Intensity & Essence: Twin Peaks' Fire Walk With Me & The Missing Pieces (Part 2 of 4) by Craig Hammill

This is the second of a four part series looking at David Lynch’s & Mark Frost’s 45+ hour masterwork TWIN PEAKS which comprises two network television seasons that ran on ABC from 1990-1991 (Part 1), a 1992 feature film and scenes cut out from that feature (Part 2), a 2017 limited Showtime series Lynch considers a feature film in 18 parts of which we’ll discuss Parts 1 - 8 (Part 3), then Parts 9-18 (Part 4).

David Lynch and Mark Frost came back from their own respective feature film projects (Wild at Heart for Lynch, Storyville for Frost) to try and salvage their TV creation Twin Peaks, which had one foot in the cancellation grave for most of 1991. Lynch and Frost returned the series to its roots and even deepened the mystery with a Season 2 finale “Beyond Life and Death” that managed the impossible by becoming one of the series’ greatest episodes ever. They ended that spectacular episode on a cliffhanger in the hopes of big enough ratings to convince ABC to allow them a third and final season to tie up loose ends.

ABC cancelled the show anyway.

So fans and audience members were left with the horrible final scene of truly decent spiritual FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Machlachlan) seemingly possessed by the horrific malevolent embodiment of evil BOB (Frank De Silva).

However a potential deux ex machina came when word got out that Lynch was directing a Twin Peaks feature film. Surely this cliffhanger would be resolved. Surely loose ends would be tied up. If we weren’t given a third season, at least Lynch and Frost would get two hours to land the plane.

Nobody was prepared for the feature film that Lynch did ultimately deliver.

Upon release, 1992’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me was almost universally panned as an awful movie. A movie that had the audacity to NOT tie up those loose ends but instead focus on the final days in the life of Laura Palmer, the tormented psychology of her father/murderer Leland Palmer, and the actual murder shown in almost unbearable horrific detail.

Fire Walk With Me premiered at Cannes to boos and jeers (only two years after Lynch’s Wild at Heart had won the Palm D’Or). Quentin Tarantino famously said the movie was so bad he was swearing off future David Lynch movies. Critics fell over themselves finding witty ways to say the movie sucked.

Thirty one years later, Fire Walk With Me is routinely cited as one of Lynch’s best movies. And while 2001’s Mulholland Drive or 1986’s Blue Velvet usually top such lists, Fire Walk With Me is this writer’s personal favorite Lynch movie. The only thing better than the movie is Twin Peaks in its entirety.

A doubly intriguing irony is that Lynch HAD shot quite a few scenes with all the other Twin Peaks’ cast members in an earnest attempt to make the movie feel like a feature length episode. But he was mandated by contract to submit a 2 hour 15 minute movie to retain final cut. And so he cut almost ALL scenes not directly linked to Laura Palmer and the central murder/mystery.

Lynch did release the cut scenes in 2014 as The Missing Pieces. At just that time, Twin Peaks: The Return (Season 3) was moving from finished script to the pre-production phase. Watching The Missing Pieces, one sees immediately why almost all the scenes had to be cut. But getting to see the cut scenes does show that Lynch and Frost were all ready moving towards a focus on time dislocation, a focus that would come to dominate Twin Peaks: The Return.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me may be one of cinema’s greatest examples of how releasing a movie at the wrong moment to an audience with different expectations can sadly obscure the ability to see a movie for what it really is.

The world had largely moved on from Twin Peaks in 1992 after its 1991 cancellation. And Twin Peaks fever had abated even further back in 1990. A 1990 or pre-Season 2 1991 feature probably would have hit the zeitgeist. A 1992 feature felt late to the party.

But Lynch himself wasn’t done with the story. He has said in many interviews that he had really “fallen in love” with the character of Laura Palmer and wanted to do right by her. He wanted to really tell her story and give the actor playing her, Sheryl Lee (in one of the great performances of the last 30 years), center stage.

What’s clear in hindsight is that Fire Walk With Me really begins Lynch’s trilogy of “Women in Trouble” which includes 2001’s Mulholland Drive and 2006’s Inland Empire.

Fire Walk With Me is also a fascinating continuation of the re-centering and re-focusing Lynch and Frost had begun with the Season 2 finale. The movie is an intense declarative poem and distillation of the key elements of the Twin Peaks narrative: the Laura Palmer murder, Laura Palmer, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise deliverng an unforgettable tragic performance), FBI agent Dale Cooper, the existential nature of how mysteries deepen and balance rather than resolve, the dark and light complexities of the human soul as reflected in a community, and a transcendent level to existence that may not offer any eternal respite from the struggles of the mortal plane.

