Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). Directed by David Lynch. Written by David Lynch and Robert Engels. Starring Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise.
Content warning: I know it’s a decades-old movie, but it’s worth mentioning just in case anybody is coming in unaware. This movie is about rape, incest, and the sexual abuse of a child. The article will talk about those topics, and the comments probably will as well. Please take care of yourselves.
What a strange movie this is.
I don’t mean that in the sense of it being weird, which is to be expected of a David Lynch. It is also that, although the surreal, fantastical aspects of the movie aren’t necessarily its strongest or most memorable elements. And I don’t mean that anything about the production is odd. It was made in a rush as part of a truncated and wobbly plan to continue Twin Peaks (1990) after the show’s cancellation in 1992, but there really isn’t anything unusual about that. The nature of Twin Peaks is such that there always more story to tell, and in 1992 show creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had no idea they would finally get around to a proper continuation in 2017.
What’s strange is that this is the story that made it to film. It’s strange and fascinating and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it’s also easy to see how Fire Walk With Me was long considered to have killed off Twin Peaks for good. It’s one thing to continue a television show in a feature film; it’s quite another thing to continue a television show in a feature film where everybody already knows the ending, and everybody already knows most of what happens every step along the way, and all of those things lead to a crushingly bleak climax and denouement that will leave the audience feeling worse than anything in the show ever made them feel.
To be clear: I fucking love this movie. I think it’s brilliant.
I didn’t always think that. I was a huge fan of the first season of Twin Peaks when it aired. I kept watching through the second season in spite of my growing disappointment. When I got around to watching Fire Walk With Me, well, I wasn’t impressed.
Most viewers weren’t, at the time. The critical consensus had largely shifted over the past thirty-three years, from widespread loathing upon release to more recent appreciation, but I hadn’t paid attention to how or why. When I sat down to rewatch the film last week, after not having seen it since I was barely a teenager, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The plot of Fire Walk With Me is actually quite straightforward, especially for Twin Peaks: it’s a prequel to the show that covers the last week of Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) life, leading up to her murder and the discovery of her corpse in the show’s pilot episode. Most of what happens in the film are things viewers of Twin Peaks already know, and the rest can be extrapolated. Sure, there is also some retconning or inconsistencies with regard to the abundant and ever-baffling Twin Peaks lore, but I’m not really going to get into that. Mostly because it’s not that important when talking about this movie, but also because I don’t get paid by the word, and there is a lot of Twin Peaks story lore.
Before we get to Laura, however, we have to suffer through the first section of the movie, which is not very good. I am aware that opinions vary, but I found myself rolling my eyes more than being intrigued during the opening scenes that deal with the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) and subsequent investigation by FBI Special Agents Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland. Their characters probably have names, but they aren’t important because they exit the story right before David Lynch himself shows up, followed by David Bowie, and honestly the whole thing is just annoying. I find myself in agreement with Steve Erickson’s 1992 review in LA Weekly—one of the few positive reviews Fire Walk With Me received upon release—where he writes, “The first half-hour is Lynch at his worst.” (Apologies for the Reddit link, but it’s the easiest place I’ve been able to find the full text of that review online. I recommend reading it! It’s an excellent piece of film criticism that says a lot of important and smart things both about this film and about the contemporary reaction to it.)
Once we get all that out of the way, the movie becomes so much better. We hear the first notes of the iconic theme music by Angelo Badalamenti. We see the “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign with its inexplicably large population number. We know where we are now, and it’s both comforting and ominous.
(Aside: David Lynch and Mark Frost intended for the town’s population to be 5,120, but longstanding rumor has it the number was altered by ABC because they were worried a very small town would be off-putting to viewers. My own personal theory, which is not in any way backed by evidence, is that somebody in Los Angeles was doing the television studio exec equivalent of the Lucille Bluth banana meme: “It’s a small town. How many people can it possibly have? Fifty thousand?”)
And then we see Laura Palmer. She is very much alive, lit in warm colors and surrounded by rich greens, walking through dappled morning sunlight. It’s a deliberate contrast to how we first met her, blue and cold and dead, in the show’s pilot.
Twin Peaks is a show structured around the death of a teenage girl, but everybody involved has always been very open about the fact Laura Palmer’s murder was essentially a framework on which to hang the rest of the story. For all that “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was a ’90s pop culture meme—I remember kids writing it on chalkboards and notes in middle school—the show was never about Laura Palmer. It was about how people reacted to her death, particularly the man investigating her death. Twin Peaks is Kyle MacLachlan’s show. It wouldn’t work, and certainly wouldn’t have the same impact, without his oddball charm as Special Agent Dale Cooper.
