Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
The Secret History of Twin Peaks
by Travis Hedge Coke
Is Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks a comic?
Taking the first twenty pages of over three hundred as a sample, less than one-fifth of the pages are text-only, and that text is a mix of specific typefaces and handwriting. The visual and textual elements are vital and irreducible, working together to create atmosphere and narrative beyond their individual parts.
It is a comic.
It might be the best comic of 2016, its year of release.
Viral marketing, unreliable history, critique of American history as sin and corruption, The Secret History of Twin Peaks is the great American novel as much as its followup, The Final Dossier, is Our Town (in Hell).
Twin Peaks was an immeasurable advance in viral marketing of television and film back in the early 1990s. In an era where home media recording systems were rarer, it featured a 1-900 number you could call to be caught up on the show. There were epistolary novels and faux found documents that did not only copy from the television show, but added canon, advanced spoilers, and in the case of serial killer, BOB, and protagonist, FBI Agent Dale Cooper, detourned our understanding in significant ways.
The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by Jennifer Lynch, was released between the first and second season of Twin Peaks, and was both a bestseller and our first reliable indication to doubt the dichotomy of the Lodge spirits, and that much of the cosmogonic rules we had been given might not be as true as we had been led to believe.
Print memoirs of Dale Cooper, as written by Scott Frost, and a collection of FBI reports dictated to his secretary (“Diane…”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper), were released soon after to similar acclaim and a Grammy.
All of these were presented in traditional format, as fictional presentations, with the exception that oftentimes, the authors’ names would be absent from the covers.
With, Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town, the level of artifact presentation changes dramatically. The Access Guide is formatted with fake ads, local folklore, and history trivia as a town pride supplement, a tourism booster.
Like, The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, the Access Guide fed directly back into the audience’s understanding of those original two seasons of Twin Peaks, and the first follow-up movie, Fire Walk With Me, but its nature as a physical, visually confirmable artifact helps cement the presentation of Twin Peaks as a town and world, with some of the fakelore and minutiae not playing back in until the third season more than twenty years later.
With the Access Guide, these print/page artifacts become not only epistolary, which adds a level of convincingness, but fake documents, and comics.
It is Mark Frost’s season three prologue, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which perfects this form of comics presentation.
It is important that everything in The Secret History of Twin Peaks be plausible within the confines of that world and within the genre of conspiracy theory literature, and also plausibly deniable.
In all its media forms, unreliability and a discomfiting absurdity are in constant interplay, in Twin Peaks, with an emotional realness and close human intimacy.
The central three voices The Secret History of Twin Peaks – the investigator, The Archivist, and our FBI annotator – are flawed and specific perspectives. The truth may be, in some cases, between the three of them, or it might be betwixt and with none of them.
Appraisal of facts to the side, their moral judgements and personal aesthetics are not, by The Secret History, prescribed to us, nor are they necessarily didactically countered.
The Secret History of Twin Peaks forgoes traditional comic book visual grammar for a less intrusive scrapbook aesthetic which is easier for the target reader to put their faith in, and a mature variation on the photo-document grammar of conspiracy theory nonfiction and pop histories.
A traditional “nonfiction” paperback on reptilian aliens east of the Hamptons, or a tell-all on psychic sex practices of mid-century American presidents, would include the occasional fuzzily reproduced photograph between paragraphs or a slightly higher quality insert a four to eight pages of photographs and maps seeking to imply the truth of all the book’s statements via evidence that a boat mentioned existed or that someone can put an X on a map.
The visual grammar of The Secret History is an elaboration of these techniques, involving real documents, digitally or physically altered images, maps, illustrations, diagrams, faux weathering, and faked documents. Some of these are color coded, some are treated for anaglyph special effects, and many real documents are presented in a fictitious context specifically to bolster the fictitious storylines.
The closest stylistic predecessor to The Secret History, would be the Incunabula Papers, aka the Ong’s Hat conspiracy, a long-form collaborative work of pseudo-nonfiction by divers hands, including Joseph Matheny, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and journalists who shall remain nameless, which was presented as a collection of found documents, including a rare book catalog and a flyer for a meditation retreat.
Plausibility is purchased by carefully cropped fictional newspaper articles, worn notebook pages, photographs of real historical figures, and documents stamped SECRET.
A reproduced United States passport, in The Secret History, communicates narratives and verifiability beyond what pure text would convey so quickly.
The Secret History pokes fun at its presentation as found documents with the anaglyph fx and a dustcover covering two thirds the hardcover, so that when lined up, the front reads, “The Secret History of Twin Peaks, a novel,” with a sepia photo of the famous waterfall from the television program, and when the dustcover is removed, we see a secondary image on the back of the dustcover, and that on the hardcover, it says, “The Secret History of Twin Peaks,” and there is an owl and the owl glyph from the show.
The final text of the novel, and the memo from Gordon Cole, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the inside flaps of the dustcover, direct us to look deeper.
“The owls may indeed not be what they seem but still serve an imperative function: They remind us to look into the darkness.”
“Roll up your sleeves and get to work on this thing – time is of the essence – and get back to me with your findings ASAP.”
Indeed, early into The Secret History, we can see in a photograph, the bound hardcover of which we are reading an annotated version, has nearly the same cover and spine as what we hold, but not quite.
Rather than a serious attempt to mislead our critical faculties, The Secret History has fun with credibility and unreliability.
