ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

1. ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery

2. Twin Peaks “She’s dead, wrapped in plastic.”

3. Twin Peaks Cooper’s Dream The famous dream sequence in Episode 2 of Season 1

6. Paratext: “Throughout this book, then, while I will occasionally use the above terms as context deems appropriate, I will more frequently refer to paratexts and to paratextuality. I take these terms from Gerard Genette, who first used them to discuss the variety of materials that surround a literary text. A fuller definition of these terms will be offered in chapter 1, but my attraction to them stems from the meaning of the prefix "para-," defined by the OED both as "beside, adjacent to," and "beyond or distinct from, but analogous to." A "paratext" is both "distinct from" and alike—or, I will argue, intrinsically part of—the text. The book's thesis is that paratexts are not simply add-ons, spinoffs, and also-rans: they create texts, they manage them, and they fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them. Just as we ask paramedics to save lives rather than leave the job to others, and just as a parasite feeds off, lives in, and can affect the running of its host's body, a paratext constructs, lives in, and can affect the running of the text. (6)

7. Lavery Paratexts Forthcoming: Books on Joss Whedon, TV Finales, The Sopranos, Supernatural, Television Art (a text book), TV Auteurs

8. Television Paratexts Contributed To

9. Dr. David Lavery Founding Co-Editor, Co-Editor (2001- )

10. Founding Co-Editor

12. Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks • Edited by David Lavery • Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994 • Contributors • Acknowledgements • Introduction: "The Semiotics of Cobbler: Twin Peaks' Interpretive Community | David Lavery • Bad Ideas: The Art and Politics of Twin Peaks | Jonathan Rosenbaum • The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks | Marc Dolan • "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?" alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery | Henry Jenkins • Family Romance, Family Violence, and the Fantastic in Twin Peaks | Diane Stevenson • "Disturbing the Guests with This Racket": Music and Twin Peaks | Kathryn Kalinak • The Canonization of Laura Palmer | Christy Desmet • Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks | Diana Hume George • Double Talk in Twin Peaks | Alice Kuzniar • Infinite Games: the Derationalization of Detection in Twin Peaks | Angela Hague • Desire Under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body of Reality in Twin Peaks | Martha Nochimson • The Dis-order of Things in Twin Peaks | J. P. Telotte • Postmodernism and Television: Speaking of Twin Peaks | Jimmie L. Reeves, et al • Appendix A: Directors and Writers • Appendix B: Cast List • Appendix C: Abbreviations • Appendix D: A Twin Peaks Calendar • Appendix E: Twin Peaks Scene Breakdown • Bibliography

13. Henry Jenkins (1958- ). Comparative media theorist. "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?" alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery | Henry Jenkins

14. “The series that will change TV.” • Rodman, Warren. "The Series that Will Change TV." Connoisseur, September 1989: 139-44. • Watch Promos

15. Mark Frost

16. Mark Frost

17. David Lynch

19. 1977 1980 1984 1990 1986

20. 1996 2001 1999 2006

22. Twin Peaks Generic Allegiances: • Frost once described Twin Peaks as "a moody, dark soap opera murder-mystery, set in a fictional town in the Northwest, with an ensemble cast and an edge” • A mystery (“Who killed Laura Palmer?” drove the story for its entire first season and nine episodes into the second) • A soap opera (it even contained within it another soap opera, Invitation to Love • an FBI drama (Malach) • a detective story (Hague, Nickerson) • a sensation novel (Huskey) • a western (complete with a “Doc” right out of Gunsmoke and a Sheriff in a cowboy hat) • a coffee commercial (Reeves, et al)

23. Ancillary Texts / Commodity Intertexts Peaks Paratexts

24. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Peaks Paratexts

25. The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life. My Tapes Peaks Paratexts

26. Diane: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper Peaks Paratexts

27. Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town Peaks Paratexts

28. Wrapped in Plastic, a Twin Peaks fanzine Peaks Paratexts

34. Major Characters Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham) Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) Denis(e) Bryson (David Duchovnay) Gordon Cole (David Lynch) Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh) Laura Palmer, Maddy Ferguson (Sheryl Lee) Philip Gerard (One-armed Man (Al Strobel) Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn-Boyle) Dr. William Hayward (Warren Frost) Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) Jerry Horne (David Patrick Kelly) James Hurley (James Marshall) Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) Nadine Hurley (Wendy Robie) Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) Hank Jennings (Chris Mulkey) Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re) Shelley Johnson (Madchen Amick) The Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) Pete Martell (Jack Nance) Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) Josie Packard (Joan Chen) Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) Albert Rosenfeld (Miguel Ferrer) Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean)

35. “Never before, in the history of television, had a program inspired so many millions of people to debate and analyze it deeply and excitedly for so prolonged a period. . . . Twin Peaks generated the kinds of annotated scrutiny usually associated with scholarly journals and literary monographs. . . .” David Bianculli, Teleliteracy

36. At 10:01 p.m. Thursday, April 19, the telephone started like a tribal drum. Everybody in the continental United States--including my children, my editors, my enemies--wanted to know about the dwarf. What did the dwarf mean? Why was he talking backwards? In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Berkeley, California, there are Twin Peaks-watching parties every Thursday night, after which . . . Deconstruction. About the dwarf: Like, wow. Bunuel was mentioned, and Cocteau, and Fellini. John Leonard, "The Quirky Allure of Twin Peaks"

