Martyn Pedler

What’s your favourite thing David Lynch has ever done?

Wild At Heart still makes me giddy as a schoolgirl, and after many rewatchings I think that Lost Highway is very nearly a perfect film. In fact, I don’t really understand why Mulholland Drive gets so much love when it feels like a compromised version of the same story – albeit with lesbianism and that terrifying scene behind the Winkies.

If pushed, though, I’d probably say that Twin Peaks is his best – and just writing that sentence makes me feel sorry for Mark Frost. You know, the other half of the buzzing LYNCH / FROST logo that ends each episode.

Way back in 2004, I wrote this piece for a book on cult TV called Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion. It wasn’t meant to be Lynch-specific, but it was just so much easier, analytically speaking, to give him credit for everything.

Auteur theory is so seductive that we happily pretend it’s not entirely ridiculous. How can anything as inherently collaborative as movies or TV be the equivalent to a single artist alone in a room with a canvas and a paintbrush?

Even worse: it’s obvious that Twin Peaks was never a single-author text. It never had the same sense of a single controlling force of, say, Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing or Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and I’m sure those men would never say they were wholly responsible for the identities of their respective shows, either.

It’s slightly more plausible for a movie to be one individual’s unique vision, but still basically impossible. And even if it is? There’s a good chance it’d be better if it wasn’t. There are endless stories about Hollywood films being crippled by compromise after compromise, I know, but no one talks much about the opposite.

Do you know how unlikely it is that one human is truly talented at one single thing? So what are the odds that they’ll be good at everything?

The Wrapped In Plastic fanzine with its hand-drawn cover of "Twin Peaks's Invisible Man: Mark Frost".

It’s such an improbable, one-in-a-million lightning strike, and yet everyone seems to think they’ve been struck by the same blast. M. Night Shyamalan and Richard Kelly are both filmmakers with undeniable talent, but seemingly without a sense of their own limitations. If they’d work on other peoples’ screenplays, they might really have something.

Of course, I would say this. I’m a writer with zero urge to direct. (Directing would mean… actually… you know… talking to all those people? Every day? No thanks.)

Recently, Judd Apatow’s success with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up gave him the influence to make his most personal film without artistic compromise – and sadly Funny People turned out to be misshapen, self-indulgent, and unable to hold up to his more commercial films that came before it.

Lynch’s best movies, for me, are one that’s based on Barry Gifford’s vivid characters (Wild At Heart), and another script co-written by Gifford himself (Lost Highway). Lynch works best when his creative impulses are being somehow reigned in by another’s influence. The television structure and ongoing collaborators of Twin Peaks provided the perfect balance.

When we think of Twin Peaks, sure, we think of backwards talk and non sequiturs, but it was a soap opera, first and foremost, and deeply wedded to the all the TV conventions that implies. I feel sorry for the writers on the show who – so the story goes – would spend whole episodes getting the show back on track after Lynch would come back for an episode and throw all their plans into disarray.

(And yes, these were often the most memorable episodes, no doubt – but I bet that made it more annoying for the others involved, not less.)

So, to Mark Frost, who’ll I know never read this but what the hell:

Sorry.