Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Director ~ David Lynch

Writers ~ David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

1992, France-USA

Stars ~ Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick

Begins with Lynch’s imitable humorous non sequiturs and eccentricities and notable cast/cameos (Isaak! Bowie! Sutherland!) with only the discordance of Badalamenti’s score to hint at what’s to come. Then, when this set-up is over, the twang of Badalamenti’s iconic theme tune kicks in and triggers a rush of instantaneous bliss for Twin Peaks fans as that beguiling Americana suburban rock’n’roll-retro-fantasia kicks in. This being a film (yes yes, it starts with the declarative destruction of a television set), there’s extra gore and the nastiness is less oblique as Laura Palmer mood-swings and spirals her way down to the inevitable. On the way, several series regulars stop by to make appearances and there’s a pitstop to a sublime Julee Cruise number. For all the dream-like and nightmarish textures, there’s always the sense that we’re only a thin layer away from the worst, from ugly neo-realism. Even the unknowable motivations, enigmas and violence of this ugliness is dressed up in the otherworldliness of the red room. Or, as Michael Wilmigton called it: "horror kitsch".

Widely critically panned at the time of release, actually it always seemed within Lynch’s spectrum. Perhaps people were expecting his more comedic, goofy side after ‘Wild at Heart’ (which I consider Lynch’s comedy), but its tone was no surprise if you were familiar with his earlier works. And for all its eccentricities, which had served him well for the series, ‘Twin Peaks’ was always about the ripple effect the murder of Laura Palmer had on the whole community and focus on her story is not a nice one which goofiness would serve well. Rather, having enticed the audience in with oddball humour, it descends into in increasingly claustrophobic nightmarishness with little reprieve. As befits the tale of a murdered girl. Lynch took the opportunity in film to show what could only been alluded to in the show ~ drugs, breasts, blood, general smalltown degeneracy.

Lynch’s insistence that dreaminess and nightmarish are interchangeable, or at least divided by a wafer-thin membrane of dissonance, is integral to his particularly unique grasp of tone. Lynch has always conveyed bleakness through this dreaminess, with the uncanny and the supernatural the only way to articulate the nightmarish forces against you and within you. Or at least to represent the cognitive dissonance plaguing the characters such as Laura Palmer. Lynch’s projection of this liminal space through both a fetishisation-homage of the mythology of an American Rock’n’Roll era and a modern horror sensibility creates something singularly appealing and disturbing. ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ certainly shed the more superfluous Lynch fans as he headed into increasingly nightmarish supernatural cryptograms, ‘Straight Story’ excepted, and finally landed in the near-impenetrable ‘Inland Empire’.

Sheryl Lee gives a great performance, veering from wholesome to off-the-rails to traumatised as demanded by the troubled Laura Palmer. While Moira Kelly makes for a rather unmemorable Donna Hayward, it is Ray Wise that is never to be forgotten, following Willem Defo and Dennis Hopper as another Lynchian almost cartoonish portrayal of violent, unhinged, toxic masculinity. And just a glimpse of Bob clutching a chest of drawers remains an indelibly unnerving ‘Twin Peaks’ tableau.

 

 

‘Twin Peaks’ surely holds the unique position in TV history as even the dream sequences in ‘The Sopranos’ seemed permitted by Lynch’s wilful weirdness and play with the repressed. For a while after the initial series, everyone tried to be “weird” and “eccentric” (my favourite is ‘Eerie, Indiana’), but arguably it was only when the freedoms of the initial streaming age occurred that the legacy of ‘Twin Peaks’, which showed just a little loosening of the tie was popular, would reach full fruition. We have a lot to thank Lynch and Mark Frost for, even as ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ can be seen as Lynch reiterating his more oblique agenda.

And, of course, we now know there was more to come.