Twin Peaks Return to Twin Peaks
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Return to Twin Peaks Return to Twin Peaks New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television Edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner 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 may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 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 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. 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, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. 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 L ist 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 Twin 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 Twin 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: Twin 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 Twin 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 Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010), as inspiration. Both Full 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 Full and Return are pluralistic, 2 bringing their contributors’ respective expertise and methods into play in illuminating different aspects of the Twin 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 .