I’m not sure which is the bigger achievement. David Lynch’s daring to tell an unfiltered story of the sexual abuse and suffering of a teenager in 1992, or to use it as a gateway to the modern media world, where world-building and origin stories rule.
These days, cinematic universes are all the rage, but back in 1992, when David Lynch released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a movie spin off of the legendary TV show that birthed countless incarnations to this day, the phrase hadn’t even been officially coined. While the film and television landscape boasted more than a few sequels and some prequels in that era, plus a lot of merchandising for popular franchises like Star Wars, it wasn’t really until Marvel’s Iron Man in 2009 that audiences began to seriously consider the idea that the movies and shows they watched took place in a world that extended beyond what they saw on their screens, worlds that could cross between television, films, and other media. Even if Mr. Lynch’s vision was far too niche, surreal, and offbeat to change all that in one shot, Twin Peaks was almost two decades ahead of the curve, using a film and supporting books to expand the scope of a television show in ways that were practically unheard of at the time, doing so in more ways than one, and in rather unsettling ones at that which haven’t been replicated to this day. Thus, it’s not surprising in retrospect that the film functions on multiple levels, one that can be seen as the sort of world building we have become accustomed to more recently and another that is much darker and more disturbing, the sort of choice only Mr. Lynch could make or would make, though in a sense it can be viewed as a classic origin story, where the creators go back to the beginning. As an extension of the Twin Peaks universe, Fire Walk With Me opens with the investigation of the murder of Teresa Banks which occurred a year before the events depicted in the television show, introducing new characters and new aspects of the world that were only hinted at on the small screen. Gordon Cole, who was played by Mr. Lynch himself and appeared in the original, dispatches Agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley after a body is discovered by the Deer Meadow police floating in a river, but he does so with a bizarre twist likely familiar to watchers of the show and unfamiliar at the same time. Rather than issuing the orders verbally, a woman in a red dress appears and performs some type of miming dance to provide the agents with the background of the case. We learn two things of relevance: First that the town of Deer Meadow is likely to be Twin Peaks in reverse, a place where the locals are hostile to the FBI, and the case itself has been identified with a mysterious “blue rose” which is not explained, yet hearkens back to the supernatural elements of the series and informs the audience that the FBI was investigating these strange happenings long before Laura Palmer was found wrapped in plastic.
Sure enough, the agents arrive in Deer Meadow to find a squalid, rundown police station with none of the original’s charm, no coffee or donuts waiting for them, and police officers who are both taunting and abusive, refusing to cooperate because they have secrets of their own, involved in the drug trade in an echo of the Canadian Mountie from the second season. Agent Desmond is presented as similar to the beloved Special Agent Cooper in appearance, but radically different in demeanor. Instead of a polite boy scout with an almost childlike enthusiasm for anything and everything, he’s more than willing to be confrontational and aggressive, reinforcing the idea that we are watching the show through the looking glass, observing its negative image. After putting the recalcitrant cops firmly in their place and asserting their authority over the case, the agents search Banks’ body to discover the letter “T” under her fingernail, an event that was described in the show, then visit a diner that might be in even worse shape than the police station. There, an old, cigarette smoking waitress rather than the lovely and charming Shelly or Norma pours coffee that’s barely a light brown and seemingly deranged patrons linger, one of which babbles in French. Unlike the Great Northern where there are fine rooms and reasonable prices for Cooper to stay, the agents don’t even have a hotel, as though they were homeless. Instead of sleeping, they proceed directly to a dilapidated trailer park to visit Banks’ former dwelling in search of clues and a ring they believe was missing from the dead body. During their search, they encounter an unnamed strange woman that should perhaps be seen as an analog to the Log Lady from the series, who receives messages from her dead husband through a piece of wood. In this version, she appears dirty and unkept, holding a compression pad over the left side of her face for reasons that are unexplained, says nothing, shudders, and then walks away while a faint electrical noise is heard from the transformer outside. Sometime later, Agent Desmond returns to investigate further, but when he seemingly finds the ring in a pile of dirt, he simply disappears. While this is similar to individuals crossing into the Black Lodge in the show, there are no infamous red curtains or anything to suggest a doorway, merely the strange ring, suggesting that the lodge is everywhere and there’s more than one way to enter.
