University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

Home , Bob (Twin Peaks), Dale Cooper, Dana Ashbrook, Donna Hayward, Double R Diner, Episode 1 (Twin Peaks)

“THE EVIL THAT MEN DO:” GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN TWIN PEAKS

MATT STERN

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2019

To my wonderful parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge and thank my thesis committee:

Dr. Tace Hedrick, Dr. Maddy Coy, and Dr. Jillian Hernandez. This thesis is possible thanks to their advice, encouragement, and support. I would also like to thank our

Center chair, Dr. Bonnie Moradi, and our graduate coordinator, Dr. Kendal Broad, for the work they do that makes our work possible. I am so thankful to have been able to work with such brilliant scholars throughout my master’s education here at the

University of Florida.

I also thank my brother Mike for introducing me to Twin Peaks several years ago.

This thesis would never have happened without his encouragement to come to Florida for school in the first place. I would also like to, again, thank my parents; I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for their support, patience, and wisdom. In addition, I want to thank my best friends from back home in New York and all the new friends I made here in Florida for the support they’ve given me throughout this last year and a half.

Lastly, I want to thank my partner Nick for being so helpful and supportive throughout the writing process.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 7

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

Why Twin Peaks? ...... 10 The Necessity of Feminist Intervention ...... 13 Definitions of Violence and Gender-Based Violence ...... 18

2 TWIN PEAKS, EVIL GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE, AND EMPATHY ...... 22

Gender-Based Violence as “Evil” ...... 25 The Function of Violence in Twin Peaks ...... 31

3 ANALYSES: ON-SCREEN VIOLENCE AND HEGEMONIC IDENTITY POLITICS ...... 46

Analysis of On-Screen Gendered Violence ...... 47 Analysis of Twin Peaks’ Racial Politics ...... 57

4 CONCLUSION ...... 67

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 70

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 72

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1. Laura Palmer’s corpse, unwrapped...... 44

2-2. Sarah Palmer shouts and cries...... 45

3-1. Laura Palmer gazes into the camera as BOB/Leland murders her...... 66

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

“THE EVIL THAT MEN DO:” GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN TWIN PEAKS

Matt Stern

May 2019

Chair: Tace Hedrick Major: Women’s Studies

This thesis is an exploration of the meanings of gender, violence, and power in

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult classic television/film series Twin Peaks. Through an alternative reading of the series’ narrative and imagery, an analysis of representations of gender-based violence in key scenes of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return is presented. The first body chapter reveals how Lynch and Frost attempt to foster both an empathy and a deep unease in the viewer through scenes that construct gender-based violence as a literal “evil” that is enmeshed in

“good” American society and that undergirds fantasies of the American dream. The analysis in the second body chapter illuminates that at times these graphic images of gendered violence contradict and undermine that construction through a seeming incapability on the part of the filmmakers to disinvest from hegemonic notions of masculinity, femininity, and whiteness. Using this analysis, the concluding chapter briefly explores how hegemony privileges the visions of white male filmmakers and suggests that new possibilities for representing both women and gender-based violence could come from a cultural shift that gives access to creating popular media to filmmakers of marginalized identities.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

On April 8, 1990, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult-classic television series Twin

Peaks premiered on ABC and forever changed the landscape of modern TV. Blending elements of the soap opera, crime drama, and supernatural thriller – all wrapped up in a neo-noir style – Twin Peaks captivated audiences with its central question: “Who killed

Laura Palmer?” After solving this question midway through the second season, the show suffered a ratings decline and was cancelled, with the series finale airing on June

10, 1991. Despite its short run, Twin Peaks is remembered for challenging television conventions with its unusual narrative and visuals, strange cast of characters, and – of particular interest to us here – treatment of graphic, sometimes sexualized violence, toward women.

A prequel film written by Lynch and collaborator Robert Engels, and directed by

Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, premiered on August 28, 1992 – a little more than one year after the series ended. The film focuses primarily on Laura Palmer’s

(Sheryl Lee) last week alive and the tragic circumstances leading to her death. A dark film, Fire Walk with Me mixes horror, psychological thriller, and neo-noir elements to depict Laura’s sexual and psychological abuse by her father, Leland Palmer (Ray

Wise), who has been possessed by the otherworldly evil entity named BOB. Critical reception to Fire Walk with Me was mostly negative; audiences were disappointed with the film’s dark tone, obscure themes, and lack of answers to the show’s cliffhanger ending. Over the years, however, the film has garnered more positive reception, especially with the resurgence of Twin Peaks’ popularity (perhaps due to its availability

over streaming services such as Netflix) that is evidenced by the plethora of Twin Peaks blogs and discussion boards on Internet platforms such as Tumblr and Reddit.

Thanks to its surviving popularity, on October 6, 2014, the cable television network Showtime announced that a third season of Twin Peaks, written by Lynch and

Frost and directed by Lynch, was in the works. This third season, Twin Peaks: The

Return, premiered on May 21, 2017 and – once again – proved to audiences through its

18-episode run that even 25 years later, Twin Peaks still has the potential to challenge notions of what a television show can look like. Like Fire Walk with Me, the new series employs psychological thriller elements and neo-noir style, but unlike the film it is slow paced and intentionally dream-like. Through scenes of heightened tension, profound surrealism, and new images of graphic gendered violence, Twin Peaks: The Return aims to unsettle audiences and spark productive conversations about the politics of gender, whiteness, masculinity, and violence.

This thesis will offer an alternative reading of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return based on empathy. My alternative reading is articulated through an analysis of the series’ representations of gender-based violence in key scenes and through scenes in which characters react to situations of gendered violence. In Chapter 2, I will discuss how Lynch and Frost attempt to foster both an empathy and a deep unease in the viewer through scenes that construct gender-based violence as a literal “evil” that is enmeshed in “good” American society and that undergirds fantasies of the American dream. In Chapter 3, however, I will illuminate that at times graphic images of gendered violence contradict and undermine that

construction through a seeming incapability on the part of the filmmakers to disinvest from hegemonic notions of masculinity, femininity, and whiteness.

Why Twin Peaks?

In the early 1990s, Twin Peaks challenged television norms through its unique presentation. For example, the series’ heavy reliance on film conventions such as dramatic sound and long, tense tracking shots was entirely new for television in 1990.

By combining genre conventions of soap operas and crime dramas, Twin Peaks achieved a tone that was simultaneously dreamy and neo noir. Twin Peaks: The Return also challenged television norms through its implementation of a non-linear narrative and its use of disturbing imagery. Through implementing intriguing twists to its mysteries and presenting the audience with a cast of quirky characters – along with surrealist plotlines, imagery, and dialogue – both Twin Peaks shows tell nuanced stories about heterosexual desire and relationships while simultaneously troubling ideologies around hegemonic/deviant sexuality by centering its murder mysteries around incest, femicide, and rape.

This alternative reading will reveal that Twin Peaks takes a different approach to gender-based violence than other TV shows by, I will argue, attempting to foster empathy in the viewer using emotionally charged images. Along with these images, gender-based violence is condemned by the characters and portrayed as an “evil” in the series’ contemplation of what is “good” and what is “evil.” The series also accurately represents the real threat of sexual violence in women’s lives and combats myths about sexual harassment, such as the idea that women suffer sexual violence at the hands of strangers rather than known men (Kelly 1988, 95, 133). Twin Peaks’ use of graphic

violence in scenes of gender-based violence, however, contradicts some of the interventions laid out here.

My reasons for writing this thesis stem from my inner-conflict with Twin Peaks’ contradictions. I have been a huge fan of the show since my brother introduced it to me in high school, but developing a feminist consciousness and a serious commitment to radical feminist politics has thrown my appreciation for the show into disarray. Although the three Twin Peaks texts are quite different, I love them for their genre-bending tendencies, thought-provoking storylines, unconventional use of image and sound, and the well-written characters. Indeed, although Twin Peaks generates contradictory messages about gender-based violence, the series features many three-dimensional, well-acted female characters that are never only victims. Furthermore, I appreciate Twin

Peaks’ skill at representing women’s subjectivity – despite being written and directed by men – for it is surprisingly beyond that of some other related live-action television dramas, such as The X-Files or American Horror Story, that often relegate their female characters to positions of eternal victimization. In contrast, while Twin Peaks certainly portrays women characters as victims in scenes of gender-based violence, they are never only victims for we are often given opportunities to see characters’ experiences of love, mystery, and intrigue in their everyday lives.

In addition to gender, Twin Peaks also makes important interventions about class and capitalism. The alternative reading put forth by this thesis reveals that Lynch and

Frost are critical of the ways in which white men in power use money and influence to gain corrupt means. Furthermore, the filmmakers take a look at the intersections of gender and class to investigate how wealth (or the lack of it) has an impact on women’s

lives. Despite this, Twin Peaks leaves much to be desired in regards to its discussions of race and sexuality. Queer desire is unfortunately absent in Twin Peaks and it is not a very racially diverse series, either. In fact, some of its representations of race – particularly when representing women of color – are quite problematic. As we will see later, characters of color embody the filmmakers’ incapability to de-center whiteness in their narratives.

Although the filmmakers are critical of certain kinds of masculinity, Twin Peaks still operates through white male subjectivity. While I do believe that most of the female characters in the series are well-rounded in that each individual women character is represented to have unique goals and desires, there is still a way in which maleness is held up as the ideal – for example, through sexist language between male characters about not being able to understand women.1 Indeed Twin Peaks investigates how gender-based violence affects American communities through storylines about femicide, rape, and domestic abuse, but a lack of nuanced understandings (on the filmmakers’ parts) about how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in women’s lives plague the show’s ideological formations. At most, the show only creates connections between gender and class by juxtaposing poor women’s situations (for example, Shelly’s struggles to get by as a waitress at the Double R Diner) with that of wealthy women’s

(for example, Catherine Martell and Josie Packard are shown to live lavish lifestyles thanks to their sawmill empire and business connections). By putting so much stock in

1 In Episode 4 of the original series, Cooper remarks to Andy, Sheriff Truman, and Hawk that it’s useless to try to understand women because they were “drawn from a separate different set of blueprints.” In Episode 11, after Cooper tries to help Lucy with her relationship troubles with Andy and fails, Sheriff Truman says that trying to fix women’s problems is like trying to fix potholes on a road.

“good” white masculinity through its protagonist, Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), at the same time that it attempts to critique “evil” white masculinities, Twin Peaks creates contradictory notions of the way violence is shaped by gender, race, and power.

The Necessity of Feminist Intervention

In his canonical text Ways of Seeing, author John Berger describes what I believe Lynch and Frost are attempting with Twin Peaks:

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words) (1977, 33).

Lynch and Frost’s use of genre bending, strange imagery, ominous sounds, mystical and spiritual viewpoints, dream analysis, and abstract dialogue points to the idea that they want to “define our experiences more precisely” where we do not have the words to do so. Gender-based violence is a topic Twin Peaks attempts to address through these techniques, for better or worse.

Why would Lynch and Frost want, or need, to discuss gendered violence? It is certainly not the case that these two filmmakers set out to make arguments about gender-based violence with Twin Peaks. Instead, it is through a feminist alternative reading that one can see how Twin Peaks, with its narrative and imagery so intimately tied to an issue which is also at the heart of feminist thought, ends up located very close to discourses surrounding gender-based violence. For example, Twin Peaks is wrapped up in discourses that focus on the dynamics of gender and power in situations of abuse, the prevalence of rape myths, and the complex relationship victims of gendered violence have with sex and sexuality. In our current sociopolitical climate, it’s quite difficult for filmmakers to produce a text that isn’t close to some area of feminist inquiry.

Because my research interests lie in the area of feminist media studies, I am always engaging with media through a framework that asks: how does this text use gender, race, sexuality, and class to get people thinking about oppressive power structures and inequitable systems?

