Movement in the Box: The Production of Surreal Social Space and the Alienated Body

‘Make sense of it’: Cult and complex TV fandoms, post-Truth discourse and an excess of meaning in Twin Peaks: Season 3

“…He intrigues critics and audiences because of his abstract and impressionistic take on storytelling, one informed by his directorial preference for doing ‘what feels right’ in the moment, rather than scripting (and then realising) an obsessively intricate and lucid narrative. This artistic identity, or ‘Brand Lynch’, connotes ‘uncertainty’ (Hills, 2018: 24), and it is therefore unsurprising that Season 3’s impenetrability has been heavily credited to its director. The perception of a typical fan, that Lynch ‘mock[s] the kind of rationality that assumes that one air-tight explanation will account for all details’ (Jenkins, 1995: 62) exemplifies this ‘brand’.…”

“…Nochimson, 2014). The assumption, one that circulated in recaps of Season 3, became that his ‘experimental vision […] seems more significant than coherent world-building’ (Hills, 2018: 314). Yet the insinuation that Lynch is wholly concerned with formalism and experientiality and therefore uninterested in forensic fandom ignores key features of his own role in the conception of Twin Peaks and in his oeuvre historically.…”

“…Everything becomes fluid and unmoored: there is no objective way of understanding the Twin Peaks story even within the diegesis of the show and its paratexts, epitomised in Season 3’s widely discussed focus on nostalgia and memory (cf. Hills, 2018; Fradley and Riley, 2021). As I unpack below, Frost’s political concerns regarding post-truth distortions and the conflation of ‘history’ and ‘myth’ are actively assisted by Lynch’s direction.…”

“…Fannish activity in the era of so-called ‘Quality TV’ became much more immediate and collaborative than when the initial seasons of Twin Peaks aired, extending across a wealth of disparate algorithm-based communicative platforms (message boards being joined by social media, instant messaging apps, YouTube and so on). This was furthered by the explosion of ‘recap’ culture in television-adjacent journalism and blogging (Hills, 2018). A multi-platform communication matrix necessarily engendered more ‘complex’ television shows, and the density of these texts demanded ‘drillable engagement and forensic fandom’, with viewers encouraged ‘to pay attention and connect the narrative dots’ (Mittell, 2015: 289).…”

“…Media outlets such as Vulture , The A.V. Club and IGN reworked their approach to televisual criticism to match this trend, with their ‘commonification’ of ‘recap culture’ (Hills, 2018: 317) comprising ‘episode-by-episode recaps [with] a much tighter focus on individual elements of the show’ (Crampton, 2016).…”