The Impossible Life of Robert Jacoby, 1927/31/40 - 1969/86? • discussion w/ Creamed Corn and the Universe podcast

Visit/download the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other platforms

My past two appearances on Creamed Corn and the Universe, at host Colin's suggestion, have covered two of the most obscure characters in the Twin Peaks universe in very different ways and for very different reasons. Yet both provide a rich field for discussion. Following my episode on Ronette's angel - who is about the most purely "David Lynch" that a character can be - I'm back to talk about Robert Jacoby, a quintessential Mark Frost creation. Robert is equally fascinating and frustrating for me. Given by obsession with chronology I can't help but be driven crazy by the inconsistencies exhibited by Dr. Lawrence Jacoby's brother, a reporter for the Twin Peaks Gazette (later the Twin Peaks Post), as featured in The Secret History of Twin Peaks. Within single articles, indeed within single paragraphs, the character himself completely contradicts his age and the order of events in his own life. Is this just sloppiness on the author's part, or is there some larger thematic thread to draw here? Can both be true? As Colin and I talked, we found ourselves more and more enmeshed in a reading which tied the character to a larger theme of avoidance and deception (self- and otherwise). This conversation is a great example of discovering a thesis in the process of hashing out the details. I hope you have as much fun listening to this as I did recording it.

belated February 2021 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #25 - Season 2 Episode 17 and LOST IN THE MOVIES #76 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Kings Row / Political Reflections: Pandemic, Protest, Election, Insurrection & The Future (+ Us, Brideshead Revisited, documentaries on the Roosevelts, Reagan, and Lee Atwater, podcast recommendations, listener feedback, Twin Peaks Reflections: Nicky, Dougie, Hide-Out Wallie's, Timber Falls Motel, Milford family/The Secret History & more)

I promised this one - or rather, these ones - a long time ago, but kept postponing. The bonus sections, featuring film capsules, podcast recommendations, political reflections, and listener feedback, were originally planned for the summer but work on Journey Through Twin Peaks videos pushed them back to February (same with my "Twin Peaks Cinema" coverage of the dark small town melodrama Kings Row, starring Ronald Reagan, which I wanted to discuss in conjunction with a documentary on the fortieth president). Then, for complicated reasons, I found myself working on several projects simultaneously while also traveling for the first time since the pandemic began (as well as getting sucked into the drama surrounding the stimulus vote in Congress) - so the "February" podcasts ended up getting published in March.

Hopefully, the material was worth the wait. Kings Row was a particularly fascinating work to dig into between its social drama, psychological motifs, and dark family dynamics; it makes an interesting comparison point not just to Peaks but to other films discussed as "Twin Peaks Cinema" like Peyton Place and Our Town. Only after recording was I reminded that the same director, Sam Wood, helmed both Our Town and Kings Row - so perhaps I'll have more to say on those films from that angle in the future. At one point, I also hoped to offer full "film in focus" reviews on the 2019 horror film Us, Jordan Peele's clever, twisty follow-up to Get Out (which I reviewed a couple years ago), and Brideshead Revisited, the definitive arthouse-TV literary adaptation. Although I ended up shaving them down to extended capsules, I will definitely be revisiting both titles in other mediums.

Elsewhere, listener feedback ranged across numerous aspects of Twin Peaks (from the zeitgeist of its different eras to the collaboration between Lynch and Frost to its impact on multiple video games). Podcast recommendations on historical, cinematic, and political subjects were divided into four mini-episodes with all the accompanying links in the show notes. And my political reflections ended up standing on their own as a ninety-minute episode...unsurprisingly, given that 2020 was arguably the most historically significant year in America since 1968 even if just for the pandemic (which takes up less than ten minutes, although it hovers in the background of everything else).

That's just a small sample of what's in these podcasts; I even had to excise and save more than half the film capsules and the Journey Through Twin Peaks feedback for upcoming episodes. I did get up my belated Lost in Twin Peaks coverage of the comeback (?) episode where the late second season really begins, which was also meant to publish in February. My "March" rewards will be a little late too, but only by days in this case. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are links to all the podcasts, followed by a detailed rundown of the content for each one....

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76: Twin Peaks Cinema - Kings Row (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Nicky, Dougie, Hide-Out Wallie's, Timber Falls Motel, Milford family/The Secret History, Lee Atwater documentary, updates on Journey Through Twin Peaks/Lost in Twin Peaks & more)

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - Film Capsules: Us, Brideshead Revisited, The Roosevelts, Reagan (+ A Letter to Three Wives, The Enchanted Cottage, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Knights of the Round Table, Rasputin and the Empress & more)

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - Listener Feedback: Twin Peaks & video games, Audrey/Cooper, what led to Cooper's downfall, Sunset Boulvard, importance of season 2 subplots, "wrong turn" in season 3 climax?, Mark Frost in collaboration and tension w/ David Lynch, Laura (1944), Seattle connections, 2014 zeitgeist vs 80s/90s era & now (+ why podcasts are late, upcoming installments & more)

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - Political Reflections: Pandemic, Protest, Election & The Future

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - (1 of 4) Podcast Recommendations

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - (2 of 4) Podcast Recommendations

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - (3 of 4) Podcast Recommendations

Lost in the Movies patron episode #76 bonus - (4 of 4) Podcast Recommendations

Lost in Twin Peaks #25 - S2E17 (Wounds and Scars/"Episode 24")

