Twin Peaks: Hyperconscious Histories of Mediation ~ Jennifer Beckett, Wendy Haslem & Radha O’Meara

Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Volume 29, 2017

Abstract: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) creates a sophisticated hyperconscious web that intersects televisual and cinematic technologies and their histories, and analysis reveals a continual obsession with how the moving image mediates and connects actual and virtual spaces and times. Whilst Jim Collins identifies sophisticated hyperconscious cinema as marked by eclectic intertexts and ubiquitous quotations, here we see a web of conscious connections that expand across serial television. The matrix of audiovisual technologies, invisible histories and materials featured in Twin Peaks: The Return generates unstable references to existing media, including Lynch’s previous work. These fabricated, mediated histories prioritise accidents and expose the inadequacies of new technologies. They become fetishised and aestheticized throughout the series. This is particularly evident in Lynch’s exploitation of the pure elements of television and cinema: light, sound and cinematography. Across this series, machines, images and narrative elements exist under an imminent threat of catastrophe. This article will explore how Twin Peaks: The Return embraces technological glitches, how it relies on unreliable forms of illumination and how it displaces nostalgia onto imagined, but elusive, histories.

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) creates a sophisticated hyperconscious web that intersects televisual and cinematic technologies and their histories. Like Lynch’s earlier work in film, advertising, art, architecture, animation, ringtones and even weather reports, Twin Peaks: The Return reveals a continual obsession with how the moving image mediates and connects actual and virtual spaces and times. Whilst Jim Collins identifies sophisticated hyperconscious cinema as marked by eclectic intertexts and ubiquitous quotations (125), here we see a web of conscious connections that expand across serial television. The matrix of audiovisual technologies, invisible histories and materials featured in Twin Peaks: The Return generates unstable references to existing media, including Lynch’s previous work. These fabricated, mediated histories prioritise accidents and expose the limitations of new technologies. This is particularly evident in Lynch’s exploitation of the pure elements of television and cinema: light, sound and cinematography. Across this series, machines, images and narrative elements exist under an imminent threat of catastrophe. This article will explore how Twin Peaks: The Return embraces technological glitches, how it relies on unreliable forms of illumination and how it displaces nostalgia onto imagined, but elusive, histories.

Material Media and Technological Malfunction

Film and television are contingent on illumination and Twin Peaks identifies this dependence and its associated risk in the opening credit sequence. The logo for Lynch’s Rancho Rosa production company features incandescent light bulbs that flicker and crackle at the beginning of each episode. This is matched by the flashing and buzzing of the Lynch/Frost Productions logo at the end of the prologue, imagery that evokes radiating radio signals. The use of lighting as a pivotal, but fallible force continues to the title sequence. A ring of refracted light hovers over an image of Laura Palmer’s face, splitting to display some of the colours of its spectrum. Whilst light is an essential element of both cinema and television, refracted light from lens flare has conventionally been understood as accidental, an error to be avoided for mainstream cinematographers. Lynch’s work, however, highlights these accidents. These paratextual moments enclose the text, isolating and foregrounding moments of technological malfunction.

Material manifestations of media feature heavily in the new series of Twin Peaks. While the physical manifestations of media and communications technologies are so often miniaturised and hidden from view in our digital age, Lynch draws viewers’ attention to their materiality in Twin Peaks. Like the aesthetic of the audiovisual presentation itself, the diegesis features new forms that combine devices and styles from various eras. We see these technological assemblages in the surveillance cameras trained on the glass box supervised by Sam Colby in New York, the control panel piloted by dispatcher Maggie Brown (Jodee Thelen) in the Twin Peaks Police Department, the radio studio operated by Dr Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), and the array of servers and screens that plays host to conversations between FBI staff Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself), Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) and Tammy Preston (Chrysta Bell). Gramophones and transistor radios evoke nostalgia, but they are also fused with Twenty-first Century systems of networks, mobile phones and digital surveillance. The elaborate, obtrusive form of these apparatuses is matched only by the character’s associated behaviours: “I can hear you perfectly…What’s that?” FBI Chief Cole yells. Moreover, the mismatch between technological affordances and behaviours extends to The Return‘s production, notably in the contradiction between Lynch’s role as sound designer and his character’s difficulties hearing. As Goddard has noted of Twin Peaks’ first two series, the technological devices featured in the mise en scene takes on agency, rather than being just props.

