i
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly, it flaps out Looking with its hooks, for something to love. Sylvia Plath, “Elm” The twentieth century has proven congenial to the Gothic. Gothic literature and film attest to the continuing vitality of the genre. Examples of today's popular Gothic include such works as Stephen King's The Shining with its Gothicized haunted hotel, modern Gothic romances and Harlequin clones whose covers feature persecuted maidens in the shadow of gloomy mansions, and horror films as diverse as Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and the perennial remake of Dracula. However, while many scholars and critics have addressed the use of Gothic elements in literature and film, the field of the Television Gothic has yet to be explored in any detail.
ii This is despite the fact that television would seem an ideal medium for Gothic inquiry. It is, after all, a mysterious box simultaneously inhabited by spirit images of ourselves and inhabiting our living rooms. In fact, television has aired its fair share of programs with Gothic elements. (“Aired” itself is a good Gothic concept—ghostly messages traveling through the air. ) Thriller, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, The Night Stalker, Friday the 13th: The Series, the original Dark Shadows and its stupendously dull 1991 remake (a sort of Dynasty with fangs) are but a few examples of series that utilized Gothic devices. However, David Lynch s Twin Peaks was the first series to tap the full potential of the "Television Gothic."

This new Television Gothic utilizes familiar Gothic themes and devices such as incest, the grotesque, repetition, interpolated narration, haunted settings, mirrors, doubles, and supernatural occurrences. But these elements undergo a sea change once they are immersed in the “currents" of television. What could have been a soothing repetition of formula instead becomes a disturbing process of transgression and uncertainty. Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic is a distinctly postmodern form. Gothic as process rather than product. The basic methodology of this process involves the combination and exploitation of two highly domestic forms—television and the Gothic novel. The result of this process is a series in which the domestic is the Gothic and television becomes the ghost in the home. In exploring this new Television Gothic, it is useful to: (1) start with a working definition of "Gothic," then (2) present an overview of typical Gothic devices operating in Twin Peaks, and finally, (3) analyze two fundamental Gothic elements that are transmuted through the medium of television: incest and the family romance, and the fragmented and multi-formed narrative.
“I perceive,” said Emily, smiling, "that all old houses are haunted. . . ." Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) Definitions, like old mansions, are inclined to be haunted—haunted by past definitions. "Television Gothic" is a haunted phrase, testifying to the intrusion of the past into the present. In order to appreciate the nature of this haunting, we must begin with a definition of the Gothic and with an acknowledgment of the limits of such a definition. Any definition of a genre is at best incomplete. There will always be exceptions, overlaps, and gray areas. Further, such definitions all too often

reduce and trivialize a complex subject. Those of us interested in genre criticism console ourselves by the hope that well thought out models will be recognized as just that—models. As such, they should serve as aids to understanding, not as prescriptive chains on thinking. Even among other genres, the Gothic seems particularly difficult to define. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that, rather than speaking of one monolithic category “Gothic." It is more appropriate to recognize that there are many Gothics.
iii But a larger part of this difficulty lies in the fact that the Gothic itself is an unstable genre, one that is characterized more by its process than by its individual products. The Gothic is easy to recognize, but hard to define. Although difficult to define, its very fluidity and resistance to boundaries make the Gothic a particularly apt genre for television. As will become evident, Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic resistance, creating a Television Gothic characterized by a polysemous mingling of "authentic" representations which constantly forces the viewer into an uneasy oscillation between ways of understanding. Given all the above caveats, we will, for the sake of convenience, focus our definition on three commonly accepted fundamental characteristics of the Gothic. Our working definition of "Gothic" will include the following primary elements: (1) the use of standard Gothic devices which generally are recognized as capable of producing fear or dread, (2) the central enigma of the family, and (3) a difficult narrative structure (one that frustrates attempts at understanding). The transformation of these Gothic elements into "Television Gothic" in Twin Peaks is the subject of the rest of this essay.
"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book Castle of Otranto, Clermont, Mysterious

Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time." “Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?" Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818) Something "horrid" is the first recognizable hallmark of the Gothic. Commentators note that the Gothic is "a literature of nightmare" (MacAndrew 3), "literature where fear is the motivating and sustaining emotion" (Gross 1). In fact, fear is one of the engines that drives the plot of Twin Peaks. Windom Earle would have agreed with Austen's two young friends concerning their interest in the horrid. Discovering the secret of what draws Bob to humans, Earle comments, "It's fear! My favorite emotional state!" Those particular Gothic devices used to promote fear are fairly well identified. In her study of Gothic conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that one knows generally what to expect in the way of Gothic paraphernalia: You know the important features of its mise en scene: an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a Catholic or feudal society. You know about the trembling sensibility of the heroine and the impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrannical older man with the piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them. You know something about the novel's form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators. and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories. You also know that, whether with more or less relevance to the main plot, certain characteristic preoccupations will be

aired. These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial error, possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust-and Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse. (Sedgwick 9-10) All these devices are recognizably Gothic, and many of them occur in Twin Peaks. For example, the woods around Twin Peaks are a wild and mysterious landscape. ("There's a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods," muses Sheriff Truman.) The Book House Boys form a secret, quasi-mystical institution. Subterranean spaces exist (Owl Cave), as do resonant silences, guilt and shame, nocturnal landscapes and dreams. Strange fires occur (the fire at the Packard Mill and the mysterious command "Fire, walk with me”). The flickering torches of the charnel house are replaced with the cold glare and strobe effect of fluorescent lights in the morgue. Discovered manuscripts (Laura Palmer's diary) and mediated narratives (Cooper's tapes) abound. Cooper's quest for knowledge and his decision to sell his soul qualify him as a Faust-like figure. And, of course. the unspeakable occurs: rape, incest, and murder. The most antisocial of crimes intrude into the sanctuary of domesticity.
The stranger youth and I approached each other in silence. . . . What was my astonishment on perceiving that he was the same being as myself.

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) Exploring all the Gothic devices in Twin Peaks at any great length would be impractical here, but the device of the Double can exemplify how rich the series is in Gothic terms. It should not be surprising that a series titled “Twin Peaks” should be filled with doubles. In fact, there are several dozen examples of doubles in Twin Peaks, typically serving as mirror images of good and evil, original and imitation, appearance and reality. A few examples follow. Laura and Maddy are identical cousins (reminiscent of a warped version of The Patty Duke Show). There are two sets of Bobs and Mikes—the teen-agers (Bobby and Mike) and the spirit presences of the demonic Bob and the mysterious Mike. There is an enigmatic White Lodge and its counterpart Black Lodge, one representing good and one evil. Laura has led a double life as good-girl Homecoming Queen and as a wanton bad girl. There are two sets of books for the Packard Sawmill (one the original, one a fake). There are two diaries of Laura Palmer (one a "cover" story and one a secret diary). The series Twin Peaks is doubled by the series Invitation to Love. Love and fear double as mirror images, as engines which attract spirits from another plane of existence. Dream beings have counterparts in the town of Twin Peaks (Bob/Leland, the Giant/the Old Bellhop, Mike/the One Armed Man). The same actress, Sheryl Lee, plays both Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson. The same actress, Piper Laurie, plays both Catherine Martell and the mysterious Japanese businessman. The dwarf warns Cooper of the existence of the “dopplegänger” (German for “double”). There are two Dale Coopers in the final episode, one good and one evil. The sheer exuberance behind the use of such Gothic devices is extraordinary. Lynch exploits the television potential of Gothic devices to the hilt. While a literary text can only create doubles through written

