hospitalterrorizer

before the showing later, coming here between things i need to do in working out because i had a thought i'd rather write down than forget / try to dredge up later. it's not a special one really, it's just a sense i get from watching cooper at the end there, and the way the final episode takes from the entire landscape of america a labyrinth he is caught in, both extracting that sense from the red room bits in the epsiode, which resemble the end of season 2 and this entire sequence now a distension of that, in some way, that this kind of being lost and fumbling gives one a sense one has throughout life, of losing track of oneself, one's actions, what they might be doing to others. both the compulsion to fix it, undo it, put it away back into a circuit of goodness, or just that one realizes after living so long what one has done, that is what those final moments feel like. i can't believe what i am, this sort of feeling. diane experiences this in the episode, laura experiences something of the obverse of that where it is her realizing what has happened to her, some mirroring of tragedy, her own being lost isn't entirely dissimilar and she's as complex a being as everyone else, having done things to some extent, to others, but there's everything else too, realizing in proportion to your life, what has happened to you. i suppose cooper experiences this too, of life washing over you at the bottom of experience. this works so well because of those prior seasons and fwwm, of course, we know what they were, we feel what has changed, the length and time spent with these people leaves us with actual senses of loss when they aren't precisely what is remembered, this makes those final moments even more devastating.

the way he seems regretful and the kind of despair over things past, that cannot be smoothed over, reminds me of this conversation i had with my dad over how he disciplined and raised me. at one point he said something along the lines of:

i would have done things differently, i wish i did things differently.

one of the few times i'd seen him cry, which made me think about him yelling at me for years to cry less, cry less, and it felt strange seeing that he could allow himself. he wanted to be a solid force, which is why the discipline was so corporal and rough, growing up, something internally consistent and perfect.

but the sinking feeling of being there in that conversation, in the burger shop (red robin), at least to some extent the end of the series is approaching something like this kind of regular doomed feeling, expanding it, or giving it the space to articulate how it touches every other thing, that this sensation touches mortal fear, a wider sense of life, that the impossible is there, as much as it is shoved away. the inertia of what is ignored dragging one along.

i've returned, from the pilot episode of twin peaks. here is how i looked:

i had to take the really blown out photos of the outfit so the plaid showed better. trying to dress around the colors of the show. a bit.

as i said though, great episode of tv, never imagined seeing it on a big screen like that which made me very happy, and there's issues with audience, everything about lynch being turned into a kind of meme and moments from the show being these things people feel trained to laugh at, so moments like andy weeping in front of the murder site, that horrible nightmarish train, in a scene which makes me cry, especially seen so large and before the force of that image, that massive clot of disused, abandoned infrastructure, the site of passage of people and carrying of objects and lumber, industrial utility, the backbone of the community now in disuse and still employed, there's a lot there to absorb, but also andy being so touched and desperate to be seen as strong, it's overwhelming emotionally. so why laugh, is it because he's designated as funny, this thing the show moves around rather deftly and complicates and then a role he moves into, and out of, it's graceful, and it felt as if the people didn't want to allow it that. or james' big head. and maybe that's the fault of season 2 to some extent, that it makes james kind of a joke in ways. but it also doesn't, not entirely. i found this all frustrating, i can't know what i'm actually meant to feel from the images i just know there's a sense that they come off as trained and trying to appeal to an authority of images employed elsewhere, rather than the thing as it happens. i dunno. it's frustrating and when it's about this, and about what a lot of lynch does, it drives me a little mad. there's also the moment where the girl runs through the schoolyard screaming before the announcement of laura's death to everyone, this horrible premonition, this impossible thing, you know. it's shocking and seems like too much, not that it is too much in the space of the fiction, that it's a wrong inclusion, but it's this eruption of something. it's this totally quotidian thing overdriven, taken beyond itself. it's not funny!! maybe saying it's not funny would make it seem funnier to them. maybe it is funny, maybe i am just stupid, too easily taken in by things?

but enough about them, i think visually it's really perfect, getting to see it presented this way, i don't think it's the intended way but it's a good way, there's some very neat things done that you can't really notice on small screens. for instance, lucy watching harry pick up the phone as pete calls in about laura's body, you can see her in the reflection of the glass. i found that beautiful and there's this greater sense of something a little uncanny there, that she's ghostly and that we're turned from her yet seeing, it has a quality of perversity to it, to notice that after all these years.

certain images are much more violent feeling, even if they aren't themselves violent, or are only related to violence in a distant way. my gf also noting that one scene of the autopsy room with the miscommunication between the doctor and cooper, the flickering light, the way that articulates this navigation of reality / the domestic as sham-like, inconstant and still upheld as if it were the only thing, even in the face of this, and then that moment with andy. i also thought much more about that giant piece of wood on the shore of that pebble beach, as an image of similar effect. the way it is its own place almost, the folding out of a rather full darkness.

also thought about how james cannot see laura, the way he says it makes a terrible sense that she died, and this is both true and emerges from a kind of misunderstanding it feels like, that she's wrapped up in some terrible criminality, and thus she had to die, and not that the relationship between these things is otherwise. as always, bobby's words ring true, it was you good people.

