Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me: A Review
Through the darkness of future's past, The magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds...
"Fire... walk with me."
Beginnings:
David Lynch is one of the most critically acclaimed film makers of all time.
He has been described by The Guardian as "the most important director of this era", while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking”.
In 1990, in a surprise move, he created the television show Twin Peaks. It became an instant commercial and critical sensation and completely redefined the possibilities of television as a medium as well as profoundly and permanently altering its DNA.
Twin Peaks was briefly the biggest television show in the world.
Focusing on the mysterious murder of a beautiful high school student, Laura Palmer, it bore many of the hallmarks of David Lynch’s experimental surrealism.
With the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer being revealed midway through its second season and a dramatic change in timeslot however, ratings very quickly began to wane before the show’s cancellation in 1991 – representing one of the biggest “rise and fall” stories in the history of television.
In 1992, with the reputation of, and public appetite for, Twin Peaks having taken a sharp nosedive, and the now defunct show having become something of a public laughing stock, David Lynch (again surprisingly) decided to make a Twin Peaks film – a prequel of sorts.
The film would detail the final days of Laura Palmer.
Of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch has stated:
“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.”
The film’s release was an unequivocal disaster.
It was notoriously booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival and it tanked at the Box Office.
The critical and commercial failure of the film threatened to derail David Lynch’s entire career.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in fact has a Metacritic rating of 28% (which is remarkable per se for the fact that this rating relates to a David Lynch film).
Times film critic Vincent Canby stated: "It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be".
However, it is my belief, and the belief of an increasingly notable minority, that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is most likely David Lynch’s masterpiece and his finest hour.
A strange, eerie, ominous, disturbing and at times baffling creative endeavor, there is no doubt that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has its flaws. The film is split in two with even the most ardent David Lynch fans seemingly unable to properly justify the purpose of its first 30 minutes.
Yet in many ways, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me works best as a psychological horror. And make no mistake; it is darker, nastier, more disturbing and heavier than any horror film you have ever seen whilst being as beautiful and as spellbinding as any film you have ever seen at the same time.
According to David Lynch, the film is about "the loneliness, shame, guilt, confusion and devastation of the victim of incest”.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me told the story of what really did happen to Laura Palmer and it turned out that the truth of her story was quite simply unbearable.
Film maker James Gray has said of the film: "I've never seen a movie that's been made in the last 30 years... haven't seen a movie in the last thirty years, in America, which so asks us to understand and be in the shoes of a person suffering so profoundly. It's a thing of beauty."
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is certainly a thing of beauty. It is however a thing of unimaginable horror also.
This is my review of the most underrated film in the history of modern cinema and one of the best.
To put it quite simply, there has never been another film like it.
The Ghost of Laura Palmer:
“Open your eyes James…You don’t even know me. There are things about me….Even Donna doesn’t know me. Your Laura disappeared. It’s just me now.”
Laura Palmer is haunted by the ghost of herself. The essence of her was stolen and went missing years ago. She has become a shell of who she was once – she has become hollow and remote.
Although she is the object of male sexual lust (with the exception of side piece James who does genuinely love her), the paradox is that although she gives her body to these men, they can never truly possess her. Her soul is wandering lost in the woods.
Yet her torment is even worse than this.
Although Laura Palmer has had to endure a problem since she was 12 which she neither fully understands nor is able to talk to anyone about, she is plagued by an even bigger and more immediate sort of psychic agony.
What will become of her soul in the afterlife? Laura Palmer understands that the end of her life is near but her fear is amplified by the knowledge that she is also dying a spiritual death – a theme evoked masterfully by the disappearance of an angel in a painting on her bedroom wall, which brings her to tears.
She treads the dark woodlands between two worlds – between life and death – knowing that soon she will have to cross over to the other side, yet the sexual molestation of her body and the attack upon her sense of self have left her to wonder about how she will be received in the next life.
The dissociation and devastation that Laura Palmer has suffered because of her history of childhood sexual abuse is at times worn like a mask of emptiness on her face – and the truth is, to see her this way is simply horrendous.
