WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD . . .
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me goes backwards in the timeline of Twin Peaks to tell the story of Laura Palmer's last week alive on Earth. The movie is both prequel and sequel to the television series, due to some strange space-time effects of the extradimensional salon known as the Black Lodge, but it is mostly a prequel, with just a little bit of sequel in the mix. What you get has mostly to do with the prehistory of the overall saga, but there are small moments here and there that address the fates of characters towards the end of the series.
Fire Walk With Me is so bizarre that when I first watched it, I assumed it to be about Laura Palmer's point of view more than anything else: a series of grotesque hallucinations brought on by the trauma of violence, abuse, incest, and manipulation, and further complicated by cocaine, booze, and escapist fantasies of salvation, but the first half hour establishes a world outside of Laura Palmer's experience with two FBI agents investigating the murder of a woman named Teresa Banks who ends up having a connection with Laura.
When we are first introduced to Laura, she is walking down a sidewalk, the very picture of normalcy, someone that if you saw them on the street, and knew nothing of their life, you would not be likely to speculate about the horrors of their existence. As the movie goes on, Laura's life is revealed to be a nightmare of rape, sexual exploitation, and supernatural attacks on her very soul. It is important to keep in mind that Laura is a teenager-we are dealing with the destruction of a child. The world of Twin Peaks, despite its surface quirkiness and charm and damn fine coffee, also consumes its youth without mercy.
I saw this movie a couple years before I watched the television series in full, which is not how you should watch it, but I don't regret it. Fire Walk With Me isn't about mystery, so much as it is about the nature of human evil. From the moment we enter Laura Palmer's narrative, it is very quickly established that Laura's father, Leland, is a manipulative, abusive, overbearing presence in Laura's life. It is also quickly established that he is a rapist, and that his victim is his own daughter. Later, Leland is revealed to be the murderer of Teresa Banks, a sex worker whom he had patronized and confided in about his fantasies about Laura. Leland is clearly a predator who murders both Teresa and Laura and attempts to murder another young woman, Ronette Pulaski, in order to maintain the facade of 1950s patriarchal normalcy. This is somewhat different from the way Leland is presented in the TV series, where his crimes are largely blamed on his possession by a demonic spirit known as Killer Bob.
Killer Bob is a presence within Fire Walk With Me as well, but when I first watched it, he came across as a kind of fantasy scapegoat created by Laura to avoid dealing directly with the fact that her own father is the one creeping into her bedroom at night. Bob, along with other bizarre supernatural entities, are present within this movie, but they are not allowed to take the blame for Leland's actions as much as they are in the TV series. In Fire Walk With Me, Leland is a monster whose actions result in him losing his soul, as opposed to a man who is possessed against his will.
Laura has to deal with the crimes committed against her essentially on her own. Every male presence in her life contributes to her suffering: her high school boyfriends James and Bobby are too selfish to inquire about her obvious pain and distress; her psychologist exploits their intimacy to fulfill his own desire; and the Canadian-American gangsters use her and other teenagers as both a drug mule and a sex slave. Laura is totally consumed by the underworld of the idyllic-seeming Twin Peaks. Fire Walk With Me drags you into an abyss of horror with only tiny spikes of the quirky humor and sugary earnestness of the TV version.
This unrelenting hellscape, I think, is best experienced before watching the TV series. Remember, the TV show wasn't planned out in every detail from the beginning. The writers and directors found the story as they worked on it for a few years, so the mystery, as it unfolds, is rather thrown together. And you can tell, as you watch, that the shaggy dog approach to characters, story, and plot goes down some slow roads here and there. But if you watch Fire Walk With Me first, the series becomes a totally different beast: we see Leland Palmer putting on a truly sickening and desperate show-at times, a literal song and dance number-of his innocence and grief. It makes the TV version unbearably tense and unnerving to see the monster hiding in plain sight episode after episode.
As for Laura, she is left to fend for herself on earth and in the Black Lodge, which is also a kind of bizarre afterlife, Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory all in one. At the very end of the movie, she is comforted by a psychic projection of a noble FBI agent who was not able to save her; and she is brought peace by an angel seemingly derived from a painting which hung on her bedroom wall all those years she was preyed upon by Leland. The angel didn't protect her in life, but in the Black Lodge it manifests as a kind of giant, living Christmas ornament. All this seems to be a hallucination brought on by a cascade of neurochemistry at the moment of death. Her mind takes mercy on Laura, and gives her comforting visions of angels and a cinematic FBI agent to make the plunge into oblivion less agonizing.
Meanwhile, spiritual parasites fight and barter over their scraps of pain and sorrow, operating according to codes and norms and laws totally alien to humankind, neither saving us nor damning us.
Laura Palmer, in the end, faced unimaginable suffering and death on her own with only fantasies and hallucinations to comfort her.
NEXT: 5/8/18 Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)
