Time is but the stream I go a fishing in

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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

Anders Høg Hansen a

a

School of Art s and Communicat ion, Malmö Universit y, Malmö, Sweden

To cite this article: Anders Høg Hansen (2013): Time is but t he st ream I go a-f ishing in , Cont inuum:

Journal of Media & Cult ural St udies, 27: 1, 141-159

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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

1

Present pasts in 20 years of American TV serial fiction from Northern

Exposure to Mad Men

Anders Høg Hansen*

School of Arts and Communication, Malmo¨ University, Malmo¨, Sweden

This article investigates the representation ofmemoryanddreamin selected American TV serial fiction concentrating on 1990s shows that blended the real, the surreal and the supernatural. Departing fromNorthern Exposure,and moving on toTwin PeaksandThe X Files, these shows embarked on an extensive use of vision, dream and memory themes to portray, I argue, negotiations between what Jan Assmann coinedcommunicativeand

cultural memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). While Twin Peaks and The X Files

concentrated on the dark undercurrents or repressed forms of American belief and anxiety,Northern Exposuretook a more benevolent route, re-imagining and rewriting alternative American aspirations of belief and coexistence. Key protagonists were portrayed as exiled individuals engaging with their pasts and the communities of which they became part of or estranged from while on roads to self-discovery. Carl Jung’s writings formed an inspirational body of thinking for the shows, perhaps most explicitly inNorthern Exposure, which also elaborated on Jungian visions of a shared humanity among the many differences inside and between humans. All shows elaborated on the consequences of opening oneself to dimensions of life that formed theshadows(Jung 1958, 1959), humanduplexor doubling (Jung 1958), as well as the unused potential of imagination in Western modernity. Roads to self-discovery involving repressed or difficult memory work were also spelled out during the first seasons of a very different contemporary show,Mad Men.This show will be brought into discussion at the end of the article where I elaborate on the consequences of particular forms of American dreaming.

Introductory memory exposures

Northern Exposure,1990 – 1995, was filmed mostly outside Seattle, WA, down the road from the now famed Snoqualmie Falls ofTwin Peaks,which it referred to during Season 1 (Episode 5). It premiered on CBS in the summer break between the two seasons of the ABC show,Twin Peaks, which also fused drama with comedy, the mundane with the spiritual, and the realist with the supernatural.2While not as innovative asTwin Peaks, it proposed a new look at human coexistence by creating stories about how individual idiosyncrasy and difference related to communal integration, and in this project of envisioning a changed and new social world it used memory3and dream as devices with which collectives and individuals maneuvered into their futures. Apparently irreconcilable world views were integrated through re-imagining past collective cultural memories in a lively and compassionate present-day problem solving. To create instant human recognition as well as complexity4in its storylines,Northern Exposureplayfully created a

q2013 Taylor & Francis

*Email: anders.hog-hansen@mah.se

Vol. 27, No. 1, 141–159, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.737194

mixture of character stereotypes as well as cultural hybrids to embrace a range of forces that Western society have made oppositional (Zubizaretta 2006) or conflictual. It created stories about how memory – comprised local lore as well as global cinematic and spiritual (Western and Eastern) references orcultural memory(Jan Assmann 2010) – assisted in a present engagement with individual and collective development. Rather than trapping subjects in damaging quests as inTwin PeaksandThe X Files – or trying to erase and avoid the past as inMad Men – memories and dreams became life-enhancing resources. The shows, as several researchers have noted, attracted new audiences to TV fiction (e.g. Thompson 1997) and triggered proliferate academic writing.5Why were these series6 so influential? The introduction of spiritual and supernatural elements combined with realist and quirky character portrayals and storylines, the blending of humour and drama, the concern with meaning beyond the worldly, rationalist and empirical, could be argued to fit well into the zeitgeists of the 1990s. This was also mirrored in a range of other serials/series – notablyBuffy the Vampire Slayer.7

The series shared a concern with memory. While darker and damaging memories and dreams haunted the characters of the famed 1990sTwin PeaksandThe X Files,Northern Exposureignited a warmer engagement with the mental and material debris of the past. It viewed remembrance and dream as taking action! Rather than trapping subjects in damaging quests, memory and dream in Northern Exposure became socially life-enhancing resources and healing stories pointing towards possible futures (drawing from, e.g. Spencer 2006).

The darker notes ofTwin PeaksandThe X Fileswere, inNorthern Exposure,turned towards a more optimistic and life-givinghauntology(Derrida 1994), if we can imagine the variety of life’sshadows(Jung 1958) as such.8This may be said to be a feature of the show, which leans up against Spencer’s claim thatNorthern Exposureintended to heal and re-imagine a last or new frontier (2006, 211), and even teach us social compassion (200 – 1).9

Theory exposures

InNorthern Exposure,Twin PeaksandThe X Files,we were introduced tooutsidersas key protagonists struggling at the peripheries of the communities or collectives they negotiated their membership to or alienation from. Jung discussed inThe Undiscovered Self(1958) how the individual, as a disassociated and scattered self (struggling with the forces and impulses of the unconscious), was both in need of, and also framed by, an organizing principle above him/her (Jung 1958, 64). The human being could search for his inner man/self for spiritual self-realization, yet community, here in Jung seen as a state – his book written at the heights of the Cold War, it should be noticed – that had made man statistical(58 – 9): a pawn in the mass, asimplex, yet forgetting that man is aduplex(81), Jung notes. The conflict between real/inner man andstatistical man lead to fantasies ‘coming up’ from the unconscious creating conflict and split personality, e.g. as tensions between faith and the knowledge of science. Yet, we human beings are imperfect or divided personalities caught in tensions, in need for the other and community. The perfect has no need for the other, Jung notes (105).

Carl Jung, however, interestingly worked with attempts to explore and actively imagine other or multiple forms of belief. He was searching inside the psyche, not only to understand the individual, but also for phenomena to understand if/how humanity shared traits that would not continue to divide us, inside and among each other. The notion of shared ancestral traits orarchetypes10was one of his concepts, where he argued that through these traits we, to some extent, could know our past from within (Coward 1985, 64 – 7)

Northern Exposure had an explicit Jungian orientation in its focus on character dualism, and its means of how to cope with, and overcome, conflictual quests for individuality as well as community. The negotiation of the individual in relation to the collective was also prominent in the quests of Agents Mulder and Scully inThe X Files. Here the collective, however, took on a much more threatening form.

Although it may be difficult to imagine Jung coming to a consensus with Halbwachs and Jan and Aleida Assmann on approaches to memory studies, this article will, in the spirit of worked through dualisms, bring them together:

All these series worked with a myriad of references, a collective canon of culture (Aleida Assmann 2010, 99), bodies of texts or icons that, according to Aleida Assmann, as in the history of religion, referred to texts that are ‘decreed to be sacred’ must not be changed, ‘a stable reference’ (2010, 100). However, in Aleida Assmann’s elaboration ofcanon, these texts are invigorated and appropriated, thereby becoming an active form of remembrance. She opposescanonto thearchive, the latter a storehouse or passive form of remembrance, in Assmann’s use of the term (99). The evoking of canonical texts becomes a part of the personal reminiscence and sense-making of the past, in the present. Moving on to Jan Assmann, social andcommunicative memoryin the context of a recent past and autobiographical framework (Jan Assmann 2010, 99)11is rooted in everyday experience in human interactive situations. This is what we draw on, or what we cannot do reminiscing without, when we reconstruct the past or re-imagine what we were and what we want to become. The everyday communicative memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010) became a prominent take on social memory in all shows, and often the stakes that led to story development were the clashes between these different levels of memory,the culturaland communicative memoryor the mythical, historical, institutionalized and formal on the one hand, versus the recent, autobiographical, non-institutional and informal on the other (Jan Assmann 2010, 117).