The technologies of mediation depicted within Twin Peaks – hissing gramophones, looming cameras, towering high-voltage pylons, and chunky microphones – function as unpredictable disjunctures, causing glitches and disconnection just as often as they achieve their ostensible communicative purposes. The material prominence of such media within the storyworld highlights their unreliability and potential for mayhem. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin identify malfunctioning technology as a significant motif throughout the first two seasons of Twin Peaks in their audiovisual essay “Short-Circuit: A Twin Peaks System,” highlighting both the technologies, and the characters’ use and misuse of them. Álvarez López and Martin note how in Twin Peaks, electricity itself is a dynamic and dangerous motif, constantly flickering, strobing and sparking:  “This system of light gets attached, by poetic association, with the strange fate, and often the failure, of communication devices in the series.”

Short Circuit: An audiovisual essay and text by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin dedicated to the system of light and communication in Twin Peaks.

Michael Goddard similarly argues that, “the world of Twin Peaks [i]s a haunted archive of sonic and other mediations,” and notes that these technologies “become perceptible through the process of breakdown” (2016). The motif of malfunctioning technology that Álvarez López and Martin so graphically highlight as a feature of the first two seasons becomes even more prominent in Twin Peaks: The Return. The new season is obsessed with technological glitches, particularly glitching technologies of mediation – sounds emanating from nowhere, buzzes, hissing, technological devices disappearing, behaving unpredictably.

Paul Virilio’s concept of the integral accident – that each new form of technology unleashes new potential for accidents – is a productive way of understanding the role of media technologies and malfunction in Lynch’s work. Virilio highlights the accidental capacities of technologies throughout history, but also draws our attention to the growing speed, scale and danger of newer technologies and their accidents:

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway. To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. (Virilio, Original Accident 10)

To this we might add, to invent photography is to invent the distorted image, to invent cinema is to invent erratic playback, to invent television is to invent static and snow. For Virilio, “the accident reveals the substance,” underlining how the accident is essential to the device itself and an inherent function (Original Accident 10). According to Virilio, “The accident reveals something important we would not otherwise know how to perceive” (Accident of Art 63). This connects with Lynch’s history of surrealism, and his aim to engage with latent desires and identities that are obscured by a rational surface.

Whilst most film and television suppress the accidents of their production technologies, Lynch aestheticises them. Álvarez López and Martin recall the legend that the flickering light in the pilot episode was initially caused by a malfunction, but Lynch insisted on including it and reproducing it. The flickering white light in the Red Room of Twin Peaks has become an iconic signifier of the series that returns throughout each season, and is even mimicked in The Simpsons parody (episode 7.1 ‘Who shot Mr Burns?’). Justus Nieland writes about the snowy televisual image and nested frames in Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), noting that the film’s “media ecology (projection, phonography, the performing body, radio, television, the Internet) is wildly impure” (136). Lynch’s narrative experimentation is defined by a constellation of diverse media forms, the inclusion of hyperconscious intertextual references and a fascination with media glitches. In earlier seasons of Twin Peaks, the snowy static of the television screen was sometimes the object of Sarah Palmer’s (Grace Zabriskie’s) hysterical gaze, but in Twin Peaks: The Return, white noise consumes the frame entirely and for a sustained period.

(In)visible Light and the Postnuclear Sublime

The aestheticisation of media accidents reaches a crescendo in ‘Got a Light?’, Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, an episode that features a flashback sequence that verges on televisual abstraction. Like the use of black and white throughout much of this episode, it draws the viewer’s attention to the fundamental capacities of the medium and its limitations. The most compelling lighting effect is presented in the continually evolving depiction of various forms of illumination resulting from nuclear testing in White Sands, New Mexico, dated July 16^th, 1945. This montage is foreshadowed by flashes of atomic white that penetrate the preceding scene of the murder and resurrection of Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). In the New Mexico desert, the camera gradually advances on an image of an eerily expanding mushroom cloud. Whilst this is a recognisable symbol of nuclear explosion, it is also one that is rarely witnessed directly.