But Fire Walk With Me belongs to Sheryl Lee. This is her movie. Laura Palmer is the focus of nearly every scene after that first half-hour, and Lee is phenomenal in this role. She’s so breathtakingly good it is often hard to watch, because the entire purpose of the movie is to show, in agonizing detail, just how desperate, lonely, and fearful Laura was in the last days of her life. What the show revealed in flashbacks is shown now in vivid detail. What was before presented as clues or revelations for Cooper to uncover is now reframed as the inescapable realty of Laura’s life.
From the first moment we see her, walking through the neighborhood to meet Donna (played by Moira Kelly in the film, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle due to scheduling issues), we can see the sadness on Laura’s face. We see it before she’s doing cocaine in the high school bathroom, before she lies to both of her boyfriends, before she panics upon discovering the missing diary pages, before she encounters any of the people and events that blur the line between reality and nightmare, before she glimpses the always terrifying BOB (Frank Silva) in her bedroom. It’s not just that we know these are the last days of Laura’s life, but that we sense she also knows it, or fears it, because her life has become a living nightmare and she can’t see any way out.
Fire Walk With Me is, essentially, a horror movie. But Laura isn’t the final girl. She’s the dead girl walking, always doomed to end up as a beautiful corpse in somebody else’s story. The tension ratchets upward constantly as the violence and suffering escalate.
I watched Twin Peaks before I saw Fire Walk With Me, so I don’t know what it’s like to watch the film not knowing that Leland Palmer, possessed by BOB, killed his daughter after sexually abusing her since she was twelve. In comparison to the show, the film is purposefully more vague about the lines between BOB as an evil entity and Leland as a person. I don’t think this is an accident. I think it’s a purposeful choice that is meant to emphasize Laura’s perspective, thereby making room for an either/both interpretations. It might not be satisfying to leave us wondering how much of the abuse was BOB and how much was Leland, but it’s not supposed to be. The film is centered on what Laura sees and feels. There is no comfort to be had in drawing a clear, rational line between a mysterious entity and an abusive father, because a child was hurt either way. It’s supposed to be unbearable in its ambiguity.
In any case, watching the film while already knowing that Leland/BOB will kill Laura doesn’t take away any of the tension. It only makes it worse. This is most apparent in a pair of amazing (and amazingly painful) scenes between Laura and her father, played by the inimitable Ray Wise.
The first is the absolutely harrowing scene with the Palmer family at the dinner table, when Leland tells Laura to wash her hands. There is no overt violence. There are no surreal or supernatural elements. Yet Laura and her mother (played by Grace Zabriskie) are so frightened they are stammering and trembling, and Leland is terrifying in his barely-controlled rage, and the audience is left breathless. The scene is so well written and well acted that we feel its weight like a black hole in the center of the story. Everything that Laura does outside the house—all the sex and drugs and desperate rebellion—stems from the fact that she is a teenage girl whose home life is a waking nightmare.
Both Laura and Leland are so tightly bound in their respective miseries that one might think it would offer some relief when they finally blow up at each other. But when that does happen, in the second scene I want to highlight, it’s the opposite of relief. It only compounds the horror.
This happens in the scene when they are in Leland’s car and come to the stoplight. They are confronted by Philip Gerard (Al Strobel), who is a, er, one-armed traveling shoe salesman possessed by a formerly-evil entity named MIKE. (I really do love Twin Peaks. Nobody has ever done it like Twin Peaks.) The confrontation further frightens an already hanging-by-a-thread Laura, and at the same time throws Leland into a flashback that reveals the how and why he murdered Teresa Banks. And what happens immediately afterward just piles more and more discomfort onto the situation. Leland is spiraling out of control as he realizes or remembers (or both) what he’s done. Laura is scared and repulsed by her father—a sickly twisted version of the very mundane teenager awkwardness of being trapped in a car with an emotional parent. They’re both shouting things that make very little sense.
And they’re in a convertible, in the middle of town, so none of this is hidden away as it previously had been inside the Palmer house. Strangers are watching it all unfold.
