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colin_cox 's review for:
The Secret History of Twin Peaks
by Mark Frost
Twin Peaks is notorious for asking questions without necessarily providing clear, coherent answers. Unlike intellectual properties such as Star Wars and Harry Potter, there is no impression that Twin Peaks will ever make sense in a complete and totalizing way. Mark Frost's wildly ambitious The Secret History of Twin Peaks pivots from this injunction by asking similar sorts of questions without necessarily providing coherent answers.
In form and composition, The Secret History of Twin Peaks embodies the postmodern notion of narrative play. The novel (if one were to call it that) is a collage, deftly blending FBI documents, newspaper clips, personal journals, transcripts, and marginalia to produce the sensation of a story without necessarily consenting to being one. The form of the novel, therefore, mirrors the show that produced it. Twins Peaks plays with genre, tone, and cinematography in ways that leave audiences wondering: Will it commit to being anything? Is it a soap opera? Is it a crime noir? Is it a dark comedy? By answering "yes" to these questions Twin Peaks invites the stratification that comes with contradiction. The show refuses to reconcile these contradictions, and the The Secret History of Twin Peaks follows suit in many ways.
However, the novel's failure arises from its conceptual demand to answer the show's big phenomenological question: Why are the oddities in Twin Peaks happening? While Frost attempts to maintain some degree of ambiguity (this is achieved by layering or stacking several narrative voices that, when taken in total, obfuscate more than they clarify), he offers a tacit explanation for these phenomenological oddities that involves a countless array of figures from Lewis and Clark to Richard Nixon (yes, that Richard Nixon). Instead of deferment, something the show does by utilizing a serial format, Frost's novel attempts to reconcile the ambiguities and contradictions that make Twin Peaks so tantalizing.
In 2000, I began working at a video store. I learned a fair amount about stories while working there, and one of the more important ideas I learned came during my first few weeks of employment. Earlier that year the first of three Star Wars prequel films arrived for video rental and purchase. One of my co-workers loved Star Wars, and while she took umbrage with many of the film's choices, she enjoyed the film for "answering a lot of questions." It took years for me to realize what she actually meant. It was not enough to answer some questions; she wanted answers to all the questions. While I sympathize, this position fails to consider not only the necessity of ambiguity but also the necessity of intuiting which stories need telling. Are the Star Wars prequel films good? No, but that is different from considering whether the impulse to make them was the correct impulse because, again, some stories should not exist. This is not to suggest that Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks is of quality or kind with Lucas's prequel films; however, I would suggest that like those prequel films, The Secret History of Twin Peaks does not do enough to answer that simple but fundamental question: Should this story exist?
In form and composition, The Secret History of Twin Peaks embodies the postmodern notion of narrative play. The novel (if one were to call it that) is a collage, deftly blending FBI documents, newspaper clips, personal journals, transcripts, and marginalia to produce the sensation of a story without necessarily consenting to being one. The form of the novel, therefore, mirrors the show that produced it. Twins Peaks plays with genre, tone, and cinematography in ways that leave audiences wondering: Will it commit to being anything? Is it a soap opera? Is it a crime noir? Is it a dark comedy? By answering "yes" to these questions Twin Peaks invites the stratification that comes with contradiction. The show refuses to reconcile these contradictions, and the The Secret History of Twin Peaks follows suit in many ways.
However, the novel's failure arises from its conceptual demand to answer the show's big phenomenological question: Why are the oddities in Twin Peaks happening? While Frost attempts to maintain some degree of ambiguity (this is achieved by layering or stacking several narrative voices that, when taken in total, obfuscate more than they clarify), he offers a tacit explanation for these phenomenological oddities that involves a countless array of figures from Lewis and Clark to Richard Nixon (yes, that Richard Nixon). Instead of deferment, something the show does by utilizing a serial format, Frost's novel attempts to reconcile the ambiguities and contradictions that make Twin Peaks so tantalizing.
In 2000, I began working at a video store. I learned a fair amount about stories while working there, and one of the more important ideas I learned came during my first few weeks of employment. Earlier that year the first of three Star Wars prequel films arrived for video rental and purchase. One of my co-workers loved Star Wars, and while she took umbrage with many of the film's choices, she enjoyed the film for "answering a lot of questions." It took years for me to realize what she actually meant. It was not enough to answer some questions; she wanted answers to all the questions. While I sympathize, this position fails to consider not only the necessity of ambiguity but also the necessity of intuiting which stories need telling. Are the Star Wars prequel films good? No, but that is different from considering whether the impulse to make them was the correct impulse because, again, some stories should not exist. This is not to suggest that Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks is of quality or kind with Lucas's prequel films; however, I would suggest that like those prequel films, The Secret History of Twin Peaks does not do enough to answer that simple but fundamental question: Should this story exist?