MOVING PICTURES

DAVID LYNCH’S SAD, STRANGE TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME SHIMMERS AT THE BELCOURT

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Director David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me confounded many fans of the Twin Peaks television show when it hit theater screens in 1992. While most of the cast and characters offer familiar faces for the show’s fans, the tone of the film differs greatly from the original series.

Nearly all of the quirky humor of the television program is abandoned here while the weirdness and foreboding are ampedup to a point of disturbing near-incomprehensibility. The film flopped at the box office, but it’s found more favorable apologists among fans and critics as it’s been re-contextualized in the evolving Twin Peaks universe, and in Lynch’s subsequent filmography. Nowadays Fire Walk with Me seems family friendly compared to even more bonkers Lynch movies like Lost Highway (1997) and Inland Empire (2006).

This prequel film focuses on the last week in the life of Laura Palmer — the beloved teenage homecoming queen whose murdered corpse is discovered in the first episode of the Twin Peaks television series. This movie also opens with the discovery of a body of a young girl: Teresa Banks is found floating down a river in Deer Meadow, Wash. — she’s wrapped in plastic, just like Laura Palmer in the television series. FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (Lynch) sends agents Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) to investigate. The pair have to deal with a belligerent sheriff and his deputy before they make a grisly and mysterious discovery at the morgue. They also find a bizarre ring at the trailer park where Banks lived. Despite these leads the agents’ investigation hits a dead end before one of them goes missing.

The movie then leaps ahead a full year to the beautiful Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) walking to school on a gorgeous sun-dappled morning to the strains of Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting theme from the Twin Peaks television show. It’s a heartbreaking moment knowing Palmer’s fate, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is at its best when it plays as a devastatingly sad and savage love letter to the long lost Laura Palmer. In films like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) Lynch uses pairs of women characters to explore themes of innocence and depravity. Here, Palmer is both a beautiful blond popular small town American girl, and a promiscuous drug addict who’s the victim of horrific abuse and maybe even supernatural possession. Palmer leads a double life where even her closest friends and family members aren’t aware of the whole picture of her life which tragically unravels here scene-by-scene.

Lee illuminates Palmer’s hellish descent into madness and death with both ferocious intensity and deep pathos. It’s a remarkable performance that dominates a movie which is otherwise peppered with cameos by Lynch regulars like Harry Dean Stanton, shorter appearances from Lee’s television co-stars Kyle McLachlan, Ray Wise and Dana Ashbrook, and even a bizarre turn from David Bowie speaking with a Southern drawl in one of the most unhinged scenes in Lynch’s bizarre filmography.

It’s helpful to think of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as a poem more than a novel with a straightforward plot. This is a movie about the dark sex, drugs and murder in the shadow of the American dream, but it’s also about Palmer’s disintegrating personality, and there will always be images and sequences in this picture which defy explanation. That said, the most mysterious moments in the movie serve to keep viewers off balance and vulnerable if the face of Lee’s unrelenting performance. This isn’t a movie you watch so much as one you experience and endure. Movies mostly entertain us, but sometimes they can move us. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me overwhelms and leaves you shaken.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is the Midnight Movie at the Belcourt Theatre Friday, April 27

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.