Mark Frost's Contributions to TP:TR (Speculation)
Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2017 12:24 pm
There's been some discussion of this in the Profoundly Disappointed and the "Mean-Spirited" threads. I thought it deserved its own topic, especially since Mark's name seems to have largely dropped out of the conversation (both on these boards and the press) since the series started. It was nice that he got his moment in the sun with TSHoTP, but as soon as the actual show dropped, the talk shifted (perhaps inevitably) pretty much to "look what David Lynch is up to!" As I've mentioned a few times, I really do see Frost's fingerprints all over this thing, albeit with his ideas filtered/skewed through DKL's lens at times.
So maybe the most obvious place to start is that the ostensible driving force of the "plot," a mythology-heavy race between the heroes and villain to find/summon an ancient evil being, feels very Frost in season 2/TSHoTP mode (I haven't read his other books, but the descriptions of The List of Seven and The Paladin Prophecy seem very similar to the mythology of TR). He clearly gets a kick out of this kind of thing (interesting for a guy who cut his teeth on the for-the-era hyper-realistic Hill Street Blues), whereas DKL never really has. Dune was a chore for him to direct precisely because it was so heavy on this type of stuff, and ever since then, while he certainly has dabbled in the supernatural frequently, it's generally in a much more abstract, subjective and metaphorical/psychological way. Outside of Dune, TP overall is certainly the most literal "mythology" a DKL work has ever had, but when DKL was in the director's seat in the '90s, it was never about dugpas and Lodges and Blue Book (even as Gordon ironically delivered much of that exposition in non-DKL-directed episodes!): it was about abstractions and mood, and in the moments where the mythology does become a bit more straightforward/literal in DKL-directed '90s TP, it's in the service of connecting it to the experiences of the main characters through metaphor (garmonbozia). Whereas the Mr. C/FBI plot of this season feels more like straight mythology-for-the-pure-sake-of-it, which I think is much more Frost's MO.
In fact, I think it's fair to say that Frost has a legacy few ever credit to him: he's really the grandfather of all the mythology-driven series we've gotten since TP. I really don't think we would have a Westworld or a Walking Dead without Lost, and Damon Lindelof has said that there wouldn't have been a Lost without TP. And that mythology aspect of TP was very much Frost and Peyton...DKL may have created the memorable images and moods that make the mythology iconic, but Frost/Peyton were the ones who invented the very idea of having a mythology-centered television show and set the basic format that has been used as a template ever since.
Just as the original both mocked soap opera tropes and indulged in them enthusiastically and sincerely, people (including me) have speculated that TR intentionally is winking at "Peak TV"/prestige drama of the recent past (a painting from the Sterling-Cooper offices turning up in Lucky 7, the vortex from True Detective). While I think there were definitely some allusions in this vein, the more apropos analogy to the original show's soap opera fetish is the way TR uses the mythology show/"puzzle box" language of Lost and its successors, both imitating and subverting expectations within the style of the very cottage industry which TP itself spawned. If Lost fans grew weary of John Locke trying to open the hatch for seemingly an entire season, how excruciating must it have been for those same viewers to follow the epic adventures of Mr. C traveling middle America and demanding coordinates everywhere he went, only to finally pop into the Fireman's domain for a hot second, get plopped at the sheriff's station and unceremoniously shot? Like the original, TR gleefully delights in sincerely indulging a popular genre while simultaneously pointing out how silly it all is. Again, this feels very Mark. DKL hasn't watched any recent TV except Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective and some car shows on the Gear channel. True Detective is the only one of those with a mythological slant...whereas Mark seems to generally keep up on recent television and explicitly said in his Reddit AMA that he really enjoys Westworld.
Of course, all of this ended up being filtered through DKL's direction. So the Mr. C stuff takes on a more Lynchian dimension through the mood and tone, with the endless nighttime driving shots and laconic dialogue delivery giving the feel of a dream where you keep going places trying to get something (coordinates!), but can never quite figure out what you need to know, or even why you need to find it ("Who is Judy?" he asks Jeffries, even though he seems to be hunting for her throughout the whole series). But the foundation/core of the mythological scenes of this show feel 70-80% Frost in my view. (I'm not including Part 18, that's its own very Lynchian beast).
And as I implied in another thread, a lot of the material people are interpreting as a "world is going to hell in a hand basket" screed strikes me as more Frost. One has only to look at his Twitter feed to see that he's unhappy with the state of the world and thinks about it A LOT. Now I think people who disliked the show are overstating how misanthropic it actually is. I've seen complaints that the town of Twin Peaks is now one big trailer park filled with drug addicts, and I don't think that's accurate. But clearly the idea of a world gone wrong is something we're supposed to be thinking about. I'll use two scenes to illustrate that this is a theme, and that at least a fair bit of it can be attributed to Frost IMO. The first is the gun/"sick girl" scene. I think it's not a tremendous logical leap to assume that Mark was the one who wanted to address the issue of kids and guns, since DKL very rarely addresses hot-button topical issues in his work (and when he does, it's so elliptical you don't even spot it, like the OJ trial inspiring Lost Highway). This scene clearly builds a mood of dread and oppressiveness, presenting Twin Peaks as a terrifying hellish place not because of "something in the woods," but because of very human concerns which Frost seems to think about a lot more than DKL. The other scene (well, scenes) are the Jacoby broadcasts, which strike me as full-on Frost, in the same half-sincere-half-mocking mode he used for much of the conspiracy theory material in TSHoTP (i.e., simultaneously mocking Jacoby's nuttiness while allowing him to express some points Frost probably sincerely agrees with).
