Twin Peaks, David Lynch, and Cosmic Horror

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the first episode of the new season, though I think I got a fair way into it.

Twin Peaks means a lot of things to different people, but the core aspect of it that I always tended to focus on was that particularly Lynchian weirdness. In a lot of ways, I think Lynch's style of horror is an evolution of Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft's horror was all about the mysterious vast and unknowable cosmos, taking the form of hideous monsters that were far weirder than the kind of standard monsters of mythology and gothic horror.

While Cthulhu is the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, the one that I think is the most interesting conceptually is Nyarlathotep. Most of Lovecraft's mythos concerns creatures that look far removed from our own evolutionary path. But Nyarlathotep, at least in one of its forms, appears as a human being - sometimes with inhuman features like midnight-black skin (which, considering Lovecraft's racism, has unfortunate implications,) but ultimately in a humanoid form far closer to our own than even Cthulhu (who, for a Lovecraftian monster, is way closer to human-shaped than most.)

In a sense, Nyarlathotep is a way to have a creature more akin to the Devil or Antichrist in Christianity without abandoning the alien-ness of the overall mythos. Stephen King's Randall Flagg is a similar concept - a creature that walks the earth looking fully like a human, but who spreads death and chaos like a ball of pure evil. In fact, Randall Flagg is even referred to as Nyarlathotep in the Stand, though in the Dark Tower series we eventually find out he's ultimately just a very evil human being (or more likely former human being.)

Anyway, David Lynch's work, and specifically Twin Peaks, has beings that take this mundane appearance and alien nature very seriously. BOB, the evil spirit that possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to rape and murder his own daughter (uh... spoilers I guess?) looks like a normal human being in his "true" form (actually a set dresser named Frank Silva.) But BOB seems to exist purely to inflict suffering in the world - and in fact, even the "good" spirits of the Lodges are implied to also subsist on this suffering (if you watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.)

In the first episode of this revived season, we find that Dale Cooper is still in the Black Lodge (or maybe the White Lodge? Or they're the same thing?) but that his doppelgänger from the end of the original season has been living as some sort of powerful criminal with various people at his command, several of whom he kills (I imagine there's an article to be written about how the only two young women we see at least up to the point I've gotten in the pilot wind up getting violently killed while naked or scantily clad, but I'm not going to unpack that here.)

Interestingly, the Fake Cooper actually looks and dresses almost exactly as Stephen King describes Randall Flagg (at least in The Stand - in the Dark Tower series, at least at the beginning, he is described looking just about as he does in the upcoming movie.)

Now, Fake Cooper isn't exactly BOB - he's referred to as Cooper's doppelgänger, and there's another evil doppelgänger in the Lodge of the Arm (who I believe is the Man from Another Place, which could explain why the Man was looking for "garmonbozia" in Fire Walk With Me when previously he seemed like a benevolent figure.)

Fake Cooper clarifies in a conversation with some of his minions that he does not "need" anything. He merely "wants" things. This does emphasize his alien nature, though one could also interpret this as some kind of denial. Either way, he's terrifying.

Where King and even, to an extent, Lovecraft, generally use inscrutability as an element to their plots, the plot itself tends to be relatively straightforward, and in King, there's often some sort of victory against evil (while considered one of the greats of the horror genre, I'd actually describe King as more of a Dark Fantasy writer - and I mean this as a high compliment, to be clear.)

But with David Lynch, even what truly happened often remains a mystery in his stories. For example, you could interpret Mulholland Drive's first half to be the dying dream of the protagonist of the second half (which really bummed me out when I watched it,) but you could read it a lot weirder than that.

In Lovecraft, exposure to this enormous cosmos of strange godlike beings, characters often fall into a depressive madness. But in a way, Lynch creates narratives that flit along on dream logic in a way we imagine an insane mind would see things.

And in doing so, Lynch imbues mundane objects and figures with the same kind of existential dread that can come from a being like Yog-Sothoth.

