Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFs

Authors

  • Jennifer Gillan Bentley University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/6588

Keywords:

Twin Peaks, GIFs, Costuming, Participatory Culture, Textual Poaching, Television

Abstract

This article aims to widen the lens of analysis of participatory culture inspired by long-arc serials like Twin Peaks. It considers GIF creation as a form of textural poaching, a new reception practice involving skimming off and repurposing top-of-the-mind content: the most arresting elements of costuming, set design, and dialogue. This behavior has become more popular as more series rely on textural storytelling and are filled with moments of excess that feel separate from the story. After an introduction to GIFs and GIF creation, it contrasts the impression of the character and series conveyed by Audrey Horne GIFs and the actual dynamics in the “Audrey’s Dance” scene. It establishes that Audrey’s look is most visually aligned with the Sweater Girl type, but as an allusive characterization it creates excess and calls attention to itself. Part of the “cool pop” reputation of the series may stem from the wider circulation of iconic moments of excess especially given that the GIFs detach the images from the series’ uneven storytelling and its challenging surrealist sensibility.

References

‘18 Reasons Why Audrey Horne Was the Best Part of Twin Peaks’ (2016). Buzzfeed (Feb 25) https://www.buzzfeed.com/harrymcfryer/16-reasons-audrey-horne-was-the-best-part-of-twin-1ls2y?utm_term=.qxKa2lZ3#.glmgmLwB (10-05-16).

Bainbridge, Jason and Elizabeth Delaney (2012). ‘Murder, Incest, and Damn Fine Coffee: Twin Peaks as New Incest Narrative 20 Years On’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26(4): 637-651. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.664114).

Bayout, Angela (2013). ‘Audrey in Five Outfits’, pp. 20-29 in M. Hayes and F. Boulègue (eds.) Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks. Bristol: Intellect.

Bianculli, David (1992). Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously. New York: Continuum.

Blake, Linnie (2015). ‘Trapped in the Hysterical Sublime, Twin Peaks, Postmodernism and the Neoliberal Now’, pp. 229 -245 in J.A. Weinstock and C. Spooner (eds.) Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Booth, Paul J (2012) ‘Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and

Textuality’. Transformative Works and Culture 9 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/297) (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0297) (10-05-16 ).

Booth, Paul (2015). Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Brandes, Wendy (2007). ‘Naughty, Stylish Audrey Horne’. wendybranes.com (September 20) (http://wendybrandes.com/blog/2007/09/naughty-stylish-audrey-horne/) (06-10-16).

Bruzzi, Stella (1997). Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. London: Routledge.

Chin, Bertha (2014). ‘Sherlockology and Galactica.tv: Fan Sites as Gifts or Exploited Labor?’ Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/513)

(DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0513) (10-05-16).

Collins, Jim (1992). ‘Television and Postmodernism’, pp. 284-326 in R. Allen (ed.) Channels of Discourse Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition). Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press.

Coppa, Francesca (2008). ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’. Transformative Works and Cultures 1

(http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64) DOI:10.3983/twc.2008.0044) (10-05-16).

Corliss, Richard (1990). ‘Czar of Bizarre’. Time (October 1): 84+ (9 pp.).

Didion, Joan (1979, 2009). The White Album: Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Didion, Joan (1984, 1995). Democracy. New York: Vintage.

Dolan, Marc (1995). ‘The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks’, pp. 30-46 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1992). Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge.

Dyer, Richard (1978). ‘Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, pp. 91-9 in E. A. Kaplan (ed.) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI.

Eppink, Jason (2014). ‘A Brief History of the GIF, So Far’. Journal of Visual Culture 13 (3): 298-306. (DOI: 10.1177/1470412914553365).

Featherstone, Mike (2007). Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd Edition. London: Sage.

Friedberg, Anne (1990). ‘A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification’, pp. 36-45 in E. A. Kaplan (ed) Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New York: Routledge.

Gaines, Jane (1990). ‘Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells the Woman’s Story’, pp. 180-211 in J. Gaines and C. Herzog (eds.) Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body. New York: Routledge.

