Episode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:30:00 -0400

David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episode 1: Garmonbozia while still reeling from the series' third season, which aired on Showtime the year before. Now, in preparation for their upcoming course on Twin Peaks, they watched the third season again and recorded this episode. Their conversation touched on the virtues of late style in the arts, the divergence of knowing and understanding, the fate of Agent Dale Cooper, and the dream logic of the _Twin Peaks _universe.

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REFERENCES

Symposium at Lily Dale, July 27-29, 2023
David Lynch and Mark Frost (creators), Twin Peaks
David Lynch (dir.), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Chris Carter (creator), The X-Files
Erik Davis, American scholar, lecturer, and journalist
Thomas Ligotti, American writer
Stephen King, American writer
Joshua Brand and John Falsey (creators), Northern Exposure
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Robert Aickman, English writer of "strange stories"
Manuel DeLanda on signification vs significance
Weird Studies, episode 105: Fire Walk With Tamler Sommers
Kyle McLachlan interview in Vanity Fair

Episode 2: Garmonbozia

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0500

Phil and JF use a word from the Twin Peaks mythos, "garmonbozia," to try to understand what it was that the detonation of atomic bomb brought into the world. We use the fictional world of Twin Peaks as a map to the (so-called) real world and take Philip K. Dick, Krzysztof Penderecki, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Theodor Adorno, and H.P. Lovecraft as our landmarks.

Warning: some spoilers of Twin Peaks season 3.

Works Cited or Discussed:

Phil Ford, "The Cold War Never Ended", Dial M for Musicology (1) (2) (3) (4)

Twin Peaks: The Return — Official Site

Philip K. Dick, “The Empire Never Ended,” treated in R. Crumb’s “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” and the “Tractate” from Dick’s Exegesis: http://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM

Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Arthur Machen, The White People

Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death”

C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

William B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

The Book of Ecclesiastes

Jon H. Else, The Day After Trinity (documentary)