Rewatching “Twin Peaks: The Return”, and it feels like a show about the collapse of any sense of connection or continuity in contemporary American life.

This is true even in the show’s structure: “Twin Peaks” is no longer an ensemble, but a series of disconnected vignettes.


This is baked into the nature of the show. “Twin Peaks” aired on ABC. It dominated the cultural conversation. It was a phenomenon, a shared experience.

“The Return” aired on Showtime, on cable. It was arguably most successful on streaming. It felt like a show watched alone.

Thinking about how Michael Mann’s transition to digital reflected his evolving thematic interests.

Here, two similar types of shot. In “Heat”, on film, the city blurs into a sea of lights in the background. In “Miami Vice”, on digital, objects miles away remain clearly defined.


“Heat” is a pivot point for Mann.

It feels like the last time characters like Hanna or McCauley could truly see one another, when background and foreground could be delineated.

It was the last moment that signal and noise could be distinguished from one another.

This is it. I’m always fascinated by people who are like “obviously, the solution was more episodes or a longer season.”

Because, to anybody paying any attention (or an ounce of understanding of the industry) that was always *fundamentally* impossible.

https://twitter.com/westerosies/status/1822961078004805858

There were obviously some (very) dumb narrative choices in the final stretch of “Game of Thrones.”

But the truth is that the reality of television production meant that the production team were given the impossible task of ending a story the author himself couldn’t end.

The “Downey as Doom” casting choice reminds me of Marvel’s “Secret Empire”, the event that revealed Captain America was fascist strongman who led a bunch of not-quite-Nazis.

It was a great idea, particularly for the Trump era. “Here’s your nostalgic fantasy, turned rotten.” The reveal that this blonde-haired, blue-eyed icon of forties American can-do attitude was secretly an authoritarian strongman had really great potential as a moment of introspection for the comics and the country.

Downey as Doom has the same potential. Nostalgia as villain.

The direct market killed mainstream American superhero comics, both economically and culturally.

When they stopped being things that kids could - and would want - to pick up with their pocket money at the corner store, they were doomed.

https://twitter.com/comicbookaddt/status/1815152326732288026

Very simply, it is impossible to just casually get into comics.

You have to seek them out. You have to research them. You have to find a specific kind of store that stocks them. And they are very rarely designed to be accessible to new readers.

If you want to understand why so much modern franchise media sucks, it’s because this sort of attitude is absurdly common among fans, arguing that putting a character under pressure - you know, “creating drama” - is somehow “abusive” to the actor and “disrespectful” to the fans.

It is so condescending to performers - assuming actors have the same difficulty distinguishing reality and fantasy that seemingly large sections of fandom do.

Also just not understanding how storytelling/production works. Those episodes gave Gatwa time to finish “Sex Education.”

Really fascinating to see a lot of superhero fans who hate Alan Moore holding up Grant Morrison as a creator who writes with “shame, malice or false pretence.”

(I love Morrison, to be clear.)

Have you not read any of their work from the past decade and change? Since around 2011, there’s been a really profound sadness and disillusionment to Morrison’s mainstream superhero work, which is often about the limits that exist within the framework of corporate comics.

It’s really not subtle.

https://twitter.com/darren_mooney/status/1163412517605040129

Broke: "Oppenheimer's politics will be 'wrong' viewed through the lens of Twitter discourse."

Woke: "'Oppenheimer' is likely about how guilty Christopher Nolan feels for reshaping pop culture with the 'Dark Knight' trilogy and studios taking exactly the wrong lessons from it." I don't know if it will be, but Nolan's movies are often *about* his own work. Often specifically the morality of it.

Whether that's the morality of tricking the audience into catharsis ("Inception") or abandoning your family to make an epic adventure ("Interstellar").

It'll be "The Marvels" before we have any real sense of how/if "superhero fatigue" is progressing.

"Guardians", "Spider-Verse" and "The Flash" are exceptional cases in ways that will likely boost their box office. "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" are exceptional in the opposite way.

https://twitter.com/ScottMendelson/status/1655621552455680000

"Guardians" is a capper to a beloved trilogy. "Spider-Verse" is, as @ScottMendelson has argued, primed to be a breakout sequel starring Spider-Man. "The Flash" has two Batmen in it.

Whereas "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" would be tough sells to general audiences at "peak superhero."

I adore Jim Starlin's cosmic comics. I think they are massively under-appreciated as part of the evolution of seventies Marvel, and belong alongside the work of Miller or Claremont or Simonson.

Adam Warlock is one of the great Marvel characters, just like Thanos was. The Adam Warlock who appears in "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" is very different from the character who appears in the comics.

But, you know what? So was the version of Thanos who appeared in "Infinity War" and "Endgame", and people seemed fine with that.

#NowWatching "The Long Good Friday"

"The Long Good Friday" remains one of the best gangster films ever made. Even just in terms of pure filmmaking, it's a ruthlessly efficient piece of work with a powerhouse central performance from Bob Hoskins. "The Long Good Friday" is also one of the great snapshots of the early Thatcher era, a vision of Britain on the cusp of the eighties, caught between its past and future.

