"twin peaks: fire walk with me" and the anguished life of laura palmer
"...and the angels wouldn't help you, because they've all gone away."
The 1992 release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was met with a variety of emotions - disappointment, anger, annoyance, confusion, etc. This response was mostly owed to the incongruence of the prequel to the much-acclaimed show it was based off of - where Twin Peaks constructed a town full of whimsy and eccentricity, these qualities pervading the show even as it explored fairly dark themes, its subsequent prequel was almost incomparable to the show. Whimsy and eccentricity were not wholly unfamiliar to the movie - the first 30 minutes or so leads you to believe the movie will be tonally consistent with the show - but the majority of the film is spent exploring Laura Palmer’s life, a life essentially defined by the trauma she experienced. With this fact in mind, expecting FWWM to be a quaint and quirky return to the town of Twin Peaks would be inauthentic and, quite frankly, insulting to the character of Laura Palmer. For a show centered around solving the murder of a beloved small town highschool homecoming queen, the audience grows to empathize with a character never actually seen in life to a point where you grieve for her death just as her family and friends do. FWWM sought to both intensify this empathy and break the illusion of the Laura Palmer the characters of Twin Peaks were caught up in, and did so in the most devastating way imaginable. Laura Palmer was a person, not a martyr, and where the show almost encouraged a perception aligning with the latter, FWWM brings the former to light, building Laura up until you feel like you can almost reach through your screen and touch her for how vivid it is - only for her story to inevitably end as we all knew it would. Despite the foresight the audience has, the movie’s operatic finish is nonetheless devastating and deeply moving, feeling like less of an ending in earnest, and instead serves as an anguishing example of the unforgiving and never ending cycle of life - loved ones die, and the world moves on. The small world of Twin Peaks would indeed move forward, if not with a slight limp in its step.
The fairly striking tonal difference between the show and its prequel isn’t indicative of an inherently antithetical relationship between the two entries in the Twin Peaks Cinematic Universe, so to say. Both works are extremely immersive, with the music, setting, and dialogue all coalescing to create an atmosphere singularly contained in the universe David Lynch envisioned. This is part of what makes Fire Walk with Me so affecting - from the movie’s first scene, we’re immediately transported back into the world we had been introduced to two years prior. This familiarity, found in the environment itself as well as in the characters and various nuances of the show, allows the audience to comfortably settle back into the show’s universe - only to be jolted awake as we follow Laura Palmer across a tortured 120 minutes of runtime. The musical, thematic, and visual motifs familiar to the show are returned to in a variety of ways in the movie: a rundown, unwelcoming, and bizarre diner serves as the movie’s initial semi-return to the warm atmosphere of Twin Peaks’ Double R Diner; a jeering sheriff replaces the kind face of Twin Peaks’ beloved Sheriff Truman; and a dilapidated trailer park serves as the movie’s preliminary mocking reference to the utopian suburbia of small-town life in Twin Peaks. We of course see these references for themselves in earnest as the movie progresses and as the film meanders its way back to the material it referenced previously, but even the movie’s self-aware farces of the material it was based on feels like the real thing - a fact owed largely to the auteur ways of David Lynch and his collaboration with an exceptional composer, the late great Angelo Badalamenti.
Yet another feature of Fire Walk with Me is found in its exploration of the unfamiliar. We know the characters of Twin Peaks, we know the overarching story of Laura Palmer, and we know how it will end. We don’t know, however, the specifics of the relationships these characters had with Laura, we don’t know the nuances of her story, and we don’t know the significant specificities of the night of her death. All of these, and more, are expounded upon in the movie. Sheryl Lee brings a level of complexity to Laura’s character that makes her one full of contradictions: naive, but jaded; hopeful, but full of dread; full of anguish and laughter alike. She’s a drug addict, but she’s the homecoming queen. These oppositional traits could potentially make for an inconsistent and flimsy characterization, but the Sheryl Lee’s performance as well as David Lynch’s direction only emphasize and lend more depth to the war happening within Laura’s mind - on one hand, she wants to live, but on the other, she knows, somehow, that she won’t. One of the many examples of these contradictory traits lies in the minutes we first see her character: she walks on the street with her best friend Donna, making quiet conversation and laughing with her friend. She stops in her highschool hallway, waves goodbye to Donna with a sweet smile on her face, then goes into the bathroom and snorts a line of coke.
