David Lynch in the Beautiful World of "Twin Peaks"Seventy- one years after David Lynch’s debut in Missoula, 4. Eraserhead, and 2. Laura Palmer said good- bye to Special Agent Dale Cooper, the most daring auteur in Hollywood goes to the one place that seemed off- limits. The Darkest, Sunniest Director in America. They all talk about him the same way.“He kind of hypnotizes you.” —Sherilyn Fenn, porcelain ideal of Lynchian beauty“There’s nothing bigger than David.

We all submit.” —Jim Belushi, new to the Lynch universe“It just makes me smile when I get to see him.” —Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer“He breathes through the moment, and everything is alive in that moment.” —Laura Dern, five- time collaborator who has “spent [her] life working with him.”“I felt tremendous gratitude to be there, seeing his face.” —Kyle Mac. Lachlan, on- screen alter ego“He was just radiating warmth and friendliness.” —Michael Cera, who’s in Showtime’s Twin Peaks reboot with the rest of them“You just fall into that love for him.” —Naomi Watts, returning muse“Today is a torment,” David Lynch says, tugging melodramatically at the collar of his shirt like a kid who’s been forced to stop digging up worms and put on stiff church clothes. The flash of a neon yellow watch hidden beneath a black suit sleeve offers the sole ray of the playful, beatific sun god who’s been gushed over in brochure- worthy terms by all his friends and collaborators. Strike Witches Season 1 Episode 7. Here in the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont, Lynch seems cornered, physically resisting interrogation by folding up like an insect. When Lynch is asked a question about himself, his eyes squeeze shut. He bows his head and clasps his hands, somewhere between prayer and severe pain. Not surprisingly for an auteur whose work is defined by its elliptical mystery—from early lo- fi creepfest Eraserhead to humanity- is- the- real- freak- show allegory The Elephant Man to sapphic showbiz horror Mulholland Drive to the reason he’s being tortured today, Showtime’s 1.

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Twin Peaks—David Lynch really hates explaining things. What’s more, Lynch complains, he had to get all dressed up for this inquest, which meant the arduous task of emptying the stuff from the baggy khakis he wears every other day and placing that stuff into a whole new set of pockets. There’s the suit, which necessitated putting on a tie, an interloper to his strict uniform of a white dress shirt buttoned to the top. Even Lynch’s hair—a volcanic- ash cloud the musician Questlove describes as “the cool white- guy version of Bobby Brown’s Gumby with a flip”—has begun to droop from the sheer exertion of so much self- examination. For someone who has been practicing Transcendental Meditation since 1. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s reported belief that “life is a festival of disruption” (even borrowing the phrase for the name of his recent two- day event at L.

A.’s Ace Hotel), Lynch doesn’t seem particularly jazzed about today’s upset of the natural order. It’s clear he’d rather be anywhere else, doing the things he normally does: filmmaking or building furniture, taking photographs of burned- out warehouses or painting nude women wielding electric knives. Anything that might give him the comfort of humdrum routine. And absolute control. Of course, anyone who’s seen Lynch’s work knows that control is just an illusion.

That the safe routines of your existence can be disturbed at any time by a mysterious stranger breaking into your home, an unexplained videotape turning up on your doorstep, a severed ear discovered in a forest clearing, GQ asking you to do a photo shoot. This sudden meeting of the mundane and the macabre, often set in cheerful, terrifying daylight, is the classic “Lynchian” twist. It’s the moment when the mask of life’s banality slips to reveal the labyrinth of madness that was always just underneath, when Dennis Hopper bursts into your living room all hopped- up on amyl nitrite, screaming about shitty beer. A kind of a honeycomb world—an underworld that exists simultaneously with the reality we see with our eyes every day,” says Twin Peaks star Ray Wise.

Showtime's 'Penny Dreadful' aired its Season 3 finale Sunday night. Creator John Logan explains why it's the series finale as well.

This is the place where David Lynch’s work lives. You would probably expect the person who shows us these things to be dark himself, a brooding cross between Rod Serling and Edgar Allan Poe, a psychological sadist who runs his sets like a B.

F. Skinner experiment. But when I first meet him, he literally greets me with an unironic “Howdy!” And all of David Lynch’s co- workers gush that when he is not politely enduring questions about his oeuvre, he is “warm” and “sunny and cheerful.” Mulholland Drive star Justin Theroux explains that “he’s got a very sort of sparkly persona. You want to be underneath that safety umbrella that he creates.”He is also, as musician and new Twin Peaks cast member Sky Ferreira puts it, “actually really funny.”Sounds like a great guy to hang with! So what does David Lynch find funny, anyway?“Everybody loves to laugh,” Lynch says, body clenched and eyes winced shut. Larry David is great. Albert Brooks. Mel Brooks.”And then, the Lynchian twist.“I like girls that cry.”Murder in the Woods“I would have little fantasies: ‘ Twin Peaks will come back and I’ll live happily ever after.’ And [then David’s] like, ‘It’s true, Sherilyn Fenn.

