Author: G.D. Burns

https://esopusfreak.myportfolio.com/gary-dale-burns-1

Follow the above link to read several compositions (and an original photograph) from my unpublished chapbook titled Diamondbody Poems (2016-2019) which have made their appearance in the digital magazine version of the forthcoming Hudson Valley journal, Esopus Freak

The editors of Esopus Freak are both local and transplanted creatives to Catskill, NY who have backgrounds in art history, fine art, fiction and photography. The magazine will feature all of the above and more, so stay tuned and follow their feed on Instagram here

*DISCLAIMER* This post originated with a coincidental connection between the two series of the title of this piece in one actor: Robert Forster, who plays Sheriff Henry Truman in Twin Peaks: The Return. He appears alongside Mia Farrow and Rock Hudson in the third episode of MST3K: The Return with the disaster film Avalanche! The synchronicity of his appearance in both shows planted a little seed of an idea. The following is a narrow, tight-rope walk a few inches above the ground. The reader can fall off at any moment and still be safe. A metaphorical sprained ankle is the most harm that could come to you.

First, a few provisional, expository passages on the theory of nostalgia at work in the entertainment industry, and the possible results of its effect on the human psyche:

In 1989, Cameron Crowe penned and directed Say Anything. At the beginning of the film, Ione Skye’s character Diane Court memorably proclaims in her valedictorian speech to her fellow despondent Class of ’88 (with the exception of Lloyd Dobler of course!)

Having taken a few courses at the university this year, I have 
glimpsed our future, and all I can say is... go back.

Sure, Diane’s dad Jim is all laughs, but the line falls flat on everyone else. We might also sit in silence like those in the audience, confused and unsure about what she means. If not for a party to look forward to in the evening, we might become fidgety, uncomfortable, and mistake her advice as a suggestion to turn away from our present-facing-future, wandering back into a mire of child-like nostalgia with almost-adult bodies…Nevermind, party time!

If you were taken by her speech to “go back” inside your body, inside your psyche, there is an excellently comfy armchair with the brand name Nostalgia. A ghost of love haunts it, guarding access and relief, necessitating an homage from us to an old and well-known form. It wants a sacrifice of the two things worth more for their usefulness to our existence than anything else: time and attention. When we take a seat and sit back, this kindest haunting occurs in our thoughts and feelings: we return to better times. Ahhh…we are no longer reaching for comfort in our awkward bodies. We calm ourselves before that something-scary-and-new and like a late-night visit in a kitchen of worry, we nurse from a plastic teat of childhood milk.

Is this what she meant by going back? As Say Anything moves along, quick relief comes from “go back” when Diane Court’s speech passes and the narrative brings us to the party. However, throughout the party that night Lili Taylor’s character Corey Flood is strumming her sad and angry songs about the toxic dude Joe who “rapped” before Diane’s speech (and who later gives Lloyd woefully terrible and misogynistic advice). Corey states she is going to play all 65 songs of pain that she wrote about Joe, but not to go back and stay. She goes back to go through her grief and emerge she-knows-not-who (this is a Jungian reading, to be sure). She faces Joe when he approaches her alone in a side room and though scared of what comes next, she’s able to walk away from his sap-trap. Most of us forget Corey’s living example in word and song of Diane’s speech. We just remember that image of John Cusack holding up that boom box playing Peter Gabriel.

[To acknowledge my composite image of film and television above] Skye’s bit of dialogue as Diane is just as metaphorical as Matthew Fox’s character Jack Shepard from ABC’s LOST (2004-2010) when he crazily screams to Kate at the end of Season 3 that “We have to go back!” How is this different from an escape into nostalgic feeling and an avoidance of our present-facing-future? We can just as well lose the sense of ourselves at the gates of the future as in the ruins of the past. Whether we’re graduating from high school with unrealistic ideas about college and careers, or hopping planes day after day at the end of our rope waiting for the miracle to come, we can (if we’re lucky) be stopped by these experiences which we stumble over and have no place for in our lives. The lack of place, which is what is common in Diane’s speech and Jack’s desperation, is the arresting feeling that can imprison us in our wish for indulgent rests in Nostalgia’s armchair. Go back, but go back to go through – remember Corey’s songs, not “In Your Eyes.”

