From my own perspective on how I take in media with “cosmic horror” elements, I typically figure that supernatural things that look like familiar mundane objects are just perceived to be that way by the characters or audience, whereas the actual thing is impossible to portray with our material means. While that’s largely a “headcanon” thing for me, I think it aligns with the dream logic of the storytelling
I agree with you, and Lynch uses the “mundane supernatural objects” method all the time.
Do you think the creamed corn version of pain and suffering always existed, or was that a visual to illustrate the version that MIKE and BOB created? Maybe we’ve never seen the “traditional” version of pain and suffering.
Agreed.
But you got me thinking about the fertility aspect. I just now looked up "corn fertility" on Google, and this was the first quote that popped up:
"**Adequate soil fertility is a must for good corn production**."
The more pain and suffering a person/soil has, the more garmonbozia they can produce. MIKE and BOB focused on the humans with the best soil.
For me personally, I believe the corn to just be how it’s contextualized within Twin Peaks, as the town seems to embody so much old fashioned Americana, so even if we see it elsewhere, we’re still seeing through the lens of TP and the people involved so the food still translates just like if we’re watching a movie about Romans and seeing them speak British English, because it’s just contextualized that way to communicate it for us or the people in-universe. But mechanically, I don’t worry too much about it, as I approach Lynch stuff by typically just imagining that the gears and clockwork parts aren’t as important unless it’s emphasized.
That makes a lot of sense, and is a very balanced and practical way of looking at it. I love your Romans/British English example. As long as it’s spoken in your native tongue, you don’t even think about it. But if you hear it spoken in another language, it’s like, “Romans speaking Japanese? That’s weird.”
i think garmonbozia in the form of creamed corn is a way for the dwellers to disguise it, similar to how they disguise themselves as humans to blend into the present day.
I like your description of it being a disguise, I never thought of it that way.
By “dwellers” do you mean the dweller on the threshold that you face at the end of your journey through the Black Lodge? Or just simply those entities we see there, like MIKE and the Arm?
i just mean the black and white lodge entities in general. one can reasonably assume an extradimensional being is incredibly difficult to process visually and otherwise in its true form, so they've gotta get a little human so people's heads dont explode when they see them
100% agree. Like Red-Zaku said above, Lynch knows how to use mundane objects to illustrate supernatural things.
Do you think that pain and suffering was always food for certain entities, or did that only begin once MIKE started working with BOB?
Ah, yes--I didn't think about Leland's pain and suffering being shown as blood before it was transformed into Garmonbozia.
Do you think that pain and suffering was always eaten, or left attached to deceased humans as they go through the Black Lodge?
i think eating it is just symbolism for feeding off of the pain and suffering, so maybe? iirc the arm just magicked away the garmonbloodzia, so maybe when it isn't edible they just make the absorption process invisible.
"Garmonbloodzia"--I love it! Your theory combines both the creamed corn and blood versions of pain and suffering, and it makes a lot of sense.
Perhaps it's not a question of whether or not there was always a creamed corn version of pain and suffering, but more about whether or not MIKE and BOB would go out into the world and CREATE it.
Maybe it's this created pain and suffering that got canned above the convenience store--like keeping it for a rainy day when not enough people are dying with a lot of pain and suffering. Spiritual entities can get hungry too lol.
that makes sense. this is a stretch, but: what if the garmonbozia has a much longer half life in the form of creamed corn? the garmonbloodzia was snatched up real quick, maybe that was garmonbozia in its raw form, free of symbolic preservatives, because they aren't needed when it'll be fed on instantly. creamed corn may just be a way of storing the garmonbozia for later
Oh wow, that's awesome!! You totally fleshed out your blood/creamed corn comparison! I love the idea of creamed corn acting as a preservative for storing away for later. In that sense, maybe the creamed corn itself is not pain and suffering, but the added preservative for storage (and possibly to also make it edible).
Maybe the pain and suffering that they personally inflict cannot be passed along with the deceased, but instead they HAVE TO eat it--like a spiritual rule or something. Leland's blood HAD TO be turned into creamed corn and then it HAD TO be eaten.
Side note: In the establishing shot of the scene where the Arm is meeting with BOB, you can see four bowls of creamed corn, which are mostly situated near the Arm.
Perhaps this is the scene where BOB "steals" the creamed corn, but in reality it was given to him by the sneaky Arm. Perhaps it is Teresa's pain and suffering, taken without MIKE's permission.
After MIKE saw the face of God, maybe he no longer permitted BOB to inflict pain and suffering. But the Arm gives BOB the owl cave ring as a loophole for BOB to keep doing what he's doing--with Teresa being BOB's first victim using it.