Garris, Mary Grace (2015). ‘Twin Peaks’ Fashion: How to Dress As Your Favorite Lynch Ladies, From Laura Palmer to Audrey Horne’. Bustle (April 8) (http://www.bustle.com/articles/74325-twin-peaks-fashion-how-to-dress-as-your-favorite-david-lynch-ladies-from-laura-palmer) (28-05-16).

George, Diana Hume (1995). ‘Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks’, pp. 109-19 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Gillan, Jennifer (2010). Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. New York: Routledge.

Gillan, Jennifer (2015). Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid. New York: Routledge.

Grainge, Paul and Catherine Johnson (2015). Promotional Screen Industries. London: Routledge.

Gray, Jonathan (2010). Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

Grossberg, Lawrence (1989). ‘Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism’. Social Text

: 167-190. (DOI: 10.2307/827814).

Gunn, Tim with Ada Calhoun (2012). Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet. New York: Gallery/ Simon & Schuster.

Hanmer, Rosalind (2014). ‘XenaSubtextTalk: The Impact on the Lesbian Fan Community Through Its Online Reading and Writing of Lesbian Fan Fiction’. Feminist Media Studies 14(4): 608-622. (DOI:10.1080/14680777.2012.754778).

Hills, Matt (2002). Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge.

Hills, Matt (2015). ‘The Expertise of Digital Fandom as a “Community of Practice”: Exploring the Narrative Universe of Doctor Who’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 21(3): 360-374. (DOI: 10.1177/1354856515579844).

Holt, Jason (2008). ‘Twin Peaks, Noir, and Open Interpretation’, pp. 247-260 in S. Sanders and A. Skoble (eds.) The Philosophy of TV Noir. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky.

‘Inspirado: Audrey Horne’ (2014). Dressed Up Like A Lady [blog] October 23

(http://www.dresseduplikealady.com/2014/10/inspirado-audrey-horne.html) (10-06-16)

Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jane (2014). ‘Twin Peaks Fashion: How to Steal Your Favorite Character’s Fashion’ xojane.com (July 28) (http://www.xojane.com/clothes/twin-peaks-style)

(10-06-16)

Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry (1995). ‘“Do you enjoy making the rest of us feel stupid?": alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery’, pp. 51-69 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York; New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry (2012). ‘Textual Poachers Turns Twenty!’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins (November 26)

(http://henryjenkins.org/2012/11/textual-poachers-turns-twenty.html) (10-05-16).

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, Lauren (2015). ‘Here’s Why GIFs are Back and Bigger Than Ever for Brands’. AdWeek (June 24) (http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-why-gifs-are-back-style-and-bigger-ever-brands-165499) (10-05-16).

Joyce, Brittany (2014). ‘The Looks that Made Twin Peaks’. Paste (December 9)

(https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/12/style-guide-the-looks-that-made-twin-peaks.html) (10-05-16 ).

Kac, Eduardo (1995). ‘Interactive Art on the Internet’, pp. 170-79 in K. Gerbel and P. Weibel (eds.) Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World. Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag.

Kellner, Douglas (1988). ‘Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems’. Theory, Culture & Society 5 (2): 239-69. (DOI: 10.1177/ 0263276488005002003).

Klinger, Barbara (1994). Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lange, Maggie (2014). ‘A Ranking of All 118 Sweaters Seen on Twin Peaks.’ New York (magazine) (October 7) (http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/ranking-of-all-117-sweaters-seen-on-twin-peaks.html) (10-05-16 ).

Lavery, David (1995). ‘The Semiotics of Cobbler: Twin Peaks’ Interpretive Community’ pp. 1-21 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Leonard, John (1990). ‘The Quirky Allure of Twin Peaks’. New York (magazine) (May 7): 32-39.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mactaggart, Allister (2010). The Film Paintings Of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory. Bristol: Intellect.

McGowan, Todd (2007). The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press.

McGowan, Todd (2016). ‘Lodged in a Fantasy Space: Twin Peaks and Hidden Obscenities’, pp.143-157 in J.A. Weinstock and C. Spooner (eds.) Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

.

