What is Holla Forums's opinion of liberals' latest pop fiction masterpiece?

I didn't even know there was a series adapted from the novel. Wasn't an arthouse film adaptation produced in the '70s already or something?

It doesn't deserve any, Twin Peaks S03 is basically Lynch who has gotten too old to create anything that isn't an awkward imitation of what he already did before. It had no sense of consistency, balance or cohesion.

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Really it sounds like both are worse.

Yhea that is because Handmaid's Tale views theocrats as monsters without looking how capitalists would act in the same situation.

Twin Peaks has always been Lynch-lite for people who dont get Lynch

I don't agree tbh, and I say this as a big fan of Inland Empire which is often considered his "toughest". Twin Peaks S01 struck a perfect balance between awkward soap opera drama, actually engaging crime mystery and uncomfortable surreal undertones — it had a unique atmosphere. Twin Peaks S03 is a big fat mess that doesn't know if it's a fairly conventional surnatural series or a dumbed-down version of his more surrealist-inspired films — it went absolutely nowhere and provided very little of cinematographic or narrative value.

S3 has been the best season in television in years.

Season 3 was Kino with Kapital

I keep mistaking this for that Ursula K. LeGuin thing.

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Run-of-the-mill economically alienated 'liberal' moralism.

Haven't watched it yet. Has anyone here read the book?

The liberal rhetoric around it about how it relates to the "Age of Trump" is cringy as fuck, and the story is basically a liberals wet dream about how they perceive the world going, as if liberalism is this great system of affairs that is being opposed from all sides and is under the threat of conservative tyranny. Its not even all that original, its not like this theme hasn't been explored before.

absolutely baka desu

It was written during the Reagan era, when Christianity in America really took a lock down to any counter culture.

This was a product of its time, a parody in some ways, a criticism of Christianity's role of women in another.

Atwood just asked, how far would these people be willing to enforce their ideology in a hypothetical future where they got everything they wanted. And the end result would be women being treated more like machines for insemination then people. Concubines.

It's hard to put your mind in the Reaganite and Thatcher world, but this strong return to traditional values isn't farfetched. I mean christ look at ISIS.

Why are you talking shit about Hate?

youtube.com/watch?v=hGaxuWR4W_Y

It's a dystopia, meaning it's the inverse of a utopia. Marxists are against utopian thinking because it doesn't explain WHY society would change from a historical materialist perspective. The same goes for Handmaid's Tale. The whole scenario is never justified from a materialist POV.

Twin Peaks is fascist/reactionary propaganda.

The book is honestly a horrifying read. A women trying to escape a future theological state of basically Christian sharia law. There was a coup, and America becomes "Gilead". As her and her husband and son try to flea legally to Canada, she gets captured, while her family escapes to Canada without her as she's dragged into a van.

She goes to a re education camp where she's taught her womb is a gift from god in a time where population is dwindling. She's brainwashed into becoming a tool, and hooked up with a partner who already has a spouse. And it goes into detail about them having loveless disgusting sex, and this man wants to love her, but she's confused about whether or not she should. She's losing grasp on the family she already had. In exchange for basically being able to give this man a new family, since his wife is sterile Children of Men style.

She becomes a "Hand Maiden". In other words, a birth machine. It's a constant struggle between her trying to remember her family and her son, and trying to focus that attention on her new son. And probably new son. It ends on an ambiguous note of perhaps she escaped to Canada by others, a lesbian she hooked up, but it could be a ploy to return her into the re-education camp. It's far fetched. But again, it's already happening in history. ISIS is a prime example.

Perhaps I'm a pussy, but reading it was truly hard. As for the show, I don't know. All I know is the source material, Atwood's novel. I don't know why it gets so much slack.It's an effective horror novel.

Dunno if I'd go that far, it's hardly kind to small town Americana

Holla Forumstier reasoning, don't mix art and politics. If I set a certain tone in my works and make the character do certain thing it doesn't mean that I agree. kys

Its only "criticism" of small town Americana is that it is being corrupted and ruined by evil spirits. Said evil spirits are represented as drug dealers and homeless guys.