Meanwhile at FBI headquarters in Philadelphia, we find the familiar face of Special Agent Dale Cooper, but what he’s up to is unclear at first. He informs Agent Cole that it’s February, a significant date because of a dream he had in an obvious callback to the show. He walks back and forth between a hallway with a security and a security room with banks of screens, observing himself on camera, but repeating the process a few times, Agent Philip Jeffries, who has not been seen for two years, walks up behind him and enters Agent Cole’s office while he’s watching, meaning he somehow sees himself even though he’s in a different place. Jeffries then tells a story similar to the events that transpired in Twin Peaks a year later, but also radically different. After mentioning a woman Judy who cannot be talked about, he describes a scene above a convenience store where a little man, the show’s chief villain Bob, two other characters that appeared in the original, an older woman Mrs. Chalfont and her grandson, and a suit of new characters, a Jumping Man and two woodsmen. Similar to the opening investigation of the Banks murder, this serves to revisit and expand the scope of the original show. In the series, Bob, the one-armed man, Mike, and the little man are directly associated with the evil happening at the Black Lodge while Bob and Mike are also associated with the room above the convenience store. Though Mrs. Chalfont and her grandson appear briefly in the show, her name is Mrs. Tremond in the that incarnation and she seemingly does nothing except complain about her meal to Donna Hayward, exclaiming “I requested no creamed corn! Do you see creamed corn on that plate?” leaving it unclear where they fit into the universe at large. Typical of Mr. Lynch, he doesn’t provide the details even this second time around, but the presence of them all together plus three new characters makes it clear that there’s far more to the Black Lodge than we’ve previously believed and the implication that both Agent Jeffries and Desmond have been abducted by the lodge suggests that their dealings extend far beyond the woods outside Twin Peaks itself, perhaps throughout the entire world. This is further hinted at when Agent Jeffries disappears a second time, the FBI has no record of him visiting headquarters on February 6, and Agent Cooper is dispatched to continue the investigation in Dear Meadow. When he visits the same trailer park, he is drawn by the electrical sound to a now empty plot, and the manager informs him that it was previously occupied by Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, indicating that they are somehow involved in the disappearances and further expanding the nature of evil’s machinations in the world. He also sees the phrase “Let’s Rock” scrawled in blood on Agent Desmond’s car window, a prelude of what’s to come.
After expanding the universe across the first forty or so minutes of screen type, Mr. Lynch makes the daring and at the time controversial choice to completely collapse it, as though a sun went supernova and devolves into a black hole of despair. Rather than exploring the new ideas and characters teased in the opening, he devotes the remaining ninety minutes of screen time primarily depicting Laura Palmer’s final days in graphic and excruciating detail. This is an origin story — the origin of the show’s original impetus, a murder — gone completely wrong. Almost completely gone are the supernatural, soap-opera inspired, puzzle box hijinks that made the show a cult classic since its release. Instead, he builds on the literal destruction of a television set that occupied the film’s opening moments to do what could never be done on a network or any other show at the time: Tell the tragic, gut wrenching story of a sexually abused teenager who turns to drugs and prostitution to escape the misery of her existence. Though most of the plot points are already known from the investigation into Palmer’s murder that dominated the first and early second seasons of the television version, actually watching the scenes unfold is a far more harrowing experience, closer to Nicholas Cage’s Oscar winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas in 1995 than what fans or even broader audiences were likely accustomed to at the time. After all, even in today’s far more sexually explicit world, audiences aren’t frequently “treated” to the graphic death spiral of a beauty queen who recently learned that her father has been molesting her since she was twelve years old, complete with snorting coke in her bedroom and rampant nudity. In fact, if you were to dispense with the supernatural aspects at this point, interpreting them instead as elements of a surreal filmmaking style with figurative rather than literal meaning, and I believe Mr. Lynch provided at least the suggestion we should do so, all that’s left is a tragic story of abuse and suffering. On the surface, Laura is your “average” American beauty, the ultimate girl next door as she chats about boys while walking to school with her best friend, Donna, but once she arrives, she goes to the bathroom and does a line of coke before class has even started for the day. Later, she cheats on her boyfriend with James Marshall in between classes, wearing nothing but a towel, suggesting that her high school experience was rather unique to say the least and Mr. Lynch is only getting started in this regard.
