Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Initial Reaction ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Twin Peaks ◽  
Take Back

When David Lynch's film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a prequel to the television series Twin Peaks, premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, it was met with met with outright hostility. Subsequent reviews from critics were almost unanimously negative, and many fans of the show felt betrayed, as their beloved town was suddenly revealed as a personal hell. Yet in the years since the film's release, there has begun to be a gradual wave of reappraisal and appreciation, one that accelerated with the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. What has been central to this reevaluation is the realization that what Lynch had created was not a parody of soap opera and detective television but a horror movie. This book argues that the horror genre aids Lynch's purpose in presenting the protagonist Laura Palmer's subjective experience leading to her death as the incorporation of horror tropes actually leads to a more accurate representation of a victim's suffering and confusion. The book goes on to explore how the film was an attempt by Lynch to take back ownership of the material and to examine the initial reaction and subsequent reevaluation of the film, as well as the paratexts that link to it and the influence that Fire Walk with Me now has on contemporary film and across popular culture.

Cherry Pie Wrapped in Barbed Wire: Fire Walk With Me as a Horror Movie

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-74
Author(s):  
Lindsay Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Gain Control ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Twin Peaks ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Town

This chapter discusses Twin Peaks and its engagement with and subversion of genre conventions. It discloses how the Twin Peaks television series is viewed as a work of postmodernism and a pastiche of several genres that provide references to film noir, which gives the series a cinematic feel. It also points out that the Twin Peaks series parodied television genre conventions, while David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is less interested in parody and pastiche and presents a more personal and subjective story. The chapter examines how Fire Walk With Me reveals more of the strange and unearthly realm that exists side-by-side with the town where larger forces of good and evil fight to gain control of Laura's soul. It describes the strong sense of the supernatural in Fire Walk With Me; an element that situates the film in the horror genre through the creation of mythical and mystical spaces.

scholarly journals The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

Politics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandria J Innes ◽  
Robert J Topinka
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas.

scholarly journals California and Irony in Mad Men

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Taveira
Keyword(s):  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
The Self ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The Aesthetic

The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television series Mad Men (2007¬–) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s’ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper’s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman’s concept of “sinthomosexuality” and Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show’s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of “quality TV” (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.

Anti-Americanism in Retreat: Jack Lang, Cultural Imperialism, and the Anti-Anti-Americans

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Kuisel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
American Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Movie Star

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.

Mainstream Trends and Masterpiece Traditions

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva N. Redvall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Long Form ◽  
The Uk

The chapter explores the successful meeting of “mainstream trends” and “masterpiece traditions” in the commissioning and production of Downton Abbey (2010–2015), and the way in which this “postheritage drama” marks a significant transatlantic encounter between different broadcasting cultures and storytelling traditions. Drawing on recent research on the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States in television drama, the analysis first details how this period drama became a collaboration between the commercial UK broadcaster ITV and the American PBS station WGBH and its Masterpiece series. The chapter then investigates how the long-form narrative with soap opera elements was designed to tap into the UK tradition of heritage drama, while drawing on the speed and storytelling style of US television series. The chapter closes with a discussion of Downton Abbey’s production story in relation to the series’ remarkable popularity in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond.

scholarly journals CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MYTHMAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Denis D. Pyzikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Western Esotericism

H.P. Lovecraft created an original mythology that has not only become science fiction and fantasy classics, but also determined horror genre development in general. In his literary works, Lovecraft used images derived from both ancient religious traditions and contemporary western esotericism, filling his imaginary worlds with mysterious cosmic creatures. The writer’s cultural and historic environment played a very important role as the cultural landscape of New England and theosophical concepts widespread at that time had a great impact on the author’s work and writing. The original “mythology” invented by Lovecraft later played a key role in development of some new religious movements. Besides, Lovecraft’s mythology and images are reflected in the modern popular culture. The paper analyzes Lovecraft’s works and religious motives that are used or reflected in them, cultural factors that influenced the writer and Lovecraft’s heritage place in occult concepts, practices and subcultures of today.