the other thing, regarding the men in the series and james in particular, his whole way of being wounded and the way this offloads things onto the women around him, and we see this much more with laura. it's interesting how this kind of thing's captured here, it's also something one sees all over, that kind of neediness which spills out in such a way that it creates a task others have to manage. beyond anything like friendship or relationships, it's much more of this coddling thing, and in ways james is very coddled. it's not like that's all he is or all he does in the show but it's a part of his character, and this is explored with a lot of the men, benjamin horne as well, bobby of course, the way he treats shelly, leo and shelly. leo is maybe the best example of this dual coddling / control thing (oh yes, harold, too), that the coddling also creates condition for control. leland, as well. but as i said with james, there's more going on and his suffering isn't to be discounted outright but it's the way things spiral out. but this kind of thing comes to mind thinking of some of the men in our lives. how aggravating it can be, beyond aggravating, nauseating, a feeling of being kind of trapped in the social bondage of sympathy and politeness and that there is a thing which must be done about something that requires that you begin to disappear. on top of this, often a material factor involved in this as well, another kind of labor that exists. not to belabor the point but laura being this volunteer, seeming to do an impossible amount with her life, to uphold this image of herself which was needed by all of these other people.

and of course, if meeting him here the first time, this is all much less apparent i think it's this feeling of him post-fwwm that you get. here he is generally likeable, but it's that this changes, and i think it's good it's complicated, it's good that one remembers always that he forces his face into laura's in this desperate kiss because he needs her to love him, beyond proof, it's just a completeness he is crying out for, or that he need to express himself which excludes laura generally, perhaps it is this need to express oneself i ought to point to, and this is where a frustration i have enters into things, but this stoic affect and there still being this flow of expression and the need to express, the overriding of others in that, this is quite common across the series. any of this is subtle at the start, but i do think the way he tells ed that she was the one, both an earnest heartbreak and this strange thing he makes of her. regarding the completeness, it may be too simple to say he does it for coherence with some image he has of himself, of his life, and more that his affection might be able to 'work,' on someone, rescue her from something he scarcely understands and doesn't understand that he doesn't understand and doesn't want to understand that he hasn't even begun to, he sees some lack in her that has to be done away with. as if through her he can redeem the world, make it livable for himself, which is a kind of absolute negation of her. that it can't be as bad as it seems, and they have something pure. the belief in anything pure seems to be a nightmarish thing across the series. it's rather cruel, when he cries out and tells her that she loves him. much of his loves in the series have this quality though. with donna his inability to really commit, flirting with maddie, that going so badly, it's torture for her. one understands why and still, we see enough of donna to know something is shoved away, her trying to occupy the bad girl idea to do something for him, it's so painful. all of this keeping up appearances is torture.

a thing i noticed personally, i've always felt this way but seeing it so large it brought it to mind, how much i want to be in a world filled with that same kind of light, it's so beautiful, and it's so horrific, i think it's that it can easily fall into either, that neither negate the other, that it's all a kind of intensity.

i'm unsure which episode's we'll see in theaters after this. we may do the episode that's 6, 7, and 8. but who knows. my gf finds this friend a little hard to be around lately. we may try with another friend, if we do decide to go. they had pie and coffee at the concession stand, today, they were fine. i want to find a rather good pie out here, i do like pie, generally. maybe i should learn to do it myself.

also this up at the ticket table. they had the popcorn machine wrapped in plastic and 'she's deaaad' written on it which i found a little tasteless frankly, but what can you do. it isn't that it's not a funny show but i think the humor's employed kind of precisely to brush up against the serious stuff and create a kind of disquiet.

also watched this before going:

or most of it, finishing it now. i wonder how much of this history of the surrounding area was consulted for thinking up the show. a lot of the stuff about the modernization of woodcutting and the move away from trains to trucks and so on feels rather embedded into the show, and stuff like electricity coming in, the way the social field is constructed at all, that one can have a sense of that at all, the weirdness of feeling that history at the edges of modern possibility, and what intersects to produce the quotidian. also a great term i never knew, misery whips for those old two man saws to cut down huge trees. whatever the case, it feels like much of this history is pertinent to the show in some way, even if it's just that it offers a lens through which to look at the very real effects on regular lives and on what would come to be a standard of living in this country, the industry which informed that, what technology engenders in life and the ways it folds things into use. beyond that though a relationship to a place. but i dunno, stuff about trains and similar things, stuff about electricity, the presence of war and the way the work force exists, just interesting to note all that from another angle.

i'd like to see more videos like this, i wonder how to find more like it.

it is interesting to consider the way here, at the beginning of the series, the domestic horror sits at the edges, it's in shots of the palmer house, the flickering light, it's something we slip into the stream of, it's always going on and the moments of focus, the turning of the fan, that one dark hall shot from the upward angle, whose up there (leland, of course), or even the scene of sarah's tranquilization which suggests what happens earlier/later, to her. it's just there, it's very flatly there.

i bring it up largely because it's an aesthetic field i am so fond of. i don't know. i just love it a lot, it articulates a very strong feeling i've had growing up, the ways the homes looked, the way other people's lives looked, the kind of things waiting in my past and other pasts of relatives, and then the utility of each day carrying that and subjugating any abjection to maintain the functioning better.

all the crying in the theater, though, has left me with a rather persistent headache. don't feel i will be much good for the rest of the day.

i did doodle, at least, that was fun, here that is:

i should probably go sleep now.

so,

so it may begin again.

of course, i am talking about twin peaks, took me long enough to rewatch it, so long that i find myself thinking, well what if i did season 3 again, not having to write about each episode (though i imagine i couldn't stop myself entirely, maybe the thoughts would be less episode focused, though), allowing myself to binge it, what would accrue then. maybe. with all the time i have i don't see why i can't or shouldn't. there's something about its dry presentation of this despair inducing part of life and the portrayal of what is beneath notice in this country, in the world, the assumptions of repeated iconography and his mode of eviscerating it, and that the entire thing is the most astute observation of the way these things carry on, are reformulated, etc, in the present.