The actively circulated memory that keeps the past present could be seen to find particular prominence in any detective and crime show that works backwards, starting with the crime before it works its episode or serial narrative backwards. The question I am adding and will concentrate on is how the series explore humanity and culture in this process. Theoretically, I attempt to concentrate on the odd coupling of Carl Jung with Aleida and Jan Assmann in my investigation.

Northern Exposurein particular elaborated on the tensions between a culturalcanonof references and recognized literature and the presently breathing individuals’ autobiographical and oral work with recent communicative memories. Jan Assmann elaborated on the notion of communicative memory inspired by Halbwachs’ initial notion ofcollective memory12and the social aspect of reminiscence. Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by moral and social props, Coser notes in his introduction to Halbwachs’Collective Memory(1941). People acquire their memories in societies, yet memory research (before 1941) had a tendency to treat people as isolated individuals (Halbwachs 1941/1992, 38). No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people (43); we aid each others’ memories and we successively engage with them (38). Each scrutiny or recall marks a point of possible reinterpretation, since memory – as history-writing – is a practice of the present or something we reproduce under the influence of the present milieu, as Halbwachs put it (1941/1992, 49).

Northern Exposure especially, but also The X Files and Twin Peaks, worked with individual as well as social or collective dreamscapes articulating general or personal fears and rites of passage. These uses of dream and memory become interesting to discuss in relation to a distinction between layers of the unconscious: a personal level and a

collective level, what Jung called the collective unconscious (Jung 1960, 87). Jung describes the latter as what remains from our forefathers, images already filled out (Jung 1960, 101 – 2), forces and figures, or archetypes, that reproduce the same myths (92). Although sceptical towards this conceptualization, in particular the biologism in Jung, I findNorthern Exposure’sappropriation of Carl Jung’s terminology interesting. It made sense to address memory- and dream-driven stories in the show to evoke visions of a shared humanity. Several characters from time to time experience the same dreams or nightmares (as e.g. Laura and Agent Cooper inTwin Peaks). Their difficult, symbolic and conflict-resolving dreams inform their waking orientations. The content of the dreams is quickly interpreted and worked through: in tales to others, in public art or transmission over the radio. Bonds between the deeply personal and the collective were tangled or tightened in almost every episode.

Fish out of water

Northern Exposurebegins when Joel Fleischman(Rob Morrow),13 a young, yuppyish, temperamental, whimsical, Jewish doctor from New York, finds himself forced to take up a job as medical practitioner in the remote town of Cicely, Alaska (population: under 1000) to pay off his student loans. The show initially concentrates on the newcomer and his adjustments, learning and quests in this new community, which includes a core group of outcasts and yetrootedtownspeople and their spiritual and mundane relationships and routes.14

A key node of the fictional Cicely is the town-radio KBHR, where the local artist, DJ, Harley Davidson-rider and caravan-livingChris Stevens(John Corbett) shares his musings and philosophy. Chris sets the wordy, worldly and otherworldly tone of the show. The radio is the medium where time and themes flow from Chris’s mouth and albums to the ears and souls of the community. Chris is also another sort of mediator: he conducts the weddings, funerals, public art, memorials and other ceremonies in the town.

The indeterminable Alaskan location of the fictional Cicely creates the impression of an imaginary place. It looks very familiar on the surface, but is also just as much a state of dreaming mind. Its remoteness and weirdness allow creators and writers to play with human relationships that not only draw on ‘regular social conventions’ (Chan 2006, 42 – 3) and realist notions, but also recognize that Alaska was the final frontier (Spencer 2006, 211). The rural and remote location furthermore allows for an emphasis on oral culture, rumour and face-to-face relations – yet the radio station and Chris’ musings (as mentioned above) connect the place to work, to history, and assure the sharedness, and the mediatization, of the stories going around among selective people. The town of Cicely accommodates individuality and difference, and offers ground forindividuationprocesses (Spencer 2006, after Jung), where individuals confront itsshadows and try to integrate unknown parts of oneself or one’s past. Yet Cicely also paves the way for community. The quest forindividuationis coupled with a search for community, a double orientation that may also characterize frontier dreaming – or what frontier mythology is made of.

Another key character isMaggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), a young, independent, feisty and feminist bush-pilot (running the local air taxi service). In the pilot episode, Joel takes her for a prostitute. ‘I am not a hooker. Jerk! I am your landlord’, she spits. The dynamic between Joel and Maggie – or O’Connell and Fleischman, as each often addresses the other by using surnames (as Scully and Mulder inThe X Files) – is portrayed through a series of situated sexual ignitions and cold showered arguments throughout the series, a reluctant couple formula principle where both characters struggle with

perspectives they lack or cannot quite integrate or come to terms with their ownduplex. We initially view the newcomer, Fleischman, as the ‘fish out of water’ (Thompson quoting Falsey and Brand 1997, 162) transferred from his urban habitat to a strange rural impasse. In fact, all characters slowly take shape as strange fishes coming together in the bowl of Cicely where they bounce against each other, following and resisting the streams, oscillating between small town incidents and trips into the Alaskan wilderness.

Fish in the water

Several episodes inNorthern Exposurebring Joel Fleischman’s Jewishness into play. In ‘Kaddish for Uncle Manny’ (4.22), Joel abolishes his attempt to gather 10 Jews to do the minyanprayer when his Uncle Manny has passed away. With help from Maurice and other townspeople, he succeeds in finding a few ‘unlikely’ Jews, and then decides to use his own new community ofgoysto do the prayer. In ‘Things Become Extinct’ (3.13) and ‘Shofar, So Good’ (6.3), Joel also explores his Jewish identity. Another example that I will concentrate on here is ‘Fish Story’ (5.18), which begins with O’Connell (a non-Jew) offering to make the Jewish Passover dinner for Fleischman. After a series of ‘experiences’ on the lake nearby, Joel realizes why he fled from Maggie’s offer.

In ‘Fish Story’, after saying no to Maggie’s proposal for a Passover Seder, Joel nevertheless experiences his own sort of pass-overor pass-throughat the nearby lake. As he fishes with Ed and Chris, Joel hooks the local big fish, known as Goony, but Goony resists capture. ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. Henry David Thoreau’, Chris muses, as they sit by the lake – just before Joel catches the fish. Later Ed and Chris leave and Joel spends the night at the lake, holding on to a resisting Goony.

