Time is but the stream I go a fishing in
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in
Anders Høg Hansen a
a School of Art s and Communicat ion, Malmö Universit y, Malmö, Sweden
To cite this article: Anders Høg Hansen (2013): Time is but t he st ream I go a-f ishing in , Cont inuum: Journal of Media & Cult ural St udies, 27: 1, 141-159
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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies , 2013 Vol. 27, No. 1, 141–159, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.737194
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in 1 Present pasts in 20 years of American TV serial fiction from Northern
Exposure to Mad Men Anders Høg Hansen*
School of Arts and Communication, Malmo¨ University, Malmo¨, Sweden This article investigates the representation of memory and dream in selected American
TV serial fiction concentrating on 1990s shows that blended the real, the surreal and the supernatural. Departing from Northern Exposure, and moving on to Twin Peaks and The
X Files , these shows embarked on an extensive use of vision, dream and memory themes to portray, I argue, negotiations between what Jan Assmann coined communicative and cultural memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). While Twin Peaks and The X Files concentrated on the dark undercurrents or repressed forms of American belief and anxiety, Northern Exposure took a more benevolent route, re-imagining and rewriting alternative American aspirations of belief and coexistence. Key protagonists were portrayed as exiled individuals engaging with their pasts and the communities of which they became part of or estranged from while on roads to self-discovery. Carl Jung’s writings formed an inspirational body of thinking for the shows, perhaps most explicitly in Northern Exposure, which also elaborated on Jungian visions of a shared humanity among the many differences inside and between humans. All shows elaborated on the consequences of opening oneself to dimensions of life that formed the shadows (Jung 1958, 1959), human duplex or doubling (Jung 1958), as well as the unused potential of imagination in Western modernity. Roads to self-discovery involving repressed or difficult memory work were also spelled out during the first seasons of a very different contemporary show, Mad Men. This show will be brought into discussion at the end of the article where I elaborate on the consequences of particular forms of American dreaming.
Introductory memory exposures Northern Exposure, 1990 – 1995, was filmed mostly outside Seattle, WA, down the road
from the now famed Snoqualmie Falls of Twin Peaks, which it referred to during Season 1 Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012
(Episode 5). It premiered on CBS in the summer break between the two seasons of the ABC show, Twin Peaks, which also fused drama with comedy, the mundane with the
spiritual, and the realist with the supernatural. 2 While not as innovative as Twin Peaks, it proposed a new look at human coexistence by creating stories about how individual
idiosyncrasy and difference related to communal integration, and in this project of envisioning a changed and new social world it used memory 3 and dream as devices with which collectives and individuals maneuvered into their futures. Apparently irreconcilable world views were integrated through re-imagining past collective cultural memories in a lively and compassionate present-day problem solving. To create instant human
recognition as well as complexity 4 in its storylines, Northern Exposure playfully created a
*Email: anders.hog-hansen@mah.se
q 2013 Taylor & Francis
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mixture of character stereotypes as well as cultural hybrids to embrace a range of forces that Western society have made oppositional (Zubizaretta 2006) or conflictual. It created stories about how memory – comprised local lore as well as global cinematic and spiritual (Western and Eastern) references or cultural memory (Jan Assmann 2010) – assisted in a present engagement with individual and collective development. Rather than trapping subjects in damaging quests as in Twin Peaks and The X Files – or trying to erase and avoid the past as in Mad Men – memories and dreams became life-enhancing resources.
The shows, as several researchers have noted, attracted new audiences to TV fiction (e.g. Thompson 1997) and triggered proliferate academic writing. 5 Why were these series 6 so influential? The introduction of spiritual and supernatural elements combined with realist and quirky character portrayals and storylines, the blending of humour and drama, the concern with meaning beyond the worldly, rationalist and empirical, could be argued to fit well into the zeitgeists of the 1990s. This was also mirrored in a range of other serials/series – notably Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 7
The series shared a concern with memory. While darker and damaging memories and dreams haunted the characters of the famed 1990s Twin Peaks and The X Files, Northern Exposure ignited a warmer engagement with the mental and material debris of the past. It viewed remembrance and dream as taking action! Rather than trapping subjects in damaging quests, memory and dream in Northern Exposure became socially life- enhancing resources and healing stories pointing towards possible futures (drawing from,
e.g. Spencer 2006). The darker notes of Twin Peaks and The X Files were, in Northern Exposure, turned towards a more optimistic and life-giving hauntology (Derrida 1994), if we can imagine the variety of life’s shadows (Jung 1958) as such. 8 This may be said to be a feature of the show, which leans up against Spencer’s claim that Northern Exposure intended to heal and re- imagine a last or new frontier (2006, 211), and even teach us social compassion (200 – 1). 9
Theory exposures In Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and The X Files, we were introduced to outsiders as key
protagonists struggling at the peripheries of the communities or collectives they negotiated their membership to or alienation from. Jung discussed in The Undiscovered Self (1958) how the individual, as a disassociated and scattered self (struggling with the forces and impulses of the unconscious), was both in need of, and also framed by, an organizing
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 principle above him/her (Jung 1958, 64). The human being could search for his inner man /self for spiritual self-realization, yet community, here in Jung seen as a state – his book written at the heights of the Cold War, it should be noticed – that had made man statistical (58 – 9): a pawn in the mass, a simplex, yet forgetting that man is a duplex (81), Jung notes. The conflict between real/inner man and statistical man lead to fantasies ‘coming up’ from the unconscious creating conflict and split personality, e.g. as tensions between faith and the knowledge of science. Yet, we human beings are imperfect or divided personalities caught in tensions, in need for the other and community. The perfect has no need for the other, Jung notes (105).