My purpose in writing this thesis comes from my desire for audiences to engage in more critical analysis. While this might be a large demand, there is no better time than now for the creators of our media to genuinely engage with calls for social change in response to analyses that reveal a text’s sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic investments. As bell hooks argues,

Fierce critical interrogation is sometimes the only practice that can pierce the wall of denial consumers of images construct so as not to face that the real world of image-making is political - that politics of domination inform the way the vast majority of images we consume are constructed and marketed (1992, 5).

When most fans of Twin Peaks watch the series or the film, they are certainly forced to think about gender-based violence and what it means for graphic images of violence to be so unsettling. However, many of these fans are probably not thinking about the potential feminist impact of Twin Peaks or, conversely, what Twin Peaks is saying about gender-based violence when it simultaneously defines gender-based violence as “evil” but also provides graphic violent imagery for viewer pleasure. John Berger writes, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (1977, 8). My feminist eyes see violence, on an interpersonal, structural, and symbolic level, against those located at the intersections of marginalized identities; I cannot ignore how global media characterizes and portrays violence against women, people of color, queer people, poor people, disabled people, and people who fall outside the gender binary.

Bell hooks says in her book Black Looks: Race and Representation that she

“consider[s] crucial both the kinds of images we produce and the way we critically write and talk about images” (1992, 4). I believe that representation in media, although an oft- researched area of feminist studies, is so important for feminist scholars to continue to consider because we are enveloped in global media, and the representations apparent in this media serve to shape ideologies that penetrate our daily lives. As much as I love watching Twin Peaks, it’s difficult for me to come to terms with the injury it potentially causes to viewers’ psyches through its violent imagery. Thus, in discussing the series and its scenes of graphic violence, my goal is certainly not to reify that same injury in text form. Rather, I hope it becomes clear that this thesis, by providing the space for me to work through my issues with a series of texts which have greatly influenced my life, is meant to help envision how filmmakers like David Lynch could better contribute to gender-based violence discourses in future work.

When I say that Twin Peaks has influenced my life, I mean that it has shaped my tastes for other live-action media. Almost everyone who consumes media regularly has at least one text that they would identify themselves a “fan” of. I am certainly a fan of

Twin Peaks: I think about it almost every day and I quote it in my daily life quite often. In

“‘Going native’: Aca-fandom and Deep Participant Observation in Popular Romance

Studies,” author Catherine M. Roach (2014) writes about the phenomenon of “aca- fandom,” in which academics publicly identify as being part of the fan culture of the text they analyze in academic pursuits. She writes,

The aca-fan is the hybrid offspring of two species of parent. The typographic dash or slash represents the union of academic and fan, but also their ongoing tension in a complex new mode that seeks to hold together and embody two distinct forms of agency and engagement in regard to a textual object. In aca-

fandom there is both conjuncture and disjuncture between academics' investment as fans reading the genre for pleasure and their investment as scholars analyzing it for understanding (2014).

Here, aca-fandom comes into play because this thesis combines my personal affinity for

Twin Peaks and my scholarly interest in studying Twin Peaks’ relationship to the field of

Women’s Studies. Positioning myself as an “aca-fan” of Twin Peaks enriches this thesis because it reveals how my alternative reading is supported not just by an analysis of the text but also by extensive knowledge about and deep appreciation (even when I put forth critiques) for the text.

While I have already argued that Twin Peaks is not to be understood as a feminist television series, I believe that it helped create the possibility for other shows to present feminist work not only by opening up space for primetime discussion of gender- based violence, but also by making popular unconventional styles that challenge our conceptions of what makes “good” television. Of course, many of the scenes that make

Twin Peaks so important in this regard are lost in this thesis because here we’re focusing on key scenes of violence rather than the scenes of tender love, ridiculous humor, and mystical happenings. These unconventional styles seen in Twin Peaks are also characteristic of David Lynch’s other work and there is definitely potential for the disruption of societal norms in the kind of media that Lynch and those influenced by him create.

Like Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch could be characterized as an “auteur” because he employs a signature style, for his recurring use of key actors, and because his name points to a specific type of film. In “What is an Author?,” Michel

Foucault ponders on the function of authors in society and discourse. He writes,

...an author's name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. … Finally, the author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author's name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates (1998, 304 - 305).

Thus the name of an author, or in our case here a film/tv auteur, points to a collection of works that are not only differentially classified, but that also participate in a certain discourse that lends meaning to the entertainment we consume. Indeed, film fans, critics, and scholars have used the term “Lynchian” to refer to not only David Lynch’s films, but also to a broader set of media that investigates the human condition through obscure presentations, tense moods, and – often – graphic violence.

In this way, we can understand how certain media is not meant to be simply absorbed uncritically. Certain filmmakers – like Lynch and the other auteurs mentioned above – make art with an intention and it is the audience’s job to decipher its meanings.

While one could argue that some media is meant to be consumed uncritically, this is not the case with Twin Peaks and Lynch’s other work: his goal is to unsettle and make viewers question the reality of their world. Take, for instance, the opening scene of

Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, in which images of the American dream – a white picket fence, clean-cut grass, and sunny skies – are juxtaposed with a severed human ear.

Here, Lynch forces audiences to grapple with the idea that there is unseen violence and corruption enmeshed in our ideas of American goodness and innocence. Unsettling imagery and reality-bending can also be seen in Lynch’s work with dream logic – in which characters have their entire reality questioned by sudden changes in the world

around them or by being transported to other-worldly places – in Twin Peaks, as well as in his films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. So, we might ask, what specific discourses does Lynch’s work contribute to? Lynch’s goal in much of his work is to investigate the horror, the ugliness, and the crime that undergirds fantasies of an innocent modern America. In the next two chapters, I want to focus specifically on

Lynch’s (along with Frost’s) contributions to discourses about gender-based violence and hegemonic white masculinity.

Definitions of Violence and Gender-Based Violence

Violence

“Violence” in this thesis is defined as acts of and threats to commit physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, and/or mental abuse. My decision to understand

“violence” to include threats and intentions to sexually abuse and/or physically abuse is informed by Karen Boyle’s critique of content analysis in her book “Media and Violence:

Gendering the Debates.” She warns that content analysis is often inadequate for analyzing violence because violence is often defined in these analyses as not including threats of violence and, in addition, the analyses do not focus on the metaphorical function of violence in a text (Boyle, 2005, Loc 843). I do not intend for my content analysis in this thesis to fall into the traps Boyle outlines; on the contrary, I am taking into account both acts of and threats of violence in Twin Peaks and I am – rather than simply naming instances of violence – analyzing Twin Peaks in order to understand how violence functions in the series.

When discussing violence in this thesis, my goal is not to separate acts of violence between each other in such a way that we lose sight of how violence is “a behaviour that takes on particular meanings (for the perpetrator, victim and others) in

relation to the specific social, political and cultural context in which it is enacted” (Boyle,

2005, Loc 233). Although the analysis portion of this thesis is divided between key scenes, I do not understand the scenes to be inherently separate from each other.

These scenes – although taking place at different points in the series and thus are subject to their narrative contexts – are integrally connected by their common meanings they represent about gender and sexuality.

Gender-Based Violence

The definition of “gender-based violence,” or at times “gendered violence,” used in this thesis is based on how Nkiru Nnawulezi, Carrie Lippy, Josephine Serrata, and

Rebecca Rodriguez define the term in “Doing Equitable Work in Inequitable Conditions: an Introduction to a Special Issue on Transformative Research Methods in Gender-

Based Violence” as “the physical, psychological, social, and political violence perpetrated by individuals, groups, or institutions against others based on their actual or perceived gender” (2018, 507). What’s productive about Nnawulezi et al.’s definition is the way in which they understand that gender-based violence is influenced by gender, race, class, and sexual inequities. They also understand that gender-based violence is the result of “systems of power and oppression create the conditions for and reflect the violence that occurs interpersonally” (Nnawulezi et al. 2018, 507). Furthermore,

“gender-based violence” is informed by a recognition that gender-based violence itself disproportionately impacts both women and people who do not subscribe to the sex- gender binary.

Another important aspect of my definition of “gender-based violence” for this thesis is related to Liz Kelly’s popularly cited continuum of sexual violence (1988). In

Surviving Sexual Violence, Kelly articulates that discussing men’s sexual violence against women as a continuum describes not only “the extent and range” to which it is proliferated but also the way in which acts of sexual violence “pass into one another” and “cannot be readily distinguished,” or in other words cannot be placed into neat categories. (Kelly 1988, 74, 76). Importantly, the continuum of sexual violence allows us to understand that forms of gender-based violence both in Twin Peaks and in real life are the result of “abuse, intimidation, coercion, intrusion, threat and force” used in patriarchy, and their perpetrators are often not held accountable because of the primacy of hegemonic masculinity (Kelly 1988, 76).

“Gender-based violence” is also related to Karen Boyle’s explanation of

“continuum thinking” in her essay “What’s in a name? Theorising the Inter-relationships of gender and violence,” in which she highlights the importance of making connections between women’s experiences of violence and men’s behavior in acts of violence

(2019, 21). Although Boyle warns that gender-based violence is a “worryingly gender- neutral term” (2019, 32), I am using it with the purposeful intention of acknowledging that male violence in Twin Peaks is indeed gender-based; in other words, I am focusing on the role of men as perpetrators of violence. Boyle writes,

But insisting that gender is not a synonym for women (and gender-based violence is not synonymous with violence against women) is not to argue that we simply add men to existing models – built on women’s experiences of victimisation and survival – and stir. Women and men are differently positioned in relation to gender-based violence. Placing men in gender-based violence more often means making men visible as perpetrators (2019, 31).

Because the goal of this thesis is to reveal how Twin Peaks’ representations of gender- based violence inform and are informed by hegemonic ideas of gender, my analysis

makes men visible – as Boyle suggests above – by recognizing the role of white hegemonic masculinity in male characters’ acts of violence against women characters.

CHAPTER 2 TWIN PEAKS, EVIL GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE, AND EMPATHY

Let’s begin with a brief, crude summary of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return. Twin Peaks begins with authorities finding Laura

Palmer’s corpse wrapped in plastic, washed up on a rocky beach. Laura Palmer was

Twin Peaks’ charming, benevolent homecoming queen; everyone loved her, but almost no one knew about the secret life of drugs and sexual abuse she was hiding. The FBI sends Special Agent Dale Cooper to Twin Peaks to investigate and solve her murder, which he believes was committed by the same killer who murdered Teresa Banks, a young woman from a neighboring town. Cooper quickly comes to appreciate Twin

Peaks and all of its oddities. The show presents us with the ongoing lives of those closest to Laura and interweaves their narratives into the central mystery. The show also delves into mystical and supernatural investigations, in which the key to solving

Laura Palmer’s murder is hidden in a strange dream Cooper has early on in the series in which Laura appears. Midway through season two it is revealed that Laura’s father,

Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), is possessed by an evil entity named BOB (Frank Silva) and it was through his possession that he had been raping her and eventually murdered her.

Leland also murders Laura’s cousin/his niece, Maddy Ferguson (also played by Sheryl

Lee), which leads Cooper and the Twin Peaks authorities to his arrest, confession, and death. Before Leland dies, BOB relinquishes his possession and his whereabouts are left unknown.

After the murder was solved, a new storyline began in which Cooper is being hunted by his former FBI partner, Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), who has gone mad.

