[page 273] Abstract: In his classic study The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx explores the interruption of the American pastoral scenery by technology, an essential trope in nineteenth century American literature. The conflict between the pastoral and the industrial has informed American culture ever since: Frederick Jackson Turner’s proclamation of the frontier thesis in 1893, the Western myth, the white flight into the suburbs in the 1960s and the 1970s, and the portrayal of the countryside as a lost Arcadia belong in the same tradition which locates the essence of Americanism in peaceful coexistence with nature while ignoring the contributions of technology and industrialism in the development of the American imperium. Several examples of the above can be found in the original two seasons of Twin Peaks: the town itself represents an idyllic paradise, as Dale Cooper constantly reminds us, threatened by mild interruptions of modernity. The nostalgia for the 1950s small-town optimism remains in the viewer’s memory despite the crimes committed in the town and the ominous finale of Season 2. Not so much in Twin Peaks: The Return. There is no romantic evocation of the American past anymore. The show underlines the invention of the atomic bomb as the catalyst that solidifies pure evil in America. The destructive force of nature, released by the explosion, disrupts not only the natural landscape but also time and memory itself. The distortion unleashed by the bomb represents a betrayal of the foundational myths of America, threatening the efforts of its purest citizens to retain the moral imperatives of a country which has declared that all humans are created equal.
Keywords: technology, garden myth, America, Arcadia, atomic bomb.
When Showtime announced the third season of Twin Peaks on 6 October 2014, fans of the landmark television show had many reasons to be excited. Not only would they be able to discover what happened to FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) twenty-five years after the devastating finale of the second season, but also, and perhaps more importantly, they would find themselves once again back in a place “won-[page 274]derful and strange,” as a teaser posted on the official Twin Peaks Facebook page on 7 May 2017 suggested. Also “familiar,” one could add. After all, despite the traumatic story of incest, murder, and horror that lies in the heart of the series, Twin Peaks, the town, as depicted in the first two seasons, is a beautiful place that blends pristine natural landscapes with images of a tranquil, nostalgic town that somehow revives 1950s America well into the 1990s. What could be more exciting than finding ourselves back in the Double R Diner where a damn fine cup of coffee and its famous cherry pie await? Returning, just a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidential term, to a fictional place many originally visited for the first time during the optimism and excitement that accompanied the last phase of the Cold War, felt like returning to a long-gone golden age, an arcadia which was somehow lost during the twenty-five years of Dale Cooper’s exile in the corridors of the Black Lodge.
This idea of returning to a lost paradise is an essential part of the American mythos. It even preceded the discovery of the continent. As Ray Allen Billington notes, Europeans during the Age of Discovery
saw America as a slightly improved version of the Garden of Eden, overflowing with Nature’s bounties, and peopled by a race of superior beings who lived in a perfect state of equality, without want or without masters—a model that would lead decadent Europe into a better future of which philosophers dreamed. (49)
In the new continent, Europeans projected older ideas about a lost Arcadia, Thule, Elysium, Garden of Eden, a divine place in which life was supposed to be simpler, more meaningful, and without the suffering, pain, and conflict of the human condition.
In the centuries that followed the discovery of the continent, Americans themselves have constantly attempted to return to the garden: nature has been repeatedly referred to as a place of regeneration, where Americans would be able to retain their exceptional traits. J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, [page 275] that child of French nobility turned into both an American and an early exponent of Americanism, celebrated the agricultural character of the country during the times of the American Revolution: “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida” (67). A century later, during the Progressive Era’s rapid industrialization, Wisconsin-based historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed his seminal frontier thesis, in which he argued that the American character was forged during the epic westward expansion that started with “the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs” and concluded with the arrival of the pioneer farmer, the hero of Turner’s national narrative (12). Turner’s friend and fellow historian Theodore Roosevelt initiated an ambitious conservation effort during his terms as President of the United States (1901-1909), with the purpose of preserving American nature for the benefit of the nation. This was no small task, for as his fellow conservationist John Muir once wrote, “the forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted” (145). Legends of the American West and the Western as an artform have perpetuated the idea of the return to a garden as quintessentially American, and Roosevelt’s salvation of God’s favorite forests have allowed Americans to visit the country’s mythical landscapes ever since. When this is not possible, they are able to return to the freedom of the American countryside in their fantasies. For example, the Marlboro Man, the famous cowboy figure that appeared in cigarette advertisements between 1954 and 1999, is one of the many examples of the commodification of the myth of the garden, while posters advertising cigarettes, as Rob Kroes mentions, in many cases do not depict tobacco products, just images of the American West (103). In this way, the idea of a prelapsarian garden as the heartbeat of the American experience has survived into the present day.