Carl Jung, however, interestingly worked with attempts to explore and actively imagine other or multiple forms of belief. He was searching inside the psyche, not only to understand the individual, but also for phenomena to understand if/how humanity shared traits that would not continue to divide us, inside and among each other. The notion of shared ancestral
traits or archetypes 10 was one of his concepts, where he argued that through these traits we, to some extent, could know our past from within (Coward 1985, 64 – 7)
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 143 Northern Exposure had an explicit Jungian orientation in its focus on character
dualism, and its means of how to cope with, and overcome, conflictual quests for individuality as well as community. The negotiation of the individual in relation to the collective was also prominent in the quests of Agents Mulder and Scully in The X Files. Here the collective, however, took on a much more threatening form.
Although it may be difficult to imagine Jung coming to a consensus with Halbwachs and Jan and Aleida Assmann on approaches to memory studies, this article will, in the spirit of worked through dualisms, bring them together:
All these series worked with a myriad of references, a collective canon of culture (Aleida Assmann 2010, 99), bodies of texts or icons that, according to Aleida Assmann, as in the history of religion, referred to texts that are ‘decreed to be sacred’ must not be changed, ‘a stable reference’ (2010, 100). However, in Aleida Assmann’s elaboration of canon, these texts are invigorated and appropriated, thereby becoming an active form of remembrance. She opposes canon to the archive, the latter a storehouse or passive form of remembrance, in Assmann’s use of the term (99). The evoking of canonical texts becomes
a part of the personal reminiscence and sense-making of the past, in the present. Moving on to Jan Assmann, social and communicative memory in the context of a recent past and autobiographical framework (Jan Assmann 2010, 99) 11 is rooted in everyday experience in human interactive situations. This is what we draw on, or what we cannot do reminiscing without, when we reconstruct the past or re-imagine what we were and what we want to become. The everyday communicative memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010) became a prominent take on social memory in all shows, and often the stakes that led to story development were the clashes between these different levels of memory, the cultural and communicative memory or the mythical, historical, institutionalized and formal on the one hand, versus the recent, autobiographical, non-institutional and informal on the other (Jan Assmann 2010, 117).
The actively circulated memory that keeps the past present could be seen to find particular prominence in any detective and crime show that works backwards, starting with the crime before it works its episode or serial narrative backwards. The question I am adding and will concentrate on is how the series explore humanity and culture in this process. Theoretically, I attempt to concentrate on the odd coupling of Carl Jung with Aleida and Jan Assmann in my investigation.
Northern Exposure in particular elaborated on the tensions between a cultural canon of references and recognized literature and the presently breathing individuals’
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 autobiographical and oral work with recent communicative memories. Jan Assmann elaborated on the notion of communicative memory inspired by Halbwachs’ initial notion
of collective memory 12 and the social aspect of reminiscence. Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by moral and social props, Coser notes in his introduction to Halbwachs’ Collective Memory (1941). People acquire their memories in societies, yet memory research (before 1941) had a tendency to treat people as isolated individuals (Halbwachs 1941/1992, 38). No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people (43); we aid each others’ memories and we successively engage with them (38). Each scrutiny or recall marks a point of possible reinterpretation, since memory – as history-writing – is a practice of the present or something we reproduce under the influence of the present milieu, as Halbwachs put it (1941/1992, 49).
Northern Exposure especially, but also The X Files and Twin Peaks, worked with individual as well as social or collective dreamscapes articulating general or personal fears and rites of passage. These uses of dream and memory become interesting to discuss in relation to a distinction between layers of the unconscious: a personal level and a
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collective level, what Jung called the collective unconscious (Jung 1960, 87). Jung describes the latter as what remains from our forefathers, images already filled out (Jung 1960, 101 – 2), forces and figures, or archetypes, that reproduce the same myths (92). Although sceptical towards this conceptualization, in particular the biologism in Jung,
I find Northern Exposure’s appropriation of Carl Jung’s terminology interesting. It made sense to address memory- and dream-driven stories in the show to evoke visions of a shared humanity. Several characters from time to time experience the same dreams or nightmares (as e.g. Laura and Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks). Their difficult, symbolic and conflict-resolving dreams inform their waking orientations. The content of the dreams is quickly interpreted and worked through: in tales to others, in public art or transmission over the radio. Bonds between the deeply personal and the collective were tangled or tightened in almost every episode.