representations, television permits such visual doubling devices as the same actor or actress playing two characters, or a giant suddenly appearing where an old bellhop stood a moment before. The visualization of Gothic images heightens and intensifies the standard function of the double—to problematize the distinction between appearance and reality. Equally significant for the Television Gothic is how Twin Peaks uses Gothic devices such as the double to challenge the distinction between the normal and the abnormal, the domestic and the uncanny. Lynch transforms standard Gothic devices into Television Gothic by domesticating them. He brings the horrid and the normal into juxtaposition until the viewer is unsure what is normal anymore. By using television to do this, Lynch challenges the most deep-seated expectations of the aim of television. As David Marc notes, "the aim of television is to be normal. The industry is obsessed with the problems of norms, and this manifests itself in both process and product" (327). When the boundary between the normal and the Gothic begins to crack, it becomes clear that for Twin Peaks the normal is the Gothic.
Heaven directed my bloody hand to the heart of my child. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) Television, the most domestic of all media, is a natural venue for the Gothic, the most disturbed of domestic fictions. As John Ellis observes in Visible Fictions, "broadcast TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon" (113). A television set is an everyday item within the home, it is "another domestic object" (Ellis 113). Like that other strangely domestic item, the Gothic novel, television can create a sense of the uncanny precisely by drawing on the

unfamiliarity of the familiar. In fact, the Television Gothic is the uncanny/unheimlich contained within the familiar/heimlich of the home. In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud traces the development of the German terms, “unheimlich” and “heimlich.” Initially, heimlich meant homely, plain, familiar, comfortable. Unheimlich, or uncanny, meant everything that was not home-like. Over time, the meaning of “heimlich” changed, so that which had been familiar and domestic came to mean that which was guarded, furtive, withdrawn, and hidden. The key point here is that unheimlich and heimlich are not two antithetical states. Rather, one thing is contained within the other. The uncanny is that which ought to remain hidden and secret, but which has become visible. What strikes us as uncanny is not something new, but something familiar. Just as the heimlich contains within it the unheimlich, so does the familiar domestic home contain within it the Gothic potential of Television. Heimlich Unheimlich Home Television The home contains the uncanny. The uncanny is familiar and terrible in its familiarity. Television is the ghost in the home, a barely perceptible presence that can be at once familiar and strangely disturbing. Neil Postman notes that: television has achieved the status of "myth," as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our

consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our television sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on television, are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. (79) Television's Gothic potential stems in large part from its reassuring domesticity (its "natural" presence and acceptance in the home) combined with its under-utilized ability to disrupt viewers' comfortable notions of domesticity. What is so frightening about the Television Gothic? The fact that it returns to the domestic sphere—something repressed yet familiar—the specters of incest and family violence. Like the early Germanic invaders after whom it takes its name, the Gothic brings with it the threat of the destruction of culture. The Television Gothic, even more so, makes such threats strikingly visible and manifest. There it is, on your television screen, in your own living room—a father assaulting and killing a “daughter" in his living room.
iv Sarah Palmer voices the complaint of the Television Gothic when she cries, “What is going on in this house?" The domestic gone horribly wrong is the essence of the Television Gothic. Lynch taps into our need to turn common life into the stuff of nightmare so that we can call it unreal. Better the Gothic than the horror of everyday domestic life. As James B. Twitchell astutely points out in Dreadful Pleasures, "the early gothic usually tells the story of a single and specific family romance run amok: 'father' has become monstrous to 'daughter.'" ("Father" includes any role of paternal dominance [Twitchell 421].) The dysfunctional family lies at the heart of the Gothic, and thus the Gothic is profoundly domestic. In what is generally known as the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, Prince Manfred of Otranto desires to marry his prospective daughter-in-law (a barely concealed incestuous desire), and eventually kills his real daughter by

