Twin Peaks

Franck Boulègue

Description

Few contemporary television shows have been subjected to the critical scrutiny that has been brought to bear on David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks since its debut in 1990. Yet the series, and the subsequent film, Fire Walk With Me, are sufficiently rich that it's always possible for a close analysis to offer something new – and that's what Franck Boulègue has done with Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic. Through Boulègue's eyes, we see for the first time the world of Twin Peaks as a coherent whole, one that draws on a wide range of cultural source material, including surrealism, transcendental meditation, Jungian psychoanalysis, mythology, fairy tales, and much, much more. The work of a scholar who is also a fan, the book should appeal to any hardcore Twin Peaks viewer.
Foreword
Acknowledgements
It’s Happening Again!
Chapter 1: Birds, Mountain Peaks and Dreams for Sale
Chapter 2: Northwest Passage to the Ocean of Consciousness
Chapter 3: How I Slept Like a Log: Dreams, Nightmares and Secret Gardens
Chapter 4: Mirrors, Curtains and Windows: Introspection, Visions, Masks and Viewpoints
Chapter 6: Food, Clowns and Dance: Twin Peaks’ Carnival of Souls
Conclusion
Appendix 1: At the Roots of Meaning
Appendix 2: Filmic Influences

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• David Lynch
• Film
• Twin Peaks
• Jung (homonymie)
• Mark Frost
• Art
• Video
• Carl Jung
• Jung

