scholarly journals “That Show You Like Might Be Coming Back in Style”: How Twin Peaks Changed the Face of Contemporary Television

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raluca Moldovan
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
David Lynch ◽  
American Film ◽  
Twin Peaks ◽  
The Face ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Small Screen ◽  
Detective Series

Abstract The present study revisits one of American television’s most famous and influential shows, Twin Peaks, which ran on ABC between 1990 and 1991. Its unique visual style, its haunting music, the idiosyncratic characters and the mix of mythical and supernatural elements made it the most talked-about TV series of the 1990s and generated numerous parodies and imitations. Twin Peaks was the brainchild of America’s probably least mainstream director, David Lynch, and Mark Frost, who was known to television audiences as one of the scriptwriters of the highly popular detective series Hill Street Blues. When Twin Peaks ended in 1991, the show’s severely diminished audience were left with one of most puzzling cliffhangers ever seen on television, but the announcement made by Lynch and Frost in October 2014, that the show would return with nine fresh episodes premiering on Showtime in 2016, quickly went viral and revived interest in Twin Peaks’ distinctive world. In what follows, I intend to discuss the reasons why Twin Peaks was considered a highly original work, well ahead of its time, and how much the show was indebted to the legacy of classic American film noir; finally, I advance a few speculations about the possible plotlines the series might explore upon its return to the small screen.

The Ecologies of Film Noir

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Rental Property ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Artificial World

Postwar American film noir explores an artificial world that does not foster human happiness and growth, but leads to a kind of human incapacity to act and respond. Beyond merely depicting these negative environments, noir lays bare the attachments to bad living and unsustainable striving that underwrite the accumulating culture of the Anthropocene at midcentury. Positioning itself as the genre that critiques postwar peaceful prosperity, noir gives us the characters, places, and scripts for human expiration as the counter to both nuclear survivalism and consumer capitalism. The hospitality of film noir is rental property. Indeed, impermanent dwelling of the individual and humanity as a whole is one of noir’s lessons for the Anthropocene. American noir is an ecological genre that teaches us in the spirit of Roy Scranton’s book how “to die in the Anthropocene.”

scholarly journals DE NARCISO A ORFEO. ALTERIDAD NARRATIVA Y ESPECTATORIAL EN TWIN PEAKS. THE RETURN DE DAVID LYNCH

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Víctor ITURREGUI-MOTILOA
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
David Lynch ◽  
Twin Peaks ◽  
The Spectator

Resumen: Este artículo propone un estudio de la alteridad y la ficción en la serie Twin Peaks. The Return. Realizaremos un estudio de las decisiones formales y narrativas como procesos de significación, con el análisis fílmico y narratológico como herramienta. El trabajo se centra en la construcción del punto de vista y la identificación del espectador. El motivo de los mundos y figuras duplicadas desarrollado por David Lynch en su cine alcanza su acmé en la ficción televisiva. Además, estas ideas se materializan en la revisión de dos de los mitos clásicos sobre la relación con el Otro: Orfeo y Narciso.Abstract: This paper consists on a study of alterity and fiction in Twin Peaks. The Return. It will discuss the formal and narrative decisions as forms of signification, using film and narratological analysis. This research will pay attention to the construction of the point of view and to the identification of the spectator towards these images. The classical themes on lynchean films, such as alternative and duplicate worlds and figures, sublimate in TV fiction. Moreover, these ideas are represented by reinterpreting two myths related to the Other: Orpheus and Narcissus.

scholarly journals The Hybridization Of The Noir Genre As Expression Of Ethnic Heritage: Rafael Navarro’s Sonambulo

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Anna Marta Marini
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
American Film ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Film Genres ◽  
Fundamental Reference

In his ongoing comic book series Sonambulo, versatile artist Rafael Navarro has been able to channel his Mexican American cultural heritage by creating a unique blend of narrative genres. In his work, Navarro exploits classic American film noir as a fundamental reference and hybridizes it with elements distinctive to a shared Chicanx heritage, such as lucha libre cinema, horror folktales, and border-crossing metaphors; the construction of an oneiric dimension helps bring the narrative together, marking it with a peculiar ambiance. Drawing heavily on a diverse range of film genres, as well as ethnocultural pivots, this comic book series carves out a definite space in the panorama of the Mexican American production of popular culture, adding a powerful voice to the expression of US ethnic minorities.

The “Eagle Scout Film”: David Lynch as Auteur and Genre Filmmaker

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Jonathan Monovich
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
David Lynch ◽  
Hybrid Films ◽  
Hostile Environments

Knowing David Lynch’s background as an Eagle Scout, this article explores that many of Lynch’s films and their protagonists, particularly Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) in Blue Velvet (1986), embody Eagle Scout-like heroes and serve as genre-like “Eagle Scout films.” These films and their protagonists have similarities with the film noir and western genres and their detective/cowboy heroes through their dealings with ethics, morality, and justice in sadistic worlds. In his genre-hybrid films, Lynch acts as an auteur in using recurring thematic preoccupations/stylistic tendencies, while exemplifying hostile environments offset by a central protagonist with an Eagle Scout-like set of morals.

Femme fatale

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
French Version ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
French Film ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The City

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger

3. Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-64
Author(s):  
James Naremore
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Standard Report ◽  
The Impact

During the period when American film noir was at its zenith, Hollywood’s self-appointed censorship agency, the Production Code Administration (PCA), exercised control over the movie studios. The PCA’s standard report form of the 1940s was manifestly puritanical and ideological. ‘Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir’ explains the strategies used to get past the strict censorship rules and considers the impact of political censorship, especially the concern with communism, and the general culture’s treatment of women and minorities on Hollywood noir through the 1940s and 1950s, a period of time that saw probably the most regulated, censored, and morally scrutinized pictures of the kind in American history.

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