Lorna Jowett

Lab Coats and Lipstick: Smart Women Reshape Science on Television

Lab coats and lipstick—why not? Does science need reshaping? And if so, how can television help to do it?

Nightmare in Red? Twin Peaks Parody, Homage, Intertextuality, and Mashup

A well-known nineteenth-century aphorism states that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and, following this logic, the many “imitations” of Tw in Peaks might stand as flattering evidence of its status as an innovative, landmark television product—a show that, according to Robert J. Thompson, “changed the face of television” (152). In Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, Shara Lorea Clark mentions a Saturday Night Live (1975–present) sketch, two episodes of The Simpsons (1989–present), and Sesame Street’s (1969 –present) “Monsterpiece Theater: Twin Beaks” segment as some of the first TV references to a show that “saturated the cultural consciousness” (9). It might be expected that Twin Peaks would attract this kind of attention during its run, but a more lasting influence is apparent in the number of “imitations” that continue to be produced. From the Japanese video game Deadly Premonition, released in 2010, to Disney’s animated Gravity Falls (2012–present), described by its creator Alex Hirsch as “my weird Tw in Peaks meets The Simpsons series” (in Radish), these twenty-first-century references to Twin Peaks attest to the continued vitality of this ground-breaking series.

Folding Time: History, Subjectivity, and Intimacy in Vonnegut

Science fiction can have immense temporal range, giving it epic scale. One novel can deal with the whole of time; a time travel story can shift between many different time periods. These perspectives inevitably alter the way we see time and how it functions in relation to individuals, to nations, and to humanity. Science fiction’s epic temporal scale, like its potential spatial range (whole galaxies), means that it looks at things from a distance, an estranging distance. Estrangement is a key strategy of science fiction because, as any science fiction fan or scholar knows, it is not about aliens or other planets and not about the future. Putting distance (in time or space) between the reader and the events unfolded in its stories, science fiction comments on what is happening now, and how our past has brought us here. “Intelligent” science fiction can be deeply political, and it engages with history and the present in complex ways. Thus, Gene Rodenberry, creator of Star Trek, noted that during the 1960s, his show could “make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, unions, politics and intercontinental missiles,” and because it was science fiction, “they all got by the network” (Johnson-Smith 59). This is, perhaps, a problem inherent in using the fantastic to comment on the real: people are often distracted by the medium and do not perceive the message.