Twin Peaks: the Return part 11

There’s Fire where you are going.  
David Lynch & Mark Frost 
Snoqualmie WA 2017

This section of the Return appears to have been the most popular, not only because so much of it was set in the titular town, but because it hit so many of the notes familiar to those who loved the original series and doing so with an even greater mastery than previously seen thereabouts.  From the nearly murdered school teacher, Miriam, found crawling out of the woods by some kids who likely know her from school, to Shelly foolishly rushing to lend her vehicle to her deranged daughter, facilitating Becky’s attack on her rival’s door, to the chaos Deputy Bobby Briggs tries to contain inside and outside the RR Diner following a camouflage clad child shooting his dad’s loaded pistol through the restaurant windows, Lynch & Frost move their convoluted narrative with astounding ease through abrupt tonal shifts from pathos to grotesque comedy to horror to the uncanny and beyond. 

Mike Lamas as Mike Chavez at Falcon Studios

in Big River (John Rutherford) 
Man to Men (Chi Chi LaRue) 
& Dirty Stories (Chi Chi LaRue)
Falcon Studios 
San Francisco CA 1995

Mike Lamas reached the pinnacle of mass exposure in 1995 with the release of five videos he made (under his alternate nom de porn Mike Chavez) for the San Francisco based behemoth Falcon Studios.  The best of them, Bull Pen, is not pictured here because I’ve already used those pictures in long past posts (though, if I come across better screen captures from it, I may be tempted to construct another.)  The biggest hit of the bunch was Big River, a very campy gloss on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, though the most obvious scenes from the latter (Huck and Jim alone on their island in the river) calling for explicitly erotic reinterpretation were timidly not even touched.  A few years after these pictures were made, Mike quit the business and moved to Palm Springs with a jealous hairdresser into whose business he dumped most of his hard earned savings.  It all sounds reminiscent of Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit,) except that Mike survived his personal economic exploitation and smartly returned to Pomona.

There’s no backup for this.

Twin Peaks: the Return part 11 
There’s fire where you are going.  
David Lynch & Mark Frost
Los Angeles CA 2017

As Diane’s encrypted text message predicted, Bill Hastings led them to the site where he and Ruth found the entrance to the Zone and Major Briggs’ longtime refuge; and as she probably supposed when sending it, her message likely led to his demise, losing the upper half of his head to a Woodsman.  Gordon, on the other hand got a clear view of his Blue Rose vortex in the sky and beyond it to a charred staircase with three Woodsmen staring back, and was nearly sucked in before the timely intervention of Albert.  Ruth's headless corpse was found on the site and Albert photographed her all important left arm.  Diane’s unheard response to Detective Macklay’s naive call for backup suggests that this wasn’t her first encounter with this particular subgroup of peculiar phenomena.

Later, back at the Station, Gordon and Albert allow Diane to see the photo (or perhaps an altered version) that Albert took of Ruth's arm.  In doing so, they appear to mislead Diane concerning the coordinates that Mr C has been seeking.  Diane tells them that she saw the spectral Woodsman leave the police car after killing Bill, when in truth she saw him enter it, and in plenty of time to have warned them.  Coffee and doughnuts are served and Diane is permitted to smoke as they go over the events of the day.