This image gives way to another dizzying view of black and white rain or sparks that seem to ascend and descend simultaneously. Here, the televisual image teeters at the limits of representation. This abstraction is reminiscent of the ‘snow’ that results from a malfunctioning cathode ray television. Visual motifs commonly associated with media corruption and decay are treated as objects of beauty for sustained consideration. This sequence also provides visions that are extreme in scale. Microcosmic images of translucent skin with connecting blood vessels are contrasted with deep orange impressions of fire and then the artificial colors depicting the swirling atmosphere of the universe from space. This associative montage joins intimate microcosmic bodily interiors with the macrocosmic star stuff of the galaxy. Natural elements also figure prominently as impressions of unrestrained force. Fire becomes volcanic, crashing waves become tidal. The morphing display of video and cinematic noise dissolves into a tumbling flame, transitioning from pure imagistic light to pure organic light. These apocalyptic images are set against the discordant sounds of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). The soundtrack begins with the scream of violin and cello and intersects the rising and falling modulations of stringed instruments with fleeting moments of silence. The montage is built from a clash of oppositional forces: the macro and microcosmic, continuity and disruption, light and darkness, sound and silence.

Whilst the montage begins with an image of atomic testing, it displaces its sublime symbol of catastrophe onto abstract images that rely on light for their powerful effect. Part 8 offers a range of ways to represent unimaginable atomic force. References to the histories of atomic testing take a range of forms from pure white flashes to abstract impressions of dynamic movement. Symbols of the mushroom cloud are subsequently dissipated into images of global, environmental and personal catastrophe. Freda Freiberg identifies the impact of abstract flashes of white light rendering the image of nuclear destruction abstract, unrepresentable (95). Freiberg argues that films like Akira (Otomo, 1988) use flashes of illumination to depict the ‘aesthetic of the postnuclear sublime’ in the awe inspiring, indescribable impact of a force that is beyond conventional representation (95). In Twin Peaks the aesthetic of the postnuclear sublime is built from flashes of light and sound, pure elements of screen media. The electrical technologies that we rely on to present images and sounds, also test the limitations of televisual representation.

 

The postnuclear explosion sequence is repeated in a new context, revealing how the aesthetic and narrative form of Twin Peaks: The Return depends on the technologies and effects of earlier media. In a scene reminiscent of a cross between Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) and The Addams Family (Levy, 1964-66), Senorita Dido (Joy Nash) adorned in jewels and a sparkling evening gown sits on her couch like a patient Norma Desmond, swaying gently as she listens to music. A bell sounds and the Fireman credited as ‘???????’ (Carel Struycken) enters to investigate. His character moves to an adjacent room as the flickering light of the projected image illuminates his face. The Fireman watches the images of the apocalypse on a large, squared screen. He watches digital effects via the technologies of early cinema, the flicker of projected light evidence of the presence of celluloid. In a reimagining of the connection between filmic technologies and the body, the Fireman levitates and his head begins to secrete projected coloured images. Images of gold and orange sparks and fire stream across the ceiling, brightly coloured digital ectoplasm set against the background of a decidedly black and white home. These illusions of digital ectoplasm escape the spatial limitations of a mechanical projector and screen. A crystal ball descends and is caught by Senorita Dido. The face of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) appears within, offering a spectral presence that returns us to the original central enigma of Twin Peaks. Senorita Dido kisses it affectionately and lets the crystal ball float off like a balloon. It travels through a funnel and is dropped onto a flickering black and white image of the world. Digital effects land on celluloid projections, intersecting the immaterial digital with material celluloid technologies.

Twin Peaks: The Return re-settles in the American landscape with an iconic image from the 1940s. A gas station is shown in black and white as it lights up from within, with smoke appearing and disappearing, footage progressing and reversing in time. This scene of people wandering around a gas station is barely more than a compilation of media glitches: flashes, darkness, buzzes, jump cuts, blurred images and jittering framing, foregrounding spatial and temporal discontinuity. The rhythm of people walking is stilted by the use of jump cuts that disrupt bodily gesture and the rhythm of the soundtrack is equally jerky, littered with glitches like a needle skipping on a record player. The scene moves in and out of focus, with the small white lights on the petrol bowsers increasing in size as focus diminishes. The temporal disruptions and sporadic rhythm of illumination reveals its source in photography and the flickering image of pre- and early cinema. These images are indebted to the conventions of film noir, but also appear as revisions, hauntings of the original form. Spectrality emerges from the reproduction and repetition of images, something that has never been more possible than with digital technologies. Older forms of media exist at the edge of both the abstract, atomic sublime montage and this noirish gas station sequence.

