A Halloween treat from a textbook I'm working out of for a paper on Postmodern Gothic Literature.

*There is a detailed spoiler about ep. 29*

From the “Postmodern Gothic” chapter in GOTHIC: The New Critical Idiom by Fred Botting (1996)

“Enmeshed in processes of doubling, (the postmodern gothic film's) attempt to join its parallel images never closes. (A film)… signifies… that identity, meaning and unity are spectral illusions of signs. It cannot expunge this horror, cannot take an eternal and fixed position.  The invocation of evil, however, signals a return to romantic patterns of organizing the significance on a global and binary scale.  In the films of David Lynch, a similar interplay of good and evil, light and dark, is manifested as uncanny and unavoidable duplicity. In Blue Velvet (1986), the play of visual allusions also absorbs the American Gothic tradition in which the uncanny proximity of good and evil is seen to be very close to home, within the boundaries of community life.  Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-2), uses similar Gothic contrasts in a visual text whose network of allusions, quotations, stylistic parodies and pastiches was as broad as it was reflexive.  Playing with various narrative conventions the series followed the investigation of a terrible murder of a girl in the small town community to uncover evil’s multiple sources in primordial, individual, cultural and narrative locations: deep in the woods, in human fears, selfish desires and sexual repressions, in the community and within the family.  The evil in the woods refers to Hawthorne; the evil father resonates throughout Gothic, as does the identification with psychopathology. The figure of evil, the vagrant face of BOB, appears in the mirror image of the paternal perpetrator, a reflection that haunts the series.  Evil, also, is located in outer space, an echo of the Cold War threat of Communism that had just disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evil’ splace is multiplied in the dense network of cultural and narrative allusion. Evil is also identified, in the self conscious use of romance forms, with myths and fictions.

            The final battle of good and evil is staged when the detective enters the deceptive Black Lodge- a place of reversals and evil doubles- to save the woman he loves. They both return. But the romantic happy ending is undetermined by the final scene. Washing in his hotel bathroom, the detective looks in a mirror. Staring from it is the disheveled face of BOB, the evil image and sign of diabolical possession. The turning of one into the other, good into evil, forms a doubly self conscious and banal inversion of the conventional romantic ending. The camera returns from the mirror to focus on the detective’s features, now distorted in a malevolent grin which is itself a reflection of the mirror image’s evil face.  Not so much a conventional display of the truth of interiority, of the evil within, the double presents evil as an effect of images and narrative surfaces, another device of diabolical duplicity.  Having turned the figure of good, unity, coherence, identity and cleanliness into evil’s double, another alluring figure in a diabolical repertoire of signs, the series’ playfulness evokes both laughter and horror: it just plays games, and yet, there seems to be nothing but narrative games, no position outside or determining them, no frame that is not, itself, caught up in a web of duplicity and ambivalent effects that contaminate all cultural boundaries and distinctions.”

"There is no need for medicine. I am not in pain."

It's going to be at the University of Westminster in London, at the start of next July, I think.

"There is no need for medicine. I am not in pain."

That's what I thought, too.

But I clicked it anyway.