Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: How David Lynch’s film finally found redemption after 30 years
Once deemed a spectacular failure by critics as well as fans, the Twin Peaks prequel was ahead of its time with both its approach and its subject matter
Film Features David Lynch
[Completely obvious editor’s note, if you need it: This article contains spoilers about Twin Peaks.]
A soapy, surreal, serial drama co-created by Hill Street Blues veteran Mark Frost and film director David Lynch, Twin Peaks arrived on network television like an atom bomb, debuting April 8, 1990, and putting the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” on the lips of tens of millions of people. Almost inconceivably, 14 months later the show went out with a whimper, euthanized by ABC with a bundled two-episode send-off following a shuffling of time-slots and a hiatus of nearly two months. The series was a supernova, and it left the medium of television changed forever.
Why, then, did Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, arriving in theaters less than two and a half years (a mere blink of the eye in the pre-internet era) after its progenitor’s unlikely takeover of mainstream culture, land with such a thud—commercially, and especially critically?
The brilliant, ahead-of-its-time film, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, has taken a long and winding road to redemption, both within Lynch’s larger canon and among fans of Twin Peaks, which of course was continued with 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. The movie’s initial failure, though, is rooted in two factors—one an active choice, and another wholly beyond its control.
A coda to an incomplete series
Arriving on the heels of the show’s stupendous finale, Fire Walk With Me offers no payoff to numerous cliffhangers—indeed, audiences don’t learn the fate of intrepid Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), much less the answer to the question, “How’s Annie?” Instead, the film revisits a mystery already “solved,” in the definitional sense. It is a prequel, released at a time before those were en vogue.
Famously, the movie’s co-creators had a philosophical difference of opinion. Frost wanted to move Twin Peaks forward. Lynch, gripped by the Laura Palmer plotline, wanted to explore the last week of her life, plus use those events to set up a narrative that spanned time across other films. In the end, Lynch co-wrote Fire Walk With Me with series scribe Robert Engels, and Frost took an executive producer credit but wasn’t creatively involved.
The movie opens with an investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), an itinerant young woman tangentially connected to Laura. This portion of the film takes place in Deer Meadow, a nearby town whose openly hostile local law enforcement serves as a counterpoint to the openness and cooperation shown in Twin Peaks. FBI Special Agent Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) heads up this inquiry; when he disappears, Cooper pays a visit.
Cut to one year later. Homecoming queen Laura (Sheryl Lee) finds herself in a doomed spiral. Cheating on boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) with James Hurley (James Marshall) and others, she numbs herself with drugs and pushes away best friend Donna Hayward (Moira Kelly, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle). In the last week of her life, Laura comes to the realization that her father Leland (Ray Wise), under the sway of a malevolent spirit named Bob, is in fact her longtime sexual abuser. Laura succumbs to darkness and is murdered.
Following bread crumbs to Twin Peaks’ beginnings
The lived details of this period, many uncovered by Agent Cooper during the original run of the series, lend the movie—a literal death march—a sense of grim foreboding. Or, for those only interested in storytelling through plot, tedium. If Twin Peaks was all about secrets, big and small, Fire Walk With Me makes explicit (in both senses of the word) that it is about the evil men do, and all that flows from that (a concept which would be explored more in The Return). This dovetails with the second big reason for the film’s rejection.
Fire Walk With Me centers on Laura’s story—and by necessity her suffering—taking viewers into deeper, darker waters, without much in the way of the lighter counterbalancing tonality that would satiate the “coffee and donuts” crowd from its small screen iteration. Supernatural-adjacent elements and coded symbolism are still quite present, and in several respects even amplified (at a certain point, we can talk about Judy). But the sense of humor so frequently used to leaven weighty topics in Twin Peaks is largely absent.
The quirky and uncanny became full-on disquieting; this would decidedly not be a film for casual fans. (For perceptive viewers, its opening credit sequence, ending with the destruction of a TV set, tips its hand.) This isn’t a soap opera, it’s an aria of despair.