Earle is seeking revenge on Cooper because years ago Cooper fell in love with Earle’s

wife, Caroline, who was witness to a crime he and Earle were investigating. During the investigation, Caroline was killed; Cooper believes that Earle committed both the initial crime and Caroline’s murder, which is later confirmed by Earle himself. As the series comes to its end, Earle begins searching for the Black Lodge and White Lodge, two otherworldly places with unknown powers related to evil and good, respectively. It is also revealed that BOB is from the Black Lodge. In the final episode, Earle lures Cooper into the Black Lodge using his girlfriend, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), as bait.

Earle is killed by BOB in the Black Lodge and Cooper encounters his evil doppelganger.

Cooper and Annie escape the Black Lodge, but the series ends on a cliffhanger in which it is revealed that it wasn’t Cooper who left the Black Lodge – it was his evil doppelganger.

The film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, is a prequel to the series. The only answer related to the show that the film provides is that the real Cooper is still trapped in the Black Lodge. The first half hour of the film follows FBI Agents Chet Desmond

(Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) as they investigate the murder of

Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), which was only mentioned in the series. Desmond mysteriously disappears, leading Cooper to take his place in the investigation; he hits a dead end. The remainder of the film takes place one year later and follows the last week of Laura Palmer’s life. Fire Walk with Me presents Laura’s own investigation into who

BOB, who has been sexually abusing her since she was 12 years old, really is. BOB wants to possess Laura like he possesses Leland, but Laura would rather die than be possessed by BOB. She discovers that BOB is possessing her father. After a night of sex and drugs, Leland/BOB finds Laura and kills her. The film ends in the Black Lodge

with Cooper standing by Laura’s side as she (at least, this is my theory) transcends to the White Lodge.

Twin Peaks: The Return provides more questions than answers through its unusual narrative structure, but I will do my best to summarize it. Cooper has been trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years while his evil, darker skinned doppelganger

(from here on called “Evil Cooper”) has been running amok accumulating money and power, leaving violence and tragedy in his path. Like the original series, The Return presents the interweaving lives of characters involved in the narrative; some characters are new and some return from Twin Peaks. The primary narrative centers around the

FBI’s Blue Rose Task Force – which we find out Cooper is part of – and their mission to stop an evil force related to the Black Lodge called “Judy.” Cooper leaves the Black

Lodge on the condition that he has to kill Evil Cooper. However, Cooper leaves the

Black Lodge through unintended means and ends up stuck in the body of Dougie

Jones, a tulpa1 created by the Evil Cooper. As Dougie, Cooper is unable to function like everyone else – instead he is confused, as if in a daze or a trance, and gets by by repeating what others say to him and by, for moments at a time, coming back to himself.

Many different events (both relevant and not relevant to the main story) transpire, and Cooper comes back to himself fully after being electrocuted. Cooper and his friends defeat Evil Cooper, and Cooper resumes his mission to defeat Judy. In order to do this, he goes back in time to prevent Laura Palmer from being murdered, travels to an alternate dimension, and finds Laura – who is now someone else named Carrie Page

1 Lynch borrows the “tulpa” from Tibetan Buddhism; in Twin Peaks: The Return, a tulpa is a sentient being created in someone’s image using the Black Lodge’s magic.

and has almost no re-collection of being Laura – and brings her to her home in Twin

Peaks to see her mother, Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), who we have been led to believe might be possessed by Judy. Sarah is not there, but as they walk away from the house Carrie hears Sarah’s distorted voice shout “Laura!” and Carrie lets out Laura’s signature scream, which cuts off the electricity in the house and the screen cuts to black.

Gender-based violence appears in all of the Twin Peaks texts in several forms and in many different storylines. Acts of physical violence, sexual abuse, emotional torment, and threats by men to commit such acts are rife in both the main storylines and in the side plots. While my summary describes much of the main action centering around Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer, there is in actuality so much more that happens throughout the two different series and the film. The remainder of this thesis will deal with Twin Peaks’ key scenes that contribute to my alternative reading of the series that centers empathic engagements rather than pleasure in gratuitous violence. The majority of these key scenes will be those that are important to the central narrative, but some of these scenes cover events that are technically less important to the story. Still, because they appear in the texts and are certainly memorable, I believe it’s important to incorporate these scenes no matter what their significance.2

Gender-Based Violence as “Evil”

The Twin Peaks mythos is heavily influenced by a world view that says there is a

“good” and “bad” in the world that are constantly at war with each other. The series,

2 Perhaps the insignificance of certain acts of violence to the story actually tells us that Twin Peaks occasionally uses gender-based violence as an unnecessary plot device.

through juxtaposing light, dream-like imagery and dark, moody overtones classifies certain elements of life in the Twin Peaks universe as benevolent and others as evil.

The evil elements of Twin Peaks are those related to the Black Lodge: some forms of evil are seen in characters such as BOB and the Man from Another Place (Michael J.

Anderson), while others are found in themes such as violence, corruption, death, and – I will argue – gender-based violence. Good, on the other hand, is found in connection to the White Lodge through characters such as The Giant/The Fireman (Carel Struycken) and (according to her characterization in The Return) Laura Palmer herself, as well as in themes such as love, friendship, food, and justice. The latter is perhaps the most important for our purposes here, as good is also epitomized by law enforcement systems such as the Twin Peaks Sheriff Station and the FBI, as well as the characters that inhabit positions in these agencies such as Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry

Truman (Michael Ontkean).

The good/evil dichotomy is first explicitly mentioned in Episode 4 of the original series. Sheriff Truman, Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse), and Big Ed Hurley (Everett

McGill) invite Cooper to share coffee and pie at the Double R Diner. It’s nighttime and although there are lights on, the diner is darker than usual. By this point, it’s become clear that Cooper is becoming enthralled by Twin Peaks’ odd charm, which Sheriff

Truman describes as being “a long way from the world.” It’s also clear by this point that mystical happenings are influencing the narrative, as the episode before this one ends with Cooper having a strange, cryptic dream taking place in the Black Lodge; he believes the key to solving Laura Palmer’s murder is hidden in his dream. Sheriff

Truman explains to Cooper that the cost of having so many “good things” in Twin Peaks

is that there is “a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods.

Call it what you want – a darkness, a presence. It takes many forms. But it’s been here as long as anyone can remember.” Truman then reveals that Big Ed, Hawk, and himself are part of a secret society called the Bookhouse Boys that has been around for generations to fight this evil.

The characters do not quite understand what exactly the evil they’re fighting is, but as the series progresses and especially after watching The Return, it becomes clear that the evil is based around the Black Lodge, the evil force Judy, and BOB. This places

Laura’s rape and death at the hands of BOB (and, by extension, gendered violence) in close connection to the evil Cooper, Sheriff Truman, and their friends are opposing.

Once it was revealed in The Return that the FBI had been tracking Judy and other unexplainable phenomenon through the Blue Rose Task Force, Cooper’s reason for coming to Twin Peaks is re-contextualized as both solving Laura Palmer’s murder and stopping the evil – whether it’s BOB or Judy. This establishes Cooper as Twin Peaks’ chief authority on the evil at hand, and this evil is most often expressed in the series through gender-based violence.

In her scathing feminist analysis of Twin Peaks, Sue Lafky (2000) argues that

Twin Peaks is not unlike other media texts that contribute to a culture that continues to place value in gender-based violence and the silencing of it. Aspects of Lafky’s analysis have merit, but I generally disagree with her reading of most scenes. In particular, I want to offer a different reading of one of the most important scenes of the original series, in which Cooper, Sheriff Truman, Agent Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), and Major

Garland Briggs (Don S. Davis) discuss Leland’s revelation as Laura’s killer and BOB’s

host. Lafky reads the scene as a reinforcement of the bonding between men over having saved the day, and furthermore argues that Twin Peaks depends on a harmful ideology of rape that says sexual aggression is connected to “the sickness of individual rapists” rather than cultural factors (2000, 16). However, the mythos of Twin Peaks and the scene itself contradict her argument because the evil the characters are opposing is overtly defined not as related to “sickness” but as the dark underbelly of a society that wants to think of itself as innocent.

In the scene, Sheriff Truman is struggling to believe that BOB is real and responsible for Leland’s actions, but Agents Cooper and Rosenfield understand that

BOB is representative of a greater evil the FBI is pursuing. Agent Cooper, framed by the camera from below so that the viewer looks up to him, attempts to explain this to

Truman, who is on the ground. Major Briggs then asks, in his ever-poetic dialect, “An evil so great in this beautiful world…finally, does it matter what the cause?” The camera cuts back to the view of Cooper from below and he replies, “Yes, because it’s our job to stop it.” Cooper’s position in this scene as being looked up to encourages the audience to believe that what Cooper is saying is the truth, that we should believe him (and by extension, Agent Rosenfield) and understand him as the authority in this situation. Harry stands up, and Rosenfield quotes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when he suggests,

“Maybe that’s all BOB is: the evil that men do.” Lafky writes this quote off, but I have believed ever since my first viewing of the episode that this is one of the most important moments of Twin Peaks in regards to both its cultural value and its mythos: when

Rosenfield says that BOB is the evil men do, he is not using “men” to mean “humans” – he means it literally. By having Cooper reject the possibility that it really was Leland who

was in control during Laura’s murder and by having Rosenfield locate BOB as the evil that men do, the series shoots down the possibility that the evil the FBI is attempting to defeat can be located in individual men’s actions; instead, Agents Cooper and

Rosenfield identify BOB as a spiritual manifestation of gendered violence within the evil they’re pursuing as FBI agents.

Laura Palmer herself is characterized in a way that reflects the show’s world view of good and evil. In the original series, the townsfolk of Twin Peaks regularly spoke of

Laura’s good deeds – for example, starting a “Meals on Wheels” program with the local

Double R Diner that delivers food to the elderly. Her characterization as the inherently benevolent homecoming queen – and the daughter of a successful business lawyer – establishes both notions of the American dream and fantasies of a normative American innocence. “Part 8” of Twin Peaks: The Return even deifies her by revealing to the viewer that Laura was created in what appears to be the White Lodge.3 Through Twin

Peaks’ neo-noir perspective, however, this American dream becomes twisted by

Laura’s abuse. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, we see how Laura’s abuse by her father/BOB makes her feel as if there’s a darkness inside of her (“the evil that men do”) that she attempts to escape via sex and drugs, which are identified by Twin Peaks’ moralistic constructions of fantasies of the American dream as sources of corruption.

While I don’t agree with Lynch and Frost’s moralistic, outdated view of sex and drugs, employing the empathic framing of my alternative reading still reveals how gendered

3 The scene suggests that Laura was placed on Earth by the forces of the White Lodge in order to combat Judy’s entrance into our dimension and her creation of BOB. Agent Cooper’s goal of bringing Laura Palmer back home in the finale of The Return in order to see her mother – who might be possessed by Judy – corroborates this.

violence is consistently defined as the source of “evil” that is part of “good” American society yet simultaneously shatters images the American dream.

Dialogue within the series also exhibits that gender-based violence is condemned as evil by the residents of Twin Peaks and other characters. The most prominent examples of this come from the original series. On several occasions, Bobby

Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), while talking to his married lover Shelly Johnson (Mädchen

Amick), sharply criticizes her husband Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re) for abusing her and at one point says that he’ll kill Leo the next time he lays his hands on her. In another scene, Doctor Hayward (Warren Frost) – the beloved town doctor – gives an emotional reading of Laura Palmer’s autopsy report and sadly remarks “who would do a thing like that?” Although these are small moments, I argue that they are important for Twin

Peaks’ construction of gender-based violence as a form of evil. It’s also important to note here that in these moments, “evil” is connected to a sense of moralism – what is

“good” and what is “bad” – rather than to the supernatural evil Twin Peaks’ FBI is pursuing. Thus, Twin Peaks deals with different kinds of evil simultaneously; for example, when dealing with Leo’s domestic abuse of Shelly, the show more clearly critiques men’s individual actions because it is not tied to BOB, the Black Lodge, or any other mysticism.