When she discovers pages are missing from her diary, Laura begins her downward spiral, one we know will inevitably lead to her death and perhaps she knows it as well. She reveals to the introverted agoraphobe, Harold, who had killed himself in the original series, that she’d been sexually abused by a strange figure named Bob since she was twelve years old and that she believes Bob stole the pages to hide his identity. After a brief scene between Agent Cooper and Albert Rosenfield, the forensics expert on the show, where Cooper is convinced the killer will strike again and proceeds to describe Laura herself, we cut back to her encountering the Chalfont’s while preparing food for Meals on Wheels. The Chalfonts give her a strange painting with a half open door, and the grandson cryptically informs her that “the man behind the mask” is in her bedroom right now. Laura rushes home, only to discover that her father is Bob. That night, she experiences a strange dream that serves to simultaneously introduce a new concept into the universe that will not come to fruition until 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return and visualize her trauma, crossing the boundary between the surreal and the real impacts of her sexual abuse. In the world of Twin Peaks, she enters the painting in a dreamlike trance and meets Cooper in the Black Lodge, though he isn’t there yet in the real world timeline and would not be until after a murder that hasn’t happened yet is solved. The Little Man refers to himself as “the arm” and makes the whupping sound, similar to the electrical currents earlier. Cooper informs Laura not to take the ring. When she wakes up, Cooper’s girlfriend from the original show, Annie Blackburn, is dead and bloody beside her in the bed, telling Laura that the “good Dale” is trapped in the lodge and she should write it in her diary. From a world-building perspective, this introduces the concept that time doesn’t pass in the lodge the same as it does outside, creating the opportunity for loops hinted at in the earlier scene with Agent Jeffries as well as the idea that one must choose to enter the lodge in some fashion, in this case by taking the ring. If we consider the story more literally, however, Laura cannot immediately come to grips with the knowledge that her father has always been her abuser. Confronted by memories she has long suppressed, she experiences a psychotic episode where she witnesses herself out of her own body, mysterious men who terrorize and confuse her, and then finds a dead woman in her bed, presaging her own fate. When she awakes the following morning without the ring, she is only more anxious and confused, unable to trust her own perceptions after not recognizing her own father as the monster in her life.
As the film progresses, it explores two more critical aspects of this phenomenon. First, the only purely good character in Laura’s entire life is Donna and as such, she seeks to protect her from her own awful experiences, refusing to bring her alone on her nightly excursions. When Donna shows up unannounced at the Road House while Laura is prostituting herself, she freaks out when a man molests her, half clothed, half conscious, unwilling to see the one bright thing in her life tarnished in a scene that could only be put together by Mr. Lynch. Fans of the show will be familiar with his use of subtitles for dialogue spoken backward and played forward in the Black Lodge, but here, he subtitles an entire scene at a rowdy bar, making the reality that we can barely hear what we’re saying when the loud music is playing plain, only to stop once a half naked Laura melts down upon seeing Donna half naked as well, making the moment even more dramatic, as though we were suddenly thrown into a documentary or actually watching it unfold from one of the seats. Everyone else in her life, however, Laura is more than willing to exploit. She sleeps with Bobby Briggs primarily to secure cocaine, and when he’s forced to shoot someone during a drug deal gone bad, she is so drunk and out of it, her first reaction is to laugh. James, meanwhile, is something of a useful idiot, a dalliance that she takes advantage of because of his contrast with Bobby. She sleeps with Leo and Jacques because they supply drugs as well and expand her opportunities to sell her body, desperate to feel alive. The two are also a gateway to Teresa Banks and Ronette Pulaski, who narrowly escapes death in the original show. This brings us to the second critical aspect: In the second half of the film, Mr. Lynch devotes a significant amount of time to Laura’s father Leland, making it unclear if he is fully aware of his actions when he’s possessed by Bob or in the literal interpretation, if he is mad, suffering from a perverse compulsion that he cannot control. When Leland and Laura are in the car, Mike pulls up beside them, and starts yelling about how “the thread will be torn” while brandishing the ring. At first, Leland seems shaken and confused, repeatedly wondering what kind of world it is when someone comes up at the blue like that, but then he experiences a memory of killing Teresa because she’d recruited Laura for a threesome. We learn that the television smashed in the beginning was during the course of that murder, but ultimately it’s unclear who did the killing. Did Bob kill her to protect his identity as Leland? Did Leland kill her to protect his own identity? Does it matter when they are one and the same?
