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.

 

We The Animals (book & film)

We The Animals

Novel: Justin Torres, 2011

Film: Jeramiah Zagar, 2019, USA

“We wanted more.” begins Justin Torres’ slim novel, a prime candidate for the best-ever three-word summary of childhood. It’s told in fragments, in key memories that make up chapters. Elliptical but fluid, often subtle, vivid and surprising, it’s a quick but immersive coming-of-age read. It’s the tale of three brothers, their macho father and faltering mother; their dysfunctional family, told from the viewpoint of young narrator up to the point where they all drift apart. “We” becomes “I” with the onset of adolescence.

It’s also afflicted with the kind of literary portentousness that overrides a lightness of touch that might have highlighted how humour one of the strongest glues between siblings. Where are the fraternal in-jokes and joshing? The gleeful silliness of kids? Some funnies despite everything would have boosted characterisation and bonded the reader even closer. Rather, we get defining memories, seriously told: growing-up a serious business for this narrator. For example, the scene where the boys cover themselves in food: their mother says it reminds her of when they were born and she asks them to do the same to her. It is, as Patrick Ness says, a moment “Which works thematically, but never for a moment feels like a real thing that could have happened.” Or there’s the symbolism of Papa machismo digging what appears to be a war trench in the yard. Our narrator goes to lay in it.

As an example of how clear prose conveying layers of perspective –conveying that dad resorts to violence, that ma will continue to be defiant, the challenge to machismo, that the kids are watching, that this is a part of their relationships – segues into something that feels more like literary confection by the end of the sentence:

"With that, Paps took a step toward her and slapped her across the side of the head, but she kept screaming right at him, right up in his face, 'Big-dick truck! Big-dick truck!'”* pg. 64

Nevertheless, Torre’s elliptical style is suited to the editing and stream-of-consciousness and the poetic leanings of film. Jeremiah Zagar’s adaptation comes from the same lineage as Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’ but is more akin to Carla Simon’s ‘Summer 1993’ in that it feels tied to a poetic interpretation of reality instead of a wilfully ethereal formlessness. Or even Andrea Arnold’s ‘American Honey’ where every-day colours take on a dreamy luminosity. There’s a voiceover, which usually gets my heckles raised, but here it wisely takes from the source and applies sensibly to provide a thread through all the vignettes (“We wanted more.”).

The representation of gender, as typical in these coming-of-age tales, are of the macho father and vulnerable mother: the former is prone to a temper, though he isn’t mean, and played with injured animal compelling charm by Raúl Castillo; Ma, as always with repressed and frustrated mothers, swings between passive and hysterical, but Sheila Vand manages to step back from overacting. The boys don’t get much to say, but they are a gaggle of unkempt charm. As in the book, they are mostly just a jumble of reactions and postures, soaking it all in. It is only at the end, when divisions and individuality begin, that their conversation strikes as vivid.

Underpinning and defining all this is the near-poverty and desperation of their social status. As Puerto Ricans in rural upstate New York, they are outsiders in this community in this era (1980s?); when they befriend a “white trash” kid, it is perhaps Jonah’s true introduction to others just as disenfranchised as his family. And, of course, there are multiple layers to outsider status – to be an outsider within outsiders – which is where his burgeoning sexuality comes in. The context of class aspiration and pride is articulated wonderfully in the scene where the father gets the family to dance as if they were poor, rich, white, etc.

Zagar and director of photography Zak Mulligan employ a visual mixture of the documentary and the stylised. Mulligan says,

“That particular style, of handheld shooting with wide lenses close to the subject, has really grown on me. That technique is used throughout the film to give the audience a sense of being among the characters, and not just watching them.”**

The camera always feels intimate, however freewheeling it seems. Occasionally, Jonah’s journal and scribblings take flight into animation. All this confidently captures the riveting collage of Torre’s book.

The film expands on the novel’s details, making the narrative more fluid, giving it forward motion instead of staggering through a series of dislocated reflections. For example, the fake phone calls are a repeated game for the boys, as are the visit to the rock-kid’s house; the “body heat” game is a frequent motif.  The journal is introduced from the start where, in the book, its existence is a somewhat abrupt late revelation.  And here, although the film is not particularly less reflective or pensive than the prose, we can see clearly the boys laughing and playing around.

The most notable difference in Zagar’s adaptation is that the film gives our storyteller hope where the novel has him crushed. Perhaps both endings are indicative of their times: we no longer blindly accept tales of unaccepted sexuality being a tragedy, empathising that way; we’ve moved into demands for positivism now. So the poetic and touching earnestness of Torre’s novel becomes a sincere but optimistic interpretation.  

• * Torres, Justin, ‘We The Animals’, (Mariner Books, 2011, New York), pg. 64
• ** ‘We The Animals’, Montage Pictures bluray booklet, pg. 3-4.

