From 2011's Crazy Clown Time.
Watch:
Friday night I did something I've been meaning to do for some time: I brought the television and blu-ray player from upstairs down into the living room and set it up just below the tv there. Then I grabbed the disc with Twin Peaks: The Return from both the standalone BR set and the A-Z set and cued up 17 on the top screen and 18 on the bottom.
It looked something like this:
Obviously, the pictures don't really do it justice, as I snapped them pretty haphazardly, as not to take away from the viewing experience. To talk about this further, I'm going to pilfer from a text thread I have going with my friend Chester Whelks.
Watching Twin Peaks: The Return episodes 17 and 18 simultaneously felt like it was going to shore some long-overlooked or half-formed theory about the series up into something definitive, but that didn’t happen. I can’t say I took a hell of a lot away from this other than the uniqueness of the experience itself, which is not to be undervalued. I haven't had something like this since The Flaming Lips' Zaireka, and I cherished it. That said, I was hoping for something really jaw-dropping, and that just did not happen.
It is, however, considerably more difficult to watch two episodes at the same time and keep information from both coming in equally; I kept confusing events in the same episode as happening across both, which in and of itself might just say something about the validity of this interpretation. The fact that Episode 18 gets quiet when 17 is really going tells me there is probably more here and I just need to try the experiment again, but go in with specific ideas to watch for, instead of just careening through haphazardly.
There are quite a few instances of blocking, dialogue and conceptual juxtaposition that make me think this coupling is intentional. A lot of opening doors and traversing thresholds in sync between the two episodes that make me inclined to give this some credence to these being two parts of the same whole (or "two birds with one stone," in the show's vernacular).
Being that The Return is an 18-episode series and thus perfect for “coupling,” I became interested in the idea of watching the entire series as 9 “couplets." I'm in the middle of a three-day weekend from work, so who knows...
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