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #19 - S2E11 (Masked Ball/"Episode 18") open to all patrons

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Images from a return to Twin Peaks (2 of 2): Mark Frost, Other Collaborators, and The Return

The first collection features many other screenshots from Part 5

(corresponding to chapters 29-33 on YouTube)

This concludes my screenshot collection of all juxtapositions, superimpositions, explanatory titles, collage-like mosaics or other visual manipulations from my video essay series Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass". This process has escalated with each part - for Parts 1 and 2, a few screenshots were included alongside the videos; Part 3 featured many more, and by Part 4 there were so many screenshots I needed a whole separate post for them. By Part 5, I had to split this screenshot collection in two, and this round-up right here is over twice as long as the previous one. The Mark Frost section in particular is cluttered with original compositions, which is what happens when you need to visualize the work of someone whose output was frequently literary. As a result, that standalone video on YouTube (chapter 35) took months to create, far longer than any other individual entry in Journey (you can also watch chapter 34, about the original series collaborators, and chapter 36, a chronological journey through the third season, on YouTube). Hopefully this offers an enjoyable opportunity to pause and explore the various comparisons and illustrations on their own, separate from the whole.

Secret Histories Return to Twin Peaks: Mark Frost and the Spatiotemporal Expansion of Season 3

Christmas arrived with a nice surprise for me today, when I learned that Offscreen, a Canadian film publication, has uploaded my recent article for them, about Mark Frost's book The Secret History of Twin Peaks and what it tells us about the third season of Twin Peaks that Frost co-wrote with Lynch. The essay is lavishly illustrated (including the above graphic, which seems to be a compilation of an image from the book with a 3D clarification of an underlying image) and should provide fodder for anyone looking to explore Frost's relationship to The Return (which, constant name changes be damned, I've decided I prefer to call the third season). Here is the opening paragraph along with a link to Offscreen, where you can read the rest of my article (the accompanying issue will be available soon...):

For those tempted to primarily credit (or blame) writer/director David Lynch for the open-ended, multifaceted, difficult to pin down nature of the limited series Twin Peaks: The Return, co-writer Mark Frost’s book The Secret History of Twin Peaks both confirms and contradicts that thesis. Like The Return (as the show’s third season was dubbed in one of Showtime’s few permitted interventions), Frost’s work pursues a long-dormant story in several directions. Both series and book abandon the tight timeline and bounded setting that once marked Twin Peaks, shifting from the parable-like containment of the original to something more consciously saturated in explicit American history. Surprisingly, however, the incidents and direct concerns of The Secret History and The Return barely overlap; the book’s curious focus on UFO lore, along with most of its enticing loose ends, never pays off (and barely even comes up) in the series. In retrospect, the book can look like Frost’s own personal, private path, an opportunity to explore subjects that interested him under the Twin Peaks masthead while Lynch directed the series as a film rather than a week-to-week show that Frost could help run (Lynch has stated baldly that he didn’t read Frost’s book). Yet The Return and its literary companion, complemented in October 2017 by Frost’s much shorter and simpler The Final Dossier, do have some broader commonalities in spirit, reminding us that Frost co-authored The Return, however curtailed his role in its actual production.

Continue reading "Secret Histories Return to Twin Peaks"

In other news, I'm slowly advancing on several fronts, including ideas for a Patreon account, which I'll unveil here soon. Until then - Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and (though I hope you'll have something more to read here before then) Happy New Year too.

Discussing The Secret History of Twin Peaks #2 (Twin Peaks Unwrapped)

The Secret History of Twin Peaks, by Mark Frost, fostered a number of elaborate theories about what its unusual approach means - or whether it means anything at all. Last week I appeared on Twin Peaks Unwrapped where I discussed the book with hosts Bryon and Ben. Are the "mistakes" and "inconsistencies" of the book actually purposeful, and if so what purpose do they serve? What does the novel tell us about Mark Frost's vision of Twin Peaks as opposed to David Lynch's? How seriously should we take the intimations of flying saucers?

After my appearance, the podcast brought on another guest, Aaron Mento. He had very strong opinions about what Frost intended. Listen as he decodes the words and images, and see what you think...

Discussing The Secret History of Twin Peaks #1 (Obnoxious & Anonymous)

2026 UPDATE: Cameron Cloutier has since changed his views on the book, reporting, "I jumped the gun when this first came out, but after Season 3, The Final Dossier and a decade in between, I see how it all works together—as opposed to me reacting to this being the first new TP content in 25 years and worrying what this could mean for Season 3." In a recent interview, he discusses this directly with Mark Frost.

Several weeks ago, Mark Frost's new novel, The Secret History of Twin Peaks was released to general excitement, acclaim, bafflement, and frustration. Imaginatively written as an FBI dossier full of fictionalized mixed-media files (newspaper clippings, confidential reports, postcards, etc), Frost takes us through the history of the town and some of its inhabitants up to the final day of the series, going just a few hours further than what we had already seen. To the surprise of many readers, Frost focused a lot on a wider context - Lewis & Clark, Jack Parsons and the occult, UFO lore, even the JFK assassination and Nixon administration. Like all parts of Twin Peaks, the Secret History found its celebrants and its detractors...and Cameron Cloutier (as the video's cover-image suggests) was definitely one of the latter! I joined him for a video chat on his Obnoxious & Anonymous YouTube channel to discuss the book for several hours with other Twin Peaks fans. This was the first of my appearances on two different podcasts - the second will be cross-posted later today.