The trip to the lake triggers a recounting of the Old Testament’s story of Jonah, a minor prophet who turned his back on God’s call by fleeing on a boat (Bible, Book of Jonah 1973). Joel reluctantly ended up in Alaska, and has now gone fishing. The big fish forces Joel to stay in a rowboat alone through the night while the fish drags the line. At some point, Joel feels the rumbling below. Has Goony finally given in? No, it is neither Spielberg’s shark inJaws(1975) or Melville’s Moby Dick – and Joel is not Captain Ahab. (Melville 1851). He is there alone not dragging people with him as inMoby Dick. Up from the ocean, and Joel’s unconscious, comes Joel’s former New York Rabbi! After a chat on Judaism in the beautiful quiet moonlight, the rumbling under the boat comes back – and this time it is Goony. And she/he is hungry. Like the prophet Jonah, Joel ends up in Goony’s stomach but at least with the company of a rabbi. Down there the Rabbi lectures on Jonah while Joel also encounters old artefacts from his past – significant objects of Joel’s past ‘exhibited’ in the tomb of the whale while the two men look for an exit, in this case the excretion canal (Jonah was thrown up, Joel and the Rabbi are going for the other end). As soon as, the Rabbi concludes that Joel should remember his responsibility and welcome Maggie’s plea for intimacy by saying yes to the Passover dinner, they are on their way out. But just before excretion or escape from the burden of memory, they find themselves in a ‘tube’: the subway on the way to downtown New York. Joel wakes up disoriented on the lake where he had been fishing with the townspeople on their way searching for him. Joel asks, with a bewildered just awakened gaze, what happened to the Rabbi and the fish?

The experience on the lake, maybe a dream and/or a speech from the unconscious that draws from Joel’scultural memoryor canon of Judaism (Assmann 1995), led Joel to come to terms with his own change. The episode also exposes two other stories about resistance and change through a journey and a return. I’ll give the third parallel story some reflections

too. Here the elderly tavern owner Holling has a try with painting by numbers. He becomes overconcerned with the result, the product and if people like his work or not. Chris, the radio DJ, then mediates and convinces Holling to separate the art from the artist. Chris practices anaesthetics of the transitory(as he names it) by arranging public, collective events of a memorable quality where he lets objects undergo a journey, exposure or annihilation through a rite. Chris’s rites of ‘letting go’ add to the show’s concern with the ephemeral. Chris arranges for humans, as well as the remnants and artefacts of human creation, to go on their last journey. Also orally, he evokes traditions and texts that belong to different domains of ourcultural memoryin Jan Assmann’s terms. Like Carl Jung, Chris believed in art practice as an alleviator of fear or anxiety.

Northern Exposureencircled the need for resistance and civil disobedience, yet also posited that fate and the ‘stream’ may carry us – apropos the references to Thoreau and Civil Disobedience(1849/1993) in the episode ‘Democracy in America’ (also the title of a book by de Tocqueville, 1840, who is also quoted in the episode) and the quote from Walden, ‘Time is but the stream I go a fishing in’ (1854). This passage, against or with a stream, may also hold a possibility for a return to community in an altered state. The ‘stream’ in Northern Exposure can also be seen as life’s dynamic and changing state or even a carousel15: it may lead you astray but it leads you back or home. An engagement with a key mythology in the collective memory, a monster, a past event, is reworked and then community life continues as ‘normal’ (at least until next week’s episode). The ‘Fish Story’16episode ends with aPassoverdinner for Joel, with all the key characters in the series, in Joel’s house. The focus on parallel storylines concerned with different forms of unworked debris surfacing or being humorously trialed can be seen as Freudian in character, yet there is a strong focus on known and unknown connections of mentality, themes that the different individualities share as a collective. Thecollective unconsciousis referred to in several of Chris’ radio musings, as well as in a shared dream with his brother Bernard (Aurora Borealis 1: 8), where they find themselves sitting in a truck, while Carl Jung is trying to drive. Jung cannot drive, and the two men wake up before the crash. Appropriately, in a later episode, Joel receives Jung’sThe Undiscovered Selfin his post. Moving on to other fish in the water, one of the so-called nature episodes ofThe X Files engages with a sea monster not called Goony but Big Blue. Mythologies play a slightly different role in The X Files; they represent either folklore or supernatural, or border-natural, phenomenon – i.e. the designation ‘X File’ and a case for the detectives Mulder and Scully. We are engaging with rumours and myths often of an oppressing and collective character that can take the form of a conspiracy that our key detectives, as whistleblowers, and outcasts, manoeuvre within a bureaucratic machine or apparatus, or enter a community ‘full of secrets’ – aim to unravel.The X Filescan be said to belong to a 1990s atmosphere or belief in government conspiracy and a paranoia towards the dealings of political man and state power. In the light of the rise of Wikileaks and related movements aiming to expose systemic secrets, might the mythology of The X Files gain new relevance? The Wikileaks phenomenon has been led by other exposures, personal scandal-stories, and as inThe X Files, a focus on ‘from below’ describing whistleblowers, the risks they take, the protection they need and the truth they search for to make it available for the public. The repressed public memories, or that which is not yet made collective, but should be made collective may be said to heraldThe Lone GunmenofThe X Filesas the early digital age disclosure movement helping whistleblowers within the system.

In the episode ‘Quagmire’ (3: 22), we also see characters stuck on a lake engaged in a dialogue about change while waiting to be eaten. The two key characters are FBI detectives: the largely intuitive and adventurous Fox Mulder and the more sceptical and

reluctant Dana Scully. Mulder takes Scully out on a Saturday morning drive to investigate an incident at a lake in the forest. Mulder believes that something weird is going on at the lake (and of course he is right). Scully thinks there is nothing to it, but she cannot resist Mulder’s speculations and goes along. Several local townspeople have been killed by something that lives near or in the lake. The little town markets itself around the myth of ‘Big Blue’. After some unexplained killings, Scully and Mulder rent a boat and take to the lake to investigate. Their boat is attacked by something big from under the water, but find rescue on a rock that protrudes about the surface. They sit down with their guns pointed towards the dark lake and Scully wonders if Mulder really is like Captain Ahab, the hunter of the great whale in Melville’sMoby Dick(1851), a man on a restless quest dragging people with him. Earlier in the episode, Scully’s dog – which she has named ‘Queequeg’ after one of the harpooners ofMoby Dick– was eaten by the alleged monster – just as a dog had to die inJaws(Spielberg 1975). Scully’s family history then intrudes: her father was always away on the ocean; he called her Starbuck, after another harpooner, and she called him Ahab. We have learned this in a previous episode, but it is retold here on the rock. Mulder’s family history joins in: hiss father resisted the operations he became a part of. The legacy of their fathers is vividly alive. We see a stereotypical representation of an UFO on Mulder’s X Files office poster. Below the hovering UFO the words ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’ are written in clear and confident capital letters. But are they the shadows of their fathers, and their lost siblings, that hovers over Scully and Mulder and guide their quests? Scully’s sister dies after a failed operation from which Scully escaped, but got her sister instead; Mulder’s sister was abducted.

At some point in their conversations they hear sounds. Is it the monster? No, it is only a duck. Scully reminds Mulder that cartographers tagged so-called ‘undesignated territory’ with the note ‘here be monsters’. Her remark encapsulates the series. The Alaskan last frontier inNorthern Exposureas well as the woods ofTwin Peaksalso became metaphors. Character quests on all three series became about inhabiting places and a knowledge that leads to transgression in imagination. The ‘data’ the detectives look for inThe X Filesare not only ‘the truth’, but data that come to change the way we understand the world. Furthermore, the personal and the professional quests of the detectives come to reflect or reinforce each other.