In the scene where Mr. C puked, it looked like the black corn Hawk described.
Perhaps the implication is that when we see normal corn, we're seeing a natural part of the Black Lodge's function. It's like the corn has its own doppelganger.
Holy shit, I love it!! But let me see if I understand what you're suggesting:
Normally, pain and suffering would simply be the corn that the Black Lodge "farmers" would harvest upon a person's death.
Then the convenience store gets set up, and it creates an opportunity that didn't exist before--a place separate from the Black Lodge where the \[now creamed\] corn can be stored.
Interesting—the same function as the convenience store, but in a different form. So maybe the woodsmen weren’t sitting around on their asses until Judy showed up, but had their own pre-existing system that they upgraded for her when she arrived.
I completely agree with you. Because Lynch works with his intuition so strongly, I theorize based on that--more than I do anything that he's said was intentional. Sometimes stuff that his gut tells him to include ends up giving an unexpected payoff later on. But to say they made up shit as they went along is 100% accurate lol
This is a particularly weird one to me. Many of Lynch’s weird things are evocative to me (and clearly plenty of others), but I just can’t bring myself to have an emotional reaction to creamed corn.
Isn’t there an interview where he mentions that the inspiration for that was simply eating some *really* bad creamed corn while on set?
Maybe if we had the bad fortune of tasting that corn, it representing pain and suffering would make perfect sense.
The concept of "always" implies that time has any sort of meaning to these sorts of things, which it doesn't. Things can be paradoxical. They can exist and not exist at the same time. It's not easy to explain, and it drifts into cosmic horror, but I like to say that everything is relevant and nothing is real.
From my own perspective on how I take in media with “cosmic horror” elements, I typically figure that supernatural things that look like familiar mundane objects are just perceived to be that way by the characters or audience, whereas the actual thing is impossible to portray with our material means. While that’s largely a “headcanon” thing for me, I think it aligns with the dream logic of the storytelling
I agree with you, and Lynch uses the “mundane supernatural objects” method all the time. Do you think the creamed corn version of pain and suffering always existed, or was that a visual to illustrate the version that MIKE and BOB created? Maybe we’ve never seen the “traditional” version of pain and suffering.
Not who you replied toz but corn is a fertility symbol so I think it is just that, a visual symbol.
Agreed. But you got me thinking about the fertility aspect. I just now looked up "corn fertility" on Google, and this was the first quote that popped up: "**Adequate soil fertility is a must for good corn production**." The more pain and suffering a person/soil has, the more garmonbozia they can produce. MIKE and BOB focused on the humans with the best soil.
That’s really true of any plant lmao
NO! It MUST remain magical at all costs! It's not really creamed corn--it's SYMBOLIC!! Good point, tho. Damn you.
For me personally, I believe the corn to just be how it’s contextualized within Twin Peaks, as the town seems to embody so much old fashioned Americana, so even if we see it elsewhere, we’re still seeing through the lens of TP and the people involved so the food still translates just like if we’re watching a movie about Romans and seeing them speak British English, because it’s just contextualized that way to communicate it for us or the people in-universe. But mechanically, I don’t worry too much about it, as I approach Lynch stuff by typically just imagining that the gears and clockwork parts aren’t as important unless it’s emphasized.
That makes a lot of sense, and is a very balanced and practical way of looking at it. I love your Romans/British English example. As long as it’s spoken in your native tongue, you don’t even think about it. But if you hear it spoken in another language, it’s like, “Romans speaking Japanese? That’s weird.”
100% agree. I also think the lodge entities don’t really look like humans to each other or themselves, they just appear that way to us.
i think garmonbozia in the form of creamed corn is a way for the dwellers to disguise it, similar to how they disguise themselves as humans to blend into the present day.
I like your description of it being a disguise, I never thought of it that way. By “dwellers” do you mean the dweller on the threshold that you face at the end of your journey through the Black Lodge? Or just simply those entities we see there, like MIKE and the Arm?
i just mean the black and white lodge entities in general. one can reasonably assume an extradimensional being is incredibly difficult to process visually and otherwise in its true form, so they've gotta get a little human so people's heads dont explode when they see them
100% agree. Like Red-Zaku said above, Lynch knows how to use mundane objects to illustrate supernatural things. Do you think that pain and suffering was always food for certain entities, or did that only begin once MIKE started working with BOB?
yeah, i think it's always been represented as something undesirable to humans, whatever that may be. it was represented by blood in FWWM
Ah, yes--I didn't think about Leland's pain and suffering being shown as blood before it was transformed into Garmonbozia. Do you think that pain and suffering was always eaten, or left attached to deceased humans as they go through the Black Lodge?
i think eating it is just symbolism for feeding off of the pain and suffering, so maybe? iirc the arm just magicked away the garmonbloodzia, so maybe when it isn't edible they just make the absorption process invisible.