Twin Peaks’ representations and discussions of gender-based violence on primetime television are enhanced by its genre blending and bending. By heavily incorporating elements of soap operas and crime dramas, Twin Peaks enables investigations into issues that women face in their daily lives. In “Media and Violence:

Gendering the Debates,” Karen Boyle does not mention Twin Peaks specifically, but

she does discuss the soap opera/crime drama combination on prime television as a precipitator of “spaces for feminist discourse” (2005, Loc 3947). When discussing this combination, she writes,

…representations of rape on prime-time television incorporate feminist anti-rape discourses, by, for example, acknowledging the victim’s experience, challenging rape myths (that she provoked it, rape is the cost of female independence, men ‘can’t help it’ when they rape) and condemning the rapist. The ‘soapification’ of prime-time television – the frequent use of ensemble casts and multiple, overlapping storylines in prime-time dramas – means that the rape story unfolds from the perspectives of several characters who debate not only the facts of a case (which most frequently hinge on consent), but also their meaning (2005, Loc 3967).

Twin Peaks embodies all of the features described here and thus opens space for feminist discourse on gender-based violence. Although Boyle goes on to critique aspects of rape narratives on primetime television, we can understand how the characters’ dealings with gender-based violence open up potential spaces for non- feminist shows to still contribute to feminist discourse. Linda Williams captures this idea when she describes that the use of sex, violence, and emotion in popular genres is a

“cultural form of problem solving” (1991, 9). As we will see in the next section, the role of sex, violence, and emotion come up again as I reveal that Twin Peaks contributes to feminist discourse by placing emphasis on the role of viewer empathy in the meaning- making process.

The Function of Violence in Twin Peaks

The original Twin Peaks is, at its core, a story about gender-based violence: the series revolves around a woman’s rape and murder. Laura’s murder facilitates the events of the show and are the basis of Cooper’s investigations into the evil of the Black

Lodge. Furthermore, Laura’s corpse wrapped in plastic quickly became one of the show’s most popular images; it appeared on posters, promotional material, and the

covers of DVD releases. Indeed, this is how the audience was first introduced to Laura, just minutes into the pilot episode. After Andy (Harry Goaz) breaks down in sobs while taking pictures of her tightly wrapped body (even before knowing who it is), Sheriff

Truman and Doctor Hayward turn her over, and Sheriff Truman lifts the plastic from her face. A light dusting of sand mixed with mica crosses her face like a spray of freckles, her lips are almost an electric blue, and her hair is artfully arranged around her face like the Sun’s corona (Figure 2-1). Her face is beautiful, if a little eerie, seemingly untouched by violence (yet we still know she was murdered). “Laura Palmer...” Sheriff Truman sadly remarks as Angelo Badalamenti’s lamenting track “Laura Palmer’s Theme” plays.

This highly aestheticized image of Laura – cold, blue, and dead yet still beautiful – epitomizes the show’s view of gendered violence as enmeshed within American society yet hidden by fantasies of beauty, innocence, and the American dream.4 The strength of the image is proven by its popularity, but can’t its popularity also be explained by our fascination with women and death? There isn’t space here to attempt to answer questions related to why Western society is obsessed with images of women being beaten, raped, and killed. Rather, I want to analyze how Twin Peaks both contributes to and resists this societal fascination that consistently reifies gender norms.

With that in mind, we can turn to the real question at hand: what is the function of violence in Twin Peaks? As I put forth in the introduction, Twin Peaks uses emotionally provocative imagery to conjure up feelings of empathy in the viewer. This thesis’ alternative reading reveals that scenes of gender-based violence in Twin Peaks – rather

4 Through this alternative reading I propose, the show’s viewpoint here explains Laura’s characterization as a divine (“good”) yet tragic (“evil”) figure that I discussed in the previous section.

than being graphic for the sake of being gratuitous – are graphic because within them there is potential to experience an affectively negative response through “feeling into” the victim of violence (Ganczarek et al. 2018, 141). By being made uncomfortable and disturbed by such violence, the audience would understand that gender-based violence is something to condemn rather than glorify. Much like Linda Williams identifies the potential of the “gross” genres of pornography, horror, and melodrama to have affective responses on audiences through their excess, empathy is invoked in Twin Peaks via

“the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” (1991, 4). In order to fully understand how empathy is invoked by the series, we must first understand the term and take a look at how scholars working on questions of empathic responses theorize how art can invoke empathy.

Empathy is defined as the action or capacity of not only understanding but experiencing the feelings and/or thoughts of another.5 Because empathy is so closely tied to the experience of emotions, Twin Peaks can be understood as a highly empathic text as – I argue – it is heavily invested in invoking emotions through imagery and sound. In his investigations into the value of empathy in art therapy in “Affect

Regulation, Mirror Neurons, and the Third Hand: Formulating Mindful Empathic Art

Interventions,” Michael Franklin writes that because another’s emotions are not accessed through the senses, emotions are instead accessed through empathy:

5 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German aesthetics scholars such as Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps developed the concept of “Einfühlung,” which literally translates to “feeling into” (Ganczarek et al. 2018, 141). According to Ganczarek et al. in their essay “From ‘Einfühlung’ to Empathy: Exploring the Relationship Between Aesthetic and Interpersonal Experience,” in “Einfühlung,” a person projects oneself into “another body or environment” in order to understand “how it feels to be in that other body or environment” (2018, 141, emphasis in original). Using the idea that one human could feel into the experience of another human being, Edward Titchener coined the term “empathy” in 1909 for the English language (Ganczarek et al. 2018, 141).

“empathy is instinctually an intersubjective, imaginal practice of entering the world of another” (2010, 161). By entering the world of a text, audience members are invited to experience intersubjective transactions with characters in order to glean meanings and messages; in empathic engagements with Twin Peaks, viewers experience a range of emotions, from joy at successes in love and friendships to disgust at images of women being murdered.

According to Joanna Ganczarek, Thomas Hünefeldt, and Marta Olivetti

Belardinelli, there are two different notions of empathy: aesthetic empathy and interpersonal empathy. They write,

[empathy] is usually applied to other human beings, but it is also readily applied to works of art, thus giving rise to the distinction between aesthetic and interpersonal “empathy”... Aesthetic and interpersonal “empathy” therefore differs mainly in that interpersonal “empathy” concerns other human beings, whereas aesthetic “empathy” concerns human artefacts, especially those representing human beings or human environments (2018, 142).

Based on this quote, we can see how this thesis is concerned with aesthetic empathy because it is dealing with art (film and television) that represents both human beings and environments. Aesthetic empathy and its connection to embodied representations is particularly relevant to scenes of gendered violence because, as we will see in the next chapter, the scenes feature heavy emphasis on women’s bodies and men’s participation in violence against them.

Further meditation on empathy requires understanding the experience of parasocial interaction, in which an audience member feels a friendship-like bond with onscreen personae and might even feel that they are part of the onscreen personae’s conversations and interactions (Cummins and Cui 2014, 723). The degree to which one experiences parasocial interaction varies by the characteristics of the message being

portrayed by a media text and an individual viewer’s ability to engage in “cognitive empathy” through perspective taking (Cummins and Cui 2014, 724). For example, R.

Glenn Cummins and Boni Cui suggest in their essay “Reconceptualizing Address in

Television Programming: The Effect of Address and Affective Empathy on Viewer

Experience of Parasocial Interaction” that viewers who experience “mood contagion” or

“emotional contagion” – in which one “spontaneously adopt[s] the emotions of others” – more easily experience parasocial interactions (2014, 728).

Experiences of parasocial interaction explain how empathy can be cultivated in viewers, especially in scenes that feature conversations and the conveying of verbal messages. Scenes of graphic violence, on the other hand, are more relevantly understood through the embodied nature of aesthetic empathy. Of course, I cannot assume all viewers of Twin Peaks have sufficient skills at engaging with empathy through perspective taking. However, it’s important to remember that my goal here is not to ascertain what viewers are gleaning from their watching of Twin Peaks but rather what an alternative reading of Twin Peaks centered on empathy reveals based on how the filmmakers represent gender-based violence.

Scenes in which empathy is cultivated in the viewer that do not feature violence yet still discuss the topic of gender-based violence illuminate how Twin Peaks opens up space for feminist discourse about gender-based violence on television. Across David

Lynch’s work – particularly in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive – there is a common theme of women experiencing misery which is embodied by crying and sobbing. Although images of women crying are not at all uncommon in Western media,

Lynch’s construction of scenes of women crying feel different to watch because they

are, in a sense, realistic: rather than keeping the scenes short and to the point, Lynch seems to intentionally draw visceral reactions from the audience using extended images and sounds of women in emotional distress. While they are certainly upsetting to watch, these scenes are powerful because they articulate the effects of gendered violence on women. Many of the female characters in Twin Peaks are displayed crying at some point, but there are two specific scenes of women crying to focus on for this alternative reading.

The first scene comes in the pilot episode of the original Twin Peaks, when

Laura’s mother, Sarah Palmer, discovers her daughter is dead. Leland, who is at work at the Great Northern Hotel, is on the phone with Sarah (to ask if he knows where Laura is) when he receives a visit from Sheriff Truman. As soon as Sarah realizes why Sheriff

Truman is visiting Leland, we see her begin to break down in the kitchen, and we hear her sob and shout “Laura!” over the phone whenever the scene shifts to Leland and

Sheriff Truman. “Laura Palmer’s Theme” plays again to mark the tragic circumstances of the scene. When Sheriff Truman tells Leland that he’s there because of Laura,

Leland drops the phone in shock and the camera cuts back to a close-up on Sarah sobbing and shouting “No! Oh, no!” Leland leaves with Sheriff Truman, and the scene ends with a slow pan over the telephone in the Great Northern and Sarah’s shots, and then a jump cut to Sarah screaming, “No!” and pulling on her hair. Sarah’s screams and cries, with their shrill tones and haunting sadness, have the potential to instantiate a particularly visceral reaction in viewers. Along with her cries, reading Sarah’s contorted crying face through a framework of empathy, in which we seek to understand her despair, instantiates that same kind of visceral reaction (Figure 2-2). Witnessing a

mother’s distress at her daughter’s murder just ten minutes into the pilot sets the tone for the series’ darkest moments. Through cultivating empathy via shots and sounds of

Sarah crying and shouting, Twin Peaks tells the audience that gender-based violence affects those around the victim to a profound degree.

This sort of empathy is cultivated in The Return as well. The second example of women crying I want to discuss is found in Part 16, when Diane (Laura Dern) tells FBI

Agents Gordon Cole (David Lynch), Albert Rosenfield, and Tammy Preston (Chrysta

Bell) about the time Evil Cooper visited her after his disappearance. A lot of plot-driving elements happen in this scene, but I will focus specifically on the empathy drawn from

Dern’s performance. In the scene, music does not play and the camera shifts between shots of Diane in a chair, Gordon in a chair, and Tammy and Albert sitting behind a desk. Diane explains to them how Cooper came into her apartment and they talked for a while, but she didn’t realize it wasn’t the real Cooper until they kissed. The camera keeps its focus on Diane as she closes her eyes and dramatically raises her right hand close to her face, as if she’s re-experiencing the moment. As she begins to cry, she says that Evil Cooper “saw the fear in her” and she reveals that he raped her. She says twice, “he raped me,” to emphasize the severity of the act on her psyche and the camera cuts to Gordon and Albert giving each other a look to signal that rape is not something they’d expect of Agent Cooper. After this, Diane begins to realize that she is in fact a tulpa created by Evil Cooper based on the actual Diane and continues to sob as she repeats, “I’m not me!”6 She then attempts to shoot Gordon in her hysterics by

6 To be clear, Evil Cooper raped the real Diane, then created a tulpa of her. Thus, this tulpa Diane is remembering what happened to the actual Diane. The distinction between real and tulpa Diane is purposely blurred to emphasize how these experiences fracture Diane’s sense of self.

pulling a pistol from her hand purse, but Albert and Tammy shoot her first and she disappears, revealing to the audience that she was a tulpa. Diane’s sobbing and admission of rape, in this alternative reading, not only invokes empathy but also comments on the impact sexual violence has on one’s personhood; just as Evil

Cooper’s creation of a Diane tulpa literally fractured Diane into two different beings, we see how rape also fractured Diane’s sense of self to the point that she repressed all of this information until it was time to tell her FBI colleagues what happened.