The three shows, with their obvious differences taken into consideration, are about journeys into undesignated territories. Mulder looks for monsters. The two city detectives sit on a rock on a lake and are scared by natural sounds while they also long for a noisy metropolis – as with Joel inNorthern Exposure. They have in their urban lives turned their back on nature, and now it is turning its back on them, to paraphrase an angry biologist at the beginning of the episode. Later when they are rescued by the biologist, Mulder manages to shoot the monster, after it had taken a bite out of the biologist. The monster turns out to be an alligator.

Mulder is disappointed there was no monster. Scully comforts him. However, he prevented more killings by shooting the alligator. Those myths and stories, like the one on Big Blue, are stories Mulder finds hope in, he explains. People want to believe, and that is why the stories endure, Scully responds. I could add to this that the poster in Mulder’s office is not so much about UFOs. ‘What is older than the hills?’, one of the billboard adverts asks (along the highway when Mulder, Scully and Queequeg drive into town). It is not really the cartoonish Big Blue depicted, as we may think. What is older and bigger than the hills isbelief! Mulder and Scully glance over the dark lake for a moment and then turn around to enter their car. We see a glimpse of something that could be a very big fish in the lake. The episode ends.

Double trouble and other dualities

InThe X Files, Scully and Mulder share an understated intimacy while repeatedly clashing over science and the supernatural. The stereotypic gender conventions are played with Mulder general being the intuitive, supernatural, alien-hunter with a propensity towards the use of dream and psychic powers where possible, a trait he shares with Agent Cooper inTwin Peaks.17Fleischman and O’Connell inNorthern Exposureare also in a different way established as dual and complementary characters: the urban and the rural, the rationalist and the intuitive, the thinker and the feeler, the Republican and the Democrat, the scientist and the handywoman, the educated and the streetwise. They do, however, also share traits that trigger conflict as well as attraction: they are both talkative, bold, individualistic personas seeking to be respected and heard. Maggie is initially only attracted to the fleisch, not the man/persona, – yet their relation grows as the series progress and it is by far the only or central dualism in the series.

InTwin Peaks,Agent Cooper is paired or related to a range of characters and an object, his detective diary, a small hand-sized tape recorder. When the creator behindThe X Files, Chris Carter, invented Mulder, he must have thought of Agent Cooper ofTwin Peaks,and then proceeded to do something completely different with the character. While Cooper is warm, open, literal, a classical gentleman-like persona, Mulder is deadpan, enigmatic and ironic, a post-modern trickster to the bone. Neither of these men are, however, traditional FBI agents. In both cases, we could be talking about strangely isolated individuals appropriating the FBI as a Federal Bureau ofImagination.Cooper records his thoughts to a personal assistant at home called Diana, or just a tape recorder called Diana, with ramblings on Douglas Fir, coffee and pies, and comments on the course of his investigation and life in Twin Peaks. The taped tales become Cooper’s memory archive and reconfigurations, his therapeutic wall, and his ethnographic notebook. This device replaces, but also ironically mocks, other formats of authoritative voice-over, such asthe Voice of God,and connects the private and public or professional Cooper. His federal agent toolbox consists of classical methods spiced up with Buddhism and Tibetan philosophy, including dream material as clue provider – the latter trait he shares with Mulder and his lean towards abduction, contrary to Scully’s more classic deduction (Peterson 2007, 25). Mulder does not seem to make small talk with many people, if any, and Cooper is much better at that. Cooper also smiles often and downs coffee, pie and doughnuts (Mulder primarily lives off of sunflower seeds). Only once does Mulder try a slice of pie and then he eats everything in a obsessive gesture to, and quotation of, Lynch’s Cooper character.

While it is easy to see where Scully and O’Connell find theirotheror complementary persona, the case is more complicated with Cooper. Agent Cooper is open towards other explanations, including those yet to be explained. Cooper also equips himself with varied and eclectic principles in his work, notably a concern with the meaning in coincidences, i.e. where events are seen as related by meaning, and not by cause (borrowing from Jung’s notion ofsynchronicity).18

Mulder is as open to the supernatural as Cooper, and his quest is also driven by earlier tragic circumstances in his life. However, Mulder appears more stubborn in particular beliefs or wants. Like Ahab seeking Moby Dick, Mulder seeks the truth – and in his search he finds an ally in Scully. Cooper has Sheriff Truman, but they do not challenge each other (for a long time) as Scully and Mulder do. Truman follows Cooper, who leads the investigation as a Buddhist-leaning anthropologist agent inhabited by local lore as a result of his own intensive participatory observation. David Lynch and Mark Frost created a

heartfelt romance, drawing heavily from the style of soap opera,19which Lynch himself was raised on, but told through an ironic lens. I do not claim that there is no heart inTwin Peaks’heavy shedding of tears and emotional and redemptive dialogue, but Lynch/Frost created a counterpoint to the means with which the characters fought with their lives: they unfolded the drama in a distinct visual style with slapstick as well as deadpan humour (combining early silent movie humour with what appeared as very rare and new forms). Sometimes the visual spoke volumes through a parallel story related in many scenes (Hank talking seriously while buck antlers stick up behind him, as if the antlers were growing out of his evil head; Sheriff Harry Truman looking out the window while a picture of Former President Harry Truman is visible on the wall; etc.). The latter visuality, speaking silently, as well as through slapstick, the narrative off-roading or de-routing of story development, provided a satire to the drama, a bizarreness to the mundane or a playfulness that confronted the horrific (Campbell in Reeves et al. 1995, 190).

During its second season,Twin Peaksmoved slowly away from the foreground crime story towards a stronger engagement with the supernatural as well as everyday life in Twin Peaks. Its many characters and its occupation with the bizarre may have caused less interest (viewer numbers were dropping during the long second season), though its conundrum-style signs and stories would have been even more difficult to deal with if the show had premiered 10 – 15 years earlier. Henry Jenkins’s research (in Lavery 1995; Lavery and Chain 2006) points towards how the VCR era, late 1980s and onwards, allowed viewers to go through scenes and episodes several times. Furthermore, the emerging Internet allowed viewers, not just those sharing a water-cooler at work, to discuss and create community, across the country and the globe, among fellow Twin Peakersonline.Twin Peaksposed secrets and riddles that made it urgent for viewers to debate what others thought was happening. Twin Peaks, and the rise of the Internet paved the way for online fan communities, Jenkins (1995, 2006) noted. The similarly difficult The X Files also triggered online discussion – and writers often picked up on viewer suggestions when adding/developing detail in the stories. As this is written (July – August 2011), I notice recent entries inTwin Peaks Gazetteonline and on Facebook I do a thumbs-up to theNorthern Exposure2011 fan gathering,Moosefest,in the city of Roslyn, Seattle. While its supernatural focus and complexity would trigger people to record and watch again and discuss online,Twin Peaksdid not really provide a sustained engagement with alternative worlds, as in the longer lasting The X Files (Johnson-Smith 2005). It did, however (from Season 2) explore the supernatural aspects of the story it had laid out.Twin Peaksbegan, at least in the foreground story, in a recognizable crime story plot mode with discovery, investigation and revelation (E – F) of crime, and in this process unraveled how the crime was conceived, planned and committed (A – C) (after Johnson-Smith 2005, 54). After about a dozen episodes, the series shifted from being concerned with an explanation of the past, and became more focused towards ‘what will happen to the key characters’. Theshadows(Jung 1958, 1959) of the characters was explored and the everyday drama decentred the crime story. It took the first season to work the shadows up from the mental debris of the characters’ pasts, their personal and collective unconscious.Visions20of the reality of supernatural places, people and spirits became a major concern. Visions were important for other characters than Detective Cooper. Major Briggs explained the difference betweenvisionanddreamto his son, Bobby, in one of the many beautiful and soap-opera-ish scenes (Season 2, Episode 1). Sitting in front of each other in the double R diner, Dad and son are at first miles apart in miscommunication. Briggs talks about the pie, the huckleberries are delicious, etc. But suddenly it changes. Briggs asks if he can share something with his son:‘... A vision I had in my sleep last night. As distinguished from a