Mediaphilia and Mediaphobia

Effects associated with media contingency, unpredictability and defect are used strategically to produce anxiety in the characters and the audience of Twin Peaks.

Although the apparatuses of communication feature prominently in Twin Peaks: The Return, their absence also becomes significant. Beverly Page (Ashley Judd) is concerned by a humming that emanates from the Great Northern Hotel, a sound we hear most acutely when the camera glides into the empty corners of rooms. The rhythmic rumble is reminiscent of the ceiling fan that murmurs in the staircase at the centre of the Palmer house in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. Michel Chion suggests that such sounds are used throughout Lynch’s work to convey mood and agency: “Their meaning is neither erotic nor sexual as such, nor can they be reduced to some primary function. They are life itself, vital power, absurd and ever-present” (Lynch 142). In The Return, Beverly seems especially concerned by the provenance of this humming: it would be understandable if only there were a malfunctioning device she could attribute it to. It is the disembodiment of communication that disturbs. The mystique is explained by Michel Chion’s concept of the Acousmêtre, “a form of ‘phantom’ character specific to the art of film” (Audio-Vision 128). According to Chion, a sound with an unexpected or absent visual referent takes on a mysterious, omniscient power and presence throughout the diegesis (Audio-Vision 129-31). Prolonged moments of blackness and silence – conventionally so rare in television – produce a similarly powerful effect for the audience, who might be as mystified and fascinated as Beverly.

The fetishised objects of communications technology combine with the mysterious power of the disembodied effect in powerful scenes.  In Part 3 of The Return, Cooper encounters Naido (Nae Yuuki), an eyeless woman in a void, then he becomes drawn to a humming mechanism on the wall of a darkened room. The apparatus is a steampunk assemblage of sockets, circuits and dials; its whirring drone roars with sonic distortion as Cooper’s image is rendered smokey, semi-transparent and stretched. This distorted image of Cooper’s body is gradually consumed from head to ankles by the large socket at the centre of the apparatus, which glows and zaps to a background thump of heavy machinery. Finally, Cooper’s body imbibed by this peculiar device, his shoes drop to the floor. This combination of the fetishisation of technological materiality with the phantom power of droning sound is an example of Jeffrey Sconce’s “Haunted Media,” whereby radio, television and other media technologies are culturally associated with spectacular and spectral disembodiment. According to Sconce, media technologies inspire incorporeal fantasies and, “In more extreme variations of this technological fantasy, the entire body can be electronically dissolved and teleported through telecommunications technology” (9). Sconce suggests that the subject emerges into an “electronic elsewhere” (9), which might be represented here by the Red Room, from which Dougie Jones seems to emerge via a buzzing, glowing electrical socket in the wall of a suburban house a few minutes later. Dougie Jones functions as a kind of double or tulpa for Agent Cooper and is also played by Kyle MacLachlan. In episode 15, Dougie Jones commences his reawakening as Cooper (episode 16) completes the electrical circuit that brought him to Vegas, by attacking a power socket with cutlery and falling into a coma.

This motif of malfunctioning technology and accidents leading to amnesia also features in Lynch’s films. René Thoreau Bruckner, for example, analyses the amnesia and ‘lost time’ that characters experience after a car accident in Mulholland Drive (Lynch 2001) as a meditation on the temporal interval necessary for the perception of motion in cinema. Similarly, we can understand the diegetic prominence of malfunctioning communications technologies as meditations on the media themselves, and on the spatial, temporal and corporeal dislocations that these technologies create. Receptionist at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s department, Lucy Brennan (Kimmy Robertson), figured as a simpleton in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, now displays a distinct mediaphobia, whereby she seems incapable of comprehending the function of a mobile phone. This stands in stark contrast to her original mastery of the department’s complex switchboard system, as noted by Goddard (2016). Lucy simply rejects the possibility of spatiotemporal dislocation, even when the technology is working perfectly well. Surprisingly, she comes to a sudden realisation whereby she makes sense of the dislocation of mobile phones at the same time as she intuits that the man taken by other staff for Agent Cooper is in fact a doppelgaenger, a disruption of conventional correspondences of body and identity.