TAKE THAT FLAG OFF.

boring af

Atwood is a Canadian neocon.

It was written in the Reagan/Thatcher Era when you couldn't escape from accusations of being commie, satanist, anti christian, and Christianity had a dominance on culture. You couldn't escape from Televangelists. All progress made in the past decades was declining, unionization was downhill.

twood wrote the novel as a response, perhaps first as parody, like Oryx and Crick. Then as speculative fiction on just would would it be like if these people actually had control.

And it's prophetic in the sense of radical Islam employing similar standards.

Hardly, half the people in town are either fucking around, are borderline sociopathic out of boredom, are in other people's business, are trying to rob each other and destroy the wetlands… That's without the involvement of Bob at all

Death of the author, her political views don't matter in subject to her work.

I'm not talking about the television show. I'm talking about the book and the context it took place in.

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I'm talking about S3. Everything is portrayed as the black lodge influence.

That is liberal postmodern bullshit.

Where did I say anything about censorship? I watched the whole of Twin Peaks S3 and mostly enjoyed it. Doesn't change the fact that it's fascist bullshit.

Oh well I haven't watched that… I watched Twin Peaks with my ex. ;_;

And this is your answer to any idea you don't like.

Just say you don't want to engage in the material and provide your opinion besides "POST MODERNISM LIBERAL I HATE THEM I HAATE THEM" and move on. Death of the author isn't even that big of a god damn deal

This is so stupid. This is so fucking stupid and shows how little you understand about art.
Lynch use the americana as a way to deliver a comfy and familiar tone, then he drops all your expectations invading what you percive as comfy and familiar by putting elements like bob, the black lodge and fucking psychos.
There nothing reactionary with it. Propaganda needs a message and an agenda, not all movies have one, lynch especially most of the time doesn't have both

In fact a good example of Death of the Author is The Shining. The movie rules and has nothing to do with the novel. The novel sucks cock. Disregarding the source material and interpreting it differently creates new ways to look at fiction. Instead of a ghost story where garden hedges turn alive, it's about psychosis when locked in a spacious hotel for so long.

One is interesting one is not.

And HMT is rife with potential in this regard. Perhaps not the television show, but it's something challenging to the public enough for various interpretations. Her politics have nothing to do with what could be done to the source material.

Practically every story has a political context fam. Some are more blatant but usually it's there (other than, sometimes, straight romances or dramas but even then)

Lynch was a Bernie supporter. I know that doesn't mean much, but I doubt he was going for reactionary propaganda.

After all Dale, for all his white knight sensibilities, tries to fix everything, but ends up fucking up in the worst possible way.

I haven't seen S3 so I can't comment much but as a general rule, everything is political to a greater or lesser extent

Straight from the fucking mouth of RedKahina

I would have to agree. Season 3 felt to me to be all about decline. Twin Peaks classic was about a small town slowly devolving. Twin Peaks Season 3 is about where that devolution has taken complete hold.

Handmaid's Tale is dystopian bs and the author is a shitty Canadian conservative. Two true statements that belong together.

Anyone who tells you their movie doesn't have a message is a fucking liar. And the message of Twin Peaks is purely reactionary.

Lynch has always openly flirted with fascism. Look at his collaboration with Marilyn Manson. They are birds of a feather.

Who? Refute my arguments you retard.

Again, death of the author. Her politics don't matter.

And yet you probably think you're living in a suffering world full of suffering people. Dystopian is what you make of it. You also have to understand that the book wasn't meant to be highly realistic. It's just shining light on what American and Thatcherite conservative rhetoric really means deep down.

Nigga are serious rn? You got me, here's your (you) dumbshit

You have to go back

Lemmy collected nazi paraphanalia but was an anarchist. If anyone's a liberal here it's you.

God damn bringing Marilyn Manson into this

Kys.
You are fucking joking right?
How's this any different from a Holla Forumsyp saying that putting a girl in star wars is sjw propaganda?

You're triggered about a story where spirits travel through a web of electricity.

Please consider self harm.

