"Twin Peaks: The Return" (2017)

“Twin Peaks: The Return” (TP) resembles poetry. If music is good, ninety percent of listeners like it. If poetry is good, ten percent of readers like it.

TP is a painting that one befriends and revisits. The characters are alive because the action is not cut into cartoonish snippets, which would make anyone appear either an action-hero and a wit or an insufferable bore.

The characters look more real because aged. They do not look like obvious choices for a TV show. They are known to have lived and, so, are alive. 

The reason some object to the atomic bomb is because they cannot deny the number of deaths a nuclear conflict would inflict. By contrast, when non-nuclear warfare is entertained, it is easier to engage in wishful thinking and believe that the conflict will somehow resolve quickly and with few victims (at least for the favoured side). One may also believe that the more skilled will live, and the lesser skilled will die—that is, that the outcome will be fair. The bomb, by contrast, kills indiscriminately.

One may enjoy mountains without understanding how they have been formed. One may be lulled by the sound of the ocean even if one does not understand wave formation. One can enjoy without understanding. (It very well may be that our perception is just coarse enough not to generate more intricate observations than we can explain, at least collectively, as humanity. But then again, it may not be.)

There is no operationally useful definition of god, but an epistemically useful one can be gleaned from a metaphor: red blood cells as individuals, the organism they serve as god. The organism looks nothing like a red blood cell and is beyond each cell’s comprehension. The best each cell can do is to serve the organism by fulfilling the function that the cell has the urge to fulfil. TP displays an organism. It may be just beyond the capacity of the viewer to comprehend this organism and its intentions. 

TP is suffused with love for life, for people, for differences. TP takes as axiomatic the acceptance of differences, as well as the tolerance towards the diversity of individual passions. Everyone has been manufactured for a purpose.

TP’s goal is to scare one out of “reality,” to make one think, for oneself. The movie is a canvas on which the viewer can project his own anxieties, visions, hopes, and aesthetics.

TP is a reunion of friends and family. These friends and family are not TP’s characters but one’s former selves.

As one moves from place to place, and as one chooses to be a slightly different self, one inhabits different realities. Later, one can travel and revisit a past reality. But one may not recognise it. Or the reality may refuse to recognise one. All one can do is to inhabit well the roles that one has been granted or has chosen and focus on the best strategy from now on.

Not to feel diminished by others’ accomplishments, everyone ultimately creates his own reality, populates it by his own values, and inhabits it. David Lynch creates a world that the viewer is free to co-opt. In Lynch’s world, you do not have to be rich. You do not have to be smart. You do not have to be particularly beautiful or young. You do not have to be sane. But you have to be, to connect, and to dream up a possibility result, a hero, or an idea that would unite and encourage some to become heroes.

Lynch grew up in provinces. He knows how to listen to silence and how to notice. He knows what electricity sounds like, what the night sounds like, and what the evening fog sounds like. Living in the middle of nowhere makes one sense-deprived (as does meditation) and compels one to create in order not to be stifled by silence.  

TP explodes in episode 18 (E18), which comprises half of the series. The states are high: E18 manufactures reality: our reality. It is there for a purpose, which, by the end of the episode, will have been accomplished.

Interpreting TP (should one feel compelled to do so) is a metaphor for artistic and scientific endeavours. The ambiguity, the incompleteness, and the improbability of the narrative is what makes interpreting it so compelling and addictive.

Yet TP is not magical realism. Magical realism flouts rules. TP creates a new world, with a vocabulary and a consistent set of rules.

For Lynch, film is as a primarily visual and audio medium. Music is the portal between realities.

To fight evil, one must accept all parts of oneself, good and less good.

"Blade Runner 2049" (2017)

There is a kind of wit that is universally recognised as wit but is neither funny nor particularly clever. Instead, it is exact and understated. Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner is like that: remembered as substantive but stitched together from tasteful platitudes.

The world of the Blade Runner is alive and full of intensity, to which replicants and humans contribute alike. This world is saturated with its inhabitants' dreams and aspirations. It may not have turned out to be the best of all possible worlds, but at least the affairs today are not the way they used to be yesterday; at least there has been change, an attempt to design a better world---a distinctly human and humanising attempt.

The movie is not about a story. (Each character is more interesting than the story he tells.) Instead, the movie is a platform where to develop one's own thought experiments and onto which to pin one's own experiences, of solitude and intensity, accumulated by traversing and inhabiting the many laboratories of human experimentation and design.

