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Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me
David Lynch, USA, 1992, 134 minutes
Review by David Alexander (1992)

Twin Peaks was a weird little TV series, a curious mix of murder mystery, small town melodrama, soap opera, backwoods Manicheanism, Stephen King style horror and surreal mischief. Slow moving, digressive, occasionally rambling, often incoherent, sometimes looking like it was all made up as it went along, it was a funny, sad, frightening, beautiful and infuriating experience. The movie is more of the same. Described as a prequel, a return to the last days of Laura Palmer’s short and demon-haunted life, it runs more like an addendum to the TV series, sort-of a filling in of the blanks, a colouring of details, without, that is, giving anything away (so, for example, the eventual fates of Dale Cooper and Audrey Horne, amongst others, left suspended at the climax of the TV series, remain unknown.)

The first twenty minutes work the best. A flashback to the events immediately following the murder of Teresa Banks, Bob’s first victim, featuring two new FBI eccentrics played by Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland, they exquisitely mix black comedy and police procedure with dream logic and a vague sense of dread. The rest of the movie, centring on the last week of Laura Palmer’s life, is over-long, rambling, incoherent and occasionally, in the dream sequences and the night club scene particularly, extraordinary. The grand finale, featuring an angel straight out of religious kitsch, once again highlights David Lynch’s propensity for the gratuitous happy ending.

Never less than entertaining, rarely more than trifling, Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me is probably best interpreted as Lynch’s gift to ‘Peakies’ everywhere: an encore, a curtain call, one last skit for all you fans out there. It’s loud ‘n’ lary, features one helluva soundtrack and a couple of great performances, from Sheryl Lee as Laura and Ray Wise as her dad, but ultimately, like the TV series, doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts.

From the off it should be obvious that despite screaming out for one, the odds were stacked against sequelizing the most perplexing and surreal TV since The Prisoner; multiple disparate plotlines dangled tantalisingly, but adequate numbers just weren't there. Thus this big screen reading of same fades in on the oft-cited, never-seen death of drifter and trailer park resident Teresa Banks, now dead and wrapped in plastic.

In the space of his first thirty minutes Lynch seeks to rework the mutant soap's entire first series - another dead girl, another small town playing on a full deck of weirdos (featuring that great veteran Harry Dean Stanton as a caretaker), another letter cringingly secreted under a fingernail, and another FBI agent (Chet Desmond - Chris Isaak). This is at once the film at its most accessible and perplexing as crooner Isaak acquits himself with remarkable self-assurance in his major league debut (notable cameos for director Jonathan Demme notwithstanding) and everyone drifts through their respective paces with much the same straight-faced aplomb that so carried the series, especially in the late curve ball of a sub-plot with Agent Dale Copper (Kyle MacLachlan), FBI chief Gordon Cole (Lynch), and offloads a mercifully brief but tortuous cameo from David Bowie.

Much of this is suddenly forgotten once those familiar chords kick in and the audience pitches a year later headlong into Twin Peaks itself. Here Laura Palmer is one promiscuous, troubled high school teenager with a serious nose candy habit, haunted by the insidious lank-haired presence of the mysterious Bob who seems to have taken possession of her father Leland (Ray Wise) - the stage now set for the inexorable seven day slide from All-American Teen Queen to floater, while taking time out to tie up a loose end or two from TV, chiefly in establishing the unresolved relationship between Leland and the dead girls.

As with any and all prequels, by definition the end is never in doubt, and with Laura's fate sealed it becomes simply a matter of getting there, with Lynch loathe to open out his scenario as might be expected from a film. Indeed, if anything the canvas he paints is considerably diminished, reducing to little more than cameo shots the majority of those we know (and love) - James, Leo, the Log Lady - and eliminating others in their entirety - Ben Horne, the Sheriff's department. Similarly the Great Northern Hotel is conspicuous by its absence and the Double R passes before us in an instant, to the extent that the director seems determined to alienate his core audience. Certainly the catchphrases and absurdist humour are nowhere to be seen, replaced by Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels with razor-edged intensity. The result could do with losing twenty minutes but runs for the majority with the fever-dream of the best Lynch and Tim Hunter episodes - the original pilot, or the controversially violent revelatory episode that finally nailed Leland. The big screen makes the deviant sexuality and implied violence explicit, the latter imbued with a naked brutality, at times genuinely shocking in its execution.

By reducing the palette from the word off, the film tightens its grip as it progresses to a central focus between Laura and Leland that steers an uneasy and dangerous path between the demonic and the incestuous. Wise is gradually fed into proceedings, shrewdly not adopting his blackly comic but ultimately pitiable TV persona, instead opting for a measured, slow burn that reduces our sympathies but is all the more unsettling. Lee is called upon to chop and change at the drop of a hat from emotional basket case to drug fiend temptress, a performance of quite singular assurance that never allows audience sympathies to stray as we finally enter that railway carriage deep in the woods.

Derided at Cannes, where Wild At Heart emerged triumphant, this picture could easily have been a soft option, tossing in well-known elements and sitting back on the box office, but what Lynch serves up owes far more to the enduring spirit of his back catalogue than anything else recently. Unlike the messy Wacky Dave on auto-pilot that Wild At Heart degenerates into, Twin Peaks invokes the genuine surrealism of Eraserhead, employing freak show characterisation (his own son recalling the experimental short The Grandmother), and a willingness to suspend reality for the sake of the extraordinary (a lengthy scene is played out with the hypnotic backing music loud enough to drown the dialogue), the whole swept along on a soundtrack of industrial grind and the impressive airless, non-recycled jazz-styles of regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti.

Ultimately Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me doesn't have the power-house drive of the extraordinary Blue Velvet, but what it does signal is a real return to form; a willingness not to sit back and play at being the David Lynch his audience expects. It won't win converts and will almost certainly lose some of the hitherto faithful, but as a modern horror movie that goes the extra distance it is valuable indeed.