... wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.
Books: The Good Life
Movies:
TV: Twin Peaks (season one)
The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert J. Waldinger and Marc Schulz
This is the 2023 nonfiction book about the conclusions drawn largely from the Harvard Longitudinal Study, a scientific study that has followed hundreds of Bostonians since 1938, gathering data about health, circumstances, and happiness, with an eye towards figuring out what makes human beings happy.
Do not read The Good Life if you're in the dumps and looking for a way out of the pit.
The basic précis of the book is that you need warm, loving relationships in your life to be happy, which is exactly what you don't have (or don't perceive) if you're depressed. The book spends most of its subsequent pages almost comically backpedalling: "Don't worry! You can totally nurture your friendships and find your way to happiness! You're not doomed!"
At one point the writers point out that talking to people is easy: "We need to make a point to ask ourselves: Who is this person, really, and what's their deal? Then it's as simple as asking a question, listening to the reply, and seeing where it takes us."
I mean, sure, that's technically correct, the same way that "just don't feel bad about things!" is technically advice you *could* give a depressed person. It presumes that, when people have trouble holding conversations, it's because the *intellectual concept* of a conversation is well beyond them, and once it's explained, surely everything will work out fine.
I suppose I'm being needlessly catty towards this book. It does a fine job of taking basic (if very Western) ideas of living a happy life and giving them scientific support. Honestly, though, the 'support' is very informal and anecdotal - mostly anecdotes from the Grant study, and assurances that those anecdotes characterize overall trends in the data.
And on some level, the book is a victim of its own success: these ideas about happiness are commonplace only *because* this longitudinal study was so groundbreaking. The basic notion of "have friends you care about, and that's pretty much the whole ballgame" largely stems from the Grant study and similar efforts.
Ergo, I'm not sure I can recommend the book. It explains what it takes to be happy. But it's a bit like explaining the rules of Go: just because you know what it *takes* to succeed doesn't mean you know *how* to succeed. Ultimately you feel that whiff of desperation - "no! really! making friends isn't hard!" - because that's where the book strays out of its lane.
It does a fine job explaining the basic things that seem to make people happy.
How to pursue those things... is best left to other books.
Twin Peaks (season one)
This is the first season of the 1990 David Lynch murder mystery, in which Laura Palmer, the Homecoming Queen of a the fictional small town of Twin Peaks, Washington, washes up on the shore dead and wrapped in plastic. Kyle MacLachlan plays Dale Cooper, an FBI agent sent to investigate.
Then things get weird.
It's very odd that I've gone 35 years without watching this, especially since I used to consider myself something of a TV nerd. I suspect I watched bits and pieces of the show, decades ago, but at this point I'm not even sure: maybe I saw the show itself, or maybe it's just implanted so securely into pop culture that, even if you've never watched it, you've watched it.
I will cut to the chase and say "I didn't enjoy season one as much as I'd hoped I would." As Blank Check observed, season one of Twin Peaks is much, much less Twin Peaks-y than we think it is. There is exactly one scene (a dream sequence, at that) set in the Black Lodge. The Log Lady appears maybe five times.
In a lot of ways, and I feel ridiculous saying this, it's a straightforward soap opera about a murder case. The weirdness is there, sure, but it feels blunted somehow in retrospect. Dale Cooper practically vibrates with idiosyncracy, but Dale Cooper is absolutely familiar via pop culture - it's hard to see him with fresh eyes. ("Ah. Right. He's a Dale Cooper type. Got it.") The odd, out-of-time quality of the show (it's set in the fifties except when that's inconvenient ¹) is intriguing, but we've seen so many shows in its wake (Riverdale, for example) play with the same can't-pin-it-down historicity.
One senses that Twin Peaks opened a ton of doors, and I've spent the last 35 years watching all the shows that walked through those doors, so it's hard to see the original for what it is.
Honestly, the wildest thing, to my eyes, is the *scale* of Twin Peaks. The two-hour premiere introduces (per imdb) *sixty-one* characters, not including the crowds of extras. The show quickly launches from that into thorny interrelationships between *everyone* in the town, and enough conspiracies and betrayals and uneasy alliances that one suspects the show bible runs longer than the scripts themselves; I quickly gave up on following all the plot curlicues. Maybe this sense of freewheeling invention is normal in soap operas, but it makes prime-time dramas feel buttoned-down and staid by comparison.
And there are wonderful bits and pieces of the terrifying, dream-like, gorgeously incomprehensible world we all associate with the show. In a way, it's a world where everything is terrifying *because* it is incomprehensible. And I have the benefit of hindsight: I know that nothing ever really gets explained. It's like the film is doing the opposite of "understanding the point of view of the villain": it's stepping back to the point where the world's cruelty and horror seem inherently otherworldly.
All that said, I didn't have a *bad* time with season one by any means, and it was nice to finally see this thing that I'd seen in bits and pieces for decades. I'll go on to see season two, with the eventual goal of watching The Return - even if I don't like it, what a bravura act of creation that must be.
For next week: In the backlog, I've got a biography of Siskel & Ebert and part one of the film adaptation of Wicked. I'm currently reading a book about building good habits. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about David Lynch and an audiocourse about the classical technology. I'm watching the second season of Twin Peaks, and goofing off with the second season of Um, Actually.
____
¹ ... again paraphrasing Blank Check.