Fire Walk With Me is about the shame, guilt, loneliness, self-concealment, and overpowering confusion that exist within a victim of incest. This fact, while part of the narrative DNA of Twin Peaks, was certainly not at the core of its mainstream appeal. Laura’s actions—her acting out, the messy contradictions—were largely described, not shown. She was, after all, dead.
Tough takes—even from former fans
Lynch’s film brings Laura to life—something for which viewers at the time were decidedly not ready. Contemporary reviews back up this reading. The Washington Post dinged the film as pretentious and “profoundly self-indulgent,” stating, “Laura Palmer is exhumed most cruelly.” The New York Times called it “an undifferentiated mess of storylines and hallucinations.” People Magazine deemed it a “nauseating bucket of slop.”
In a somewhat more measured, mixed-negative review, Variety stated, “Another significant setback is that Laura Palmer, after all the talk, is not a very interesting or compelling character, and long before the climax has become a tiresome teenager.”
Quite apart from popular disinterest (the film grossed only $4.2 million in theaters), it’s interesting to sift through this mixture of critical rejection, offense, and outright disgust aimed at the mere depiction of one young girl’s hell (again, a completely known commodity going in, given two seasons of television, not to mention Jennifer Lynch’s superb companion book The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer). Many critics seemed to harbor hostility over the story the film is attempting to tell. Of the reviews at the time that did engage directly with incest, almost all expressed degrees of bewilderment over the self-destructiveness of Laura’s behavior.
This underscores just how wildly ahead of its time Fire Walk With Me was in its deployment and embrace of modes of expression which centered the victim’s experience. The film, and particularly Sheryl Lee’s virtuoso performance, courses with whiplash impulsivity, a type of behavior not uncommon among sufferers of serial abuse.
Lynch and Sheryl Lee in lockstep with Laura
Laura’s recognition of her father as her molester also comes in fragmentary fashion. A strange encounter leads Laura to rush home midday, and when she sees her father leaving the house following a vision of Bob, Laura unravels, overcome by hysterical denial. At night, Leland emotionally terrorizes his daughter at the dinner table, excoriating her for having dirty hands. Later that evening, a grief-stricken Leland visits his daughter’s room, tearfully telling her how much he loves her. Frozen, Laura recognizes her “real” father, a genuinely loving side of him, but still asks the portrait of a winged angel on her wall, “Is it true?”
Revisiting Fire Walk With Me, it’s hard not to be struck by moments like this, and the mesmerizing manner in which Lynch, almost like a double-helix, repeatedly interweaves the tender and terrifying, the quiet and emotionally heightened. There is a streamlined purity of intent to the movie and its construction, and even its few compromises (the creation of Isaak’s character to accommodate less participation by MacLachlan, for example) arguably expand its borders in interesting ways.
Among the most heartbreaking scenes are some of Laura’s interactions with the two people closest to her—a living room chat with Donna, and a late-night motorcycle ride with James on the night of her death. Equally heartrending, however, is a chance encounter Laura has outside of the Roadhouse, where the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) stops her, places her hand on Laura’s forehead as if checking her temperature, and says, “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.”
This evocative moment, which leads into a striking performance of “Questions In A World Of Blue” by Julee Cruise, is quintessential Lynch—highly emotional, but from an unusual angle. It speaks to an intuitive knowledge of the hidden, and also the notion that the tragedy of this single story has larger, deeper reverberations that we can barely comprehend.
Fire walks again, finding new fandom
In the years since its release, Fire Walk With Me has enjoyed a significant reappraisal, and even embrace by younger fans—bolstered by the film’s excellent 2017 Criterion home video release, which includes the so-called “Missing Pieces” (over 90 minutes of material shot but excised from the theatrical cut of the movie), alongside new interviews with Lee and composer Angelo Badalamenti, among other special features. There is also no small amount of excellent scholarship on the film, including the books Laura’s Ghost, by Courtenay Stallings, and Fire Walk With Me: Your Laura Disappeared, by Scott Ryan.
