Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 1992

[8.0/10] I’m colder on Twin Peaks than most. The series never really clicked for me for a myriad of reasons, most of which stem from growing up in a time when television was awash in the series’ successors, making its innovations seem unremarkable. But the one thing that always worked for me is when the show went for the frightening or unnerving. Whether it be a forced perspective shot of Bob advancing toward the camera, or Leland’s manic grin, or the chilling tones of a predatory assault, the show could always scare me even when it couldn’t always impress me otherwise.

It makes sense, then, that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me proves to be the franchise’s finest hour by discarding most of the quaint quirkiness of its world, the overwrought ponderous exchanges, and leans into the darkness that was always at the core of the series. Fire Walk with Me isn’t about a picturesque town with a seedy underbelly; it’s not about a twisty investigation; it’s not about the misadventures of the local misfits. It’s about one woman’s trauma, her descent, the “young timber” that would start this brushfire and burn up in the process. And in that, it becomes a more gripping and disturbing slice of Lynch’s world.

It’s too much to call Fire Walk with Me a deconstruction, but the film digs into what the television series only hinted at, and often sidestepped. In all its mysticism and whodunnitry, Twin Peaks often elided the central horror upon which the show was founded -- that a father raped and murdered his daughter. It’s understandable that Lynch and Frost could only delve so far into that founding, horrifying detail of their series on network television. But free from those constraints, the show’s creators don’t shy away from the ugliness and disturbing qualities the events that started their story in motion.

It’s a story centered on Laura Palmer. Laura was the black hole of Twin Peaks. She wasn’t present in the events of the show, but she took with her all the light that once been there and everything was still caught in her orbit. And yet, despite the presence of her identical twin cousin Maddy (don’t get me started) and appearances in dream sequences, she never really felt like a character on the show.

Instead, she felt like a device, an impossible, fantastical individual who somehow managed to touch all these lives so forcefully, without ever touching the ground. Part of that can be waved away with how we lionize people in death, particularly a tragic death, but still, in many ways, Laura was the piece of the Twin Peaks puzzle that never really fit, the character who was more a series of conveniences, of details for others to react to, than a real person.

Fire Walk with Me corrects for that. It not only makes Laura the central figure of its story, but it traces the last legs of her doomed path to turning up wrapped in plastic in agonizing, gut-wrenching detail. Gone is the almost mythic figure who everyone in the town waxes rhapsodic about but no one seems to really know, and in her place is a victim of abuse, trying everything she can to cope with and outrun the horrors she is party to on a daily basis, slowly succumbing to them in poignant, tragic fashion. In a franchise that ended every episode with Laura Palmer’s smiling visage, the movie succeeds by finally making her a vivid, haunting, and haunted character, and telling her story.

The film only really falters when it devotes too much of its run time to filling in the rest of the blanks from the television show instead of focusing on that big one. The film doesn’t gain much, if anything, from seeing Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland investigate the Teresa Banks murder for half an hour. As much as I enjoy Twin Peaks going more explicitly weird (another flavor of the T.V. series I consistently appreciated despite my general lukewarm feelings), we don’t really need to see David Bowie strolling into the FBI and setting off Cooper’s premonitions about the forthcoming murders with the usual cast of otherworldly characters. To be frank, despite the fact that he was the best character in the show, Fire Walk with Me has too much of Agent Cooper.

Sure, it’s nice to see him once more and hear confirmation that the “Good Dale” is trapped in the lodge, or have glimpses of Harold the agoraphobic, or even to learn how the events set in Twin Peaks connect with those set in Dear Meadow. But Fire Walk with Me is at its best when it’s less focused on answering the questions of how the collage of preceding events connects to the later ones we know, and chooses instead to answer two simple questions that have been nagging at the corners of Twin Peaks from the beginning: what would drive Laura Palmer to be the sort of person mixed up in all the things Cooper and his cohort uncover, and what was it like for her to be trapped in that inescapable downward spiral.

The answer to the first is that she was abused by her father from the age of twelve, and that whatever essential light remains within her, the kind of light that someone like James Hurley can still connect with, has been twisted by years of suffering, accelerated by realizations of who, if not what, is inflicting this sort of pain on her. And the answer to the second is that it would be a disorienting, dehumanizing experience, one that warps your sense of sexuality and leaves you reaching out for any sort of comfort or palliative to take away the pain that emanates from the very place you call home.

The most harrowing moments of the film, and there’s no shortage of them, are the ones that take place in the Palmer household. Independent of the supernatural elements that marked Twin Peaks as something different, Lynch paints a terrifying portrait of a home filled with abuse and denial, one of a piece with the likes of far more grounded films like Precious. You could edit away all the appearances of Bob and the Red Room in this film, and still come up an unnerving tale of what it’s like to cope with such abuses, to live in a house where your tormentor is inescapable.

