Mark Frost and Twin Peaks: A Re-Appraisal
Looking into how much credit we ought to give the co-creator of Twin Peaks through the lens of his other works of fiction.
I made an offhand comment about Mark Frost in my article on literary analysis through the works of David Lynch that was meant as a caveat to any pedants that might be out to catch me out. After mulling over the prospect of discussing his work (and with the encouragement of one longtime reader), I thought that it was high-time to re-evaluate Mark Frost’s contributions to the Twin Peaks series. Lynch’s renown in Hollywood has allowed his reputation to dominate the series, and Frost has often been treated as a junior partner at best, or forgotten entirely at worst. I cannot rightly say that this is meant to estimate “how much” of a contribution he had in the series because it was a collaborative effort and those concepts are incredibly hard to quantify. Rather, I wanted to read through Frost’s two books on the series (as well as a few other novels he’s put out) so we can gauge when and how his stylistic choices shine through on screen.
What parts of Twin Peaks do we know have little to do with Mark Frost? If we look at David Lynch’s oeuvre as a whole, (reducing the last essay I wrote on this subject to a few sentences) heavy metaphor, spirituality, cosmology, and dreams all come to the forefront as major areas of interest. This is not to say that Frost has no overlap in talking about these themes, but we can attribute at least three of these four aspects largely to Lynch. We’ll get into the odd one out here in a minute, but there are some uniquely “Lynchian” moments in the show that are worth drawing attention to if we want a baseline measurement of that quality. Movies like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive show his penchant for extensive, drawn-out metaphors. There are some pretty standard symbols for light and dark in the main plot that we went over in the last essay, but even smaller details like the white foam contrasted with the dark liquid of the Black Yukon Sucker Punch1 fill out the atmosphere.2 Most of Mulholland Drive takes place in a dream, and the visuals of the visits to the Black Lodge are reminiscent of some of the more abstract sequences in that film.
In order to identify what Mark Frost has brought to the table, then, it only makes sense to look at some of the projects that he has completed on his own. There are a handful of TV shows he wrote individual episodes for, but with that medium being a collaborative effort, it’s still hard to separate what one person brings to the table. Instead, reading a few of his novels outside of the Twin Peaks canon will inevitably help to enlighten us on his preferences. The List of Seven, for example, is a historical fiction novel that follows Arthur Conan Doyle and his at-times reluctant investigation into the occult world of Victorian England. As I have been preaching about since I began publishing book reviews on this website, Frost does the right thing in eschewing certain indicators of the genre. In the Victorian era there are bound to be mentions of wrought-iron lampposts and horse-drawn carriages, but Frost elevates his work to the next level by capturing some aspect of the weltanschauung of that time in nearly every sentence. The driving incident that sets the plot in motion is a séance that Doyle had been asked to attend in order to discern whether it was real or not. This is the first major hallmark of that era: simultaneous credulity and incredulity towards the spirit world. The thing that Harry Houdini was second-most famous for was similarly as a debunker of psychics, although Doyle’s attitudes both in the book and in real life tended to lean more optimistic on the topic. Of course in the book, he later receives objective confirmation about the supernatural across his exploits. The focus of the plot quickly transitions from concerning Doyle’s escape from otherworldly powers into an investigation of who the members of the titular list are and how to stop them. There are naturally many literary parallels between this story and Doyle’s other works (he and another character, Jack Sparks, eventually end up at Reichenbach Falls), but the bulk of the focus of the novel is on the practice and beliefs of theosophy. This late 19th century religion has fallen out of favor over the last hundred years or so, and its central tenet was that all faith leaders shared some sort of arcane knowledge about the world that they had slowly been revealing to the rest of humanity. This focus draws to mind the episodes of Twin Peaks where one character or another breaks off into a tangent about religion. Of course, the concepts of the White and Black Lodges come from the mythology of the Nez Perce by way of Aleister Crowley, but there are other events like Cooper’s tossing of rocks at bottles3 because of his alleged connection to “the plight of the Tibetan people.” Later, he even gives Leland Palmer rites from the Tibetan book of the dead, even though he has an otherwise normal Christian burial. Others have noted the strong association between BOB and the demonic Jewish entity known as a Dybbuk.4 The multicultural origins of legitimate magical practices in the world of Twin Peaks suggests that, on some level, the theosophists have tapped into a kernel of truth.
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