stabbing her with his phallic dagger. In Twin Peaks, fathers are repeatedly monstrous to daughters. Leland Palmer compulsively kills daughters. He rapes and kills his real daughter, Laura, as well as killing her double, Maddy, and another young girl. Ben Horne sleeps with one daughter-figure, Laura, and narrowly avoids sleeping with his own daughter, Audrey. Facing a masked Audrey in the brothel, One-Eyed Jack's, Ben suggestively comments, "You know how to interest a man." Father/daughter incest marks the Gothic plot. Both Castle of Otranto and Twin Peaks feature the most anti-domestic (that is, destructive of domesticity) of crimes, but a crime that is ineluctably tied to the domestic. Early Gothics distance this crime by placing it in the past (the Middle Ages were a popular time period) or in a foreign locale (Italy was a favorite spot for dark deeds). In contrast, Twin Peaks affirms the closeness of the Gothic. Where Twin Peaks modifies the Gothic genre, causing a shifting in the Gothic process, is in its insistence on the quotidian, the common, the ordinary as the essence of Gothic. The Homecomig Queen. the town diner, the local sheriff, the high school football star, the motorcycle-riding rebel, the family dinner table—all these are familiar television fare. Even that most ubiquitous of all twentieth-century artifacts— plastic—assumes the mantle of the uncanny. "She's dead. Wrapped in plastic," says Pete in the pilot episode after finding the body of Laura Palmer, Homecoming Queen. Common plastic appropriates the heady status of the Gothic veil. Layers of translucent plastic tease the viewer's eye with the suggestion of a female body. When a hand removes the plastic. revealing Laura Palmer's face. the lingering camera shot is as resonant as the moment Emily lifts the black veil in Mysteries of Udolfo, but for different reasons. Udolfo resonates with the strangeness of the Gothic, Twin Peaks with the ordinariness of the Gothic. The terrible object behind the veil is a gruesome wax figure of a

body in the last stages of decay. The figure beneath the plastic is a much more common object—a dead body. Where the wax figure creates distance between viewer and text because of its exotic, unusual, and bizarre qualities, the body creates closeness because of its ordinariness. The Television Gothic reveals what is behind the veil in the first episode, while readers of Udolfo had to wade through several hundred additional pages before learning the mystery of the veil. What is the difference? By postponing revelation, Radcliffe makes the Gothic moment remote, attenuated and rarefied. By beginning with the unveiling, David Lynch makes the Gothic immediate. It may be objected that with this early unveiling, Lynch is in fact destroying the Gothic. "How obvious," we think. "We recognize this. Here is that most ordinary of objects in any mystery—a body." But our moment of certainty is short-lived. It is precisely Lynch's point (and a point that characterizes Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic) that the ordinary is the Gothic. Consider, for example, the bizarre image of blood dripping on a donut. A commonplace, ubiquitous object such as a donut can be uncanny when it is juxtaposed with another common item—blood. And this point, the ordinariness of the Gothic, is reinforced through the series' emphasis on the enigma of the family. Incest and child murder are not the only family enigmas in the series. Gothics fairly bristle with family mysteries, and Twin Peaks is no exception. In fact, Lynch uses physical and mental deformity metonymically to suggest the extent of the distorted and dysfunctional family. The strained family dinners at the Horne's are silent except for the monotonous humming of the teen-aged autistic son, dressed in full Indian war bonnet. Donna's mother is in a wheelchair. Nadine has only one eye and limits her discussions with her husband to her obsession with silent drape runners. The Log Lady talks to

her log in lieu of a husband. Sarah Palmer is subject to visions and fits of (demonic?) possession and her husband, Leland, goes insane. In addition to the above examples of dysfunctional families, examples of spouse abusers are plentiful in Twin Peaks. Leo routinely beats his wife, Shelly, and leaves her to die in a fire he sets. Nadine emotionally abuses Ed. Windom Earle kills his wife, Caroline. Earle approves of Leo's abusive behavior ("domestic violence—now I'm partial to that!") and in turn keeps Leo imprisoned as a slave/pet/torture object in a cabin in the woods. Earle as the manic ex-husband plots to destroy a King and Queen (Cooper and Annie), as if no symbols of wedded power can be allowed to exist. In his glee over his plotting, Earle comments, "I haven't been this excited since I punctured Caroline's aorta!” Domestic violence and dysfunctional families are the norm in the series. In fact, it is difficult to find any "normal" nuclear family within the world of Twin Peaks. This is particularly telling, in light of comments such as John Ellis' that "home" and “family" are part of "a powerful cultural construct . . . broadcast TV assumes that this is the basis and heart of its audience" (Ellis 113). If this is the case, Lynch's construction of anti-nuclear families, a construction meant to be projected into the homes of other families, must be powerfully unsettling. In fact, it must be Gothic.
The explanation occupied several pages, which, to the torture of young Melmoth, were wholly illegible. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) In addition to the enigma of the family, another key aspect of the Gothic is its narrative ambiguity. Gothic novels are characterized by problematic structures. One much-commented-upon characteristic of the

