Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was my first taste of Twin Peaks.
Yeah, I did it all wrong. Fire Walk With Me gives it all away, but I didn't care at the time. Even though I was a fan of David Lynch from Blue Velvet, Dune, and The Elephant Man, I had no interest in sitting through hours of television even if it was something with the vaunted cult reputation of Twin Peaks. So, I purchased a VHS copy of Fire Walk With Me, watched it almost as many times as I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, and loved every minute of it.
Weirdo FBI agents investigate crimes with no earthly solutions.
Hey, that's David Bowie! Oh . . . now he's gone.
A gang of demons hang out in a ratty apartment wheeling and dealing for creamed corn shares of garmonbozia ("Pain and Sorrow").
A bizarre, curtained-off salon represents some kind of hellspace of judgment (?).
A one-armed man bellows a mortal warning to a young woman in danger, his face burning with emotion, fighting to have his voice heard above revving engines.
An out of control drugs-and-booze orgy in an after hours club features subtitles to render dialogue understandable above the punishingly loud music.
A tracking shot across a wasteland of crushed-out cigarette butts,
the ruins of addiction,
of pain unceasing,
desire unending,
no cure, no magic pill in sight . . .
I loved every minute, even if I didn't understand all those minutes. My take on it was that it was a plunge into a hell of murder, rape, incest, hallucinations, small town conspiracies, extra-dimensional influences, and ultimately, absurdly, inevitably hope. Sure, it's a hope found in the final traumatic moments of death as a broken mind unleashes a cascade of uplifting electrochemical sensations to give you a gentle glide into the abyss. But you take hope where you can find it in this life, right?
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a detective story, a teenage romance (featuring twenty-six year old teenagers, of course, but that's probably for the best), it's a character study featuring magnificent dialogue and engaging performances, and it is most definitely a kind of horror film. It transcends easy genre categories, and, at the time when I watched it, I saw it as an extension of the approach Lynch took with Blue Velvet. I still think this, but now I also see Fire Walk With Me in the context of the Twin Peaks TV series. It might also be my favorite Lynch work after Twin Peaks: The Return/Season Three.
Hmm . . . how will it hold up after another watch?
