Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
“Laura Palmer did not commit suicide,” Special Agent Dale Cooper once cautioned Doctor Lawrence Jacoby while investigating the savage murder of the popular teenage high school student who helped with the meals on wheels in the Washington town of Twin Peaks; Doctor Jacoby, a psychiatrist who had been seeing Laura as a patient, responded, “No, but maybe she allowed herself to be killed.”
Agent Cooper assigned to the murder of Laura Palmer by Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole and arriving on the morning of Friday 24th February 1989, there were parallels with another murder investigation which had dead-ended a year before with no arrests and no suspects, an unloved and unwanted young woman named Theresa Banks.
Her body dumped in a river in nearby Deer Meadow, that case had been investigated by Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley, the latter a newcomer unfamiliar with the unique working practices of the department, of Cole’s strange “Blue Rose” cases, and Agent Desmond himself vanishing without trace, last seen at the Fat Trout Trailer Park where Banks resided.
Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, having run for two seasons from April 1990 to June 1991, what started off as a quirky character ensemble mystery soon veered off into elements of the surreal and supernatural, the murder of Laura Palmer intimated to have been committed by a possessing entity from the “Black Lodge,” though the indications were there from the start, one of the running subplots driven by ownership of the Ghost Wood.
Released in 1992 and serving as both prequel and in some ways a sequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was directed by Lynch who also appears as Gordon Cole from a script co-written with Robert Engels, subtitled “the last seven days of Laura Palmer” and with Sheryl Lee taking the lead, Laura’s story previously only told posthumously through her diary, her recordings for Doctor Jacoby, photographs or the memories of others.
A skewed perception of a complicated woman old before her time, carrying a secret burden since childhood and leading a dual life in plain sight, Laura’s story is not a happy one and Fire Walk With Me is not a comforting film, the cherry pie of the RR Diner replaced by Hap’s Diner where surly waitress Irene says there are no specials on offer, a fire without the warmth which made the televised version of the misty Pacific northwest town of forests and mountains so welcoming despite the undercurrent of strangeness.
Network standards no longer applying and Lynch unleashing the bloody violence of his films Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart in a world blended with the dreamscape of Eraserhead, the opening shot is of a television set being smashed, the cathode ray broken and the nightmare within escaping, the atmospheric and often upbeat jazz noir of Angelo Badalamenti taking on darker tones, sombre and mournful.
The narrative streamlined and the wider context of the town excised for expedience, the Palmer family remain central, Ray Wise as father Leland, both loving and monstrous, terrorising his daughter one moment then weeping over the behaviour he cannot comprehend the next, and Grace Zabriskie as damaged and downtrodden mother Sarah, with Moira Kelly taking the role of Laura’s best friend Donna Hayward when Lara Flynn Boyle declined to return, while the involvement of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper’s is remote.
With Dana Ashbrook and James Marshall reprising their roles as Laura’s “official” boyfriend, football star and drug dealer Bobby Briggs and her biker lover James Hurley, they are seen before the event which changed them irrevocably, going about their frustrated and imperfect lives but as yet not wounded by tragedy, only the “Log Lady” Margaret Lanterman (Catherine Coulson) able to see what is unfolding and offering what comfort she can.
Laura last seen alive by James at the intersection of Sparkwood Road and Highway 21 late on the evening of Thursday 23rd February, Fire Walk With Me sits at the crossroads of Lynch’s work, a film often misunderstood and rejected but as defiant and unrepentant as Laura herself, claiming the only victory which she can over the evil which has blighted her life and smiling as she gives herself to the angels, a template for his later trip down Mulholland Drive, regarded by many as his masterpiece, and the unexpected return to Twin Peaks of 2017.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is available from Criterion now on a 4K UHD and Blu-ray double disc featuring The Missing Pieces, ninety minutes of footage with many additional characters cut from the original release and interviews with Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie and Angelo Badalementi