While the future is unwritten, LOST is exceptional in that it agitates the heart and the mind to turn reflexively away from the screen and to look in on our own lives (but perhaps not for every viewer, as its nostalgia holds true with new podcasts popping up devoted to re-watches and analyses even after close to a decade since its final episode). Like Jack, we can’t return to the same place to begin something new – we have to undergo some kind of journey. There is no new birth in nostalgia itself, as its inertia can keep one fixed like a mirage seeming to offer a familiar destination. Speaking to the human psyche as an individual, albeit a social individual, what could actually benefit one is a return to the paths and places-not-yet-set where we felt uncomfortable, where our nostalgia did not hold us in a Stockholm syndrome-like hug. It is possible to grow where time and attention are available to us without the crippling discomfort of the unknown. This is how we can find footing, and begin to progress beyond the state of the fool.

LET US NOW SLOW our narrative of the utilization of nostalgia and our challenge against it by focusing on two recent but very different shows that have promised to “take us back,” both using the subtitle or tag line “The Return”: Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and Twin Peaks. The high contrast between these two television shows in form and in content is intentional, and can illustrate a number of things to us as audience members of streaming television in the early 21^st century. Initial considerations are purely contextual:

• Twin Peaks was brought back by Lynch and Frost following conversations in August 2012 between them and later in 2014 with exec Gary Levine, who was at ABC during the show’s original run, resulting in a drafting and developing of another season for Showtime; MST3K’s original creator Joel Hodgson secured funding for their return with a Kickstarter campaign (the most successful to-date for a TV/Film production at $5.7 million) after reacquiring the rights to the show with the help of Shout! Factory.
• Twin Peaks was released part-by-part in 18 weekly installments (with occasional breaks) by Showtime through multiple streaming services just as the first two seasons were classically aired on ABC; MST3K was dumped as a fully-watchable season on Netflix, as the streaming service and original content provider does so with all of their new shows.
• Lastly, just beyond the horizon of the contextual, Twin Peaks has been a highly influential sci-fi/mystery/horror show to the writers and producers of many subsequent productions, such as The X-Files, LOST, and scores of others; MST3K has had a different kind of cult influence – as a spoof on sci-fi and a riffing comedy that mocks and lampoons (with endearment) “the worst films ever made.” Indeed, Hodgson and Lynch/Frost couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, at least on conceptual and demonstrative grounds, as creators in the medium of television.

Despite these contrasts, both shows inspired and fed strong fan bases. Through the rallying of their support, each show was revived during their original runs to continue more episodes – in the case of MST3K on another network (the SciFi [now SyFy] channel) and for Twin Peaks a final number of episodes added to their second season on ABC. In this way, the idea that each are now “returning” is a wondrously nostalgic trick. These shows were brought back, and now it is happening again – the exact tagline of Twin Peaks: The Return. Each are returning with the creator’s own awareness that they are returning with all the accompanying fandom expectations and comparisons to their “original” forms. Each show navigates these treacherous waters in their own way with callbacks and references, continuations of plot threads, and bringing back characters who have disappeared long ago. In the case of Twin Peaks: The Return, even characters who have long since died (David Bowie’s Phillip Jeffries, Frank Silva’s BOB, Don S. Davis’s Major Briggs, and a few others) somehow make an appearance. Television is a dark magic.

There’s nothing really new in what I have to write here. The phenomenon of returns has fast become a trend in television in this second decade of the 21st-century and does not seem to be slowing down. It follows the same commercial trend of film sequels and re-boots that are regularly green lit in Hollywood. What differentiates both MST3K and Twin Peaks in their format is that each of these returns are intentionally limited in their release and their short burn is a trademark of how nostalgia, despite being so useful to gain our time and attention once more, is unsustainable over long periods. MST3K has quasi-challenged this statement with their second (shorter) return season called “The Gauntlet,” marking the 30th anniversary of the show’s debut on Thanksgiving Day in Minneapolis in 1988 – but David Lynch and Mark Frost have no intention of continuing Twin Peaks with another season. The fan base for the show has only a reading left for them of Frost’s publication Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier written from the perspective of the return season character Agent Tammy Preston. While this writer thinks it is a bookend worth checking out, some fans feel that this book and Frost’s previous The Secret History of Twin Peaks are non-canonical works from the series co-creator, you know, the-one-who-is-not-David Lynch.

