What's your rating for Fire Walk with Me?

Right, if Lynch wanted those scenes in the film he would have included them. FWWM is damn near perfect as it is; never has Lynch made a better film. Watching the Missing Pieces recently it's obvious that, with one or two exceptions, they wouldn't fit into the film; they're basically their own little film, which is why Lynch edited them as such this year. The overall tone and formal approach (which is much closer to the series's use of wide, static master shots than the film's abundance of visceral close-ups) as well as the general focus of these scenes is completely different from that of FWWM. They're more of an aesthetic middle-ground between FWWM and the series: not as dark and Laura-focused as the former, but darker and less comforting than the latter. I like watching the Missing Pieces as their own little world, part of Twin Peaks but existing as a kind of lighter interlude before the brutal and highly emotional assault of FWWM. The only deleted scene that I would have liked to see in FWWM is Leland coming home at night and looking at Laura in the bushes; absolutely chilling.

Also, I'm just kind of against fan-edits on principle -- not that people shouldn't be allowed to make them, but that the finished work that the artist put out there has the final word, and I've never seen a fan-edit that was better than the real thing. Unless you're talking about restoring something that was originally intended, like putting Schooly D's Led Zeppelin-sampling "Signifying Rapper" back in Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, I think there's something mildly distasteful about the concept of tinkering with films and TV series.

It's like Season 2 of Twin Peaks. Yes, that infamous mid-late patch of episodes (I mark it as stretching roughly from Leland's wake to that silly femme fatale ineptly strangling a grieving Harry) does kind of suck compared to the rest of the show, but it exists. It's out there. It shouldn't, and can't, be erased from history by some fan editing out all the bad parts, as has been done and discussed many times. Even with how bad much of the material is, there's still some good scenes and I'd rather watch the original series the whole way through than some artificial fan-made edit that rearranges and cuts up and re-orders and messes with all the scenes to their personal liking. (Plus, the upswing in quality starting with Gordon Cole's reappearance, and especially the final episode's swift return of the show to its peak for one final hour, is that much more startling and compelling when viewed after the 5-6 hours of dull inanity that is mid-Season 2). You take the bad with the good, and I think Lynch understands that. I can't see him going back and revising history by re-editing and completely altering some existing work he did decades ago. Few works of art are "perfect," and it's useless trying to attain such a goal, but that seems to be the purpose of so many Peaks fan-edits.