Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

Watching Twin Peaks for the first time and I think the fact that I haven’t seen The Return yet makes this feel like a slightly incomplete experience, though that wasn’t true for the majority of this film’s existence so what can you do?

It’s a brave film, in a lot of ways: in resisting “fan service,” in refusing to resolve any mysteries left from the series, in adding at least a dozen additional threads, and in control. A lot was shot and written for this movie, but Lynch recognized, correctly, that the story being told here wasn’t the town’s or Agent Cooper’s or the denizens of The Cool Room, but Laura Palmer’s, and while the stuff on the periphery of that story adds to the lore and raises the stakes of whatever spiritual battle one perceives to be taking place in and around Twin Peaks, this is, well and truly, about Laura Palmer, as much as the television show is about her absence. 

It’s an uncomfortable watch. My partner was gripped up on my arm and watching through the corners of his eyes for the last 15-20 minutes, and I can’t blame him. Fire Walk With Me is about abuse and incest and rape, about a life run so thoroughly and spectacularly aground that the notion of its having happened within the dream of a dream is something of a relief. The show, I think, lets Leland off the hook for what he does, treating him like a passenger in his own life. Fire Walk With Me makes him as much of a monster as BOB, as you’re not seeing him through the dispassionate eyes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but through those of his daughter. Whatever BOB is, whatever’s being beamed to our planet from The Cool Room, Laura and Sara Palmer both know that they’re living with a monster. It feels like much of the town is on the edge of that as a premonition, too, but they’re all so wrapped up in normalcy or their infatuation with Laura or both that the only people who think to ask her what’s wrong are similarly powerless. 

There is, obviously, the supernatural element to consider, much of it brutal and horrifying, but what’s sticking with me, what makes this so good and so harrowing and so alive within the context of one of television’s most lived-in shows is how tight Lynch keeps things on Laura, like nobody else in the world matters, like a match which, when snuffed out, deprives the place in which she burned of light. Which is exactly what she was.