Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television

262 Pages·2016·2.657 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Catherine Spooner (eds.)

Return to Twin Peaks
Return to Twin Peaks
New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and
Genre on Television
Edited by
Jeffrey Andrew W einstock
and
Catherine S pooner
RETURN TO TWIN PEAKS
Selection and editorial content © Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and
Catherine Spooner 2016
Individual chapters © their respective contributors 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-56384-2
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
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First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One
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ISBN 978-1-349-57140-6
E-PDF ISBN 978–1–137–55695–0
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-55695-0
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Return to Twin peaks : new approaches to materiality, theory, and genre
on television / edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Twin Peaks (Television program) I. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, editor.
II. Spooner, Catherine, 1974– editor.
PN1992.77.T88R48 2015
791.45972—dc23 2015020262
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
Contents
List of Figures vii
Preface ix
by David Lavery
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction “It is Happening Again”: New Reflections on
Twin Peaks 1
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Part I The Matter of T win Peaks
1 Wondrous and Strange: The Matter of Twin Peaks 29
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
2 Substance Abuse: Special Agent Dale Cooper, “What’s the
Matter?” 47
Martha P. Nochimson
3 “The Owls Are Not What They Seem”: Animals and Nature
in T win Peaks 71
Sherryl Vint
4 “That Cherry Pie is Worth a Stop”: Food and Spaces of
Consumption in Twin Peaks 87
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
5 “Wrapped in Plastic”: David Lynch’s Material Girls 105
Catherine Spooner
Part II Twin Peaks , in Theory
6 Jacques Lacan, Walk with Me: On the Letter 123
Eric Savoy
vi Contents
7 Lodged in a Fantasy Space: Twin Peaks and Hidden
Obscenities 143
Todd McGowan
Part III Genre, Fandom, and New Reflections
8 “Complementary Verses”: The Science Fiction of
Twin Peaks 161
J. P. Telotte
9 “Doing Weird Things for the Sake of Being Weird”:
Directing Twin Peaks 175
Stacey Abbott
10 “I’ll See You Again in 25 Years”: Paratextually
Re-commodifying and Revisiting Anniversary
Twin Peaks 193
Matt Hills
11 Nightmare in Red? Twin Peaks Parody, Homage,
Intertextuality, and Mashup 211
Lorna Jowett
12 Trapped in the Hysterical Sublime: T win Peaks ,
Postmodernism, and the Neoliberal Now 229
Linnie Blake
Notes on Contributors 247
Index 251
Figures
I.1 The Big Reveal: Leland’s Reflection is BOB 4
I.2 Echoes of Leland: Cooper Possessed by BOB 7
1.1 Ominous Fan 34
1.2 A Policeman’s Dream 40
2.1 The Dangling Phone 54
3.1 Cooper and Annie Dance 77
3.2 Blowing Trees 81
4.1 Cooper Enjoys a Cup of Deep Black Joe 91
4.2 The RR Diner 97
5.1 Audrey Changes Shoes 112
5.2 The Miss Twin Peaks Contest 118
6.1 The Letter 125
11.1 The Simpsons Meets Twin Peaks 217
11.2 Psych Meets Twin Peaks 224
Preface
My edited collection on the show that was supposed to forever change
television, Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Wayne
State University Press, 1994), was not born at a propitious time for
television studies. As I have recounted before (see “Climate Change”),
hardly anyone was taking series television seriously at the beginning of
the last decade of the last century. The idea for the book was hatched
just before Twin Peaks went off the air in the spring of 1991—at a
time when potential publishers just couldn’t be convinced that either
a show still airing or one about to be cancelled ( Twins Peaks was, of
course, both) was worthy of serious consideration. Of course they did
not foresee, nor did I, that the book would stay in print for over two
decades, prove to be a watershed in the scholarly study of Quality
Television, and pay off with astonishing regularity year after year.
Nor did Wayne State University Press or Full ’s editor have an inkling
that Twin Peaks would be reborn in another century and in another,
radically different television era. Professors Jeffrey Weinstock and
Catherine Spooner’s volume stands as Full of Secrets’ s worthy heir,
auspiciously arriving on the scene when Twin Peaks is miraculously
about to return, in fulfillment of Laura Palmer’s promise in the Black
Lodge, 1 to a world where both television studies and passionate atten-
tion to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s creation continue to burgeon.
