Chapter Two:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
By Brett Beach
February 25, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
At that point in my life, I had had relatively few encounters with Lynch's work. I had seen Blue Velvet once, had yet to see Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, or Dune (the latter occurred for the first time only a few days ago) and was still in love with the idea of Wild at Heart, having missed my chance to see it the one week it played in Bend and with its home video release still a few months off in the future at this point in time. No, I was writing simply from the vantage point of loving Twin Peaks and being caught up in the mania and the hype surrounding said show, buzz that had not quite begun to crest in the fall of 1990. My amour fou with Lynch's oddities and eccentricities sprung almost entirely out of my fondness for this creation and it makes me regret my unrestrained fawning, particularly in light of how I much prefer the auteur's latter-day career (think post- Lost Highway) to much of what followed in the wake of Eraserhead.
Watching Twin Peaks was even more of a commitment and challenge for me than for most of its devoted fans. Without the monetary means for a satellite dish and with no hope of cable being installed anywhere nearby (it can be tough when you are living smack dab in the middle of a national forest), my family and I had four channels from which to choose. Well, to be perfectly accurate, three and a half. We got CBS and ABC stations from an affiliate in Eugene and PBS and an NBC/CBS hybrid broadcasting out of Bend. If that last comment sounds confusing, allow me to elaborate. The latter channel would opt for NBC prime time programming three days out of the week and CBS evening shows the rest of the time, which meant that we would sometimes have the same series playing on two of our four channels and that I was exposed to Murder She Wrote and Crazy Like a Fox but not St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues.
What the Bend stations did offer with their closer proximity was fairly decent reception. The Eugene stations would often be, as the weather-invoking description goes, "snowy." If one were lucky, the snow would be in color, which at least made it easier to make out what was going on in most shows. With a program like Twin Peaks, where on any given week, there were dream sequences and bizarre impressionistic imagery the likes of which didn't have precedence on evening programming, attempting to ferret out subtext and context (let alone the damn text itself!) from between the lines of static and interference was trying at best and hopeless at worst. But from April 1990 through June 1991, I stuck around for weekly helpings of pie, coffee, doughnuts (and one very lucky cherry stem) through several time and day scheduling changes that eventually left the show in the purgatory known as Saturday night.
I had never revisited the show or the 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me in large part because of how the series ended. I held a grudge against Lynch for nearly two decades for choosing to end on so many cliffhangers when he knew that the show was not coming back for a third season. I have known for many years that this was childish and even went so far as to buy The Gold Box DVD set when it came out, promising that someday I would watch again and deal with my mixed emotions. How adult! Over the last month, I did review all 30 episodes of the show, the international version of the pilot and Fire Walk With Me. I have made my peace with the show and love it (warts and all) once again, but the film does not hold up nearly as well. I recognize what it wants to accomplish, but as I will discuss below, the film fails precisely because of what it strives to do by preventing Lynch (or is Lynch preventing himself?) from following his subconscious muses.
Fire Walk With Me premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival and its reception there was far less warm than that accorded his previous effort, Wild at Heart, which had won the Palme D'Or only two years earlier. There are apocryphal anecdotes of its being booed by anywhere from half of the audience to the majority of those in attendance. Keeping in mind that booing at Cannes is apparently as time honored a tradition as cheering, it can be said at least that the film inspired passionate reactions. When the film was released in the US on August 28, 1992, it met with a lackluster critical and financial reception. Opening on nearly 700 screens, the final hurrah for the denizens of Twin Peaks grossed less than $2 million on its way to a final tally of just over $4 million. It was the lowest-grossing feature ever for Lynch at that time, throwing under even Eraserhead.
I recall seeing the film opening day and being sufficiently freaked out on my drive home, despite the fact that it was summer and the sun was still out. In the days that followed, though, I had to admit to myself that whatever might be good about it, it was in no way satisfying. With my recent viewing evoking a similar reaction, I have attempted to clarify for myself why I find it lacking. Notably, several things stand out about Lynch's feature film effort to wrap up the loose ends from his cult series that provide a marked contrast to the rest of his oeuvre.
1) Fire Walk With Me may be the most blatantly commercial feature film Lynch has ever produced (and yes, I take Dune into consideration when making that statement) which makes it all the more poignant that it was roundly rejected at the box office. By choosing to make the storyline a prequel and focusing on the final days in Laura Palmer's life, Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels (who also worked extensively on the series) wrote themselves into a corner. The movie has to build up to Laura's death, which it does, and then, um, it's over.
