An Ode to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
(Originally posted June 15th, 2023)
This review contains spoilers for Twin Peaks (1990–1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
TW// Discussion of rape, incest, and sex trafficking.
Sometime during my recently completed freshman year of college, as I came home from an unusually miserable late-night work shift, David Bowie’s Five Years came on shuffle. It’s not a work I fully understand, the bizarre lyrical story of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the album it originates from, borders on incomprehensibility, but that’s never dampened the impact of the album or that track. In a haze of exhaustion and depression, I sat for a half hour, playing the track on repeat and sobbing as it chronicled bizarre and mundane occurrences as the news of inevitable calamity spread and people, especially the child narrator, emotionally prepare for the changing, soon-to-end world.
“I never thought I’d need so many people.”
As I’ve lived on my own, I’ve felt weighed down by issues stemming from childhood. There’s an omnipresent buzz in my head, a fear that in my pain I’ve been forced to grow up too fast and won’t be able to adjust and grow into the adult I want to be, and this is reflected in the art I find solace in. It’s why I’m so dedicated to Evangelion, why I connect so deeply to the fear and confusion of Five Years, and why I find so much value in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. In the half dozen times I’ve watched it in as many months, as upsetting as it is, I’ve grown to find comfort in it because there’s catharsis in knowing somebody cares. There’s an urge to treat artists as almost divine, brilliant beings creating new worlds in their own image. The best artists, however, are shackled by the worlds they create, as their works become meaningless should they intervene with the truth — if not in the logical progression of facts (this is David Lynch, after all), then in a more abstract emotional sense of the truth. This tragedy was written before this film was made, not only in the predetermined canon of the Twin Peaks series but in Lynch’s worldview, his insights into abuse and violence stopping him from creating a story he feels dishonest to how things are. All he can do now is show us. Show us what happened, why it happened, and why it shouldn’t have happened. Strangely, perhaps this moves them closer to my view of the divine. For as all-powerful as I was taught God is the one thing my faith maintained they couldn’t do was lie. To break the rules of their world would be to render it meaningless, so the divine intervention chronicled in sacred texts still relied on human action and reaction, the same principles that guide storytelling.
The most direct comparison between art and the divine is in prayer, the outreach of a soul to an unreachable distant light, a cry for the embrace of an unseen being for comfort. There’s a reason religion so often facilitates this through art, be it music, painting, sculpture, or story. Fire Walk with Me is one part of a decades-spanning epic that chronicles the birth and death of good and evil in the supernatural fabric of its world, meant to act as a reflection of our own. Maybe what makes it unique and unusually powerful is its place as a fable in this almost biblical tapestry, Badalamenti’s score emulating a divine chant while Lynch composes his light show to illustrate the rapturous intersection between heaven, hell, and earth. The scope of this emulated divinity gives the film’s heart, this unwavering empathy in the face of oblivion, more gravity. It’s something meaningful on a personal and universal scale.
Maybe. It’s dangerous to elevate artists this way. David Lynch is a flawed and mortal human like the rest of us. And David Bowie, as great as he is in Fire Walk with Me, as powerful as his music is, and as much as I want to celebrate him as an artist, must be approached with apprehension. He’s a perfect fit to collaborate with Lynch, but his involvement with this film is depressingly ironic, given his own alleged sexual predation. This divine treatment of artists will inevitably lead to disappointment and betrayal. Maybe it’s all this theological conjecture, these religious parallels, and my pretentious comparison of art and the divine that makes this so meaningful. Maybe I just need to cry. Either way, these works mean something to me. I need this film. I don’t think that will ever change.
“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.”
Twin Peaks is a cornerstone of Lynch’s career-spanning examination of capitalist and patriarchal moral rot, the seedy underbelly of society clashing with the spit-shined Americana on top. The best parts of the show, concentrated around late season one and early season two, are about uncovering who Laura Palmer was, what happened to her before the night of her death, and unraveling her all-American girl Homecoming queen persona. Though these sections of the series are effective, they’re bogged down with tonal and structural issues. As charming as the off-beat soap opera plotlines are, the show’s structure and network interference too often make them distracting to the show’s understanding of the cultural and systemic issues that lead to and persist after Laura’s murder. Fire Walk with Me has all those outstanding elements and entirely circumvents its flaws. No more tedious subplots and tonal issues. There are subplots, and you can find humor in them, but as amusing as the off-kilter police procedural is, it’s outweighed by an atmosphere of dread. The discordant, mournful strings over the pulsating blue screen building towards a burst of violence; The sickening sound of a fingernail being ripped from flesh; The callousness of the law enforcement officers, only expressing emotion through petty antics and condescending arrogance; and Cooper’s ominous musings warning that the killer will strike again, though nobody knows where or when. It’s suffocating.