it begins with a rather shocking and grotesque image, this burning stillness, mr. c sitting in hellfire and disappearing, and where he sat, dougie-as-cooper reborn to be sent to janey-e and sonny jim. these things nearby one another already leaves each feeling unsettled, the car crash way images are thrown side by side across the series is a principle method in making us feel, as if feeling the dirt beneath our nails, what exists underneath the images of everyday. the excavation isn't one of stating primacy of truth, of the underside, even allowing to some extent a sense of what goes into the creation of those images. in the shower, before watching, i kept thinking about the nuclear bomb as icon of america, as illustrated in the show, and that to some extent much of the americana he examines takes on a difficult character through his assembling of images, what goes on around them, the best example of this that i can think of is the palmer house, or leland playing golf inside the house in a wrong way (and that these aren't outcomes of guilt exactly, never does he feel very tortured over what he did, it's this kind of childishness, dominance over a space running itself wild, that he is the capacity to command / deign space, his desires are total), but the nuclear test sites and the bomb itself is a kind of hideous thing, it is this pillar of sociality and what the place is, it's also never freed from being horrific, it instantly always is, thus its presence as a horror-image itself can be examined, how it appears in cole's office, the way it modulates what goes on there, that it can be poked at with humor in that way, despite this it unsettles everything as well.

this moment is so hollow, what it is sandwiched between and how it came to be in the first place, rendering this love, this meaningful relationship between people down to a mechanical process, it must exist, it is a kindness for its own sake, to prove kindness, almost. this desire to make an image whole, and in some ways this mirrors what he is attempting to do with laura. to redeem the image of the family, to save it from disrepair and loss and any extant horror. there is so much failure surrounding the image that its resplendence is the condition for its horror, that it negates the abject, not unlike what we saw in earlier seasons with how men would move around women, how they would speak over them, attempts to pull sarah out of her suffering over laura, or in fwwm, leland's command of the house, his general demeanor, becoming some kind of singing clown, getting happy to negate that intolerable thing, any disgusting infirmity of being hidden so as to continue use, human uprightness, etc. cooper is nothing, if not upright, mr. c was also nothing if not upright, even if inverted his methods were precise.

'the story of the girl who lived down the lane,' is a rather affecting way to put it, she is a hovering fable, baked into things, it isn't necessarily her, there's a multitude of things like this, there's a sinking feeling it creates, the phrasing makes how horrible it all is wholly present by saying it in as small a way as possible.

also, this sequence feels quite strongly tethered to what we see in the end of season 2. he seems less lost, he doesn't run from laura's shrieking in quite the same way, but he doesn't seem perfect, he wants to be impossibly perfect, he cannot be, and so what happens feels similar to what happens in season 2's conclusion, an ambling through a nowhere, a swelling failure at his back, propelled here by losing laura in the forest, that first rescue sucked away from him, something else must happen now.

the two of them asking, is it you, yes, is it you, and neither feel exactly truthful, and this sets us towards their becoming richard / linda, instead of diane and cooper, though cooper never wholly occupies the richard role, and maybe diane doesn't either. i think an essential thing about what happens with them as they do this is diane's lack of enthusiasm. she asks if he wants to do this, she is anxious and we see this kind of withdrawn behavior we saw with her other self. the entire thing with these two seems to be less about becoming richard / linda, and more about affirming the ways they've changed over the years, that they can't be what they were, because they're something else too, cooper's halves are joined not in him reclaiming goodness, but in what feels like this cold reenacting of the rape of diane. it's a very disgusting and upsetting sequence.

as with all the doubled selves related stuff, this appearance coming after us feeling like we must be with them 'actually,' and seeing this confirms as strongly to me, as with leland in fwwm, the lack of any easy split, and that here there is an evocation of one leaving oneself, not quite dissociation or any purely internal state articulated in film, but this distance one has, two places at once, a premonition, out of joint with oneself, or one's self-conception, oneself as a coherent continuous thing, lacking the underside. to some extent, there is this horrible feeling around what goes on with diane that she is being thrown into something so as to rescue someone else, as if there is some way to save the world, what exactly this means is unclear, diane cannot be herself, her trauma feels as if it is both a utility and cannot be spoken aloud, whatever is coming cannot be stopped.

the entire thing with the motel also recalls what happens in fwwm, with leland and teresa banks, or, it's that it evokes the purchasing of sex, that uncomfortable atmosphere, the buying of a room, the distance between both parties, and then the way he commands her, turn off the lights, you're going to come over to me. he is unlike himself, he is totally himself. she is unhappy, terrified, utterly herself too.

the shots of the sex sequence are less like any portrait of love and sensuality, more a sequence of landscape shots constructed out of flesh, one of my favorite things in the episode, maybe favorite is a difficult word to use, i love it deeply, it makes me cry, but it's a pained crying, there's a beauty to it but it's a beauty of annihilation, of life at the bottom of something, it's a spareness of being, it's when one's sole weight is the weight of their bones, each creaking and distinct, dim lights in the distance, trees at night and streetlight through them, electrical wires, sex you don't want to have, because it is these things, surrounded by these things, it is the bareness of these things, it's very direct.

her hands on his face are rather telling, as if she is trying to make him not himself, deface him, make this event, as it happens (again), unrecognizable to herself. she stares up pleading with nothing cosmic, this too is a bare pleading, that she could be free of this happening, free of what makes it terrifying and this total horror passing through her, what makes him this man who can treat her so badly, to make her remember and to turn her into an encounter in a motel, it's also that this is them crossing that threshold, to meet each strange rule of whatever game they are playing to cross over to some other place, 430 miles exactly, right here, right here, and it having to be this place, to go some other place, where they feel themselves become 'different,' people, where the years that have changed the two of them have erupted, with less drama than their tulpas, still rather dramatic, this change of names. they are themselves, they are changed.

