Postmodernism and Television: Speaking of Twin Peaks

Jimmie L. Reeves, et al.

The Project

• Interdisciplinary study between grad students and faculty
• American Culture, Comm, Slavic Languages, & History Departments...
• Fields ranging from Women’s Studies, Genre Studies, TV Analysis, Pop Music Criticism, Narrative Theory, Eastern European Literature and Film, Journalism Practice, Comic Books, Screenwriting, and Museum History
• This ‘essay,’ in and of itself, as “thoroughly postmodern in its own right”
• A spectrum of huge fans, mild interest, and dislike…
• Using Twin Peaks to discuss major defining characteristics of Postmodernism as an “artistic tendency and intellectual movement”
• Distinguish postmodernism (artistic/intellectual styles) from postmodernity (transnational, socio-economic structures)

“TV II”

• “However, without endorsing an updated economic or technological determinism, we still acknowledge the interlocking factors associated with ‘postmodernity’ that have stimulated the production of programs exhibiting characteristics of postmodernity” (174)
• 1950s TV changed American Communication
• But then, 1980s changed it again!
• Power of the three-network oligarchy that dominated broadcast television in the previous three decades was undermined by the advent of “TV ii”
• Satellite and cable distribution system, remote controls, personal computers, video cassette recorders
• Revised what it meant to “watch TV”
• Affected network programming strategies...

1970s TV

• “Watching TV” meant watching the programs of ABC, NBC, or CBS
• “Least Objectionable Programming” or more cynically, “Lowest Common Denominator”
• Astounding profits for these networks!
• Satellite/Cable TV fractured the Big Three’s audiences
• They found themselves in a similar predicament to 1950s Hollywood studios…
• In response, the networks adopted a fragmented programming philosophy during Prime Time
• Target younger audiences and families in the first hour and then shift into a “yuppie” mode
• 1980s example: The Cosby Show and Family Ties, then Cheers, then Hill Street Blues

“The networks’ quest for the sophisticated viewer with money to burn has provided economic incentive for supporting the narrative innovations that are often labelled ‘postmodern’ (175)

“This incentive, combined with television’s maturation as a storyteller system and the parallel maturation of the ‘television generation,’ has made TVII an era when innovative producers are rewarded for exploring and blurring generic boundaries” (175)

“Quality Demographics”

• “Dramadies”: humor of dark comedy and the tangled relationships of soap opera (M*A*S*H)
• Frank’s Place, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story, L.A. Law, Hooper Man, and The Wonder Years, etc.
• ABC aggressively hunting for “quality demographics”
• Wealthier baby boomers, who are especially attractive to advertisers
• Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, Twin Peaks, even Cop Rock, formed the programming base for ABC’s strategy…
• (If you don’t know Cop Rock, please watch that link!)
• All these shows display self-reflexivity and pastiche of postmodernism

Twin Peaks...

• “What set TP apart, and made it even more postmodern, was its omnivorous appetite and its multivalent digestive system. No popular genre, no morsel of culture, whether high or low, was safe from TP’s haphazard hunger” (175)
• The Wonder Years was a balanced mix of domestic sitcom with family melodrama
• There is no such synthesis in TP
• “Instead, the multiple generic worlds invoked in TP exist as fragmented realities that may indeed collide, but never finally come together into a univalent totality” (175)
• Self-conscious and playful juxtaposing of seemingly incompatible worlds provides much pleasure for the audience!

The Wonder Years & Twin Peaks

The Conversation

• Six topics on TP and Postmodernism:
• Pleasure
• Intertextuality
• Decentered Subjectivity
• Self-consciousness
• Irony
• Politics
• Authorship also came up later…
• “While we generally agree that TP is a stellar example of postmodernism, there is not as much unanimity in the group about whether postmodernism is distinct enough from modernism to constitute a uniquely new artistic self-consciousness” (176)

The Conversation: Intertextuality

• Three modes:
• Familiar actors and their previous work(s)
• The way TP appropriates elements from different TV and film genres
• Creators also appropriate items from the external culture from both the past and the present
• “TP ostensibly takes place in the present, but retains a real fifties feel” (176)
• “This confusion in temporal coding is considered by many to be a distinguishing, as well as a disturbing, attribute of postmodernism” (176)

The Conversation: Intertextuality Cont...

