The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Uncanny Doubles in Twin Peaks

Yates, Mark

Abstract

Co-created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks (1990-2017) adhered to and resisted the conventions of procedural dramas on television. It did so by making familiar conventions seem unfamiliar in an intertextual pastiche of soap opera, detective story, science-fiction, and horror, using but, at the same time, subverting a number of established television tropes within Twin Peaks (1990-91), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). This experimentation with genre, which placed supernatural beings alongside the stock characters of generic television, was hinged on the utilization of a series of uncanny doubles that negotiated between public and private selves. By using Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the uncanny to explore the dualities that are present throughout seasons one and two of Twin Peaks, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Twin Peaks—much like the owls of its infamous tagline—was not as it seemed.

Citation

Yates, M. (2020). The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Uncanny Doubles in Twin Peaks. In A. Szanter (Ed.), Policing the Monstrous: Essays on the Supernatural Crime Procedural (29-45). McFarland

• Online Publication Date: Oct 30, 2020
• Publication Date: Oct 30, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jul 12, 2023
• Pages: 29-45
• Book Title: Policing the Monstrous: Essays on the Supernatural Crime Procedural
• ISBN: 9781476670539
• Publisher URL: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/policing-the-monstrous/