There are many people who try to reach Laura Palmer for a variety of agendas and purposes (from the men who want to use her sexually, to her friends who want to save her but are not sure what she needs to be saved from). Yet the nature of her problem has made her fundamentally unreachable – even to herself.
Her repression of childhood trauma has created a terrible void within herself that she understands can never be filled (her only avenue of escape being self medicating with Class A drugs and remoulding herself as a lady of the night and prostitute in order to experience the sensation of recovering control of her own body and sexuality instead of being victim to the most unspeakable violation of it).
Because Laura Palmer’s emotions have either been worn down and numbed by heavy drug use and dissociation or dialed up by her fight or flight response to danger, nobody is able to truly recognize the distress she is in.
The clock is ticking.
The Strange Dark Road To Horror:
Donna : Do you think that if you were falling in space… that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?
Laura : Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever… And the Angel’s wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away….
There is so much mystery in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me. It is a world in one can easily become lost – but be warned: terrible things lurk there.
In typical Lynchian fashion he has created a world which is at once both comfortingly familiar and completely terrifying.
To a point it is perhaps true that Lynch is mining the same territory that was first marked out by Stephen King, by finding the horror within the four walls of domestic family life and therefore shattering our illusions of the safety of the familiar.
Again, like Stephen King, much of Lynch’s work in this film is informed by the Gothic tradition.
Fire Walk With Me does indeed adopt a heavy handed use of the Gothic Double (the characters of both Laura Palmer (the schoolgirl vs prostitute) and Leland Palmer (Leland vs Bob) are split by a duality and between good and evil).
But although Lynch does make use of the many of the conventional tropes of horror in Fire Walk With Me, the way in which he employs these ingredients is completely and totally unique to himself.
The film operates at an intensified level precisely because his use of magical realism and surrealism implore the viewer to abandon pre-existing dependency upon conventional exposition, linear plot advancement, time structure and scientific logic to reach for a state of heightened awareness of life’s connectedness and hidden meanings.
It is perhaps with this in mind that Lynch commences his film with a shot of a television being smashed.
What is required is a very deep mode of interaction between film maker and viewer which acknowledges the existence of a daimonic reality in which strong hidden forces rule our lives behind the curtain of ordinary reality.
This is a level of reality which we all know but suppress in the name of pragmatism.
In Fire Walk With Me, the “forest” does not just signify the wild and the mysterious world beyond the forces of domestic control. It also signifies the darkest and hidden recesses of our psyche and a level of reality which is deeper and in many ways more real than our everyday one.
Yet the virtuosic abilities of Lynch as a film maker are so dazzling that he does not always need to swing for the fences to evoke this level of “hyperreality” in the story of a young schoolgirl who is raped and eventually murdered by her father.
He has a spectacular visual flair for the small and simple also, which when used is equally effective.
In one scene, we witness Laura Palmer suffer a jaw-dropping and in truth very alarming level of psychic suffering whilst at school upon the discovery of the true identity of her rapist the previous night. As we see her get up and leave her seat in the classroom, Lynch cuts to a highly poignant and ominous shot of her empty seat. His message and cue is this time clear and simple: this was the time Laura Palmer would ever sit in that school seat…
The “Lynchian” Mental Life of the Sexual Abuse Victim:
The world of the written word is replete with tributes to and definitions of the “Lynchian”.
This is often said to be good evidence of the mark of the true Artist – namely that he has invented a signature style which did not exist before him.
Although this is true, and you can certainly see Lynchian influences in television shows as varied as Game of Thrones, Lost, The X Files, The Sopranos, Mad Men and films such as the It reboot, Requiem for a Dream, Pulp Fiction and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, every attempted definition of “Lynchian” is in truth a different definition to every other.
In fact as anyone who really does “know” and “understand” the work of David Lynch would tell you, his work is not designed to be either known or understood.
The work of David Lynch is elusive and enigmatic.
Its magic is performed by producing unfamiliarity in what is familiar.
The films of David Lynch are the most explosively informed by Freud precisely because of his use of the “uncanny” to facilitate fear and uncertainty.