Admittedly, the "sick girl" scene feels like a spiritual cousin to Eraserhead's existential dread, and the absurdist punchline with the sick girl herself certainly feels like a Lynch touch. But again, that's the nature of DKL being the one to actually shoot the stuff.
Anyway. Anyone else feel like doing some pointless speculating?
So maybe the most obvious place to start is that the ostensible driving force of the "plot," a mythology-heavy race between the heroes and villain to find/summon an ancient evil being, feels very Frost in season 2/TSHoTP mode (I haven't read his other books, but the descriptions of The List of Seven and The Paladin Prophecy seem very similar to the mythology of TR). He clearly gets a kick out of this kind of thing (interesting for a guy who cut his teeth on the for-the-era hyper-realistic Hill Street Blues), whereas DKL never really has. Dune was a chore for him to direct precisely because it was so heavy on this type of stuff, and ever since then, while he certainly has dabbled in the supernatural frequently, it's generally in a much more abstract, subjective and metaphorical/psychological way. Outside of Dune, TP overall is certainly the most literal "mythology" a DKL work has ever had, but when DKL was in the director's seat in the '90s, it was never about dugpas and Lodges and Blue Book (even as Gordon ironically delivered much of that exposition in non-DKL-directed episodes!): it was about abstractions and mood, and in the moments where the mythology does become a bit more straightforward/literal in DKL-directed '90s TP, it's in the service of connecting it to the experiences of the main characters through metaphor (garmonbozia). Whereas the Mr. C/FBI plot of this season feels more like straight mythology-for-the-pure-sake-of-it, which I think is much more Frost's MO.
In fact, I think it's fair to say that Frost has a legacy few ever credit to him: he's really the grandfather of all the mythology-driven series we've gotten since TP. I really don't think we would have a Westworld or a Walking Dead without Lost, and Damon Lindelof has said that there wouldn't have been a Lost without TP. And that mythology aspect of TP was very much Frost and Peyton...DKL may have created the memorable images and moods that make the mythology iconic, but Frost/Peyton were the ones who invented the very idea of having a mythology-centered television show and set the basic format that has been used as a template ever since.
Just as the original both mocked soap opera tropes and indulged in them enthusiastically and sincerely, people (including me) have speculated that TR intentionally is winking at "Peak TV"/prestige drama of the recent past (a painting from the Sterling-Cooper offices turning up in Lucky 7, the vortex from True Detective). While I think there were definitely some allusions in this vein, the more apropos analogy to the original show's soap opera fetish is the way TR uses the mythology show/"puzzle box" language of Lost and its successors, both imitating and subverting expectations within the style of the very cottage industry which TP itself spawned. If Lost fans grew weary of John Locke trying to open the hatch for seemingly an entire season, how excruciating must it have been for those same viewers to follow the epic adventures of Mr. C traveling middle America and demanding coordinates everywhere he went, only to finally pop into the Fireman's domain for a hot second, get plopped at the sheriff's station and unceremoniously shot? Like the original, TR gleefully delights in sincerely indulging a popular genre while simultaneously pointing out how silly it all is. Again, this feels very Mark. DKL hasn't watched any recent TV except Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective and some car shows on the Gear channel. True Detective is the only one of those with a mythological slant...whereas Mark seems to generally keep up on recent television and explicitly said in his Reddit AMA that he really enjoys Westworld.
Of course, all of this ended up being filtered through DKL's direction. So the Mr. C stuff takes on a more Lynchian dimension through the mood and tone, with the endless nighttime driving shots and laconic dialogue delivery giving the feel of a dream where you keep going places trying to get something (coordinates!), but can never quite figure out what you need to know, or even why you need to find it ("Who is Judy?" he asks Jeffries, even though he seems to be hunting for her throughout the whole series). But the foundation/core of the mythological scenes of this show feel 70-80% Frost in my view. (I'm not including Part 18, that's its own very Lynchian beast).
And as I implied in another thread, a lot of the material people are interpreting as a "world is going to hell in a hand basket" screed strikes me as more Frost. One has only to look at his Twitter feed to see that he's unhappy with the state of the world and thinks about it A LOT. Now I think people who disliked the show are overstating how misanthropic it actually is. I've seen complaints that the town of Twin Peaks is now one big trailer park filled with drug addicts, and I don't think that's accurate. But clearly the idea of a world gone wrong is something we're supposed to be thinking about. I'll use two scenes to illustrate that this is a theme, and that at least a fair bit of it can be attributed to Frost IMO. The first is the gun/"sick girl" scene. I think it's not a tremendous logical leap to assume that Mark was the one who wanted to address the issue of kids and guns, since DKL very rarely addresses hot-button topical issues in his work (and when he does, it's so elliptical you don't even spot it, like the OJ trial inspiring Lost Highway). This scene clearly builds a mood of dread and oppressiveness, presenting Twin Peaks as a terrifying hellish place not because of "something in the woods," but because of very human concerns which Frost seems to think about a lot more than DKL. The other scene (well, scenes) are the Jacoby broadcasts, which strike me as full-on Frost, in the same half-sincere-half-mocking mode he used for much of the conspiracy theory material in TSHoTP (i.e., simultaneously mocking Jacoby's nuttiness while allowing him to express some points Frost probably sincerely agrees with).
Admittedly, the "sick girl" scene feels like a spiritual cousin to Eraserhead's existential dread, and the absurdist punchline with the sick girl herself certainly feels like a Lynch touch. But again, that's the nature of DKL being the one to actually shoot the stuff.
Anyway. Anyone else feel like doing some pointless speculating?