In addition to these scenes of female characters crying, empathy is also cultivated in Twin Peaks through screaming. In particular, Laura Palmer’s harrowing scream is used multiple times throughout the three Twin Peaks texts – not just when she’s being murdered – to emphasize the horror of acts of gender-based violence against her by BOB/Leland. Laura’s actress Sheryl Lee is able to let out a blood curdling scream that is arguably more physically affecting than those heard in horror films, and indeed when Laura’s screaming is used in a scene it signals that something horrific is happening. When it comes to Laura’s two murder scenes (once in the original series and once in the film), Lynch uses her screams to further heighten the tragedy of her death and in turn invoke empathy in the viewer for her experiences of gender-based violence. Although Laura’s screaming is certainly unpleasant to experience, its capacity to sonically represent the horrors of gendered violence prove, in this alternative reading, that Twin Peaks has the potential to unsettle audiences with violence rather than pleasing them.

Randi Davenport, in “The Knowing Spectator of Twin Peaks: Culture, Feminism, and Family Violence,” agrees that Twin Peaks can unsettle audiences with violence

rather than feed into a pleasure for battered women. Davenport points to Twin Peaks’ potential to shed light on the issue of gender-based violence and domestic abuse through the use of its graphic imagery (1993). She writes,

I would like to suggest that in its exploration of the behavior of abusive men and the damage suffered by their victims, Twin Peaks is informed by, rather than at odds with, recent feminist discussions about sexual violence. Indeed, the series exposes the regularity with which women find themselves victimized by men.

By sympathetically focusing its audience’s attention on the sexual victimization of women, Twin Peaks demands that its audience understand not just that sexual violence occurs, but that our culture tolerates a range of practices that serve to authorize violence against women. (Davenport 1993, 255)

In her insensitively titled essay, “Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks”

Diana Hume George clearly does not agree with Davenport. Hume George is concerned with the proliferation of images of violence against women and she sees

Lynch’s “fetish for victimized women” as dangerous (Hume George 1995, 115). She writes, “In a society as riddled with domestic violence as ours, it’s risky business to feed a mass audience the idea that the girl next door might be a whore, that the seductive adolescent perhaps wants a real man to hurt her” (Hume George 1995, 115).

Furthermore, she questions Davenport’s argument that Frost and Lynch were attempting to critique gendered violence and incest in Twin Peaks. She writes,

If I, a feminist, well-informed about these issues, so severely misread, if I miss the point and the boat, then what chance is there that the mass viewership, with a high stake in repressing truths about family life, and massive unconscious misogyny, will understand what Davenport takes to be the series’ feminist intent? It must be mammothly subtle. (Hume George 1995, 117)

While it is possible that viewers will watch the show uncritically and without feminist consciousness, I disagree that the series is so subtle about its stance on gender-based

violence that it goes unnoticed. On the contrary, I would argue that the series calls attention to the violent and systemic nature of sexism in a way that challenges the complicity with which patriarchal society views violence in both media and real life.

Indeed, Davenport’s essay supports this argument. She argues that gender- based violence is already featured in most television shows in a way that is actually more problematic than in Twin Peaks because it is presented in such a “familiar form” that audiences do not question the violence that occurs to female characters (Davenport

1993, 255). In contrast, she argues, Twin Peaks calls attention to the issue by being so graphic that it becomes unfamiliar: “What made Twin Peaks hard to watch was its powerful suggestion that sexual violence is not pleasurable or natural but is common and is practiced by lots of seemingly average men” (Davenport 1993, 255). Davenport also highlights that sympathy plays a role in this by making audiences sympathize with victims of violence and “regard as unacceptable those behaviors that permit men to victimize women” (Davenport 1993, 256). I argue that it is empathy with the characters rather than sympathy that fuels a critical perspective on Twin Peaks because empathy encourages the audience to feel emotions with a character while sympathy encourages the audience to feel a certain way, often pity, for a character. The characterization of the women in Twin Peaks supports Davenport’s argument because all of the main female characters – even those who act antagonistically such as Catherine Martell (Piper

Laurie) and Josie Packard (Joan Chen) – are humanized through their dynamic personalities and growth.

Sue Lafky disagrees with this in her essay “Gender, Power, and Culture in the

Televisual World of Twin Peaks: A Feminist Critique,” which I mentioned earlier in this

chapter. Lafky sees Twin Peaks as contributing to a culture that silences victims of violence and, in particular, incest. She points out that “incest” is never said aloud by a character in the show (2000, 15), even after it is revealed in the middle of season two that Laura was raped and murdered by her father who was possessed by an evil entity from the Black Lodge. As Leland dies in custody and BOB relinquishes his possession over him, he reveals that BOB came to inhabit him through sexual abuse as well. Lafky argues that at this point, the show should have critiqued patriarchy and its influence on abusive behavior (Lafky 2000, 15). I agree that Twin Peaks certainly would have benefitted from a more open discussion of the relationship between sexual abuse, incest, and patriarchal structures. After Leland’s death, the particularities of his crime are only discussed twice in the original series: once directly after the revelation in the scene I analyzed earlier with Cooper, Truman, Rosenfield, and Briggs, and once in the next episode, when Agent Cooper comforts Laura’s mother, Sarah Palmer. Immediately after, all of the characters congregate at a memorial for Leland and Laura. The mood at this memorial is far too cheery, and most of the characters don’t acknowledge what has occurred. By the end of the episode, the series’ new mystery begins and we do not return to Laura Palmer’s story until the film.7

However, it’s Laura’s story that Davenport finds so important for feminists. She argues that Twin Peaks offers a challenge to “the pornographic trope of the Seductive

Daughter” and, furthermore, takes care not to put blame on the victims of violence, abuse, and assault (Davenport 1993, 256). Davenport briefly explains the Seductive

7 We might blame this episode’s poor handling of the memorial on the fact that CBS forced Lynch and Frost to reveal Laura’s killer earlier than they wanted to, but it is still nonetheless a glaring issue in a show that, in most other situations, shows a lot of care for its main characters.

Daughter’s construction in literary works such as Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, and in psychiatric texts on incest and rape, as a “nymphet” who participates in her own rape by using her uncontrollable sexual appeal and appetite to draw her father into an incestuous relationship (Davenport 1993, 256-257). This model of victim blaming, much like the tiresome “she asked for it” argument, perpetuates sexist ideologies that excuse rape, rapists, and heterosexist structures’ investment in rape culture. Davenport writes,

“By holding the incestuous father responsible for activities that it explicitly defines as criminal, Twin Peaks actively displaces the image of the Seductive Daughter”

(Davenport 1993, 257). I agree with this argument, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me makes an even stronger case against the Seductive Daughter by portraying Laura

Palmer as an active subject struggling to survive ongoing sexual abuse at the same time that she is investigating who BOB really is and how her abuse is connected with the strange, supernatural phenomenon happening around her.

I agree with Lafky that it is disappointing that the original series does not overtly contextualize incest and gender-based violence as connected to patriarchy. Indeed, there are several instances in which Twin Peaks misses several opportunities to take issue with oppressive structures and their effects on women. We might even critique the series, as Lafky does, for its investment in law enforcement and the FBI as an unequivocally benevolent system (Lafky 2000, 11).8 However, this does not mean that

Twin Peaks fails to engage with a critique of gender and culture; just because characters in the series do not outright say “gender-based violence is evil and

8 The FBI in Twin Peaks does not resemble the FBI in other television shows or in real life because its unconventional agents come to their conclusions through fantastical means – such as through dreams – rather than through “evidence.”

connected to men’s feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies under patriarchy” does not mean that the show does not portray this argument in other ways. In the next chapter, I will perform an analysis that will illuminate how Twin Peaks contributes to discourse on gender and violence through empathy in such a way that it attempts to make these interventions; however, it will also become clear that there are ways in which the series contradicts itself.

Figure 2-1. Laura Palmer’s corpse, unwrapped. Frost, M. and Lynch, D. (Writers), & Lynch, D. (Director). 1990. “Pilot.” In M. Frost and D. Lynch (Producer), Twin Peaks. Los Angeles, CA: CBS Television Distribution.

Figure 2-2. Sarah Palmer shouts and cries. Frost, M. and Lynch, D. (Writers), & Lynch, D. (Director). 1990. “Pilot.” In M. Frost and D. Lynch (Producer), Twin Peaks. Los Angeles, CA: CBS Television Distribution.

CHAPTER 3 ANALYSES: ON-SCREEN VIOLENCE AND HEGEMONIC IDENTITY POLITICS

In this chapter, I will focus on analyzing key scenes of gender-based violence in the three Twin Peaks texts. Built into this analysis will be contemplations on what Twin

Peaks successfully articulates about gender-based violence for feminists and, conversely, how it contradicts itself through normative ideas about gender, race, and sexuality in relation to power. What we will see through this alternative reading of the series is that aesthetic empathy is cultivated in the scenes to create spaces for Twin

Peaks to articulate to the audience that gender-based violence is a real issue in women’s lives. However, the filmmaker’s critique of gender-based violence is limited by its representations of masculinity and femininity, as well as by investments in white subjectivity.

Although this was my first time performing critical analysis on the original Twin

Peaks and Fire Walk with Me, I have watched both texts countless times. Because The

Return was shown over the course of several months in 2017, this is only my third time watching it and the first time performing a critical analysis of it. In all honesty, it’s difficult to discuss the three texts together because they are quite different from each other in terms of their narrative focus and storytelling style. What bridges the texts together, other than the overall Twin Peaks mythos, is their dealings with surreal representations of American life and their engagements with representations of gender, class, and race.

While there is no space in this thesis for an analysis of how Twin Peaks, in 1990, dealt with gender-based violence compared to The Return in 2017, this is an interesting project for future research. In the meantime, it’s important to remember that each text is a product of its temporal sociopolitical context. Indeed, The Return is more politically

radical than Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me thanks to its critique of classism and capitalism, but unfortunately its view of gender and violence has not shifted significantly.

As this analysis will illuminate, based on my critical watch-through of the three

Twin Peaks texts, violence and gender in Twin Peaks plays out in a cycle. Normative ideas about masculinity as dominant and femininity as passive, as well as the idea that men are entitled to women’s bodies, are critiqued by the key scenes that follow.

However, we will also see that in some ways, the filmmakers reify these normative ideas by constructing men as powerful and women as helpless in the scenes. While the filmmakers are careful not to glorify male characters’ violence in the scenes – which follows with their construction of gender-based violence as “evil” – the female characters’ construction in some scenes as weak, helpless, and/or sexualized undermines the potential some of these scenes might have for a feminist critique of gender-based violence.

Analysis of On-Screen Gendered Violence

In this section, I will explore scenes of men perpetrating acts of violence and making threats to enact violence toward women. While I am taking into account many instances of men committing or threatening to commit acts of violence toward women throughout Twin Peaks, the key scenes I focus on in this analysis are Laura Palmer’s two death scenes, Maddy Ferguson’s death scene, and any scenes of violence between

Shelly and Leo Johnson. Rather than dividing this section up by the types of violence or by the scenes themselves, this section is divided by common elements that several scenes share between each other. This strategy, I hope, will be more productive for understanding how gender-based violence is represented in Twin Peaks rather than

simply naming and describing each scene, which I believe might only reify the effects of violence.