We’re coming back. And it’s gonna be great, and it’s gonna be all of us.’” —Sherilyn Fenn, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart“I said, ‘If you do choose to revisit it, don’t forget me.’ And he said, ‘Well, Ray, you know, you’re dead. But perhaps we can work around that.’” — Ray Wise, Twin Peaks. It’s been more than a quarter- century since Lynch last filled our living rooms with hilarious crying girls, back when he first partnered with Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost to ground his dreamy abstractions into something ABC could cut commercials around. Network executives suggested something like Peyton Place.

Instead, the duo delivered a Dickens­ian delirium, a two- season network drama where the murder of beloved homecoming queen Laura Palmer unraveled a sleepy logging town’s secret connections to demons and alternate dimensions. It was a treatise on the monsters lurking just beneath the placid surface of American life. And it was a show whose willingness to be downright maddening, embrace of art- house surrealism, and DMT- hallucination- of- Happy- Days aesthetic would forever change the prevailing wisdom about what people would watch on television. Since the series’ 1. DNA has lived on in every show from The X- Files to Lost to Mad Men to approximately 9. And Lynch has spent those intervening decades being begged relentlessly by Twin Peaks’ fans—not to mention its cast and crew—to return.

The revival of Twin Peaks marks Lynch’s return to filmmaking after the longest break in his career; he hadn’t released anything high- profile since 2. Inland Empire. So why now? Well, there is the fact that, in the show’s finale, Laura Palmer meaningfully tells her would- be avenger, Agent Cooper, “I’ll see you again in 2. I sense that David takes numbers and numerology very seriously,” says Showtime president David Nevins, who shepherded the series’ return. And that kind of promise, he feels some desire to fulfill.” It’s a tidy explanation, except Lynch says he didn’t even remember that detail until Frost pointed it out to him. Really, there’s only one reason David Lynch does something: He wants to. He doesn’t do anything he’s not feeling,” says Laura Dern, who will join Twin Peaks in one of many new mystery roles.

I’ve watched him write a wonderful movie and put it to the side. And maybe ten years later, he’s like, ‘Oh, I might be feeling that movie again now.’ ”According to Frost, Lynch finally came around to feeling like going back into the Pacific Northwest woods over one of their semi- regular lunches at the Musso & Frank Grill in Los Angeles.

Frost and Lynch had a falling- out over the 1.

What Happens if Justice League Bombs? Greetings and/or salutations, people!

Welcome to io. 9's (occasionally weekly) mail column, where I solve the mysteries of the world of nerd- dom to you, both fictional and otherwise. This week: What was Elektra’s deal in The Defenders? Is an evil BB- 8 droid a good thing or a bad thing?

And, most importantly, who’s to blame for Game of Thrones season seven? And don’t forget to send your questions to postman@io. Untie the League Lys D.: What happens if Justice League suck as bad as Batman v Superman does? Do the other DC movies get scrapped? Do they try another new DC [movie continuity], or do they have to wait a while so people don’t get confused? How long would it take for the taste of JL to wash out of people’s mouths?

Let’s take a step back and remember that “bomb” is a relative term here. For all its faults, Batman v Superman made a ton of money—$8.

The problem is that WB knows it could have made a lot more if it had been better, and fans had actually liked it. Then the studio miraculously got Wonder Woman right, so it knows that it has the power to make a true, Marvel Studios- level superhero blockbuster, even if it has no real idea how it managed it. Since these movies still make money either way (for now), there’s no impetus for Warner Bros. To wonder if WB will reset the DC Extended Universe is to wonder if it actually has a cinematic universe in the first place.

Aquaman is much too close to being finished for the WB to back out of now, and Wonder Woman 2 is as a safe a bet as there could be. But what does it actually have in the works that’s even close to definitely getting made? The next film on the schedule is Shazam in 2.

Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam for his own film later. Neither Cyborg nor Green Lantern Corps. Cyborg has a star—and they’re both ostensibly coming out in 2. Not likely. Now, here’s all the DC films that Warner Bros. The Batman, which was originally announced in 2. Matt Reeves said he was completely starting the movie over from scratch this past summer.

The Flash, which has had Ezra Miller attached to star since October 2. Flashpoint at this year’s San Diego Comic- Con. Batgirl, by the suddenly less beloved Joss Whedon. Justice League Dark, which was announced in 2. Lobo, announced in 2. A Joker and Harley Quinn movie.

