The 1992 film,
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a prequel to the
Twin Peaks television series that ran from 1990 to 1991, opens with a shot of a television being destroyed. This moment sets the stage for a horrific murder, but it is also an ingeniously visual way for director David Lynch to announce that he is deconstructing the wildly popular and endearingly quirky series, and that fans of the show should go into this feature movie expecting a vastly different tone. Sure enough, the wonderfully lively homemade cherry pie aesthetic of the show gives way to a descent into the personal hell of a high school student, Laura Palmer, who, despite her beauty and her strong-willed independence, seems to drift toward her grisly demise with poetically resigned fatalism.
During the original two seasons of
Twin Peaks, the world was introduced to Laura Palmer, played by Sheryl Lee, by way of her corpse, which was found washed up on a shore, and, subsequently, by way of her adorable and angelic homecoming queen photograph. The Laura that television audiences knew in the show was a mere memory and a photogenic smile that left them anxious to know the identity of her murderer. Even a handful of “red room” scenes with Laura talking in cryptic slow-speak and a side-plot involving her cousin, Maddy, who was also played by Lee, did not go a long way toward unveiling her mystique. In
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, however, Sheryl Lee's Laura Palmer is a living, breathing, walking, talking, laughing, and loving human being in the flesh, and we instinctively feel protective towards her, despite knowing the outcome of her story from the start. The experience of watching her futile struggles against drug addiction, promiscuity, and incest is akin to watching a train wreck unfold in real life, and the darkness, which seems miles removed from the amusing “damn fine cup of coffee” absurdity that graced the television show even during its bleakest episodes, is overbearing.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me does not solve the mysteries of the television series, and, in fact, it draws us deeper into the uncanny mythology by zeroing in on a strange green ring, a trailer park scene with the late Harry Dean Stanton, an unsettling disappearance, and a foreboding cameo by the late David Bowie. The appearances of favorite eccentric characters from the show are either minimized or confined to the feature-length collection of deleted scenes, known as
The Missing Pieces, that appears on Blu-ray editions of this movie. A handful of actors, namely Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, Mädchen Amick, and Kyle MacLachlan, reprise their roles, but to a different and more menacingly atmospheric drumbeat. Moira Kelly, one of the most gorgeous actresses of the 1990s and beyond, takes over the role of Laura's best friend, Donna Hayward, who was portrayed by Lara Flynn Boyle during the series, with favorable results, because she is more convincing as a naive character foil for Laura.
I first watched this movie six months ago immediately after enjoying a marathon though every episode of the original two seasons of the television series on Blu-ray, and, although I found it to be a brilliantly effective film, my appreciation was admittedly clouded by “Twin Peaks fatigue.” Upon revisiting it today as a lead-in before jumping into a new Blu-ray set of the third
Twin Peaks season, however, I find that it functions quite well as an unnerving stand-alone horror film in the same scatterbrained way that other Lynch movies, like
Eraserhead and
Mulholland Drive, exist on their own baffling terms.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is not a film to be “enjoyed” in a casual sense of the word, but there is a joy to be found in immersing one's self in Lynch's world, where anything goes. This film is also a visual wonder that takes the neo-noir cinematography of the series a few into a territory that is a few shades darker, especially during an early nighttime diner scene, during an insanely erotic nightclub sequence, and, finally, during a train car scene, where unimaginable terrors play out.
This Criterion Blu-ray gifts us not only with a great-looking transfer of the feature film and of
The Missing Pieces deleted scenes, but also with a new present-day interview with the lovely Sheryl Lee and a 2014 table discussion with Lee, Wise, Zabriskie, and Lynch himself.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me seems to look better on this Criterion disc than it does on my
Twin Peaks Original Series box set, but it may just be my expectations at play, since I have not compared the two transfers side-by-side.
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