Femicide and Male Aggression

When it comes to scenes of women characters being murdered, “femicide” becomes a useful term and framework for thinking through how on-screen death becomes gendered. In “What’s in a name? Theorising the Inter-relationships of gender and violence,” Karen Boyle writes,

The coining of [femicide] is not (only) a question of semantics – highlighting the linguistic male assumption in homicide – but rather names a specific form of homicide: the murder of women because they are women. This is differentiated not only from male homicide but also from the murder of women in other contexts (e.g. indiscriminate spree shootings). Femicide tells us both who the victim is and why they have been targeted. Although femicide remains under-researched (Weil, 2016), one of the advantages of conceptualising the murder of women because they are women – as distinct from female homicide – is that it allows us to understand femicide on the continuum of (men’s) violence against women (Radford and Russell, 1992) (2019, 24, emphasis in original).

There is certainly a distinction to be made between Boyle’s concern with the murder of real-life women and my focus in this thesis on Twin Peaks’ fictional women. Despite this, Boyle’s understanding of femicide enriches this analysis because it describes how women being killed in Twin Peaks does something other than drive the narrative: it purposefully, and contradictorily, titillates and disturbs the audience by creating an understanding that women characters are killed by men because they are women.

This is in contrast to scenes in which men are killed in Twin Peaks. These scenes are often much shorter, especially if committed with a gun, and do not emphasize the brutality of violence. As Linda Williams writes, “While male victims in horror films may shudder and scream as well, it has long been a dictum of the genre that women make the best victims” (1991, 5). This holds true for the moments of Twin

Peaks in which horror conventions are evident, for most scenes of femicide are lengthily drawn out and highly aestheticized by the use of cinematic techniques such as strobing lights (Laura’s death in both the original series and the film), varying motion speeds

(Maddy’s death), screen tears (Phyllis’s death), and heightened levels of gruesome

Foley such as the sloshing of flesh, blood, and guts (Lorraine’s death). While we might question if such graphic violence really is useful for discussing gender-based violence, I contend that the deaths of women characters are at the very least not gratuitous and, importantly, point to the horrific end-point of acts of gendered violence.

On the other hand, there is a danger that these kinds of images reify gender- based violence – especially if we are to assume that some viewers will find more pleasure than discomfort in the graphic images. However, Twin Peaks might be understood differently because of its emphasis on male aggression. In the quote above,

Boyle articulates that the term femicide locates men’s role as perpetrators in acts of gender-based violence. Femicide in Twin Peaks follows this model, as the filmmakers do not hide who is committing the murders or attempt to reduce male characters’ screen time in the scenes. Instead, Twin Peaks shows the male characters committing murders in an extremely negative light through emphasizing the evil intentions behind their aggression; the most prominent example comes from BOB’s shouts of maniacal laughter and the claps of thunder that occur alongside them during Laura’s murder in the original series.

Empathy

Central to my alternative reading, I have argued that Twin Peaks cultivates viewer empathy for women in scenes of gender-based violence. Through this empathy,

the filmmakers can articulate to the audience that gender-based violence is an evil that should not be reproduced. Virtually every scene of gendered violence engages with empathy via images and/or sounds of female victims of gender-based violence. Similar to the ways in which Sarah Palmer’s and Diane’s crying, which I discussed in the previous chapter, invokes empathy in viewers via images and sounds of their misery, scenes of gender-based violence cultivate empathy by displaying the female victims of gender-based violence in fear and in pain.

In some instances, empathy can be instantiated simply by viewing women experience pain at the hands of men. In scenes where women are threatened by men – for example, when Malcom (Nicholas Love) puts his hands on Donna Hayward (Lara

Flynn Boyle) and threatens to kill her or when Harold (Lenny Von Dohlen) confronts

Maddy and Donna with a gardening tool – women’s faces and body language display fear for their lives. This kind of empathy cultivated from viewing women in fear is also prevalent in scenes of domestic violence, such as when Leo assaults Shelly for misplacing his favorite shirt in Episode 1 of the original series.1 Shelly brought home pie for Leo, but he approaches her in an intimidating matter and slaps it out of her hands.

Shelly backs herself into the corner of their half-built home as Leo tells her he’s going to

“teach [her] a lesson.” Threatening music is interlaced with rock music on the radio that

Leo turns on to stifle the sounds of his violence. “This is going to hurt you,” he says as he approaches, swinging the sock over his head. The swinging sound of the sock is highlighted as Shelly cries, “Please, Leo, no!” The scene ends as the camera, via Leo’s perspective, approaches Shelly who sinks down into the corner and hides in fear. By

1 In actuality, Shelly hid the shirt because it mysteriously had blood on it.

creating a sense of empathy in the audience for Shelly’s situation so early in the series and a distrust for Leo, Twin Peaks accurately constructs the cruelty and unjustifiability of acts of domestic violence.

Empathic imagery becomes more extreme when it comes to scenes of femicide.

In her analysis of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, author Lindsay Hallam remarks that experiencing Laura’s death in the film “creates a strong gut response, and a powerful emotional impact” (2018, 67). This simultaneously embodied and emotional reaction is exactly the kind of empathic response I’ve been describing. Another prominent example of this is in Laura’s murder scene in the original series; at one point, we’re presented with interweaving shots of Laura looking into the camera and screaming, and BOB swinging downward with a blunt object. Laura screams and grunts as pain is inflicted upon her. Laura’s holding gaze into the camera at the audience sparks empathy, as if she is begging the viewer for help (Figure 3-1). Similar instantiations of empathy occur during Maddy’s graphic murder, although instead of Maddy looking into the camera, she reaches out to the audience via her screams: “Somebody help me!” she shouts as she attempts to get away from BOB/Leland.

As we see with Maddy, empathy can also be evoked by sound. Screams in terror, especially Laura’s screams as mentioned in the previous chapter, can create a corporeal reaction in viewers based on empathy. Music can also play a role in constructing a scene’s empathic capabilities, for example when Luigi Cherubini’s operatic “Requiem in C Minor” floods Laura’s murder scene in Fire Walk with Me with painful emotion (Hallam 2018, 66). Just as easily, however, diegetic silence in a scene – such as when Evil Cooper kills Phyllis or Darya The Return – can create a sense of

tension, doom, and bleakness that could fuel empathy for a character’s experience of violence through revealing the fragility of human mortality.

Men’s Sense of Entitlement to Women’s Bodies

As I detailed in the introductory chapter, based on Liz Kelly’s formulations of the continuum of sexual violence, gender-based violence can be the result of several elements of aggressive male behavior, including “intrusion” (1988, 76). Twin Peaks critiques men’s acts of intrusion on women’s bodies by highlighting their sense of entitlement to women. Rather than glorifying male characters’ unwanted sexual abuse,

Twin Peaks makes abuse ugly and uncomfortable to watch.

There is quite a bit of discussion of sexual abuse and threats by men to commit it throughout Twin Peaks, but there are very few scenes of acts of sexual violence. The most noteworthy occurrence of sexual violence in the series comes toward the end of

Fire Walk with Me, when Laura is assaulted by BOB in her own bed. At first, Laura seems to be reveling in pleasuring herself, but then strobing lights that indicate Black

Lodge forces are near begin and BOB comes in through Laura’s window. BOB slowly climbs on top of Laura and her pleasure turns into pain as BOB assaults her. BOB’s grunting noises and contorted face exhibit the gruesome nature of sexual violence. The camera shifts between close-ups of Laura and BOB, as she demands to know who BOB really is through moans of pain. Eventually, with his head in her hands, she realizes that

BOB is her father as we’re presented with a close-up shot of Leland in BOB’s place.

This scene, which ends with the revelation of incest, is so unpleasant precisely because it portrays the horrific nature of men’s sexual abuse of women through their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies.

Male characters’ sense of entitlement to female characters’ bodies is also displayed in threats. In these situations, particularly in The Return, the filmmakers encourage the audience to feel disgusted by these male characters’ public displays of harassment. Two key scenes in particular show this: the first is when Richard Horne

(Eamon Farren) harasses Charlotte (Grace Victoria Cox) at the Roadhouse. The show had already established Richard as a “bad boy” type, but it then takes his characterization to the extreme when he invites Charlotte over to sit next to him, puts his hand around her neck, and shouts in her ear, “I’m gonna laugh when I fuck you, bitch!” In the second example, a random man comes onto Sarah Palmer at a bar. When she thwarts his advances, he calls her a “bull-dyke lesbo” and threatens to “fucking pull

[her] lesbo titties off.” Sarah retaliates by revealing she is possessed by some sort of evil (is it Judy?) and kills the man by biting a chunk of flesh out of his neck. The discomfort evoked in these two scenes at men’s behavior is used to critique the unnecessary intrusion and harassment men commit toward women when they feel a sense of entitlement to their bodies.

Sexuality and Death

In some scenes of femicide, Twin Peaks portrays a problematic connection between sexuality and death. In Laura’s death scenes and in Darya’s (Nicole LaLiberte) death scene in The Return, the women wear sexy lingerie. In Laura’s death scene in the film and in Darya’s death scene, this is not particularly an issue because they are not framed within the male gaze. In Laura’s death scene in the original series, however, there is more of a case that Laura’s death becomes sexualized. In the scene, when the camera cuts back to Laura now still and dead, strobing lights flash and the camera pans

over her body, highlighting her pink corset which has now been dirtied and bloodied.

The camera then pans up to BOB as he screams into the night. Laura’s body is indeed framed by the male gaze here (even if momentarily) and that unfortunately undermines the empathic potential of this scene, particularly because – as I argued earlier – its empathic capabilities are so strong.

BOB’s presence as an evil being that thrives on death, pain, and sex also places sexuality into Maddy’s death scene. At one point in the scene, after inflicting some pain on Maddy, Leland brings her in close, cries, and slowly spins her around as if slow dancing.2 The scene then interweaves these shots with BOB, in slow motion, sexually writhing on Maddy and kissing along her jaw line. Here, Lynch mixes the motif of dancing attached to Leland with the motif of sexual abuse attached to BOB to create a harrowing murder scene. This scene, compared with Laura’s death scene, more successfully represents the connection between sexuality and death in Twin Peaks’ mythos by resisting offering sexualized images of the female victim.

Sex can also become linked to death through music. Particularly, in the scene in which Jean Renault (Michael Parks) kills Blackie (Victoria Catlin) in her brothel One

Eyed Jack’s, sensual jazz music plays as we see them kiss through Sheriff Truman’s voyeuristic perspective. A horn in the jazz track lets out a distinguished high note as we hear the knife that was up Jean’s sleeve penetrate her back. Still at her mouth, he lays her down on the ground and sensually licks her blood off his lips. While this scene also does not portray sexualized imagery of female victims of violence, the sexual elements

2 Before this, Leland’s affinity for dancing was a motif the show often used in moments of both humor and sadness.

of the scene represents that for “bad” women, sex can be dangerous and fatal. Indeed,

Laura Mulvey notes that dangerous women with on-screen “established guilt” (1988, 66) experience fetishistic scopophilia from spectators (here, the audience is the spectator via Sheriff Truman’s voyeurism) that results in either “punishment or forgiveness” (1988,

64). Here, and in most instances, the end result is punishment.