Gothic is "the difficulty the story has in getting itself told" (Sedgwick 13), a problem in structure which means that Gothics “cannot be efficiently told" and are criticized for being "unaesthetic, anti-artistic, preserving only the unities of the subconscious" (Twitchell 41). The Gothic structure is complex and convoluted. In the Gothic, stories are interrupted by other stories, fragments of lost manuscripts give tantalizing hints at meaning, poetry is interspersed throughout prose, and baroque, overly-detailed explanations and descriptions contribute to a general hemorrhaging of language. Similarly, the Television Gothic as exemplified by Twin Peaks is filled with multiple story lines (love stories, a murder mystery, international business deals, a paternity mystery, a beauty contest, etc.), fragments of interpolated narratives (such as Laura Palmer's diary or Cooper's dictation, and perhaps even the commodified products of the series including books, tapes, newspapers, and even collectible trading cards), poetry and cryptic messages ("Fire, walk with me," "l will tell you three things") and puzzles within puzzles. If, as Raymond Williams suggests, "flow" is "the characteristic organization and therefore the characteristic experience" of television, then what is one to make of a series that resists such organization (Williams 86)? An important aspect of the workings of flow, according to Williams, is the creation of "a sense of the world," that is, of some meaning (Williams 116-18). Twin Peaks frustrates flow by its constant fracturing, restructuring and undercutting of meaning. Catherine Martell, waiting to discover the secret of Eckhardt's black puzzle box, sums up the frustrating process, saying, "I can't take any more of this. Boxes inside boxes. Whatever is in that better be worth a fortune." In fact, inside the box within the box within the box is a key— suggesting only the existence of yet another box. Twin Peaks takes our desire for meaning and aggravates it. Explanations are baroque and overly

complicated, like Gothic architecture. In place of highly detailed decorations (which distract and bewilder), or elaborate stained glass (glass which is opaque rather than transparent), the Television Gothic gives us too many clues and too many messages. For example, Cooper's explanation (in Episode 2009) of the solution to the murder of Laura Palmer is spoken very rapidly, overwhelms the viewer with a profusion of explanation, and is not based on scientific rationality but on allegory and the language of dreams. (Cooper explains that the dwarf in his dream danced and that Leland danced; he says that Bob had gray hair, and Leland's hair turned gray; and he says that the letters under the fingernails of the victims were spelling out Bob's name.) Such a baroque explanation is closer to a parody of meaning than to a real explanation. (In fact, Saturday Night Live successfully parodied Twin Peaks in a skit starring Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper.) Even more significantly, the narrative process of Twin Peaks frustrates our very expectations of genre itself. This Television Gothic never comes to rest at any one point. There is no moment of complete ease or comfort, no point at which the series settles into one easy mode. Rather, there is a constant slippage of meaning. The series never settles into a familiar groove for any significant length of time. The Television Gothic frustrates attempts to pin it down to any one particular narrative form. It is a commonplace of genre criticism to assume that viewers are attuned to those semiotic cues that forecast the type of genre, and hence the type of narrative to follow. As Jane Feuer notes in her discussion of the sitcom, television genre “assures the interpretability of the text" for the audience (119). Genre makes a series comfortable and understandable (or perhaps boring and predictable). For example, the various semiotic cues of the conventional Gothic are part of our cultural furniture. We understand that mysterious wounds in the heroine's throat signal a vampire story. However, unlike the run-of-the-mill television Gothic, a characteristic of the