The movie is a postcard from the civilisation, which this season is brought to you by Canada, a country with no identity and, hence, welcoming of all identities.

Memories and the instincts to act on these memories comprise consciousness. One is human if one is valued by and values other humans and contributes to their narrative. Just as a patient cured of a decease remains human, so are replicants---thoroughly overhauled instantiations of man---human, too.

Terror

(Lyric Hammersmith, 3 July 2017)

The play does not offer much in the way of acting. Instead of developing relationships with each other, the characters simply speak at the audience, rather well. What is spoken is Philosophy 101, illustrated with the same textbook examples. Should one be utilitarian? There is not much else out there. Should one ever defy the authority of man or law if one believes this authority to be malicious or mistaken? WWII has answered this question. The facts of the case at hand are curious.

The chilling finale is that forty percent of those scattered about the house think differently.

The Great Gatsby

(12 Pilgrimage Street, 2 July 2017)

Fitzgerald’s novel is moralising and trite. The play is contrived and protracted. The actors try to conjure up intensity by shouting and running around. The soundtrack bears no relationship to the period or the mood of the performance. (The dance moves presumably do.) The audience are neglected and neglectful guests, not privileged voyeurs.

The Comedy About a Bank Robbery

(The Criterion Theatre, 1 July 2017)

Shakespeare would set plays in exotic locations, which might as well not have existed. So exiled, events are less prone to being judged by the audience's parochial norms. Characters avoid being typecast by their location alone.

Today, dramatic settings tend to gravitate towards the US, which has an air of plausibility about it, in part, due to the news coverage, but mostly because of its cultural reach. For a theatregoer in London, the late-1950s Minneapolis, where the theatregoer has never visited, is likely to be more real than Birmingham, where the theatregoer might have even lived. The US history is recent enough for audiences to identify with and to see the analogies with and the repercussions for the present. Individualistic, the US is an auspicious setting for stories about individuals.

Besides, just like Facebook and science, art does not live by national boundaries. The London art scene is also the New York art scene. The leadership of the English-speaking world is unlikely to ever be challenged, not because this world is infallible, but because the entire world will have become English-speaking before any challenge can be mounted.

Much of contemporary entertainment is free or cheap, and easily goes viral. As a result, it is often designed to be sterile: politically correct and targeting the least common denominator. By charging its customers a hefty ticket fee in money and time, live theatre makes it harder for the audience to be inadvertently exposed to offence and makes it costly to admit that offence has been committed. (It is hard to admit one has paid to be offended. Instead, one has probably payed to be intellectually challenged.)

A Comedy About a Bank Robbery is a slapstick comedy designed in London, set in Canada and mostly in Minneapolis, and energised by the 1957 hit "Dynamite." The staging of action scenes is impressionist and free, instead of appearing constrained and impoverished by the limitations of live theatre.

BP Portrait Award 2017

(The National Portrait Gallery, 2 and 3 July 2017)

Some are thrust into reality. Few are comfortable in it. The substitute is nigh. In the meantime, the exhibition honours those who bother with the expensive business of traditional existence by painting them and welcoming them in the heart of London, still a centre of modern civilisation. Not all succeed at existing, for not all succeed at connecting. "Carmel," "Carmen," "The Levinsons," and "Society" do. Some connect to seek in-group approval, out-group approval, the viewer approval, or self-approval. Each crafts his own narrative and style in order to be unique and, thus, not directly comparable to anyone else. Some incite the viewer to assert a narrative, as "Carmel" does.

There is something to be said for a random allotment of awards, which lately seems to have been the case with BP portrait awards. If one accepts progressive taxation, why not "tax" a better painter more by refusing him recognition? However, while progressive taxation does not flip the after-tax income ranking, BP awards may flip the post-award recognition. Two considerations may make such flipping palatable. First, before the award has been made, a better candidate may face a slightly higher probability of winning, so expected recognition will be aligned with merit. Second, even after the prize has been awarded to an arbitrary candidate, the authors of better work will gain greater recognition from the public, journalists, and gallery owners. The committee's choice of winners is a better indicator of the prevailing politics than of artistic merit.

As population grows mobile, and alternative forms of existence flourish, Living in London, NYC, Paris, San Francisco, and Los Angeles proper will become a form of traditional existence that only the best of the best will be able to afford and for ever shorter amounts of time.