And frankly, looking at my own writing, I can kind of see his influence on my works, even if a lot of it was more through cultural osmosis and perhaps the collective unconscious, as I didn't see any Lynch until I was a sophomore in college and a lot of the Lynchian imagery I use I came up with before then.

American Gods takes us through Laura Moon's Revenant Journey

Laura Moon was never a happy person.

The story of American Gods begins with Shadow going through incredible trauma. Released after three years in prison, he finds out not only that his wife is dead, or that his best friend is dead, but that the two of them were having an affair.

It's a pretty standard tale - the affair when a spouse is in prison - but what we find in this episode, "Git Gone," is that Shadow idealized his life with Laura long before his prison sentence. The episode goes way back to before Laura had even met Shadow, and we get a glimpse of her life - she's a blackjack dealer in an indian casino where they don't even want her to shuffle her cards by hand anymore - something she likes to do (and what I interpret to probably be the reason she got that job in the first place.) Laura literally attempts to kill herself that night, closing the lid on her hot tub and filling the enclosed space with insecticide, though she obviously stops before she succeeds.

She meets Shadow when he attempts to do a little sleight-of-hand grift on her, and what begins as a hypothetical pitch for her to help him do a heist turns into flirting, sex, and then a relationship and marriage.

And Shadow's into it. He gets a job at Laura's friend's husband's gym and is happy as long as he's with Laura.

But Laura is not. The underlying problem hasn't been addressed, and as much as she loves Shadow (which she believes she does, and... I think if you believe you love someone that's love, though it doesn't mean you won't do shitty things to them) her own depression has not gone away. Chillingly, during a montage of "happy relationship stuff," when Shadow is going out to the store Laura asks him  to buy some bug spray, which for us and for Laura has some more obviously dire connotations.

Ultimately, Laura proposes that the long-abandoned plan to rob the casino is the only way she's going to feel happy - getting enough money to move somewhere better and quit her terrible job.

And it's this robbery that get Shadow arrested, and rather than have her plead for her part in the failed heist, Shadow instead takes double the sentence to keep Laura out of prison.

And then, her cat dies, and when Robbie comes to bury it for her, their affair begins - a totally unhealthy affair that Laura seems to know is a bad idea but won't stop. And it's this affair that gets both her and Robbie killed (thankfully not shown in the same graphic detail that we saw with Scott Thompson's random friendly recovering alcoholic last time.)

Now, the character details are clearly important going forward, but one might have inferred all that detail. This is where things get interesting.

Laura, after seeing her own dead body while her spirit hovers above the wreck, winds up in that crazy desert otherworld that we saw Anubis measuring the old Egyptian woman's soul in (also maybe the place where the cab driver was transported while the djinni was fucking him?) Laura is obviously not really tied to Egypt, which does make me quibble a little with the fact that it's Anubis that meets her in the afterlife, but ultimately, the death god informs her that her soul is heading toward darkness, because she has no beliefs. Darkness is represented as her old hot tub with a can of "Git Gone," which again, is filled with existential dread. (Side note: I really wonder what an agnostic would get as an afterlife in this show.)

But before Anubis can force her there, the lucky coin Mad Sweeney accidentally gave to Shadow yanks her back into her body, and she has to zombie her way out of her grave.

And now Shadow shines like a beacon for her in an otherwise colorless world. She tracks him down as soon as she's out of her grave and kills the "Children" who had lynched him (in the end of the first episode.) Hiding from him, her arm falls off, and she attempts to repair it at her grieving friend Audrey's house, where we get a simultaneously hilarious and intense scene where Audrey (who has literally complained to Shadow that she'll never be able to get any sense of closure because anything she says to Laura or Robbie will just fall on dead ears) finds her and reacts with exactly the same amount of abject horror as any normal person would.

As Laura sets about her plan to track down Shadow and actually tell her she's, you know, back, she and Audrey almost run into a man walking his dog. Except it's not a man and it's not a dog. It's Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis - aka Anubis and Thoth. As undertakers, they are well equipped to more substantially repair Laura's body, though Mr. Jaquel warns Laura that when she is done with her task, he will take her into the darkness.