In his classic study The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx argues that this pastoral idea, as he terms it, has been central in American literature. Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during the industrialization of [page 276] the country, Marx adds, a different trope appears with urgency in American literature, one that represents the interruption of pastoral scenery by technology (15-16). One example is the whistle of a locomotive disrupting Thoreau’s peaceful revery at Walden Pond, as described in Walden: “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter” (103). Marx’s study shows that for Americans, combining the pastoral idea with the advent of industrialization and modernity has always been contradictory, as the most powerful industrialized country of the world was founded on dreams of yeomen farmers enjoying, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The American tendency to return to the garden underlines for Marx a mental conflict between the city, a word that signifies “the disciplined habits of mind or arts developed by organized communities,” culminating in the artificial world of technology, and the country, the natural world which stands as the opposite of civilization. According to Marx, Americans tend to move away “from sophistication toward simplicity” (9-10). Yet they cannot escape the recurring appearance of the machine in the garden, the sudden incursion of technology into the pastoral landscape.
In Marx’s work, however, a third image is equally essential, and important for the present analysis of Twin Peaks: The Return. In the writings of the Elizabethan era, such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (the remote island in which could have been the newly discovered America), Marx discerns that the wilderness that the early colonists encountered was not a serene garden. On the contrary, “the New World is a place of hellish darkness; it arouses the fear of malevolent forces in the cosmos, and of the cannibalistic and bestial traits of man” (41). The wilderness, nature in its natural state, is antithetical to the excesses of civilization that the American ideal detests, but it is not in itself the serene prelapsarian garden. Wilderness is as dangerous as the modern world. Yet, between the primordial horror of the wilderness and the destructive menace of technology, there is an ideal [page 277] place where balance can be reached. Located somewhere between nature and the city, it retains as much as possible the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic of yeomen farmers. It is a cultivated garden in which the machine can blend harmoniously into the American countryside, a place in which Americans can use technology to improve their lives without becoming enslaved to the perceived negative aspects of civilization. Marx calls this ideal place the middle landscape. Twin Peaks, the town, is in many respects such a place.
Twin Peaks as the Middle Landscape
Placed somewhere between the hellish primordial wilderness and the devastating and alienating forces of technology that dominate the artificial life of the city, the town of Twin Peaks stands as a prime example of what Marx terms the middle landscape, which represents the ideal of “a rural nation exhibiting a happy balance of art and nature” (226). The distinction is clear in the first two seasons of the series: the dark woods outside of the town represent the wilderness, a place where spirits dwell and that should be better avoided. The newcomers from the city are met with skepticism in Twin Peaks: think of Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), whose metropolitan ways and scientific methods come into conflict with Harry Truman’s (Michael Ontkean) more traditional approach. It is even suggested that Dale Cooper, who came from the city, may have been himself the harbinger of evil: “Before you came here,” Jean Renault (Michael Parks) tells Cooper, “Twin Peaks was a simple place. . . . Suddenly, the simple dream become [sic] the nightmare. . . . [M]aybe you brought the nightmare with you.” There is constant anxiety that the town’s simplicity may be lost, that the complexity of civilization may turn the dreamy town into a nightmare. There may be a hotel, a lumber mill, and a diner serving consumerist hallmarks such as apple pies, coffee, and fast food, but these have been blended into Twin Peaks’ middle landscape: they are not distorting the American pastoral landscape. In a way, the [page 278] nostalgic 1950s America they express is part of it, making Twin Peaks the ideal American town.