LITTLE

IT'S A FUCKING FANTASY TELEVISION SHOW

The cool thing now is how everything has to be about politics in our own reality and a story can't just be it's own thing, you know, fiction

Give me a popular story and I'll tell you what political context it has (unless I haven't seen it)

The X-Files is reactionary by blaming all the problems on aliens (note: codword for non whites)

Political context is another thing and often is not even voluntary.

Pic related then

I was joking about the x files

Holy shit dude. Nothing in the new season retconned the old one. How can you even say anything for sure about the black lodge when it's the most surreal aspect to a super surrealist show.

It's been really cool honestly.

For once stalinstache is the only correct one. I can't stand leftypol when it comes to art.

There are some pretty huge cultural differences between the Middle East and the US. The most extreme Christian religious groups in the US amount to groups like Westbro Baptist Church and people like Pastor Anderson. That sort of religious conservatism is mainstream in most of the Middle East, and it is ISIS that is the fringe extreme.

I just wanted an excuse to post that pic.

I didn't say it was always intentional but regardless the work reflects the author's own preconceptions about the world

wow you clowned me dog cmon

Oh shit sorry user

just stop, you pasta-loving sperg

An obvious psyop.

Just stfu.

The Reagan era raises more problems like the Warsaw Pact still existing and why they wouldn't go Red Dawn on Gilad, and why isn't Gilad facing WWIII from western Europe sending all its forces to liberate the USA before the Warsaw Pact does?

Tell me, what do you think the message is? Do you realize that Mark Frost is a lefty?

user, you're being a moron.

Literally the entirety of Lynch's ourvere (except maybe Dune and The Elephant Man) is about how beneath the surface of bourgeois middle class America is a rotten, disgusting core. Go fucking watch Blue Velvet again. Also, Eraserhead is LITERALLY about social relations under capitalism.

Was listening about it on NPR, seemed interesting, but when the creators started talking about how all forms of resistance should be utilized my hopes for it were dashed when they listed forms of peaceful objection that really only serves the establishment. "Staunch feminists" my ass, just liberal fucks.

wow you fucking IDIOT. jesus christ i don't even know where to begin.

you either have never seen a lynch project outside of twin peaks or you are literally incapable of looking at art critically outside of "cops are good guys so its fascist lel." the entire basic premise of twin peaks, and this isn't even where it gets interesting, the BASIC FUCKING THEME of the show, and really this applies to several lynch films, isn't that "good small-town america gets corrupted by "evil spirits and drug dealers," it's that this "nice" small town culture CAN'T EXIST without this perverse underside of incestual rape and exploitation.

lynch's goal has never been to romanticize 50's-era family narratives, it's actually always been the opposite: to expose these narratives as fantasies, which function to mask the fact that "nice towns," a la twin peaks, always conceal this horror beneath the surface. i mean for christ's sake, the villain gets revealed to be the perfectly normal-appearing suburban father type, and NOT the "drug dealers" you're so concerned about defending. how much easier could he have made it for you?

oh my god, fuck off. would you really like for every movie to have some big focus on a critique of capitalism so that they meet your not-reactionary criteria? how boring could one man's taste be?

Literally this. Fantasy and desire, both in the Lacanian sense, actually make up a very big portion of what Lynch deals with in his work.

Highly recommend people (especially that user) read The Impossible David Lynch by Todd McGowan. It examines Lynch's work through the lens of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Zizek, etc. It's even Zizek-approved (he has a blurb on the back cover). If you still think Lynch is reactionary after reading it then you're a buffoon.

I'd post the pdf, but it's too big of a file.

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This motherfucking poster really gets Lynch. Fucking nice.

Never really been convinced of this. Not like it isn't his most open to interpretation work though.

If we lived in a world where Islamic countries were the first world. Europe and America were the third world and instead of ISIS we had Christian extremists terrorists. Would Tankies support the Christian Extremists against imperialism?

