Twin Peaks

TV Milestones

by Julie Grossman, Will Scheibel

Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel's enthusiastic book on the television series Twin Peaks takes fans through the world that Mark Frost and David Lynch created and examines its impact on society, genre, and the television industry. Grossman and Scheibel explore the influences of melodrama and film noir, the significance around the idea of "home," as well as female trauma and agency. In addition to this close investigation of the series itself, the authors examine the rich storytelling surrounding Twin Peaks that includes the film prequel, Mark Frost's novels, and Showtime's 2017 revival. In Twin Peaks, Grossman and Scheibel argue that the show has transcended conventional binaries not only in film and television but also in culture and gender.



The book begins with a look into the publicity and critical discourses on authorship that framed Twin Peaks as an auteurist project rather than a prime-time soap opera. Despite critics' attempts to distance the series from the soap opera genre, Grossman and Scheibel explore how melodrama and noir are used in Twin Peaks. Grossman and Scheibel masterfully examine star performances in the series including Kyle MacLachlan's epic portrayal as the idiosyncratic Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheryl Lee's haunting embodiment of Laura Palmer. The monograph finishes with an examination of the adaptation and remediation of Twin Peaks in a variety of different platforms, which have further expanded the boundaries of the series.

Twin Peaks explores the ways in which the series critiques multiple forms of objectification in culture and textuality. Readers interested in film, television, pop culture, and gender studies as well as fans and new audiences discovering Twin Peaks will embrace this book.

Genres: Nonfiction

122 pages, Paperback

Published February 11, 2020

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only complaint about this book --and it is an unfair one--is that it is too short. The TV Milestones series consists of compact volumes of only around 100 pages, illustrated with stills from the shows, so they are very economical, not only in terms of price point but also in terms of their commentary. This book faces the challenge of trying to deal with a TV series that ran in two different iterations, twenty-five years apart, with an intervening cinematic release set in its universe. All three of these takes on Twin Peaks are dense and complex in their own right and could well merit (and indeed have received, in some cases) extensive and intensive critical attention. A book of 100 pages cannot possibly offer an exhaustive analysis of work so self-consciously and deliberately unconventional, iconoclastic, and downright ambiguous (if not impenetrable). Grossman and Scheibel nevertheless manage to offer a very effective synthesis of the critical tradition so far, while focusng on a few specific topics: auteurism; genre; the depiction of the femme fatale (Lynch's representation of women in his work has often been criticized; Grossman and Scheibel do, I think, an exceptional job of addressing what is going on, in Twin Peaks, at least); and performativity, in a chapter that offers brief but nevertheless insightful explorations of three key performances: Ray Wise's, Kyle McLachlan's, and Sheryl Lee's--whose brilliant performance in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has been (in my opinion) undeservedly undervalued. There is also a final chapter on paratextual materials (e.g. the various Twin Peaks-related "official" books, such as The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, perhaps for me the least interesting chapter, as I am not really familiar with these; I know of them but have not read any of them. From my point of view, a few more pages on the televisual/filmic material would have been of more interest, but the paratextual stuff is a legitimate subject and I don't fault the book for looking at it briefly. One could always quibble about what more or else the book might have considered, but I will eschew such armchair quarterbacking, as for a very short book, this one offers considerable value, not only for the Twin Peaks neophyte or fan (though the scholarly language is occasionally perhaps just a tad challenging for non-academic readers) but also for the Twin Peaks scholar. I am moderately familiar with the critical tradition and found insights here that were new to me; I don't know whether the dedicated Twin Peaks scholar would find as much new, but such a reader would, I think, find this book a useful and insightful pathway into the show.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've got a review out soon at 25 Years Later.