It is an abstract idea to get a grip of and a stranger one yet to fully digest: however David Lynch’s films allow us to bridge the gap between the conscious and subconscious realms of our psychological lives by reminding us that sometimes we know but at the same time we do not know.
In many ways therefore the magical realism and duality that haunts this strange world serves as a powerful and realistic metaphor for the psychological journey that someone goes through when unearthing and recovering memories of childhood sexual abuse.
Although David Lynch is not interested in psychological realism per se, his use of horror tropes, create a level of psychological hyperreality which shed light on Laura Palmer’s quest to establish the true identity of her rapist, Bob.
Dissociation is followed by an active process of reconstruction – putting together clues, symbols and meanings to illuminate the darkest recesses of a fractured psyche.
Our objective should not to be seek to translate these distilled elements of the subconscious in order to arrive at any particular meaning.
Fire Walk With Me creates an entire universe with its very own language which operates at a subconscious level to convey its many layers of meaning.
The Greatest Unrecognised Performance In Film History:
In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Sheryl Lee delivers a performance to fall in love with.
Like the subject matter of the film, Laura Palmer is dark, mysterious and beautiful all at once.
It is not just the fact that Sheryl Lee is beautiful however – stupendously beautiful even.
It is the fact that she manages to convey every emotion known to humanity.
Her face – as a projection screen of unspeakable suffering – is electric in every scene she is in.
She manages to deliver a truly virtuosic acting performance of genuinely Operatic dimensions.
There are times when Laura Palmer is detached from others around her – dissociated to such a heightened degree that it is truly horrendous to witness – yet these moments are masterfully counterbalanced by those in which she is shockingly vulnerable – often in the same scene.
The effect is so disarming that you simply want to reach into the screen and put your arms around her and never let go.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me combines the horrific with the sweet, the dark with the light, the domestic with the wild and the ugly with the beautiful. In this exhilarating, terrifying, disturbing and dizzying ride, you find scene after scene white hot with emotion.
At times the film is truly hideous. At other times it is achingly beautiful.
The scene in which Laura Palmer “breaks up” with her “second boyfriend” (and perhaps true love) James in the woods is one of the most astonishing scenes in modern film history. The manner in which the inner conflicts in Laura Palmer manifest themselves, the way in which she mercilessly (and in fact hilariously) taunts and slaps him before passionately and uncontrollably realizing and confessing her love for him - the darkness and tragedy of it all – is just spellbinding.
What really strikes me about that scene is the emotional “heaviness” of it (aided indelibly by Angelo Badalamenti’s hypnotic, eerie and desolate dark woodland of a film score). It is just so so “heavy” that it is almost unwatchable.
That there are several scenes in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me which are just as hypnotically effective (the dinner table scene, the scene in which Philip Gerrard/Mike pulls up alongside the car of Laura Palmer to warn her about her father) is perhaps all the evidence that is needed in a contemporary and fair appraisal of the film.
In order to fully understand the emotionally staggering nature of Sheryl Lee’s performance, it is only right to consider the direction of David Lynch.
Often even the staunchest defenders of the film credit it as a “vision” of a truly visionary film maker.
In fact I disagree with that assessment.
It was not the product of a vision; instead it was the product of an exploration – an exploration of the dark dynamics that occur within a child’s mind when subjected to incest.
In practical terms this meant that the script provided only the most minimal of starting points.
Once rolling the actors were required to exaggerate their performances and to amplify them until the point of absurdity. By extracting these wildly off beat performances out of his actors and actresses and with the use of strange tonal shifts, huge close up shots, a parody of Soap Opera kitsch, and surreal post-modernism, David Lynch achieved a level of “hyperreality” in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.
In this case, more really does mean more.
The more levels and layers of the performance, the more meanings that can be learned from them.
It is perhaps for this reason that at times, one finds oneself actually fearing for the wellbeing of Sheryl Lee as the actress.
How much further can she be pushed? How much further can she go? In many ways it is remarkable that she did not completely break down during filming.
It must be said that the film contains several other outstanding performances from the supporting cast. Ray Wise as rapist/murderer/father Leland Palmer is pushed almost as hard and achieves a performance which is also virtuosic.
But as far as the actors go, the star that burns brightest is the sadly underappreciated and underused talent of Sheryl Lee.