It is the lo-fi and seemingly low effort visual representation that eases the reader into memories of cheap salacious UFO tell-all and junior high classroom printouts, and that gives The Secret History its adrenaline. The Secret History does not trade on truth as much as excitement at the possibility of truth.
And, it encourages the reader to delight and being possibly lied to.
A two-page spread of a bookshelf in The Secret History is a masterpiece of subtle characterization, visual joke, and key to one or two of the central mysteries of the novel. Each book on the shelf has been selected by a character for archiving at the Bookhouse, and each reveals the kind of literature they like and, in that, what it may say about them.
Even the lexicographic element of this spread give this narrative clues, while Lucy’s inclusion on the shelf among otherwise all men, the so-named Bookhouse Boys, is both testament to Lucy’s indispensability and to the old boys club nature of this community, and American community in general.
All of the books presented on the bookshelf as favorites of the Bookhouse Boys (plus Lucy), are books about the pursuit of truth.
The Secret History of Twin Peaks uses color to layer in meaning, intimation, and feeling. Primarily composed of black, white, green, and red, just as the first two television seasons were, we are over two hundred pages in before a diagram by local psychiatrist, Dr Jacoby, proposes the use of red and blue lenses to filter or reorganize red and blue aspects of reality.
The first televised season had a celebrated red color grading, tinting nearly all shots with a warm red that coupled with an avoidance of any rich blues in shot, gave the series a built-in sense of immediate nostalgia and familiarity.
Fire Walk With Me opens with blue, as it brings us through the snow on a tv screen to the world of Twin Peaks.
In The Return, the third televised season of Twin Peaks, a blue tint is put over scenes where life gets too real, people get close to uncomfortable truth, such as when Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield are faced with Cooper not being Cooper but a double who sweats toxic masculinity and they are so shaken they become defensively sexist with their colleague, Agent Preston.
Revisiting the entirety of The Secret History of Twin Peaks under the lens of Dr Jacoby’s optical integration system and its underlying perceptual/interpretive notions, as detailed in his typo-beset report to Calhoun Memorial Hospital, we can utilize anaglyph glasses to discover, looking through one lens alone or the other, hidden images, or use of both lenses simultaneously to discover 3D or energetic fx.
Even the text grows in meaning under this methodology, with the FBI annotations evaporated by the red lens, which ostensibly suppresses the logical portion of our perception and interpretation.
Much as the now popular theory that Laura Palmer, former murder victim, is the Antichrist, Twin Peaks has always been built on conflicts of misogyny and anxiety over the eager easiness of misogyny. By closing one eye, wearing anaglyph glasses, we can remove our annotating FBI agent and principal female voice completely.
Even the gentlest men in The Secret History of Twin Peaks are acknowledged as potentially violent, even plausibly violent. Simultaneous, there is an assumption by nearly every character at some point, that some women are simply masochistic, or even more misogynist than most men.
This, as a base, gives Twin Peaks much of its great energy, yeah it is also horrifying and difficult to distinguish clearly as separate from the beliefs or practices of the property’s authors. Often times, when it is said that David Lynch or Mark Frost have shown a misogynist hand in Twin Peaks, what they have for sure shown us is a misogynist world. Is up to us to take the interpretation from there.
In the television series, we have seen the character of Gordon Cole, played by David Lynch, act inappropriately with much younger women, including, in what apparently amused Lynch as inappropriate, kissing a waitress while we, the home audience, are aware that he is a writer, director, and showrunner of the program, and she is an employee in the cast.
By presenting a woman as the final voice in both The Secret History and The Final Dossier, Mark Frost is able to counter and to couch some of this systemic misogyny in a less confrontational, but still unpleasant and overwhelming fashion.
The Bookhouse Boys include Lucy, but they don’t. Just as Lucy is part of the police force, but not too much.
Marjorie Cameron, whose work with her late husband, Jack Parsons, and beyond his death, is of great significance both to Twin Peaks and to The Secret History of Twin Peaks, is brushed off by Doug Milford, the Archivist, and our FBI annotator, as “the new wife.”
Lana Milford, play largely for laughs on the television program, as a woman so sexy it can kill older men, is reframed in The Secret History as a complex assassin.
Josie Packard, frequently presented and responded to in the television program as naive and precariously placed, and Norma Jennings and Annie Blackburne’s mother, Vivian Smythe Lindstrom Blackburn Niles, are both reworked in The Secret History of Twin Peaks to have much more extensive personal agency and criminal intentions.
Like the revelation in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, that Tommy Hill has spent his life shrugging off casual racism from his white friends in this small town, specifically re the Hawk nickname, not Hawk for perception or speed but Tommy Hawk for tomahawk, there are better ways to handle this basic frisson, but I’m unsure there are better ways to handle it in Twin Peaks.
Our FBI analyst, guiding us through The Secret History and then further commenting in The Final Dossier, seems very strongly to like Dr Jacoby – a man often reviled and who is disbarred from medical practice – over the generally loved and admired Special Agent Dale Cooper, because she sees one as a kind of retiree wizard and the other as a fundamentally sexist control freak with delusions of boyhood.
The strength of Twin Peaks, to me, is it is inarguable in its context. The sexism, the racism, the masochism, abuses, aiding and abetting and instability and hope and infidelity are inarguably American, inarguably Twin Peaksian, and indelibly agitating.