scholarly journals Semiotic in Interpreting the Text of Women's Role Indonesian Horror Film in "Setan Jamu Gendong"

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rr. Astri Indriana Octavita ◽  
Yulia Sofiani Zaimar
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Women's Role

<p>This research applies an analysis of a woman character in Indonesian horror film, through deeply exploration of <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie. This horror film, that is concerned with female sexuality. <em>Jamu</em> seller character in <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie would be chosen to be the subject of this academic research, usually comparing their features with those of the stereotype. The data that is taken, show the <em>jamu</em> seller should be considered as protagonist characters. Nevertheless, she could express multiple functions. While this is a broad and concentrate on area of the research, work in it has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon semiotic and feminist theory, which the researchers think, has limited the field in analyzing. In defining these diverse constructs, the researchers expand this focus sexuality by drawing from critical theories of semiology to provide the details of the way that taken-for-granted ideas about normative female sexuality are articulated, and stereotyping in popular culture. Over the research, it would show, how these paradigms serve to constrain and simplify broader cultural conceptualizations of female semiotically sexuality, placed them in second gender, At the outset of the research, the researchers had hoped to find out, that the horror genre in Indonesia was a place in which alternative modes of being and subordination could be explored and considered.</p><strong>Keywords:</strong> women, <em>jamu</em>, semiotic, gender, stereotype

scholarly journals Slovanská fantasy globálnym popkultúrnym fenoménom

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 119-126
Author(s):  
Juraj Malíček
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
Global Television ◽  
Television Market

The aim of the paper is to introduce or rather (re)present The Witcher as a model-like pop cultural phenomenon illustrating the mechanisms within the framework of which a local hero, the main character of fantasy narratives written by Andrzej Sapkowski, transforms into a global hero. The Witcher — the character as well as the trademark, or rather brand — represents popular culture pars pro toto and emblematically a pop cultural artefact, undergoing a transformation on an axis from short stories to a novel saga, becoming an object of local cinematic and television-based adaptation and also a thematic basis for a successful digital-game series distributed globally, as well as recently a source of a high-budget television series designed for a global television market.

scholarly journals Enfant Diabolique in International Cinema

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Tan
Keyword(s):  
Film Festival ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Authority Figures ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Film Making

THE PRESENCE OF HORROR GENRE genre at the Singapore International Film Festival 1996 inspired these recollections: John Carpenter's remake of the seminal Village of the Damned featured in this year's Singapore Festival of Arts All-Night Horrorthon, is a chilling account of what happens when a small community of sinister children, endowed with telepathic and destructive powers, gradually unfolds evil plans for world domination. In this current age of contemporary film-making technology, the film's sound and special effects are superb, but that isn't what makes the film frightening. It is the notion of innocent, "helpless" children, rising above the domination that parents, teachers and adults at large have traditionally exerted over them, turning on the conventional authority figures, threatening them, violating them, and ultimately triumphing over them. This is the theme of the enfant diabolique, or diabolical child, which has found expression and gained favour in numerous films made all over...

Scenes from the End of the World in American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Shayna Sheinfeld
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Apocalyptic Literature ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Terry Pratchett

This chapter examines the influence of biblical apocalyptic literature in popular culture. After exploring the problems of terminology and definitions, it examines four examples of apocalyptic in popular culture: two of these, Good Omens (Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, 1990) and the television series Supernatural (created by Eric Kripke, 2005–2020) draw directly from the biblical apocalypses, especially Revelation. They also change details from Revelation in order to better fit their agenda. Two additional examples are explored: the movie 2012 (2009) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Both focus on end-time scenarios that do not derive directly from the biblical apocalypses but instead use the flood narrative from Genesis 6–9 to highlight their eschatology. This chapter argues that the shift in popular culture from drawing directly on biblical apocalypses to drawing on other narratives—specifically the flood—derives from a turn toward environmental concerns in contemporary Western culture.

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