• Intertextuality creates a hierarchy for those hip enough to catch all the references and inside jokes
• Provides a certain amount of intellectual pleasure
• Superficial references that don’t seem to go anywhere else…
• “There is an interesting irony at work here. This inclusive textual practice brings in all of these different references both to high and low culture, but that textual practice in itself is exclusionary” (177)
• Rewards those with the right kind of “popular cultural capital” or “legitimate cultural capital” with pleasure
• People who don’t get the references maybe work these instances into the plot or assume they’re referring to something else that they’ve seen/experienced before - very subjective
• Multiple signifieds - polysemous - characteristic of postmodernism

The Conversation: Genre and Pleasure

• Compelling exploration of two competing genres: detective story meets the soap opera
• Though rich with wild juxtapositions and non-sequiturs which are not to these genres
• “The show gives you a lot of traditional pleasures - the narrative, the whodunit mystery, the various romantic intrigues. But while it gives you these pleasures with one hand, it takes them away with the other” (178)
• juxtapositions of emotional heartache with ironic, even goofy, actions
• Opposed to traditional Hollywood that would not normally take one out of these emotional moments, TP revels in this…
• TP very open to contradiction...
• Forces you to take a step back and think about how/why this is happening

The Conversation: Genre

• Other genres referenced in the show include the horror film, the commercial, the sitcom, the western, film noir
• Mrs. Palmer’s screams are reminiscent of the horror film, which may take the audience out of emotional involvement
• Cooper’s descriptions of commercial objects (hotels, pie, coffee, etc)
• Andy and Lucy seem to be from a sitcom - don’t know how to react to these truly troubling moments
• (Donna and James seem to be in a soap opera)
• One-Eyed Jack’s is a Brando western, character from The Searchers says his trademark line from the film
• tension between wilderness and civilization
• Harry as western character, his deputy is Native American
• The Log Lady…
• Audrey seems to be a film noir femme fatale or 50s juvenile delinquent

The Conversation: Real vs Supernatural

• Reality accorded the supernatural and real world very postmodern
• Postmodernism involved in questioning and redefining what is real
• “Something very different from modernism is that the dreamworld or the magical is given as much credibility as other more common notions of reality” (181)
• Magical Realist literature…
• Real vs. supernatural and how the show treats both so fluidly. Reality is multivalent.
• Cooper’s and Major Briggs’s careers associate them with science, reason, and logic, yet they have the strongest connections to the supernatural

The Conversation: Multivalence

• Cooper’s presentation of ALL facts as equal (evidenced in his recordings for “Diane”), no matter how serious or inane or random
• “...there is no way of making sense of the world, as all hierarchies of meaning and experience are levelled to a flat, equivalent valuation of randomly selected facts” (182)
• Laura Palmer as multivalent as well
• Homecoming queen, innocent daughter, good student, community volunteer, etc.
• Her diary presents a much darker, sexual, sinister side to her
• “I think this mixture of the rational and irrational, the fixed and the indistinct, might be the closest approximation we have yet to reality” (182)
• Generic worlds/worldviews blur and bleed into each other constantly

The Conversation: Generic Montage

• The way we “channel hop,” “scrambling genres and images into a surrealistic flow of information,” is similar to the world of TP
• Channel hopping is part of our reality
• TP augments and expands views of the world that watching TV has taught us
• Generic montage in TP
• Can be read as critical and progressive or just packing everything as a neutral set of commodities
• Progressive and regressive simultaneously
• Disparate emotions as products to be consumed over and over again, back to back and simultaneously

Discovery of Laura’s Death and Leland Dancing

The Conversation: Romance

• “What Lynch provides his audience is not the naturalized romance of Hollywood, but the ironic, self-conscious ‘Romance’ of a postmodern sensibility” (184)
• “It’s as if Lynch is smirking at our weakness for the false sense of hope provided by celluloid happiness. Against the backdrop of pervasive evil and tragedy, such visions of love and happiness are portrayed as merely pathetic delusions” (184)
• “The ‘happy’ endings of [other Lynch films] are so self-consciously constructed against a backdrop of evil and tragedy that they signify not hope but hopelessness” (184)

The Conversation: Decentered Characters

• “Laura seems to have 6 or 7 halves to her heart…”
• Other characters take Laura’s place in her various activities
• Donna as community volunteer and eventually femme fatale
• Audrey’s sexuality and close encounter with incest with her father
• Laura is fragmented
• Disembodied spirit of BOB inhabits real people in their actions or dreams
• Real enough where they all share a similar dream and an artist is able to draw his sketch
• Nadine as Ed’s wife, but also a teenager with superhuman strength
• Leland is completely fragmented between BOB and Leland, referring to one or the other at different times
• Ben Horne as owner of the lodge and One-Eyed Jack’s
• Schizophrenia as postmodernist characteristic…
• But are these characters “decentered” or just “complex”??

