Diane, it’s 1 pm. I’m at the end of my journey. Diane, this franchise gives me a strange feeling. It’s a series of clues that lead in circles and imagery that defies explanation. It’s mesmerizing and alienating in the same breath. It features purposely terrible performances, scripts where the characters talk past each other, and numerous scenes that most likely take place outside of space and time.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me takes those features, cranks up the volume and the contrast, and lets out a primal scream. Where the series was often subdued and mostly played by the rules of network television, the film opens the floodgates. It does so by putting the focus back on the woman who started it all: Laura Palmer. Only this time Laura is in the driver’s seat – this is the inciting incident of Twin Peaks from Laura’s perspective, a missing piece at the heart of the story that is crucial to decoding all of the madness.
As a note, I also watched Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a compilation of deleted and extended scenes that didn’t make the cut for the 1992 film. It’s an interesting bit of ephemera, and it features the return of some members of the series ensemble who are absent from the original film like Joan Chen and Michael Ontkean, but a lot of the scenes function similarly enough to what was actually in the film that I’ll mostly be focusing on Fire Walk with Me here.
One last time: here’s five thoughts on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, with a little bit of The Missing Pieces thrown in. Spoilers below. Content Warning: sexual assault, suicide.
1. Are You Talking About that Little Girl that Got Murdered?
We open on a prologue following the investigation of the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) in Nega-Twin Peaks, a.k.a. Deer Meadow, WA. Twin Peaks was always concerned with foils and opposites, so it makes sense that as the film reestablishes the importance of the murder mystery it solved halfway through the second season, it does so by emphasizing everything that Twin Peaks the town is not. Where Twin Peaks is kitschy and charming, the people of Deer Meadow are openly hostile. The Sheriff’s department is cold and mocking where Sheriff Truman’s team was quirky and inviting.
Even the mystery itself is the opposite of Laura’s in many ways. Where Laura was somehow deeply connected to every person in town, Teresa Banks was a loner, a drifter who interacted with very few townspeople. No one seems to know her by name, and the few that do outwardly associate her with drug use and wildness. As the series wore on, Laura’s good girl facade later gave way to a persona that was closer to how the town perceives Teresa, but it’s striking that there’s no mask on Teresa’s supposed dark side. She has a bit of a bigger part to play in The Missing Pieces, which makes it clear that she was killed by Leland Palmer after attempting to blackmail him for his indiscretions, but we mostly see her in shadowy glimpses during Fire Walk with Me – the film originally kept her just as mysteriously distant as the series kept Laura.
The opening also introduces us to Agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley, played by Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland. They’re fitting guides through the first segment of the film because their relationship is the reverse of Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman. Desmond, who takes the lead, is mostly stoic, while Stanley, the sidekick, is more whimsical and eccentric. Their odyssey through Bizarro-Peaks is off-putting, made even more so by the film’s refusal to slow down to explain what’s going on. Agent Cooper later pops into the film, but his appearance is mostly contained to a brief, strobe-lit interlude (containing David Bowie of all people) that was intercut with a visit to the Black Lodge and a meeting of the spirits.
2. We Live Inside a Dream
Twin Peaks the series is strange and often abstract, but it’s always careful to provide enough to orient a mainstream audience. In the year that passed between the end of the series and the filming of the movie, David Lynch clearly rid himself of that obligation. Saying Fire Walk with Me is uninterested in handholding would be an understatement; it’s purposefully baffling, throwing image after inscrutable image at the screen and rarely pausing to let the audience decipher whatever it is they just saw.
Continued belowFunctionally, this lets the film spend more time with the various spirits of the Black Lodge, and expands on the lore surrounding their allegiance and motivations. The most frightening moments of both films take place within the Lodge itself, in both the red “waiting room” and in a new place described as being above a convenience store. A meeting of the spirits in that room brings together BOB, the Arm, a couple of spooky lumberjacks, a man in a plaster mask, and an old woman who’d previously shown up in a single episode of the series going by the name Mrs. Tremond with a boy she claimed was her grandson before mysteriously disappearing. This time around, she and her grandson were going by the name Chalfont, lurking in a trailer park near the home of Teresa Banks.
Throughout both the series and the movie, what exactly the spirits are trying to do remains unclear. BOB is clearly evil, but everyone else remains somewhat ambiguous. Mrs. Chalfont seemingly aids Donna, but in the film seems to set up Agent Desmond for his doom. The Arm variously mocks Agent Cooper and provides him with clues spoken as riddles, and he spends most of his time during Fire Walk with Me hanging out with BOB and feasting on a dish he calls “pain and sorrow.” The Giant only appears to help Agent Cooper, but he’s later seen in the company of the Arm. Whether they serve the light or the dark is not clear, giving way to an even more troubling idea: perhaps they serve no one beyond their own whims, doing whatever they please for their own amusement.