The Book of Mormon

(The Prince of Wales Theatre, 4 July 2017)

Two sets of beliefs co-exist: science and religion. Science organises knowledge. Science’s political instantiation is democracy. Religion makes statements about that which cannot be verified from experience. Religious beliefs help cope with whatever cannot be controlled. Religious beliefs also help affect individual behaviour by postulating non-verifiable threats and inducements at a sufficient distance from common experience. Religion’s political instantiation is church, an authoritarian state. A well-designed religion promotes the beliefs that favour desirable social outcomes. As any authoritarian regime, however, centralised religion is liable to be closed to change and vulnerable to being hijacked by a malevolent leader.

"The Book of Mormon" is about the power of creating and sharing one’s own narrative and about distilling dreams into a collection of principles, not a particular instantiation of these principles. A good story is not necessarily a true story but rather a story that resonates, gives hope, and leads to socially better outcomes. Of course, an untrue story should be universally recognised as a metaphor. Art and some branches of mathematics deal in such metaphors. (Good art and mathematics are true in the sense that they are internally consistent but may not be true in the sense that they need not correspond simply to observed phenomena.)

Religion designed right is art.

There is no virtue in being boring when it costs the same to be unique. Seduced by the exclusivity of the experience, theatre audiences can handle uniqueness. In the wild, the exercise of uniqueness is an effective sorting device for identifying friends and fellow travellers and is the only way to bet on finding one's niche.

“The Book of Mormon” is subtle and intense. The intensity stems from the show's occasional directness, from Cody Jamison Strand's owning his part, and from the musical format, which has been perfected over decades to fuse acting, singing, dancing, and a notch of surrealist madness into an efficient universal language. The ephemerality of the art form renders the artwork immortal.

Andy Warhol. Dark Star

(Museo Jumex, 10 June 2017)

The comfort of the abundance of commodities is the service that well-functioning economies provide. This service is not limited to the provision of physical goods. The public utilities in charge of news and entertainment, too, deal in commodities. One can pick a celebrity, pick an angle from which one would like to see this celebrity presented, and then consume the desired product in an unlimited quantity. This consumption nourishes but does not graduate to a relationship.

One may additionally seek relationships in order to become a part of a narrative and to learn to turn from a consumer into a producer, thereby opening oneself to new sources of joy.

"The Americans" (2013–2014, seasons 1–2)

The series is about sex, love, family, and vocation---in no particular order. Season 1 is structured as a perfect textbook. There is a context for each episode, so that it can be watched separately, at least in principle. But there is also a theme, a plot line, that runs through. Season 2, confident in its ability to keep the attention of the audience, is a single, extended story.

The show does not require its protagonists do stupid things to get themselves into interesting situations. Instead, the plot presents the characters with situations in which morally correct behaviour is not apparent and consumer-grade morality is inapplicable. All characters are intelligent, mature.

The show correctly captures the signature of a foreigner: someone who has had an opportunity to question and redefine the social norms and graces, someone who has reduced Americanness to its essence.

By contrast to movies, the series has no worldwide distribution. Hence, there is no pressure to win foreign markets with technological gimmicks and short snappy conversations. There is no misconception that the story must be brought down to the lowest common denominator to appeal broadly.

Episode "Only You" captures something ineffable in Gregory's desire to die in the streets of an American city. The romanticism of a ten-minute walk through the---for the occasion---San-Francisco-exuding streets of D.C. is worth a lifetime in Moscow, for him.

"La La Land" (2016)

"We are all visitors here," said Hugo H.

"Everything passes," said Maricela N.

"Now, you can't live your life like that..." said Woody A.

All passionate to be and to create and, in that, all citizens of the world that has grown out of the Republic of Letters, and that has been taking refuge anywhere they would dance to jazz and beauty is not legislated.

"La La Land" comes from that world. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling can neither sing nor dance. But the film is not about singing or dancing. It is about living, which is singing and dancing, and playing, and wagering, and daring, and hiding, and winning and losing, but never looking back for too long. Stone and Gosling can do that.

The musical does not attempt to resuscitate the Musical. Instead, "La La Land" aims at inventing the musical. It is a litmus test of the past seventy-eighty years of the civilisation. If progress has been made, the invention would differ from, and, in some ways, surpass, the original. It is a better world now indeed.

One should not mourn the world that could have been, for that is the world that has made the world that is here today possible.