The Secret History of Twin Peaks

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N. Needleman
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by N. Needleman »

I think it's mostly canon except where it isn't - like all the books.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

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Pöllö wrote:So is the book canon or not? Lol.
Nah.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by bob_wooler »

It's probably canon, but irrelevant. Irrelevant canon.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by laughingpinecone »

I'm sure that's what Frost set out to do... being irrelevant and inconsistent with his own work from a few months earlier... anyway, we'll all see in a few months, I'm sure we'll all be proven so wrong on so many fronts in so many creative ways, myself of course included. But I do find it weird that the co-creator's work is being dismissed in this way. Then again Lynch's solo (well, + Engels) endeavour has gone through a lot of that as well.

btw there's plenty of ominous imagery piling up on Coop during the show itself, starting with his very introduction with Dance of the Dream Man. And I wouldn't call this reading of events a "chosen one" narrative - more like a designated victim. Simply targeted from early on, like Laura, over and over until he lost.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

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Yeah but that imagery starts piling up once he gets to twin peaks. One of the main reasons I'm not into the "BOB's master plan" fanfic (besides agreeing with NN that it's kinda pat and lame) is that while they hint early on at a receptiveness to inspiration from dreams, all the lodgey stuff feels like it's something new he's encountering. For a start, he doesn't refer to BOB as "that guy from the dreams I've been having all my life". Then again, you could make similar arguments about the Philly stuff from fwwm so who the hell knows lol (this is why it isn't necessarily "dismissing" the tie-ins - not in a pejorative sense anyway - when people discount them from the main body of canon. You'll never get all the paradoxes to resolve)
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by Dalai Cooper »

ie, it's all canon imo but don't expect it to have much bearing on the next thing
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Ross
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

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laughingpinecone wrote:I'm sure that's what Frost set out to do... being irrelevant and inconsistent with his own work from a few months earlier... anyway, we'll all see in a few months, I'm sure we'll all be proven so wrong on so many fronts in so many creative ways, myself of course included. But I do find it weird that the co-creator's work is being dismissed in this way.
But I'm not sure how you can consider some sections of the book cannon when they contradict a substantial chunk of the show? I mean which do you choose? Now of course if we see in S3 that all of these things somehow make sense in their contradictions, then sure, its canon. Until then, I'll choose what was shown in the series.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by Agent Earle »

Well, the scene from the show with Major Briggs and an alien - or maybe ominous would be a more appropriate term - message he delivers to Cooper isn't contradicted in The Secret History in any way, it's merely reflected in a new light, so I have a strong hunch something's up there...
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by Cappy »

I like the idea of Twin Peaks having a fluid canon. Not everything has to fit into a logical and coherent narrative. If certain details don't fit, that actually heightens the mystery in the sense that it forces us to investigate even harder. Even if we stay within the parameters of the TV show and FWWM, inconsistencies and contradictions crop up.

I'm thinking of:
- Wyndom Earle hitting Bobby with a log, but in the next episode Mike has the head wound and Bobby is fine
- Norma celebrating w/ Ed after Annie has been abducted, like nothing has happened
- The ring in FWWM doesn't make clear sense, and in spite of it's status as a plot point of paramount importance, never once appears in the show (except for maybe on the dead Milford's finger...)
- Cooper describing the events of his dream incorrectly (he says that Lucy and Truman were in his dream, but they were not in his dream as depicted in Ep. 2)
- Bobby and Shelly re-enacting a scene from the pilot with Heidi in the final episode

Whether intentional or goofs/mistakes, these oddities only serve to pique my interest in TP.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by Dalai Cooper »

Yes, well said, that was what I was trying to get at I think!