But in a way, her revival has changed something fundamentally in Laura. She has a purpose now, and Shadow is something to believe in. Her life before was defined by a soul-crushing routine, and it's clear that her affair with Robbie, just like the failed bank heist, were just desperate attempts to break that routine. But the routine is as dead as she is, and in finding and protecting Shadow, she has an active thing to do.

This version of events is elaborated a great deal more than it is in the books, and I'm really curious to see the Laura side of the story (even if I'm also slightly sad that we didn't see Mr. Wednesday this week - though we did see his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, flying over the SUV before the accident.)

Cecil's Brother and Praxis Burgers on the Latest Welcome to Night Vale/Alice Isn't Dead

Welcome to Night Vale is certainly horror-based, but usually, the horrific stuff is played for laughs. It's impressive that the show can weave back and forth between taking its horror seriously and making it silly or even endearing (like the fact that the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is probably evil, but generally doesn't do anything beyond annoying mischief.)

Anyway, the point is: probably the scariest the show has ever gotten was an episode called Cassette. In this, Cecil discovers some old audio tapes of his time as a kid. Some of the details don't add up with his own recollections, like that he doesn't (if I recall correctly, he doesn't even remember being a NVR intern - though he was destined to run the show after Leonard Burton retired.)

Of course, the two biggest details that are mentioned in Cassette are that A: the recordings mention his having a brother and B: Cecil seems to be killed by some kind of monster while looking at a mirror.

Now, this "season" of WTNV has kind of had two through lines - that of Huntocar and the tiny civilization (which we now know is a tiny, seemingly more "normal" other than the after effects of being buried under the bowling alley version of Night Vale, and that of the Distant Prince and residents of Night Vale remembering alternate realities.

So in the recent "Cal," the eponymous, seemingly non-existent brother shows up at Cecil's home, and a whole other set of memories floods into him - he's not married in this version of reality, and he's even still partially in the closet to his brother. I think his sister Abby might not even exist in this version of events (which of course means his niece Janice doesn't either.)

With tears in the fabric of reality showing up, all linked to the Distant Prince, it seems, one has to wonder what exactly is going on, and if it has anything to do with the fact that the tiny civilization is actually another version of Night Vale.

One thing it does do is seemingly negate one frightful theory I had about the episode Cassette - that the Cecil we've been listening to is actually the monster that killed the real Cecil. If the Cassettes are from a different reality, then our Cecil at least seems to be... who he is. This actually also could explain how Leonard Burton was able to fill in for Cecil even though one of the old tapes he played was Cecil reporting on Leonard's grisly death (something I just wrote off as Night Vale weirdness, which I'm 100% not ruling out.)

Anyway, apparently we're getting "A Story About Huntocar" at the beginning of June, and if it's anything like "A Story About You" or "A Story About Them," it'll be great. (Also, given that both of those episodes deal with agents stealing buildings from the tiny civilization - agents, I assume, of a Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency - it would make sense for it to be of the same style.)

On Alice Isn't Dead, we get a second appearance of Praxis Industries. In the first season's episode "The Factory by the Sea," Keisha (not yet known by that name) makes a delivery to a factory that seems to have a single employee, who rapidly ages during her visit until she realizes that the lumber she had delivered was actually his coffin, which he drifts away in.

The second appearance of Praxis takes a different form, but there's a similarly uncanny element. In "Chain," Keisha and Sylvia visit a fast food place called Praxis, in which the same brother and sister appear in every restaurant. They're absolutely the same people - they remember the two visitors and even have a drawing Sylvia made.

In the end, the Praxis restaurant closes - and we can be confident that this means that every location is gone.

Given that Alice Isn't Dead is an examination of American culture, it makes a lot of sense to examine the way that we're drawn to these chains - little pockets of familiarity that you can find anywhere.

It's a rich theme to examine, especially these days, when the ideas of monoculture and multiculture are in tremendous conflict. And given that this is a show about a (black, assuming that the character shares the ethnicity of the performer) lesbian going around rural parts of the country (in other words, the most conservative parts of the country) looking for her wife - a designation that wasn't even permitted only a couple years ago - there's certainly interesting questions about what sort of familiarity we can expect as we travel the country.

