Did you miss the thrill of Twin Peaks during the mid-season break? Were Saturday nights just a little flat without the anticipation of having your sense of anticipation messed with? When the show resumes this week, do you have any idea what to expect? Don’t you just love it that you have to say “no”?
Did you stick to coffee and doughnuts the night Twin Peaks revealed the identity of BOB? Or did you need something a little stiffer? Can you remember the last time you were so scared by a television program that you needed to pour a drink during each commercial break? Have you noticed that this show has abandoned much of its irony, taken its tongue out of its cheek, and adopted the codes of the fantastic, the fabulous, and the horrific? In doing so, hasn’t Twin Peaks shifted from being a clever joke about soap opera and cranked itself up several emotional gears? And isn’t it true that its science-fiction-cum-slasher-movie aesthetic has moved it beyond the cerebral and started hitting you in the guts, with all the violent force of Laura Palmer’s killer?
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Doesn’t television sometimes have an emotional power unmatched by cinema? When the serial invades the fabric of our lives and begins, in this case, to structure our Saturday nights–becomes, indeed, its climax? And when we are all watching it together–if not as a nation, then at least as a time zone united in horror–doesn’t that lend television greater impact, the ability to constitute a media event whose simultaneity thrills its participants in a way that cinema never can?
Can soap opera deal with parallel (nonrealist) realities? (If your answer is no, what about Pam Ewing’s dream?) Isn’t the crypto-feminist critique of Twin Peaks for its images of violence against women (Laura, Madeleine, Shelley, Catherine, Josie, Audrey, Blackie–half the women in the show, it seems) a mistake? Aren’t we no longer distanced from these women through intertextual joking, and instead required to feel? Isn’t this identification (the triumph of soap, of the serial, of the TV audience) important precisely because causing people to identify with the horror of violence and abuse is the first step toward educating them about it? Are we so dumb as to believe that all representations endorse what they show? And if–as some critics have suggested–soap narratives correspond to female sexuality through the link with multiple climaxes, doesn’t the constant reiteration and discovery of questions have something to do with the way women talk, not through bold statements, but through tentative inquiry?
We would like answers to these questions, but–like chastity–we don’t want them yet, do we? Aren’t questions always more erotic than answers?