dream, which is a mere sorting and cataloguing of the day’s events by the subconscious; a vision, fresh and clear as a mountain stream, the mind revealing itself to itself’.21Briggs then retells the vision of a meeting and embrace he had with Bobby last night and how he felt about this vision: his joy when seeing Bobby happy and in harmony with himself and life. Bobby, who had entered the conversion as a slacker trying to shield his discomfort by a body language of indifference, is quickly alerted and de-masked. The encounter appears to transform his relationship to his Dad. Rather than making reconciliation take place over a time span of actions and talk, it takes place in this one moment. The scene is in a style related to many other face-to-face dialogues of the show, not far from the style we may imagine shapes ‘Invitation to Love’, the daily soap opera that many characters in Twin Peaks follow on TV. Doublings again.Twin Speak. The soap within the soap. A genre within another. Always another side to the coin of memory. This doubling may be the serie’s legacy. The soap and satire approach to supernatural drama and dream-working of the collective closet of icons, archetypes and spirits shapedTwin Peaksportrayal of culture and small town America. As Jimmie Reeves put it (in conversation with a group of Lynch scholars):Twin Peaks‘...evokes, mocks, yet lends quasi-reverence for the icons of the

past, while it places them in the present’ (in Lavery et al. 1995, 177).22

Another doubling providing ground for the cultural work of the show is a tension between the urban – rural and real and imagined/dreamt or hard-to-comprehend territory23 Cooper represents the city, brought into foreign waters in the forested Pacific Northwest, as does Fleischman in Northern Exposure and as does Scully/Mulder in a range of episodes across the USA, notably a series of small town and nature episodes (including ‘Quagmire’, discussed earlier). As in many small town crime stories, a murder makes the coziness crack and dark forces and incidents arrive (or work their way up to the surface). In Twin Peaks,the use of the Black Lodge and the spirit Bob take this model further. InThe X Files, the existence of the undesignated territory results in crime story endings without proper closure. The unresolved is labelled and given an appropriate place: an X File placed in a drawer in a basement of the FBI building, deported to the underground, or the unconscious, as shadow to remain ‘not understood’ or taken out of official history. Scully and Mulder run back and forth between this little office where light cannot enter (but where there is imaginative light enough) and an outer world where ‘normalcy’ is interrupted with conspiracy, cloned humans, possible aliens, strange animals, tribes in conflict – a world of American anxieties.

While Mulder and Scully try to understand the communities they temporarily enter, Cooper and Fleischman try to settle in the community they each have ended up in for a long time. With a professional job to do and a good portion of unskilled ethnography, their stays in Twin Peaks and Cicely, respectively, end up becoming a form of Jungian self-discovery. While Fleischman and Cooper had formed their individual personas before their arrival (individuationachieved, a point also confirmed by Spencer (2006, 220) on the character Fleischman), the quest for both of them in their new roles is to become part of a community, and function as fully fledged social human beings.

The duality of characters, or traits, gender roles or thematic parallel stories is in Northern Exposurealso developed in relation to the relationship between the past and the present. A variety of episodes show how apparently minor family feuds and incidents of the distant past suddenly play a crucial role in present-day conflicts. The series warmly mocks the human condition – our tendency to hold a grudge and fight each other. The symbolism is often striking. In ‘Democracy in America’ (3.15), the fight in the election of a new mayor is over a traffic stop sign. This in a town with hardly any traffic. Now a sign of the red light, thematter or ‘thing’ of concern opens a discussion in the community.

In ‘Family Feud’ (4.19), a newly launched memorial, a totem pole, re-ignites an old feud between two tribes of Cicely because of different interpretations of a fish crest, which dates back to an incident in 1934. Passed on conflictual cultural memorieshave been ignited in a communicative work through (elaborating on Jan Assmann’s terms) representing the tension between the canonized, established, formal and inherited and the present, living, shared and divided references and memories, which all provide fuel for identity development and orientate wise steps into the future. They end up leaving out the fish, and they are friends again. The residents of Cicely easily forget, but also easily remember. Many episodes unfold through a bite of a Proustian Madeleine sponge cake, though it only generates a brief conversation with the past rather than speaking volumes (as in Proust). The residents quickly move on with their lives giving a sign of action in the act of remembrance.

In a re-enactment of the town of Cicely’s formation back in 1909 (‘Cicely’, 3.23), the creators reveal the history of Cicely and show how the descendants of the earlier Cicelians have become the residents of today. Each key character of the series plays a 1909 simulacra of the present-day character. Thus, the 1909 version of the 1990’s ‘Joel’ character must also be a visitor. So in 1909 he is Kafka, arriving from his urban entanglements into the rural pioneer town of Cicely to cure writer’s block. The mixture of fantasy, myth, memory and history characterizesNorthern Exposure.Capital ‘H’ history is doubled with the minor histories, the mythical pairs with the mundane in the stories of past and present. The notion of memory as a present faculty, as all remembrance necessarily must be, but also a craft of the creating mind, is prominent. Memory is a processing engine facilitating future action. In relation to this point, ritual often plays a role in creating the passing from a difficult past to a tolerable future. In ‘Northwest Passages’ (4.1), Maggie is inspired by an Indian rite. She leaves a goodbye note to each former dead lover down by the river. The stream will deliver the messages, and she can move forward. When she stays over at the river to go to sleep, she dreams that she has a walk in the nearby forest, where she stumbles into all the ex-boyfriends having a barbecue together. They have all received their note – and they are now complaining about what Maggie wrote, such as blunt remarks on their sexual capacities. Maggie then wakes up with a fever and is rescued by Joel and others from the town.24

‘There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier’

