TWIN
PEAKS
POSTMODERN THEMES
Twin Peaks was a television series set in 1989 that was lucidly grounded in postmodern theory. Its postmodernity was evident in its use of numerous intertextual references and double coding within a multigeneric narrative. Charles Jencks stated in "What is postmodernism?" that "postmodernism's best works are characteristically double coded and ironic;" which Twin Peaks certainly is.
On a superficial level, Twin Peaks was a small town night time soap opera wrapped up in a detective story that was launched by a murder and worked through the weekly exploration of various characters lives up until the resolution of that crime.
On an underlying level, Twin Peaks coded into this narrative an exploration of dominant ontology. Its subject matter referenced everything from Christian and Buddhist spirituality to night time television soap operas.
Such intertextual references were sometimes explicit and explained by the characters involved, or were more obscure. For instance, any reference to the black lodge or the white lodge in Twin Peaks is a reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but also to Christianity and its notions of heaven and hell.
The frequent line "The owls are not what they seem" in Twin Peaks refers to the fact that few things are as they appear on the surface in the world of this series. It also draws on the symbolic use of owls in Whitley Strieber's 'Communion', where owls were symbols of contact with other worlds.
In Twin Peaks, even a reference to something as trivial as creamed corn is double coded, considering the fact that in many cultures corn is a symbol of life, and thus when one takes away corn, they take away life. This symbol was made more obvious in Fire Walk With Me; but such references were common in this series which often drew on other disparate cultural contexts to create its narrative. Self reflective hints to the heavy coding of this series are present in regular references made by characters to the codes and clues needed to crack the mysterious world of twin peaks.
Many of the points made in Steve Conner's article 'Postmodern tv, video and film' (which quotes Norman Denzin's study of the postmodern elements of David Lynch's Blue Velvet) also apply to Twin Peaks. Like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks "provides an improbable and disturbing stitching together of different genres and genre expectations" through its "running together in a postmodern fashion the tradition of the small town film" with a meditation on family violence inside a reappropriated, Daliesque version of the detective genre; resulting in a rhizomatic mix of the unpresentable and the common place.
Twin Peaks' small town locale, affluence and lack of children is reminiscent of other night time soap operas of its era, including Dallas, Falcon Crest and Knot's Landing. However, the fact that its male hero resolves the central narrative of this series through a mix of traditional detective work and intuitive techniques questions gender stereotypes in the extra filmic world and poses a challenge to the conventions of the detective genre.
Twin Peaks surrealistically used a variety of characters with mythic proportions including dancing dwarves, giants, doppelgangers and owls plus the spiritually charged black and white lodges to depict the role of divine influence in people's lives. And as within postmodern culture, everything about Twin Peaks was plural. It lay within two mountains, had two creators, numerous directors with broad film and television experience plus two versions of its double pilot and finale episodes.
In her paper 'Twin Peaks and the Television Gothic', Lenora Ledwon suggested that this doubling technique serves to "problematise the distinction between appearance and reality". The internal simulacra used in this series, upitomised by the ironic mirroring of Twin Peak's own convoluted story line in the self reflective'Invitation to Love' soap opera, effectively distances ideas of objective reality and again questions society's categories.
This
postmodern spirit is also evident in the numerous popular culture references
found in Twin Peaks which are used to extend upon its intratextual meaning.
For instance, the series murder victim Laura is loosely based around a character
from the 1950's noir film Laura. Indeed, Laura's
presence as the central, absent figure in Twin Peaks' narrative is also somewhat
reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rebecca'.
The Sheriff of Twin Peaks, Harry S Truman, gained his name from an ex US President;
while Dale Cooper is named after a prominent Northwest American figure.
The brothers Ben and Jerry, who are food obsessed,
are named after a gourmet icecream and the brothel in the series is named after
the 1950's Marlon Brando Film 'One Eyed Jack.'
In addition to this the one eyed character in the series, Nadine Hurley, is
a female version of one of the most popular soap characters of the eighties,
Patch from 'Days of Our Lives'; while biker James
Hurley is intended to be a nineties version of James Dean.
In Twin Peaks, the one armed man is an intentional homage to that absent figure
from the 60's tv series, 'The Fugitive'. And also
like Alfred Hitchcock, series co creator and auteur David Lynch starred in the
Twin Peaks series and the film Fire Walk With Me as dotty FBI chief Gordon Cole,
an affectionate parody of Lynch himself whose name was gained from a minor character
in one of Lynch's favourite films, 'Sunset Boulevarde'.
The
utilisation of double coding, double genres, intertextual references, plural
meanings and irony in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me reflects the plurality
and spirit of postmodernism as a whole. Denzin concluded in his study of Blue
Velvet that "postmodern individuals want works like
Lynch's for in them they can have their sex, their myths, their violence and
their politics all at once". This is a view that could be seen to
adequately apply to Twin Peaks also.