A Nightwing movie. That insane “gritty” Elseworlds Joker origin movie from Martin Scorsese. Theoretically Black Adam, a Deadshot solo movie, and Suicide Squad 2. And there’s always Man of Steel 2 and Justice League 2. All these movies were either announced so long ago that we have no reason to believe they’ll actually get made in the next five years, or are so new that there’s little chance they’ll survive until gestation. Since 2. 01. 3, WB has made four DCEU films: Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, Batman v Superman, and Wonder Woman. Do you really think all 1.

I’m guessing five, max, and it’ll take at least 1. Oh, and if somehow Justice League is a smash hit and everything gets greenlit? Well, then Ben Affleck is still obviously, adorably desperate to abandon this nonsense, and Flashpoint almost certainly will, by its very name, reset the DC movie- verse anyway. And then there’s WB’s astoundingly insane decision to maybe make DC superhero movies that aren’t in continuity with the rest of the films, for maximum audience confusion and absence of synergy. The bottom line is that WB is basically so terrified it’s going to screw these movies up again, that it’s waiting for Justice League and Aquaman to come out, and let the studio know if it’s on the right track or not.

Until then (and, if we’re being honest, probably long after then) it’s going to keep throwing anything it can think of against the DC movie wall. The occasional movie will somehow come out, and no one can be sure if it’ll be part of the cobbled- together Extended Universe or not. Not even Warner Bros.

GRRM Warfare. About 8. People, Give or Take: 1) Are Benioff and Weiss actually bad showrunners who have coasted on George R.

R. Martin’s work? Why was the decision made to shorten seasons seven and eight when the show could have clearly benefitted from more time? Will season eight have the same problems? No. I know Weiss and Benioff have barely done anything else in Hollywood beyond Game of Thrones, which seems pretty incriminating. I also know that it feels like the two of them fully abandoned the books this season, and then calamity and problems immediately ensued. But let’s remember that Weiss and Benioff have made six good to great seasons of Game of Thrones, and there’s a hell of a lot more to showrunning than just putting the books onscreen. More importantly, the two have been going off script from the books from the very beginning, from that wonderful, iconic conversation between Cersei and Robert Baratheon in season one right through that magnificent season six finale where Cersei finally achieved everything on her vision board.

They had run out of book material for various storylines starting back in season four, and yet we were good straight through six. Have poor choices been made this season? Absolutely, but that brings us to…2) .. I think is responsible for most of the season’s problems.

More time would have allowed more characters more moments, more explanations for some of the bizarre things that happened (see below), and just more breathing room to give the various storylines more weight. It still wouldn’t have solved the godawful mess that was the Sansa- Arya storyline, but it likely did mean Weiss and Benioff needed to figure out a way to kill Littlefinger sooner rather than later, and the only way they could think of to kill him with some drama was by turning Arya into a crazy person. As for who decided to shortened the seasons, I sincerely doubt Weiss and Benioff wanted to. Game of Thrones is their baby, and they knew they were in for a long haul, assuming the show didn’t get canceled.

I doubt they were bored right at the beginning of the series’ epic conclusion. Certainly HBO didn’t want shortened seasons; they’d be happy to run Game of Thrones until the heat death of the universe. That leaves the actors, and remember, seven years is a long time for an actor to play a single character, especially actors of the caliber of Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage. I bet anything Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke at minimum are dying to be done with it in order to move on to new projects. The actors all had to sign new contracts for season seven and eight, and for many of them, the show needed them more than vice versa.

I imagine these two shortened seasons was all they could get out of (one or more of) the biggest stars, forcing them to try and stuff everything they hoped to do in 2. Which resulted in problems like…Grey(Worm)’s Audacity. Wes: What the hell was the opening scene with the Unsullied and Dothraki waiting outside of some castle and how did we teleport from there to the first meeting ever of the major players? I have scoured the net trying to figure out what the scene was and no one has covered it.

Please help! Although it wasn’t spelled out, it’s actually pretty easy to put two and two together here. The big truce meeting was at the Dragonpit, right by King’s Landing. Obviously, Cersei was not going to remove her army and Euron’s fleet from the capital for these little talks, because that would have been dumb as hell, and Cersei is not dumb. However, Daenerys would also not just come to King’s Landing, right smack in the middle of Cersei’s forces, without her own troops. So she had Grey Worm, the Unsullied, and the Dothraki surround the city, so if things went bad her forces were there to bail her out/kick Lannister ass. The better question is, how did the Unsullied get from being trapped in Casterly Rock with no food and surrounded by Lannister troops, to hanging outside King’s Landing looking totally fine?

You know, I pride myself on being able to figure out completely unsupported ways to fill the plot holes of just about anything, but I have no clue here.