The words are Don Draper’s (2/4), a key character inMad Men, the period serial on life at and around a big advertising company in New York in the early 1960s. Each season depicts one year. We begin in 1960. Season 125unfolds with a detailed portrayal of an expanding American middle-class consumer culture during a period where popular culture changed the country but where minds and cultural norms did not move yet so fast. The advertising company’s take on American identities and their campaigns to capture consumer emotions is the show’s key to the portrayal of culture. A central character is the mysterious, handsome, undoubtedly creative genius Don Draper, who is not really Don Draper. The actual Draper died from in combat during the Korean War. Next to him in a trench was Dick Whitman, barely surviving a bomb blast. Whitman takes the dead and unidentifiable Draper’s ID neckband and immediately changes his identity. We learn in several flashbacks (and in the return of Whitman’s lonely brother, Adam, who finally tracked down Dick), that the two boys’ childhood had been far from easy. The new ‘Don Draper’ pursued or invented a life, on the other side of the past that now was no more: a project of forgetting. As advertising digs into emotions that may not be fully transparent or

clear, Don Draper is a newappearance(Dunn 2010, 30)26suited to an American impulse or feeling. Draper is the wealthy, lonely and unhomely man who has difficulty building a history. He looks for a new frontier to cross, a new lover, a disappearance to San Francisco. Although Draper says his life only moves forward, he does not appear to have a clear plan. He does not even have a contract; he is a free agent in his self-conception. He cannot handle his past and therefore not his future either. For Draper to fully appear, his strategy is to escape from another or former track of his life. Draper has a problem connecting different life-epochs or spheres of relations, since he does not really allow a life story or some coherency in the diversity to evolve. There are many attempts and moments of regret, which leads us to engage with him and the serial. However, he generally lives in an instantaneous practice of the pursuit of an American dream. While the 1930shobo27was a gentleman of the rails, sleeping like a stone because he is freed from the pressures of the past. As Fritz writes (2010, 63), Don Draper has become amodern hobo, I would say, one who has manufactured himself as an empowered version of the poor wanderer he saw enter his childhood home for a meal and some work.

Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice Its Alright’ (Dylan 1962) is used as end music in the episode where Don tiredly let his body sink to the staircase in the empty house after his family has gone to celebrate Thanksgiving at his in-laws house. We see two different versions of the scene. First, we see Don’s hopeful imagination where he arrives home to a family that has not yet left and kids who embrace him (this scene plays without the bittersweet Dylan tune). This is Don’s wish to reconnect, which is unfulfilled. Don’s lonely moment on the staircase can be linked to another event just before his return to the empty house. He presents an idea for an advertising campaign for Kodak’s new slide projector using a circular tray prosaically named ‘The Wheel’, but in Don’s brilliant imagination now called ‘The Carousel’, vividly mirroring how a child’s movements are circular, a merry-go-round, exploring the world and then returning home (after Teschner and Teschner 2010, 137). Don uses emotional images from his own happy family moments, his recent history suddenly there, mediated and passed on to stunned and touched employees. After Don’s convincing demonstration, he attempts to move in circular fashion to return home, but the house is empty.28

In Season 2, Don disappears temporarily from his corporate New York life, his mistresses, and a life in a hotel after his wife Betty has thrown him out. First on business in California, Don impulsively skips a planned meeting, stays over with bohemians and pursues a new love affair (although the latter is not so different from escapades at home in New York). During Don’s flight from his everyday work duties, we see Don at a beach. He has crossed the country and goes alone into the great Pacific Ocean – to the George Jones country tune ‘Cup of Loneliness’. In the first season of the show, Don Draper’s memories appear to visit him in an accidental fashion: a situation or the arrival of a person from the past forces memories upon Don, which he tries to shake off. He attempts to go back to the stage of ‘between’, beingafterthe past that is no more, or not influencing him (or at least in an attempt to arrange life so) and at the threshold of the forward approach he endorses. There is no attempt at integration. John Fritz writes, ‘Don Draper’s memories are always triggered externally. We never find Don simply contemplating his past’ (2010, 64). Memory here becomes amneme, a reappearance, rather than ananamnesis, an intended recall (terms from Plato used by Junker-Kenny 2010, 204; Ricoeur 2004, 17). I find Fritz’ emphasis on mneme, interesting, while also seeing moments of anamnesis, as the presentation of the carousel and other situations in the series reveal.

Don/Dick’s duality is clear in Mad Men. The former Dick and the new Don, the husband and father on the one hand versus the restless lover with parallel mistresses on the

other. Don has disconnected his past and his present as he lives double lives, and this parallel of life stories lends to the intriguing complexity of the character.

Conclusion

With this article, I have tried to showNorthern Exposure’snon-judgmental approach to living, its delighted use of dream and memory as guidance for action, its integration of life-forms and quests – the profane, secularized, scientific and mundane combined with the spiritual, religious, mythic and folkloristic – its dedication to community without buying off individual idiosyncrasy.

Twin Peaks,The X FilesandNorthern Exposureprovide meeting points and clashes between what Metta Spencer names (after Tanaka) thehorizontaland thevertical,29or the worldly and the spiritual. The series teach us about the consequences of leaving out, or questing for, particular dimensions of life or belief.Northern Exposureembraced a move from reductionism to holism and benevolently engaged with the living fossils (term borrowed from J.J. Clarke’s work on Jung 1994, 183), the cultural memory, of our pasts, which the series then re-imagined and rewrote. The transformative power of memory and dream apparent inNorthern Exposureplays on the productive use of the past in the present and the future. Chris, the radio DJ and lay minister, acts as a memory anchor of the collective. His mediations work in several ways: not only as a transferer of radio speech ‘texts’ and music to the listening ears of the community, but also as a go-between public interventionist in the public hall and church. He is the community middle-man for marriages, funerals, conflict resolution, public art presentations and performances, an interpreter of the community’s memory knots.30The character types of the show prove to be more subtle beneath their stereotypical surfaces. As any good fictional character, the characters of Northern Exposure are contradictory, but the sometimes overstated traits provide an easy entry to recognizing a striking feature of the person.

We may more freely perceive and accept the storylines and quirky characters due to the geographical placement of the stories inNorthern Exposure. Cicely is a place far away enough to hold a possibility, as Taylor says (1994, 25). It is in a real land, but further out. It plays with another kind of American dream than that seen inMad Men.

WhileNorthern Exposurewon drama awards (as did the other shows mentioned in this article), it really was a comedy.Mad Menis a drama set in New York, the urban opposition to the village life of Cicely. It is clear, however, that both places provide dream spaces for invention. Cicely was mostly made up of exiles, apart from the few Native Americans, each carrying a residue of personal and cultural debris, as Iain Crawford nicely put it (1994, 18). Don Draper and other key characters, for example Peggy, are not much different in this sense. However,Mad Menis different in its take on community. There is little ofNorthern Exposure’swarm romance. The design and clothes are pretty, where everything in Cicely is gritty. A space inNorthern Exposure looks like a place where people actually live;Mad Menlooks like a design brochure despite its celebrated realism and accuracy. Everybody is smoking, but there is no smoke in the rooms. Its interior is surface and art. InNorthern Exposure,the interior looks real, fragile and rustic, but within this weary frame strong and unlikely social integration takes place, while inMad Menit dissolves.

WhileNorthern Exposuremoves characters to a more comfortable territory, making the faults charming, it never becomes comfortable or easy to feel with/for Don Draper in Mad Men(genre-wise we have moved from comedy to drama, from stealth fantasy to realism, which also explains the different approach to character portrayal). We come to

feel sympathy for Don Draper partly because of his difficult past, and we notice his reluctant engagement with that past in the present. Draper’s antagonist inMad Menis not his rival Pete or his wife Betty or any other living, present character – it is his relationship to his pasts and the actions that made him depart from it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Erling Bjo¨rgvinsson for leading me toNorthern Exposure, to Nordic Summer University organizers for the Hauntology and Aesthetics seminar at University of Rejkjavik, Iceland, 2009, where participants shared impressions on the first and early paper. Also thanks to Tracy Wise and Sara Rehnstro¨m for comments. Finally, thanks to my wife Happy Singu31for watchingMad Men

Season 1 with me before ‘leaving’ forDesperate Housewives– and then returning for my re-watch, and her first viewing, ofTwin Peaksduring Summer 2011.