Maddy is the best girl.
After audrey and shelly.
there shouldn't be anymore twin peaks imho, the only thing I regret about this season is the absence of interaction between Dale and his old friends and audrey. Fuck this season even made canon all the stuff between audrey and billy

I agree but I also never imagined this new season would have ended up as good as it did.
Actually, I'm pretty convinced that Billy Zane's seed didn't take and that Richard was conceived from Bad Cooper raping comatose Audrey in the hospital.

Oh and I completely agree. Maddie was an angel.

lol why did it post maddie again

I haven’t watched the movie but from what I read in this thread I support the New government. In times of crisis authoritarian measures which are anti-liberty are needed.

Fucking this. When it was annunced I was fucking annoied being a long time twin peaks fan. I avoided all the news and articles about the new twin peaks, and I didn't even watched the premier. When the season ended I torrented all the 18 part expecting lynch to sellout, Holy shit was I wrong.
Also it was confirmed that richard is bad cooper son when bad coop trick him into being electrocuted and calls him "son". Audrey talk about billy during her scenes with the neckless guys
Where the fuck is audrey btw?
Fucking smoking babies

The new goverment (Gilead) are run by complete idiots. They picked a fight with the USA that leads to a civil-war that went nuclear (image if the breakup of the Warsaw Pact led to a full on nuclear exchange between Warsaw Pact members). Despite fighting a nuclear civil-war they waste manpower hunting down insurgents with human spies with not even WWII era surveillance equipment. With low birth rates they don't utilize bunkers, space station or test tube babies.

I fucking wish I knew. Her parts were great though. I loved that pseudo midget guy.

My dude then you completely missed Lynch completely cucking the Showtime executives. When they didn't approve his budget as well as COMPLETE control over the project he just walked the fuck away. Que gigantic negative fan reaction ending with Showtime caving. This is how a director who has been fucked in the ass by the industry several times handles shit in his old age.

Fucking scam

Serious question: Who was best girl?

Holy shit. More directors should have the balls to do this. I don't think show time will allow anyone to have complete control over their projects now, they basically went in loss with the return. it's not like they even give two fuck about it tho, the could pay for 5 more season of twin peaks only with what they made with the maywheater vs mcgregor fight. Lynch did good, I didn't want to see another season of the frost show.

kek I've heard. He's not all bad though I think.

My friend who got me into Lynch tells me the Twin Peaks book he wrote was actually surprisingly good. And going by what I've seen of him talk about in interviews and twitter etc it seems like Naomi Watts' character, or at least that rant about "the 1%" was a Frost idea.

I heard that lynch didn't even read his book. lel.
I like angry naomi, proud to be frosted this time around

Eh Lynch is too busy making tables and watching car repair shows to care about Twin Peaks post-production I bet. You should see how Lynch responds whenever people ask him about TP now.

Well he always acted like that. Fuck my edition on dvd doesn't even have chapters selecting and has this nice red harring inside

Harem ending is obviously the best choice but if it comes down to it, Hyun-Ae. I want to take her to Earth and show her the modern world

Well obviously Atwood wasn't writing a thriller. It's pointing out the problems of Theological America, its sexism (yes I know we all hate that word), and its need for women to be carriers for children.

In the fever pitch of Reaganism, there was a fever pitch in Televangelists, doomsday prophets, all kinds of Mormon cults. Atwood wanted to write about this specifically in the novel, in a parody kind of way. Just ramp it up to 11. But while being a parody of fever pitch American Christianity, it's also a terribly disturbing book on just how plausible it can be in small locations.

Sure, the entirety of America is outlandish. But these things don't just happen in the Near East. In the 80's and Christian and Mormon cults rode this fever, and it was highly reported on. Women were being treated like cattle, not so different from Fury Road. Not just this, but it happened at a young age, sometimes as early as 12.

The point being, the plot is set around a hypothetical future, a sort of parody of the time, where human birth rates are dwindling. The question the novel asks is, in a scenario like this, in America. What exactly would stop the Conservative American fundamentalist Christian right at the time (and really still now), from actually instituting Gilead.