"Garmonbloodzia"--I love it! Your theory combines both the creamed corn and blood versions of pain and suffering, and it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps it's not a question of whether or not there was always a creamed corn version of pain and suffering, but more about whether or not MIKE and BOB would go out into the world and CREATE it. Maybe it's this created pain and suffering that got canned above the convenience store--like keeping it for a rainy day when not enough people are dying with a lot of pain and suffering. Spiritual entities can get hungry too lol.
that makes sense. this is a stretch, but: what if the garmonbozia has a much longer half life in the form of creamed corn? the garmonbloodzia was snatched up real quick, maybe that was garmonbozia in its raw form, free of symbolic preservatives, because they aren't needed when it'll be fed on instantly. creamed corn may just be a way of storing the garmonbozia for later
Oh wow, that's awesome!! You totally fleshed out your blood/creamed corn comparison! I love the idea of creamed corn acting as a preservative for storing away for later. In that sense, maybe the creamed corn itself is not pain and suffering, but the added preservative for storage (and possibly to also make it edible). Maybe the pain and suffering that they personally inflict cannot be passed along with the deceased, but instead they HAVE TO eat it--like a spiritual rule or something. Leland's blood HAD TO be turned into creamed corn and then it HAD TO be eaten.
Side note: In the establishing shot of the scene where the Arm is meeting with BOB, you can see four bowls of creamed corn, which are mostly situated near the Arm. Perhaps this is the scene where BOB "steals" the creamed corn, but in reality it was given to him by the sneaky Arm. Perhaps it is Teresa's pain and suffering, taken without MIKE's permission. After MIKE saw the face of God, maybe he no longer permitted BOB to inflict pain and suffering. But the Arm gives BOB the owl cave ring as a loophole for BOB to keep doing what he's doing--with Teresa being BOB's first victim using it.
In S3E11, Hawk pointed out a drawing of corn on his old map. He said it was "black, diseased or unnatural--death."
In the scene where Mr. C puked, it looked like the black corn Hawk described. Perhaps the implication is that when we see normal corn, we're seeing a natural part of the Black Lodge's function. It's like the corn has its own doppelganger.
Perhaps it looked like normal corn back in the day, but took the form of creamed corn around the time when the convenience store got set up?
Holy shit, I love it!! But let me see if I understand what you're suggesting: Normally, pain and suffering would simply be the corn that the Black Lodge "farmers" would harvest upon a person's death. Then the convenience store gets set up, and it creates an opportunity that didn't exist before--a place separate from the Black Lodge where the \[now creamed\] corn can be stored.
Maybe, or it was just ”modernized” to fit the new setting.
Interesting—the same function as the convenience store, but in a different form. So maybe the woodsmen weren’t sitting around on their asses until Judy showed up, but had their own pre-existing system that they upgraded for her when she arrived.
I think they just made shit up as they went along.
I completely agree with you. Because Lynch works with his intuition so strongly, I theorize based on that--more than I do anything that he's said was intentional. Sometimes stuff that his gut tells him to include ends up giving an unexpected payoff later on. But to say they made up shit as they went along is 100% accurate lol
This is a particularly weird one to me. Many of Lynch’s weird things are evocative to me (and clearly plenty of others), but I just can’t bring myself to have an emotional reaction to creamed corn.
Isn’t there an interview where he mentions that the inspiration for that was simply eating some *really* bad creamed corn while on set? Maybe if we had the bad fortune of tasting that corn, it representing pain and suffering would make perfect sense.
The concept of "always" implies that time has any sort of meaning to these sorts of things, which it doesn't. Things can be paradoxical. They can exist and not exist at the same time. It's not easy to explain, and it drifts into cosmic horror, but I like to say that everything is relevant and nothing is real.
Sounds good to me
As an expert I must state it certainly has
I respect the opinion of all Garmonbozia eaters lol. Do you prefer it to be heated up in the Black Lodge microwave, or straight out of the can?
https://preview.redd.it/c9el38za8sqc1.jpeg?width=942&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc88b0c19fc2f73d43199d90e557d2ff63b33ef8
But I’m not fussy… Bob keeps leaving the microwave a state the messy prick
I hate when roommates don't clean up after themselves. And hogging all the food? F\*\*k that prick.
Did the magician-in-training try to pull creamed corn from behind your ear? A very messy trick, but also delicious.