37. “I have never been able to sit through a whole episode of Twin Peaks. It's a postmodern soap opera, which means that every time someone on screen eats a piece of apple pie, you can hear a thousand students start typing their doctoral dissertations on ‘Twin Peaks: David Lynch and the Semiotics of Cobbler.’” Libby Gelman-Waxner, Premiere magazine

38. Fandom. Twin Peaks was one of the first television series to inspire active fan participation and heavy investment in a current series. At water coolers around the nation and on alt.tv.twinpeaks and elsewhere, avid followers of the show speculated endlessly about the significance of minute visual details (often captured and rewatched on their VCRs) and narrative developments in the series (Jenkins). Interest in the series was not limited to the United States: Twin Peaks was a cultural phenomenon in the UK, in Europe, and, especially in Japan. Even after the show’s cancellation, Japanese flocked to the Pacific Northwest to tour the “actual” sites of the series: the Double R Cafe, the Great Northern Hotel, the location where Laura Palmer’s body was found, “dead, wrapped in plastic.”

39. Twin Peaks DNA: “dreamy, cinematic (rather than televisual) style, slow pacing, extreme violence, emotional excess, disturbing sexuality, strung-out narrative, accentuation of subtext, controversial subject matter, lush scoring, uncanny dream sequences, the demand for complete attention it placed upon television viewers accustomed to distraction, its reliance on “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment in the latter” (David Foster Wallace)

40. Lynchian. David Foster Wallace on Lynch’s style as a filmmaker: • “both extremely personal and extremely remote” • “the absence of linearity and narrative logic” • “the heavy multivalence of the symbolism” • “the glazed opacity of the characters’ faces” • “the weird ponderous quality of the dialogue” • “the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants” • “the precise, painterly way scenes are staged and lit” • “the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted”

41. Legacy. Though Twin Peaks did not, as predicted, radically alter television, it did have a lasting influence. Northern Exposure (1990-1995), Picket Fences (1992-1996) and The X-Files (1993-2002)—whose star David Duchovny played a transvestite Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Twin Peaks—both colonized television territory Twin Peaks had opened up, as did, less successfully, such flops as Eerie, Indiana (1991), American Gothic (1995-96), Murder One (1995-97), and Wolf Lake (2001). Though post-Twin Peaks television has often seemed designed for a viewership with Attention Deficit Disorder (Peyton), some of the medium’s most important contemporary creators now think of the series as a television touchstone: both Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel) and David Chase (The Sopranos) speak of Twin Peaks in hushed tones. And the name itself has become part of the language: to evoke “Twin Peaks” in relation to any narrative or any sequence of events is to label it as strange, inexplicable, unique.

44. Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files • Edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, Marla Cartwright (Middle Tennessee State University) • The Television Series, Edited by Robert Thompson • Syracuse University Press, 1996 • TABLE OF CONTENTS • Contributors ix • David Lavery, Angela Hague, Marla Cartwright, Introduction. Generation X: The X-Files and the Cultural Moment (1) • Jimmie L. Reeves (Texas Tech University), Mark C. Rodgers, and Michael Epstein, University of Michigan), Re-Writing Popularity: The Cult Files (22) • Susan J. Clerc (Bowling Green State University), DDEB, GATB, MPPB, and Ratboy: The X-Files’ Media Fandom, Online and Off (36) • Allison Graham (University of Memphis), “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?”: Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files (52) • Michele Malach (Fort Lewis College), “I Want to Believe” in the FBI: The X-Files as an FBI Drama (63) • Leslie Jones, “Last Week We Had an Omen”: The Mythological X-Files (77) • Rhonda Wilcox (Gordon College) and J. P. Williams (Georgia Southern), “What to You Think?” The X-Files, Liminality, and Gender Pleasure (99) • Lisa Parks (University of Wisconsin), Special Agent or Monstrosity?: Finding the Feminine in The X-Files (121) • Alec McHoul (Murdoch University, Australia), How to Talk the Unknown into Existence: An Exercise in X-Filology (135) • Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State University), The Rebirth of the Clinic: The Body as Alien in The X-Files (148) • Elizabeth B. Kubek (Syracuse University), “You Only Expose Your Father”: The Imaginary, Voyeurism, and the Symbolic Order in The X-Files (168) • Episode Summary (207) • Works Cited (211) • Index (221)

45. Trust No One: Reading The X-Files Edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, Marla Cartwright (Middle Tennessee State University) The Television Series, Edited by Robert Thompson Syracuse University Press, 1996 With a preface by Chris Carter and David Duchovny [Not]

47. The degree to which The X-Files became in the last decade part of our cultural vocabulary can be demonstrated by an exchange from a first season episode of the WB series Angel in which Kendrick, an obviously sexist male detective, hassles female detective Kate Lockley (Elizabeth Rohm), who has come to believe in the reality of vampires. The following dialogue ensues: • Kendrick: "Come on, Kate. Everybody knows you've gone all Scully. Anytime one of these weird cases crosses anyone's desk you're always there. What's going on with you?" • Kate: "Scully is the skeptic." • Kendrick: "Huh?" • Kate: "Mulder is the believer. Scully is the skeptic." • Kendrick scratches his head: "Scully is the chick, right?" • Kate: "Yes. But she's not the one that wants to believe."

48. The Cast • Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) • Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) • Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) • Agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick) • Associate Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) • Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) • Agent Diane Fowley (Mimi Rogers) • Alex Krychek (Nicholas Lea) • The Lone Gunmen (Dean Haglund, Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood) • X (Steven Williams) • C. G. B. Spender/The Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) • The Well-Manicured Man (John Neville)

49. Chris Carter Creator of The X-Files