engleski

Time and Seriality Deconstructed: The Case of Twin Peaks: The Return

The borders between TV shows and films are often blurred. One of the best examples is Lynch' s Twin Peaks, where he claimed that the third season is an "18-hour movie". The main feature of TV shows is the ability to create smaller story arcs, while films are often treated as one-time realizations of a certain concept. However, in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the story arcs are prolonged to a certain level of frustration. For example, the awakening of Agent Cooper takes place in the 16th episode out of 18, thus deconstructing the classical notion of an omnipresent protagonist. The Return was released in the standard weekly form rather than all at once. To compare, studies have shown that binge-watching could be seen as a form of TV addiction (Sweet 2017), since the brain is continually producing dopamine. However, in the case of Twin Peaks: The Return or similar TV shows, the suspense is demolished, there are no cliffhangers or resolved loose ends. Forcing a weekly schedule of episodes is preventing the feeling of loss after the show is over, since the studies (Karmakar et al. 2015) show that brain stimulation is lowered as in other forms of depression. According to Horvath et al., weekly episode viewing also improved sustained memory. From a philosophical perspective, we are dealing with two notions of time. First, time spent watching classical closed episodes seems shorter because there are no missing odds and ends. Second, time spent watching movies or open-ended TV shows is differently experienced since there is no fragmentation involved. Most of the audience prefers binge- watching hours of episodes instead of watching a two-hour film: we posit that it is the case because the human brain prefers closed story fragments, even though the overall time spent might be greater.

seriality, identity, temporality, time conceptualization, binge-watching

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