as well, i'd like to point out how for large portions of this sequence, especially as they are pre-coitus, cooper lacks any distinction, is total silhouette.

from the beginning of this episode we'd seen cooper multiplied, beginning with mr. c, his replacement for janey-e, him in the forest, him after the labyrinth, where exactly he is isn't ever a question posed outright but he, upon thinking about it, is a difficult thing to place. he will never be what he was in episode 17 again, he was scarcely what he was there, in that episode. the multitude of coopers shown doesn't ever really leave us satisfied with his presence, in each case it underlines something unavoidable, which is this coldness of his presence across the episode, the coldness in parts of 17, and especially here in this diner, the acknowledgement of what he is doesn't seem to leave him whole, it seems to leave him a different kind of resistant. as if there is something to be done with laura which would prove the matter of his soul, though i hesitate to claim this is the dimension of his selfishness, this is here, to some extent.

shot at great distance, we're cut off from him, he wanders around pointing a gun at everybody, endangering everyone, and in one of the only moments of humor in this episode with the frying of the guns, a joke which is itself presented with such distance that it being funny seems questionable, the coldness of a dead thing, it is all abject, the image itself cold, the space is too big. also would like to note here the way the episode maintains one of the throughlines across the season, this moment of these men tugging on the waitress' dress (then getting beaten up for it (and the way this interacts with this cold cooper, both something we want to be happy about and what follows being too unpleasant to maintain that sense, waving his gun around, threatening everyone), but the presence of this quotidian misogyny, and the way the quotidian creeps in here is much like the rest of the season, as much as it feels like it pointedly drops many things from its preceding episodes, even shedding diane, we enter the heart of something it feels like, but the quotidian americana captured digitally always feeling so clear it's dirty, this weird sheen that is kind of pretty in how it feels like an articulation of dusty surfaces, places we cannot keep handles on (carrie page's 'i tried to keep a clean house,' being taken multiple ways), everything is uncanny (multiple shots where people seem to become small enough in proportion to where they are, via angling and so on, that the space is emphasized, i really love this, it captures a rather true feeling about living in these kinds of places).

meeting carrie, telling her that he thinks she's a girl named laura palmer, his words closely if not exactly but i think exactly, at least, girl named laura palmer, emphasizes all of this. there's a sense one can have watching this, that he is un-personing carrie, dragging her back into being laura. watching this time i also got a sense about one trying to escape a past, or imagine oneself escaping something, to detach entirely and not being capable, and that this is articulated here at cosmic scale, where one exits oneself but there's still this way they are surrounded by death and horror, this dead man in the chair closer to an echo of something like her and bobby in the woods, a life of danger following her (not just danger, really, danger sounds too glamorous / not precisely what i mean (but the failure is interesting enough to preserve), domestic torture, abuse, a life of being both the face of something and thus taking on other needs, the object of sociality), this kind of repetition across a life. not that it believes it's impossible to get away, but things are set against her, and cooper encountering her can only thing to make her go to the source of things. while many may say things about this being an encounter with judy to end her reign, things do not seem to go this way. it seems to be much more a fumbling thing, he seems lost and determined, which is a rather bad combination.

one of the other light moments in this episode, how she asks if she'll need a coat, and she says she's got a few, and seems excited to go away.

i am fond of the way their journey through the night, this long drive, feels like the kind of tunnel we see at the end of inland empire. marching slowly, a kind of long dread, it's quieter here, though. the descent is very slow and it's very difficult to say more about the dread, or the paranoia which first comes in a fear of being followed, and when that evaporates, it lingers, an impression on glass, and the things she says in the ride, i was too young to know any better, in particular, being a miserable kind of line. it's interesting that at no point cooper really asks after her life in odessa. only listens to her mumblings. he is set on something happening. there is a stilted conversation about the chalfonts with the tremonds, and they also prove difficult to talk about. the way alice tremond here comes off as a wound in the work itself, she is stilted in a way that works, and clearly not an actor that works, she's just somebody confused and tired, this thing which seems to put a stop on cooper's plan, but her connection to the people who disappear from the fat trout trailer park in fwwm, or the strange family who are harold's neighbors, they are always hard to approach in terms of what they articulate, always something missed, both from them but they give the sense of things missed, us always being too late on some trail, but not of any mastery over the characters, nothing like that. it's closer to a sense of many things happening, just as with the woodsmen seeming to be these emanations of a wider and entitled force, violence / the undesirable aligning itself with force, employed, reaching for that same kind of uprightness, as well as a multiplication of images of a kind of domestic horror distended even farther from regular life, uncomfortably close to something while still being elusive.

i like that the questions and answers are so dull, there's very little that is gripping beyond the circumstance of this encounter. do you rent the house, who did you buy it from, do you know who she bought it from, and there's a connection to other things cooper is missing that we seem let in on, with the tremond / chalfont stuff. once again, he is outside something, his wrongness is underlined in this way as well. he never had all the facts, things remained hidden from him, and this isn't a grave personal failure necessarily but it is one of the things which makes this feel much more like something quite awful is happening. that is the only feeling i ever got from it, but at times i wonder about the people who see this ending and find it a happy one. that somehow there's any kind of release anywhere. even if he never found carrie, there's a sense that doom is hanging over her in odessa. she tried to make it work, speaking as if it's already all lost.

when cooper hunches over in the street, begins asking what year it is, the total lack of place he's had, his multiplication, it all seems to swollen up to this, this is so dreadfully wrong, and among the first questions we are asked, at the beginning of the return, near the beginning of this episode, is it future or is it past, goes unanswered. the notion of her rescue has thrown things out of joint terribly, he cannot grasp it as an impossibility, a woman whose difference to laura was unclear to us is now made to remember, becoming laura again, a past escaped returning, darkness falling as if this other thing is being sucked away, another phantasmal labyrinth cooper failed through, once again meeting laura's shrieking with fear, he cannot stand to hear what this pain itself is articulating. at the end of fire walk with me she had the angel, and he is there too, this is their one moment of really seeing one another, perhaps.