It is a performance which conveys tremendous humanity.
It is very moving to understand how although she deals with her trauma by presenting her body to the men around her as both sexually available but psychically remote and barren, underneath it all is the tragic reality of a very scared and very vulnerable child.
It is difficult not to love that poor girl. It is even more difficult not to fear for her.
This was the greatest film performance by an actress that was never recognized with an Oscar nomination.
The Sound of the Other World:
The biggest compliment that anyone could possibly pay to composer Angelo Badalamenti is that his soundtrack to Twin Peaks (both the series and the film) is as crucial to its legacy as David Lynch’s direction and writing is.
This would be no exaggeration.
Arguably one of the most recognizable television theme tunes of all time, his eerie, dreamlike, beautiful and ultimately menacing score has been called by online music bible AllMusicGuide “one of the best scores ever written for television”.
Instantly evocative and suggestive of two strange foreign worlds echoing eachother, Angelo Badalamenti managed to craft music that served as the vehicle for David Lynch’s expressionistic and surreal visuals.
The Guardian highlights the duality in the unsettling beauty of his soundtrack:
“That duality is also represented in Badalamenti’s instrumental pieces, via techniques such as chord suspensions, evoking dissonance and longing.”
It is a truly remarkable piece of work.
Perhaps the first and last word on how it was conceived should go to the great man himself:
The Work of an Artist:
What exactly is David Lynch inviting us (the viewer) to do with this film?
I think that he wants us to be brave and courageous.
I think that he wants us to watch without judgment and to construct our own version of the “reality” of Laura Palmer’s tragic final days.
He wants us to be thoughtful and intelligent.
Most of all he wants us to engage in a process of creative interaction with the film – precisely because he does not want to condescend us. He trusts in our humanity to make of it what we will.
By presenting such an uncompromising and nuanced portrait of Laura Palmer, he puts tremendous trust in us. He wants us to know that she was far from perfect and he wants us to know what she experienced and how that influenced what she became.
Against all odds given the film’s structure and style, this is what makes the film such a humane one.
By presenting his work in fragments, which cross different dimensions of reality, tones and genres, and do not operate in an orthodox way, he magnifies this responsibility upon the viewer.
The film ends with a shot of the ghost of Laura Palmer being comforted in “the Lodge” by Agent Dale Cooper before she sees the angel that had disappeared from her painting and begins to cry tears of happiness.
It is a powerful image and note on which to end the film. It is a lone final message of hope: perhaps David Lynch is suggesting that there is hope even for the raped and murdered victim of incest.
What did I make of Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me when I first watched it?
I watched it alone at the age of 14. Once the film had ended I honestly did not know what I had just seen. I knew only that I had never seen a film like it before.
I felt haunted by a tremendous feeling of sadness. A sense of dread. Maybe even a sense of loneliness.
I can understand how people detect undertones of sadism in the work of David Lynch. The narrative thrust of Fire Walk With Me reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s classic “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” in many ways. “Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”
Like Tess, there is a dimension to the actions of Laura Palmer which could be described as altruistic.
But at the end, although alone, I actually stood up and applauded. I said to myself: “What an artist. What a fucking artist!” I knew immediately that I had to see the film again.
Reflections of Reflections:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is anything but an easy watch.
This is not a “film” in the way many people know and understand that word.
It is better to see it as a type of expressionistic painting. The strokes of rich red and jet black darkness (my word, the darkness…) really do require us to take a step back, reconsider and reimagine.
This is not the sort of film you should watch with friends or a partner.
To that extent I can in part understand the reaction at that disastrous and now infamous screening at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.
Fire Walk With Me is a shadowy masterpiece of the blackest night sky which is best watched alone in a darkened room, in the same way I first watched it.
Rapid moral judgments become futile.
The line between reality and fantasy blurs.
The conscious mind wages a war with the subconscious one.
Forget everything that you believe a film can and should do.
See it for what it is - not for what it was said to be.
And the hidden bonus is, because of the film’s monumental commercial Box Office failure, it is (at the time of writing least) available for free on YouTube. Just skip the first 30 minutes….