Men’s Dominance Over Women

Earlier, I suggested that violence in Twin Peaks is a cycle: the filmmakers critique hegemonic gender constructions in scenes of violence at the same time that normative ideas of gender are, nonetheless, constructed by the scenes. This process occurs as the result of men’s placement over women in scenes of gender-based violence, which re-establishes hegemonic notions of men’s dominance and women’s passivity. For example, in the scene with Jean and Blackie I just described, Jean’s placement over

Blackie, especially as he lowers her to the ground with himself on top, represents the control and action men have privilege to in scenes of violence. Blackie’s submission to

Jean’s kisses and her quick death, on the other hand, signal her passivity and inaction.

In BOB and Leland’s scenes of violence, particularly in Fire Walk with Me, they are framed over their victims in such a way that they appear large (by taking up the space of the screen) and domineering. For example, in the flashback scene in which

Leland kills Teresa Banks, Leland’s stature is accentuated by the small space of

Teresa’s trailer and her placement below him. The filmmakers employ a similar technique several times in The Return, such as when Steven (Caleb Landry Jones) yells in Becky’s (Amanda Seyfried) face and raises his fist to punch her, or when Ike the

Spike (Christophe Zajac-Denek) kills Lorraine (Tammie Baird); the men’s dominance

over women is marked by the fact that they are literally on top of their female victims.

One might point out that if men are perpetrating violence in these scenes, it’s obvious that they would be in positions of control over their victims. However, because we’re thinking here about both the feminist and empathic potential of these scenes, it’s important to pay attention to the ways in which the mise-en-scene signal to the audience different notions about gender, race, and sexuality. When it comes to the positioning of characters in scenes of gender-based violence, there is risk in portraying women as weak, helpless, passive, and inactive.

What is that risk exactly? When the camera consistently frames women as only victims, without any agency to fight back against male perpetrators, hegemonic notions of femininity as subordinate due to passivity are reinforced. While I have argued elsewhere in this thesis that it’s politically productive that scenes of gender-based violence represent its presence in the lives of real women, the representations of women themselves in the scenes creates a contradiction to this argument. Feminist scholar Laura Kipnis, in the “Vulnerability” chapter of The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex,

Envy, and Vulnerability, teases out a similar contradiction from the fact that feminist politics has raised awareness and criminalization of rape. She writes,

But the paradox now to be grappled with is that upping women’s awareness and anger about rape has also had the unintended – and probably not so beneficial – by-product effect of reinforcing conventional feminine fear and vulnerability, which also impedes women’s lives, wending its way into every corner of female emotional existence, including the propensity for emotional injury by men. The question we’re left to solve is how women are supposed to negotiate the psychical terrain of vulnerability in a social context where physical inviolability is hardly guaranteed, and when it’s a bodily fact that sexual violation and sexual pleasure share the same...venue (2006, 130-131).

Scenes of women experiencing violence and/or rape in media might similarly invoke feelings of vulnerability and fear in women. Can this be circumvented through shifting representations of women, or of what happens to women? Can the way gendered violence is represented be altered to reduce contradictions related to gender and agency?

As we’ve seen in this section, gender and sexuality fuel Twin Peaks’ critiques of death and violence through constructing discomfort and invoking empathy in the audience. At the same time, however, we can take issue with the way Twin Peaks at times contradicts its interventions by sexualizing women victims of violence and representing them in terms of hegemonic masculine/feminine distinctions that leave little room for interpreting women outside of traditional gender roles. While engaging in this analysis, I began to wonder how symbolic violences – sexism, racism, or homophobia, for example – influence Twin Peaks’ ability to engage in empathic exchanges with the audience. In the next section, we will look at how Twin Peaks problematically deals with the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality to emphasize the importance of considering different subjectivities in media texts.

Analysis of Twin Peaks’ Racial Politics

One of the most prominent issues with the three Twin Peaks texts are their racial politics. Lynch and Frost take an approach to racial diversity that ignores important discourses about racialized experiences. Because Twin Peaks actually says more about whiteness than it does about non-whiteness, in most situations characters of color are enveloped in “a vision of diversity and plurality while clinging to notions of sameness where we are all one” (hooks 1992, 13). In her book of essays about representations of

blackness in visual media, Black Looks: Race and Representation, feminist scholar bell hooks writes,

Moving away from the notion that an emphasis on sameness is the key to racial harmony, aware feminist activists have insisted that anti-racist struggle is best advanced by theory that speaks about the importance of acknowledging the way positive recognition and acceptance of difference is a necessary starting point as we work to eradicate white supremacy (1992, 13).

Through this quote, we can begin to understand how it is problematic that Twin Peaks contributes to a meaningless idea of diversity in which filmmakers plop people of color into their narratives without considering how a character’s experiences could be influenced by their race in relation to gender, sexuality, and class.

This isn’t to say that race is completely erased or invisible in Twin Peaks.

However, the show participates in conversations about race that do not challenge the white-centered status quo. Racial difference only appears in Twin Peaks through stereotypes, such as with the emphasis on Native American police officer Hawk’s indigenous spirituality and Josie Packard’s representation as a cunning “dragon lady” from Hong Kong. While there are certainly interesting interventions to be made about these characters in future research, here I want to focus on the minor character Jade

(Nafessa Williams) in Twin Peaks: The Return – one of two black women with dialogue in The Return – in order to reveal how Lynch and Frost’s dependence on white subjectivity creates unfortunately racist representations.

Jade only appears in two episodes: Part 3 and Part 5. She is a prostitute working in Las Vegas, Nevada but we don’t know much about her beyond this. We are introduced to her along with her new client Dougie Jones, a tulpa created in Dale

Cooper’s image by the Evil Cooper as a means of avoiding returning to the Black

Lodge. Jade and Dougie met up to have sex in an empty home in a suburban housing complex called Rancho Rosa.3 In the first scene we see them in, they are several minutes post-coitus in a bedroom, sitting side-by-side; Jade is nude and has just finished dressing Dougie, whose arm is numb.4 Jade is nude for a large portion of her screen time, with her breasts and buttocks deliberately framed in each shot for viewer pleasure – first in the bedroom, then away from the camera down a hallway, and finally in the shower (which is conveniently missing a shower curtain).

While Jade is showering, Dougie is transported to the Black Lodge and is replaced by Dale Cooper, who has emerged from an electrical socket. Dale – who Jade

(and everyone else in Dougie’s) believes to be Dougie despite his change in appearance – is confused and low-functioning, often staring off into space and repeating what others say to him. After Jade gets dressed in a black mini-dress and hot pink stiletto boots, she gets “Dougie” to leave the house with her but he has forgotten his shoes. Over the next several minutes, a strange sort of comedy ensues as she commands “Dougie” to do several simple tasks - retrieve his shoes, put on his shoes, find his keys - but he is unable to do them and she ends up, reluctantly, having to do them for him.

Historically, black women have played specific roles in TV and film that satisfy racist stereotypes. As a fan of Twin Peaks, it’s disappointing that Lynch and Frost

3 Jade has the keys to the house, but it isn’t explained why. Is she also a real estate agent? Does she or someone she works with/for own the house specifically for prostituting?

4 Dougie is wearing the owl cave ring. In Twin Peaks mythos, one who wears the owl cave ring on their left ring finger finds that their arm goes numb and soon encounters the Black Lodge in some tragic form.

represented Jade as a prostitute that viewers are encouraged to ogle for her “to-be- looked-at-ness” from her very first scene (Mulvey 1988, 62). I want to be careful here and point out that the issue isn’t specifically that Jade is a prostitute; it’s important to acknowledge that sex work is a legitimate career when one makes the choice for themselves to enter the field. However, there is certainly an issue with Lynch and

Frost’s apparent inability to imagine a black woman as anything other than a prostitute and as spectacle for viewer pleasure. In addition, Jade’s on-screen servicing to

“Dougie” – particularly in the long moment where she puts his shoes on him and ties them – shores up notions of black servitude and the mammy figure. Jade’s positioning in the mise-en-scene only enhances the problem: in two different shots, we see Jade bent down so that her head is at the level of his pelvis, resembling fellatio, and the second shot is filmed from a high angle so that “Dougie” appears to be in a dominant position over Jade (Figure 3-2).

While our first instinct might be to characterize this as a “bad” representation because of Jade’s stereotyping, when thinking about race and representation, bell hooks argues, it’s important to think about images outside of a “good”/“bad” dichotomy.

She writes,

For some time now the critical challenge for black folks has been to expand the discussion of race and representation beyond debates about good and bad imagery. Often what is thought to be good is merely a reaction against representations created by white people that were blatantly stereotypical … For those of us who dare to desire differently, who seek to look away from the conventional ways of seeing blackness and ourselves, the issue of race and representation is not just a question of critiquing the status quo. It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad (1992, 4).

Thus for hooks, there is more value in thinking about how filmmakers can radically alter representations through seeing blackness differently rather than simply classifying representations as good or bad. Indeed Jade’s characterization is marred by her stereotyping, but in order for us to think about how Lynch and Frost could have otherwise imagined Jade, there must be a shift in our culture’s relationship to blackness.

In the first chapter of Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks argues that the radical changes we want to see in representations of women of color will come as a result of loving blackness and deconstructing whiteness; she writes, “...the logic of white supremacy would be radically undermined if everyone would learn to identify with and love blackness” (1992, 12). For hooks, black people and non-black allies can decolonize their minds and divest from paradigms of white supremacist domination through celebrating and recognizing the value in blackness and black culture (1992, 18).

Lynch and Frost’s investment in whiteness rather than blackness is shown elsewhere in Part 3. Jade and Dougie’s scene opens with a shot of the billboard outside of Rancho Rosa to establish the setting. The billboard features several smiling white people of varying ages, implying a sense of safe familial community coded through whiteness. In Lynch’s true noir fashion, Twin Peaks: The Return investigates the differences between what we see on the outside of a situation and what is actually happening – the seedy underbelly of the American dream. Jade and Dougie’s dealings are not the only occurrence in this scene; interwoven throughout are also moments of conversation between Dougie’s assassins (who bug his car with a bomb) and a sad display of a white mother’s drug addiction and neglect toward her young child. Lynch and Frost’s juxtaposition of the happy family on the Rancho Rosa billboard with these

latter two bleak realities inside of the complex work to form a critique of organized crime, drug addiction, and poverty. However, juxtaposing the billboard’s white happiness with Jade’s black body creates an uncomfortable dichotomy in which we are encouraged to understand racialized sex work as part of a network of seedy crime.

While I am not condoning Dougie’s choice to cheat on his wife with Jade, I do not understand extramarital affairs – especially in Twin Peaks, in which almost no character is faithful to their lover – to be synonymous with the destruction of lives by murder and drugs.

Hooks’ intervention that “[l]oving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being” inspires me to question how Twin Peaks: The Return might have looked if Lynch and Frost made loving blackness their mission (1992, 20). Earlier in this thesis I suggested that Lynch, Frost, and their collaborators fail to properly address gender-based violence throughout Twin Peaks due to their investment in the primacy of white masculinity and, at times, the sanctity of white femininity. How could

Jade have been represented differently in such a way that she maintained her minor importance to the narrative?5 How could Lynch and Frost have attempted to discuss or at least acknowledge current racial politics, as they do with current discussions about capitalism elsewhere in The Return?

5 While giving “Dougie” a ride to the Silver Mustangs Casino, Jade hits a speed bump and “Dougie” drops the key to his room at the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks that has been in his pocket since 1989. In Jade’s second and final appearance in the show, she finds the key and drops it in a mailbox so that it gets returned to the hotel. At the end of the series, after Cooper has come back to himself, he uses the key to travel back in time to attempt to prevent Laura Palmer’s death.