Yet, we know that the serene life in Twin Peaks is just a façade which hides horrors of domestic abuse, drug cartels, prostitution, and death. The idea of death in the pastoral landscape disrupts the essential American myth of the garden as a place of regeneration. This is an old idea: after all, outside of the Garden of Eden, no earthly paradise has been able to prevent death, the main outcome of humankind’s exile from heaven. The corpse of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the first episode of the original series is reminiscent of two seventeenth-century paintings that depict death’s intrusion in the pastoral landscape: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri’s Et in Arcadia ego (1618-1622) and Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego (1637-1638)—the title of both paintings can be translated into “Even in Arcadia I [Death] Am.” The paintings, depicting shepherds examining a tomb and a skull in an otherwise idyllic pastoral landscape, are pessimistic reminders that even the desired middle landscape is not safe from the finality of death.
In Twin Peaks, violence and death are closely associated with Laura Palmer’s fate and her relationship to her father Leland (Ray Wise) and BOB (Frank Silva), the spirit that possesses him. Several studies have explored the dynamics that surround the evil at the heart of Laura’s tragedy from a variety of perspectives 1 by focusing on the original series. Yet, while the original series presents the tragedy of a woman, a family, and a town as metaphors for America, The Return does not really need any metaphors: the third season is about America itself, and its creators are able to discuss what they think is the essential evil that destroyed the country’s innocence. Not surprisingly, it’s something closely related to modern civilization and technology: the atomic bomb.
Lynch’s fear of several aspects of modern civilization and technology are well recorded: electricity is constantly a menace in his oeuvre. In The Return, Lucy Brennan (Kimmy Robertson) has been unable for more than a decade to understand how mobile phones work, and Dr. Will Hayward (Warren [page 279] Frost) and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), the characters that one might expect to be in touch with the modern, as representatives of science, have sought refuge in nature. In suggesting that technology, the main characteristic of modern civilization, is at least worrisome, Lynch and Frost place themselves in a long list of American thinkers and intellectuals who have been skeptical about the machine’s incursion into nature.
One may recall Thomas Cole’s series of paintings The Course of Empire (1833-1836) to view how deeply engraved into the American psyche this anxiety about modern civilization is. In this series of five paintings, Cole depicts the rise and fall of an empire. The first painting, the Savage State (or The Commencement of Empire), presents the original state of the world before humanity took control. It depicts the primitive wilderness, a world dominated by the elements of nature. There are a few humans in the painting, difficult to see: they simply belong to the world and have little influence over nature, which seems to swallow them within its mountains, rocks, woods, and dark skies. It is a depiction of Native Americans living as part of the natural world. The woods outside the town of Twin Peaks, dark, menacing, and primordial, are comparable with Cole’s depiction of the world’s original state. The Arcadian or Pastoral State, the second painting, depicts an idealized representation of the middle landscape. Here the skies are clear, and nature has been tamed without being destroyed: agriculture has taken over the wilderness, a temple has been erected among the trees, a shepherd tends to his flock, an old man appears to paint with a stick on the floor: the image of an idealized ancient Greek Arcadia. A few elements of technology, however, appear here: a warship, a child who sketches a soldier on a stone, and, most importantly, smoke coming out of the temple, indicating that fire has been domesticated. These are still minor elements and are absorbed into the natural landscape, like the lumber mill and the Great Northern Hotel seem to be in balance with Twin Peak’s landscape. Yet technology has entered the garden. [page 280]
With the advent of technology, we naturally arrive at the painting called The Consummation of Empire. Here, the world has been conquered by humans, and the sceme suggests the Roman Empire at its apogee. The city has replaced the countryside, and every element in the painting seems to be made by humans: temples, domes, bridges, a port, statues, and a triumphal procession taking place at the center of the painting, suggesting military victory. Civilization has been achieved and has reached its imperial stage. This, however, is not supposed to last: Cole’s two last paintings, Destruction and Desolation, depict the end of an empire. Destruction comes about through warfare, an art invented by humans and accomplished by human-made tools crafted for killing. Invasion by foreign forces and the collapse of the polity are not unrelated to civilization’s positive aspects: “Luxury has weakened and debased,” Cole says in an 1836 article about his work in The Knickerbocker magazine (“Fine” 630). Desolation depicts the silence that follows the suffering of war: there are no humans left, just the ruined remnants of their past existence: an Ozymandias of long lost and forgotten greatness.