Fish out of water Northern Exposure begins when Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow), 13 a young, yuppyish, temperamental, whimsical, Jewish doctor from New York, finds himself forced to take up
a job as medical practitioner in the remote town of Cicely, Alaska (population: under 1000) to pay off his student loans. The show initially concentrates on the newcomer and his adjustments, learning and quests in this new community, which includes a core group of outcasts and yet rooted townspeople and their spiritual and mundane relationships and routes . 14
A key node of the fictional Cicely is the town-radio KBHR, where the local artist, DJ, Harley Davidson-rider and caravan-living Chris Stevens (John Corbett) shares his musings and philosophy. Chris sets the wordy, worldly and otherworldly tone of the show. The radio is the medium where time and themes flow from Chris’s mouth and albums to the ears and souls of the community. Chris is also another sort of mediator: he conducts the weddings, funerals, public art, memorials and other ceremonies in the town.
The indeterminable Alaskan location of the fictional Cicely creates the impression of an imaginary place. It looks very familiar on the surface, but is also just as much a state of dreaming mind. Its remoteness and weirdness allow creators and writers to play with human relationships that not only draw on ‘regular social conventions’ (Chan 2006, 42 – 3) and realist notions, but also recognize that Alaska was the final frontier (Spencer 2006, 211). The rural and remote location furthermore allows for an emphasis on oral culture,
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 rumour and face-to-face relations – yet the radio station and Chris’ musings (as mentioned above) connect the place to work, to history, and assure the sharedness, and the mediatization, of the stories going around among selective people. The town of Cicely accommodates individuality and difference, and offers ground for individuation processes (Spencer 2006, after Jung), where individuals confront its shadows and try to integrate unknown parts of oneself or one’s past. Yet Cicely also paves the way for community. The quest for individuation is coupled with a search for community, a double orientation that may also characterize frontier dreaming – or what frontier mythology is made of.
Another key character is Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), a young, independent, feisty and feminist bush-pilot (running the local air taxi service). In the pilot episode, Joel takes her for a prostitute. ‘I am not a hooker. Jerk! I am your landlord’, she spits. The dynamic between Joel and Maggie – or O’Connell and Fleischman, as each often addresses the other by using surnames (as Scully and Mulder in The X Files) – is portrayed through a series of situated sexual ignitions and cold showered arguments throughout the series, a reluctant couple formula principle where both characters struggle with
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 145 perspectives they lack or cannot quite integrate or come to terms with their own duplex.
We initially view the newcomer, Fleischman, as the ‘fish out of water’ (Thompson quoting Falsey and Brand 1997, 162) transferred from his urban habitat to a strange rural impasse. In fact, all characters slowly take shape as strange fishes coming together in the bowl of Cicely where they bounce against each other, following and resisting the streams, oscillating between small town incidents and trips into the Alaskan wilderness.
Fish in the water Several episodes in Northern Exposure bring Joel Fleischman’s Jewishness into play. In
‘Kaddish for Uncle Manny’ (4.22), Joel abolishes his attempt to gather 10 Jews to do the minyan prayer when his Uncle Manny has passed away. With help from Maurice and other townspeople, he succeeds in finding a few ‘unlikely’ Jews, and then decides to use his own new community of goys to do the prayer. In ‘Things Become Extinct’ (3.13) and ‘Shofar, So Good’ (6.3), Joel also explores his Jewish identity. Another example that I will concentrate on here is ‘Fish Story’ (5.18), which begins with O’Connell (a non-Jew) offering to make the Jewish Passover dinner for Fleischman. After a series of ‘experiences’ on the lake nearby, Joel realizes why he fled from Maggie’s offer.
In ‘Fish Story’, after saying no to Maggie’s proposal for a Passover Seder, Joel nevertheless experiences his own sort of pass-over or pass-through at the nearby lake. As
he fishes with Ed and Chris, Joel hooks the local big fish, known as Goony, but Goony resists capture. ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. Henry David Thoreau’, Chris muses, as they sit by the lake – just before Joel catches the fish. Later Ed and Chris leave and Joel spends the night at the lake, holding on to a resisting Goony.