what hurts especially about the rescue of laura is that it would right the town itself, the thing that produced these conditions, it would salve over a problem of different proportion, which we experience to some extent across the whole series, but there is this hang up, on laura, in death she is still hung up, needed for the town to exist, now such that if she hadn't died, it would not have to contend with what it is, the horror of this little slice of america an impossible thing to itself, the violence of domesticity something that can be redeemed. and beyond this, a wider pessimistic sense, the particular kind of despair created, that of the small thing staring up at what it is caught up in, the tangle of life and quotidian torture. it's rather overwhelming. it's also rather difficult to articulate each and every thought i've had about this show, or this episode, so much time passing between each attempt at writing on it.

maybe final thoughts, until tomorrow or until i begin watching it again / feel it rise up through me as some kind of vomit, but so much of this episode's run time being a kind of silence, of words largely meant in their barest register, diane laura and cooper all try and articulate other things but seem to get caught on something, it is the way a kind of negative inner experience, of self as abject and the way one accrues years, accrues failures, the trauma of particular experiences and existence more broadly, are articulated, that it seems to be working in this register primarily.

the flickering of shots of the house, that it takes a couple shots back and forth for her to recognize it, and upon recognizing it, rather quickly it slips away, out of existence, and it's laura whispering in cooper's ear after some darkness as the credits roll. it feels as if that is the past, and that is her telling him what will happen, him not wanting to believe, starting anew, this cycle of her murder happening and re-happening, sucked back across time, out of this guilt of their encounter, this guilt he has for being in love with the lie a place makes for itself. with laura, it feels quite like fire walk with me in how it is oriented around laura's experience, here at the end, laura/carrie i suppose but i do feel like, despite any distinction that does exist, she is meant to be her, the way other diane is diane is linda and cooper is mr.c is dougie is cooper-as-dougie is richard, here. her recognition of sarah's name, all these years flooding back to her, a future she was never able to have in life now playing out horribly, some cycle still extant, her inner experience feels more present than cooper's, whose we do get in startling fashion in episode 17. across the season, though, laura's crying out, over what feels like this moment, this doubled circuit of images, first in the red room and then here, is shown, heard by other characters (that one jumpscare with gordon (which i think made me kind of cry)), it's a kind of emphasis on an ignored, abject thing, her existence as passed over in search of some other kind of completeness, that she is an icon to be used for some kind of world-saving cooper must do, for his own soul, largely i feel the way about it the way i did when i first saw it, devastation and shock that it uses her struggling to recognize, out of place-ness, in those final moments, and recognition, as this moment she seems to realize all the same things we are, and she is the instant we realize as well, it's simultaneous with her, the weight of failure, what has happened to her, every exact detail is something we know, and it returns to her as precise memory, and his gambit to erase that from history etches it deeper and deeper. love is not enough, is maybe the briefest thing to say about it all.

one other thing is the way the return renders suffering at this limit as horror broadly, i was looking back at an old conversation with a friend after i first saw it, and said that with characters like ed and norma, there's an extent to which their suffering bears fruit, there is goodness there, something simple, as well. with laura (and at the time i mentioned audrey, who is victim of many things as well), the show has reality break down around these two, and many other women across season 3 but with laura especially there's a way in which it takes stock of how there's just a kind of rawness, after this kind of experience, after a life like that. cooper aiming to rescue her kind of recalls how we remember him, too idealistic and pure, always perfect but not enough here, and the effect is the world staring into the face of this suffering person and trying to undo what already has happened, what is known intimately, wiping it away and saying that it wasn't as bad as it was, while one knows too well that it was, and is speechless, signed away to silence and shrieking.

that laura remains almost invisible to those who see her, too, that she seems to always be existing for others, and that we see not just that but her experience of that, is so painful, as well. i guess not just invisible but in a kind of social binding, that sociality constricts her and produces what she must be and this rescue is in some sense an effort to produce an innocent world, to deliver her into innocence, and that it sees this idea of innocence as maybe the most vulgar thing possible. to disconnect her from a source of trauma which may improve her life, even as we see with her being carrie, that she is wrapped up in something else. life gets away from us all, cooper is attempting to make that not happen. we can only fail at that. once again, love is not enough.

i started rewatching the series out of this resonance with laura palmer, and also a curiosity regarding the way i feel this resonance, mostly that at times i feel very strongly about it and feel i need it, beyond comfort, it feels like it just articulates something very meaningful. but i have no conclusions about this. i simply feel it in my chest, i think i have said so much about it, that it has become quieter, in some way. but it's maybe just deeper now, speaking so much the tongue is ground down. i certainly feel less articulate about all of this, and quite stupid generally. i think, though, that it's kind of good i have no solid thing to say about why laura means so much to me. there are scenes, there are the moments she is wordless and is only capable of shrieking, i feel i grasp this, or the particular ways despair seems to exist around her, articulated by her, domestic terror, etc. lots of things, i guess. it's everything, once again, as well, the way those words orbit around in my head, that love is not enough, this horrible sense of failure from one's surroundings and having to traverse this, the whole series captures this, though especially through her, and especially in fwwm and in the return.

i love it so much i want to see it again already, i love it so much i'm going to see some of season 1 in theaters tomorrow. just the pilot. but that's okay... the pilot's so special. maybe we'll go another day for one of the other episodes.