LET US ADMIT that the demand to produce continual, original content, updated like software, is no guarantee of a quality experience because of re-investment in our nostalgic memories. Both return seasons are their own new shows, but viewers undoubtedly draw on their feelings and impressions of a past nostalgic experience with their predecessors – and compare. Audiences are mixed in their reactions but nonetheless these productions guarantee spent time and attention (and money earned). On the other side of the screen, the actors who are paid to be a part of the return can be less than enthusiastic to re-inhabit their past roles.

ANOTHER CASE in point, the two return seasons of The X-Files. Each sorely lacked the depth and vision of the original series, and are unarguably weak in their conception and demonstration of an earlier millennial (the time, not the generation) style and flavor. Interestingly, David Duchovny’s revival as Denise in Twin Peaks: The Return is full of life, but as Mulder he is a kind of Casper the Friendly Ghost – there-but-not-there – and the dramatic weight falls on Gillian Anderson and the supporting cast to carry any of what little coherence the writing has for them. Anderson’s character arc as Scully has been the focus of the show since the last few seasons (and arguably the films as well) and in the case of their return seasons, has portrayed Scully with care, maturity and skill. Unfortunately, Duchovny overburdens and isolates her dramatic force much too often with lethargic deliveries and detached affect. Combined with the weak writing, it’s a slough to get through. SPOILER ALERT not SPOILER ALERT: The Cigarette Smoking Man is still trying to pull all the strings and it’s just about as interesting as watching people recycle their glass and cans at a grocery store.

When it comes to MST3K‘s return, Joel Hodgson and his team of writers have the benefit of new characters and a new scenario that mirrors the first incarnation and plays with strange combinations and guest stars. It’s moderately amusing and there are some quality riffs and jokes. Twin Peaks however must (and I believe, does) deliver the relish of newness with the trick of a return, gifting us memorable new characters and in some cases the wondrous evolution of our old favorites. Lynch and Frost have been sensitive and highly aware of the expectations of the fan base’s secret wishes, and the use of the alternate-Coop and “Dougie” can be seen as the very reflection of the frustration to get back the Agent Cooper they left in a different kind of armchair at the Black Lodge. Like the finale of LOST, it has divided fans new and old – but much like anything truly worthy of our time and attention, we are left on the other side of the screen with the question “why?” – which we can choose to pursue, or not…

This writer feels he must pull back as far as he can and see the whole project of Twin Peaks: The Return in the round as a journey through the nostalgia of its own fandom, the mythology of the original show, as well as Lynch’s entire on-screen canon. The utilization of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as being integral to the substance of the story arch of The Return in particular is a brilliant move and so inimical to the desire for us to sit down in our armchair – almost as if like William Castle, Lynch and Frost have placed an electric buzzer there to go off whenever we find ourselves too comfortable in our assumptions about what is happening and how things are going to unfold with our beloved characters. In this, there’s a lesson for us to internalize, and for Hollywood and the streaming giants of Hulu, Amazon and Netflix to consider when they soon gift us with another project that promises to take us back.

Bubbles are beautiful. They reflect light, yet you can see through them. They are colorful and also translucent. They are created and contained by the pressure of the air and maintained by the strength of the structure of itself. The physical science of the bubble is that “it is the shape that minimizes ​the surface area of the structure, which makes it the shape that requires the least energy to achieve.” Scientifically, its beauty lies in the economy of its geometry. And then, it pops as fast as it was made and ceases to exist.

Once that structure *pops* one can always make a new bubble with soap, water, and a ring which gives you enough time to blow or pull some air through. The sight of a sphere or form floating, contained, yet free and angelic in its lightness, speaks to us from childhood and into adulthood as somehow connected to our own lives – as if we were also spherical in our being somehow. Maybe we see a reflection of the blue marble we live upon, the eyes in our heads, perhaps, in the very conception of ourselves in the sphere of the womb.

