CONTENT WARNING / TRIGGER WARNING: This review discusses themes of sexual assault, incest and murder, though it doesn’t include graphic descriptions of scenes from the film.
“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.” ~ Laura Palmer to Donna Hayward
“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.” ~ Margaret Lanterman to Laura Palmer, outside the Roadhouse
“The angels will return, and when you see the one that's meant to help you, you will weep with joy." ~ Doctor Hayward to Laura Palmer, in Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces
I was overwhelmed.
Like much of David Lynch’s work, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is difficult to write about. So many things in it are mysterious and open to the viewer’s interpretation, and I have to frequently remind myself that it’s a work of art, not a straightforward depiction of real life. As Lynch used to say, film is the medium - so it says what it wants to say through that medium! There’s symbolism, there’s ambiguity, and it’s often in a dialogue with the television series that preceded it, just as the much later Season 3 is in dialogue with both. And there’s that Lynchian dreamlike quality - “we live inside a dream!”, as Phillip Jeffries insists in the prologue. The film is the dream of David Lynch, and it cannot be fully comprehended in a purely rational way. On its own terms, however, it is truthful; it’s just very hard to analyse, because so much of it is a matter of feeling, created through a myriad of filmic techniques and minute details and connections that permeate the work, often subliminally.
So I won’t attempt to cover all of it here, even if I had the space to do so. My main focus will be on Laura Palmer, as that is true of the film too, but there are other aspects, many of them important to Twin Peaks as a whole, that I’ll have to leave out. I’m still confused by the green “owl cave” ring, for instance, which is introduced in this film and recurs many times in Season 3, and which seems to connect people with death and with both the black and white lodges. There are the creepy scenes, filled with significance, but impossible to describe, such as Laura seeing herself within the picture on her bedroom wall, or Annie Blackburn appearing in her bed and telling her something that hasn’t happened yet - a scene which will have a big pay off twenty-five years later in Season 3. And the wonderful, touching moment when the Log Lady, Margaret Lanterman, appears to Laura outside the Roadhouse and gently places her hand on her forehead, speaking to her with infinite compassion. “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.”
There’s a unique, weird beauty and humanity in David Lynch’s films, no matter how dark the themes.
And there’s no space either to reflect on the wonderful filmmaking on both visual and musical levels, the haunting images, colours and motifs that recur throughout the film, and the frequent use of close-ups which bring us even closer to Laura’s experience. Fire Walk With Me is a thing of gorgeous beauty despite the terror, but I have neither the space nor the expertise to discuss that here. My words are often personal and subjective, and certainly incomplete. After all, if film is the medium, then no complete or fully objective, encompassing view of the work is possible, which is why Lynch himself resisted verbal interpretations of his films. Trying to “explain” the overwhelming ending in particular can only be a relatively mundane, inadequate approximation. I can only write about what it means to me.
Back in 1992, when Fire Walk With Me was released, most critical reactions to it were crass, stupid and uncomprehending (with notable exceptions; thank you, Mark Kermode!). I saw it on television in about 1995, I think, and while I didn’t completely get everything it was saying, I was very moved, especially by the ending. I now understand the film as a harrowing story of patriarchal abuse, incest, trauma and resistance. It moved me thirty years ago and it does so now more than ever, perhaps because I can understand it more deeply.
And it’s only now that I can appreciate (and sympathise with) the positive critical reviews of the film that have emerged since its release. James Gray called Fire Walk with Me "a classic example of how the critics get it wrong," adding that the film's empathy for how Laura "suffer[ed] so profoundly [was] a thing of beauty." Gregg Araki called it Lynch's "masterpiece" and a "perfect movie," praising Sheryl Lee's performance as "one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema." He included the film in his list of the ten greatest films of all time during the 2012 Sight and Sound directors' poll. Céline Sciamma, who had not seen the series prior to watching the film in theaters, said that while she felt "totally lost" at times, the film "changed the way that I look at cinema" and that "the whole world felt different" after she saw the film. Jane Schoenbrun said that it was "my favorite film" and "goes to places that made me feel things I'd never felt before." And Jacques Rivette said that "I have no idea what I saw, all I know is that I left the theater floating six feet above the ground." [This paragraph is a copy and paste from Wikipedia’s page on the film.]
