Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

David Lynch | 2hr 15min

As far as fated high school prom queen Laura Palmer is concerned, the only supernatural forces by her side as she suffers through her final days are those demons driving her towards a violent, degrading death. They hide in plain sight within the idyllic Washington town of Twin Peaks, masking an evil so insidiously manipulative that even its victims try to disassociate them from the images of warmth and comfort they project. If there are any guardian angels working to defend innocent civilians from their influence, then they certainly aren’t looking over Laura while she sinks into a deep pit of self-destruction. As she kicks back one weekend with her far more naïve friend Donna, she can’t resist inserting herself into the hypothetical question she is posed of whether one would slow down or accelerate while falling through space.

“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.”

The end of her life is near, and she can see almost exactly how it is going to unfold, with no chance of some saving grace arriving in the nick of time to save her. Still, even with this pessimistic clarity, there is still a shred of hope in her lingering glances to the angel picture that hangs on her wall. Salvation is but a distant dream in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, even as its shallow façade casts a sleepy spell over suburban America.

David Lynch’s prequel to his television series offers an alternate view of the titular town – one which has not yet pulled in FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper to investigate Laura’s inevitable murder, and that keeps its darkest secrets contained to a smaller group of characters. This is not to say that Kyle MacLachlan’s detective is absent though, as the thirty-minute Deer Meadows prologue effectively bridges the gap between him and Twin Peaks, sending him down the dead-end rabbit hole of a previous murder in a neighbouring town that bears striking similarities to Laura’s own demise.

The extension of these formal parallels between Laura and the late Teresa Banks is striking, and this is quite significantly not some piece of dramatic irony that escapes the attention of Lynch’s characters either. Though Laura and Cooper never meet in person, a mystical, psychic connection forms between the two, allowing both a prescient foresight of their destinies and specifically giving the latter an image of who the killer’s next victim will be – another blonde, sexually active high school girl with a drug problem, crying out for help. “You’re talking about half the high school girls in America,” his colleague teases, though he isn’t exactly wrong. The surreal portrait that Lynch is painting of the nation’s corrupted innocence reaches far across modern society, exposing the lie that its supposed moral safe havens are impenetrable, incorruptible defences for the nation’s youth.

Further linking the detective and the subject of his future investigation is the limbo where both disappear to in dreams, encountering visions of each other along with a small assortment of bizarre figures. Lynch’s eye for eerie designs reaches a peak in this metaphysical plane referred to as the Lodge, enclosing its inhabitants on all sides with red curtains and laying out a black-and-white, zig-zag pattern on the floor beneath them. So too do his slow, long dissolves subtly emphasise the Lodge as the connective tissue between the two, fading from Laura to its red curtains and then onto Dale in one lethargic transition, and further inducing a soporific reverie through the formal repetition of this editing device. The lore of the Lodge runs much deeper than what is presented in Fire Walk with Me, but in essence it draws our two primary characters into another layer of existence between life and death, and occasionally hosts the demon whose presence has been haunting Laura since she was a child – Killer BOB.

Taking the form of long-haired, dishevelled man with a sinister smile, Bob projects the image of a man who anyone would easily believe sneaks into the rooms of teenagers at night, whispers his evil intentions in their ears, and takes advantage of them. That his nocturnal attack on Laura is accompanied by silent flashes of lightning without thunder should clue us into her numb detachment from reality, instinctually kicking in to preserve any remaining belief in evil as a foreign agent, and not a homegrown mutation of the familiar. After all, this is the image of malevolence that is easier to live for her to live with, even as it breeds a self-loathing which pushes her into underage sex work and substance abuse. Never one to address the psychological breakdowns of his characters through a literal lens though, Lynch’s subtextual implications begin to reveal themselves with the discovery of Bob’s true identity – or perhaps possessed victim is a more appropriate term. Laura’s own humble father, Leland, is the mortal through which this demon inflicts his sadistic cruelty on the world, but even upon learning this we are simply left to wonder: which man in this parasitic relationship is the true evil, and which is wearing the other’s face as a mask?

