All Laura Palmer’s Children: Twin Peaks and Gendering the Discourse of Influence

Toward the end of the Antenna roundtable in which Jason Mittell, Amanda Klein, and I discussed the announced return of Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991) for a third season on Showtime, we noted how our varied reactions and fears reflected our memories more than the show itself.¹ Mittell mused, “With Twin Peaks, I feel like I am less of a fan of the show itself than the idea of it.”² In the months after the initial announcement, the breakdown of contract negotiations between David Lynch and Showtime (settled on May 15, 2015, with Lynch tweeting about the return of the show) helped further distill exactly what fans and critics indicate they value about the series. Much of the online debate centered on whether people would still watch the third season without Lynch directing the episodes, a highly auteurist discussion epitomized best by the campaign involving the original series actors as well as fans musing in text and video form across social media platforms, “Twin Peaks without David Lynch is like …”³

Similar to Ross Garner’s questioning in this section of how and why Twin Peaks is being discursively positioned as “classic” television, I would suggest that the show also plays a telling role in the construction of quality TV as specifically masculine and auteurist. Reviews of Twin Peaks and recent television shows identified as “Twin Peaks–esque,” including the two shows under discussion here—the “guilty pleasure” Pretty Little Liars, henceforth PLL (ABC Family, 2010–), and the “quality” investigative drama The Killing (AMC, 2011–2013; Netflix, 2014–)—reveal how Lynch’s series is currently used to emphasize and legitimate an imagined history to the masculine television form, even though reviewers and critics did not eschew its melodramatic mode upon initial release. In fact, the initial reception of the series and its later critical treatment as cult television (rather than quality television) typically framed it through discussions of auteurism and soap opera.⁴

The legacy of Twin Peaks has roots in the contemporaneous critical and popular reviews of the series but with a major erasure of the form and pleasures of melodrama. In Andrew Smith’s 1990 review of the pilot, “David Lynch’s Twin Peaks the Ultimate TV Soap Opera,” auteurism was already key to thinking through the show as a playful and subversive “distortion of the soap genre.” Indeed, many reviews from the time talk about the series in terms of its status as a distorted or weird soap opera, which shouldn’t be too surprising given that the show invites this discourse by including the soap opera Invitation to Love within its own diegesis during the first seven episodes.⁵ However, more recent articles such as James Orbesen’s “How Twin Peaks Shaped the Entire Golden Age of TV” and even Joe Pompeo’s (misleadingly titled) “How Twin Peaks Made Modern Art of the Soap Opera” elide discussions of melodrama and soap operas.⁶ Not surprisingly, given Lynch’s presence, the critical community has consistently invoked auteurism as one of the most important ways—if not the most important—to position the series; however, its function has shifted dramatically in terms of the gendering of the televisual medium even since the debut of Twin Peaks.

Quality TV as a historical genre is being refined and deployed in the paratexts of recent shows, as evidenced especially with the first seasons of PLL and the US version of The Killing, series that both center on the murder of a female high school student who, like Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), lived a secret life (Alison DiLaurentis [Sasha Pieterse] and Rosie Larsen [Katie Findlay], respectively). As Twin Peaks is often mentioned by critics in relation to any series that has a murder mystery, especially that of a young woman, at its center or, more vaguely, a sense of oddness, it would seem that both series would have been discussed in relation to the Lynch and Frost series, but this was not the case.⁷ Rather, the continuing project to masculinize and thus legitimate television is visible in...