The trip to the lake triggers a recounting of the Old Testament’s story of Jonah, a minor prophet who turned his back on God’s call by fleeing on a boat (Bible, Book of Jonah 1973). Joel reluctantly ended up in Alaska, and has now gone fishing. The big fish forces Joel to stay in a rowboat alone through the night while the fish drags the line. At some point, Joel feels the rumbling below. Has Goony finally given in? No, it is neither Spielberg’s shark in Jaws (1975) or Melville’s Moby Dick – and Joel is not Captain Ahab. (Melville 1851). He is there alone not dragging people with him as in Moby Dick. Up from the ocean, and Joel’s unconscious, comes Joel’s former New York Rabbi! After a chat on Judaism in the beautiful quiet moonlight, the rumbling under the boat comes back – and this time it is Goony. And she/he is hungry. Like the prophet Jonah, Joel ends up in
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 Goony’s stomach but at least with the company of a rabbi. Down there the Rabbi lectures on Jonah while Joel also encounters old artefacts from his past – significant objects of Joel’s past ‘exhibited’ in the tomb of the whale while the two men look for an exit, in this case the excretion canal (Jonah was thrown up, Joel and the Rabbi are going for the other end). As soon as, the Rabbi concludes that Joel should remember his responsibility and welcome Maggie’s plea for intimacy by saying yes to the Passover dinner, they are on their way out. But just before excretion or escape from the burden of memory, they find themselves in a ‘tube’: the subway on the way to downtown New York. Joel wakes up disoriented on the lake where he had been fishing with the townspeople on their way searching for him. Joel asks, with a bewildered just awakened gaze, what happened to the Rabbi and the fish?
The experience on the lake, maybe a dream and/or a speech from the unconscious that draws from Joel’s cultural memory or canon of Judaism (Assmann 1995), led Joel to come to terms with his own change. The episode also exposes two other stories about resistance and change through a journey and a return. I’ll give the third parallel story some reflections
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too. Here the elderly tavern owner Holling has a try with painting by numbers. He becomes overconcerned with the result, the product and if people like his work or not. Chris, the radio DJ, then mediates and convinces Holling to separate the art from the artist. Chris practices an aesthetics of the transitory (as he names it) by arranging public, collective events of a memorable quality where he lets objects undergo a journey, exposure or annihilation through a rite. Chris’s rites of ‘letting go’ add to the show’s concern with the ephemeral . Chris arranges for humans, as well as the remnants and artefacts of human creation, to go on their last journey. Also orally, he evokes traditions and texts that belong to different domains of our cultural memory in Jan Assmann’s terms. Like Carl Jung, Chris believed in art practice as an alleviator of fear or anxiety.
Northern Exposure encircled the need for resistance and civil disobedience, yet also posited that fate and the ‘stream’ may carry us – apropos the references to Thoreau and Civil Disobedience (1849/1993) in the episode ‘Democracy in America’ (also the title of a book by de Tocqueville, 1840, who is also quoted in the episode) and the quote from Walden , ‘Time is but the stream I go a fishing in’ (1854). This passage, against or with a stream, may also hold a possibility for a return to community in an altered state. The ‘stream’ in Northern Exposure can also be seen as life’s dynamic and changing state or
even a carousel 15 : it may lead you astray but it leads you back or home. An engagement with a key mythology in the collective memory, a monster, a past event, is reworked and then community life continues as ‘normal’ (at least until next week’s episode). The ‘Fish
Story’ 16 episode ends with a Passover dinner for Joel, with all the key characters in the series, in Joel’s house. The focus on parallel storylines concerned with different forms of unworked debris surfacing or being humorously trialed can be seen as Freudian in character, yet there is a strong focus on known and unknown connections of mentality, themes that the different individualities share as a collective. The collective unconscious is referred to in several of Chris’ radio musings, as well as in a shared dream with his brother Bernard (Aurora Borealis 1: 8), where they find themselves sitting in a truck, while Carl Jung is trying to drive. Jung cannot drive, and the two men wake up before the crash. Appropriately, in a later episode, Joel receives Jung’s The Undiscovered Self in his post.
Moving on to other fish in the water, one of the so-called nature episodes of The X Files engages with a sea monster not called Goony but Big Blue. Mythologies play a slightly different role in The X Files; they represent either folklore or supernatural, or border- natural, phenomenon – i.e. the designation ‘X File’ and a case for the detectives Mulder and Scully. We are engaging with rumours and myths often of an oppressing and collective
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 character that can take the form of a conspiracy that our key detectives, as whistleblowers, and outcasts, manoeuvre within a bureaucratic machine or apparatus, or enter a community ‘full of secrets’ – aim to unravel. The X Files can be said to belong to a 1990s atmosphere or belief in government conspiracy and a paranoia towards the dealings of political man and state power. In the light of the rise of Wikileaks and related movements aiming to expose systemic secrets, might the mythology of The X Files gain new relevance? The Wikileaks phenomenon has been led by other exposures, personal scandal- stories, and as in The X Files, a focus on ‘from below’ describing whistleblowers, the risks they take, the protection they need and the truth they search for to make it available for the public. The repressed public memories, or that which is not yet made collective, but should
be made collective may be said to herald The Lone Gunmen of The X Files as the early digital age disclosure movement helping whistleblowers within the system.
