But if we are completely honest with ourselves, our desire
for more Twin Peaks was also tied to
nostalgia, and though Mark Frost and David Lynch did provide answers to most of
the questions we’d spent 25 years pondering, they defiantly refused to give in
to our desire for nostalgia. Like Agent Cooper, Twin Peaks was back but not quite in the form in which we were
expecting it to be. Many questions were answered, but the holes that remained
left some viewers feeling challenged a bit out of their comfort zones.
Our first clue that this was what we should have expected
from a third season of Twin Peaks is
a firm understanding of David Lynch’s uncompromising artistry: there is no way
that the man who made Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr., and INLAND EMPIRE was going to take us on a trip back to Twin Peaks just so we could enjoy one
more comfy helping of cherry pie. Our second was Mark Frost’s book The Secret History of Twin Peaks, a
winding journey through the town’s history that teasingly focused on matters
far removed from the original series’ main events and characters.
As stimulating as these new print and screen additions to Twin Peaks lore have been to some of us,
other longtime fans have found them understandably frustrating. Such fans
should take heart in the publication of what could be the last word on Twin Peaks, because Frost’s latest book,
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier,
answers a lot of questions.
While Mark Frost presented The Secret History of Twin Peaks as a near-multimedia collection of
newspaper articles, diary entries, memos, footnotes, and other print materials,
The Final Dossier is much more
straight-forward. It is a series of between-then-and-now narratives that reveal
the fates of characters who didn’t show up for the return, such as Sheriff
Truman, Leo Johnson, and Donna Hayward, and explanations of some of the more
talked-about matters in the latest series. Such questions as who was behind the
so-called Manhattan experiment and who was the girl who swallowed the
frog-roach are now answered. And, yes, we finally find out how’s Annie.
The Final Dossier
is Mark Frost’s satisfying conclusion to Twin
Peaks for those who were unsatisfied by Lynch’s elliptical television
incarnation, and it is much tidier than Frost’s own Secret History. That means it is also much briefer—The Final Dossier is a scant 145
pages—and much less idly luxurious. Images are few and the design is far more
austere than the lovely Secret History.
However, we get much more time with our favorite Peaks characters and much more
humor than we did in The Secret History.
Those who revel in the unsolved mysteries of the Showtime
series might want to steer away from Frost’s book, or at least, parts of it. I
personally found the short but illuminating chapter on Audrey Horne a bit too
illuminating even as Frost avoids giving us too clear a picture of what her
current situation is. Yet, I was not at all sorry I read it, and with all the
theories about what really happened in the third season of Twin Peaks already floating out in the zone, I imagine that Frost
would delight in having us accept his version of events as just one more theory
that may or may not be gospel. As far as theories go, I’ve read none that were
more entertaining or compulsively readable than Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.