De-centering Twin Peaks, Re-centering Twin Peaks

The complex negotiations of actual and media histories that interweave throughout Twin Peaks: The Return are complicated by reviving a series that has been long dormant. However, the series’ hyperconscious self-quotation both invites and thwarts audience nostalgia. Our memories of the world of Twin Peaks fail to anchor our understanding, so our nostalgic framework is dislocated. The town itself is subject to a nostalgic haunting that plays off both the audience’s aesthetic nostalgia for the original series and our desire for catharsis, as framed by the notion of a ‘return’ in which we are ostensibly fulfilling Laura Palmer’s promise to Special Agent Dale Cooper: “I’ll see you in 25 years.”

Lynch toys with nostalgic desires by creating moments that tempt fulfilment, while refusing its function as a reflective, sense-making process. Twin Peaks: The Return reflects Fredric Jameson’s ‘nostalgia mode’ in which the use of artefacts, ideas and cultural stereotypes reinvent the shape and characteristics of earlier media, reawakening a sense of the past and revealing an inability to focus on the present (197-198). Jameson writes that, “we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach” (198). The appearance of the now grown child Wally Brando (Michael Cera) entices resolution to the question of Lucy’s pregnancy in Season 2. However, Wally awkwardly meets with Sheriff (Frank) Truman (Robert Forster), a disjunctive figure with the same title and professional role as his brother, who featured in earlier seasons, Sheriff (Harry S.) Truman (Michael Ontkean). The costume, performance and dialogue of this scene appears to have bled over from Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). Wally appears as an adored, but ephemeral, transitory presence. He can only visit momentarily and remain in the external space outside of the Sheriff’s Office. He is part of, but apart from the world of Twin Peaks, while his parents, Andy and Lucy, Twin Peaks fixtures, become almost obsolete. In this instance the presence of iconic film images on television is destabilising. This mismatch of cinematic and television history serves to highlight the strangeness of a Truman who is and isn’t Truman, in a scene that is itself painfully out of place. Similarly, Gordon Cole’s surreal encounter with Monica Bellucci recalls the intertextual and extratextual associations of the actress’ star persona, but integrate uneasily with the trajectories of long-standing characters Cole and Cooper.

As a result of this overwhelming refusal to conform to nostalgia, when Lynch does directly deal in it in later episodes it feels like an unravelling of expectation. Episode 15 in particular uses nostalgic interplay as a tribute to loss – the resolution of Ed and Norma’s love story carries with it a sense of grief for all the years they could not be together, while the loss of the Log Lady seems less like a farewell to a loved character and far more like a farewell to actress Catharine E. Coulson herself. More directly, the final episodes, centering around Laura’s physical return, undo the very premise of the original series. Lynch, in a flashback episode created from the original footage, dissolves the very scene that launched the show as the image of Laura Palmer’s, plastic-wrapped body simply evaporates from the water, while Pete Martell is shown taking a path that leads away from the beach on which he found her body. The entire history of Twin Peaks as we know it, it turns out, is a glitch and we are left without a sense of resolution and with far more questions than we started with. Nostalgia for Lynch then is at odds with the narrative; it is itself a glitch.

This glitching nostalgia also appears to have affected the town of Twin Peaks itself, rupturing audience expectations of it, as if Lynch’s refusal to fulfil the nostalgic function of a ‘return’ has fractured the space of the town. Many characters, such as Beverly at the Great Northern or Jacoby in his refuge, appear to teleport through and into the town or simply appear. Similarly, the aesthetic sensibility of the town has been subverted. In the first series, daylight seemed to offer the characters of Twin Peaks a refuge from the supernatural forces. In The Return, however, it seems to presage either an uncomfortable encounter with this past (in the Sheriff’s office, Bobby’s childhood home) or acts of violence (Richard Horne’s spiralling rampage). Similarly, spaces of refuge, such as the Sheriff’s Station, the Double-R Diner and The Great Northern Hotel, are now largely closed-in by the tight framing, creating a sense of unease and discord. Jacques Renault’s roadhouse – The Bang Bang Bar, with its previously glitchy neon sign and history of violence – in contrast to the original series, becomes a thriving part of the Twin Peaks scene, offering the town’s inhabitants moments of musical escape from the pall hanging over them. Lynch’s fractured nostalgia, the unfamiliar, narrowed and dark space of Twin Peaks thus forces the audience to travel more cautiously through a town that once seemed welcoming, if quirky.