In the episode ‘Quagmire’ (3: 22), we also see characters stuck on a lake engaged in a dialogue about change while waiting to be eaten. The two key characters are FBI detectives: the largely intuitive and adventurous Fox Mulder and the more sceptical and
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 147 reluctant Dana Scully. Mulder takes Scully out on a Saturday morning drive to investigate
an incident at a lake in the forest. Mulder believes that something weird is going on at the lake (and of course he is right). Scully thinks there is nothing to it, but she cannot resist Mulder’s speculations and goes along. Several local townspeople have been killed by something that lives near or in the lake. The little town markets itself around the myth of ‘Big Blue’. After some unexplained killings, Scully and Mulder rent a boat and take to the lake to investigate. Their boat is attacked by something big from under the water, but find rescue on a rock that protrudes about the surface. They sit down with their guns pointed towards the dark lake and Scully wonders if Mulder really is like Captain Ahab, the hunter of the great whale in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a man on a restless quest dragging people with him. Earlier in the episode, Scully’s dog – which she has named ‘Queequeg’ after one of the harpooners of Moby Dick – was eaten by the alleged monster – just as a dog had to die in Jaws (Spielberg 1975). Scully’s family history then intrudes: her father was always away on the ocean; he called her Starbuck, after another harpooner, and she called him Ahab. We have learned this in a previous episode, but it is retold here on the rock. Mulder’s family history joins in: hiss father resisted the operations he became a part of. The legacy of their fathers is vividly alive. We see a stereotypical representation of an UFO on Mulder’s X Files office poster. Below the hovering UFO the words ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’ are written in clear and confident capital letters. But are they the shadows of their fathers, and their lost siblings, that hovers over Scully and Mulder and guide their quests? Scully’s sister dies after a failed operation from which Scully escaped, but got her sister instead; Mulder’s sister was abducted.
At some point in their conversations they hear sounds. Is it the monster? No, it is only a duck. Scully reminds Mulder that cartographers tagged so-called ‘undesignated territory’ with the note ‘here be monsters’. Her remark encapsulates the series. The Alaskan last frontier in Northern Exposure as well as the woods of Twin Peaks also became metaphors. Character quests on all three series became about inhabiting places and a knowledge that leads to transgression in imagination. The ‘data’ the detectives look for in The X Files are not only ‘the truth’, but data that come to change the way we understand the world. Furthermore, the personal and the professional quests of the detectives come to reflect or reinforce each other.
The three shows, with their obvious differences taken into consideration, are about journeys into undesignated territories. Mulder looks for monsters. The two city detectives sit on a rock on a lake and are scared by natural sounds while they also long for a noisy
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 metropolis – as with Joel in Northern Exposure. They have in their urban lives turned their back on nature, and now it is turning its back on them, to paraphrase an angry biologist at the beginning of the episode. Later when they are rescued by the biologist, Mulder manages to shoot the monster, after it had taken a bite out of the biologist. The monster turns out to be an alligator.
Mulder is disappointed there was no monster. Scully comforts him. However, he prevented more killings by shooting the alligator. Those myths and stories, like the one on Big Blue, are stories Mulder finds hope in, he explains. People want to believe, and that is why the stories endure, Scully responds. I could add to this that the poster in Mulder’s office is not so much about UFOs. ‘What is older than the hills?’, one of the billboard adverts asks (along the highway when Mulder, Scully and Queequeg drive into town). It is not really the cartoonish Big Blue depicted, as we may think. What is older and bigger than the hills is belief! Mulder and Scully glance over the dark lake for a moment and then turn around to enter their car. We see a glimpse of something that could be a very big fish in the lake. The episode ends.
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Double trouble and other dualities In The X Files, Scully and Mulder share an understated intimacy while repeatedly clashing
over science and the supernatural. The stereotypic gender conventions are played with Mulder general being the intuitive, supernatural, alien-hunter with a propensity towards the use of dream and psychic powers where possible, a trait he shares with Agent Cooper
in Twin Peaks. 17 Fleischman and O’Connell in Northern Exposure are also in a different way established as dual and complementary characters: the urban and the rural, the rationalist and the intuitive, the thinker and the feeler, the Republican and the Democrat, the scientist and the handywoman, the educated and the streetwise. They do, however, also share traits that trigger conflict as well as attraction: they are both talkative, bold, individualistic personas seeking to be respected and heard. Maggie is initially only attracted to the fleisch, not the man/persona, – yet their relation grows as the series progress and it is by far the only or central dualism in the series.
In Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper is paired or related to a range of characters and an object, his detective diary, a small hand-sized tape recorder. When the creator behind The X Files, Chris Carter, invented Mulder, he must have thought of Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks, and then proceeded to do something completely different with the character. While Cooper is warm, open, literal, a classical gentleman-like persona, Mulder is deadpan, enigmatic and ironic, a post-modern trickster to the bone. Neither of these men are, however, traditional FBI agents. In both cases, we could be talking about strangely isolated individuals appropriating the FBI as a Federal Bureau of Imagination. Cooper records his thoughts to a personal assistant at home called Diana, or just a tape recorder called Diana, with ramblings on Douglas Fir, coffee and pies, and comments on the course of his investigation and life in Twin Peaks. The taped tales become Cooper’s memory archive and reconfigurations, his therapeutic wall, and his ethnographic notebook. This device replaces, but also ironically mocks, other formats of authoritative voice-over, such as the Voice of God, and connects the private and public or professional Cooper. His federal agent toolbox consists of classical methods spiced up with Buddhism and Tibetan philosophy, including dream material as clue provider – the latter trait he shares with Mulder and his lean towards abduction, contrary to Scully’s more classic deduction (Peterson 2007, 25). Mulder does not seem to make small talk with many people, if any, and Cooper is much better at that. Cooper also smiles often and downs coffee, pie and doughnuts (Mulder primarily lives off of sunflower seeds). Only once does Mulder try a slice of pie and then he eats everything in a obsessive gesture to, and quotation of, Lynch’s
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 Cooper character.
While it is easy to see where Scully and O’Connell find their other or complementary persona, the case is more complicated with Cooper. Agent Cooper is open towards other explanations, including those yet to be explained. Cooper also equips himself with varied and eclectic principles in his work, notably a concern with the meaning in coincidences,
i.e. where events are seen as related by meaning, and not by cause (borrowing from Jung’s notion of synchronicity). 18 Mulder is as open to the supernatural as Cooper, and his quest is also driven by earlier tragic circumstances in his life. However, Mulder appears more stubborn in particular beliefs or wants. Like Ahab seeking Moby Dick, Mulder seeks the truth – and in his search
he finds an ally in Scully. Cooper has Sheriff Truman, but they do not challenge each other (for a long time) as Scully and Mulder do. Truman follows Cooper, who leads the investigation as a Buddhist-leaning anthropologist agent inhabited by local lore as a result of his own intensive participatory observation. David Lynch and Mark Frost created a
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 149 heartfelt romance, drawing heavily from the style of soap opera, 19 which Lynch himself
was raised on, but told through an ironic lens. I do not claim that there is no heart in Twin Peaks’ heavy shedding of tears and emotional and redemptive dialogue, but Lynch/Frost created a counterpoint to the means with which the characters fought with their lives: they unfolded the drama in a distinct visual style with slapstick as well as deadpan humour (combining early silent movie humour with what appeared as very rare and new forms). Sometimes the visual spoke volumes through a parallel story related in many scenes (Hank talking seriously while buck antlers stick up behind him, as if the antlers were growing out of his evil head; Sheriff Harry Truman looking out the window while a picture of Former President Harry Truman is visible on the wall; etc.). The latter visuality, speaking silently, as well as through slapstick, the narrative off-roading or de-routing of story development, provided a satire to the drama, a bizarreness to the mundane or a playfulness that confronted the horrific (Campbell in Reeves et al. 1995, 190).
During its second season, Twin Peaks moved slowly away from the foreground crime story towards a stronger engagement with the supernatural as well as everyday life in Twin Peaks. Its many characters and its occupation with the bizarre may have caused less interest (viewer numbers were dropping during the long second season), though its conundrum-style signs and stories would have been even more difficult to deal with if the show had premiered 10 – 15 years earlier. Henry Jenkins’s research (in Lavery 1995; Lavery and Chain 2006) points towards how the VCR era, late 1980s and onwards, allowed viewers to go through scenes and episodes several times. Furthermore, the emerging Internet allowed viewers, not just those sharing a water-cooler at work, to discuss and create community, across the country and the globe, among fellow Twin Peakers online. Twin Peaks posed secrets and riddles that made it urgent for viewers to debate what others thought was happening. Twin Peaks, and the rise of the Internet paved the way for online fan communities, Jenkins (1995, 2006) noted. The similarly difficult The X Files also triggered online discussion – and writers often picked up on viewer suggestions when adding/developing detail in the stories. As this is written (July – August 2011), I notice recent entries in Twin Peaks Gazette online and on Facebook I do a thumbs- up to the Northern Exposure 2011 fan gathering, Moosefest, in the city of Roslyn, Seattle.
