Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Contemporary Film and Television) [Paperback]

David Lavery (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0814325068 | ISBN-13: 978-0814325063 | Publication Date: January 1994

A collection of essays on "Twin Peaks" and the postmodern mediascape.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Full of Secrets" contains virtually everything you need to know about "Twin Peaks." This fascinating collection of essays considers David Lynch's politics, the enigmatic musical score, and the show's cult status, treatment of family violence, obsession with doubling, and silencing of women. Also included are a director and writer list, a cast list, a "Twin Peaks" calendar, a complete scene breakdown for the entire series, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Essays include:

"Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks"

"Family Romance, Family Violence, and the Fantastic in Twin Peaks"

"Infinite Games: The Derationalization of Detection in Twin Peaks"

"Desire Under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body of Reality in Twin Peaks"

"The Canonization of Laura Palmer"

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814325068
• ISBN-13: 978-0814325063
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #478,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Lavery is the author of over one hundred and twenty published essays and reviews and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of twenty books published or under contract: Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Southern Illinois U P, 1992), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Wayne State U P, 1994), "Deny All Knowledge": Reading The X-Files (Syracuse U P, 1996), Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slaye(Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002), This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (Wallflower, Columbia U P, 2002), Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom (Continuum, 2006), Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: An Unauthorized Guide (Sourcebooks, 2006, 2007), Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By and Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO (in the Reading Contemporary Television Series, I. B. Tauris, 2006), Dear Angela: Remembering My So Called Life (Lexington Books, 2006), Lost's Buried Treasures (Sourcebooks, 2008, 2009, 2010), Saving the World: A Guide to Heroes (ECW, 2007), Finding Battlestar Galactica (Sourcebooks, 2007), The Essential Cult TV Reader (U P Kentucky, 2009), Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on the Gilmore Girls (Syracuse U P, 2010), Joss Whedon: Conversations (U P Mississippi, 2010), On the Verge of Tears (forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Joss: A Creative Portrait of the Maker of the Whedonverses (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris/St. Martin's). The organizer of international conferences on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and Lost, a founding co-editor of the journals Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and Critical Studies in Television, he has lectured around the world on the subject of television (Australia, Turkey, the UK, Portugal, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany) and has been a guest/source for the BBC, NPR, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The New York Times, A Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Publica (Portugal), The Toronto Star, USA Today. To learn more about him, visit his home page at http://davidlavery.net/. His C.V (in PDF) is available here: http://davidlavery.net/CV/Lavery_Curriculum_Vitae.pdf.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Damn Fine Book, November 19, 1998

By 

Aaron Shakra (Eugene, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Contemporary Film and Television) (Paperback)

I hadn't begun viewing episodes of Twin Peaks until this past summer. After I had rented and viewed every episode, I went right into reading this book. With the episodes fresh on my mind (especially after only one viewing) I think I probably appreciated the writing more than a hard-core Twin Peaks fan would. There's a smattering of essays covering every aspect of the show; from the music to its depiction of women to alt.tv.twin-peaks... the last essay is a twenty or so page dialogue discussing postmodernism and Twin Peaks. There are five appendixes containing scene-by-scene breakdowns of the episodes, a calendar of events, cast listing, writer/director listing and abbreviations listing. There's also a bibliography and an index.

This isn't easy reading; it suffers from the Really Smart People syndrome (every contributor holds a PhD)--meaning lots of large words and plenty of asides with a dictionary--yet every piece is insightful in its own way. My favorite was Angela Hague's "Infinite Games: The Derationalization of Detection in Twin Peaks" which likened Twin Peaks's narrative structure to what philosopher Robert Carse called "infinite play." Really great stuff.

64 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 1/2 Simplistic garbage, 1/2 Pseudo-intellectual nonsense, January 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Contemporary Film and Television) (Paperback)

"The echolalia and subvocal signs of the semiotic - what we might call feminine Twinspeak - therefore co-exist with and challenge both the patriarchal canonization of Laura Palmer and its Freudian subtext. (104)"

The above sentence comes from arguably the best of the twelve essays contained within this book, Christy Desmet's "The Canonization of Laura Palmer." She makes some extremely insightful points, but to reach them, you have to wade through pretentious written-with-thesaurus-in-hand idiocy like the preceding paragraph.

In general, those expecting to find opinions on what the Red Room really is, or whether coffee and cherry pie are a metaphor for something deeper, will have to parse through endless masturbatory babble, and for the most part will be ultimately disappointed by the lack of any revelations about the show itself (one notable exception is Angela Hague's interesting "Derationalization of Detection," which delves briefly into what actually happened to Cooper in the Black Lodge).

Some essays, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Bad Ideas..." might simply be re-titled "Why I liked Twin Peaks," as it comes off more like high-brow film criticism than anything else, revealing nothing about the show other than why the writer thought it was good. Ditto Marc Dolan's essay "The Peaks and Valleys...", which contains only speculation as to why the show might have lost its audience. Henry Jenkins' is awful, doing nothing more than chronicling ultimately irrelevant discussions on alt.tv.twinpeaks while the show was airing.

A few of the feminist writers are equally terrible for different reasons. Martha Nochimson's "Desire Under the Douglas Firs..." had potential to be very interesting, but went on a "phallocentric" tangent, and from her we read insights like "The phallic nature of the thumbs up sign, and the phallic incapacity of the Old Bellhop, who cannot stand up straight, are complemented by the visionary presence of The Giant, a phallic presence, as emphasized by the visual foregrounding of The Giant's crotch. (153).

In addition, I fear, some of these writers seem to be a little out of their depth, and readers who are specialists in any of the fields contained within might be able to find numerous mistakes. For instance, in the essay about music (my own area of specialty) Kathryn Kalinak misidentifies leitmotifs, writes musical examples in the wrong key AND mode, and generally reveals herself to be musically illiterate. She also assigns import and symbolism to things that deserve none. She notes that in one scene, "a country and western selection on the jukebox mysteriously disappears for Shelley and Norma's entrance only to reappear a few moments later," citing this as proof that Lynch is trying to make us aware of the line "between illusion and artifice." Nonsense. It was an editing mistake. I could wax philosophical that the chess game between Cooper and Earle (which contained impossible positions/illegal moves) was Lynch trying to symbolically demonstrate any number of things, but it was really just Lynch being lazy, and that's fine.

The essays alone really only merit two stars, but following them "Full of Secrets" has several excellent appendices which contain writing/directorial/acting credits, a Twin Peaks calendar of events, and a complete scene breakdown from the pilot through FWWM, all very well done and useful.

For the rest of the book, well, you've been warned.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent - Each essay is thought provoking and well-written, February 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Contemporary Film and Television) (Paperback)

If you are a die-hard TP fan, then you should grab a copy of this book. Most of the essays are quite academic in nature, but that fact doesn't diminish their readability. You may not agree with every analyzation from each author, but if you loved the show, you'll gladly welcome the fresh insights.