“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, September 10, 2011

The True Horror of Twin Peaks


You know the one thing that's truly frightening for me about Twin Peaks? The fact that the demons and spirits are also suffering and confused, even the good ones. That little dwarf doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, does he?

It's a profoundly Buddhist view.

Maybe I shouldn't be watching this while I write Hyperobjects. For my sanity's sake. But there's almost a logic to that. I've already talked about it a bit in the book and mean to do so a little more. It's the deep noir. And that viscous coffee.

3 comments:

Henry Warwick said...

and that damn fine cherry pie.

Andy Hageman said...

I like the way that viscous coffee embodies your "deep noir" in relation to "mouthfeel." This is not simply a noir ecology of terroir, in which we taste and wax Romantic (in a polyvalent sense of the word) over a place that is at least as distant as under our feet. Mouthfeel means it's in you. It's staining your teeth, like Black Lodge Laura's:
To follow your Michael J. Anderson thread into Mulholland Drive, what matters is not the notion that "He's the one who's doing it."

Timothy Morton said...

Yuck Andy! Mouthfeel!