i think i should try to get all of twin peaks onto my external ssd. would be good to have around. since i #love it so much. i feel part of what took me so long to get around to watching this episode was my desire to say more about it, it feels overwhelming, to some extent, and i feel i have failed myself or something. to some extent as well, it was the dragging of my feet which make it harder for me to say the things i feel i could. i think i can justify it a bit, though, as i think i'd put blame on the carpal tunnel stuff on doing this, basically. that issue isn't so bad lately but some days are worse than others. i'd do it again, though, i like the show too much. maybe watching the return in a tighter clump, probably not so soon but sooner than is reasonable, probably, would be good for getting out final thoughts or anything, really. perhaps it's also lapses in reading and so on. i don't know. i feel dim, beneath the thing i love, i feel dim.

what else, of today. i drew a bit, something else, just to try and do more, using azpainter, during an internet outage. i watched a dumb video i don't really want to talk about beyond describing it as kind of dumb. i didn't do music really, i listened to some of my stuff through the new airwindows meter which showed interesting results. it's a bit more useful and its opacity regarding grading feels like it might be good for me so i don't pay so much mind to any of that.

i need to go sleep now, excited about tomorrow although we'll be going with our friend who keeps doing too much coke and talking to some guy who wants to fuck my gf (former opiate addict who now also has a serious coke problem (selling baseball cards to fuel his habit saying it's only bad when it gets to the point he's selling the clothes off his back)), the guy who said he wants to turn her into a cat or whatever, our friend being rather spineless, saying so neutrally or as neutrally as one can, which is probably decently neutrally, that he said that she and her 'nonbinary partner' are having issues so maybe there's something he can get into, which he got from my gf's brother being stupid and saying she could have any 'real man,' on like that. the last time this came up i didn't take too much issue with it because he seemed ashamed enough but my gf went out with him a bit ago and he was even more off the rails, kept bringing up shit she didn't want to deal with, and at one point went off to go do blow in a bathroom for like 30 minutes which honestly i just think it's kind of rude to be hanging out with people and not even excuse yourself. he's also got that thing going where he can't drink alone or if someone doesn't it makes him feel bad, he started getting all sad my gf didn't want to drink when they were hanging out and he still got her drinks which she felt obligated to drink. i basically like him but the summers can make him act crazy and it's grown much more desperate and less like, i dunno, it wasn't that it was fun it's just that there wasn't as much of a sense of it being a thing where he wants others to participate like that, or that he's going to be on a coke buzz the whole time acting kind of crazy and having that kind of stimulant thing going. and idk. his own personal stuff and us seeing that / going through that with him feels distinct, the recent phase feels almost like he's used to thinking of others like ornaments in his life, and now he's playing with them, or maybe the coke makes him think he's penetrating something and doing something that will give him insight. i dunno. there's other stuff that's a bit sleazier, plenty of things that seem like him wanting to run around on his gf and then his agreeing with my gf's brother that there's issues about me not bringing anything just come off like him absorbing my gf's brother's projection because it conforms to something. it's a bunch of nonsense, really. he's not, like, what this all sounds like. i mean he can be shitty and kind of manipulative in his pathetic way but, i dunno, mostly, he isn't whatever this all must sound like. at least i have to believe that. i don't know. it's so easy to feel like drugs are stupid, a waste of time, just this kind of social lubricant. i think it's stupid to wish people didn't do them but i do wish people didn't do them.

i need to sleep like actually now, tomorrow will be good he's usually not getting high to go see a movie i think,

so,

watched anime, i did work on music too, though. but mostly i watched 3 episodes of needy girl overdose. after the third, that one primarily focused on k-angel/ame, and its really wonderful lack of clarity around itself as true or not, the last 3 are much more about karamazov, and tend to be more like what i though the show, after that first episode, was going to be, it's not any more regular really but there's a greater sense of continuity, at least up to episode 6 and episode 6 might be another breaking point with the way the show operates, a move elsewhere, or a different way to take its broken up musings. i do like that the episodes kind of oscillate in focus and after the fourth it leaves you wondering if it'll continue to be about kache, who is always introduced with her very cruel bio / card thing that calls her an npc, and episode 5 begins with her and sort of shifts between the three poles it focuses on, from kache (with the members of karamazov) to k-angel in a stop motion bit (which has a bit i'm really in love with where she vomits after smelling an otaku's leftovers, and then the vomit sticks on her, in continuity, which i feel like makes this gag thing into something more uncomfortable / pointedly abject, and also makes her getting cleaned by his mother a bigger deal, there's quite a lot happening there, in that moment, even if it's all playful it's more affectively dense, the shots of her hanging on the drying line are very pretty, there's a weightlessness there that feels pointed), and after this the focus returns to karamazov, it's just interesting to note this because upon reflection, this kind of cycling is a well hidden rhythm but to some extent it's here especially in these episodes that feel a bit more show-like, and the way it modulates this and maintains some attachment to its excesses / desire to escape formal bounds, it always interrupts itself, this process both allows it to have a roving eye with regards to characters or stick them together and get them to quickly part and have things that do feel like some kind of continuity form. importantly though, this continuity is unstable, for a period in episode 4 it cycles around these moments which, coming from an unremarkable life of an npc, both giving us a sense of her being judged by herself but also her as seen by michica, this swarm of being one is both surrounded by, interred in, and desperate to escape, this character of the modern internet articulate rather well in the ways her life is rendered as indistinct but in a cruel way, featuring cruelty to those around her, eyes struck out, nobodies, she is part of this apparatus of judging life as much as she is its subject, and everyone is alike in this way. this is one of the strongest things that's articulated in these 3 episodes and while the show is clearly focused on social media as this thing which creates the mass of human thought / activity as something consumable, this panoptic function of self-discipline almost, the other episodes are also pointed at other things, private experience that severs one from this and makes them desperate for its approval, the intensities that people are brought up around, the difficulty of this kind of abjection needing to be hidden from polite society, intolerability of its appearance, a general atmosphere of misogyny and use, the terror of use as the primary guiding force in all things, etc, in 4-5 especially, kache's place as a kind of nobody who exists to gaze up at these stars is examined, and what this sea of nobodies even constitutes. there's a moment where iirc it's moudoku talking about this kind of attitude she and the other streamers take towards them, which is that they are at once necessary and irritating, the thing railed against in their streams, as well as the necessary thing for them to keep existing. there is a tragic relation there, not that she says it in a way that notes this but i think through all their musing something that appears to me is what feels absent, or that something is skated past.

