WEIRDLAND: Twin Peaks's Reality Blur, Baby Driver (Nostalgic American Paradise), Lucid Dreams

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Twin Peaks's Reality Blur, Baby Driver (Nostalgic American Paradise), Lucid Dreams

Playing games with time: Becky called Shelly (known as Shelly Johnson, now Shelly Briggs in the 3rd Season) to complain about Steven who had been MIA two days. Mom told her to get down to the Double R for some cherry pie à la mode. A subsequent scene, set in the evening after Shelly had left work, saw Bobby hit the Double R for dinner (his usual: a plate of spaghetti and two pieces of garlic bread) and speak of an event that happened earlier that day, the discovery of “some stuff my dad left for me.” At no point did anyone reference the events of two weeks ago, when Becky went gunning for Steven upon discovering his adultery with Donna’s little sister and Bobby had to deal with madness in the streets outside the Double R.


Twin Peaks: The Return (Part 13) featured a musical performance as strange as Audrey’s reality blur. For the first time, a fictional musical act took the stage. James Hurley, former secret boyfriend to Laura Palmer, former sucker for femme fatales and neo-noir subplots, sang “Just You and I.”  One of James' signature moments in the Season 2 was recording an old school rockabilly ballad called “Just You” with Donna and Maddie singing back-up. This sincere scene segued into one of the most terrifying scenes in all of Twin Peaks, Maddie’s vision of BOB appearing in the Hayward dining room. Now, 25 years later, James was on the Roadhouse stage, singing “Just You” once again. The guitar was the same, the thin falsetto vocal was the same, and besides the bald head, even James seemed the same. 

The final moment of Part 13 might have been a comment on James and the final destination of his dead-end pining, with his fixation with what was and what could have been. We saw his uncle, Big Ed Hurley, a man also owned by the past, sitting alone behind a desk at his gas station, looking out the window at the pumps, with nothing to keep him company except his memories, most them reminding him of lost love and unrealized dreams. It was a moving still life of quiet pain and sorrow, beautifully sad and subtly devastating. Source: ew.com

Ansel Elgort gets high marks for playing Baby as a generally cool, emotionless driver. Baby Driver allows Ansel Elgort and Lily James to truly shine. I've never been a fan of car racing movies and when Baby Driver is not mired in featuring big car chase sequences, the film allows Elgort's Baby and James's Debora to shine and explore some decent on-screen chemistry. Lily James seems to be channeling Madchen Amick's Twin Peaks character for much of her performance, but when the pair shares the screen, Baby Driver hits its high notes. Source: wlswarts.blogspot.com

David Lynch once said, all his characters seem to end up in a diner sooner or later. The diner is where Baby and Debora meet and fall in love, the perfect place for the fairytale of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver to begin. Baby Driver, a reimagining of noir, takes well-worn tropes of the crime film and upends them. Baby’s father, Doc, Bats, and Buddy all threaten the dream, his fairytale ending, a golden world of warmth, soft light, the sound of his mother singing “Easy,” and Debora. 

At first glance, Baby seems to share the macho stoicism of his cinematic predecessors, but it’s a facade, a defense mechanism. Baby constantly listens to music and wears sunglasses because he needs to drown out the world and the ringing in his ears caused by a childhood accident that killed his parents and left him with tinnitus.

Baby’s and Debora’s love story seems old-fashioned, but in the world of crime stories, it’s radical. In heist films, women are usually absent (Reservoir Dogs). Partners in crime are more often than not ill-fated: Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands. Like Walter Hill’s The Driver, everyone’s dialogue in Baby Driver is hardboiled, but Baby’s and Debora’s interactions have the earnest sweetness of Hill’s Streets of Fire. The mural in Bo’s Diner is Debora’s dream: a couple in a ’59 Chevy Impala convertible, alone in the desert, watching the sunset, a Route 66 road sign beside them. It’s another kind of getaway, a getaway to a nostalgic American paradise. Debora’s dream becomes Baby’s dream.

Debora is ride or die. Even when the full horror of Baby’s “job” reveals itself to her, she believes in him. Joseph aside, the men in Baby’s life bully him, challenge him, try to stop the music. But Debora is in tune with Baby — she even walks to the rhythm of Baby’s music when he first sees her. They are always in sync, their feet tapping to the same beat as they listen to T. Rex in the laundromat, their fingertips circling the rims of their wine glasses on their fancy restaurant date.

Baby is different, he’s kindhearted and innocent. Even the title Baby Driver feels a little bit like a “fuck you” to the hardboiled machismo typical of these films. This is a coming-of-age story where Baby doesn’t lose his innocence, he reclaims it. Baby redeems himself, transcends the trauma of his past, eludes the violence of his father and of his cinematic predecessors. He makes music out of the taunts of bullies. He gets a second chance. None of it comes easy, but you can’t have a rainbow without a little rain. Source: birthmoviesdeath.com

About 50 per cent of us will at some point in our lives experience “waking up” and being conscious while still in a dream – possibly, we may even be able to act with intention in it. Such “lucid dreams” are not only a vivid and memorable experience for the dreamer, they represent a strange, hybrid state of waking consciousness and sleep which could tell us completely new things about our inner lives. Nightmares are among the most common debilitating symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. There is some evidence that lucid dreaming can be induced, too. Questioning the nature of one’s environment during the day – “Is this real or am I dreaming?” – increases the chances of having a lucid dream. Reports suggest that simple alterations  can significantly alter the emotional tone and experience of the dream, helping us realise it is not real and that we able to exert control over it. Brain regions involved in meta-cognition are among the most activated in lucid dreaming.  Source: www.psypost.org

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