What is interesting with Twin Peaks is that, while we have seen in the series the equivalent of the first and second stages of The Course of Empire, we have not seen the third stage, which depicts civilization’s glorious moment. While the original series focused on the town of Twin Peaks, a representation of the pastoral middle landscape, The Return gives glimpses of imperial glory during the time we spend in notable American locations—New York City, Las Vegas, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Texas—yet the season depicts these places as dark, gloomy, and depressing: empty residential areas, as the outcome of the 2008 housing crisis, are paired with Dougie Jones’ (MacLachlan) adventures in Las Vegas’s casinos, where many who have not achieved the American Dream (or who lost what they had achieved during the economic crisis) hope to be as lucky as Dougie. What is equally distressing in the series is that the town of Twin Peaks is no longer depicted with the positive colors of the original two [page 281] seasons. In The Return, the town of Twin Peaks is itself a dark, gloomy, and depressing place. By subverting viewers’ expectations—Twin Peaks in 2017 was not the happy place we remembered from the early 1990s—Lynch and Frost show that the pastoral stage of America has ended and what has been left is not positive. It seems that the machine destroyed the garden to such an extent that the country has gone directly from the pastoral stage to that of desolation, with humans remaining as empty shells of their past selves, such as Dougie Jones and Cooper’s evil doppelgänger.
The Machine that Burned the Garden
The Return has subverted expectations in multiple ways, but the fundamental one that disappointed some fans of the original series is, I believe, the series’ refusal to present us nostalgic images of Twin Peaks as a middle landscape. If, as Greil Marcus has noted, the town of Twin Peaks in the original series was a blend of the sylvan village and the film noir city (154-156), in The Return the sylvan village/middle landscape has been swallowed entirely by the film noir city, and no signs of it remain. The town is now dark and depressing and, in most cases when we find ourselves in it, we view the interiors of places that indicate connection with organized society, that is, with civilization: the police station, the convenience store, the Roadhouse, and the Double R Diner. The parts of the plot that occur in nature mostly take place in the deep dark wood outside the town and are mostly horrifying.
Lynch and Frost are very clear about the fundamental incident that destroyed the American ideal of the middle landscape, leaving the country to exist either as a primordial wilderness or a Kafkaesque remnant of its civilization: the distorted image of a dark, gloomy, scary city that perpetuates and feeds on human pain and suffering, a valley of constant “garmonbozia” production, in Twin Peaks’ terminology. Part 8’s depiction of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army at 05:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945 at the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, serves as the [page 282] catalyst that explains the solidification of evil in America. Long gone are the days when technology could blend with wilderness in order to form a middle landscape. Here is a man-made machine that has no desire to coexist with the garden. The destructive force released by the explosion disrupts not only the natural landscape but also time and memory itself: the nation’s image of the past gets distorted into an ugly dark mirror of itself: a Woodsman (Robert Broski), uncannily resembling Abraham Lincoln, the president who lived in a log cabin and mastered the wilderness, infiltrates a radio station—a temple of free speech and artistic expression at one time—and renders the nation unconscious.
