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TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME
Rating: 
USA. 1992.
Director – David Lynch, Screenplay – Robert Engels & David Lynch, Producer – Gregg Fienberg, Photography – Ron Garcia, Music – Angelo Badalamenti, Special Effects – LA Wizards (Supervisor – Robert F. McCarthy), Production Design – Patricia Norris. Production Company – CIBY Pictures/Spelling Films International/Twin Peaks Productions.
Cast:
Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer), Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), Chris Isaak (Agent Chester Desmond), Moira Kelly (Donna Hayward), Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs), James Marshall (James Hurley), Kiefer Sutherland (Agent Sam Stanley), Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Dale Cooper), Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer), Frank Silva (Bob), Eric Da Re (Leo Johnson), Harry Dean Stanton (Cal Rodd), Michael Anderson (Man from Another Place), Walter Olkewicz (Jacques Renault), Phoebe Augustine (Ronette Pulaski), Al Strobel (One-Armed Man), David Lynch (Gordon Cole), Madchen Amick (Shelly Johnson), Lenny Von Dohlen (Harold Smith), Pamela Gidley (Teresa Banks), Miguel Ferrer (Albert Rosenfeld), Catherine E. Coulson (The Log Lady), David Bowie (Agent Phillip Jeffries)
Plot: FBI agent Chester Desmond goes to the town of Deer Meadow to investigate the murder of waitress Teresa Banks whose body was found wrapped in plastic. However Desmond disappears while searching Teresa’s trailer-park home. Investigating Desmond’s disappearance, FBI agent Dale Cooper has a prescient dream. Exactly one year later in the town of Twin Peaks, teenager Laura Palmer is leading a double life – on one hand the Homecoming Queen and involved in charity work, on the other forced to resort to prostitution to support a cocaine habit. In the last few hours leading up to her murder, Laura receives visions of the mysterious Black Lodge and discovers that the sinister figure of the man Bob who has been sexually abusing her since the age of twelve is really someone who possesses her father.
Twin Peaks (1990-1) was perhaps the cult tv series of the 1990s. The series was a huge hit but with the network’s insistence on the revelation of Laura Palmer’s murder in the second season, audience interest plummeted and the series was abruptly cancelled. With Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the series’ creator David Lynch has crafted a cinematic prequel.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was controversial from the moment it premiered at Cannes to a booed reception. It seems no two people alike have the same opinion of Fire Walk With Me, except for a unanimous agreement on how confusing it is – the mainstream critics hated it, a few brave souls went out on a limb to call it David Lynch’s best film so far and, surprisingly enough, many of the fans of the series disliked it claimedly because it varies considerably from the series (a surprising reaction as it is remarkably faithful to series continuity). One’s own reaction is a mixed one that falls somewhere between the three stools. Fire Walk With Me in some ways it feels an unnecessary film – the story of the circumstances surrounding Laura Palmer’s death murder served best when they were part of an unfolding mystery, an investigation uncovering the dark and twisted secrets behind the facade of a small town. The events were best as presented in the series – when mysterious and ambiguous and full of startling revelations, not when presented as here, out in the open. In doing so the film clarifies little, not so much as it merely connects together details raised in the series. (If anything one wishes David Lynch would have chosen to do a sequel to the series, which ended on the truly startling cliffhanger of Agent Cooper returning from the Black Lodge possessed by Bob).
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a challenging film to like. It demands a good deal of an audience. At times it seems like David Lynch is trying to be David Lynch so much that the film becomes far too silly for its own good – like a sequence at the airport with information being imparted to Chris Isaak regarding his assignment via cryptic clues involving a woman in a red dress standing with one hand in her pocket, walking in a circle and wearing a blue rose in her buttonhole. Far more so than the series ever did, the film detaches itself from any connection to reality. The series created a world that was like a thin mask of normalcy hiding the bizarre and inexplicable, but in the film it feels like Lynch has departed from even the common normality the series paid lip to. The film jumps between past, present and future (Heather Graham’s character, even though she was not introduced until the second season and not killed until the very end of the series, turns up dead in Laura’s bed trying to warn her), afterlife, metaphor and inexplicable symbolism with a disregard for anything approaching linear, or even coherent, narrative.
One can see this was the way that David Lynch wanted to take the series, particularly in the final episode’s venture into all-out surrealism – and his subsequent films Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) – take this even further to become pretzels of incomprehensibly wound and unresolved plotting ends. But the results baffle everybody, most particularly during the film’s extended prologue: at the end of his investigation Chris Isaak appears to completely vanish into what might be the telephone wires or as a television transmission – his disappearance is never referred to or explained anywhere else in the film, or for that matter the tv series either; and then in a brief one-line cameo David Bowie appears as an FBI agent who walks into the FBI office and then vanishes into what looks like another tv transmission. None of this has any bearing whatsoever on the rest of the film.
Without the extended (20 minute) prologue, in just telling the story of Laura Palmer alone, Fire Walk With Me could have been a lot better. And once into the main story about Laura Palmer, Lynch plunges through the sordid build-up to her death and gradually intensifies the film into an all-out nightmare. The film’s gradual intensification – from the surprisingly forceful scene in the Bang Bang club with her being used as a whore, to Bob’s raping of her, Leo and Jacques’s rape/bondage session in the cottage in the woods (which Lynch surprisingly does shy away from depicting) and her final stabbing and wrapping in plastic by her father – is disturbing and powerful.
In the tv series Sheryl Lee was given little opportunity to do anything – she obtained brief fame for her single appearance wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the pilot and was thereafter relegated to occasional appearances in the Black Lodge and given the bonus consolation of playing Laura’s cousin Maddie in a rather poor black hair dye job, which revealed little in the way of talent on her part. One expected that Sheryl Lee, in being required to carry the film here, may well have not been up to the task. However contrarily she surprises considerably and delivers a tour de force performance. She is all one imagined Laura Palmer to be and more – beautiful yet tragic, innocent yet coolly sophisticated, tough yet vulnerable. The film’s real story arc is a tragedy – about the final moments in the despoliation of an innocent who has fallen far beyond redemption. In being required to display an acting range that goes from coke-addict become whore – “Who wants to fuck the Homecoming Queen?” she announces herself – to a wholesome innocent broken by secrets she carries, Lee does an amazingly good job.
David Lynch’s other films are:– Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1994
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