The Impossible Dream Of A Walking Fire (Twin Peaks: Part 3) [Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me/The Missing Pieces]

(In addition to the content warning which you should heed below, I'm also going to add a spoiler warning: This post will reveal who killed Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. If these writeups have made you curious about the show and you don't know who did it, I urge you to check out the show and see the mystery unfold for yourself. I have to talk about it to express the way this film made me feel, so I cannot be vague about it. Please understand, and tread carefully.)

(CW: parental abuse)

I've put this off for long enough, but when you understand what we're dealing with here I don't think you'll blame me. The last time we were here, we skirted around a secret shame, peeking into a girl's diary and finding only darkness and despair within. Despite that, though, there remained a disconnect. It was a disconnect that I myself created to try and shield myself from the alternative, which was too horrible to contemplate. A shield can only last so long, though, and its defense finally shattered. That last dark arrow which tore through me, which left me harrowed and haunted, staring in stunned silence as a swirling storm of inevitability crashed forth upon me? It was called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. A film which I tried to tape when I first encountered the diary, but bounced off of back then. I was older and wiser now, and in the right headspace to watch the movie. As shameful as it was to look upon the Secret Diary, there is one positive. It did give me insight into Laura Palmer, and more importantly extra empathy for her plight and tragedy... and that's what this film is all about.

Which makes the fact that this film was a flop for David Lynch all the more rankling. An urban legend persists out there that the movie was booed at Cannes, and though it's fake the many negative reviews from the time show a certain truth of an audience reacting with revulsion and rejection. On the one hand, I can empathize. It is not a pleasant watch, beyond any shadow of a doubt. It is a dark depressing film filled with horrors as Laura Palmer realizes the doom that hangs over her. It's miles away from the quirky gonzo fun of Twin Peaks, the show. I can get not vibing with that, I really do. On the other hand, my empathy allows me to connect with the doomed Laura Palmer. As she is haunted by the most awful specters, so too am I haunted in seeing her pain. I already was this way, but peeking at her diary really put me on that wavelength. If I'm to be damned, then at least I am a damned person who understands the hellish trauma tearing apart Laura Palmer. A lesser version of myself, say, a version of myself from a few years ago who would go into polemics over betrayal of utopian ideals in a show added for the sake of cheap pathos? They would be fierce in their condemnation of the people who rejected this film. Yes, I know it's bleak, but don't you care about her? No, it's not a movie about answering the cliffhanger of the Twin Peaks show, damn it! Did you just completely tune out and refuse to engage with what the film was doing, until it did exactly what you expected of it??

This has always been what the show was. This is the very dark heart of it. As the great Lady Emily puts it, it's always been a show about a girl lost in the woods. At the halfway point, the network forced David Lynch to solve it and the show tried to move on from that... but it couldn't. Neither could David Lynch, who found himself haunted by Laura Palmer like I have been but from a creative sense. The difference is, he was in a position to do something about it, and so he did. He made this movie, and I am here to tell you a truth about it and me. It is every bit as uncomfortable and horrifying as I am trying to make it out to be, and even more so. It is not a pleasant film that you throw on to relax and unwind while having a cool drink. It is a depressing nightmare that ends in the brutal death of Laura Palmer. It also, because of how it has refused to leave my internal landscape, my new favorite David Lynch movie. Let me try to tell you why. Let me try to express the nightmare.

There's an absolutely haunting moment at the midpoint of Twin Peaks, right when David Lynch and Mark Frost are forced to reveal who killed Laura Palmer. It centers on a simple phrase: "It is happening again.". Fire Walk With Me, in its own cryptic way, shows a cycle of many things happening and of what came before. The entire opening half-hour is focused on a prior cycle, an eerie off-reflection of Twin Peaks set in the town of Deer Meadow. Everything about the Deer Meadow sequence feels like tropes and elements a fan of Twin Peaks would recognize, but twisted and malicious. The friendly small-town vibe is replaced by this closed-off hostile place which doesn't take kindly to outsiders poking in, and it simultaneously makes you pine for Twin Peaks while also showing a prior cycle. Then there's the briefest flirtation with a previous cycle when David Bowie shows up at the FBI for all of two seconds and then vanishes with no explanation. (More on this in a bit.) Then, in one gut punch of a establishing shot and the hint of an Angelo Badalamento, we're back. We're back in Twin Peaks, in the year 1989, a week before Laura Palmer dies. This is her story.

I've been dragging my feet so long on talking about this that my David Lynch film journey has jumped ahead by a decade, and so will we for a moment. There's a scene early on in his 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, where a man is at breakfast with a friend and telling him about a dream he had of something behind this very restaurant. They go outside to investigate, and see a terrible something and the man falls to the ground, presumably dead. The point of this scene is that his dream came true, something half-formed from his memory manifesting in reality. A similar thing happened to me watching this movie, as I get to see Laura Palmer go up to her bedroom and get her diary out to write in it, only to find pages missing and to give it to the agoraphobe Harold Smith. This... I read this! In my deepest shame, I read this, I imagined it, and now the dream has come true on the screen. It is an eerie feeling, and the eeriness keeps permeating through the film.