And yet, as much as Fire Walk with Me is, thankfully, Laura’s story, it also adds shading to Leland. Ray Wise, who was a little shaky in the early going of the television series, gives a superlative performance as a man trapped inside a monster. There is a quiet menace to him, when Leland-qua-Bob is examining his daughter’s fingernails, or forcing his wife to drink a drugged glass of milk so she won’t hear what’s happening in the next room, or placing his hand over Teresa Banks’s face and asking if she knows who he is.

But there’s also a supreme pathos when the hints of the real man inside peek out. When Leland-qua-Leland breaks down crying and kisses his daughter on the forehead, it adds another layer of tragedy to this whole skin-crawling ordeal. When he looks off, not understanding why his daughter tells him to stay away from her despite his earnest inquiries as to what’s wrong, it’s heartbreaking. And when he yells out “please don’t make me do this” before the last, terrible moment, it makes him another of Bob’s victims, one violated in different but no less horrible ways.

It’s a tack that works on multiple levels. The unfathomable pains inflicted on Laura by her father, who periodically comes to and recognizes the devastating horror of his actions, deepens the awful, tragic qualities of these events. But it also works symbolically, for the way that real life abusers alternate cruelty and kindness with no demon possessions to account for their actions. In Fire Walk with Me, Lynch bridges the gap between the supernatural and the all too real, using the one to comment on the other, in a fashion that his televised efforts only grazed.

More than anything, Lynch proves himself almost preternaturally adept at painting moods and atmospheres in the film. I’d be lying if I claimed I could parse out the meaning of every shot or stray line of dialogue in the luridly-colored sequence where Laura and Donna party with Jacques Renault. But Lynch does a tremendous job at crafting this phantasmagoria, establishing a tone of this hedonistic, dreamy world that Laura would understandably try to escape to as a respite from the horrors of home, and yet just as strenuously act to keep Donna from being wrapped up in it.

It would be false for me to say I understood every piece of the scene where the one-armed man effectively corners the Palmers in their car and screeches warnings and admonitions at them. But the film creates a sense of terror in these moments, of deep existential dread to have the world circle up and offer such halting, ominous cautions.

I cannot pretend that I comprehended every bit of symbolism deployed in the final Red Room sequence. But I can report the palpable sense of relief, of catharsis, from Laura seeing the angel there. She spends much of the film feeling like the good guys never showed up in the elemental battle between good and evil at the roots of Twin Peaks, that something somewhere should have intervened to stop all this horror from being visited on her, and then when she learns that one is there, that there were, in some way, beings looking out for her, she smiles, and we smile with her.

Much of these scenes and sequences are more liminal than literal, better served to evoke a response than make clear rational sense. But that serves Lynch’s ends. The medium exists to create emotional responses in the audience, and in that, Lynch and his collaborators cut out the middleman and go straight for a feeling more than for a beat in the story. In the same vein, the ending of the film is impressionistic. The death of Laura Palmer is terrifying, yes, but it’s not just a mere spate of brutality. It is operatic, shown in flashes, made all the more chilling by the mere glimpses of it we see, the pleas against it, the lives dragged down amid this mystic-tinged cruelty.

Twin Peaks could always scare you when it wanted to. Sure, it could get mired in the muck of love quadrangles or lumpy conspiracies, but when it zeroed in on the core threat, lurking at the edges of the piece and only occasionally taking center stage, it had a vividness and effectiveness the rest of the show couldn’t quite match. Fire Walk with Me gives itself over to that darkness, to that chill, and is all the better for it.

It gives those elements form in the story of a man possessed and forced to do terrible things and, more importantly, of a young woman facing unimaginable horrors, abuses that drive her to seek solace in strange places, that have twisted her into a confused, wounded animal, and that finally make her a full-fledged, ruefully-drawn part of Twin Peaks. In that, Lynch finds something sadder, and scarier, than all the ghosts and demons that came before.

The first time I saw Fire Walk With Me, I was not impressed. At all. The film seemed too violent, brutal, and utterly disconnected with the Twin Peaks that we had become so accustomed to through the TV series. I couldn't see the point, past documenting Laura's descent into madness, and felt like this was just another example of David Lynch, well, being David Lynch. The second time around, I saw FWWM in theaters - this is a film that demands your complete attention - and was able to appreciate it much more (and now it's one of my favorites). Like in S3 of Twin Peaks, Lynch doesn't make art for instant gratification, and it took me a while to appreciate FWWM (I feel as if it's a somewhat separate entity from the TV show altogether).
In this film, we get a first hand look at all the things hinted at in the show but never really shown, like Bob's truly evil acts or Laura's actual meltdowns. It's a complete 180 from the quirky, lighthearted show, but helps us understand Laura, arguably the series' most important character, as an actual person instead of just a plot device. On repeated viewing, FWWM seems to me to be an essential part of the Twin Peaks series, as different from the show it may be. Also, the soundtrack is absolutely stellar (in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time - FWWM Theme, The Pine Float, and Moving Through Time are must listens).