It is also, above all, a deeply personal film for its director, a singular genius whose least personal film (1983’s Dune) was the one that made constant creative compromises under pressure from the studio. “I really like [Fire Walk With Me]”, he told an interviewer five years later. “It’s as free and as experimental as it could be within the dictates it had to follow.” Lynch was also famously unhappy with the narrative direction of Twin Peaks in Season 2. The studio execs forced him and co-creator Mark Frost to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer; a lot of other writers and directors developed new stories for many of the characters, and by his own admission he struggled to keep up with the pace of writing a 22 episode season of television. Lynch was a director who absolutely needed full creative control over his work. But following the opening credits of Fire Walk With Me (with its deeply haunting Badalamenti score), he immediately takes back control by smashing a TV set with an axe. And with a terrified woman’s scream, we are suddenly in the uncompromising world of a unique cinematic vision.
With this film, Lynch brings Laura Palmer’s story centre stage, finally giving her a voice. At many points through the entirety of Twin Peaks, including Season 3, certain characters insist that “Laura was the one”, and Lynch wanted her to be the subject, not an object. “I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer: radiant on the surface but dying inside”, he said. “I wanted to see her live, move, and talk.” Before this, we’d only seen Laura as a corpse, and in photographs and snippets of cassette recordings. Yet the story is a perfect and intrinsic continuation of Twin Peaks, despite being a prequel. Lynch may have set it before the series so that he could escape the subplots of Season 2 and focus on what really mattered to him, but it felt like a sequel to me because my experience of all that had gone “before” made it so much more moving. Only the 30 minute prologue feels like a prequel; the rest is a culmination of everything thus far.
Sheryl Lee’s performance is incredible, by turns subtle, terrifying, seductive and heartbreaking. Even her portrayal of Laura’s cousin Maddy in the TV series - excellent as it was - was not on this level; and it’s astonishing that she was so unknown before Twin Peaks, Lynch basically picking her because her photo looked right and he wanted her to play a “dead girl”. And Maddy was a fine character who served an important narrative purpose, but I never felt we were truly inside her head. Twin Peaks was full of diverse characters, many of them adorable, but in nearly every case I feel they were viewed from the outside, though often with great empathy. In Fire Walk With Me, we get as close to Laura’s tormented state of mind and traumatic final week as both Lee and Lynch can bring us. It’s a painful though surprisingly varied experience; Laura is a very real character, and as such she’s complex and many-sided. She’s not even always likeable, but I always feel sympathy for her because it’s impossible not to.
Ray Wise, as her father Leland, also gives a powerful performance, terrifying and at times affecting. In some ways Leland is an enigma, because Lynch chose to represent the most terrible side of his personality through the demonic spirit Bob - the most obvious reminder that Twin Peaks is not a piece of realism. And it raises disturbing questions. If Leland is literally possessed by Bob, how much is he aware of his actions, and are they truly his own? If they are not, what is the story saying about abuse, incest and murder? “I always thought you knew it was me”, Leland cries to his daughter, as she sees him on one side and Bob on the other, moments before she is killed. In the last few seconds of her life, when she puts the ring on her finger, he screams, “no! Don’t make me do this!” This is confusing - is he screaming at Laura or Bob, or both?
Again, this isn’t a realist film any more than it’s a “horror movie”; David Lynch is his own genre. In Mark Kermode’s memorable description, it’s “a heartbreaking depiction of a life falling apart, and of the boundary between this world and the next being nothing but paper thin.” As such, I feel that Bob is a kind of personification of “the evil that men do” (as Albert Rosenfield says in Twin Peaks, following Leland’s death). Leland claimed that Bob was a man who abused him as a child, and it seems Leland wasn’t able to resist him as Laura was. So Bob “entered” him. Surely this is a metaphor for multi-generational abuse and trauma. In contrast to her father, Laura resists Bob until she can’t, until she can only defeat him by putting on the ring and sacrificing herself - possibly for her friend Ronette Pulaski, but also to break the cycle of abuse. She’s Leland and Sarah’s only child, so with her death it can no longer continue.
Bob is Leland’s mask. Laura knows that Bob is real (“he’s been having me since I was twelve!”, she insists to her friend Harold Smith), but she doesn’t know who he is. Her discovery of the truth - that her abuser and rapist is her father - happens twice, because the first time it’s almost impossible for her to accept and comprehend. She flees the Palmer house in terror, having seen Bob creeping about in her bedroom, then moments later watches Leland casually trotting down the front steps to his car. “No, no!”, she cries, burying her face in the grass. “It can’t be him, no, it can’t be!” Sheryl Lee is heartbreaking in this moment. For all of Laura’s many faceted complexity, here we completely empathise with this terrified, heartbroken, devastated teenager.