to some extent she feels like she is ignoring the way she needs them to exist, and that her individuality is propped up on the kind of learned / trained things they talk about as being beneath them. or maybe, it isn't an absence of awareness but the fact that, following some of her characterization in episode 5 and her whole denpa girl act, that it's if she admits this then she can no longer believe in herself. in 5 ame appears, her card also reading npc, one follower, to talk with her when she is off duty in an arcade, in this moment with ame, split between herself as the most popular thing and absolute nothing, it's this lack of place, this total distance she has from everything, that seems to give her something.

i do really love in episode 4, how kache's thing with michica is examined, as well, this essential thing underlining her insecurity but also her desire for escape, there is both something beyond her but also this way that beyondness is enforced socially or digested socially, and so it is no longer really a beyond, it's a measuring stick, the path is so fraught and difficult.

the way it presents each break with what is normative, for each character, is quite interesting because for each character who seems to be more there than kache, although i think moudoku is a bit different, they seem so untouched by a kind of banal need to be like something that enables accession to whatever is beyond sociality, despite the fact that nechika and michica are touched by subculture and there is something pre-existing there, they also are elaborating a kind of thought, this feels like something kache cannot see inside of herself, until suddenly there's this ability to break with her life, kick out her rapist boyfriend, enter this kind of outside position, and i think the show aligns this with a kind of beauty, clearly she is inspired by michica's pursuit of beauty, to go outside of what is desirable for beauty (the destruction of the classroom windows, wounding herself, a kind of austerity and violence about it which leaves it more grotesque (and this kind of thing corresponding to an inner experience of a need for cuteness / beauty, kawaii culture's violence and excess return to it here (and this is elaborated in episode 6 especially))), or even the way the show makes of itself a kind of montage, flickering between shots of real flowers blooming or wilting or any other thing, a kind of dialogue of these forms opens up, a kind of silence of a garden, as well. but it's also an unstable position, and the show doesn't seem to suggest here in this instability they must change, but that they are responding to a wider kind of horror, the kind of thing which shuts people out, or in submission to regularity, one is subject to a rather blatantly portrayed rape culture and culture of misogyny, in about every episode this appears. thus it's not really judging them, it finds their attempts to articulate anything moving, it kind of allows these flailings and crises and moments of slippage to exist without any perspective that would eradicate the messiness of it all.

i also like when kache is speaking very politely and plainly at one point and they chide her for it, trying to get her to break with a kind of language, but they also come off cruel for it, this is part of the messiness of the thing which i appreciate. i wouldn't call it complexity, especially, at least here in this moment, but it underlines the creation of a need to be like something despite the fact that the point is to escape this in the first place. they are all in a bind, there are so many things to be, they are almost trying to reach escape velocity of themselves to become actual stars. this seems to be what is at stake at times.

episode 5 brings us closer to michica somewhat but in an off-side way, it's more about kache and moudoku however a large part is an emphasis on clothes as ritual / the meaning of dressing up, something exceeding how one is seen and more like an armor or eve a kind of thing one does to wield oneself against their surroundings, both something like defense and some ritual which carries some aesthetic form around with oneself, or emanating from oneself, this is related to michica's goth loli stuff but they are all like this. there's funny stuff about punk subculture stuff, not like, 'real' punk but punk as seen in j-fashion.

the part with moudoku's origin also complicates what clothes / fashion can do, to an extent, both enabling her but also it's this kind of uncomfortable sequence where she is changed:

everything is rendered so as to keep a sense of loss, and underlines the kind of tragedy around her low self esteem / requiring this to see herself as cute, it's also her escaping hiding / being a neet, to some extent, it does feel like it wants to closely examine this position one can find oneself in, of want beauty and to exceed oneself, and that there are inescapable status markers around this, there's a succeeding involved that is socially based, this success is measured in the most vulgar way in the show, and in life at times, in this social panopticon we've erected out of the internet. it feels like one of the few things that approaches the lives of the kinds of beings 'we' are, we being the people who were raised online or found themselves tethered to the internet at an early age, which feels more accurate than any generational division, it's a very wide spread of people living in this aftermath. it's also observant of the particular strains of japanese society and where their youth culture's gone, there's an emphasis on expensive things which is interesting, each of the characters seems to want money, there's very little generosity towards ideas of total abandonment of these things. it is that kind of bluntness, willing to sell-out, success and social visibility and shining, the need of proof.

this makes moudoku's encounter with ame especially interesting, ame being her hated idol / loved idol, out of dress and almost the inverse, the thing which exists in the shadow of the other, as minimal an existence as possible, friendless, going to look at that merry go round in a sad arcade alone, because she seems to suggest that no matter what proof there is there's the thing which requires more, to the point there will never be enough to totally be that other thing, that other thing to some extent disproven, though k-angel's thing seems to be a truth which shimmers, inconstant and see-through, ill-held, she is the icon of the wounded quality of this way of being, in this way ame is coherent with that, and is an image of a greater slippage. in any case, seeing her is always the most exciting thing, to me. maybe i will be totally wrong, as the show goes on, in my assessment of things. but i feel like it is her who articulates the most important things, or articulates the need for noise by her extreme silence of being, that she seems to have almost evaporated. she energizes moudoku, by being her friend, and moudoku never knows while ame does. this uneven knowledge too, is interesting.