Individually and collectively, these works (plus many more) speak to a greater readiness and willingness to meet the demanding Fire Walk With Me where it actually exists, rather than on a less formidable plane of serviced nostalgia, whose drama creates no lingering discomfort. Our culture is now more aware than ever of the effects of trauma, and how people cope in different fashions with some of the long shadows it casts. If the topics of incest and rape are not completely destigmatized, there is at least an openness, particularly post-#MeToo, to both survivors sharing these stories and others bearing witness to them.
Fire Walk With Me illustrates how sometimes society catches up to art. Thirty years after its release, its full weight and resonance can now be appreciated.
95 Comments
Even as a fan, this movie felt like a slog. I watched it again recently and could not help but fast forward through parts. I do agree with what the reviewer says: David Lynch has a very intuitive understanding of emotion (especially the darker elements therein), but it’s as if it all gets filtered through an autistic robot’s brain. Small moments can be really impactful, while the big swings sometimes fall flat.Dune is still his best film.
Dune is still his best film.Good on you but I don’t know a single Lynch fan who would agree haha. I’m a big time Lynch fan, and love sci-fi, but I barely made it through Dune once. But I love that you love it. The set and costume design I think is on point.I’d say my favorite is either Mulholland Drive or Wild at Heart.
Good on you but I don’t know a single Lynch fan who would agree haha.*Phony Pope raises his hand*Ok, I probably wouldn’t put it at number one, but it’s pretty close to the top for me.
Still a sore spot for me, still kills me knowing Mulholland Drive started out as a pilot… now THAT is a show I would tension-ingly anticipate tuning in to every week.
I think it’s for the best Mulholland Drive is a movie, because I don’t think Lynch was that into making any TV series that could have gotten greenlit.
I liked Lynch’s Dune (in some ways more so than the recent one), and I also really liked The Straight Story in part because it is so unexpected for Lynch. And because I really like Richard Farnsworth, although mostly for The Grey Fox.
My moms family is from Iowa so I have a strong bias towards Straight Story, hell they filmed a scene absurdly close to my grandpas house. Its a really solid mid western experience.
It might be nostalgia clouding things, but I also preferred his Dune to the recent one.
I just love that David Lynch also did the screenplay for Dune, and it didn’t take him 2 movies to do it. The costumes are awesome, and the sound design is very comforting to me. I love the guys in the floor length leather suits with the old-timey microphone translator device and the vacuum cleaners. Brad Dourif and his hand gestures! And the line “Mood is a thing for cattle and love play”. Everybody looks awesome and the Harkonnens really seem vile. It is so odd in so many ways it really does seem like the distant future (or the distant past, as some have posited).
I can’t disagree with you there. Loved the look of the movie and really agree about the Harkonnens.
“whaaaaat?” to all of that.
Everything bad eventually becomes good thanks to internet revisionism.
This was never bad in the first place.
The Black Death, despite killing 30% (or maybe even more) of the population of Europe and Asia, led to significant increases in quality of life of the survivors in part because the value of labor went up dramatically.
Oh yeah the whole “the black death was good actually because that’s how we got the Renaissance” argument has always weirded me out. Then again, I have an MA in medieval studies.
Here’s why the Black Death could be bad for the Democrats during Mid Terms
That’s because people who don’t care for it are unlikely to keep talking about it. The metaphor of evaporative cooling/boiling off has been other for other social processes.
Or the initial disappointment of getting a prequel after a
cliffhanger conclusion as the final word in the series has faded after
30 years and a genuine follow-up series, while Lynch’s later movies
prepared people better for his stylistic choices here than the Twin
Peaks series had.The thing still has genuine issues,
but some of its biggest problems at release were just the result of
being the wrong thing at the wrong time and that doesn’t matter in 2022.