If a Children of Men style event happened, I don't think its far out of the question. I mean look at how states deal with family planning and birth control, abortion rights, even if its a rapist. And these publicized cults from the 80's aren't that historically recent. Hell some still exist in their compounds.

It's farfetched, but it's not meant to be completely serious, but at the same time it is. It's just warning of the dangers of unchecked religious power. In the future what's stopping, an entire section of barren Utah from example, becoming some Mormon Gilead Compound? It's happened before, it'll happen again.

Reproductive rights in America have the danger of sliding down a slippery slope in some states that, no matter how farfetched you might think it is, push come to shove, would become Gilead.

It was literally about Iran, retard.

Yet the story has Gilead hold the UN hostage and throw nukes around with little consequence. The sexism of Gilead is overshadowed by the fact Gilead should be in the same position Nazi Germany got itself in 1944, where it should be surrounded by powerful armies trying to snuff it out. It could have even had the story end with Gilead ending exactly like Nazi and Offred ending up in occupied Gilead yet like Nazi apologists have that why Offred's account is in question.
This would make for far better contrast, all the power Gilead had over women be smashed to pieces by a stronger army, levelling Gilead to rubble and Gilead dying by the sword. Thus giving what should be a unsatisfying answer to would stop American fundamentalism, which would be with tons of collateral damage as larger armies kick their ass (thus like Nazi Germany you wouldn't want them to get that far).

Oui, mi amor

It was partly Iran, it was partly sentiments and news at the time coming from the US. The story is horrifying, but it's not a literal intrepretation of the future.

Atwood's whole body of wrong, save for some, is somewhat half parody, half serious. It isn't an accurate perdiction of an entire nation, it's a glimpse into the lives of actual people we know today who had to go through these ordeals. Putting yourself in their own shoes.

Taking the UN hostage isn't really all that out of the question. And nuclear exchange is somewhat inevitable. These little details may flesh out the story, but they're just bits and pieces to establish the fanciful setting. What you're not getting is that I'm saying Atwood didn't intend to write about geopolitics, she just added soem shit to make the setting. The work itself is on a similar vane to Oryx and Crake. Atwood said of this, "Give it a hundred years, who's going to stop us." Corporate compounds exist and the English language further deteriorated, the enviornment is ruined, and genetic engineering is common place. The normal person is uneducated to a fault if they can't afford private school in these compounds, the police are private. It's a corporate-feudal world of compounds named after multinational corporations, that are called things like "HelthWyzer" and "RejoovenEsence". Yet this too, is somewhat parody. But it's parody enough to make you feel uneasy this is quite possible. That's just her style of story telling.

If you want to read an Atwood book about the possibilities of uncontrolled American capitalism that's lasted for a hundred years, just read Oryx and Crake.

The Hand Maiden's Tale is largely a book of its time in the 80's, on a specific subject, andhypothetically blown up. The purpose isn't the outside world of Gilead, the purpose is telling the story of a mother who was stolen from her family and forced to become a machine simply for insemination and creating as many children as possible. Because a Children of Men event happened.

But all of this is backdrop. It's just shining a light on the very real problems 70's and 80's America had with Christian communes and cults, the televangelist infiltration of media, the strong religious fervor in Americans. Your gripes about the setting are missing the point.

The story is horrifying because its based on a hodge podge of actual events. It's part parody, part horror. Just like much of her work.

To add onto this, it makes much more sense if you view her work somewhat through the lens of a Paul Verhoeven movie. The questions it can ask are indeed important, but the outside details distract you because its parodying them. Atwood just takes much of the humor away when she wants to. A good example of the Verhoeven-esque feel of her work would be Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam.

I think a good way to describe them would be fancifully grounded.

it would have to be next year i think

I was talking about the TV show not the book. The show gets marketed as some bold critique of gender roles.

Yeah I haven't seen it so I can't comment. TV shows usually miss the point of the source material so I avoid it.

Oh right, I listened to the audiobook.

But man, it's made so nightmarish for women that it's absurd, almost grimdark.

"What are you complaining about? Do you have any idea how bad women had it before we took over? They had to actually struggle to find a husband! Even had to get plastic surgery and shit! Cut up their faces! In a true utopia, women's faces should instead melt off in a radioactive death camp!"