(The Heidi thing does not really contradict anything though - they remember that they have said it before - but I agree that the scene adds to the sense of weirdness)
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by Cappy »

Henrys Hair wrote:This may have been mentioned before but, according to the Cooper bio, the letter under Teresa Banks's fingernail appeared to be typed by a Smith-Corona Model 99. Not quite the same model used by the Archivist, and the Banks investigation in the book is wildly different from what we're shown in FWWM, but could be a clue of some sort...
I was just re-visiting My Life My Tapes when I noticed that detail too. I don't know enough about typewriters to know if it connects to the typewriter(s) being used in Secret History, but if there is a connection it would seem to imply that BOB individually typed the letters that went under the fingernails (bizarre mental picture there, I know) and typed up this dossier that is rife with contradictions and errors. But why would he write or edit an existing document that is filled with so many errors that could easily be disproved by anyone who knows Norma, Nadine, Annie, etc.?

I've been thinking about this off and on since Secret History dropped, and I think maybe Annie and maybe a few other elements from the original series don't really exist, at least not in the sense that other characters exists. The history described in the book may be real, or the closest we can get to objectivity. Some kind of disturbance during the original series created Annie and the other elements that are inconsistent with Secret History, and maybe only one or a few characters know the real truth. Annie's existence might be similar to the switching out of protagonists in Lost Highway, or characters swapping roles near the end of Mulholland Drive.

Whoever wrote Secret History can see through these changes, and is trying to resolve the two versions of events. "One chants out between two worlds..."
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by laughingpinecone »

Ross wrote:
laughingpinecone wrote:I'm sure that's what Frost set out to do... being irrelevant and inconsistent with his own work from a few months earlier... anyway, we'll all see in a few months, I'm sure we'll all be proven so wrong on so many fronts in so many creative ways, myself of course included. But I do find it weird that the co-creator's work is being dismissed in this way.
But I'm not sure how you can consider some sections of the book cannon when they contradict a substantial chunk of the show? I mean which do you choose? Now of course if we see in S3 that all of these things somehow make sense in their contradictions, then sure, its canon. Until then, I'll choose what was shown in the series.
But the show already contradicted the show and then the movie contradicted it some more. I'll gladly take an all-encompassing retrospective from an authoritative source that's so brazen in its contradictions that they have to be intentional. At least some of them. But once you flip to "feature, not bug" mode, both the book's genuine mistakes and all the old stuff that doesn't add up gets flipped as well. Not any canon could pull it off with a straight face, but for Twin Peaks, that's based on mysteries, on unexpected juxtapositions etc, it sounds to me like a seamless fit. I believe it's saying we can't be sure of facts, we can't be comfortable in our seemingly solid data, that reality is weirder than that. So I choose both...
It's early to say exactly where they're going with this, if Frost's claims that people remember stuff wrong all the time are to be taken at face value (at least for the most part... we know something's up with Annie), if there's some supernatural force at work, if things are weird just because or any combination of the above or something else entirely. But at this point I am expecting s3 to contradict assorted details from everything else we got so far, deliberately, like a cat who knows exactly that it's pushing a glass off the counter.

I'm in a fandom with a continuity guy who checks that every closed door we find was closed on the right side by someone with a key who had a good reason to cross that door and lock it. And I adore it. But I don't think Twin Peaks is interested in doing anything of the sort and, on the contrary, it's experimenting with conflicting details as a narrative device.

(I may be making this up, but didn't someone report somewhere that Lynch created some inconsistencies on purpose in FWWM? If I'm not making this up, isn't this similar, but on a larger scale?)

ETA also what Cappy said!
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FauxOwl
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by FauxOwl »

I don't really see the point of releasing a book before the new season that isn't canon (yes, I know there's the cash grab aspect of it, but I'd like to think that something written by Mark Frost, the co-creater of the series and co-writer of the show, would have some relevance). The incongruities seem blatantly intentional. Some of them seem to serve no other purpose than calling attention to the incongruities.

We'll know more after seeing the whole season 3, but at a minimum it's far too early to dismiss the book as non-canon or irrelevant.
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N. Needleman
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by N. Needleman »

^I agree with that. I do think that whatever bearing the text has on the show - written afterwards by Frost - that its core may not heavily inform that of the show's script(s). Same as the Secret Diary and MLMT with the original series.
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Re: SPOILERS: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Post by garethw »

The 'INLAND EMPIRE' DVD has a feature called "Other things that happened".

I think of TSHoTP in much the same way. Canon, but not crucial to the central narrative.
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