Late to the party but also I’m guessing Age of Ultron plays better now we see what it was trying to set up at the time. So along those lines even if not a direct parallel, Fire Walk With Me plays better with more story being released since it came out.
Late to the party but also I’m guessing Age of Ultron plays better now we see what it was trying to set up at the time.
I don’t know if that’s the internet so much how eventually, everything finds its cult, and Lynch has been all cult for almost his entire career. Really the first season or so of Twin Peaks was the only time his work broke out of there.
I like FWWM fair bit, but I think its reputation has over-corrected to a degree. The film takes a while to really get going with a lot of tangents (even for a Lynch film) that make it feel like the film doesn’t quite achieve what it sets out to do. Some of this is expanded on in The Return (i.e. Philip Jefferies, Judy, the Firemen, the ring, etc.), but as it is in FWWM, a lot of it is just mentioned in passing.I’m also vaguely annoyed that the film is still discussed as being under-rated when it really hasn’t had a negative reputation in years. Direct that discussion to Lost Highway or something.
Absolutely.
Lost Highway was the first Lynch movie I saw, and it’s still my favorite. The idea that it has a mixed reputation sounds exactly right, but fuck that.
Mulholland Drive got all the attention that Lost Highway deserved.
Love David Lynch.But I’m with Mark Frost here.
In order to do what Frost wanted to do in 1992, and create a direct sequel to the series, they would have needed to walk back Cooper’s 25-year imprisonment in the Black Lodge. That was established very early on the series, and if Cooper was just rescued within a few weeks, it would have been a narrative cheat. It was better that Lynch waited until all of the cast had actually aged so that it felt earned when Cooper finally escaped.
The plot would have been them following Bob as he took on other hosts. Not sure how long he would have stayed in Cooper but that was the plan.
As someone very happy with what The Return turned out to be, I think it is fair that Mark Frost likely had no idea that such a show would even be possible or that Lynch actually had hard plans for it at the time.That said, I do think there could have been a sequel that did deal with Coop not being there (as The Return did for much of it) or something that showed dark!Coop doing his thing, how everything that happened in that 25 year gap happened etc. I do think there was an opportunity to have a more anthology feel with a different case or other fallout from Laura Palmer without have Coop out of the lodge.
Lynch was always adamant about not being finished with Twin Peaks. He personally killed plans for stuff like literary continuations because he wasn’t finished with the series. Mulholland Drive was initially planned as a spin-off focused on Audrey.
I realize that, but again, I think even the Mulholland Drive segway highlights that he didn’t have a clear roadmap. Lynch saying he wanted to do it theoretically doesn’t change that it’s reasonable that Mark Frost was like “hey, what you’re imagining doesn’t exist” at the time. Because before high nostalgia and the rise of prestige premium cable, it wasn’t going to happen.
Laura Palmer tells Cooper she’ll see him again in 25 years, but that never required that he be trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years. There were all sorts of ways to go while still remaining true to that one cryptic line.
Cooper is seen in old age makeup during the first Black Lodge dream sequence around the third episode, so it was established very early on that Cooper spends a long time there. While there were ways to write around that (like maybe Cooper experiences 25 years in the Lodge, while only a few weeks go by in Twin Peaks, and he comes out looking the same), I think Lynch always intended for Cooper’s fate to be super dark — with him being literally trapped for decades — and he had difficulty cracking the story until Kyle MacLachlan had aged into the role.
It establishes that he’s there 25 years later, but says nothing about how much time he spends there. It could be that he was intended to return to the Black Lodge after 25 years rather than being stuck in it for the duration, it could be (as you noted) that time passes differently in the Lodge and he ages faster when he’s stuck in it, or it could be a less-literal hint at something that was going to happen outside of the Lodge like so much else of what’s said and shown there, which season 3 or the second movie would build on.Obviously, him being trapped there for 25 years is what happened, but I think that only seems like the obvious solution now because it’s what Lynch wound up going with. It would hardly be the first time he took an ambiguous moment or happy coincidence and ran with it (that’s how we got BOB, the back half of Mulholland Drive, and the entirety of INLAND EMPIRE, among plenty of smaller examples).All I’m saying is that if they wanted to follow up Twin Peaks right away, a cryptic line and a scene with old man makeup, both delivered in Symbolism Land, was hardly a creative straightjacket requiring a definitive retcon to escape.
