<scp> <i>Twin Peaks</i> </scp> , the Limits of Postmodernism, and David Lynch's Ecological Imagination

ABSTRACT For most of its afterlife, Twin Peaks has been read as an exemplary postmodern text. Importantly, the show's first season coincided with the publication of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism. But what happens if we read the show in relation to a different text published at roughly the same time: Bill McKibben's The End of Nature? As McKibben argues, in order to develop an ecological imagination, we need to abandon the Romantic concept of “nature.” In Twin Peaks, I argue, Lynch dissolves the concept of “nature” by practicing a dialectical aesthetics that reveals how ecological relations and capitalist relations are inextricable.