Another Lynch film which I've had time to watch thanks to dragging my feet is 1986's Blue Velvet, in many ways a prototype for what Lynch would begin to excel at. It in many ways resembles Fire Walk With Me, but at the very end it does have a happy ending of sorts. We'll contrast that with Fire Walk With Me in a moment, but it's key to note that one of the central themes of Blue Velvet is the creeping darkness lurking just under the surface of American suburbia. Blue Velvet's Lumberton, NC is haunted by some really fucked-up people who do some really fucked-up things, and Twin Peaks is haunted by much the same. You can distill Laura Palmer down to that, if you like: cheery exterior, dark and haunting interior. There is a reason she is like this, an even darker and more haunting interior within this all-American family dynamic that I can ignore no longer. I hope you heeded the warning above about spoilers, because I have to finally confront the truth of what was done to Laura Palmer.

Her abuser, and inevitable killer in the horrible climax of the film, is her own father. The diary said as much, but I preferred the reading where that wasn't the case. A safer reading where Laura is haunted by some force that wants to possess her. Fire Walk With Me, in one awful fucking scene, forces you to confront that terrible truth. Leland Palmer, possessed by some force known as Bob but Laura's father all the same, has been abusing her and will become her inevitable killer. It was a shocking twist on the Twin Peaks show, but the ramifications of it are kept off of TV. In the film, we go all out. Any Twin Peaks fan going into the movie knows, but to be confronted by it? To see Laura's agony and trauma laid bare as she realizes who the monster who wants to possess her is? It's not a pleasant thing to see at all. The full horror of it, the dark and haunted interior made manifest with no TV broadcast standards to consider, is one that leaves an impression on me. How could it not? Every moment of this is horrible, especially the lead-up to the murder. Then, it happens. Exactly as was foretold on a safer show, shown in all its lurid and horrific detail. Laura Palmer, the tormented soul who refused to yield, killed by a monster that used to be her father. You know it's coming, but you still feel the loss, as profound as the folks of Twin Peaks will feel it at the start of their show.

That's the bleaker ending, which Blue Velvet shied away from... but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Some remnant of Laura, stuck in the infamous Red Room, seeing an angel come to her and smiling. Is it a smile of freedom? Freedom from her abuse, from the cycle which claimed so many before her? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that this is and will remain a harrowing film, but one I don't think I will ever forget. I won't ever forget Laura Palmer, and the pain and hurt she went through in her last days. It was not an exploitative joy to watch her endure such things, to be clear. The film is a tragedy, and Laura's descent is truly tragic. Almost as tragic is people bouncing off of the movie, but I've litigated that already. If only it were more like the show, they must wish. As it turns out, they almost got their wish.

20-odd years later, a curious thing surfaces: The Missing Pieces. A feature-length compilation of deleted and extended scenes from Fire Walk With Me, locked up in licensing hell and finally set free. It's more of this incredible experience, so it must be good, right? Well, sort of. It's deleted and extended scenes, and watching them you can see why. Some of them are just extraneous flavor, while multiple others have focus on the quirky characters of Twin Peaks that fans of the show have grown to know and love. It's lovely to see these bits out of context, but I absolutely understand why they were cut. Sweet as they are to see again, this isn't a movie about the quirky characters of Twin Peaks. It's a movie about Laura Palmer, and shoving all that Twin Peaks-ness in would only dilute that. It's what I believe, and perhaps it's what Lynch believed when he cut the scenes out of the film.

It's not all best left on the cutting room floor, though. Extending David Bowie's scenes in the movie help establish the idea of his character as part of a cryptic previous cycle we are forced to ponder about on our own time. That would be nice to have, but the real key? There's two scenes that I feel wouldn't have hurt being in the film. The first is an extended scene with Laura at her friend Donna's place, and part of it has that same uncanny feel of having read it in the diary. It also makes the metaphor of the angel at the end of the film more explicit, and maybe it was too straightforward and on the nose of explaining the ending of the film. Still, I like the scene a lot. The second is this wordless but terrifying scene of Laura staring at a ceiling fan, transfixed as her face slowly morphs from hypnotized blankness to a wide-eyed manic grin of pure malice, the dark interior struggling to break free. With just one scene of her slowly grinning, Sheryl Lee perfectly shows the struggle between light and dark within Laura, and I really wish this had been in the film. It even has her mother re-iterate the whole "it's happening again" motif.

The last scenes of note deal with teases of what happens after the series ends, implying that the end of the series is a part of the cycle once more. How that will pan out remains to be seen. The original plan was for it to be followed up with more movies, but nobody liked Fire Walk With Me at the time and so that was scrapped. David Lynch moved on to other films, and so the world moved on... but something else happened at the end of that series. Laura Palmer, in some ghostly form in that strange red room, told Agent Dale Cooper she'd see him again in 25 years. 25 years on from Fire Walk With Me was 2017, recent history. The 90's a long-ago faded time, lost to the mists of history. Except... David Lynch kept his promise.

Next time, we return.