Indeed, The Return offers several critiques of capitalism and U.S. politics. For example, in Part 6 Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) and Mickey (Jeremy Lindholm) – two residents of the Fat Trout Trailer Park – complain about being poor, needing government assistance, and the government being unhelpful. Later in Part 6, Janey-E

Jones (Naomi Watts) gives an impassioned rant to two white loan sharks looking for money from Dougie, her husband. She says, “We are the 99 percenters, and we are shit on enough, and we are not going to be shit on by the likes of you!” After agreeing to give them some amount of the money Dougie owed, she then says, “What kind of world are we living in where people can behave like this? Treat other people this way without any compassion or feeling for their suffering? We are living in a dark, dark age and you are part of the problem.” While the loan sharks are not necessarily where Janey-E’s concerns should lie in relation to being part of the 99 percent, here Twin Peaks: The

Return presents audiences with an opportunity to think about the relationship between money, power, and a lack of empathy from people – importantly, in this case, white men

– that prey on others’ weaknesses and suffering.

The Return also puts forth critiques of capitalism through Dr. Jacoby’s (Russ

Tamblyn) – a popular character from the original series – monologues as his online persona, Dr. Amp. As Dr. Amp, Dr. Jacoby hosts a web show in which he warns people of the dangers of our government. In his most affecting speech, Dr. Amp proclaims,

“The fucks are at it again! These giant multinational corporations are filled with monstrous vermin, poisonous, vile murders and they eat, drink, and shit money. They buy our politicians for a song, then these fucking politicians sing as we gag and cough, sold down the river to die. Fuck you who betray the people you were elected to help,

elected to work to help to make life better for!” Feminist, or at least leftist, viewers can appreciate these scenes of Dr. Amp’s radio show for their capacity to generate conversation in audiences about the disproportionate distribution of wealth and the ways in which money runs U.S. politicians.

These critiques pair well with critiques of the hegemony of white masculinity. The

Return is pleasantly packed with scenes in which white men are shown to be contributing to corruption through violence, extortion, and drug smuggling. The most prominent example of this comes from Part 13 when Evil Cooper goes to a place called

“The Farm.” At the farm, there is a gang of white men and their boss is the strongest guy; whoever is able to beat him in arm wrestling becomes the new leader. In a show of masculinity, Evil Cooper crushes their leader at arm wrestling and becomes the new boss. All of these men’s representations as seedy, violent, and hypermasculine critiques the value our culture places in white masculinity by showing an extreme end goal of that masculinity: crime and corruption.

White men are also at the center of critiques about institutions, particularly law enforcement. Many characters involved in law enforcement take the form of rude, incompetent, and/or corrupt white men. For example, the head of the FBI in Las Vegas,

Randall Headley (Jay R. Ferguson) repeatedly screams at his colleagues and undermines them. Also in Las Vegas law enforcement, the Fusco brothers (Larry

Clarke, Eric Edelstein, and David Koechner) are particularly obnoxious detectives and use sneaky tactics to get their way. In Twin Peaks, the rude deputy Chad (John

Pirruccello) is revealed to be corrupt when the audience finds out he’s part of a drug smuggling ring. In another scene in Part 13, a white cop sells poison to Anthony (Tom

Sizemore) in a back alley, which he plans to use on Dougie. By locating violence, corruption, and rude behavior in white male characters rather than male characters of color or female characters, Twin Peaks specifically critiques the degree to which white men are able to get away with whatever they want.

It’s important to point out, however, that critiquing the behavior of white men does not preclude the series from investing in white masculinity in its own ways. In fact, because the majority of the people contributing to The Return – as well as the other two

Twin Peaks texts – are white, Twin Peaks is constructed through a framework of white subjectivity. The series’ investment in the primacy of white masculinity is exemplified in the character of Dale Cooper, who is consistently throughout the Twin Peaks texts constructed as the ideal white man. In Black Looks, bell hooks quotes Christian Walker as saying, “If white artists, committed to the creation of a non-racist, non-sexist and non- hierarchical society, are ever to fully understand and embrace their own self-identity and their own miscegenated gaze, they will have to embrace and celebrate the concept of non-white subjectivity" (hooks 7). What would Twin Peaks look like if the filmmakers had constructed the narrative through racial intersubjectivity, perhaps through bringing on artists of color to work on the series? Perhaps more importantly, what feminist interventions could be made in media like Twin Peaks, that aims to challenge viewers’ perceptions of reality, if it were purposely situated outside of white male subjectivity? Or to bring us back to gender-based violence, what would Twin Peaks’ scenes and discussions of gendered violence look like if they were constructed outside of white male subjectivity?

Figure 3-1. Laura Palmer gazes into the camera as BOB/Leland murders her. Frost, M. and Lynch, D. (Writers), & Lynch, D. (Director). 1990. “Episode 8.” In M. Frost and D. Lynch (Producer), Twin Peaks. Los Angeles, CA: CBS Television Distribution.

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

As a fan of Twin Peaks, it has been my goal to do justice to the intricacies of the series while also teasing out the details that contribute to its contradictory messages on gender-based violence. On the one hand, an alternative reading of Twin Peaks reveals the extent to which gendered violence impacts the daily lives of women through empathic imagery and sound in both violent and non-violent scenes. On the other hand,

Twin Peaks displays graphic violence against women – that audiences could take pleasure in, be unsettled by, or both – in a way that reifies hegemonic notions of gender that keep power imbalances that contribute to gender-based violence intact.

In Chapter 2, I revealed how Twin Peaks is established through a dichotomy of

“good” and “evil,” and furthermore how Twin Peaks constructs gender-based violence as part of this evil. By relating acts of gender-based violence, particularly the original series’ central mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder, to the evil Black Lodge and its inhabitants such as BOB and Judy, gender-based violence also becomes constructed as part of the evil that threatens good in the Twin Peaks universe. Dialogue among characters further constructs gender-based violence as evil, and this discourse is enabled by Twin Peaks’ fusion of soap opera and crime procedural. I also argued in this chapter that the function of violence in Twin Peaks is located in the empathy the filmmakers attempt to cultivate through images of women experiencing violence, pain, sadness, and misery.

This argument is taken into my analysis in Chapter 3, in which I explored how gender-based violence is represented in several scenes from each of the Twin Peaks texts. Analyzing these scenes revealed several common threads, such as the role of

male aggression in acts of femicide, the role of empathy in viewing experiences of gender-based violence, and the degree to which men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies influences their decision to enact or threaten violence toward women. However, these interventions are at times contradicted by the way in which Twin Peaks establishes a connection between women’s sexuality and death, and also by the consistent framing of men as dominant over women. I then investigated how Twin

Peaks, as a text, enacts its own violence through offering questionable representations of race. Through analyzing how Twin Peaks problematically represents one of its only black female characters, I revealed how the filmmakers’ investment in whiteness rather than blackness – despite efforts to critique both white male identity and capitalism – limits Twin Peaks’ ability to engage in empathic transactions with viewers.

Ultimately, this thesis has dealt with the fact that there is hegemony in who owns the means of representation in popular media. Popular television texts – in general, but also those specifically about gender-based violence – including Twin Peaks, have historically been created by white men, thus establishing their hegemonic control over our modes of popular art and entertainment. In other words, white men have had the power to represent – for our purposes here – gendered violence and racialized sexuality as opposed to other groups of people (for example, women of color) who might have the lived experience to represent these issues in ways that shore up less contradiction.

In “Repossessing Popular Culture” from her book Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital,

Gender, and Aesthetics, Laura Kipnis writes,

A class becomes hegemonic not through its capacity for sheer domination, but through its ability to appropriate visions of the world and diverse cultural elements of its subordinated classes... (1993, 30).

Similarly, in “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” Stuart Hall writes,

Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that's not what the term means); it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it (1993).

What both Kipnis and Hall are pointing to in these quotes is that a certain group’s ability to control, for example, media representations comes from their access to shifting cultural balances of power. This means that white men are not destined to own the power of representation and women are not destined to be subordinated by these representations; with enough feminist demand and the ability to access both cameras and a mass audience, women – particularly women of color – might appropriate our

“visions of the world” differently so that gendered violence and racialized sexuality in media can be politically productive through speaking to women’s experiences rather than being titillating or gratuitous for men’s viewing pleasure.

Gender-based violence in popular media is always going to be a touchy subject.

Rather than avoiding its messiness, this thesis aimed to tackle it head on and revel in the contradictions inherent in Twin Peaks’ discussion of gender-based violence. My hope is that scholars will continue to engage with how gender-based violence is represented in media so that we can hold accountable the creators of content to not glorify gender-based violence. If we are one day able to consume images of gender- based violence in a way that is indeed ethical or feminist, perhaps real-life gender- based violence itself will become easier to combat.

LIST OF REFERENCES

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Boyle, Karen. 2005. Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates. London: SAGE Publications.

———. 2019. “What’s in a Name? Theorising the Inter-Relationships of Gender and Violence.” Feminist Theory 20 (1): 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700118754957.

Cummins, R. Glenn, and Boni Cui. 2014. “Reconceptualizing Address in Television Programming: The Effect of Address and Affective Empathy on Viewer Experience of Parasocial Interaction.” Journal of Communication 64 (4): 723–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12076.

Davenport, Randi. 1993. “The Knowing Spectator of ‘Twin Peaks’: Culture, Feminism, and Family Violence.” Literature/Film Quarterly 21 (4): 255–59.

Foucault, Michel. 1998. “What Is an Author?” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 299–314. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Franklin, Michael. 2010. “Affect Regulation, Mirror Neurons, and the Third Hand: Formulating Mindful Empathio Art Interventions.” Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 27 (4): 160–67.

Ganczarek, Joanna, Thomas Hünefeldt, and Marta Olivetti Belardinelli. 2018. “From ‘Einfühlung’ to Empathy: Exploring the Relationship between Aesthetic and Interpersonal Experience.” Cognitive Processing 19 (2): 141–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-018-0861-x.

Hall, Stuart. 1993. "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?" Social Justice 20(1-2): 104+. Academic ASAP (accessed March 22, 2019). http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A14028914/AIM?u=gain40375&sid=AIM&xid= da9944e9.

Hallam, Lindsay. 2018. Devil’s Advocates: Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me. 1st ed. Devil’s Advocates. Auteur Publishing. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Hume George, Diana. 1995. “Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks.” In Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, edited by David Lavery. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Kelly, Liz. 1988. Surviving Sexual Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kipnis, Laura. 1993. “Repossessing Popular Culture.” In Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics, 1st ed., 14–32. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2006. “Vulnerability.” In The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, and Vulnerability, 1st ed., 123–63. New York: Pantheon Books.

Lafky, Sue. 2000. “Gender, Power, and Culture in the Televisual World of Twin Peaks: A Feminist Critique.” Journal of Film and Video 51 (3/4): 5–19.

Mulvey, Laura. 1988. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley. New York; London: Routledge; BFI.

Nnawulezi, Nkiru, Carrie Lippy, Josephine Serrata, and Rebecca Rodriguez. 2018. “Doing Equitable Work in Inequitable Conditions: An Introduction to a Special Issue on Transformative Research Methods in Gender-Based Violence.” Journal of Family Violence 33 (8): 507–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-018-9998-8.

Roach, Catherine M. 2014. "'Going native': aca-fandom and deep participant observation in popular romance studies." Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature 47, (2): 33. General OneFile (accessed March 30, 2019). http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A370213352/ITOF?u=gain40375&sid=ITOF& xid=3cdbfe08.

Twin Peaks. 1990-1991. Directed by David Lynch et al. Lynch/Frost Productions. Television series.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. 1992. Directed by David Lynch. CIBY Pictures. Film.

Twin Peaks: The Return. Directed by David Lynch. Lynch/Frost Productions. Television series.

Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44 (4): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Matt Stern received his bachelor’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, with a minor in Cinema and Cultural Studies, from Stony Brook University in May 2017. He will graduate with a master’s degree in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida in May 2019. His research interests include feminist media studies, women of color feminist theory, and games studies.