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781783206612
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Front cover image: Twin Peaks (1990—1991). Lynch/Frost/Spelling/ The Kobal Collection
Production editors: Jelena Stanovnik & Matt Greenfield
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-659-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-660-5
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-661-2
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
We stand on a peak of consciousness, believing in a childish way that the path leads upward to yet higher peaks beyond. That is the chimerical rainbow bridge. In order to reach the next peak we must first go down into the land where the paths begin to divide.
Jung, 1953, p.60
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
It’s Happening Again!
Chapter 1: Birds, Mountain Peaks and Dreams for Sale
Chapter 2: Northwest Passage to the Ocean of Consciousness
Chapter 3: How I Slept Like a Log: Dreams, Nightmares and Secret Gardens
Chapter 4: Mirrors, Curtains and Windows: Introspection, Visions, Masks and Viewpoints
Chapter 5: Mythology and Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauties and Angry Gods
Chapter 6: Food, Clowns and Dance: Twin Peaks’ Carnival of Souls
Conclusion
Appendix 1: At the Roots of Meaning
Appendix 2: Filmic Influences
References
About the Author
Foreword
I’ve watched Twin Peaks – and by that I mean all thirty episodes, plus the feature film Fire Walk with Me – probably two dozen times, no exaggeration. I remember viewing the series week by week way back in 1990–1991, when it first aired on American network television (never missed an episode, even during the difficult Little Nicky-Evelyn Marsh-Lana Budding Milford times), and can even recall the run-up to the show’s premiere, as I was, at the time, a television editor at the entertainment trade paper Variety , where we seemed to run almost weekly stories documenting David Lynch’s rapturously anticipated dive into television (and ABC’s complete befuddlement over how to handle it).
Years later, and another lifetime: As programme director at the nostalgia-themed cable television outlet TV Land (spin-off of Nick at Nite), I spent two years lobbying for the displacement of our 11 p.m. weeknight drama, the bromitic (though admittedly popular) 1970s private-eye show Mannix , by something – anything – with a little sting, like, say, The Prisoner or, yes, Twin Peaks. Our Brady Bunch -obsessed VP wasn’t biting. What was I trying to do, sink the network? (Maybe, but that’s another story.) The good news: I spent hours and hours viewing brilliant but cancelled television shows. The bad news? Never got a single one of them on the air.
This brings us to The Paley Center for Media, my current place of employment, where our video library includes the entire run of Twin Peaks , meaning that ever since I arrived here twenty-four years ago I’ve been able to watch any episode, any time (yes, I’ve heard of Netflix). I have indulged, plenty. Sometimes, in my luckier moments, I am even required to watch, as in the winter of 2014, when we planned our commemoration of Laura Palmer’s Red Room promise to see Dale Cooper again in twenty-five years (lots of doughnuts, lots of coffee, plus a screening of a fan edit of the entire series stripping out every single piece of footage not pertaining to the Laura Palmer murder investigation). At my night job – as adjunct professor of television – I frequently teach Twin Peaks , often to students who resist anything pre-2000 – though, curiously, not Twin Peaks. Here’s my point: I know Twin Peaks. Or thought I did. Now, thanks to Twin Peaks : Unwrapping the Plastic, I’ve been humbled: turns out what I didn’t know about Twin Peaks could fill a book, which is precisely what Franck Boulègue has done here, in the pages that follow.
My signature approach to Twin Peaks is through the noir lens, darkly. Hard-core Peaks fans know that David Lynch and Mark Frost are aficionados of the classic cycle of noir films, hardboiled, crime-centric B pictures produced by Hollywood studios in the 1940s and 1950s, characterized by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 as belonging ‘to a class that we used to call the crime film, but would best be described from this point on by a term such as criminal adventures, or better yet, such as criminal psychology’. Multiple Twin Peaks denizens are namesakes of classic noir characters, including Laura Palmer, a nod to the title character in Otto Preminger’s masterful 1944 crime thriller, titled simply Laura. Grouping Twin Peaks within this style of film can be an unconventional choice, in that classic noir is typically tellurian, eschewing the supernatural. However, the argument can be made that the black spirits roaming the Twin Peaks universe are merely metaphors for the darkness in our own souls, and what is noir ultimately about if not that?
Connections of this sort transcend academic exercise. They illuminate and challenge, prying our minds open to new avenues of interpretation. ‘Buddha urged people to investigate things – he didn’t just command them to believe’, the Dalai Lama has said (the quote seems appropriate, given the influence of Eastern thought on the series – read all about it in the pages ahead). Investigate! Isn’t that what drives the Twin Peaks narrative? The great, overriding gift of Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic is that it offers provocative new approaches to our critical appreciation of Twin Peaks , profoundly and innovatively investigating the artistic, spiritual, cultural and psychological influences on David Lynch and Mark Frost as they created and executed first the series and then (Lynch, but not Frost) the film. Nietzsche, Jung, Kafka, Hopper, Ernst, Duchamp, Cocteau, Blavatsky, Carroll, Bettelheim, Campbell – all of them are here, along with many distinguished brethren. Franck’s expansive knowledge of these titanic thinkers, and his virtuosic articulation of this erudition, is, for lack of a better word, awesome, in a literal sense. As a television historian, I’m particularly enthralled by his excavation of the obscure 1987 BBC Two programme Arena , in which Lynch discusses the work of twentieth-century surrealists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Jean Cocteau – I had to find and watch it! – but this book really brims with citations of films, paintings and literature that are so convincingly linked aesthetically or thematically to Twin Peaks that they cry out for direct interaction by any intellectually curious fan of the film and series.
In his introduction, Franck writes that ‘ Twin Peaks is fundamentally about one thing: the “process of individuation” described by Carl Gustav Jung, that is to say, the integration by the various characters of the unconscious elements of their personalities in order to evolve as individuals’. Clearly, so many of the souls who pass through Twin Peaks undergo metamorphoses of this sort, perhaps none more so than Dale Cooper, the seeker, who journeys thousands of miles in search of truth, finding, yes, evil beyond comprehension, but also transformative love, so profound he is willing to sacrifice his soul for it. Reading Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic is itself a journey, on the other end of which we arrive wiser, clearer and more appreciative than ever of this truly wonderful and strange place known as Twin Peaks.
I can’t wait for season 3.
David Bushman, Paley Center for Media, New York City
Acknowledgements
First, I wish to thank Diana Heyne for the editorial work she has contributed to this book. Without her numerous revisions, my text might very well have sounded like something written by The Man From Another Place!
To Scott Ryan of the Red Room Podcast, thank you for the perfect picture of Big Boy. One of these days, I hope we will be able to share a damn fine cup of coffee in just such a place.
Many thanks to Cherie Sampson for reading my unfinished manuscript, clarifying elements related to Transcendental Meditation and suggesting various connections to Native American mythology. I am very grateful for your comments and support.
My gratitude also goes to David Bushman for his expertise, his advice and especially his willingness to contribute the foreword to this book. It has always been a particularly rewarding experience working and exchanging thoughts with him.
Many thanks to the staff of Intellect Press who have followed this project since its beginning in late 2013: Gabriel Solomons, May Yao and Jelena Stanovnik. Thank you for taking a chance on a weird Frenchman obsessed with an old American TV series from the early 1990s!
And last but certainly not least, I am, as always, completely indebted to my beautiful wifey Marisa C. Hayes, whose attentive comments, suggestions, editing and corrections on this book helped to transmute an awkward first draft into a beautiful text. To quote Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks :
One woman can make you fly like an eagle
another can give you the strength of a lion
but only one in the cycle of life
can fill your heart with wonder
and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy
It’s Happening Again!
T he writing of this book was already well under way when a simultaneous ‘twin tweet’ by David Lynch and Mark Frost on the 3rd of October, 2014 suddenly changed everything: ‘That gum you like is going to come back in style’. This well-known line concerning gum, originally uttered by The Man From Another Place in t