What to make of this? There are uncomfortable questions here. In a realistic film, Laura would always know that her rapist was her respected and well-liked dad; he wouldn’t be a wild-haired, leering demon in a denim jacket. But Lynch’s films can never be described as realism. The supernatural in Twin Peaks is simply (or complexly) a way of expressing what lies hidden beneath the veneer of small town America. The soapy storylines and quirky comedy are a mask covering what’s really going on, including the ugly truth of the perfect Palmer family (pillars of their community) behind the door of number 708. Other people have said that Twin Peaks is a reaction to the vacuous soaps that populated American television in the previous decade, and a kind of meta commentary on television as a medium. It also comments on America itself - especially in the later Season 3, which uncannily anticipates the terrors and fracturing of society that would break just a few years later.
In a way, I prefer not to see Bob as a supernatural entity “possessing” Laura’s father. He’s just the mask, a representation of the monster that Leland can be as he perpetuates the generational abuse in his family, the awful things he hints at from his own childhood. Many survivors of abuse speak of how their abuser could change in an instant, from an apparently loving parent to a monster they could barely recognise. Into something like Bob, perhaps. There are scenes in both the film and series where it seems clear that Leland genuinely loves his daughter. Does he truly know what he’s doing? Does his wife Sarah know, for that matter? I would guess that yes, they do, though for much of the time they may be in denial, hiding behind the mask. If you watch Sarah closely, it’s clear that she knows. In the pilot of Twin Peaks, set just a few days later, she’s devastated by Laura’s death but at the same time, reacts almost as if she’s half expecting the terrible news.
And yet. The scene where Leland tearfully tells Laura that he loves her, and gently kisses her head after having behaved monstrously minutes earlier, is deeply moving. Weeks later in the TV series, when he dies, his heart breaks as he contemplates what he’s done to Laura, and with Dale Cooper guiding him “towards the light”, he sees his daughter once more, and we get the strong sense that even after everything he’s done, he is somehow forgiven.
Laura is the one.
Laura doesn’t recognise her father because, like him, like her family, like the whole town, like the country, maybe the world! - she’s in denial. The truth is too devastating to accept. She’s just a child who needs her father. Her reaction to his gentle expression of love for her is deeply moving, even after he’s proven himself a monster. She loves him too, and desperately needs him to be her dad. And it’s expressed through Sheryl Lee’s incredible face acting alone. She doesn’t say a word.
As helpless as she is in the face of Leland/Bob’s abuse, she copes with the ongoing trauma in the only ways she can. No one knows what happens behind the doors of Number 708; she’s the Homecoming Queen with a loving family who everyone adores. In her secret life she dissociates through drugs and sex. She hates herself because of the humiliation of the years of abuse and gaslighting. But she does resist. Again, she tells Harold, “He says he wants to be me or he’ll kill me. Fire… walk… with… me!” For a brief second her face becomes something monstrous, before she collapses in terrified tears on Harold’s shoulder. Laura has let Leland/Bob into her physically because she had no choice, but the film shows her in a battle to prevent him from corrupting her soul as her father did - once or twice coming perilously close. Ultimately, she lets him kill her instead.
Despite the tragedy of her fate, it leaves me wondering if in a strange way she actually has more agency than Leland has. Or courage, at least. After all, it’s a poor kind of agency if death is the only option. The whole film is a study of patriarchal abuse, brutality and gaslighting - one which feels even more relevant now, in an America where misogyny and an endless torrent of blatant lies are normalised in politics and social media, and the president himself is a convicted felon with multiple sexual assault allegations. Laura finally, at the end of the film, has no escape from it except self-sacrifice.
“Your Laura disappeared”, she tells James sadly, moments before she runs off to her fate in the dark woods. “It’s just me now.”
We can see the realisation in her face as she’s terrorised in the train car. She sees her face in the mirror turn into Bob, and screams. She sees Ronette’s terror, and she sees the angel - in an unforgettable moment of sudden stillness and silence - hovering above her friend. She sees Ronette’s hands miraculously untied, allowing escape. My impression is that when MIKE throws the ring into the car she remembers her dream of the Red Room, and has an intuition that wearing the ring will break the cycle. So Leland/Bob kills her, and as he carries her body out of the train car, the unconscious Ronette is of no concern to him. And Ronette survives.