3. Write It in Your Diary
When we finally get back to the town of Twin Peaks, the gang’s all back – minus four major losses. (More actors are missing from Fire Walk with Me, but all but four are in the deleted scenes of Missing Pieces). Sherilyn Fenn and Richard Beymer (Audrey and Ben Horne, respectively) are absent from the proceedings, as is Piper Laurie’s Catherine Martell. Moira Kelly subs in for Lara Flynn Boyle playing Donna Hayward, and given Donna’s substantive role in the film, Boyle’s departure is by far most noticeable. Kelly’s approach to playing Donna is far more meek and subdued than Boyle’s, which maybe makes sense for where Donna is as a character prior to Laura’s death. As a consequence, however, Donna is far less compelling here than in the show, to the point where I have trouble buying the idea of Donna and Laura being friends at all.
Though she had only gotten to shine on the series in bits and pieces, this film is the Sheryl Lee showcase. She’s given a nearly impossible task of reconciling all the various Laura Palmers, the way every person in town seemed to have a different picture in their heads of who she was, and she knocks it out of the park. Lee’s approach is to play Laura as being in the midst of a (fully understandable) nervous breakdown, which both makes the aftereffects of her death make more sense and makes for a more damning depiction of the townsfolk after the fact. As Bobby put it early in the series, something is clearly wrong with Laura in the days leading up to her death, and the lack of any substantive intervention from any of the people in her life is more horrifying than anything Laura does during the film.
Throughout her final week, Laura is haunted by visions, some brought on by spirits like Mrs. Chalfont or BOB, and some that seem to be warnings of the horror that’s to come. At one point she’s visited by a bleeding Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), telling of a future where Laura and Agent Cooper are trapped together in the Black Lodge. Laura clearly doesn’t understand the warning, but to fans of the series it’s clear enough – Agent Cooper, as we saw at the end of season 2, never left the Black Lodge, and his doppelgänger is loose in the world.
4. With this Ring, I Thee Wed
Fire Walk with Me is a traumatic journey. At various times we watch Laura nearly drag Donna and James into her abyss. We see her confiding in poor Harold Smith, setting him on the path that would eventually lead to his suicide. Most of the events are things we already knew happened to Laura, but all of them were previously relayed second hand. Hearing them described in the show, it was easy to assume that they were either exaggerations by the characters or a function of the show obscuring the truth by unmooring the details from reality. Seeing them from Laura’s perspective makes them tangible, and is itself an act of de-objectification. TV show Laura is a mirage constructed of vague half-truths and impressions; movie Laura is her own person. She’s losing herself to drugs, is repeatedly raped by an evil spirit, and is struggling to find a genuine connection among any of the people in her life, but she’s allowed her own thoughts and feelings after hours of footage in which she could only be refracted through others.
Continued belowThe film climaxes with Laura’s murder, which unfolds mostly the way it was laid out during the show (The Missing Pieces even includes a scene of the Log Lady sobbing in the woods as she hears Laura’s screams). What the film reveals, however, is that BOB’s intention wasn’t to kill Laura, it was to possess her, an act that Mike prevented by providing Laura with a ring previously worn by Teresa Banks. Mike’s intervention adds a further complication that makes the motivation of the spirits as inscrutable as the film itself.
5. I’ll See You Again in 25 Years
The film ends on a shot of Laura and Agent Cooper, seemingly trapped in the Black Lodge. It starts as a bleak, nihilistic image, but in classic Twin Peaks fashion, it gives way to a vision of hope. The pair look up above them as an angel floats past, a symbol that perhaps there’s still someone looking out for her even as her life and soul have been consumed by darkness.
That twinge of light at the end of the tunnel is where the series was left suspended in the 25 years between the finale and the limited series Twin Peaks: The Return, and that’s where I’ll be finishing for now. We previously covered that series back when it premiered (and you can check that coverage out here if you’re continuing on your journey), but I’ll be taking a break from this series before I let it further break my brain.
There are endless wikis and fan forums devoted to this show, some of which I consulted on occasion to help guide my thoughts on what was going on. But after having watched through all of the show’s original run, I don’t know that this is a puzzle that’s intended to be solved. There are likely some solutions to some of the questions it poses – Mark Frost and David Lynch are sure hands, and the show rarely feels like it’s meandering without having something specific to say. The mysteries aren’t what strikes me about the show, however. What sticks with me is the feeling of transgression, the way it juxtaposes right and wrong and muddies the water between the two. The blurring between dream and nightmare, love and sin, cruelty and kindness, is ultimately irreconcilable. This show succeeds by forcing you to sit in a liminal space.