While its supernatural focus and complexity would trigger people to record and watch again and discuss online, Twin Peaks did not really provide a sustained engagement with alternative worlds, as in the longer lasting The X Files (Johnson-Smith 2005). It did, however (from Season 2) explore the supernatural aspects of the story it had laid out. Twin
Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012 Peaks began, at least in the foreground story, in a recognizable crime story plot mode with discovery, investigation and revelation (E – F) of crime, and in this process unraveled how the crime was conceived, planned and committed (A – C) (after Johnson-Smith 2005, 54). After about a dozen episodes, the series shifted from being concerned with an explanation of the past, and became more focused towards ‘what will happen to the key characters’. The shadows (Jung 1958, 1959) of the characters was explored and the everyday drama decentred the crime story. It took the first season to work the shadows up from the mental
debris of the characters’ pasts, their personal and collective unconscious. Visions 20 of the reality of supernatural places, people and spirits became a major concern. Visions were important for other characters than Detective Cooper. Major Briggs explained the difference between vision and dream to his son, Bobby, in one of the many beautiful and soap-opera-ish scenes (Season 2, Episode 1). Sitting in front of each other in the double R diner, Dad and son are at first miles apart in miscommunication. Briggs talks about the pie, the huckleberries are delicious, etc. But suddenly it changes. Briggs asks if he can share something with his son: ‘... A vision I had in my sleep last night. As distinguished from a
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dream, which is a mere sorting and cataloguing of the day’s events by the subconscious; a vision, fresh and clear as a mountain stream, the mind revealing itself to itself’. 21 Briggs then retells the vision of a meeting and embrace he had with Bobby last night and how he felt about this vision: his joy when seeing Bobby happy and in harmony with himself and life. Bobby, who had entered the conversion as a slacker trying to shield his discomfort by
a body language of indifference, is quickly alerted and de-masked. The encounter appears to transform his relationship to his Dad. Rather than making reconciliation take place over
a time span of actions and talk, it takes place in this one moment. The scene is in a style related to many other face-to-face dialogues of the show, not far from the style we may imagine shapes ‘Invitation to Love’, the daily soap opera that many characters in Twin Peaks follow on TV. Doublings again. Twin Speak. The soap within the soap. A genre within another. Always another side to the coin of memory. This doubling may be the serie’s legacy. The soap and satire approach to supernatural drama and dream-working of the collective closet of icons, archetypes and spirits shaped Twin Peaks portrayal of culture and small town America. As Jimmie Reeves put it (in conversation with a group of Lynch scholars): Twin Peaks ‘ . . . evokes, mocks, yet lends quasi-reverence for the icons of the past, while it places them in the present’ (in Lavery et al. 1995, 177). 22
Another doubling providing ground for the cultural work of the show is a tension between the urban – rural and real and imagined/dreamt or hard-to-comprehend territory 23 Cooper represents the city, brought into foreign waters in the forested Pacific Northwest, as does Fleischman in Northern Exposure and as does Scully/Mulder in a range of episodes across the USA, notably a series of small town and nature episodes (including ‘Quagmire’, discussed earlier). As in many small town crime stories, a murder makes the coziness crack and dark forces and incidents arrive (or work their way up to the surface). In Twin Peaks, the use of the Black Lodge and the spirit Bob take this model further. In The X Files , the existence of the undesignated territory results in crime story endings without proper closure. The unresolved is labelled and given an appropriate place: an X File placed in a drawer in a basement of the FBI building, deported to the underground, or the unconscious, as shadow to remain ‘not understood’ or taken out of official history. Scully and Mulder run back and forth between this little office where light cannot enter (but where there is imaginative light enough) and an outer world where ‘normalcy’ is interrupted with conspiracy, cloned humans, possible aliens, strange animals, tribes in conflict – a world of American anxieties.
While Mulder and Scully try to understand the communities they temporarily enter, Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012
Cooper and Fleischman try to settle in the community they each have ended up in for a long time. With a professional job to do and a good portion of unskilled ethnography, their stays in Twin Peaks and Cicely, respectively, end up becoming a form of Jungian self- discovery. While Fleischman and Cooper had formed their individual personas before their arrival (individuation achieved, a point also confirmed by Spencer (2006, 220) on the character Fleischman), the quest for both of them in their new roles is to become part of a community , and function as fully fledged social human beings.
The duality of characters, or traits, gender roles or thematic parallel stories is in Northern Exposure also developed in relation to the relationship between the past and the present. A variety of episodes show how apparently minor family feuds and incidents of the distant past suddenly play a crucial role in present-day conflicts. The series warmly mocks the human condition – our tendency to hold a grudge and fight each other. The symbolism is often striking. In ‘Democracy in America’ (3.15), the fight in the election of
a new mayor is over a traffic stop sign. This in a town with hardly any traffic. Now a sign of the red light, the matter or ‘thing’ of concern opens a discussion in the community.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 151 In ‘Family Feud’ (4.19), a newly launched memorial, a totem pole, re-ignites an old feud
between two tribes of Cicely because of different interpretations of a fish crest, which dates back to an incident in 1934. Passed on conflictual cultural memories have been ignited in a communicative work through (elaborating on Jan Assmann’s terms) representing the tension between the canonized, established, formal and inherited and the present, living, shared and divided references and memories, which all provide fuel for identity development and orientate wise steps into the future. They end up leaving out the fish, and they are friends again. The residents of Cicely easily forget, but also easily remember. Many episodes unfold through a bite of a Proustian Madeleine sponge cake, though it only generates a brief conversation with the past rather than speaking volumes (as in Proust). The residents quickly move on with their lives giving a sign of action in the act of remembrance.