The real shock is that there were Lynch fans who didn’t like it in the first place. He’s definitely won the big game by being applauded for his “dream logic,” which is pretentious movie viewer slang for “filming anything he can think of and including it in the picture, regardless of whether it’s tedious, overtly stupid, or makes not a lick of sense.” I imagine at this point he’s bummed he didn’t have David Bowie sit down and trade non sequiturs with a talking monkey for twenty minutes.
you say that like it wouldn’t be awesome
Like WowBOBWow said, don’t threaten us with a good time.
Fire Walk With Me was the beginning of his dream logic period. Prior to that you had stuff that was either explicitly allegorical (Eraserhead, Wild at Heart) or just plain straightforward in narrative (The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). He certainly had dream sequences before this, but they were always designated as such and existed inside of a larger easily comprehensible narrative.Fire Walk With Me is the movie that established the reputation he has today, and yeah, a lot of people including his existing fans at the time received it with the same disdain you clearly have.
I would argue that the shift happens over the course of Twin Peaks, and particularly in the finale. In the first season, there are dreams and hints of supernatural elements, but it can pretty easily be fitted into a rational framework. So, the Black Lodge is “merely” a dream Agent Cooper has, for example, while BOB can be interpreted as a kind of psychic echo of trauma, or as a traditional evil spirit.
In the second season, the undeniably supernatural elements are ramped up (with things like the ghost of Josie trapped in the drawer knob), but it remains for the most part a rational supernatural. It’s only really in the finale, as Cooper physically crosses over into the Black Lodge, that the surreal dream world and “real world” fully intersect. At that point, the dream logic has become as important as the realistic narrative.
I don’t entirely disagree, but I think it’s important to note that pretty much the entire back half of season 2 outside of the finale was done without Lynch’s involvement, and the events of said finale still amount to “Cooper enters hell, faces off with the show’s primary demon, loses, and is possessed like Leland was,” even if it is gloriously presented. The dream logic is still safely contained in the same place it always was (even if we spend a whole lot of time there), while the outside plot is supernatural in a literal, easily-grasped way. I’d argue Maddy’s murder is a bigger turning point because it transports the symbolic imagery from the safe confines of velvet and zigzags to the Palmers’ living room.But even with that, we still don’t have the complete narrative implosions that start in Fire Walk With Me and continue through Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE, and The Return. He continued to evolve the style established in Eraserhead, but he wasn’t taking an axe to continuity yet.
You said straight forward and didn’t mention Straight Story, the literal most straight laced Lynch film ever.
I was only mentioning stuff from before Fire Walk With Me. The Straight Story is definitely Lynch’s most “normal” film, but it came out after Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway so by that point people were more surprised that he made a straightforward movie than they were when he went back to mindfucks.
Fair enough. Disney presents David Lynch will never not amuse me no matter how much I like the film.
It’s crazy how you’re looking down your nose at people for liking a director you don’t like and have the audacity to call them pretentious.
I have an issue with this specific line of criticism of both the original Twin Peaks series and this movie, which is that rather than “filming anything he can think of regardless of whether it makes sense,” Lynch rigidly maintains an internally consistent logic throughout. The supernatural/fantasy element is meant to exist on a plane beyond human comprehension, with beings that are some combination of alien, interdimensional and divine waging a spiritual battle using humans as proxies. But while the imagery is often silly and outlandish, to convey that humans cannot fully understand what they are seeing, there is a concrete explanation offerred for nearly everything — often given literally, meant to be taken at face value. The garmonbozia is literally human “pain and sorrow” and consumed as creamed corn. Lynch arguably explained too much in The Return, but in the process he demonstrated that he always had a clear idea of what was happening in this realm.
