Gray on 2/8/2021 at 01:42
I think I just completed the Disney+ Level 1 of Star Wars. I've rewatched all the movies, done all the animated shows, and I just finished rewatching Mandalorian again. As a bitter old grumpy cynic, I find his character quite relatable, and possibly enjoy that show more than some of the movies. I would strongly recommend Mandalorian to any Star Wars nerds who have not yet seen it. It starts off pretty good, then it gets a LOT better. I would not recommend the animated shows, except if you're a completist nerd like me and you need the backstories. So many of them are just plain bad, with the occasional glimmering exception of excellence. Watch Mandalorian instead.
So... level 1 complete. What's next? :erm:
demagogue on 2/8/2021 at 02:18
I decided to finally get around to watching Twin Peaks, and I'm about halfway through Season 2 now. I technically watched some of it back in the day but I had zero memory of it. I thought I might, but really everything seems completely new. I don't think I was really watching, it was just something on when I visited some friends sometimes.
Anyway, it's funny I mentioned it earlier in the context of a serial program that's "not a soap", because a few mystical scenes aside it plays pretty much like a soap, to the point of caricature. I can see how it established this quasi-genre of the cop duo, the intuitionist and the straight man which you also see in some form in X-Files, Monk, Castle, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds, True Detective, Disco Elysium, probably others.
It's pretty camp. What's striking isn't just that, but how much it mixes tropes from horror, camp, melodrama... It shifts in tone quite quickly from the very dark to practically slapstick, which I guess helps give it such a unique voice that speaks above its actual content.
I don't think Lynch had quite solidified his brand of cinematic mysticism, which you can particularly tell comparing it to Season 3 (of which I've only watched the first episode). I may say more about what I think about its meaning after I've finished the whole lot of it. For now, it feels culturally important to know it (that's the main reason to stick with it), but it has its entertaining and quasi-endearing moments, if that's what you could call them.
Gray on 2/8/2021 at 03:29
You're probably right. It is a bit like a soap. But it's twisted and weird, perhaps style over substance, but as a David Lynch fan, sometimes style IS substance. I do love quirkiness and otherness. Twin Peaks was one of the first shows that did that fairly well, even celebrated it. For me, it was much easier to relate to than whatever else crap was on at the time, with all the stereotypes and cliches. Granted, it's using its own tropes and cliches, but subverting them. Even though I am the most boring person imaginable, an old fat middle aged heterosexual white guy, I've always associated with otherness and alternativeness. But then again, the town I grew up in was almost Twin Peaks.
Starker on 2/8/2021 at 18:38
Who was the intuitionist/rationalist pair in Monk?
demagogue on 3/8/2021 at 03:33
Monk & Leland. Who else?
I think the pattern is more abstract than you're taking it, and (granted) than I explained it. Forget the terms I used & I'll try to re-explain it. I mean there's "the weird one" and "the straight one", whose job is to stand in for the audience (the role of a normal person) shaking his head (or her head in The X-Files) or standing aside mystified or with a knowing smirk when the weird one does his weird thing that magically makes progress or a breakthrough on the case.
Edit: Yes, it's the basic form of the double act from time immemorial, the funny man and the straight man. I wouldn't even say Twin Peaks coined the form for police procedurals, if you look at past procedurals. But I think we could say it set the form for the contemporary version of it, where the intuitionist one wasn't just odd but outright in to the supernatural, mystical, mentally ill, what-have-you unreal territory.
Starker on 3/8/2021 at 03:38
Er... isn't that the Holmes-Watson dynamic, though?
demagogue on 3/8/2021 at 03:52
I tried to preemptively cover that in my edit. Yes, except Twin Peaks and X-Files had the detective tapping into literally other dimensions of reality. Characters like Monk, the guy in True Detective, the player in Disco Elysium are skirting the trope because they're tapping into some messed up psychology where mentally they're in their own alternative dimension of reality. And the guys in Criminal Minds & the Mentalist tap into that by proxy. There were some other shows where people had supernatural or future knowledge I can't remember just now too. I'll grant on reflection that Castle doesn't fit though.
Anyway, yes, it's based on an old trope; Twin Peaks just added the mystical / supernatural edge to intuitionist side that other shows have played with.
Starker on 3/8/2021 at 03:56
I've tried to think of parallels between these two shows and it seems to me more like Monk draws from Sherlock Holmes rather than from Twin Peaks. Even Leland I would argue is more of a Lestrade type of character than a Sheriff Truman.
Starker on 3/8/2021 at 04:06
With Castle, I can totally see him and Beckett being such a pair, though.
demagogue on 3/8/2021 at 04:09
It's all the same trope. I'm sure it goes further back in history than Sherlock Holmes.
But would you be able to say -- forget about Twin Peaks or lines of inspiration -- that in a modern show audiences aren't content to have their detective just "be really good", at least in this branch of the trope? Something about them has to be in some way unreal to the point of practically inhuman. The intuition has to be coming from some place normal humans don't have access to no matter how much they studied... Not just Sherlock Holmes-level smart or intuitive, but like they see things normal humans don't or can't see with normal brains and sesnses. Is that a distinct branch that's recognizable as such?
Edit: Lol, okay, I think we're just focusing on different aspects. What strikes me is the injection of the supernatural, or the impulse to inject something beyond normal rules of reasoning and reality. But there are other dimensions you could slice it by, like the manner of the relationship between the duo itself.
Edit 2: Monk is a good case study actually. The running joke is, whatever he has, "it's a blessing and a curse", and we know what that means. While he was always a little off and a good cop, they play it up as if there was some radical psychic break he had when his wife was murdered and, at least the way I took it, his thinking just ramped up into mystical levels of intuition since then, or maybe he just finally gave in completely to what was always there. That's the part I find interesting; when a show plays up these mystical things that are beyond explanation. I guess it replays a Sherlock Holmes kind of shtick, but in the modern era we want a more radical version of it.