Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is one of my all-time favorite movies. People hate it, people love it, people “don’t get it”, but unlike mostly every other writeup about this film, I’m not going to pay much attention to those people. I honest-to-god do not give a shit about the controversy surrounding this film, and it is a shame that David Lynch’s best and scariest film has to be shrouded in some dumb split audience conundrum that is actually dissolving each day that The Return sinks into everyone’s brains.
Fire Walk With Me is such a deeply affecting experience because it combines Lynch’s way of intensifying reality into nightmares with the situation of a girl whose reality is a nightmare. We have spent the entirety of Twin Peaks seeing how Laura affected people, how her mythical existence extended into a death that casts a shadow over an entire community, and we even know what “happened” to her, but we did not know what really happened to her. Lynch was fascinated by Laura, and evidently realized that the fact that his audience knew that um, Ben Horne is Donna’s father, but next-to-nothing about Laura Palmer herself was wrong. With this film, she is finally given an avenue to exist and suffer within a space beyond vague statements and people looking sad at her homecoming queen portrait.
Fire Walk With Me makes me feel more things for a fictional character than I ever thought were possible. It burns with so much love and care and respect for Laura that I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s one of the most empathetic films ever made. Below I discuss a few important scenes in this film that still strike fear into me when I think about them and make me cry when I rewatch them. They are mind-shatteringly powerful, disturbing, and almost always very sad, but they are the reality of Twin Peaks.
Agent Cooper’s role in Fire Walk With Me is genius. There’s no winking humor or damn fine coffee here, and stripping back Coop from the quirky elements that in part define his character in the show leaves us with a man who has a deep intuition for the nature of the spirit world. And far from being just a cool cameo, Bowie’s role in this film bridges the dual storylines in a way much different from Lynch’s usual tonal standbys. Lynch’s unique sense of unease is overtaken by downright scariness as the film becomes drowned out by strange figures, screaming, garbled words, and primal imagery. The stuttering cuts, tellingly juxtaposed with TV static, as Jeffries rants and vanishes make it all at once abundantly clear that we are entering a multitude of territories far beyond the boundaries of the show, where Lynch is no longer bound by the conventions of TV form and narratives (both of which he broke anyway, but not to the extent of Fire Walk With Me). It is the intensity and confusion of this scene, a spirit-man going mad from his time in the same world that Laura will inhabit, that is our gateway into her reality.
Laura’s first appearance in Fire Walk With Me plays exactly to how audiences wanted to “Meet Laura Palmer”. She’s a pretty, blonde teenage girl walking down her street who appears to be the picture of innocence and virtue until she isn’t. She snorts coke! She has sex! We even see her nipples! Yet when Bobby’s anger melts after an argument simply by her gaze, we see the power she holds over the people that love her. It is evident throughout her interactions, especially with men, that she knows the power she holds. All of this makes her psychological breakdown after she sees “Bob” has ripped pages out of her diary even more harrowing. Suddenly, there is no more high school drama here - all we are left with is a distraught, powerless young girl who is being pushed to her mental breaking point by the trauma she has experienced. None of the physical characteristics that followed her throughout the show - blonde, beautiful, popular, prom queen, matter anymore. Lynch gives us what we want and then immediately takes it all away from us, making Laura’s pain bare.
I really like this scene in particular because of Sheryl Lee’s way of showing Laura’s mental descent. She is, of course, at the top of her game throughout the entire movie, but something about the way her voice breaks and the way she absolutely trembles with rage and terror when talking about Bob makes me cry. The split-second shot of Laura as a black-lipped demon-like figure is one of my favorite images of the film. It’s so bone-chillingly terrifying, and is even more terrifying because we, and Laura, don’t understand it.
This is one of the most truly shocking scenes in the movie because we are exposed to the true Palmer family dynamic. A family that always seemed loving and picture-perfect in the show is revealed to be a family controlled by Leland’s rage, control and abuse. Just like Laura, we begin to see Leland, not Bob, as the perpetrator of her abuse and downfall.
Yet despite any feelings of nausea and fear from the way Leland treats and even covertly sexually abuses Laura in front of his own wife, even inspecting her fingernails in a heart-stopping hint to her eventual murder, it’s incredible that we truly get the sense that he is a man battling himself. We see the terror he is able to inflict on Laura and the pain of the fact that he cannot control it. I have a weird way of viewing Fire Walk With Me (that isn’t necessarily canon but I think is a really interesting way of looking at it): “Bob” is not a spirit, he is the manifestation of the cycle of abuse. Leland isn’t at odds with the effect of an evil spirit on his soul, he is at odds with himself and the way his psyche has developed in response to childhood abuse. His emotional distress following this scene, as well as his awkward and sad apology after dinner, is Lynch’s way of showing sensitivity to the “abused abuser”, which is pretty much never done well in any form of media. Confusion and fear of this man who we finally see under the effects of an evil force is once again transformed back into pity and sadness. This is the Leland we knew. Yet in order to understand Laura’s pain, we must also see the Leland Laura knew.