Yeah, for all the supposed weirdness of Twin Peaks, most of it is a fairly standard soap opera and the supernatural stuff amounts to demons versus angels with flourishes. Fire Walk With Me and The Return complicated things a bit beyond that, but it still gave comprehensible in-universe explanations for things far more often than it didn’t. The cosmology and character alliances of The X-Files are more complex.
Lynch’s unique dialog/characters/stories shine (to his fans) because they emerge from traditional production. Lynch is closer to the classic film maker than most people realize
Lynch’s unique dialog/characters/stories shine (to his fans) because they emerge from traditional production. Lynch is closer to the classic film maker than most people realize
It’s entirely fair to not like what you don’t like. But criticism that comes down to some imagined insincerity of the creator is really thoughtless and plays into lazy anti-intellectual tropes. The idea that creatives are pulling one over on people is one I hear a lot from anti intellectuals: Down-to-earth, linear-minded people are sincere. Non-linear thinkers are scammers and no-talents. It comes down to the old “my kid could paint that” mentality that holds so many people back from confronting the work itself. Like it, don’t like — whatever you want — but quit acting like there’s no intentionality or earnest creative process at work coming from artists you don’t like.
They were Twin Peaks fans, not exclusively Lynch fans. I know, because I am married to one.
Pick any work of fantasy with a rigid internal logic, and Twin Peaks will stand up to it. It’s far more rigorous than Star Trek or Star Wars. The internal world-building in Twin Peaks is akin to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. It’s just much weirder. You have to pay attention to it to understand it. Keep an open mind and give it another try, buddy.
Alex Pappademas has the last word on this movie:https://grantland.com/features/twenty-things-david-lynch-fire-walk-its-20th-anniversary/
So true. I think about that article all the time. He also had a great article when The Return was announced.
Pappademas wrote a lot of good stuff for Grantland, including The Kardashiad (not sure if this link will work).https://grantland.com/tags/the-kardashiad/
I swear, there’s a scene where Kiefer Sutherland had to repeat his line because Chris Isaak didn’t catch his cue the first time, and Lynch just left the whole thing in.
“We sure could use a pick-me-up, couldn’t we Agent Desmond?”
“But why male models, Agent Desmond?”
I watched the movie opening night with a friend. Both of us enjoyed Twin Peaks (most of it – ABC saw to the problems with the rest) and we found the movie quite good. Yes, it was darker and more depressing than the TV show but we fully expected that based on the premise. Maybe we too were ahead of our time in that Laura made perfect sense to us. She was abused for years and her ultimate descent felt real even with the influence of the surreal.It isn’t a movie I watch as often as I return to the TV show, but that’s not a comment on its quality. It’s a comment on how well Lynch did in making the movie disturbing…his specialty, after all.
It’s darkness was in the very title: Fire walk with me.
Wouldn’t fire be the opposite of darkness? I mean, traditionally, that’s how people had light after the sun set.
I saw it opening week as well, and it hit me like a pile of bricks. It was the kind of experience I hope for when I step foot in a theater. Was totally puzzled by the public reaction, but I guess anything mainstream that takes a turn in another direction can expect that kind of result. It has been interesting to see how far the story has reached into popular culture, even to the point of one of the Life is Strange games (LiS: Before the Storm) including the popular girl with secret pain, trauma, etc. along with numerous FWWM references such as the band Firewalk.
‘I guess anything mainstream that takes a turn in another direction can expect that kind of result’
You think? How I Met Your Mother, Game of Thrones, the ending of Myst, Twin Peaks 3. season ….