In a re-enactment of the town of Cicely’s formation back in 1909 (‘Cicely’, 3.23), the creators reveal the history of Cicely and show how the descendants of the earlier Cicelians have become the residents of today. Each key character of the series plays a 1909 simulacra of the present-day character. Thus, the 1909 version of the 1990’s ‘Joel’ character must also be a visitor. So in 1909 he is Kafka, arriving from his urban entanglements into the rural pioneer town of Cicely to cure writer’s block. The mixture of fantasy, myth, memory and history characterizes Northern Exposure. Capital ‘H’ history is doubled with the minor histories, the mythical pairs with the mundane in the stories of past and present. The notion of memory as a present faculty, as all remembrance necessarily must be, but also a craft of the creating mind, is prominent. Memory is a processing engine facilitating future action. In relation to this point, ritual often plays a role in creating the passing from a difficult past to a tolerable future. In ‘Northwest Passages’ (4.1), Maggie is inspired by an Indian rite. She leaves a goodbye note to each former dead lover down by the river. The stream will deliver the messages, and she can move forward. When she stays over at the river to go to sleep, she dreams that she has a walk in the nearby forest, where she stumbles into all the ex-boyfriends having a barbecue together. They have all received their note – and they are now complaining about what Maggie wrote, such as blunt remarks on their sexual capacities. Maggie then wakes up with a fever and is rescued by Joel and others from the town. 24
‘There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier’ Downloaded by [anders høg hansen] at 02:03 11 December 2012
The words are Don Draper’s (2/4), a key character in Mad Men, the period serial on life at and around a big advertising company in New York in the early 1960s. Each season
depicts one year. We begin in 1960. Season 1 25 unfolds with a detailed portrayal of an expanding American middle-class consumer culture during a period where popular culture changed the country but where minds and cultural norms did not move yet so fast. The advertising company’s take on American identities and their campaigns to capture consumer emotions is the show’s key to the portrayal of culture. A central character is the mysterious, handsome, undoubtedly creative genius Don Draper, who is not really Don Draper. The actual Draper died from in combat during the Korean War. Next to him in a trench was Dick Whitman, barely surviving a bomb blast. Whitman takes the dead and unidentifiable Draper’s ID neckband and immediately changes his identity. We learn in several flashbacks (and in the return of Whitman’s lonely brother, Adam, who finally tracked down Dick), that the two boys’ childhood had been far from easy. The new ‘Don Draper’ pursued or invented a life, on the other side of the past that now was no more: a project of forgetting. As advertising digs into emotions that may not be fully transparent or
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clear, Don Draper is a new appearance (Dunn 2010, 30) 26 suited to an American impulse or feeling. Draper is the wealthy, lonely and unhomely man who has difficulty building a history. He looks for a new frontier to cross, a new lover, a disappearance to San Francisco. Although Draper says his life only moves forward, he does not appear to have a clear plan. He does not even have a contract; he is a free agent in his self-conception. He cannot handle his past and therefore not his future either. For Draper to fully appear, his strategy is to escape from another or former track of his life. Draper has a problem connecting different life-epochs or spheres of relations, since he does not really allow a life story or some coherency in the diversity to evolve. There are many attempts and moments of regret, which leads us to engage with him and the serial. However, he generally lives in an
instantaneous practice of the pursuit of an American dream. While the 1930s hobo 27 was a gentleman of the rails, sleeping like a stone because he is freed from the pressures of the past. As Fritz writes (2010, 63), Don Draper has become a modern hobo, I would say, one who has manufactured himself as an empowered version of the poor wanderer he saw enter his childhood home for a meal and some work.
Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice Its Alright’ (Dylan 1962) is used as end music in the episode where Don tiredly let his body sink to the staircase in the empty house after his family has gone to celebrate Thanksgiving at his in-laws house. We see two different versions of the scene. First, we see Don’s hopeful imagination where he arrives home to a family that has not yet left and kids who embrace him (this scene plays without the bittersweet Dylan tune). This is Don’s wish to reconnect, which is unfulfilled. Don’s lonely moment on the staircase can be linked to another event just before his return to the empty house. He presents an idea for an advertising campaign for Kodak’s new slide projector using a circular tray prosaically named ‘The Wheel’, but in Don’s brilliant imagination now called ‘The Carousel’, vividly mirroring how a child’s movements are circular, a merry-go-round, exploring the world and then returning home (after Teschner and Teschner 2010, 137). Don uses emotional images from his own happy family moments, his recent history suddenly there, mediated and passed on to stunned and touched employees. After Don’s convincing demonstration, he attempts to move in
circular fashion to return home, but the house is empty. 28 In Season 2, Don disappears temporarily from his corporate New York life, his
mistresses, and a life in a hotel after his wife Betty has thrown him out. First on business in California, Don impulsively skips a planned meeting, stays over with bohemians and pursues a new love affair (although the latter is not so different from escapades at home in