M/C Reviews: Intertexuality and Interactivity: when 'Twin Peaks' goes to the Net

	Intertexuality and Interactivity: when Twin Peaks* goes to the Net* Yesim Burul
	Twin Peaks Fan Internet Communities	25 Oct. 01

Bit

Bit 1		“Twin Peaks is both a private frenzy and a collective outbreak of madness, a myth, a nest to ease our suffering, to which everyone brings his or her little twig.” Michel Chion, David Lynch It is arguably the mysterious, extraordinary, hybrid and complicated narrative of Twin Peaks that is responsible for the cult status it has gained and sustained in the ten years since the first broadcasting of the series in 1990-1991 in the USA. The broadcasting of the series during the following years in different countries around the world, but especially in Europe, helped to spread its cult status.
Bit 2		It is not easy to understand or explain such an ongoing interest in the series, which was recently described by its creator David Lynch “as dead as a doornail”(see David Hughes’ interview with David Lynch at the British cinema magazine Empire.) Moreover, various aspects of the series and its place within the filmography of David Lynch have already been addressed by different authors and researchers (see Lavery, Chion). In this paper, I propose that it is the postmodern intertextuality of the series that accounts for the devoted involvement and intervention of its fans. Reeves et al. in their discussion of the relationship between postmodernism and “Twin Peaks” track down three modes of intertextuality. First is the appearance of actors that are familiar to the audience from other texts, especially from David Lynch’s previous works such as Kyle MacLachlan from Dune and Blue Velvet, Jack Nance (Pete Martell) and Charlotte Stewart (Betty Briggs) from Eraserhead, Frances Bray (Mrs. Tremond) from Blue Velvet, Everett McGill (Ed Hurkey) from Dune; and from other well known television or cinema ‘classics’: Peggy Lipton (Norma Jennings) and Clarence Williams III (Agent Hardy) both from The Mod Squad, Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne) and Russ Tamblyn (Dr. Jacoby) from West Side Story, and so forth. Second, “Twin Peaks” also appropriates different television and film genres. The detective story melts into a soap opera with hints of sitcom, Western, juvenile delinquency, horror and even commercials. Lastly, the creators appropriate features of popular culture beyond television, both from the past and the present, such as bringing in a ‘fifties feeling’ “though it apparently takes place in the present” (Reeves 176).
Bit 3		The secondary texts around Twin Peaks are numerous and each one of them, more or less, act as complementary features of the narrative. The "commodity intertexts" as titled by David Lavery consists of three tie-in books (The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper and the official guide Welcome to TWIN PEAKS: Access Guide to the Town); the limited edition set of “Twin Peaks Collectible CardArt” which supplies seventy-six cards representing individual characters, places, famous dialogues, trivia questions about the show, and various other things; the complete Cooper-to-Diane audio tapes and the soundtrack (Lavery 7). Access to these commodity intertexts becomes important in terms of the production of meaning because of the extra information these intertexts provide about the characters and their backgrounds. But the material left out of these “commodity intertexts” that are produced by the viewers themselves, are more sophisticated and complex than simple letters to the press.
Bit 4		Through the development of new technologies such as the VCR and Internet, the way television texts are treated by the viewers has become more complicated. The VCR has provided the opportunity to record every single episode and to watch it over and over again. As one fan asserted, “video-recording has made it possible to treat film like a manuscript, to be pored over and deciphered” (Jenkins 54). The internet has allowed a whole new set of secondary texts to be created and articulated around that manuscript. The internet has become the last site where all sorts of secondary texts meet. It is the ultimate meeting point where vertical integrity is created, because on the internet, official publicity sites of the studios appear alongside the personal web sites devoted to the works of David Lynch or to Twin Peaks in particular. Henry Jenkins’ study on the discussion group, alt.tv.twinpeaks gives an extensive account of “the potential relevance and social specificity of computer net discourse to the ongoing attempts to document and analyse popular reception of television texts” (53). The emergence and functions of this discussion group is summarised by Jenkins as follows:
Bit 5		Alt.tv.twinpeaks emerged within just a few weeks of the series’ first aired episode and quickly became one of the most active and prolific groups on the system. (One estimate suggests that some twenty-five thousand readers subscribed to alt.tv.twinpeaks, though the vast majority remained ‘lurkers’ who did not actively contribute to the discussion.) The discussion group served many functions for the reception community. One fan provided a detailed sequence of all the narrative events and updated it following each new episode. Another built a library of digitized sounds from the series, while a third generated a collection of favorite quotes… The net became the vehicle for the exchange of videotapes as well… Some fans even wrote their own Twin Peaks scripts to form fodder for group discussion during the long weeks between episodes… The group, however, spent much of its time in detailed analysis of the series (Jenkins 53-54). All of these activities show how the fans of the series can continue to translate, transform and reshape the text, which resists a closed, structuralist analysis of it. As one fan pointed out on the net “Can you imagine Twin Peaks coming out before VCRs or without the net? It would have been Hell!!” (Jenkins 54). There were all sorts of theories about WKLP (aka. Who Killed Laura Palmer) and fans even suggested that Lynch monitored the internet forums and shaped the program in response to fan debates (Jenkins 62).
Bit 6		Alt.tv.twinpeaks does not exist anymore; in the summer of 1997 it was replaced by a webring of separate websites. “Twin Peaks and David Lynch Webring” consisted of fifty-three separate websites including some sites in German and French. More than half of them were extensively Twin Peaks related while the others were concerned with the works of David Lynch in general. There was a weekly newsletter edited by Jordan Chambers and Kelly Kirwan where all the issues regarding Twin Peaks and its characters were discussed and there were about 656 ‘twinpeakers’ who subscribed to it by July 1999. Recently this old webring has been replaced by a new NetRing that links 23 websites, all exclusively Twin Peaks related. The weekly newsletter has also been stopped temporarily; but the discussions go on at the message board of Jordan and Kelly’s remarkable website “Twin Peaks Gazette”. There is also the Twin Peaks Fan festival, which began with the studio-financed premiere of Fire Walk With Me in 1992. Then studio backing allowed the attendance of several of the film’s stars and other creative talent to descent upon Seattle for what was to become an annual event sponsored solely by the fans.
Bit 7		When the series were on air “the fans’ pleasure [laid] simultaneously in their mastery over the text (their ability to successfully predict the next turn of its convoluted plot) and their vulnerability to Lynch’s trickery (their inability to guess what is likely to happen next)” (Jenkins 63). The series ended after thirty episodes (including the pilot) and ten years have passed since its first broadcasting. Yet the fan interest continues; the fans want to understand the underlying mysteries and gain a mastery over the text by overriding the original author to create new meanings and possibilities. In doing so they simultaneously announce the author/text rebirth by granting them a cult status. The discussions and analyses of Twin Peaks are reconsidered with reference to each new piece of work by David Lynch. Perhaps the link between Twin Peaks and Lynch’s other films is deliberately constructed and sustained by the director himself. Lynch, as a postmodern auteur, has a distinctive style and there are certain themes that recur in his work.
Bit 8		Amid new technologies of communication and especially the internet, everyone can be an author, a text may have multiple authors and the writing process is never finished. Twin Peaks might be dead for David Lynch himself, but it is apparently not so for many viewers around the world who are enthusiastically waiting for the extra material that may be released with the DVD edition of the series. The text has already slipped from the hands of David Lynch; continuously and elaborately is it being rewritten and reread by its fans now. Today (2nd October 2001) is the big day for all twinpeakers as Operation Creamed Corn is under way (see http://www.2000revue.com/creamedcorn/). Twinpeakers, from all around the world, will be sending their cans of creamed corn to the New Line Cinema in order to get hold of the deleted scenes of Fire Walk With Me, handpicked, edited, transferred, and composed by David Lynch himself. I can not help wondering what new insights the extra footage will bring into the analyses. The discussions will be reheated and the story will continue…

Bit 9		Works Cited Chion, M. David Lynch. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. Fiske, J. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Hughes, D. Hall of Fame: Interview with David Lynch. Empire 149 (November 2001). Jenkins, H. “Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery” in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Lavery, D. “Introduction: The Semiotics of Cobbler: Twin Peaks’ Interpretive Community” in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Reeves, J. L. et al. “Postmodernism and Television: Speaking of Twin Peaks” in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Bit 10		Citation reference for this article MLA style: Yesim Burul. "Intertexuality and Interactivity: when Twin Peaks goes to the Net" M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. [your date of access] <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/yburul.html>. Chicago style: Yesim Burul, "Intertexuality and Interactivity: when Twin Peaks goes to the Net," M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/yburul.html> ([your date of access]). APA style: Yesim Burul. (2000) Intertexuality and Interactivity: when Twin Peaks goes to the Net. M/C Reviews 25 Oct. 01. <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/features/interactive/yburul.html> ([your date of access]).

[image]

Links:
Twin Peaks Webring