Us

Us

Jordan Peele, 2019, USA-Japan

Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ starts with the Reagan-era commercial for “Hands Aross America”  playing on a tv set with ‘C.H.U.D.’ on the VHS pile beside it, and this juxtaposition proves a big clue to the film’s agenda – ripping the trick from ‘Climax’. Oh, should I then write that as ‘U.S.’? The focus of many reviews will be on the film’s sociology and politics, and Amanda Marcotte provides a useful and direct analysis that ‘Us’ concerns the uprising of the consequences of Reaganism. Peele says ‘Us’ is not about race this time, and it’s true that its metaphors are set more on class, but of course class will always feature race. The director of ‘Get Out’ is unlikely to ever be able to escape the shadow of that debut, but it is also unlikely that he would want to. Just to say that having a black family as central protagonists in a horror film seems quietly ground-breaking enough (see Shudder’s ‘Horror Noire’ for a fine run-through of the dearth of black representation in the genre). 

But why both ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ will have longevity beyond being attuned to their contemporary contexts, their eras and political climate, is that they deliver their horror wholeheartedly and with panache. ‘Get Out’ had the don’t-go-there premise, the dark secrets of a superficially benign community and the mad scientist trope. ‘Us’ has the doppelganger, the monsters underground, home invasion, the bodysnatchers and repressed coming up from the tunnels. Both films are stuffed full of all this horror stuff so while all the social commentary and poignant analogies are taking most of the attention, these tropes are providing all the fun. And they are fun films too: they are good with the natural humour. Maybe ‘Get Out’ suffers from having an obvious comic relief, but the humour in ‘Us’ is far more organic and fulfils much of the crowd-pleasing. 

I saw a Twitter witticism by someone that he had just overdosed on ‘Us’’s metaphors and had to lay down. Surely some will accuse Peele of trying too hard, of being too full of itself, but going off the rails and reaching too far is what horror does and Peele has a fine sense of the balance between fun and symbolism. After all, it’s not as if Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ is subtle. Peele is obviously wallowing and enjoying the tropes so if you read this as cliché, it’s not going to exceed disappointment. And there are all the references and rips from other films – there’s ‘Climax’ at the start, there’s ‘Funhouse’, even the red of ‘Don’t Look Now’, if you like, or Myer’s boiler suit, and the glove that is both a reference to Freddy and Michael Jackson – and on it goes. Typical of contemporary horror, the Easter eggs for fans are plentiful. 

And that Peele delivers good, solid and relatable characters that are far above the genre standard shouldn’t be undervalued. One of the notable touches is how he has characters in such outrageous scenarios talking in a more realistically casual manner that isn’t quite typical of the genre. It helps the whole cast deliver memorable performances whilst still working as archetypes (the man-child horny husband, the indifferent teen, the unfulfilled trophy wife, etc.). Lupita Nyong’o especially gives exceptional lead and support performances, proving again that the genre is giving women some of the best roles around ~ but everyone gives great twin performances.

The doppelgangers are, of course, the Ids of the characters: the brutish father, the creepy grinning daughter, the animalistic and destructive son. It is with the son, Jason (Evan Alex), that there is perhaps one of the films greatest subtleties: at a crucial moment, he seems to realise that Pluto (his double) is the worst of him, but that they come from the same stock and so intuits Pluto’s trap, that he can control his “tethered”, then apparently melding with Pluto to thwart him. And although everyone gives fantastically physical and otherworldly Id-performances, it is surely Evan Alex’s scrambling around like a monkey or a spider that remains most memorable, and so at odds with the more prosaic character of Jason. Even Umbrae’s (Shahadi Wright Joseph) smile-like-a-horror-icon and Red’s horror-croaky voice are pulled back just at the moment of being over-done. 

But like ‘Get Out’, ‘Us’ almost sabotages itself with an unsubtle moment where everything stands still for exposition. These moments are untypical of the fluid flow and fine judgement on display before and after, but it seems there is so much to get in that Peele hasn’t yet quite figured how to avoid these moments of obviousness. But nevertheless, much else is so strong that surely this weakness can be forgiven. 

It’s not so much about the twist which any genre-savvy viewer will suspect/know – so it’s barely a twist at all, maybe – but how the film plays with that throughout and what it goes on to say: it’s about how, given the chance, she came from the underground and learnt all the signifiers and mannerisms to be the thing above ground, in a comfortable middle-class and loving family. Did we think she was just playing a part, because she really did seem to care about the kids, etc.? No, she undoubtedly really meant it. Give the underclass a chance and they’ll be indistinguishable from the privileged. Hell, they might even achieve “Hands Across America” where the privileged failed.

It's a little uneven, a little mumbled, but‘Us’ is a far more open work, far

more willing to let the audience pile in with interpretation where ‘Get Out’ was more definite. It’s chock-full of social commentary and symbolism that can be parsed long afterwards. It helps that there are many striking images to hang it all on and that it’s all nicely and sharply filmed – already I note costume companies are taking the film’s get-ups as Halloween options. Peele offers another meal of genre tropes to interrogate another perennial topic of sociological horror, but does so with humour, vigour and with a sense that the genre can stab and viscerally reveal subjects in ways that others cannot.