Kabbalah, "Dybbuks", and the Religious Posthuman in the Shakespearean Worlds of "Twin Peaks"

Authors

  • Lisa S. Starks University of South Florida, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.03

Keywords:

Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return, Fire Walk with Me, Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, David Lynch, Mark Frost, Kabbalah, religious posthuman, Shakespeare, Pericles, The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth

Abstract

In the series Twin Peaks, Mark Frost, David Lynch and others create a mythological framework structured by and filtered through Shakespeare in a postsecular exploration of the posthuman. Twin Peaks exemplifies a cultural postsecular turn in its treatment of the posthuman, taking the religious and spiritual perspectives to new —and often extreme—heights in its use of Kabbalah and other traditions. Twin Peaks involves spiritual dimensions that tap into other planes of existence in which struggles between benign and destructive entities or forces, multiple universes, and extradimensional, nonhuman spirits question the centrality of the human and radically challenge traditional Western notions of being. Twin Peaks draws from Shakespeare’s expansive imagination to explore these dimensions of reality that include nonhuman entities—demons, angels, and other spirits—existing beyond and outside of fabricated, human-centered worlds, with the dybbuk functioning as the embodiment of the postsecular religious posthuman.

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Author Biography

Lisa S. Starks, University of South Florida, USA

Lisa S. Starks is Professor of English at University of South Florida. She has published many articles and book chapters on Shakespeare and related topics. She is editor of the book collection Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); author of the monograph Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Palgrave, 2014); and co-editor, with Courtney Lehmann, of two book collections on Shakespeare and film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Currently, she is working on a new monograph entitled Shakespeare, Levinas, and Adaptation, under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

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Published

2021-12-30

How to Cite

Starks, L. S. (2021). Kabbalah, "Dybbuks", and the Religious Posthuman in the Shakespearean Worlds of "Twin Peaks". Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 24(39), 29–52. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.03