McLean, Adrienne L. (1993). ‘“It’s Only That I Do What I Love and I Love What I Do”: Film Noir and the Musical Woman’. Cinema Journal 33(1): 3-16. (DOI: 10.2307/1225631).

Miranda/Fen (2016). ‘How to Dress Like A TV Bad Bitch’. Highvoltagemagazine.com (March 8) (http://highvoltagemag.com/badbitch/) (10-06-16).

Mittell, Jason (2009). ‘Lost in A Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies)’, pp. 119-138 in R. Pearson (ed.) Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show. London: I.B. Tauris.

Mittell, Jason (2015). ‘Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text’. SpreadableMedia.Org. http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/

Nochimson, Martha P (1997). The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Reeves, Jimmie L., et al. (1995). ‘Postmodernism and Television: Speaking of Twin Peaks’, pp. 173-195 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Richardson, John (2004). ‘Laura and Twin Peaks: Postmodern Parody and the Musical Reconstruction of the Absent Femme Fatale’, pp. 77- 92 in E. Sheen and A Davison (eds.) The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. London: Wallflower.

Ross, Sharon (2008). Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet. London: Blackwell.

Russo, Julie Levin (2009). ‘User-penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence’. Cinema Journal 48(4): 125-130. (DOI:10.1353/cj.0.0147.)

Saidon, Hasnul Jamal and Roopesh Sitharan (2004). ‘The Use Of Internet For An International Collaborative Project’. Leonardo Electronic Almanac 12(8) August, n.p..

Satariano, Adam (2016). ‘The GIF Guys: Giphy is Winning the Internet. Deal with It.’ Businessweek (January 28): 56-7.

Savoy, Erik (2015). ‘Jacques Lacan, Walk With Me; On the Letter’, 125-191 in J.A. Weinstock and C. Spooner (eds.) Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Skoptsov, Mikhail (2015). ‘Prophetic Visions, Quality Serials: Twin Peaks’ New Mode of Storytelling’. SERIES-International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 1(1): 39-50. (DOI 10.6092/issn.2421-454X/5113 ISSN 2421-454X).

Spooner, Catherine (2016). ‘“Wrapped in Plastic”: David Lynch’s Material Girls’, pp. 105-120 in J.A. Weinstock and C. Spooner (eds.) Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stein, Louisa and Kristina Busse (2009). ‘Limit Play: Fan Authorship Between Source Text, Intertext, and Context’. Popular Communication 7(4): 192-207. (DOI: 10.1080/15405700903177545).

Stein, Louisa Ellen (2015). Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Stein, Louisa (2016). ‘The Limits of Infinite Scroll: Gifsets and Fanmixes as Evolving Fan Traditions’. Flow 22(3) January 25.

(http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/01/the-limits-of-infinite-scroll-gifsets-and-fanmixes-as-evolving-fan-traditions/) (10-05-16 ).

Stevenson, Diane (1995). ‘Family Romance, Family Violence, and the Fantastic in Twin Peaks’, pp. 70-81 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Telotte, J. P. (1995). ‘The Dis-order of Things in Twin Peaks.’ pp. 160-172 in D. Lavery (ed.) Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Triska, Zoë (2014). ‘11 Reasons to (Re)Watch Twin Peaks’. The Huffington Post (February 11) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/10/11-reasons-to-watch-twin-peaks_n_4761444.html) (10-05-16 ).

Van Schlit, Stephanie (2013). ‘How to Dress like Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks’.

Junkee (April 27)

(http://junkee.com/how-to-dress-well-audrey-horne-from-twin-peaks/6544) (06-06-16).

Walker, Jesse (2014). ‘Avant-Gifs: Turning Online Animations into High Art’. Reason.com (October 1) (http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/01/avant-gifs) (10-05-16 ).

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (2015). ‘Wondrous and Strange The Matter of Twin Peaks’, 29-46 in J.A. Weinstock and C. Spooner (eds.) Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wyatt, Justin (1994). High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Downloads

Published

2016-12-31

How to Cite

Gillan, J. (2016). Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFs. Series - International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, 2(2), 9–24. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/6588

Issue

Section

Culture / Reception / Consumption