I remember reading in some interview that Praxis will play a big role in Alice Isn't Dead's mythos. So far, at least, both episodes featuring it appear to be standalone episodes, and in each, Praxis seems like a very different sort of company.

Now, Praxis is a real word, meaning, essentially, the process of putting a theory or idea into practice. So what does that tell us? In both episodes, there's a high concept to what Praxis represents - we see a man literally working in a factory for his whole life (that happens to go by as Keisha watches) and in this episode, we get the most literal manifestation of the familiarity chains bank on. Is Praxis all about taking these ideas and making them real?

A lot remains to be discovered about the nature of these companies - Bay and Creek Shipping, Praxis, and of course Thistle (assuming that's not "dealt with" at the end of season one.)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy was Marvel's amazing out-of-left-field success - one of their most popular movies that took a totally obscure series that few had ever heard of, and made it into one of the biggest hits of the last decade.

The movie distinguished itself in a couple ways, even if the Marvel formula and the movie's ties to the greater cinematic universe were familiar (in fact, this seems to be the only movie where there are characters who have actually heard of Thanos.) For one thing, it is a space adventure. Now, the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok absolutely looks like it will be blending Thor's realm-hopping with space travel (and this is probably how they'll get the Guardians in with the Avengers for the giant Infinity War crossover,) but the change in setting has allowed Guardians to stand on its own. The fact that James Gunn has a lot more creative control than most Marvel directors also gives the movies a stronger identity (I mourn the Edgar Wright Ant-Man that might have been.)

Guardians is also willing to be goofier than the other Marvel movies. Now, to be clear, Marvel has wisely avoided making grimdark movies where everyone is a bummer (looking at you, DC,) and there's always a sense of humor (one of the reasons the Incredible Hulk is kind of forgotten is that it wasn't all that fun - also with Edward Norton replaced by Mark Ruffalo, it's easier to imagine that it's just not part of the canon in the same way, though they did get William Hurt to come back.) But aside from just having a sense of humor, the world of the Guardians is just more heightened. You can have a huge colony inside the skull of a space-god. You can have a planet of totally-human-looking aliens. You can have proper names like Yondu, Xandar, Drax, Groot, and Rocket Raccoon.

One of the things that made the Avengers so good is that the characters' personalities were all drawn so strongly, and the interactions between these leads of their own movies had a kind of chemical reaction that improved the whole thing. Guardians has a pretty large cast - the first film is split between five protagonists - but the characters are, again, drawn well enough on their own that seeing their interactions is a blast.

Volume Two is, I'd argue, more character-based than the first movie. There is a terrible threat for the heroes to overcome, but that threat carries with it serious emotional baggage. If that hasn't been a big enough spoiler for you, let's go past the cut.

Breaking Down the Dark Tower Trailer Because I Am Complicit in Hollywood's Fanboy-Based Marketing Strategies

Such a huge part of the way Hollywood has co-opted nerd culture is the way that they have gotten people to gush about movies they haven't seen yet because it represents an adaptation of something that means something a lot to them and adapting it suggests a validation of that love.

So here I go!

While I think it's not supposed to officially release for a couple hours, some Youtube channel put up the Dark Tower trailer, and I watched it.

The trailer does some pretty heavy exposition - it explains Gunslingers, explains the Dark Tower's role explicitly (though it's important to far more than just Earth and Mid-World, Jake, but I get that we want to keep things relatively simple.)

We get three characters: Roland, the Man in Black, and Jake Chambers. The stakes are established (MiB wants to destroy the Tower, doing so would destroy both Earth and Mid-World.) So now let's get into the nitty-gritty.

In the books, there were always hints that Mid-World was a future version of our world - the fact that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie were all from different times kind of allowed for Roland to simply be from the far future. The movie seems to be steering more toward other world - there's an alien sky with a couple of enormous moons in one shot (I can't remember all the different moon names in the books, which I always interpreted to be different phases, but they could have just been different objects.)