Given the occasional cruelty that Leland displays behind closed doors, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that he is more than just Bob’s puppet. At the dinner table, his torment of Laura starts with him shaming her for not washing her hands, though the implications of virginal purity don’t remain discreet for long once he starts calling her filthy for her promiscuity. Meanwhile in the corner, his wife is rendered powerless, incapable of protecting her daughter from his verbal rampage. Leland’s tearful yet shallow apology later sounds like the words of a man deeply struggling with his own psychological issues, yet unable to come to terms with how dangerously ingrained they are in his being. Within the seven days leading up to Laura’s death, she may finally grow cognisant of her father’s true threat, but to him these hostile outbursts might as well be the work of the spirit that has taken control of him.

In fact, this is the deluded narrative that most of Twin Peaks would want to preserve, and the perspective which Lynch adopts with his trademark surrealism. The peculiar townsfolk often speak in disjointed passages that dwell on insignificant matters, until they are interrupted by cryptic riddles which speak to some profound truth. When Laura approaches the Roadhouse bar one night, she is stopped by Margaret the Log Lady who feels her feverish forehead and offers an elusive warning of the teenager’s corrupted virtue.

“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out… The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”

Inside the Roadhouse, her meaning is somewhat clarified. This is where Laura often meets her pimp Jacques, who exploits her illegal affairs with adult men. Its smoky haze is only pierced by Lynch’s red and blue stage lights, not unlike those used in Isabella Rossellini’s performance in Blue Velvet, and he even stages a similar musical act with Julee Cruise wistfully crooning ‘Questions in a World of Blue’.

The song is enough to move Laura to tears, briefly letting her mourn the loss of normalcy in her life before she picks herself back up to entreat a pair of clients. With Cruise’s melancholy song still playing in the background though, Lynch’s musical sound design continues to prove itself a crucial part of his psychological worldbuilding, underscoring her muted conversation with dreamy synths. Save for those moments that he is emphasising the emptiness of silence, he is often manipulating the blend of diegetic and non-diegetic noises around Laura, absorbing the low, steady thrum of a ceiling fan into Angelo Badalamenti’s droning score in one scene that suspensefully leads up to her discovery of Bob’s identity. On a broader level too, the main theme’s slow, lazy bass riff becomes a lethargic motif for the town in general, lulling us into a drowsy acceptance of its surreal mundanity.

Visually, the Roadhouse scene also develops the colour palette that Lynch formally has set out right from the Deer Meadows prologue with the blue rose and red shirt, and continues to weave into his costumes, lighting, and décor. The duality of this aesthetic is as cleanly divided as the moral binaries which govern this sheltered town, splitting good and evil right down the middle with no consideration for the space in between. Though it has entirely disintegrated within Laura, it takes everything in her power to preserve the spotless purity of those in her life who remain truly untainted. She is distraught to see Donna engage in the same debauched behaviour as her when they enter a sex club together, and later she breaks up with her secret lover James as she spirals faster than ever. “You don’t even know me. Your Laura disappeared. It’s just me now,” she ruefully asserts, recognising the hollowed-out shell of a woman she has become.

Still, when death finally comes for her, she does not submit to the pressing darkness without a fight. Lynch is a proven master of formal symbolism, tying mysterious threads through the recurrence of Teresa’s green ring, the Lodge, and mysterious masked strangers, but it is when Laura witnesses an angel hovering over her fellow sex worker Ronnie as they are tied up that he affirms Fire Walk with Me’s most powerful metaphor. Blessed by this heavenly entity, Ronnie just manages to escape Bob’s violence, though just as Laura expected, there are no angels looking out for her.

At least, not in this world, which would much rather brush over the traumas of those who publicly take on the celebrated image of the all-American sweetheart. Only when she is freed from those constraints and is ushered into the Lodge does she find the symbol of divine salvation she has been holding out hope for all along, recognising the goodness in her which saved multiple others from her inner darkness. After all, this is what sets her apart from men like Leland, who divide themselves into separate beings so they may simultaneously inflict their misery on others and remain guiltless in the process. When all is said and done for this tragically fated prom queen, she finds solace in her own virtue at the end of a tortured life, turning tears to laughter as the faint imprint of her angel hovers overhead.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to buy on YouTube.