episode 6 is the crazy michica episode all about beauty, the one which contains shuji terayama references at length:

nailing the face, like that, crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy pull. this episode gets back to the fragmentary style that i really love, it also really feels like a crazy aside after the prior 2 episodes, breaking into her psyche as they get ready for a show / between moments of an idol performance.

in particular, beyond stuff about the terror of a fading youth and a desire to die to be immortalized while still beautiful and young, she wishes she had died in her teens, and that were like her most favorite, most beautiful seeming moments to her; 'what i found most beautiful of all, was the moment a girl dies and becomes eternal,' (that moment is very interesting, like much of what i saw today it feels like it underlines an internal tension of these desires and that some fear still remains), but more particularly there's a focus on what drives one away from others, the perspective that creates this heaping mass of humanity which must be escaped. when approaching this it is never really afraid to make the characters come off as difficult to like, their misanthropy is easy to feel and also their attempts to be outside of what they critique feels slippery. of course, it knows this, we see things such as this:

she says this over getting acne, or had said this, and there's moments of her mother screaming at her, you're cute enough, go to school, etc etc etc, and i think the acne may seem silly at first but to make it this physical eruption where one wishes to be a seamless surface, a doll-like icon, to not have the plainness intrude into her life, that there's a mode of life which she abjects and when it happens to her she can't stand it, that it's this simple physical thing, makes it feel more true, her panic, she has become like them, the desire to be outside of humanity and to be reminded of it, in such a small way, to be reminded of the infirmity of the body not even for any dramatic reason, without the beauty and drama of blood, without the more poetic forms of abjection she might point to herself, but that thing gestured at in kind with the images taken from terayama, of that snail slithering over the bandaged face and the nailing through of the head, of this very physical, plain, filthy feeling reality, that it occurs to us poetically but is still itself the abject thing, the welt and pus, the relation to that mass, i find this very strong.

and the sequence of the live action door carrying and opening, it's so beautiful and feels honestly rather brave to stick into this episode, especially the length it's at. or this other moment, looking over an impressionistic painting in a gallery, it's of a moment in kache's life, before going fully blonde, but after the breakup, we hear that dialogue, unmoving in that painting, we see michica's hands over the painting, we see into the painting, kache speaking, looking uncomfortable about telling anyone anything, struggling to be herself, and michica walking past them there, in that painting, reduced to a surface, partitioned away, this hideous regular life.

i also love her focus on this painting, this wanting to be this:

and that she cannot be a still image, not just image, but emanation of beauty and youth, this still form of a life in joyous motion. this being impossible, toiled towards and never entered into. this is very well articulated. the grave weight of the failure.

the move towards her idea of what beauty is, which is about sensibility, motion of thought and a way of seeing, feels like it gets at this kind of being outside of things they all strive for, and that there is still failure, the profound difficulty of being, and of being forced into the role of object and that the show can use their place as streamers to examine the broadness of that role women are stuck into to examine, beyond all the other stuff about the internet in its current incarnation, the ability to hold one's life in their own hands, and all these means we have available to try and wrench it out of the grasp of some other thing, and return it to ourselves, and that this is something tragic and painful feeling, often, that it is never whole.

another thing this episode did is get at something i don't know if i've ever seen any other thing about the internet try to get at, which is the heap of references that can accrue, there's marilyn manson jokes in the episode, beside the shuji terayama stuff, besides utena stuff, besides takeshi kitano references, that this kind of aesthetic universe michica wants to cultivate is at all times coexisting with all this other stuff, that she too is an object and subject and outcome of this kind of heap, a being shot forth out of a long established subculture, these old paintings, these old films, this kind of dandyism, frayed at the edges with a modernity she cannot refuse, this reminds me of the shots in an earlier episode where she goes to hang out with some toyoko kids / adjacent subcultural people, as she's growing truant from school and becoming tiktok famous. having to be on tik tok, in these times, loving these things and being interred in this world, the way the things you love feel almost dragged down by the surrounding things, or enter into conversation which is strangely productive of something else, being else it is vague, unknown, leading elsewhere.

but yes, good show thus far, thought it's such a delicate thing it is doing that if it gets especially bad it can ruin everything. but that means it's doing something special, if it succeeds it will have been something very very good, maybe i will have more thoughts about these episodes tomorrow. it has been a bit since i've written about this show, or any, really. i need to finish twin peaks like tomorrow because they're showing the first season or some episodes in the fun theater and it'd be funny to go see all that again.

i need to go sleep now, spent a while playing marathon, had a good run today where i moved really crazily and confused a recon and stabbed her, which seemed to shock her. it's really nice to do runs on perimeter. i love that map a lot.

and music stuff, i played guitar and i keep having fun with that, at least, which keeps me tethered to some aspect of writing and the inventive portion of doing music stuff. but working on the songs and making them sound good proves difficult always. i just don't know how to get stuff to not sound. i don't know. it's like a droning river, at some frequencies, so the movement of the track doesn't come through really. how do i achieve that, i dunno. as always writing about it made me go mess with it, i'll see if that worked. i can hope for anything, that usually counts for nothing with all this.

i think that did do something, i think i need to lower the bass a bit and bring guitars more forward again. but maybe this'll solve my issues, tomorrow, when i do both of those things and only those things. i have to force myself to do as little as possible to things, sometimes.

it's sleep time, though,

so,