The source of Lynch's power has always been the way his narratives unfold in the manner of dreams (not "dream-like") burbling through the frameworks of semi- recognizable story-lines that become fractured or detoured, fold in on themselves and erupt with moments that at their finest can not be explained but just experienced. Fire Walk With Me can't have a similar kind of mystery because the characters are already familiar to us and their story arcs are dictated by where they are at when the show starts. Lynch and Engels find ways to sidestep this: staging the first half-hour around the investigation into the murder of earlier victim Teresa Banks and offering elliptical and fleeting insights into Agent Cooper's ultimate fate at the climax of the series. Despite a few thankfully gonzo moments, Fire Walk With Me seems intent on remaining straightforward in its storytelling. The film feels less like a necessary project or something with Lynch's soul stamped into its frames and more of an attempt to wring the last dollars out of a bone-dry cash cow. I have too much respect for Lynch's integrity as an artist to believe this was intentional, but I also can't think of any other instance in his long, strange trip where it felt more like he was spinning his wheels.
2) Fire Walk With Me may be the most humorless feature Lynch has produced to date. It could be argued that the subject matter - the last week in the life of a sexually abused, drug-addicted small-town girl as she spirals towards death at the hands of her father - doesn't lend itself towards jokiness but taste has never stopped Lynch from finding humor - deserved or not - in the darkest of circumstances: Dennis Hopper's foul-mouthed rallying cry of fornication in Blue Velvet; Robert Loggia's mobster pulling over a tailgater and nearly beating him to death in Lost Highway; Nicolas Cage smashing an assassin's head into pulp and juice on a marble staircase while coming on like Elvis in Wild at Heart.
Twin Peaks the series often found its absurd humor in the balance of disparate elements such as grandiose reactions to death (Leland's hysterics and jubilant old-style dancing; Deputy Andy's grief-stricken breakdowns at crime scenes) with the poker-faced adoption of some of the more ridiculous plots of any number of prime-time soaps (characters believed to be dead aren't; a father almost commits unsuspecting incest with his daughter at a Canadian brothel). It was effectively spooky and disturbing when it needed to be without ever deliberately pushing the sex or violence quotient to extremes.
Twenty years later, the show seems tame in comparison to what has followed.
My recollection of the film is that it was a hard R, delving into the seamy aspects of the town that the show could only talk about. Perhaps my tolerance to sex and violence has become too formidable, but I have come to the conclusion that The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the book tie-in from 1991 written by Jennifer Lynch, is made of more volatile material than either the show or the movie and would have been an NC-17 if it had been filmed! Fire Walk With Me frequently feels like PG-13 or series material padded up to an R in a few choice spots. There are more moments of unsettling grotesquerie and a better evocation of the Black Lodge and The Red Room in the show than the movie. And there I go again, comparing the TV show with the movie, which leads me to the pair of key points as to why Fire Walk With Me underwhelms.
1) Fire Walk With Me is not Twin Peaks the television series. This is perhaps stating the obvious, but it quickly becomes apparent if one is a fan of or is familiar with the episodes that the tone, style and point-of-view of the movie could not be further apart from that of its small-screen predecessor. In reading some critiques of the movie, I saw the point argued that the murder of Laura Palmer had forced the townspeople to throw over a cloak of homespun eccentricity to cover the very real heart of darkness at the center of the town. This accounts for the at times goofier and warmer atmosphere of the series. It's all a front! I credit this opinion for giving me the freedom to see the film in a new light, but it can't completely dissolve the bitter taste. It goes against my grain to criticize a film for not being what I think it should be, but Fire Walk With Me feels like too much of a turning away from what gave the show its heart and spirit. With the exception of Lynch's supporting turn as Gordon Cole, all of the other familiar characters seem like bizarro-world partially lobotomized versions of themselves. They're also darker, sadder and less likable.
2) Laura Palmer is better as a construct, a cipher, or a guiding spirit than as a character. Sheryl Lee gives it her all, body and spirit, but the Laura Palmer that Twin Peaks really revolves around is the one staring out of the homecoming photo at the end of each television episode. By making her flesh and blood, the mystery of the project is all but drained out. With hindsight it seems that Twin Peaks, much like Sunnydale in Joss Whedon's universe, was really the true star of its series and as much of a magnet for the weird and the violent as Buffy's adopted hometown. Laura Palmer's murder was a hook to hang a point of view on and draw an audience into the unknown. Giving her too much weight and depth helps drag Fire Walk With Me down with her.
One item of interest to end on: the (second) most unnerving sequence in Fire Walk With Me - an alcohol and sex fueled outing at a Canadian juke joint - seemed remarkably less unsettling this time around. I remembered a cacophony so overpowering that it underscored Lynch's decision to use subtitles. On DVD, the sounds seemed less raucous and you could actually hear the actors saying their lines. As it turns out the sound mix in this scene was indeed done incorrectly on the Dolby audio tracks for the 2002 DVD release. If you want to hear it in its proper fury, listen to the French dubbed track during Chapter 25. You can also decide for yourself how accurate the translation is for Jacques Renault's immortal line: "I feel as blank as a fart."
Next time: this indie romance, shot in 1989 but not released in the US until the early '90s was Nicole Kidman's farewell to the Australian film industry, and Thandie Newton's debut feature.