“new” Television Gothic (as exemplified by Twin Peaks) is that the genre does not assure the interpretability of the text. Rather, the genre assures a multiplicity of possible interpretations. (In this respect, Twin Peaks is not so much a “newer” Gothic than series such as Dark Shadows, as it is truer to its Gothic origins. It is the first television series to fully explore the potential of the Television Gothic, and hence the first “pure” Television Gothic.) Signs which ordinarily would determine a set pattern, when proliferated in the Television Gothic, create an opening in time and space (like the opening to the Black Lodge) which allows for an excess or superabundance of meaning. Where Television Gothic breaks the bounds of genre is in its resistance to a single, discrete form of narrative. This resistance is carried out through obsessive, exuberant multiplicity. Twin Peaks not only offers multiple story lines (Cooper’s investigation of the murder, business intrigues between Catherine and Ben, adulterous affairs carried on by Bobby and Shelly and by Ed and Norma, etc.), and multiple narratives, but also multiple shifts between conventional or more "settled" Gothic genres. In contrast, a viewer of the 1991 remake of Dark Shadows knows what to expect from the very first episode, if not from the very first scene. All the symbols and apparatus of the vampire story are familiar and predictable territory. Twin Peaks teases the viewer by focusing on not one, but a multitude of potential narratives, each of which itself is open to multiple interpretations. To grasp the extent of this multiplicity, it is helpful to contrast the operation of narrative drive in Twin Peaks with the operation of narrative drive in the horror film genre. In American Film Genres, Stuart M. Kaminsky charts out seven main branches of the horror film, noting a separate "source of horror" in each branch: (1) "Animal drives which threaten man"; (2) "Immortal parasite"; (3) "Witches, corrupt humans who worship evil”; (4) “Resurrected dead, or possessed beings who are figuratively dead"; (5) “Unpredictable madmen”; (6) “Mad scientist and created monsters"; and (7) "Creatures from outer

space, inside the Earth, or from the id" (152-53). Typically, we expect one primary source of horror per film. Twin Peaks as a Television Gothic, manages to fit into each of these categories at various points in the series, while resisting allegiance to any one. For example. (1) Animal drives of sexuality, fear, and rage fuel the crimes in the series; (2) Bob is called a "parasite"; (3) Lana may be a witch, and Windom Earle has studied a tribe of Indians who worship evil; (4) Leland is possessed by Bob; (5) Earle is a madman; (6) Earle also is a mad scientist, and his creature is Leo (called “Leo-stein" by Bobby in a reference to Frankenstein's monster); and (7) Project Bluebook references in the show suggest the possibility of alien creatures from outer space, while "the evil in the woods" suggests the presence of evil within Nature itself, and Albert suggests that Bob may simply be "the evil that men do." Part of the contrast, of course, lies in the nature of the two media. Film does not have the same Gothic potential as television, precisely because of the finite time period for a film. A film must end, while a television series has a seemingly infinite potential to continue telling the story and to continue multiplying meanings. However, other television shows with Gothic elements have failed to fully utilize the Gothic potential of television. Each Night Stalker episode, for example, simply introduced a new monster which reporter Carl Kolchak would destroy. (Interestingly, Kolchak narrates his story into a tape recorder, like Cooper.) There never was any real doubt or uncertainty about the outcome. The clues pointing to the existence and type of the monster in each series proceeded in a logical, linear fashion. In Twin Peaks, on the other hand, logic and meaning are confounded. Each semiotic cue which ordinarily would narrow the range of narrative meaning combines with other cues to expand the possible meanings. (Are there aliens at work in Twin Peaks? Is Bob a demonic spirit or a parasite from another planet? What do the Indians have to do with this?

Is it all something in the coffee or the cherry pie?) A proliferation and superabundance of meaning is the result. In addition to Twin Peaks' multiple narrative drives and resistance to any one form, the series demonstrates a second narrative technique unique to the Television Gothic—the use of a domestic technological device to explore the ways technology transmits emotional extremes. Repeatedly, the viewer experiences moments in which emotionally-charged voices and images are mediated through technological devices such as telephones, microphones, tape recorders, video cameras and even television. Such technological reproductions, because they are reproductions and not "originals," are themselves ghostly. And the final device transmitting these extremes of fear and love is the television set. Television becomes the ghost in the home. Examples of technology as a mediating narrative tool are plentiful. In the pilot episode, Sarah Palmer's anguished cries at first learning of her daughter's death are mediated through a telephone receiver. As Leland drops the phone, Sarah's pain registers through the lingering sound of her voice on the dangling receiver. In another example from the pilot episode, the school principal announces the death of Laura Palmer over the school P. A. system. He is overcome by grief during his announcement. We see the effect of the announcement on the students, followed by a lingering shot of the empty school hallway with the principal's disembodied voice echoing through the hall. Such moments of technological mediation re-occur throughout the series. For example, in several episodes we hear the tape-recorded voice of Laura Palmer discussing things that frighten her and excite her. We see a videotape of a highly distraught Windom Earle discussing his obsession with an Indian tribe devoted to evil for its own sake. Microphones squeak and buzz, preventing important announcements ("Is this thing on?"). A tape

