Page 215 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Postmodern television 199

Another divide within the approach to television as postmodern is between textual
and ‘economic’ analysis. Instead of the semiotic sophistication of its intertextual play
and radical eclecticism, television is condemned as hopelessly commercial. Collins
uses Twin Peaks as a means of bringing together the different strands of the relationship
between postmodernism and television. Twin Peaks is chosen because it ‘epitomises the
multiple dimensions of televisual postmodernism’ (341). He argues that the post-
modernism of the television series is the result of a number of interrelated factors:
David Lynch’s reputation as a film maker, the stylistic features of the series, and, finally,
its commercial intertextuality (the marketing of related products: for example, The
Secret Diary of Laura Palmer).
At the economic level, Twin Peaks marks a new era in network television’s view of
the audience. Instead of seeing the audience as an homogeneous mass, the series was
part of a strategy in which the audience is seen as fragmented, consisting of different
segments – stratified by age, class, gender, sexuality, geography, ethnicity and ‘race’ –
each of interest to different advertisers. Mass appeal now involves attempts to inter-
twine the different segments to enable them to be sold to different sections of the
advertising market. The significance of Twin Peaks, at least from this perspective, is that
it represents an attempt by American network television to win back affluent sections
of the television audience supposedly lost to cable, cinema and video – in short, the
so-called ‘yuppie’ generation. Collins demonstrates this by addressing the way the
series was promoted. First, there was the intellectual appeal – Lynch as auteur, Twin
Peaks as avant-garde television. This was followed by Twin Peaks as soap opera.
Together the two appeals soon coalesced into a postmodern reading formation in
which the series was ‘valorised as would-be cinema and would-be soap opera’ (345).
Similar marketing techniques have been used to promote many recent television pro-
grammes. The obvious examples are Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, Six Feet
Under, The Sopranos and Lost.
The marketing of Twin Peaks (and similar television programmes) is undoubtedly
supported and sustained by the polysemic play of Twin Peaks itself. The series is, as
Collins suggests, ‘aggressively eclectic’ (ibid.), not only in its use of conventions from
Gothic horror, police procedural, science fiction and soap opera, but also in the differ-
ent ways – from straight to parody – these conventions are mobilized in particular
scenes. Collins also notes the play of ‘tonal variations . . . within and across scenes’
(ibid.). This has led some critics to dismiss Twin Peaks as ‘mere camp’. But it is never
simply camp – it is never simply anything – continually playing with our expectations,
moving the audience, as it does, from moments of parodic distance to moments of
emphatic intimacy. Although this is a known aspect of Lynch’s filmic technique, more
significantly it is also a characteristic ‘reflective of changes in television entertainment
and of viewer involvement in that entertainment’ (347). As Collins explains,

That viewers would take a great deal of pleasure in this oscillation and juxtaposi-
tion is symptomatic of the ‘suspended’ nature of viewer involvement in television
that developed well before the arrival of Twin Peaks. The ongoing oscillation in
discursive register and generic conventions describes not just Twin Peaks but the