Mike’s visit is nothing less than the spirit world crashing into the real world at 80 mph. Thanks to some magnificent sound design, we can smell the engine burning, feel the urgency of Mike’s words, and most importantly and all at once experience the madness Leland and Laura are slipping into throughout the course of FWWM. Laura cannot understand what is happening, until she hears these devastating words break out amidst the hysteria: “it’s him, it’s your father”. And then the bough breaks, as both father and daughter succumb to a split-second moment of shared knowledge. Part of what sets FWWM apart from most of Lynch’s other films is that it does not only sink in unease for most of its runtime - it ramps up tension and terror to unbearable frequencies, and importantly lets it explode into hysteria. This constant rhythm just makes us even more scared to see the end we know is already coming.
If the ring is the sign of death and salvation that it seems to be at the end of the film, a man that at first appears threatening trying in vain to warn Laura of her demise flips this scene on its head while not minimizing the horror of it. It’s powerful stuff, that might come off as needlessly shocking or (apparently) funny at first.
The scene we hoped Lynch would not show but must be shown is where this film begins to totally careen into destruction. Laura has caught her father - not “Bob” - in the act and can no longer hold onto her feelings of doubt. This is the beginning of the end. And unlike a lot of scary moments in Fire Walk With Me, this scene is incredibly quiet. The pink lights Laura previously writhed under in the sex club are replaced with hypnotic, resigned blue lights, and it’s not sexy. She has no power over what is happening to her and the knowledge she gleans from what is about to happen to her is the only thing she has left. This scene is the embodiment of Twin Peaks to me. No love triangles, no owls, no aliens, just a young girl and her father trapped by abuse. We know that Laura knew she was going to die, and this is the scene where she realizes it. And it is somehow infinitely more horrible than anyone could have imagined.
When Twin Peaks: The Show ended in the 90s, all we knew was that Leland Palmer, acting through the force of an evil spirit, killed his daughter Laura. Now, in all of its sheer horror, we get to see what exactly - the exact pain, trauma, psychological damage, and above all, the inhuman rage - that show is built upon. Even after seeing Inland Empire, I still think this is Lynch at his most frightening. So much of his filmography is built on distressing and incomprehensible events that occur in an unreal dream space, yet when he shows what is stripped down to a girl being brutally tortured and killed by her father in the “here and now” there is a component that is largely missing from his other surreal films - empathy.
This is why Fire Walk With Me is not only my favorite Lynch film, but one of my favorite movies ever. Yeah, Mulholland Drive is a masterpiece but I feel no connection to Diane and Camilla. In Fire Walk With Me I have spent 90 minutes with Laura Palmer, I have seen her struggle to live, and now I have to see her die. Her death is sickening but necessary because this is what Twin Peaks is.
What we don’t know, throughout the entirety of the show nor the movie, is that Laura’s true peace comes through death. If my interpretation of the film is correct, she receives the ring so that Bob cannot possess her. Because Bob cannot possess her, he must kill her. Laura knew this, and even Cooper, stuck in the Lodge, knew it. Despite her gut-wrenching death, the presence of the angels she thought wouldn’t help her anymore quietly, almost as if they are there more for Laura than for us, let her know her that she has escaped. She is no longer a victim to either Leland or Bob, nor the cycle of abuse and path of self-destruction she was falling faster and faster down.
When Laura begins to smile and laugh at the end of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, suddenly everything feels okay again. The girl we have just seen go through one of the worst things that can ever happen to someone is safe. In the lodge, Laura is with her angels - the angel that is there for her in death, and the angel that tried to bring her justice in the real world. And with Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch has brought Laura to justice too. She was not the sum of her destructive behaviors, she was not the smiling beauty queen from her homecoming portrait, nor the blue-lipped corpse we knew her as. Laura was a girl fighting to survive. And by showing that struggle, Lynch has revealed the true depths of his mastery — it lies not just in blurring the lines between reality and dreams but also in tearing open the plastic wrapping around Laura Palmer, by making reality much more powerful than myth.