Mark Frost helps make the strangeness of Twin Peaks matter by taking its people seriously. We rate that collaboration with David Lynch highly, although its many stories do not always keep moving.
Fi1m perspective
In Twin Peaks (1990), jealousy is familiar; the behaviour it prompts is not always so easily understood. David Lynch and Mark Frost build a rural soap around people with secrets, then make it difficult to dismiss any of them as merely ridiculous. We were unexpectedly moved by the programme's insistence that these funny, evasive people could also be hurt. Their feelings give us something to follow besides the question of what has happened.
Frost's earlier television writing included Hill Street Blues, a useful background for a drama with so many intersecting lives. He made his feature directing debut with Storyville (1992), which he also co-wrote, but his feature directing credits remained limited. Screenwriting took him to Fantastic Four (2005) and The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), the latter adapted from his own non-fiction golf book. He later co-wrote Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) with Lynch.
That career makes more sense if we treat Frost as a writer and collaborator as well as a director. In Twin Peaks, his experience with ensemble stories helps hold the town's intersecting lives together. It would be too neat to give him the orderly storytelling and leave all the strangeness to Lynch: the familiar desires and peculiar behaviour work together. Kyle MacLachlan's steady presence matters too, giving the programme a centre without making everyone around him seem ordinary.
Our enthusiasm comes with a practical reservation: Twin Peaks sometimes takes longer than its stories need. There are stretches we would happily shorten, and the number of people to follow cannot excuse every pause. Yet its attention to their feelings is also what makes the mystery worth staying with. We would begin with the 1990 series for the comedy and the sadness, rather than expecting every hour to supply an answer. A little tolerance for wandering is required.
Biography
Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, television producer and director. He is best known as the co-creator, with David Lynch, of the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991, 2017), on which he also served as writer, director, teleplay writer and story contributor. He previously worked as a writer and executive story editor on the police drama Hill Street Blues (1982–1985) and wrote episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (1974).
Frost was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Carnegie Mellon University. He began collaborating with Lynch in the mid-1980s. Their partnership produced the series Twin Peaks and the feature film Storyville (1992), which Frost co-wrote and directed. He later wrote the screenplays for Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and adapted his own non-fiction book as the film The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005). Frost has also published several novels, some under the pen name Eric Bowman.
