Related Papers
American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
“That Show You Like Might Be Coming Back in Style”: How Twin Peaks Changed the Face of Contemporary Television
2015 •
Ioana Cireap
The present study revisits one of American television’s most famous and influential shows,
"'The Past Dictates the Future': Epistemic Ambivalence and the Compromised Ethics of Complicity in Twin Peaks: The Return and Fire Walk With Me," New American Notes Online Special Issue 15: Twin Peaks: The Return, edited by Matthew Lau and Matt Miller, February 2020.
2020 •
Joshua Jones
In this paper I explore questions of epistemology and complicity in Twin Peaks: The Return with reference to the original series and to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I characterize these works as auto-exegetical texts (texts that critically read themselves), and I introduce the notion of epistemic ambivalence to describe how they proffer the possibility of teleological resolution while deliberately failing to provide enough information to realize that possibility. I examine how epistemic ambivalence is frequently deployed around questions of complicity with and culpability for evil, with the effect that the desire for certain knowledge and meaning is problematized by its connection to a masculinized desire for mastery. I argue that epistemic ambivalence is not just an important theme but is an integral characteristic of The Return’s ambivalently complicit story of violence and objectification. I reach two main conclusions: first, that the foregrounding of Laura’s pain in both Fire Walk with Me and The Return demands that audiences address and reflect upon their own complicity with the violence inflicted upon her; and second, that while there may be value in remaining attached to the desire for certain knowledge and to the dualistic conceptions of good and evil deployed ambiguously throughout Twin Peaks, there is more ethical and critical value to be found in exploring how these works engage the ambivalence such attachment engenders.
Film Landscapes: Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture
Lynchian Landscapes and the Legacy of the American Sublime
2013 •
Allister Mactaggart
Lynchian Landscapes and the Legacy of the American Sublime While much has been made of the concept of the sublime in relation to David Lynch’s films, attention has largely been focused upon the excessive behaviour of the characters and less consideration has been paid to the importance of the role of landscape. Yet, throughout these films detailed references are suggested about the intricate relationship between nature and culture in the complexities the characters find themselves in. In this chapter I will use examples from across Lynch’s films to analyze the concepts of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque as they emerged in the development of nineteenth century American landscape painting in the work of artists such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, as they sought to find an artistic language to represent the nation’s landscape in a period of profound social and economic transformation. By so doing I will relate this artistic legacy to the contemporary cinematic setting in Lynch’s ‘film paintings’, to disentangle changing conceptions of national identity, religion and ecology.
The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory
2010 •
Allister Mactaggart
Aimed at both Lynch fans and film studies specialists, The Film Paintings of David Lynch addresses Lynch's films from the perspective of the relationship between commercial film, avant-garde art, and cultural theory. Individual Lynch works - The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire - are discussed in relation to other films and directors, illustrating that the solitary, or seemingly isolated, experience of film is itself socially, culturally, and politically important. The Film Paintings of David Lynch offers a unique perspective on an influential director, weaving together a range of theoretical approaches to Lynch's films to make exciting new connections between film theory, art history, psychoanalysis and cinema.
IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film
Whose Story is This? The Non-existence of the External Gaze in David Lynch's Films
2018 •
ASLI FAVARO, PhD
The tendency to eschew a coherent narrative has been very common especially since the 1990s and a certain approach to narration has become observable within postmodern cinema: the viewer is denied access to the truth and realities concerning dramatic structure and characters, either during part of the narrative, or throughout the entire movie. For instance, Stuart Mitchell (1999) points out that in David Lynch's Lost Highway, as Lynch himself points out, the dream/dreaminess is neither a fantasy nor a delusion but something intrinsic to the character, thus what we watch is essentially the story of the main character and it is realistic according to his logic. Analysing the David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), this article will discuss how any attempt by the viewer to achieve the truth and to distinguish reality from fantasy may be fruitless and how the filmic or fictional reality may result undistinguishably from so-called material reality. I argue that the viewer moves and stumbles with the gaze of the camera which reveals that the reality is something constructed, and that the objective reality of an external gaze doesn't exist.
Film Paintings of David Lynch : Challenging Film Theory
Antonella Tardivo
An Attempt to Crack the Code: Twin Peaks’ Narrative Complexity Understood Through Cognitive Dissonance, Narrative Mapping and Navigation
Nina Yakimova-Stelma
Approaching Twin Peaks : Critical Essays on the Original Series
David Lynch's American Nightmare
2017 •
Siobhan Lyons
‘The Same Kind of Different’: The Function and Dysfunction of Myth in the 90s Cult Television Series, Twin Peaks.
Victoria Rose
Surface attraction: hyphological encounters with the films of David Lynch
2006 •
Allister Mactaggart
How does one turn a cinematic passion into an academic thesis? This is the question that runs through my work, which is both a labour of love and a series of love letters. Does one, can one, tell the truth about one's love object? Written in solitude about the darkened passions of the cinema, and the commodified reenactment via DVD and video, it seeks to locate this body of work, organized under the signifier David Lynch, within a broader cultural history of film and art, rather than, as so many chronologically based studies have done, to assess the individual films and then collectively to remark upon the auteur's signature. Instead, it seeks to experience again, or anew, the ontological strangeness of film within the saturated market place, and observe how, in this body of work, the normative framework of the North American film industry is disturbed from inside by a practice which explores and critically examines the creative potential of the medium within the constraints...