Less than a month later, the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would find the United States victoriously ending the World War II in the Pacific and turning America into an empire. But at what cost? “Whatever elation there is in the world today because of final victory in the war,” wrote Norman Cousins in an editorial titled “Modern Man is Obsolete” a few days after the Japanese surrender,
is severely tempered by . . . a primitive fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions. (16)
The atomic explosion brought cosmic fear back into the human mind: fear of the cosmos’ indifference to humankind. In the series, the explosion explains both the arrival of BOB, the demonic spirit, born out of fire, that drives the action in the original series, and the arrival of Laura Palmer, sent to Earth in the form of a golden orb that resembles the sun, who appears to be an angelic force sent by perhaps good divine forces to counterbalance the evil of BOB on earth. As Elizabeth Lowry emphasizes, “fire and light carry multiple associations, indicating a complex web of benevolent and malevolent forces struggling for primacy” (38). [page 283]
It is not incidental that in The Return, evil appears through the fires of the explosion while good takes the form of the sun. “The opposition between Satanic fire and life-giving sun, light of divine truth and righteousness, is a recurrent device in the work of Dante, Spencer, Milton, and Bunyan,” Marx writes; “The association of fire with technology, which goes back to Prometheus and Vulcan, also forms a part of the Christian myth. Before the fall . . . there was no need for technology” (Marx 270-271). Technology, then, in the form of fire, indicates humankind’s attempts to survive the fall from the original Garden, while attempts to return to the middle landscape indicate vain attempts to return to a long-gone paradise. Moreover, in the context of the series, we know that the evil that came to the world from this atomic explosion was too strong for Laura Palmer to deter. Deterrence may have worked as a political strategy in the Cold War, but humankind still has in its hands weapons that can guarantee its annihilation, and angels may not be enough to help us survive our self-made destruction.
In 1896, Henry Adams, one of the most acute observers of the nineteenth century and descendant of two American presidents, wrote to his brother Charles:
You may think all this nonsense, but I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. (qtd. in Samuels 130)
Adams’s prophetic comment, written long before the atomic bomb was conceived, underlines the fundamental issue with technology, namely that, although it has improved human condition, there is always the fear that humankind may be enslaved or even destroyed by technology. This idea has been constantly revisited in science fiction, a genre to which one may argue that Twin Peaks belongs, and as Daniel Dinello notes, [page 284] “such technophobic science fiction serves as a warning for the future, countering cyber-hype and reflecting the real world of weaponized, religiously rationalized, and profit-fueled technology” (2). In The Return, this idea is dominant not only in the depiction of the atomic bomb. Indeed, in most cases, technology, as Franck Boulègue notes, “is portrayed in collaboration with the evil forces in Twin Peaks” (Boulègue 170). For example, when Mike (Al Strobel) says, “Someone manufactured you” while meeting one of the tulpas in the Red Room, he could be referring to every technological invention that has threatened the garden myth.
Conclusion: Innocence and its Betrayal
By revisiting the first atomic bomb explosion and by constantly raising awareness of technology’s potential threat, The Return makes it clear that, by playing with cosmic forces beyond its comprehension, the United States has lost part of its soul. Abraham Lincoln once stated, “[W]e shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth.” Following the Trinity explosion, Lincoln’s doppelgänger can only utter the phrase “gotta light?,” a question that has already been answered by the fire that allowed the evil of BOB to enter the world of the living. According to Walter Metz, “As The Shining’s hotel was built atop the grounds of Indian massacres, the plot of Twin Peaks emerges from a more recent sin of the United States government, the deployment of nuclear weapons.”
A Lovecraftian cosmic horror informs the moments after the explosion in Part 8, as we realize that the apparitions that enter the world, The Experiment, BOB, and The Woodsmen, and settle inside a convenience store, of all places, represent cosmic forces that may be entirely indifferent to humankind. The same can be said for the seemingly good forces who view the events from the safety of the Blue Room: The Fireman (Carel Struycken) and Señorita Dido (Joy Nash). They both work to construct the essence of Laura Palmer and send it to Earth as a counterforce to BOB. But did they intend Laura’s [page 285] encounter with BOB to end up as it did? Did they even care? We don’t know.
The fact that these forces enter the world by American actions suggests the country’s tragedy, perfectly summarized by Marcus:
The promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the promise that all would find themselves free to say what they had to say, the guarantee of equal justice under law, that governments were formed to respect and protect those rights, that citizens owed governments no respect if they did not—were so great that their betrayal was part the promise. (11)
America is a country built, Marcus tells us, on symbols and ideas such as freedom, democracy, human rights, liberty, etc. But the same country’s history includes slavery, segregation, the death penalty, and, recently, the withdrawal of women’s right to abortion. The gap between ideals and reality may indicate a collective unwillingness to abandon nostalgia for America’s innocence.