Scenes like these are jarring and unsettling, and are prime opportunities for Lynch to make Laura’s deeply unhealthy mindset all too clear for the audience. The context surrounding them allows the audience to understand her character even further. As the movie progresses, we come to recognize that Laura is a victim of horrible abuse, undergoing traumas no one should ever have to - but we also understand that she can be manipulative and callous at times. She strings her boyfriend on, only using him as a coke supplier, as well cheats on him with a classmate named James, she bluntly rejects Donna’s earnest wishes to help her, and gaslights said boyfriend into being more submissive and easier to handle. As I said before, however, the context of these scenes is important to obtaining a full understanding of her character. Even with all of these “flaws” - flaws which exist as a result of her trauma and subsequent coping mechanisms - we see Laura at her most callous, as well as her most vulnerable and afraid. One of the most disturbing scenes in the movie sees Laura and Donna at an adult club together, as both are drugged (willingly) into compliance. Laura is at first unfazed by this, as she regularly consorts and does business with several club goers. She, however, is jolted into horrifying awareness fairly quickly as she realizes who is with her, quickly and desperately getting a drugged Donna out of the club and back home. The morning after this takes place, Laura and Donna sit together, with Donna barely even remembering what happened. Even in her hazy memory, however, she knows something was wrong about the night previous, and asks Laura why she’d do something like that. Laura tearfully and cryptically answers, “I don’t want you to be like me.” The shame expressed here is deeply engrained in her by this point - Laura is ashamed of what’s happening to her, desperate for help, yet receiving none. She’s angry, deathly frightened, and above all, a teenage girl going through some of the most unimaginable horrors one can imagine - this, if nothing else, is the message the movie gets across.
This movie is very subdued. Based on what I just wrote, it may come across as incredibly melodramatic, but in reality the movie is composed of subtleties: dinner table conversations that play out like torture scenes, facial expressions that communicate profound emotion, and various other features that mean nothing, until they mean everything when it all adds up. The movie plays out like a domestic drama more than a horror movie - save for the more obviously disturbing scenes like the one I mentioned in the last paragraph, Fire Walk with Me is made up of character tensions and bizarrely unnerving interactions. One of the most profound scenes sees Laura sitting on her bed the night of her murder, knowing on some level what’s going to happen in a few hours. She intently stares at a painting of an angel watching over children on her wall, and is abjectly devastated to see the angel disappear right before her eyes. The motif of the angel is called upon several times throughout the movie, often serving to communicate Laura’s incredible hopelessness. This scene cements the significance of this motif as we see the last dregs of hope for salvation leave Laura’s mind. From this point, the shame, fear, and dread she feels down to her marrow is only intensified, with the perceived abandonment of the angels serving as a confirmation that there is indeed no hope for her.
The penultimate scene of the movie plays out like one of the most horrifying murder scenes possible. Laura is assaulted, then we watch her get attacked and murdered with a brutality only intensified by the operatic requiem that serves as the soundtrack, slowed down frames, and excruciating detail the director takes care to give. We see Laura die, get wrapped in a plastic bag, shoved down a river, and discovered the next morning. This, for lack of a better word, incredibly grand ending feels fitting as a release from the anguish that surrounded the movie previously. The enormity of her pain both prior to and during her murder, as well as the profound horror of a loved one - or at least the physical body of someone you love - killing you, cannot be better expressed than the incredibly dramatic ending Lynch gave Laura. For all the trauma Laura goes through, it never feels cheap or unearnest - the movie is incredibly heavy because of the respect Lynch clearly has for her character and weight lent to her experiences, and thus makes Laura one of the most tragic and beautiful characters ever written, in my opinion. For all the anguish of the movie, it’s not without hope - in the final scene, we see Laura back in the Lodge, with an angel hovering above and Dale Cooper’s hand on her shoulder. As the light of a blue TV screen reflects on her face, she laughs with tears running down her face. It wouldn’t be a David Lynch ending without an ambiguous ending open to many, many interpretations, but this scene still serves a beautiful and bittersweet ending to her character. Laura was sure that she was alone, forgotten even by the angels she so wished for, but this final scene grants us, and her, some hope. Laura did die, but the angels never went away. That was, perhaps, all she could ever hope for.
you write like a sophisticated well educated critic (of books, movies, music, art) and you see the psychological dimension of that which you are writing about. More accurately, you are drawn to cultural "objects of interest" that carry psychological dimension. Your perspectives show high intelligence, sensitivity and spiritual understanding. It is always a delight to read your articles.