favorite of the
episodes so far is the fourth. Rachel called this episode a disaster,
so keep that in mind. “It's all over the place,” she said. “So
many things.”
 |
| Somewhere between rage and delirium |
Either way though we
agreed that the scene with Cera was insane and that the stuff with
Agent Cooper, who looks just like James Comes, is fucking hilarious. Basically he has returned and is
inhabiting someone who looks just like him's life. He is more or less
a baby that cannot take care of himself. In the previous episode we
see the guy Cooper turns into with a prostitute (much has been made
that this is the first black person in any Lynch program which I
shan't get into). She ends up dropping him off with $5 at a casino
where he goes on to win 30 jackpots on the slot machines, freaking
everyone out in the process. He was gone for days apparently and when
he returns home, wife Naomi Watts is insane with rage. That is until
she finds out he has like 100s of thousands of dollars now that they
can pay the mob back with or whatever. Keep in mind Cooper basically
says nothing while Naomi Watts goes through every conceivable emotion
in less than a minute like an insane person.
This keeps happening,
people just talking at him and not noticing how weird he's being. I
can relate. There is this pretty powerful scene though when in the
morning, while Dave Brubeck builds in the background, that Coop sees
coffee for the first time and it suddenly feels like he is going to
snap back or something. He grabs the cup like a maniac, drinks it,
burns himself, and spits it out. Naomi Watts is like, “Dougie?!?
What the hell.” And Cooper say, “Hi.” Uhhhh.
These are my thoughts
so far but they are far from complete or comprehensive. Also, I imagine we have no idea what is coming down the line.
Cole and Albert say the Cooper situation is a “blue rose.” A sure
sign something surreal is on the way. Until next time.
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