Notes

1. Henri David Thoreau (from Walden, p. 61) quoted by Chris Stevens (played by John Corbett) in

Northern Exposure‘Fish Story’ (5/18).

2. The interest in the supernatural fused with realist modes does not seem to have faded in American TV serials during the 2000s – a prominent example is True Blood, using the supernatural to explore social issues, also namedSouthern Gothic.

3. The notion of memoryhas had a strong presence in cultural studies despite the continuous announcement of particular ‘turns’ (literary, cultural, spatial, memory, etc.), which could indicate that ‘memory’ haspassed, or will pass to give space to otherturns. The interdisciplinary field’s history from the late 1950s onwards has left a series of traces and concerns that point to orientations toward memory, notably the focus on identity and a history writing of the present, drawing upon living, contemporary memory. Cultural studies has also emphasized the hidden or little histories/history from below, the subject, the marginalized. Oral history research in particular (e.g. Thomson/Perks, 1998) has provided one passage into the unravelling of memory. Several anthologies in recent decades point to an ongoing concern and no turning away from memory (e.g. Erll and Nu¨nning 2010, Radstone, and Hodgkin, 2003). Among the central, recurring terms in humanities and cultural studies engagements with memory have been the sometimes illusive, or illusively applied, notions ofcollective memory(Halbwachs), andsocial, communicative, as well as cultural memory (the latter two drawing particularly from Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). Also a recent work by, e.g. Van Dijck (2007) witnesses to media studies’ concern with memory, a growing tendency in the era of digitization.

4. The notioncomplex, which has travelled into everyday language meaning a combination of parts in a whole, is also an academic term central to a variety of disciplines. It was also used extensively by Carl Jung (‘complex’ here meaning a core pattern of emotions, memories, etc. in the personal unconscious), yet I use it here in the meaning of multifaceted in a cohesive whole. 5. Twin Peaks,premiering in 1990,has been noted as a turning point in TV serial fiction, generating new audiences (Thompson 1997), and triggering a quality American TV drama serials – a tendency that is also said to begin around during the 2000s coinciding with the use of thevisual novelformat in American serials such asLost, The Sopranos,Six Feet Under, The WireandMad Men.In fact, several turning points have been mentioned, including 1980 andHill Street Blues

(e.g. Hammond and Mazdon 2005; Thompson 1997). TV serial fiction has been increasingly scrutinized in the US and the UK, notably in the humanities (journals have premiered, e.g.

Critical Studies in Television[2006],Slayage[2001], Joss Whedon’s ‘Whedonverse’,Buffy,etc. An increasing number of monographs and anthologies have been published. To mention a few, Carveth and South 2010; Delasara 2000; Lavery 1995; Potter and Marshall 2009; Thompson 1997; Wilcox 2005 – several of these works engage with a specific TV show).

6. I have used the termserialto characterize the format of longer TV fiction where a narrative or narratives evolve over a range of installments or episodes (such asMad Men), while the term

seriesis used to describe a format where each episode marks a end of a ‘case’ or semi/closure of a story or sub story, such as inNorthern Exposure– a format we may associate particularly with crime stories. In the series we get a sense of starting over again, with a new challenge or problem involving the same key characters or ensemble cast in each episode. This distinction is inspired

by Mazdon (2005, 9). Whether the series or the serial feature of storytelling is emphasized, both formats can have a season arc or ongoing sub-stories, in addition to the general story or show arc.

The X Filesis an example of a series that experienced an oscillation between what I just named

serialandseries. It had so-calledmythology episodes(Delasara 2000) relating to the general story development, as well as double and single episodes which concentrated on specific cases, also namedmonster of the weekepisodes. These episodes, closer to the classicseriesformat, did not always reach closure in terms of a disentanglement of the mystery, yet the particular story was ended. Also,monster of the weekepisodes may have planted seeds which would be taken up again in later mythology episodes. TV fiction shows that adhere to theseriesformat are easier to miss out on, for an episode or two, and then catch up with again. From the 2000s, American TV fiction using serial formats, elaborated in the so-called visual novel style, has flourished. 7. Buffy the Vampire Slayercould also be examined here for its concern with memory and dream,

and the blending of realist and supernatural dimensions of life (yet for space limitation reasons I leave this out). The series also crossed established genres intelligently and drew on an impressive repertoire of cultural memory, notably Shakespeare for whom the blending of realities and a mixture of tragedy and satire was common.

8. Derrida’s contracting ofhauntandontologymay be elaborated with regard to what Jung did with the notion of theshadow,or the ‘shadowside of the soul’. The shadow is the repressed content the individual cannot negotiate with or recognize, but which nevertheless needs to be integrated. It is ‘what escapes conscious recognition’(Jung 1960, 36, my translation). The notion ofontologyrefers to the study of the nature or fundamentals of being, while ‘to be haunted’ refers to how being is affected by forces of the ghostly or supernatural.Hauntologycan be ‘seen’ (!) as not necessarily concerned with the workings of consciousness, or the unconscious, although Derrida addresses absence/presence or visibility (1994, 202: ‘To haunt does not mean to be present’). Whether we accept Freudian or Jungian distinctions of ego/self and consciousness, the notion ofshadowcan be used to engage with content that the individual either cannot formulate, come to terms with, or identify with, but which s/he possesses anyway (and may project onto others, as Jung noted). This exploration and working definition of shadow

could be opened for further elaboration. Saul Friedlander’s notion of deep memoryexpresses what cannot be articulated or given coherent or meaningful narrative form, as opposed to

common memory; what establishes coherence (Young 2000, 12 – 14, after Friedlander). Friedlander’s memory concepts could also have been interesting to work with in the TV shows discussed. However, in this article I concentrate on the notion of theshadowand elaborate on its relationship toduplex,as well Assmann’scommunicativeandcultural memory.

9. The series in question here also created spin-off fan cultures and folklore on the Internet and on filming locations, such as the yearly ‘Moosefest’ in the city of Roslyn where most of the town scenes forNorthern Exposurewere shot.

10. In relation to the series/serials discussed in this article, it may be of interest that Jung regarded primitive lore (which in Twin Peaks and Cicely, for example, we could define as local and traditional lore) asarchetypesmodified. The lore is archetype content changed into conscious formula according to traditions (1959, 5). Jung saw the archetypes as a priori to human experience, innate psychic dispositions. It is not the latter argument I find interesting or convincing (I am critical towards Jung for parts of his biological framework, as Jan Assmann 1995, 125), but rather the idea of a community being built upon and not able to free itself from a shared mythology. This mythology may be of a vibrant, living and often evoked form, i.e.

remembered,but it may also be in the format offorgottenform, whether neglected or negated in Aleida Assmann’s sense, and then brought to the surface (2010, 99).

11. Jan Assmann notes that Warburg and Halbwachs’ profoundly social and cultural take on memory was very different from the earlier ‘biological frameworks’ of Jung, in his theory of archetypes (Assmann 1995, 125). Jung did, however, also produce works removed or moving away from his so-called biological framework (a categorization which I question) to social critique and philosophy inThe Undiscovered Self,which I engage with in this article. 12. Jan Assmann argues that Halbwachs was engaging with what he callscommunicative memory,

since the institutional character did not apply to his concept. Halbwachs was elaborating on an everyday notion of shared memories, he argues (2010, 111).