The technology-soaked spaces of The Return proliferate geographically across the US, from New York City to New Mexico, South Dakota, Nevada, and Philadelphia; the town of Twin Peaks itself is now marginal. In this way, The Return exerts a ‘centrifugal force,’ or tendency towards spatial dispersal. Conversely, in The Return, the town of Twin Peaks itself appears subject to a centripetal force centered on Laura Palmer, both as figure and memorialised object. Edward Dimendberg has identified this tension between centrifugal and centripetal geographies as common to 40s and 50s Film Noir (Dimendberg, 178), and it can also be seen throughout Lynch’s own cinematic history.

Indeed, the very notion of a return implies a re-centering both physically and psychologically. Whereas early episodes in the season are littered with peculiar intersections of characters, doppelgaengers, events and motifs, the later episodes build towards an intensity of dramatic action and psychic activity focused on the Sheriff’s Station in Twin Peaks. In this light, the character of ‘Bad Cooper’ presents not just an existential threat to the town’s inhabitants, the return of the ‘bad object’ in psychological terminology (Gordon, 156), but has caused the town to fold in on itself, reshaping its psychogeography. The result is that Twin Peaks takes on the gravitational pull of a neutron star within Lynch’s expanded universe.

We can read characters’ mediaphobia (Lucy) or use of media technologies to expel or dislocate sources of unease (Jacoby, Cole) as a rejection of the atomic force of the original trauma of Laura Palmer’s death and an attempt to re-centre themselves. In contrast to this, media technologies operate in the world of Twin Peaks as conduits of return. The explosion of atomic materials, propelled through time and space in Part 8, seems to be a movement towards rather than away from Twin Peaks. Significantly, the Fireman acts as a conduit between the worlds of this and the previous series, channelling the orb-bound spectre of Laura Palmer and also nostalgic recollection of Carly Strucken’s original character, ‘The Giant’ (who also appears in the first episode of The Return). The familiar vision of Laura, thus released, seems to draw familiar characters back towards towards the original mystery.  Most notably she appears as a spectral presence outside the hotel room of Gordon Cole in Part 9, momentarily breaking into the ‘where’s Cooper’ mystery that drives the action outside the town. As the series draws to a close, the plot concentrates increasingly on reconciling the multiple incarnations of Agent Cooper, who are finally pacified by the Fireman, the figure so heavily featured in episode 8’s luminous crescendo. This act of re-centering via a conduit is a common motif in Lynch’s work, with Part 8 evoking the ‘Club Silencio’ sequence, linking the two sections of Mulholland Drive.

Like its disjunctive relationship with media histories, Twin Peaks reconfigures the spatial relations and associations of American culture. Goddard argues that in the first two seasons of the series, the town of Twin Peaks functions as a kind of telecommunications network, with portals to other dimensions through the Black and White Lodges, which he further suggests are repositories for media recordings. In The Return, the communications network that is Twin Peaks spreads across America’s vast geographies and histories.  It does this, in part, by inverting the traditional associations between place, space, materiality, vision and movement. According to Edward Dimendberg, the centrifugal forces of American geography are commonly associated with density and visibility, while centripetal forces are associated with “immateriality, invisibility and speed” (177). Twin Peaks is an icon of hokey small-town ideals and nightmares, but it functions in the climax of the series as the site of converging dramatic and psychic intensities, fusing characters, aesthetics and ontologies that seem to be antithetical. The climactic scenes in Truman’s office, where multiple Coopers and Dianes converge before an audience of many characters drawn from across America is marked by the droning of an acousmêtr, flickering lights, double exposures, echoing voices, jerky camera movements and distorted screams.  Where episode 8 was marked by the repetition of sublime, pure white, the climax of the season is marked by repetition of pure black. The most fundamental failure of screen technology is the failure of illumination. The use of fire and harsh, high-key lighting on Cooper evokes the earlier atomic sublime montage, but wraps it in moments of all-enveloping blackness, adding further layers to the formal play between continuity and disruption. This scene also disrupts a string of dichotomies that structure conceptions of American geography: the corporeal and the spectral, materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, density and isolation, slowness and speed. Dimendberg argues that the tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces lies at the heart of modern cities and modern media, which build a new kind of space. Thus, the bucolic ideal of Twin Peaks was ruptured by the corpse of Laura Palmer at the beginning of the first season, and by the end of the third season the town becomes completely infused with the modern spectacle of places and identities in flux.