This climax is a brutal, terrifying scene. It’s deeply upsetting to see Laura’s final moments, after she’d been discussed, autopsied, buried and remembered through two seasons of television. A series in which the only question that seemed to be on everyone’s minds, both on and off the show, was “who killed Laura Palmer?”. Lynch brings her into the foreground, before the TV series and before the narratives that resulted from studio pressure and a team of other writers. He makes her real; we’ve finally got to know this person, and now we have to watch her death, that we always knew was coming.
I can understand if there are those who think Lynch objectified Laura Palmer. I’m not sure if, as a cishet man in the patriarchy, I’m compromised on the issue, but I do think Laura is the subject of the story, not just an object. The film’s empathy and compassion for Laura (and Sheryl Lee’s amazing portrayal) transcends any possibility of sexual objectification. Yes, she’s objectified by some of the people around her (and by herself, even), but not by the film, which resolutely portrays her as a real, complicated, suffering human being. Lynch and Lee together centred the experience of a victim of patriarchal abuse and trauma in a way that I find profoundly moving; they want us to see her. Indeed, both the actor and director have reported survivors of incest coming to them and thanking them, even asking, “how did you know what it was like?” It’s the power of great fictional writing, in any medium: the ability to make us empathise with a character as if they were a real person. Because these tragedies play out in countless lives every day, all over the world.
Laura’s not just a corpse anymore, a name, a statistic, a subject of gossip and reminiscence amongst her friends and family, a projection of their fantasies. She’s a true person whose inner life we have, at times harrowingly, seen so much of. And so her murder is devastating - as it should be. Murder is always devastating.
So how to describe the feelings evoked in me by that unforgettable ending, which brings a haunting closure, beauty and consolation to Laura’s story? The answer to that, as always, is that if I could do so there’d be no need for the film. I always remembered it as beautiful, but this time I was totally unprepared for the power of my reaction to it. I can’t remember having sobbed as much at the end of any work of cinema - not even with Three Colours: Blue, my favourite movie.
In one of many shot scenes excised from the film (but later assembled by Lynch into the feature length Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces), Doctor Hayward movingly tells Laura, “The angels will return, and when you see the one that's meant to help you, you will weep with joy." Laura’s moved, speechless reaction to this is deeply touching; her feeling that “the angels” have deserted her is a running thread in the film. And Hayward’s words are prophetic. We see again the iconic image of the plastic being gently pulled away from the dead girl’s face, ashen grey by the lake shore. Then that fades into the curtains of the Red Room (both are the recurring motif of something once hidden, now revealed), and Laura is sitting there with an inexpressibly sorrowful face, while Dale Cooper stands with a gentle smile and his comforting hand on her shoulder. He sees and accepts her, and in that moment perhaps she sees and accepts herself. Suddenly her face is flickeringly illuminated by a bluish light, reminiscent of the television screen in the opening credits, and she reacts with astonishment and wonder. The angel hadn’t deserted her, and she does indeed weep with joy. The dreamlike quality of this scene is impossible to convey in words; inexpressibly heightened by Badalamenti’s haunting music, it’s unique in cinema, and her weirdly illuminated face is unforgettable. It’s almost as if she’s laughing at herself on a television screen, as if in recognition that her life was a story that played out on it (“we live inside a dream!”). It’s a mirror of the film’s opening moment, the axe smashing into the TV set to the sound of Teresa Banks’ scream.
She’s free of her years of torment. She’d saved herself from perpetuating the cycle of abuse, from a fate as awful as her father’s was. And there’s also an implication, especially in the much later Season 3 of Twin Peaks, that Laura’s death had… I’m not sure, an almost global, cosmic significance, that is never stated in rational terms. Again, I can’t put this into words because really it’s a feeling, though a very deep one. But I’m haunted by Margaret Lanterman’s final words to Hawk before she died. Laura was indeed the one.
And yet, while the angel has returned to Laura and the last thing we see is her joyful, smiling face in a blue fade (a distant echo of the homecoming queen’s portrait from the end credits of the TV series), there’s still for me a hint of ambiguity, to the extent that when I saw it thirty years ago I wasn’t sure if it was a “happy” ending or not. This time I felt more strongly that it was, but it’s possible that some ambiguity was intended. After all, Laura’s death is still terrible, and Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor still plays over those closing credits. But so does Laura’s radiant smile.
The spiritual journey of experiencing this film, culminating in a sublime release from the tension that’s been building throughout, is one of those times when I wish I could thank the artist for what he’s given me. It takes something very special indeed to move me that deeply. If David Lynch was right and the angels are real after all, may he be transcending to his spirit’s content, forever.