recording of Waldo the mynah bird transmits the final painful words of Laura Palmer, "hurting me, hurting me." On several occasions, individuals are wired for eavesdropping purposes under circumstances fraught with danger. Radio transmissions from outer space (or perhaps from the woods) warn Cooper of danger. Audrey is tied up and videotaped for purposes of extortion. And, in perhaps the most blatant example, Windom Earle uses an electronic device to administer painful shocks to Leo. Lucy, the dippy secretary, pinpoints the problem of all this mediation in one of her deceptively naive remarks, saying, "I'm going to transfer him— well, not him, but his call.” What you get with an electronic transfer is not the individual, and not even the original message, but the re-creation of a message. Whether the message must travel along miles of television wire, be transferred to audiotape, or be split up into signals that are sent into space and bounced off a satellite before re-emerging in the images on your television, there exists the haunting possibility that something is lost in the mediating process. Such images are not the original. They are ghostly. The fact that so many important communications in Twin Peaks are mediated through technological devices highlights two standard Gothic complaints—the difficulty of communication and the impossibility of ever really knowing another human being. Additionally, there is one final explanation for this narrative device, an explanation highly significant for the Television Gothic. Twin Peaks' emphasis on mediated messages—messages that are transmitted through technological devices—underscores the limits of the medium, and suggests that television itself is the ghost in the home.
O! what an infinite difference between this moment and the next'

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) The more things change, the more they stay the same. When Horace Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel in 1764, he was attempting something new. In his Preface to the Second Edition of The Castle of Otranto, he comments on his intent to create a new form: It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romances, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with great success. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. (19) Castle of Otranto was Walpole's attempt to "reconcile the two kinds" of writing (19). Similarly, television's heavy reliance on "reality programming" would seem to tip the scales in favor of common life, drying up television's potential for "fancy." Lynch's Twin Peaks can be seen as a twentieth-century reconciliation of common and uncommon, home-like and uncanny, domestic and Gothic. The result of this new Television Gothic is a format in which the domestic itself operates as the Gothic.
Notes
i This essay first appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly 21.4 (1993): 260-70. ii Analysis of the Gothic in literature is extensive, and what follows is a very selective list. Standard background reading should include Summers. Two particularly useful bibliographies are Spector's and Frank's. Recent works focusing on the American Gothic include: Gross and Hoppenstand and Browne. Finally, of particular interest for those interested in Gothic narrative structure is Sedgwick's excellent analysis, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Turning to film, a selective sampling of work on Gothic and horror (the two terms, though deserving separate definitions. are often used interchangeably) includes the

following: Waller, Kaminsky, Grant, James Donald, Edwards, and Perlmutter. A useful analysis of the ''boom and bust" cycle of horror films for the period of 1978 to 1983 can be found in Kapsis. Particularly interesting for students of the Gothic are Burnell and Dadoun. Finally, mandatory readings are Wood's two articles on American horror films of the '60s and '70s—"Return of the Repressed” and ''Gods and Monsters.” The pickings are lean as far as finding essays on television and the Gothic, but Waller's "Made-for-Television Horror Films” is an insightful work which explores the technical limitations of made-for-television horror films. Additionally. while not a scholarly work, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre contains an interesting and entertaining chapter on the limits of television horror titled “The Glass Teat, or This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers.” iii While most commentators trace the origins of the Gothic to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). there is less agreement on how to categorize the branches of the Gothic. It is possible to discuss the Sentimental Gothic, the Schauer-Romantik Gothic. the Explained Supernatural Gothic, the Unexplained Supernatural Gothic, the Historical Gothic. etc. iv What makes such moments significantly different from scenes of family violence in soap operas is the series insistence on the uncanny moment, an insistence that is purely Gothic in origin.