13. Joel Fleischman, derived from German for ‘flesh’,Flesh-man, a man of the flesh, not the spirit. However, Joel changes slowly throughout the series.

14. Allegedly, the series creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey were inspired by a friend who was practicing medicine in rural upstate New York (DVD Season 1 material) as well as an Alaskan city with a quirky radio station.

15. The ‘carousel’ format may be particularly understandable in series, where characters are taken or take themselves on some kind of merry-go-round, then get off, and then next week repeat the process.

16. The Book of Jonah, which ‘Fish Story’ drew from, is, however, satirical and facile, mocking the fleeing prophet’s compassion for Israel. Joel, in the end, returns and celebrates Passover. He has had a sign, and captures the meaning of the wordpesah(Hebrew name of the festival) to protect and have compassion (Hayes in Metzger and Coogan 1993, 572). The episode suggests that Joel, at least temporarily, has found a promised land in Cicely although his exodus was lonely and reluctant. It turns out to be the dream he never had.

17. In general, he leaves the hard science and mundane rationalism to Scully, although they both hold PhDs and exchange remarks about dissertations in the very first episode.

18. See e.g. http://synchrologist.com/texts.html (accessed August 2011).

19. The termSoap Operawas applied to daytime radio serials during the 1920s and 1930s. It was soap manufacturers that mainly sponsored the programs, and although this has certainly changed, the term is still in use. Television adopted the format in the 1950s. Although slippery in definition it applies to melodramatic serials, most often running for a long time on a day to day basis, with intricate plot lines around love, family, marriage, divorces, deceptions and betrayals (Lopez, Film by Genre 1993, 298).

20. Visionswere also crucial to the Log Lady. Here through the medium of a wooden log (her ‘log book’ and memory archive!). She introduced all episodes with a separate enigmatic prologue laying forward some of the themes of the episode – and thus the Log Lady thereby became another authoritative voice (or form of voice over).

21. The mind ‘revealing itself to itself’ could be related tomeditation. Meditation gives us a way of ‘working on the mind with the mind’, Buddhist teaching says (Pauling 1990, 29). The fact that meditation has become a household word in the West has carried the misconception that it is mainly a form of trance state, relaxation, self-hypnosis or blanking of the mind (1990, 29 – 30). Rather, it is a state of increased awareness (30), much like moments ofvision, I’d propose, as Briggs and Cooper have them.

22. All reflective cultural products borrow from and relate to a tradition, or traditions, which leads to the tradition or text’s canonization, I would argue – apropos Aleida Assmann. Northern Exposureand Twin Peaksevoked ideas of a wooded, cozy small town, though inPeaksthe version is a particularly troubled one. Cicely and Twin Peaks could both be seen as small town ‘Desolation Row’ (Bob Dylan 1965,Highway 61 Revisitedalbum), a bizarre end station with figures and forces from different times and texts in confrontation and reworked (Høg Hansen 2012); in Cicely, though, we have a much less nightmarish version. Dylan had his Desolation Row in look at Steinbeck and Kerouac, while Lynch and Frost drew from, yes, earlier Lynch, but also the detective show (Frost,Hill Street Blues) and the soap opera (Lynch apparently watched a lot of these in his younger days).

23. Thompson notes that Fleischman and O’Connell rely on a well-knownreluctant coupleformat (Thompson 1997, 161). Viewing the term ‘couple’ broader, e.g. as a partnership, we could add Mulder and Scully – and even Agent Cooper and his oddities coupled with the country normalcy of Sheriff Truman.

24. After that episode we do not hear much about the old dead lovers again. Maggie does not confront them in dreams either, but she does meet a 15-year-old version of herself in Season 6, complaining that she has not had a family although turned 30.

25. In this article, I limit the discussion ofMad Mento Seasons 1 and 2.

26. George Dunn elaborates on how Don Draper believes he knows how to create an appearance, or mimesis, of love. Indirectly, appearance is what he seeks, and what may be enough to create a response in a viewer or potential consumer (Dunn 2010, 30). Connecting to a remark by Kevin Guilfoy – ‘Our emotions are being appealed to, not created’ (Guilfoy 2010, 40) – it means that it is about appealing to the manifest feelings and desires.

27. The terms vagabond and hobo may be used interchangeably for wandering occasional workers, homeless, most often on the road to another destination. The terms tramp and bum also exist, coining denizens lower down the ladder, the tramp as one who moves around, and the bum as one who neither works nor travels. Several of these terms have a rich history in American

popular fiction and other cultural representations, from mid/late nineteenth century emergences where the end of the Civil War and later industrialization have been mentioned as causing various forms of migratory practices. Chaplin took on the tramp in the 1910s, Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie did it during the 1930s and early 1940s, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The hobo was also a recurrent archetype in many Bob Dylan songs during the 1960s (Høg Hansen 2012).

28. His childhood past may have ‘wasted his precious time’, as the lyrics go in the Dylan song, and he did not seem to hesitate. He has exhibited the ‘Don’t think twice’ attitude but slowly the past catches up with Don. On one of the days where it hits hard: ‘I have a life and it only goes in one direction – forward’, he firmly tells his brother Adam. But it has become a lonely ride. A life moves forward only in time, unfortunately, or at least this is most common in my experience, and must be lived forwardly, but life can – with an expression close to the cliche´ – only be understood backwards (Kierkegaard 1842).

29. Spencer quotes the Buddhist teacher Ken Tanaka’s distinction between the horizontal (social, worldly, nitty-gritty world we live) and the vertical dimension (spirituality) (2006, 233). Spreading westward transcendence-seeking rejection of the world divided into two contradictory orientations, which Weber called (worldly) asceticism and mysticism, she continues (233). One could argue these two forms can be seen inNorthern Exposure. 30. Chris is not the only artist on the show. Expression over a range of areas appears as

problem-posing, problem-solving or even problem-creating or problem-illuminating devices: from Ed’s films, over totem poles, to Adam’s gourmet creations.

31. WhileTwin Peaks’play with genres could appear new to Western audiences, the mixture of soap and crime, realism and the supernatural, as on this show, was not uncommon territory for my wife. She made the joke ‘Nigerian movie’ sometime during Season 1. I have only seen a few Nollywood movies, yet a recent viewing of a Nollywood movie in Copenhagen made me understand her point. Also, during stays in Tanzania in late 2010 I watched a handful of recent Tanzanian movies with her, e.g.SurpriseandMagic House, all containing a good deal of soap-ish drama, spirits and ghosts interfering, and introducing slapstick, satire or/and oddball dialogue. Several of the movies appeared to be buying time (a bit likeTwin PeaksSeason 2?) to be able to make up two parts, each feature length. The tight budgets also forced directors to let much of the action and story development unfold through dialogue. The use of a repetitive spooky-grove score in one of the features (among those characteristics already mention, led me to mentionTwin Speaks). The soap opera style was not a stranger to her either. Dubbed into English, South Americantelenovelas(such asShades of Sin, which we watched together on various occasions) are part of many Tanzanians’ tear-jerking TV food.

Notes on contributor

Anders Høg Hansen has a PhD in cultural studies from Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is a senior lecturer in media and communication studies at Malmo¨ University, Sweden.

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