Jake in the movie appears to be from our era, rather than the 1970s, which frankly is fine, because other than Susannah's (well, Odetta's) civil rights background, the eras didn't play a huge part in the plot (and you could easily make Odetta's activism something modern - though to be clear, it doesn't look like Susannah or Eddie are going to be in this movie, just as they weren't in the first book.)

Still, this is clearly not just a straight adaptation of the Gunslinger (for one thing, they've explicitly said this is a sequel to the series, not a straight adaptation, which if you've read the books is actually perfectly possible, and allows for big changes to the story without breaking the books' canon.)

The movie looks like it's borrowing elements from The Wastelands, as we see Jake already dealing with his psychologist misinterpreting his visions (and we get a little shout-out to Kubrick's version of the Shining, with a photo of the Overlook Hotel on the psychologist's desk - one of, I'm sure, a million references to other King works.) We also see the haunted house that serves as Jake's portal into Mid-World in that book, though the trailer implies this becomes a two-way gate that allows Roland to first travel to Earth.

Anyway, unless they go the Marvel route and release like three trailers, I think this is all we're going to get until the movie's summer release.

Night Vale's Ghost Stories and The Missing Sky

Sometimes I do episode-by-episode posts about my favorite TV shows, or at least periodical season analyses. I'm probably going to do so for American Gods, which as I said in the previous post is one of my biggest creative influences.

But I can't exclude the podcast Welcome to Night Vale from my influences either - in a way, it kind of coalesced a lot of the things I'd always subconsciously been interested in - the supernatural as something weirder and more ambiguous and modern than typical fantasy tends to go for. Given that I came up with the idea of The House (a prominent force existing within my Otherworld setting) way back in 2006 or so, I wouldn't say that Night Vale was the first thing that made me fascinated with ancient conspiracies, but it is one of those works of art that make me go "damn, I wish I were the one who created that."

Anyway, this is all a long and convoluted way of saying that I think I might start doing episodic posts about Welcome to Night Vale (I might also do Alice Isn't Dead, the second podcast done by the Night Vale Presents team, which I also love.)

For a brief refresher if all of this is unknown to you, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that started in 2012 that takes the form of a community radio broadcast in a small town in the American southwest. The elevator pitch version if it is that it's a town where all conspiracy theories are true, but to get a little more in-depth, it's a town where eldritch abominations serve key civic functions, shadowy government agencies act in the open, massive corporations double as murderous cults, and basically everyone's understanding of what "normal" is is very, very different than ours, like the fact that worshipping "bloodstones" is thought of as the mainstream religion and people who believe that mountains exist are considered fringe nut jobs. The show is a mix of surreal humor, weird science fiction, and cosmic horror, with the kind of ever-expanding small-town cast that you see in shows like the Simpsons and Parks and Recreation.

Anyway, for me to go into all the specifics of what has happened over the course of the show here would be absurd, so I'll just assume that if that caught your interest, you'll listen to the podcast from the start.

Spoilers to follow.

Ghost Stories is the most recently finished live show (there's another one currently touring) and the recording finally went up for sale. Like most live shows, this one kind of sits loosely within the show's continuity. I believe there are references to the death of Old Woman Josie, but for the most part this kind of works anywhere.

As is often he case, the city is having a competition for citizens to tell the best ghost story, with the prize being, apparently, to be murdered and eaten by the city council and eaten (and thus turned into a ghost!) Of course the stories told are generally absurd and not really, like, real ghost stories. But over the course of the show, Cecil tells a story about a man who picks up what seems to be some ghost that lures drivers to pick her up and driver her home, from whence the driver never returns.

Ultimately, what is revealed is that Cecil is actually telling a very mundane story about the day of his mother's funeral, and makes a point about how ghost stories actually make us feel better by telling us that there is something that comes after death, and that meaning can still persist beyond the expiration of our mortal bodies. Knowing that would be a great comfort, but the truth is that we can't know, and we are left with unresolved questions and disappointments and if there is a meaning, it eludes us.

