9. Twin Peaks

Chapter Nine ("Twin Peaks"): In this chapter I address the question why Twin Peaks was "happening again" in 2017 after twenty-five years. To do so I read it against the socioeconomic and ideological background of the last quarter century.

The original series first aired during the early years of the neoliberal period of global capitalism heralded by neoconservative and Reagan administration functionary Francis Fukuyama as the "end of history." What that meant in neoliberal sociology was the superiority of "free markets" over the ideological driven politics of the past. In cultural theory, class was no longer taken to be the operative division in society on the view that in the "knowledge economy" all have equal access to "cultural capital." Twin Peaks reflected its time. It presented the vision of a world in which material conflicts are resignified as cultural differences and inverts causal explanations into the undecidable play of endless interpretations.

In line with the contemporary historical moment Twin Peaks: The Return presents a much darker vision of the world. If in its original iteration Twin Peaks presented the dark forces of the Black Lodge threatening to engulf the heartland of small town American values, today it depicts a world where the Black Lodge has most decisively triumphed and the show now shows the rapacious spirit of BOB to be a technologically wired and borderless power (moving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, South Dakota to Buenos Aries), served by a reserve army of unemployed, that New York City billionaires are seeking to harness through science (with the Glass Box device).

Beyond the surface difference of a shift from postmodern cultural politics to a new "materialist" populist politics, what has not fundamentally changed in Twin Peaks: The Return is the basic way that the show performs the ideological function of occulting the class relations that alone explain the state of the world by projecting the cause onto demonic "others"—a secret cabal of evildoers now represented by the "swarthy" doppelgänger of Cooper himself.

Keywords: Twin Peaks; David Lynch; Fukuyama; cultural theory; ideology.