I guess it makes sense that it's more of a vicious parody, not quite a dystopia in the Orwellian sense.

It would give more cause for China and the Warsaw Pact to get involved militarily, as both would have the excuse of liberating the UN for their invasion of Giled
Classic science fiction tends to time jump and use fictional nations when they want to this without causing the audience to think about real geopolitics. There is also the advantage that you can use the other fictional nations to be counter-examples so you don't just have Gilead and the USA before the Sons of Jacob, thus allowing to to go more broad.
They were real problem but overshadowed the weakening of the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie increasing exploitation of the proletariat at home and abroad. By 1985 Science Fiction was already having a field day on the fact the futurism of both east and west not only didn't happen but we were farther from those visions of utopia then in the 1960's with a number of Science Fiction works making the argument were we already living in a dystopia.

But see, that's not what the book is satirizing. A novel doesn't have to address all topics at once, then you get something like Stephen King's body of work that finds a terrible focus on what it should be doing. In other words if you address everything in a story about a specific subject, it gets messy.

The outside world isn't much touched upon in the novel for this reason, and that itself is because its from the perspective of someone trapped. There's been interpretations that nothing described by the Gilead government actually happened, it's all either self imposed or bullshit. It's all manipulation.

Which is classic cult behavior.

What I'm saying is if its a parody of the situations in the world where women are taken advantage of for only their reproductive needs, and mentally broken to only serve this cause. As was rampant during the 70's and 80's, especially in Utah.

Atwood has wrote about future class issues, albeit in an even more parody sort of way, in the books I listed.

Atwood's body of work is vicious parody at societal ills. And I don't think there's a mandatory list of things you need to cover when writing science fiction, if you put too much cooks in the kitchen it doesn't end up well. The realism doesn't matter because it's both ambiguous and satirizing, though extremely dark.

What I'm trying to say, is this book wasn't meant to predict a possible future. It's to satirize the present the book was written in.

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Except slaves were aware of the US civil-war and where they had to run to reach Union lines, and were fully aware the Confederacy as losing when Sherman marched to the sea and modern tech as made it even easier for guerrillas to propagandize. Major powers have engaged in psychological warfare since the first world war meaning Gilead would have to deal with enemy broadcasts, the air dropping leaflets and the use of load speakers when ever hostile forces were in ear shot.
Yes it workers from the perspective of women being trapped in homes but in a war even being trapped in home would mean they could listen to radio broadcasts from NATO, Cuba and anyone else wanting to propagandize to them, yet even ignoring that when ever she walked out she would see their leaflets littered on the ground given it wouldn't be hard for NATO to fly over Gilead. Remember this book was written after the Tet Offensive where the USA thought it had South Vietnam cities secured and then all of a sudden it was fighting major battles in all the cities as the locals still were able to coordinate despite all the efforts the US put in keeping the population in the dark.

I don't think the novel touches on the Tet offensive more than vaguely. The book is more or less what it seems.

I know the book doesn't touch the Tet offensive but my point is the Ted offensive shows how controlling a population can go very wrong even for a major power as guerrillas and special ops can coordinate with the population if they want to. Any agent could have given Offred a miniature radio and odds are Gilead wouldn't have known unless she was searched as by 1985 radio technology had advanced to the point a ear bud could pick up the AM/FM band easily. On the flip size this miniaturization meant you didn't need spies ease dropping as listening devices were more practice thus the actions of the Eyes seemed like that of a underfunded secret police.

I know your trying to make a point here and some of them I find merit in, but not even victorian era women we're treated like "cattle". I don't think anywhere you saw fury road style woman hoarding. Tbh, your whole post seems pretty hysterical as well. Some groups of people being anti-abortion doesn't immediatly equal possible Gilead. Hell, every time natalism is brought up we end up getting huge debates here among socialists.

youtu.be/v1pBaAd-uIQ

it's about the threat of right wing christian fundamentalism

Every time I watch a series, I regret it.