Mr. Lynch makes this inseparable duality inescapable when Bob slips into Laura’s room afterwards and while raping her, reveals his face as Leland. Whether you want to embrace the supernatural interpretation or not, interpret these events in terms of the darkness inside us all, or the darkness that comes from beyond, the suggestion that there are two sides to everyone obvious, what Mr. Lynch frequently referred to as Doppelgangers. The same as Twin Peaks is an inverted mirror of a town in Deer Meadow, we all have darker images of each other that need to be tightly controlled or they will take us completely over. Laura was abused by one spirit and as a result, she cannot control her own, so she abandons James and proceeds to a night of debauchery that will leave her dead. There is more than a subtle suggestion that she knows this when she protests being tied up as part of a sexual game, but the ending somehow isn’t quite as dark as it seems at first. As Laura is being killed, Mr. Lynch offers the audience at least a glimmer of hope when Mike, the better part of Bob, seeks to save Laura and Ronette in the railway car. Though he cannot get into the car itself, he is able to slip Laura the ring which apparently prevents Bob from fully possessing her. At the end, he kills her because he cannot have her entirely, sending her to the lodge, but at least as her own person where she will be comforted by Cooper, completing the time loop. Before her death, an angel – which also appears to have escaped from a painting made real, suggesting that all of these paintings are somehow gateways to the lodge or some other spiritual realm – appeared and saved Ronette. It reappears in the lodge itself, suggesting that in the deepest darkness, there is still some light to be found. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film received mixed reviews upon its release, critics likely being unwilling to accept the sort of world building that would become popular twenty years later and unwilling to watch the destruction of a young woman at the hands of her father.
Today, however, its reputation has grown. As Oliver Macnaughton summarized it for The Guardian on the 30th anniversary of its release in 2022, “Critics were lukewarm upon release but the resulting decades have been kinder to the unsettling prequel that takes a look at the real Laura Palmer.” In his view, Fire Walk With Me works “Twin Peaks was really about Laura Palmer, the connective tissue that brought everyone and everything together and her presence is felt throughout the entire series. There’s maybe no better example of a protagonist in Lynch’s work that embodies every theme that he has explored. Externally, a girl who personified purity and kindness. Internally, someone battling addiction, abuse and an almost prophetic knowing of her violent fate. In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is about finding the light within a cruel, bleak world. In contrast to Cooper, she sees the world with complete pessimism. When her friend Donna (Moira Kelly) asks whether she would go faster or slower while falling through space, she replies ‘Faster and faster. And for a long time, you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever … And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away.’” He concluded, “As stories of abuse towards women have become more public, Fire Walk with Me feels unfortunately relevant. Dealing with themes of incest, abuse and addiction, it’s not an easy watch. But while Fire Walk with Me is certainly a tragedy, it feels like Lynch’s love letter to Laura Palmer as a character and to Sheryl Lee as an actor. The film works so well not because Laura is a victim, but because she feels like any teenager battling their internal struggles. Though the 2017 revival would expand on Laura’s fate, the last shot of her crying with happiness feels like a perfect footnote. As the Log Lady says to her, ‘when this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out.’” Interestingly, Mr. Macnaughton didn’t mention the cinematic universe aspect of it, how only David Lynch could use the tragic tale of a doomed young woman to birth the multimedia world we take for granted as well. I’m not sure which is the bigger achievement. The daring to tell an unfiltered story of abuse and suffering in that era, or to use it as a gateway to modern media.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 