Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Reassessment of Lynch’s ‘pathologically unpleasant’ film is complete (Review)

There was a time when people would have been surprised to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on Criterion, you know. Janet Maslin’s infamous New York Times pan (“brain-dead grotesquerie… pathologically unpleasant”) set the tone for the initial Cannes reception, and things did not get any better once it went on general release. Part of this was because Twin Peaks the TV series had fallen from favour by the time this film was released – indeed, it had been cancelled – and people enjoyed having the extra opportunity to stick the boot in.

And yet it should have been obvious, even in 1992, that Fire Walk With Me corrects the main problem of Twin Peaks season two. For all the show quickly became caricatured as a wacky affair about backwards speech and damn fine coffee, the pilot episode of Twin Peaks is a coruscating exploration of a community’s grief. Later episodes maintained the eccentricities without digging into the underlying pain, so Fire Walk With Me is a feature-length reminder that this is, ultimately, a show about death. Part of the film’s genius is that it takes the main problem with prequels – the events are set in stone, the heroes can’t change anything – and recognises that this is, in fact, the core of a tragedy. After a bleak, wrong-footing prologue, we get a huge, Pavlovian rush of happiness when the Twin Peaks theme starts up and Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper appears. But why? We know he can’t come to Twin Peaks, because we’ve seen him enter the town for the first time in the pilot. One of television’s great white knights, a rare serious US drama protagonist who isn’t a tortured anti-hero, is stuck helplessly on the sidelines.

That’s how it seemed at the time, anyway; 2017’s revival series found a way to bring Agent Cooper into the events of Fire Walk With Me. The reappraisal of this film was well underway before Twin Peaks: The Return – the US Criterion edition, whose bonus features are faithfully reproduced in this Region 2 Blu-Ray, was released to tie in with that series. But it probably helps that Fire Walk With Me is no longer the nastiest, weirdest thing in the Twin Peaks canon, and several previously puzzling elements – the blue rose, Agent Jeffries, the woodsmen!!! – have been picked up and thoroughly explored in The Return.

At the root of it, though, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was always That Film. Anyone who’s seen it will have an armful of indelible moments: the wriggling, ominous music as Agents Desmond and Stanley find something underneath Teresa Banks’s fingernail, Harry Dean Stanton turning a walk-on character into a legit series icon, the suffocatingly horrible club scene, the panic attack in the traffic jam, the whole devastating finale. The essential shallowness of awards season – the fact that outstanding elements in a film won’t be nominated unless the film as a whole is admired – means Sheryl Lee and Angelo Badalamenti received Independent Spirit Awards for their work here and very little else. The Best Original Score Oscar that year went to John Williams for Schindler’s List; Badalamenti’s work is better.

Lee and Badalamenti get generous one-on-one interviews in the extra features – Badalamenti tells the “Oh Angelo!” story, as well as a great anecdote about Paul McCartney and the Queen. It’s great to hear full considerations of tracks like ‘A Real Indication’, ‘Sycamore Trees’ and ‘The Voice of Love’, which have been secret handshakes within the Twin Peaks fandom for so long. Nobody, though, deserves to talk about Fire Walk With Me more than Sheryl Lee, whose performance upholds the entire film. She talks movingly about how she was hired for the show – initially for a non-speaking role as a corpse, then as so much more – as well as her near-symbiotic connection with Lynch, and the response she got from victims of incest after the film was released.

Long-term David Lynch fans will know the director was not always peachy keen on deleted scenes, but as far back as 2001 he was talking about getting the cut material from Fire Walk With Me out into the world somehow. Part of the reason was the sheer amount that was cut – Michael Horse remembers Lynch expressing remorse over having to “cut it in two” – but part of it, perhaps, was to show Fire Walk With Me wasn’t always the oblique, dour death trip that repelled its initial Cannes audience. To this end, the most substantial extra is Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a feature-length 2014 collection of cut scenes in the tradition of Lynch’s previous INLAND EMPIRE companion piece More Things That Happened.

More Things That Happened feels like a movie in its own right, suggesting that Lynch could have remixed INLAND EMPIRE into any number of finished films. Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces is a deleted scenes compilation – but what scenes! Prior to its release, even the most determined shooting script archaeologists had no idea that Agent Cooper met with Kiefer Sutherland’s charmingly awkward Sam Stanley, or that a post-Season Two Cooper appeared in the Red Room to warn Laura not to take BOB’s ring. The humour that Lynch insisted was present in the script does make an appearance, most notably in a scene where Pete Martell has to laboriously explain to Mr. Mibbler why his two-by-four is the wrong size. There’s also a scene where a screaming Agent Jeffries materialises in Buenos Aires, which would be terrifying if not for a passing hotel worker’s reaction, which has become a perennial favourite among Twin Peaks shitposters: “Oh Mr. Jeffries, the shit it come out of my ass!”

All this is fun, but none of it obscures the dark heart of Fire Walk With Me. The most laughter we hear in The Missing Pieces is a Palmer family dinner scene, one that’s good enough and subtly unsettling enough to stack against the best moments of the pilot. As Leland gets the family to practice Norwegian phrases ahead of his big business meeting, father, mother and daughter laugh endlessly, compulsively, as if they’re scared of what might happen if they stop. The central scene of Fire Walk With Me, after all, is the one where Laura realises her father and BOB are the same person. It reminds you that all the supernatural storylines in Twin Peaks were not just attempts at quirkiness, they were a way of getting to the central truth about this kind of abuse: that the child must come to terms with the fact that their protector is also a monster. At his best, Lynch’s surrealism feels more real than reality, and this is the ultimate proof.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME

Wash with new soap behind the collar and have yourself some sugary tea, it’s time for the latest Pop Screen Patreon exclusive. This month we’re looking back at Starshaped, simultaneously a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the early years of Blur and the bleakest chronicle of alcoholism since Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Reportedly drummer Dave Rowntree still finds this film unwatchable; Graham and Ewan are a little more generous. That said, the film’s main asset is the one director  Matthew Longfellow barely seems to notice: it depicts the band on the verge of releasing Modern Life is Rubbish, an album which saved them from one-hit wonder status and set the agenda for the next decade of British rock music.

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