The public nature of this confrontation underlines a theme running through the entire story: So much happens in plain sight. In Twin Peaks the town’s dark underbelly and the circumstances of Laura’s death are treated as a complex puzzle that has to be dug into and teased apart in order to be revealed. But in Fire Walk With Me it’s so much simpler that than. There is a monster in the Palmer house. Laura is crying out for help. And nobody listens.
Fire Walk With Me is a story that almost nobody wanted following the Twin Peaks cancellation, which certainly impacted how it was received. It doesn’t provide any new answers to the deep lore of the show. It doesn’t give us a glimpse of what happens after the second season’s baffling end. Even before the movie came out, there was a sense that it was an empty cash-grab precisely because it was telling a story the audience already knew. One reporter asked Lynch about that very thing when the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992: “If you followed the television series, you know what happened to Laura Palmer, and all you are waiting for in the film is the murder. That is basically the storyline: when is she going to die?”
It’s actually a fair question, even though we might now quibble over whether film critics gave the film a fair chance. There are persistent rumors that the film was booed at Cannes, but screenwriter Robert Engels has said that didn’t happen. The booing happened later, in many (but not all) written reviews. Lynch, for his part, was pretty philosophical about the negative reviews. His reaction seems to have been the precise opposite of what followed the negative reactions to Dune (1984), for a very simple reason. With Dune, he had to surrender creative control to the studio and ended up with a film that was not what he wanted to make. But Fire Walk With Me, no matter what its detractors said, was exactly the movie he wanted to make.
And the movie he wanted to make tells an ugly story. It’s sordid and violent. It’s painfully uncomfortable and unrelentingly sad. It has very little of the show’s quirkiness and humor. It offers no hope, because we know how Laura’s life ends. We know she won’t escape. We know none of her pleas for help are answered.
Watching this movie as a forty-something woman is a very different experience than watching it as a teenage girl in the ’90s. Certain things, like the naïve way Donna idolizes Laura, or the clueless way James (James Marshall) wants to save her, simply have me clutching my heart and thinking, “Oh, my god, they’re children.” Other things, like the casual ease with which everyone accepts that of course adult men want to have sex with teenage girls and will do so given half a chance, have me reaching for a heavy object to throw and shouting, “Are you fucking kidding me? They’re children.”
Sheryl Lee also talks about this in a 2017 interview. She explains that she didn’t realize until much later just how young the character of Laura is when she dies, nor did she expect that women would approach her to tell her how much her portrayal of a victim of familial sexual abuse would mean to real-world survivors. It is often true that stories we experience when we are young look very different when we are older, but it is especially true when it’s a story about youth.
I think that’s another aspect of the initial response to Fire Walk With Me, as well as to how it has been reappraised by both critics and fans over the years. When Twin Peaks aired, there was a gossipy appeal to Laura’s story, a scandalous allure to discovering all the dirty, dark secrets about sex and drugs hidden beneath the homecoming queen’s perfect façade, but the focus was on the people around her and the man trying to solve her murder. Fire Walk With Me puts the focus squarely on Laura’s perspective and Laura’s pain, and in doing so it turns a mirror to the audience. The framing of the story changes, and with it the questions it asks of the us, the viewers: Do we think this is sordid and exciting, or do we think this is a horrifying tragedy that should have been prevented?
Not everybody likes to have that mirror placed before them. It’s a challenge to the audience. It’s a way of saying: You delighted in seeing her memorialized in iconic images. You loved her story when it was about uncovering the salacious secrets of a naughty girl. You tittered over revelations of teenage sex workers and drug addicts. You loved her beautiful and dead in that story.
But before she was a dead girl, she was a living girl who desperately needed help. And nobody helped her. That’s what this story is about.
I love the final scene of Fire Walk With Me. The film has a very shaky start, but it ends perfectly. Laura is dead. Her death was horrific and brutal. She was tossed in the river like so much trash. But in the Red Room she is no longer alone. Agent Cooper is there, but more importantly, so is the angel and the light that Laura thought had abandoned her.
All through Twin Peaks we watched how other people reacted to Laura’s death. But here we see her own grief. She knows what she suffered. She knows what she lost. She smiles and breaks down crying. She is not, in the end, lost and alone in the darkness. She is finally able to mourn everything that was stolen from her.
What are your thoughts on Fire Walks With Me? How do you think it fits into the complex lore of Twin Peaks? Have your feelings about the film changed over time?
Next week: We finish up our month-long tribute to David Lynch with his beloved magnum opus. Watch Mulholland Drive on Criterion, Microsoft, Apple, or Fandango.