Cut to: Twin Peaks, one year later. It feels like a gut punch. It should be comforting to return to this place we’ve grown to love so much over so many hours of television, seeing these characters interact and live their lives before their peace is shattered. But we know what’s coming. Seeing this peace ironically makes it hurt more. Nothing is as painful as empathy in the face of inevitability, presenting the most soul-crushing story imaginable without a trace of nihilism. The light present in every tender interaction makes us hope. We open ourselves to caring, and we are burned by reality. Not out of cruelty but as a fable, every action, reaction, and non-action from humans, angels, gods, and demons is rendered as a dream and a nightmare, a surreal cacophony of emotion with the core of something tragically real, an experience each viewer can find solace and growth in. It’s a film about abuse, specifically sexual abuse and rape, and the societal failures that enable it, so acutely showing how it grinds down the victim; each interaction painting a personal and societal psychological and emotional portrait. The pain begins as dread for the future, but as the story unravels we understand it stems from grief of the past. The pain of the abused, especially children, is more than just physical pain or death; it’s the agony of losing who you are. It seems you can’t express who you are, merely adopting personas, unable to differentiate who will help and who will harm when you’ve been betrayed again, and again, and again. On the surface, Laura is the typical all-American perfect girl, the Homecoming queen with a popular boyfriend, always with her best friend. There’s a harsher edge below that, she’s promiscuous and does drugs, but even then, as Albert says, she could be any high school girl in America. Everyone sees a different person, but nobody sees her. Some try, some don’t, but none see what we see. Through her own eyes, we see the indescribable pain that drives her. Her drug habit and emotional outbursts aren’t just typical teenage angst but the toxic defense mechanism of a woman who has been abused and violated since childhood.
“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.”
The terror of what’s to come is informed by her understanding of her past and present. Knowing can break you free or break you down, the path forward illuminated by truth or clouded by the feeling that, despite whatever moments of joy you scrape together in the present, you’ve never been truly happy. It’s too easy to give up when you feel nobody’s there for you. But they are. Just as Laura refuses to become like her father, both in choosing to reject the possession of the demon possessing him and by protecting Donna from her own abusers, breaking a cycle that started before even Leland’s crimes, James, Donna, and even Bobby somewhat, try to reach out to her. But she rejects them, consumed by her self-hatred. In her grief, as her childhood is ripped away from her, she tries to maintain a feeling of agency, creating a harsher and more mature persona, unwittingly twisting the obvious truth that what her father, Jacques Renault, and her clients are doing to her is wrong into a feeling of responsibility. This guilt is further prayed upon by her abusers, trapping her in Renault’s sex trafficking ring and spiraling further into tragedy. An unforgettable warning of what happens if options for victims are opened and accepted too little and too late.
But it’s not her fault. It was never her fault.
Perhaps the darkest implication, and something I am more sure about every viewing, is that Laura’s mother is aware of what’s happening. To what extent is unclear, but her bizarre near breakdown at Laura and Leland’s argument at the dinner table makes it clear she feels something is deeply broken. But she doesn’t do anything. For whatever reasons, perhaps societal stigma, emotional inertia, something understandable, or something pointless, she merely looks on in agony. It echoes beyond Fire Walk with Me into the rest of the story. The last time we see Sarah, a quarter century later, she destroys Laura’s portrait in rage and grief, intercut with the collapse of Dale’s time-bending quest to undo Laura’s fate, directly after she rejects James for the last time. That seemed the last chance to circumvent destiny. Dale and Sarah waited in dread, unable to shake what they knew deep down to be broken. Later they longed to be able to undo the undoable. All of it too little, too late.
There are people there for Laura. There were paths for Sarah to act. They just have to be there, and she has to accept they’re there for her before it’s too late. This should never have happened. What makes any of this meaningful is how empathetically, and at times even hopefully, it’s rendered. Every tender interaction makes us care more about the painful ones. Every frame, every line, and every expression exudes pathos in the face of this oblivion. This is where both my comfort and horror come from, both meaningless without the other. That’s what makes it so astounding, so profound, and so personal to me. I fear it’s not a work I could ever do justice in writing; I’m not nearly the writer I aspire to be; I just hope I’ve shed a bit more light on what makes it magnificent. Even if you get nothing from this review, I did. If nothing else, I welcome the few more hours more it spent on my mind.