The Conversation: Coherent/Constructed Subjects

• “Does that mean that there was at one time a coherent subject, and that it’s only in the postmodern world that we have a fragmented subject? Or is the idea of a coherent subject a fallacious one in the first place?” (186)
• “Postmodernists argue that was always a constructed ideal. We believed in the construction, and it was a goal” (186)
• “And most fictions would create a narrative that resolved the conflict” (186)
• Melodramas resolve conflicts at the end, “restoring the world to wholeness and a sense that there is a moral order at work here” (186)
• “Isn’t TP a reverse of that, in that there’s a moral and social order on the surface of things; you have your basic small-town bourgeois values - but underneath, it’s all corrupted. Things are in conflict. Things are confused” (186)

The Conversation: Recurring Lynchian Theme

• Alan Wilde: in postmodernism, “a world in need of mending is superseded by one beyond repair”
• “The underlying corruption, conflict, and confusion is what is apparently real, rather than the image of ordered social reality - which is a theme in almost all of Lynch’s work” (186)

The Conversation: Saturating of Self

• Characters aren’t decentered if there are explanations for their personality changes or double/secret lives
• Depthlessness = postmodernism
• Depth = modernism
• Kenneth Gergen: “equates the ‘saturating of self’ with the condition of postmodernism. This is to live in multiple realities, rather than a single reality. (187-188)
• Gergen goes on to say: “The postmodern condition more generally is marked by a plurality of voices vying for the right to reality - to be accepted as legitimate expressions of the true and the good… Under postmodern conditions, persons exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately playful probing of yet another reality… The center fails to hold” (A crisis for modernists!)

“For postmodernists, [the center failing to hold] is not crisis, that’s the way things are. These multiple subjects, and multiple realities, that’s just the way to be in a postmodern world where there’s fragmentation, diversity, multiple realities and voices. This was a crisis for modernists, because they wanted the center to hold. But for postmodernists, it is treated as something ironic, just the nature of being in contemporary society” (188)

The Conversation: Coherence and Power Relations

• “I veer toward celebrating postmodernism because the idea of coherence always comes down to one basic question: Whose coherence is it anyway? Coherence is mapped out by particular groups with the most power. If their coherence breaks down, then that allows other more marginalized voices to be heard” (189)
• “The part of postmodernism that I want to celebrate is the part that opens things up, so a lot of people get to tell their stories. It’s not one group controlling the stories and sense being made by narratives. Postmodernism busts this all apart” (189)

The Conversation: Sense as Contingent

• “In modernist thinking, there’s an urge to an over-arching discourse, but with postmodernism, though people do still need to make sense of the world through narrative, it’s always contingent. It’s never completely infallible” (189)
• Progressive postmodernism chips away at meta-narratives
• “Part of what I like about TP is its playfulness, its absurdity, its crazy juxtapositions. But at other times, I find it totally inappropriate when I see bizarre non-sequiturs conflated with serious issues” (190)
• “Do you see that playfulness as an evasion? I’m not sure that play can be divorced from seriousness. Doesn’t the playfulness, in fact, make you see the way things go in a rewarding way?” (190)
• “Playfulness can be a way to confront issues that may be so horrific or dreadful that there’s no other way” (190)

The Conversation: Authorship

• “The claim of irony can be used to bracket meaning and absolve the utterer of any responsibility for what is said. And that’s where Lynch gets away with murder” (190)
• Raises issues of Authorship
• Lynch’s vision of reality is ironic, fragmented, and regressive, but what about Mark Frost and the many other directors on the show?
• Major contradiction in saying that “TP is postmodern television when you consider that a lot of writing identifies postmodernism as a move away from the authored text to collaborative creativity” (191)
• “If anything, postmodern television has made exactly the opposite move” (191)
• Except for things like MTV and “Nick at Nite” and so on

The Conversation: Progressive? PC?

• TP as progressive? Politically Correct?
• Female abuse victims
• Incest victims
• Leland did terrible things, but is absolved since it wasn’t “actually him”...
• Can’t talk about “things dark and heinous,” things that are “too horrible to tell our children”
• “While in some ways TP works to give the incest victim a voice, the show also works to silence that voice”
• Lynch is “more ironic about the good and the healthy than he is about evil” (193)