Media (Dis)continuities

The flashes of light, disembodied buzzes, phantom presences and other media glitches featured throughout Twin Peaks draw attention to isolated moments and highlight the disjunctures between flows of images and sounds. This underlines the constructed and mediated nature of the text, thwarting conventions of continuity so highly prized in Hollywood cinema. In particular, the aestheticised glitch manifests the accidental effects of communications technologies, implicitly repudiating the discourse of progress commonly associated with invention. But Twin Peaks: The Return also employs lengthy scenes in continuity-style, and invites the audience to make connections across multiple storylines, doubled characters, intimate relationships, and disparate settings; across episodes, seasons and decades; and intertextually with Lynch’s films. There is a tension throughout, as narrative and form oscillates between continuity and disjuncture. According to Chion, this tension animates Lynch’s films Eraserhead (1977) and Wild at Heart (1990): “What separates them also perpetually joins them. There is no escape from that. By virtue of the wound which divides it in two, every fragment (of sound or scene) can be felt as part of a whole which it endlessly reaffirms” (Lynch 42). Flows of image, sound, narrative and meaning are repeatedly ruptured by moments of contingency and absurdity, failures of technology and meaning. Lynch’s work relies on an uneasy intersection between past and present, mediaphilia and mediaphobia. Spectres of haunted media emerge from the intersection of virtual and actual histories and glitchy technologies. In this way, Lynch creates serial television that is both new and deeply indebted to media histories, evoking an ambivalent nostalgia for his own earlier works. Whilst these destabilising nostalgic images emerge from the past, simultaneously they convey a sense of imminence, something is about to happen.

 

Works cited

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM/Stanley Kubrick Productions, 1968.

The Addams Family. Prod. David Levy. ABC, 1964-66.

Akira. Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo. Toho, 1988.

Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. “Short Circuit: A ‘Twin Peaks’ System.” Mubi Notebook (12 May 2015). Audiovisual essay and text. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/short-circuit-a-twin-peaks-system

Bruckner, René Thoreau. “Lost Time: Blunt Head Trauma and Accident-Driven Cinema.” Discourse 30.3 (Fall 2008): 373-400.

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

——-. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julian. London: BFI, 2006.

Collins, Jim. Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2004

Dog Star Man. Dir. Stan Brakhage. 1961-64.

Eraserhead. Dir. David Lynch. AFI, 1977.

Freiberg, Freda. “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime.” Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Ed. Mick Broderick, London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. 91-102.

Goddard, Michael. “Telephones, Voice Recorders, Microphones, Phonographs: A Media Archaeology of Sonic Technologies in Twin Peaks” Senses of Cinema 79, July 2016 http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/twin-peaks/sonic-technologies-in-twin-peaks/

Gordon, Suzy. “Film, Feminism and Melanie Klein: ‘Weird Lullabies’,” in Culture and the Unconscious, edited by Caroline Bainbridge, Susannah Radstone and Michael Rustin and Candida Yates, 123-140. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Inland Empire. Dir. David Lynch, StudioCanal, Camerimage, Fundacja Kultury and Asymmetrical Productions, 2006.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 192-205.

Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Universal, 2001.

Nieland, Justus. David Lynch, Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. Columbia, 1954.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

The Simpsons. 7.1 ‘Who shot Mr Burns?’ Dir. Jeffrey Lynch. Fox, 1995.

Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount, 1950.

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Comp. Penderecki, Krzysztof. 1960.

Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch, et al. ABC, 1990-91.

Twin Peaks: The Return. Dir. David Lynch. Showtime, 2017.

Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Trans. Julie Rose. Polity: Malden MA, 2007.

Virilio, Paul and Sylvère Lotringer. The Accident of Art. Trans. Mike Toarmina. MIT UP: Cambridge MA, 2005.

Wild at Heart. Dir. David Lynch. Samuel Goldwyn, 1990.

 

Bios:

Jennifer Beckett is Lecturer in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She researches media and nation, world-building and trauma.

Wendy Haslem is a Lecturer in Screen Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the intersections of early cinema and new media.

Radha O’Meara is a Lecturer in Screenwriting in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research concentrates on narrative in contemporary film and television.