This is spelled out in detail in one of the funniest and most awkward moments of The Return. In Michael Cera’s cameo, during which he appears as Wally, Andy (Harry Goaz) and Lucy’s Marlon Brando-like son, we get both the most nostalgic image of both Twin Peaks and America and, at the same time, a clear, however reluctant, rejection of that nostalgia. Wally describes how he has travelled with his motorcycle throughout the country, following the steps of Lewis and Clark, “the first Caucasians to see this part of the world.” Wally recalls his careless and joyful days in Twin Peaks, and his adventures throughout the country resemble an Easy Rider, free-of-care lifestyle as well. Yet the reason Wally is back in town is to resolve a matter of grave concern for his parents: to finally give permission to them to do as they wish with his childhood bedroom. Wally’s carefree trips throughout the country, following the steps of those who explored what for many Americans in the past was just “virgin land,” took place while Wally refused to abandon childhood. We cannot know if he will eventually [page 286] grow out of his Marlon Brando costume and his Americana phase, but we know that his parents will now build a study in his bedroom, so perhaps where once dreams of freedom were nurtured, now research of the failures born out of dreams of freedom can be conducted.
It is perhaps in the final moments of the series that Lynch and Frost’s pessimistic outlook on the course of America is clearer: An exhausted, serious, and aggressive Dale Cooper/Richard attempts (perhaps once more) to save Laura Palmer. Richard is violent and does not speak a lot, a shadow of the man we encountered in the original series. Disappointed as he may be, he does not let go. His attempts to make Carrie Page (Sheryl Lee) remember that she is Laura Palmer end in Carrie/Laura’s haunting scream that ends the show in what may or may not be a cliffhanger. For, if Carrie Page/Laura Palmer is a metaphor for America, then what has remained of America after the nuclear test? An abandoned dead man in her living room, probably shot by Carrie herself and ignored by Cooper, shows that the country does not even notice that its inclination toward violence constitutes the betrayal of its founding myths.
In the end, one wonders if there is any optimism left. To bring this down to a question of fandom, if Lynch and Frost wished indeed to offer a metaphor of America’s failure, is there any need for a fourth season of Twin Peaks following the finale of The Return, which perfectly summarizes the tragedy of a country in Carrie/Laura’s scream? Is there a way to escape the evil caused by the machine? To answer that, we should go back to one of the simplest and most enduring definitions of evil, written by someone who saw the collapse of the Roman Empire–the archetype for Thomas Cole’s paintings and perhaps for American imperial ambitions. “Evil,” Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions, “is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains” (63). It is perhaps Cooper’s disappointing, depressing, and bound-to-fail attempts to save Laura Palmer to which we should turn our attention. Despite the suffering, defeat, and loss of his personality, Cooper does not let go. And in a Twin Peaks world where the garden has [page 287] been lost and a return to Eden is impossible, he still attempts to do good. And if some good remains, at least in Augustinian terms, evil cannot entirely win.
Notes
1. See, for example, Randi Daveport, et al., “The Knowing Spectator of Twin Peaks: Culture, Feminism, and Family Violence” (Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 4, 1993, pp. 255-259); Laura Plummer, “I’m Not Laura Palmer: David Lynch’s Fractured Fairy Tale” (Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 1997, pp. 307-311); Michail Zontos, “Leland Palmer was not Alone: The Lucifer Effect and Domestic Violence in Twin Peaks and The Shining” (Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series, edited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace, McFarland & Co., 2017, pp. 111-127); and Stacy Rusnak, “Violence, Representation, and Girl Power: Twin Peaks’ Female Characters and Third Wave Feminism” (The Politics of Twin Peaks, edited by Amanda DiPaolo and Jamie Gillies, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 95-115).
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Michail Zontos received his doctoral degree in cultural history from Utrecht University. His dissertation examines perceptions of Europe in the work of American historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard. His research was supported by a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece (IKY). He has published on Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks, and American vampires. He has taught American popular culture at Radboud University, Nijmegen.
MLA citation (print):
Zontos, Michail. "Paradise Lost: Incinerating the American Myth in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 273-288.