Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

1992

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Sheryl Lee, Pamela Gidley, Eric DaRe, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Phoebe Augustine, Heather Graham, Chris Isaak, Moira Kelly, Peggy Lipton, Jürgen Prochnow, Michael J. Anderson, Frank Silva, Harry Dean Stanton, Kiefer Sutherland, David Bowie, Kyle MacLachlan, David Lynch

Words – Ben Matthews.

Despite it currently standing as one of the filmmakers most successful creations, the way the original run of Twin Peaks ended left David Lynch feeling a lot of the same frustrations he felt during his early career, where his vision was tarred by commercial influence. The first season combined Lynch’s surreal sensibilities with TV writer Mark Frost’s more formulaic approach to crime drama, to create something that could speak to middle America while also hold its own as a definitively Lynchian expression.

Set in the fictional North American logging town of Twin Peaks, the series follows the FBI’s Special Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation following the murder of popular but troubled schoolgirl Laura Palmer. For the most part, it functions as an exceptionally well written procedural, focusing on the emotional aftermath of the death, and the dark underbelly of the seemingly wholesome community.
The key question the series poses is “who killed Laura Palmer?”, and Lynch, famously aversed to spoon-feeding an audience, was never going to make the answer easy for anybody. The demand for a straight answer grew with the show’s popularity, so much so that the network demanded it be answered definitively to satiate the audience. Lynch left the show during this period, the fun of it being taken out by a premature and cynical reveal. He returned to direct the last two episodes of the second series, which managed to recapture some of his initial interest in the project, but this was ultimately in vain as the show was cancelled and its popularity among the masses waned.

This didn’t mean Lynch had finished with this story. He explained, “I couldn’t get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk. I was in love with that world and I hadn’t finished with it. But making the movie wasn’t just to hold onto it; it seemed that there was more stuff that could be done”.
After many failed attempts to bring it back in some way, he was eventually given the go-ahead on a feature film continuation of Twin Peaks, a neatly marketable prequel, exploring the last few days in Laura Palmer’s life. Events which audiences knew well from the rigorous investigation of the series, but had never seen through any kind of flashback. Frost had also abandoned the project, leaving David Lynch to create his own version of Twin Peaks, free of the constraints of a network and a co-creator. With this being the case, it was never going to be as simple as what many would have expected; Fire Walk with Me is free of the confines of a prequel or sequel, instead it being a distillation of the show’s ideas through the unfettered mind of its creator.

Lynch subverts expectation within a few seconds of Fire Walk with Me, opening on the harsh screen of an untuned television set, with an uncannily familiar but wholly new theme from the late great Angelo Badalamenti. The opening credits roll before the TV is destroyed and audiences are thrown into the investigation of murdered teen Teresa Banks, in the town of Deer Meadow.
The case runs in parallel to that of Laura Palmer, which we saw play out in the opening episodes of Twin Peaks, what’s lacking in this location is the innate warmth that Lynch brought to the town and its people. Deer Meadow’s coffee is two days old, the diner’s waitresses and town sheriff’s inhospitable, the douglas fir scarce and lacking that beautiful deep green colour.

We are eventually introduced to Laura Palmer (again played by Sheryl Lee) and Donna Hayward (this time portrayed by an incredible Moira Kelly); Badalementi’s renowned theme from the series plays in full as the two walk to school, but this moment of slight levity is abruptly cut for some of the most heart wrenching sequences in Lynch’s whole career. His early films focused on the loss of innocence, and I don’t think he’s embodied the idea better than in Fire Walk with Me. It’s more earnest than anything seen previously in the show, seemingly written as a classic tragedy, exploring the stark duality of Laura Palmer free from the conventions of a procedural in which she has already died. This type of torment seems to come natural to Sheryl Lee; Lynch uses her scream like it’s a special effect throughout their work together. The Pink Room, a seedy basement underneath the Bang Bang bar, is a great representation of Lynch’s fascination with the darkness inevitably at the heart of any “idyllic” rurality. This is juxtaposed by the following scene, where Laura and Donna share a rare tender moment, the hangover of a night you’d rather forget.
The inherent nature of Fire Walk with Me being a prequel means that we know what’s waiting for Laura at the end. Clocks are constantly used to remind us of the inevitable; dates are fixated upon like an FBI case file. Ray Wise is able to flip the switch on Leland Palmer, warping any of his season one scenes which saw him as a grief-struck parent. Fire Walk With Me’s horror is not simply derived from the inherent absurdity of the town, it holds up just as well as a depiction of an abusive father and a lonely child. There are exchanges between the two that don’t need a “Black Lodge” explanation, it can be viewed as more of a psychological horror than a supernatural one.

It is as if Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels put every effort into dramatising these last days in Laura’s life with the intention of audience upset, the dark paired with the light to create a devastating impact. The films Lynch made after were closer in style to Fire Walk with Me as opposed to Eraserhead or Wild at Heart. His LA trilogy (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire) feels particularly close; a trio of female focused stories exploring tragedy in the face of beauty. Twin Peaks may have altered television forever, but Fire Walk with Me changed the entire context of which it is based. It represents a turning point for Lynch’s career, and for the show itself which returned to air 25 years later.

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