That T win Peaks ’s reincarnation on the premium channel Showtime
was announced on Twitter speaks volumes about the media landscape
into which it arrives. Twin Peaks in the 1990s was an affair of personal
voice recorders and telephones. (As Martha Nochimson shows in these
pages, phones—and retracting phone cords—play a conspicuous role
in the series.) When the now-famous Henry Jenkins, characterized by
Howard Rheingold on the cover of his 2006 Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Collide as the “21st Century McLuhan,” con-
tributed as a young man to Full of Secrets , it was the now obsolete,
x Preface
pre-Internet alt.tv.twinpeaks newsgroup that attracted his atten-
tion. As I sought to understand the series’ promos, tie-in books, and
“commodity intertexts” in my introduction to Full of Secrets , “The
Semiotics of Cobbler: Twin Peaks ’s Interpretive Community,” John
Fiske’s Television Culture (1987) would be my guide. In the present
volume, major figures in media studies including Matt Hills, Stacey
Abbott, and Lorna Jowett can count their own work on such subjects,
not to mention such important twenty-first-century investigations as
Jonathan Gray’s S how Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other
Media Paratexts (2010), as inspiration.
Both F ull of Secrets and Return to Twin Peaks boast an impressive
cast of contributors: Full’s editor went on to do a score of books on tele-
vision; inestimable film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote the book’s
first essay; future Bruce Springsteen biographer Marc Dolan consid-
ered the series’ narrative complexities; Richard Campbell, the author
of the widely adopted text book Media & Culture: An Introduction
to Mass Communication (2009), contributed to the unique collabo-
rative dialogue on the show that closed the book. Pre-eminent Lynch
scholar Nochimson is in both Full and Return , as is the prolific and
astute film critic J. P. Telotte. Additionally, Weinstock and Spooner
assembled a similarly dazzling cast of new authors, all of whom have
made their mark in this century: the aforementioned Hills, Abbott,
and Jowett, major science fiction and Gothic scholars Sherryl Vint
and Catherine Spooner, and Lynch critic Todd McGowan.
As Glen Creeber has suggested studies of television series should
be, both F ull and Return are pluralistic, 2 bringing their contributors’
respective expertise and methods into play in illuminating different
aspects of the T win Peaks text: in my volume, music (Kalinak), dou-
bling (Kuzniar), detection (Hague), Foucauldian disorder (Telotte),
the fantastic (Stevenson), postmodernism (Reeves, et al.); in the pre-
sent collection, material objects (Weinstock), quantum physics/mate-
rialism/eastern mysticism (Nochimson), costuming (Spooner), genre
(Telotte), direction (Abbott), postmodernism, again (Blake), animals
and nature (Vint), and food (Piatti-Farnell).
As I have noted over the years, Twin Peaks has served as a foun-
dational inspiration for many of the showrunners who have carried
series television to new heights. To cite but one example, Sopranos
creator David Chase, a notorious hater of network television, has
admitted his indebtedness to Twin Peaks (Lavery and Thompson 23) .
Return conclusively demonstrates that contemporary critics, too, owe
the series a debt.
Preface xi
Reading these consistently discerning, often brilliant essays, I
found myself wondering, as scholar and fan, about what our return
to Twin Peaks —still too far off!—will reveal. I want to know—what
Peak head doesn’t?—“How’s Annie?” I want to know, too, whether
the reborn Twin Peaks will follow the Season Three plan (revealed
by executive producer Bob Engel to Max Haley) to resume years later
with no-longer Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agent
Dale Cooper who is now a pharmacist in Twin Peaks. 3 I want to know
if the series will still enthrall. In the meantime, Jeffrey Weinstock and
Catherine Spooner’s damn fine collection will more than satisfy our
appetite.
David Lavery
Middle Tennessee State University
Notes
1 . Such inexplicable prophecies have a history in the Lynchverse. Catherine
Coulson, Twin Peaks ’s log lady, has recalled on numerous occasions that
when she served as second unit director on Lynch’s Eraserhead (1976), Lynch
informed her that she would one day carry a log that talked.
2 . “What has become increasingly clear,” according to Creeber, “is that one
methodology is probably not enough to do justice to the complex array of
themes, issues, debates, contexts and concerns that are involved in a discus-
sion of any single piece of television. Textual analysis on its own is rarely
enough, but when it combines with the wider contextual or ‘extra-textual’
nature of the subject, it can still offer insight and inspiration” (Creeber 84).
3 . Whether Cooper would still be host to BOB is unclear. Surely I am not the
only reader of Scott Frost’s My Life, My Tapes to find more than a few hints
that Coop brought BOB with him to Twin Peaks—that the evil supernatural
parasite had come inside our hero years ago.
Works Cited
Creeber, Glen. “The Joy of Text? Television and Textual Analysis.” C ritical
Studies in Television 1.1 (May 2006): 81–88.
“Exclusive Max Haley Interview.” Twin Peaks Archive . No date. http://twin-
peaksarchive.blogspot.com/2007/07/exclusive-matt-haley-interview.html.
February 9, 2014.
Frost, Scott. My Life, My Tapes: The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent
Dale Cooper . New York: Pocket Books, 1991.
Lavery, David, ed. Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994.