Enchanted by visions of bringing American capitalism in Europe, but haunted by the legacy of its empire.

This week at @EscapistMag, I wrote about the big announcements from Marvel at #SDCC.

As the larger structure of the "Multiverse Saga" comes into focus, we can clearly see its antagonists.

But, who exactly are supposed to be the heroes of this epic?

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul… The "Infinity Saga" had a clear structure.

Each phase had standalone projects, dovetailing into a crossover at the end of the phase, with the scale escalating each time.

Each "Infinity Saga" phase had a movie led by Captain America, Iron Man and Thor.

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul…

Since the big Marvel Studios announcements yesterday, I’ve been thinking about a very niche and very nerdy thing that bothers me about the MCU compared to the comics from which it is drawing.

Head’s up, it is very nerdy and very niche, but it still bugs me just a little bit. So, obviously the movies theoretically draw from across the length and breadth of the source comics.

However, in reality, they are largely driven by the mainstream continuity since around 2005.

That’s where you get events like “Civil War”, “Secret Invasion”, “Dark Reign”, etc.

I feel like nobody has really commented on the fact that Warner Bros. marked the streaming release of a fairly major film with an overt hit piece on that film that was very clearly sourced within the studio.

And not the sort of “gossip” pieces you saw with “Fant4stic”, etc. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff, to be clear. It’s why that story was timed to drop when it did - to coincide with the film’s availability for digital purchase.

It’s a remarkable piece of messaging *from* (not *about*, but *from*) a major studio about one of their own films.

I empathize with this, truly.

But given that “Prey” is easily the best franchise film Disney have produced this year, unless you consider “Pixar” to be a franchise, and given that so few theatrical franchise films allow just basic storytelling, it’s maybe not the worst thing.

https://twitter.com/_ChristopherM/status/1550363400802377728

Like, a theatrical “Predator” movie probably has to look like “The Predator”, in that it has to serve larger long-term franchising goals more than just being a film.

Similarly, “Alien: Covenant” is what a theatrical “Alien” film has to look like, serving those same demands.

#NowWatching “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” “The Wrath of Khan” is one of those great movies that has somewhat been flattened in the memory of it. It’s brilliant, and epic, and propulsive.

But it is also elegiac and mournful, the story of old men who lead the young to slaughter while chasing phantoms of glories long past.

I actually quite like that there are certain recurring settings/characters in #DoctorWho largely tied to a particular version of the show.

"Peladon" (and arguably the "... Space" stories) for the Third Doctor, Sil for the Sixth Doctor, "the Other" for the Seventh and so on.

https://twitter.com/saintwalker98/status/1549604658234138624

In the Moffat era, you have characters like the Paternoster Gang and Rivier Song largely tied to the Eleventh Doctor.

In the Chibnall era, you obviously have the whole "Timeless Child" mythology. All of which, within the show, remains largely tied to a particular era.

We have reached the point in the "Top Gun" discourse where the "Top Gun" discourse consists of debates over whether there should be "Top Gun" discourse. To be fair, "Maverick" gets away with what it does by (a.) being less jingoistic than "Top Gun" and (b.) being more open in its jingoism than most of its competitors.

You go into "Maverick" knowing you're getting a recruitment film. That's not true of "Captain Marvel", say.

This week, I discuss at @EscapistMag about how #StrangeNewWorlds demonstrates the limits of allegory.

In its eagerness to retreat to the nostalgia of nineties "Star Trek", "Strange New World" eagerly shoves Spock back in the celluloid closet.

escapistmagazine.com/star-trek-stra… This week's episode of #StrangeNewWorlds is about how gender non-conforming individuals lie about their identities to trick people.

And the humanitarian crisis at the border is a ruse orchestrated by criminal gangs to infiltrate/invade.

It's not good.

escapistmagazine.com/star-trek-stra…

An interesting aspect of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise compared to other big franchises is that it's not really about fighting advancing impersonal technology, which is even there in "Top Gun: Maverick."

It's very literally an old-school action hero fighting postmodernism.

https://twitter.com/AceyMainman/status/1528124222190460928

Obviously that theme is the subtext of the modern "James Bond" franchise, but it's couched metaphors about drone warfare that makes Bond outdated - until he's not!

I love that the later "Mission: Impossible" movies are like, "Ethan is fighting the very idea of moral ambiguity."

I am quite enjoying Christopher Cantwell and Cafu’s “Iron Man” run, in large part because it feels like a very clever exploration of what superheroes should be, as fictional archetypes.

(Iron Man #1.) There’s a sense that this version of Tony Stark is quite exhausted by the sort of genre shifts that have taken root in American comics in the past few decades, where these characters are effectively demi-gods, and so wants to get back to basics.

(Iron Man #1.)