Movies:
TV: Twin Peaks (season one)
The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert J. Waldinger and Marc Schulz
This is the 2023 nonfiction book about the conclusions drawn largely from the Harvard Longitudinal Study, a scientific study that has followed hundreds of Bostonians since 1938, gathering data about health, circumstances, and happiness, with an eye towards figuring out what makes human beings happy.
Do not read The Good Life if you're in the dumps and looking for a way out of the pit.
The basic précis of the book is that you need warm, loving relationships in your life to be happy, which is exactly what you don't have (or don't perceive) if you're depressed. The book spends most of its subsequent pages almost comically backpedalling: "Don't worry! You can totally nurture your friendships and find your way to happiness! You're not doomed!"
At one point the writers point out that talking to people is easy: "We need to make a point to ask ourselves: Who is this person, really, and what's their deal? Then it's as simple as asking a question, listening to the reply, and seeing where it takes us."
I mean, sure, that's technically correct, the same way that "just don't feel bad about things!" is technically advice you *could* give a depressed person. It presumes that, when people have trouble holding conversations, it's because the *intellectual concept* of a conversation is well beyond them, and once it's explained, surely everything will work out fine.
I suppose I'm being needlessly catty towards this book. It does a fine job of taking basic (if very Western) ideas of living a happy life and giving them scientific support. Honestly, though, the 'support' is very informal and anecdotal - mostly anecdotes from the Grant study, and assurances that those anecdotes characterize overall trends in the data.
And on some level, the book is a victim of its own success: these ideas about happiness are commonplace only *because* this longitudinal study was so groundbreaking. The basic notion of "have friends you care about, and that's pretty much the whole ballgame" largely stems from the Grant study and similar efforts.
Ergo, I'm not sure I can recommend the book. It explains what it takes to be happy. But it's a bit like explaining the rules of Go: just because you know what it *takes* to succeed doesn't mean you know *how* to succeed. Ultimately you feel that whiff of desperation - "no! really! making friends isn't hard!" - because that's where the book strays out of its lane.
It does a fine job explaining the basic things that seem to make people happy.
How to pursue those things... is best left to other books.
Twin Peaks (season one)
This is the first season of the 1990 David Lynch murder mystery, in which Laura Palmer, the Homecoming Queen of a the fictional small town of Twin Peaks, Washington, washes up on the shore dead and wrapped in plastic. Kyle MacLachlan plays Dale Cooper, an FBI agent sent to investigate.
Then things get weird.
It's very odd that I've gone 35 years without watching this, especially since I used to consider myself something of a TV nerd. I suspect I watched bits and pieces of the show, decades ago, but at this point I'm not even sure: maybe I saw the show itself, or maybe it's just implanted so securely into pop culture that, even if you've never watched it, you've watched it.
I will cut to the chase and say "I didn't enjoy season one as much as I'd hoped I would." As Blank Check observed, season one of Twin Peaks is much, much less Twin Peaks-y than we think it is. There is exactly one scene (a dream sequence, at that) set in the Black Lodge. The Log Lady appears maybe five times.
In a lot of ways, and I feel ridiculous saying this, it's a straightforward soap opera about a murder case. The weirdness is there, sure, but it feels blunted somehow in retrospect. Dale Cooper practically vibrates with idiosyncracy, but Dale Cooper is absolutely familiar via pop culture - it's hard to see him with fresh eyes. ("Ah. Right. He's a Dale Cooper type. Got it.") The odd, out-of-time quality of the show (it's set in the fifties except when that's inconvenient ¹) is intriguing, but we've seen so many shows in its wake (Riverdale, for example) play with the same can't-pin-it-down historicity.
One senses that Twin Peaks opened a ton of doors, and I've spent the last 35 years watching all the shows that walked through those doors, so it's hard to see the original for what it is.
Honestly, the wildest thing, to my eyes, is the *scale* of Twin Peaks. The two-hour premiere introduces (per imdb) *sixty-one* characters, not including the crowds of extras. The show quickly launches from that into thorny interrelationships between *everyone* in the town, and enough conspiracies and betrayals and uneasy alliances that one suspects the show bible runs longer than the scripts themselves; I quickly gave up on following all the plot curlicues. Maybe this sense of freewheeling invention is normal in soap operas, but it makes prime-time dramas feel buttoned-down and staid by comparison.
And there are wonderful bits and pieces of the terrifying, dream-like, gorgeously incomprehensible world we all associate with the show. In a way, it's a world where everything is terrifying *because* it is incomprehensible. And I have the benefit of hindsight: I know that nothing ever really gets explained. It's like the film is doing the opposite of "understanding the point of view of the villain": it's stepping back to the point where the world's cruelty and horror seem inherently otherworldly.
All that said, I didn't have a *bad* time with season one by any means, and it was nice to finally see this thing that I'd seen in bits and pieces for decades. I'll go on to see season two, with the eventual goal of watching The Return - even if I don't like it, what a bravura act of creation that must be.
For next week: In the backlog, I've got a biography of Siskel & Ebert and part one of the film adaptation of Wicked. I'm currently reading a book about building good habits. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about David Lynch and an audiocourse about the classical technology. I'm watching the second season of Twin Peaks, and goofing off with the second season of Um, Actually.
____
¹ ... again paraphrasing Blank Check.