Sheryl Lee is such an underrated actress. Her anguish was so palpable in this film, and she completely succeeded playing an entirely different character in The Return. She deserves a far better career than she’s had.
that scene in the Missing Pieces where she’s just staring at a fan and incrementally widing her face into a terrifying smile is somehow one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen. she’s phenomenal in this movie
This is a very tough movie to watch and a lot of it has to do with the range of emotions that Sheryl Lee has to portray and she hits them all. One of those performances you can see an actor/actress through their entire heart and soul into and it’s a shame that her career didn’t do better but I suppose that comes with what happens when you go through your career as a dead girl who washes ashore on a lake
It’s crushing to read the reviews dismissing Laura as a “tiresome teenager” which just reminds me of the old saying that “the only perfect victim is a dead one” when it comes to abuse and SA. I’m glad people are at last giving this movie and Sheryl Lee the praise they deserve.
I loved it, but I understand its’ lack of popularity. It was barely in theaters. Where it was in theaters it had no advertising. When I finally got it on DVD it was a Japanese language dub release (my brother and I shared a multi-regional player) with ok English sub-titles (a deep menu item brought back the original english (it may OR my not have been a legal release) . The film over did the soap-opera feel to either an awful experience or appropriate experience depending on the viewer.I enjoy it in the same way I really enjoy “Serenity.” It is not great but it was/is a conclusion(final) to a series that I loved.
Fire Walk With Me feels like a soap opera to you?
The feel of the image did. It was so flat visually. The color and contrast was there but to me the flat-ness visually felt cheap for lack of a better word (it could have been a depth of field thing). I am not conveying my thoughts well. I am not sure how to convey them.
Yeah, I always thought this movie was a real impenetrable mess until I realized I was just mixing up Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure again.
Top comment right here
“Hollis! How could you?!”
FWWM is an all-time top horror film. That shot when Laura is staring into the mirror in the train car and Leland and Bob each pan in, revealing that they did and did not think she knew what she was dealing with is one of my favorite Lynch moments. The fact that he managed to top even this with The Return is insane.Side note: the replacement of Laura Flynn Boyle is the most uncomfortable part of this film.
I think Fire Walk With Me would’ve been a critical and financial success if it were released in 2007.
WHAT I’VE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE
This was my introduction to Twin Peaks as a teenager and I watched the series afterwards.Suffice to say, 14-year-old me didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on but man it was captivating.
I definitely did not like this movie very much the first time I saw it, having loved the series itself. I loved the quirky and offbeat humor contrasted with the darkness, so with that pretty much completely gone, it felt just too bleak. But then I decided to watch it again after seeing The Return back in 2017 and it seemed so much better for some reason. It seems like Return went a long way towards reconciling the differences between the original series and Fire Walk With Me and now I think it’s a pretty brilliant film.
It’s the scariest horror film I’ve ever seen. When Laura walked into the picture on her wall I was digging my nails in the cinema seat. When her father and the one-armed man argue in the car, my stress levels were through the roof. I loved it from its initial release. The scene in the club where you can’t hear what they’re saying (rightly not subtitled in most regions) is inspired. When Bowie appears and Cooper tests the cameras is chilling. There’s so much to love.
[horns blaring]“HE STOLE THE COOOOOOOORN”
I think it’s an important film with a lot of fantastic material, but I also think both reactions remain valid. Today in the 2020s it fits perfectly between the two eras of the show, but in the immediate aftermath of the show’s end it would have been a hugely disappointing retread for an audience hungry for more.
I wasn’t around for the initial run of Twin Peaks, but something I was around for was the modern Battlestar Galactica. A show with a hugely controversial and (for many) disappointing end. Shortly after the show’s finale a film was made called “The Plan” which has a similar structure to Fire Walk With Me, and yet has virtually no redeeming qualities.
The best part of ‘Fire Walk With Me’ is definitely Sheryl Lee. The choice to recontextualize Twin Peaks from Laura’s POV does an amazing service to a character that is treated as an invisible mythic figure for much of the show.
For me it serves as a kind of artistic antidote to the problems inherent in True Crime documentaries, where a silent victim is often buried beneath a mountain of puzzle details.