The above frame grab from Honey We Shrunk Ourselves (1997, Dir. Dean Cundey) presents an entirely different take on the bubble – that within the bubble is a horrifying containment. If one were to imagine sharing a single bubble with another being, you’d probably feel like the characters from that unfortunate straight-to-video film. You’d be sure that your existence together would last so briefly before the inevitable pop. You’d live in fear of each other’s movements, of each other’s voices, of each other’s slightest miscalculations, knowing that the structure that contains you both cannot by its very nature last long. You’d be hoping beyond hope that by the hand of Providence (forgive me this anachronism) your lives would be spared and you’d never have to share another moment like that with someone again. The film was a comedy but the situation isn’t funny.

This prolonged parable about you-and-the-bubble-from-the-outside being so dissimilar from us-and-the-bubble-from-the-inside is an attempt to visualize more completely an observation about differing world-views between oneself and others. While we can admire, lawfully explain, or observe other world-views, we don’t share our own Weltanschauung (Ger. “overall philosophy of life or worldview”) without running the risk of popping theirs. When we are fast becoming adults, first beginning to form a worldview, the risk and hazard that comes with searching for one is a necessity for our lives and its growth. We first seek in others what we wish for ourselves, usually by imitation. This feeds a strange void of dialogue between generations, political affiliations, religious dogmas, and ways of living because of the risk of difference when imitation ends and our own worldview develops. Regardless, we require challenges to keep from falling back into the hypnotic sleep which seems to blanket the planet, to become a little more awake and conscious of our behaviors and actions, and to maintain our worldview when we find ourselves in it. When it becomes our world, we define ourselves by it and with the others who inhabit it.

When we do share the same worldview with someone else, when we find ourselves in the bubble we’ve been admiring and seeking to experience, an alarming expectation arises: to continue to have consistent and reliable behaviors and reactions in order to keep one’s new bubble from popping. The tension which maintains the surface area of a shared worldview is also a tension which maintains the limits of its horizon. You can’t challenge the horizon – you accept its limitations, or, *pop* – it disappears. It becomes better to respond in-kind and make certain to yourself and to others which side of the bubble you’re on. Otherwise, argument, dissent, division – *pop*.

This parable is much too simplified and falls far short of the kind of synthesis of philosophical history/history of ideas which Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres volumes addresses (one review at Huenemanniac). This brief parable-essay is trying to reach for something that keeps eluding this mind when thoughts are stretched over a topic or issue. My concern (to be transparent) is with the incompatibility of differing world-views as well as the difficulty of sharing a worldview with another. As a nation, it does not seem to me to be true that the facts of an event or person are anchored in the material knowns of the world. The laws without are not the laws within – that takes an extra step, a kind of world-maintenance. We can’t make a beautiful and good worldview and expect that once a person inhabits it they will do everything they can to maintain it. We are constantly challenging our horizons. Look at the history of the assembly of the Space Station or the recently completed solo trek across Antarctica by Colin O’Brady. Bubbles pop and new ones are formed – we ought to take comfort in this instead of fearing the inevitable loss of a structure that is only formed because it “requires the least energy to achieve.” A worldview that demands to be maintained neglects the fact that there are other bubbles, and other worlds, each with their singular, unknown interiors. Some as big as a globe or as numerous as sea foam.

This piece of writing pops because it also tries to make a bubble, to encapsulate some kind of idea or opinion about Weltanschauung, using the metaphor of bubbles to represent a person’s or a collective people’s conception of “worldview.” It tries to be the stroller in Grandville’s “Ring of Saturn” (1844), bridging one world to the next and the next. It gives the impression of worldview as fragile when they are in fact much stronger and are filled with much more than air. The causes and concerns that are shared in a worldview are not to be taken lightly. History proves this to be true – people battle or judge, die or execute, over a worldview…but it seems that since we live in a period that some call post-historical or post-truth, that we ought not to fear popping more of our world-views. Taken further, we could be our own worldview, with no need to *pop*.