My mother bought Twin Peaks on dvd when she stumbled across it in JB Hi Fi in the late 2000’s. She wanted to rewatch the complex and acclaimed television series that caused a frenzy when she watched it in the early 90’s. She told me that when it was released in Australia, it seemed like everyone was asking, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’.
I started watching Twin Peaks with her when I was a teenager, and I was blown away by the story and characters, but the only other person I knew who had seen the show was my mum. I went online in search of people like me who wanted to talk about the show (who didn’t also give birth to me) and found site after site of fans who discussed the show in forums, created new media inspired by the show and rewrote plotlines and episodes as fanfiction. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed by the vast global community of watchers who loved the show as much as I did.
Imagined communities is a social and political theory, coined by Benedict Anderson, who developed the theory to explore how nations are socially constructed communities. An imagined community is one where everyday face-to-face contact is impossible, because individuals are dispersed across vast distances, but they share some sort of commonality, interest or interpretation of the world.
Twin Peaks has a large and active imagined community, and has had so since 1990. Henry Jenkins discusses the original Twin Peaks imagined community that communicated through alt.tv.twinpeaks, a forum on Usenet, which was an early computer network for discussion and file sharing (Jenkins, 2006). According to Jenkins, the Twin Peaks online community aimed to resolve narrative enigmas, develop alternate re stagings of plotlines, and use extratextual and intertextual links to analyse the show (Jenkins, 2006 pp. 119). In the 90’s, fans added resources to the online community from the television program, including sequential timelines of narrative events and lists of favourite quotes and recordings of sounds.
Today there are many online communities that celebrate and discuss Twin Peaks, including welcometotwinpeaks.com which is presented as a blog made up of series of articles about the show and about members of the community engaging with Twin Peaks at present. These articles include photo series from the Twin Peaks gatherings across the world, articles speculating narrative and cast for the upcoming season, trivia knowledge about the world of Twin Peaks and all who inhabit it and links to current and popular bands that have covered songs from the show. The fansite boasts 51,201 members, with a sidebar that includes its facebook page, twitter feed, blogroll and official and unofficial merchandise.
Why is the imagined community so important for a show like Twin Peaks? I think it is because the show is so complex and full of mysteries and questions, so viewers want to discuss and unpack all the elements of the show to gain understanding. There also seems to be a sense of comraderie with fans of the show who know that it is a quirky and eccentric program to love, and that it is not ‘normal’ television. For alt.tv.twinpeaks, Jenkins notes that there was the pervading sense that everyone was there to work together to solve the mystery of Who Killed Laura Palmer, but beyond that, that the community enjoyed sharing a common interest that they can pick apart and that still remains a mystery to most today.
Reference List
Finlayson, A. (2012), ‘Imagined Communities’, in E. Amenta, K. Nash & A. Scoot (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology
Jenkins, H. (2006), ‘Do you enjoy making the rest of us feel stupid?’, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, NYU Press, New York
Morgan, C. (2009), ‘The Figmentum Project: Appropriating information and communication technologies to animate our urban fabric’, In M. Foth (Ed.), Handbook of research on urban informatics: The practice and promise of the real-time city (pp. 144-157).