I've got to say that this story hit me pretty damn hard, as the prospect of losing a parent relatively soon is currently looming over my family. Nothing, really, is more terrifying that the idea of death, and believing that our conscious cores live on, even if it is in some scary manner, is ultimately a comfort. It allows us to mitigate and shrink death into just some object in the background and not an impenetrable wall we are all speeding toward.

On the other hand, today's new episode, the Missing Sky, was disturbing in more plot-related ways.

We get a pretty standard WTNV broadcast at first, but at some point, the sound shifts and we hear a tinnier, seemingly distant broadcast of a different episode. It's still definitely Cecil announcing the news, and it still seems to be coming from Night Vale, but there are odd things going on - primarily, this version of Night Vale seems to be a far more normal town (at first,) with the angels currently squatting in Old Woman Josie's house replaced with a woman named Erika with an angel tattoo on her arm, described as an old friend of Josie's, squatting there instead. Pamela Winchell is still mayor, and both John and Jim Peters work on their farm together. Even the Weather Report is an actual weather report that mentions temperatures and wind.

But something terrible happened to this version of Night Vale. There is talk about an attack by something, with an apparently controversial memorial to those fallen (who include Cecil's brother-in-law and best friend, Steve Carlsberg) that takes the form of a massive foot. And before this attack, the first thing that happened was that the sky disappeared, and the city was cut off from the outside world. This Night Vale is holding parades in honor of the people who volunteered to defend the city from the abomination that arrived that day a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in the normal Night Vale, Carlos goes to investigate these strange popping sounds coming from underground.

So through the episode, we're left wondering what exactly the nature of this other Night Vale is. We know that this Cecil never met Carlos. We also know that the city seems to be somewhat less outlandish, at least until the sky disappeared. I was thinking first that it could be a time jump, but the fact that Pamela Winchell was still mayor seemed to make that unlikely, and the fact that Jim Peters was not off fighting in the Blood Space War suggested that this had to be an alternate reality.

However, as it turns out, it's not an alternate universe, and it's not a different time. This other Night Vale is, in fact, the tiny civilization that lives under lane 5 at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. And the abomination that they remember from all those years ago was actually Carlos, whom the people of this miniature Night Vale nearly killed in the "season finale" of the podcast's first year.

So what the hell?

Big questions to be asked: if this tiny Night Vale is, apart from the whole missing sky thing and the worship of Huntocar, relatively normal, is this actually the real Night Vale? Tiny Cecil talks about how the city was cut off from the rest of the world when the sky was taken, but one of the themes of the show has generally been that big Night Vale isn't that easy to get into or out of anyway.

I'm assuming that the sky going missing was the construction of the bowling alley over the city. Is there a bowling alley or a Teddy Williams in this smaller Night Vale?

I definitely think this could tie into a lot of stuff from this year of the podcast - the alternate memories people have in the Ash Lake episode could be memories from each person's tiny doppelgängers.

Also, we know that Huntocar is associated with the train that arrives in the first episode of the year - which is also the train that the bandits that Lucia Tereschenko (no idea if I'm spelling that right) was working for took over - bandits who seem likely to be the predecessors of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, whom we know from A Story of You have been stealing buildings from the tiny civilization and burying them out in the desert. (I'm assuming the Man Who Is Not Short and the Man Who Is Not Tall are from the VYMGA.)

I realize that this is all making me sound like a conspiracy nut (which I'm sure is by design,) but there's some kind of connection between Huntocar, the deer-faced rail enthusiasts who installed the Night Vale subway system (who share the deer-face of Huntocar and also communicate through proprietary message-cockroaches) and the train. Huntocar even tells Cecil about the fact that the VYMGA is taking their buildings.

So... what it all adds up to is anyone's guess. Like last year's Strangers, this story is slowly building up to something, and I think today's episode was a big push forward, but I still don't really know what it could all mean. (For example, I thought the Distant Prince might have been involved at first, but that's seeming less likely - maybe they'll save him for a later "season.")