I quite agree. This is the anthesis to insert serial killer documentary here. I wish every true crime podcast had an equivalent to Fire Walk with Me, I’d love something like it for say, Zodiac.
I feel like I’ve been reading this headline for at least 25 of those years.
Eh, I feel the redemption of Fire Walk With Me came about ten years after it’s release, certainly a lot of UK publications like Time Out and Sight and Sound revaluated it and decided it was a masterpiece (which I’d absolutely agree with).
Let’s get that Chris Isaak spin off happening.
I think the main disappointment of the fans of TP was that this wasn’t resolving the series. We wanted closure, Lynch wanted something else.
This movie was massively ahead of its time, it’s like Citizen Kane mashed with Psycho in the early 90’s. People weren’t going to get it no matter what. And studios still refused to market his films even into the 2000s. Now that Lynch’s influence is eminent, we say, ‘oh, I should’ve enjoyed that’. And yet, it probably wasn’t possible for 90% of human beings at the time. You have to actually keep up with culture in order to enjoy how good these movies are, the litmus test of an ever expanding canon. And with Lynch it’s best to watch Eraserhead above all, it explains his entire catalogue.
I quite like parts of FWWM, but broadly it’s a really tough watch due to the subject matter and the pacing. As great a job as Sheryl Lee does, and as well as the movie ties up the circular plot of Twin Peaks (and sets up the third season), I have to admit I am one of the people who wants more of the tongue-in-cheek soap opera parody and Cooper’s investigations into the strange and surreal.
This is easily one of my favourite movies. Sheryl Lee is so incredibly good, but then we also get Ray Wise who is a powerhouse in his own right. Together they give a sobering portrayal of Twin Peaks from the perspective of Laura Palmer. In a lot of ways, there are two Twin Peaks- the one everyone else experiences and the one Laura experiences.Not many stories ask you to meet the victim of a murder after it takes place. After being forced to reveal the killer, Lynch seems determined to reveal the victim. Laura goes from a tragic figure we only knew through second hand accounts, to a multifaceted and complicated portrait of a woman trying to escape the misery of her life. The people of Twin Peaks all held a deep love for Laura Palmer, and by the end of this film, you understand why.
This is maybe besides the point but what I remember most about the movie is Sheryl Lees screams. Good lord, there’s scream queens and then there’s Laura Palmer. I genuinely cannot think of someone who makes more convincing shrieks and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Yeah, this. Her screams in Twin Peaks put a lot of the so-called “scream queens” of old to shame. They are “blood-curdling” to the extreme, and so genuinely felt. They are the screams of someone who is truly, deeply terrified. Lee does it again at the end of “The Return”, though I’m not sure if that’s Lee still being able to belt out that scream or if Lynch dubbed in one of her screams from Fire Walk with Me or the original series.
This fantastic article, and the amazing comments, remind me of the good old days of the AV Club. Thanks!
Every time Twin Peaks comes up I keep seeing claims as to how great of an actor Sheryl Lee is, which is something I have never read in any review or comment about her 60+ other screen credits, so here’s your chance: let’s get some great non-Twin Peaks Sheryl Lee performances up in this.
I’m an old and have vivid memories of this time period. Here’s my take: Season 1 aired in Fall 1990 and was HUGE. Season 2 faceplanted after the first few episodes beginning in Fall 1991, and as noted was unceremoniously ditched. This film was released in Fall 1992, a solid two years after the phenomenon of Season 1, and during a time where people still picked up the newspaper to see what critics were saying about movies before committing their dollars at the theater. Critics were mostly lukewarm on it (again, as you’ve noted), which is not uncommon with late summer films (which at the time were mostly viewed as studio leftovers). Take all of these things and stir them together, and I think what you got was most people not bothering to go see it.
Absolute masterpiece, and proud to say I have been telling people that for almost 30 years (first saw it a few years after it came out).