Not that Fire Walk With Me is free from forced changes. The original plan had been to have Kyle Machlachlan’s Dale Cooper investigate the Theresa Banks’ murder that dominates the first 20 minutes or so of the movie. But Machlachlan, at that time, appeared to be wary of being too closely associated with the role. He ultimately DID appear as FBI agent Dale Cooper in the movie but in a smaller capacity. Instead we get Chris Isaak’s and Keifer Sutherland’s FBI agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley respectively investigating the Banks’ murder.

Fortuitously, this change actually reinforces the doppleganger nature of all of Twin Peaks. Teresa Banks’ lurid murder in the venal burg of Deer Horn (which seems as charmless as Twin Peaks is charming) contrasts vividly with Laura Palmer’s tragic murder in soulful Twin Peaks. This prologue also allows Lynch to create a kind of mobius strip whereby things don’t connect or relate too “neatly” or “perfectly”. This in turn deepens the mystery in a true and strange way. In retrospect, a throughline with Dale Cooper investigating both murders might have been “too clean”.

Moira Kelly took over the role of DONNA in the feature film from Laura Flynn Boyle who had made the part famous in the TV series.

Laura Flynn Boyle who played Donna in the TV series also doesn’t return and so we have to take a few beats to readjust ourselves to Moira Kelly’s Donna. But it doesn’t take long. Kelly’s Donna (who truly feels like a teenager) is even more innocent and out of her depth in dealing with the discovery of Laura’s secret sordid life of drugs, prostitution, incest, and mental and emotional collapse. The greater contrast helps to heighten the tragedy.

By having to cut out all the comedic and tangential storyline scenes he had intended to include, Lynch ends up so focusing on Laura Palmer and her father Leland Palmer that the movie ends up having the kind of intense focus and thematic rigor of Lynch’s Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive. Ultimately, Fire Walk With Me becomes about the transcendent and its interactions with the spiritual, psychological, physical, and moral anguish of two human souls: Laura Palmer and her father Leland Palmer.

Just as Eraserhead feels to be about parental ambivalence and spiritual salvation, just as Mulholland Drive feels to be about the horrible difference between how one wants one’s life to be and how one’s life actually turns out, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me feels to be about how devastating existence itself can be for so many people violated by the people they trust the most. Evil Bob becomes a metaphor for parental incest. Laura Palmer’s tragic life, at risk of being remembered as the thing of network soap opera, gets reclaimed as the thing of Greek tragedy and high art.

But Lynch goes beyond this. If Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me were simply a metaphor for incest and abuse, it would still be great but not nearly as unsettling. It probably wouldn’t have thrown so many people for a loop. But Lynch goes further than this. He dares to take the story into the realm of the transcendent. Though Laura suffers the miseries of hell on earth, she ultimately experiences a kind of spiritual salvation and redemption in the existence beyond this existence. Lynch posits (as he always had throughout the series for anyone tuned in to that frequency) that there is something after this life.

One is always going to be sticking one’s neck out when one tries to capture in a movie anything spiritual or transcendent. Firstly because so many people understandably don’t believe in such things. And secondly because it’s incredibly hard to capture something true and profound about such an unknowable thing without clumsily sliding into the over-literary, the naively hopeful, or the florid.

Yet certain filmmakers have been able to do it. Carl Theodore Dryer in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet. Robert Bresson in Diary of a Country Priest and Au Hazard Balthazar. Lars Von Trier in Breaking The Waves and The Kingdoms Parts I & II. Stanley Kubrick (in a different way) in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And David Lynch in Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me (and later Twin Peaks: The Return).

One feels (or at least wonders) if the initial negative reaction to the movie had as much to do with folks’ disbelief that Lynch had the audacity to try to make a movie that was both psychologically AND spiritually daring and challenging.

One of the many warmly humorous scenes shot for Fire Walk With Me that nevertheless had to be cut.

In watching 2014’s The Missing Pieces (about 90 minutes of scenes Lynch had to cut from the feature for time), a few things become apparent. One, while it is a shame to lose scenes that contain so much of the offbeat humor and humanity the TV series was known for, it was probably for the best. A three hour forty five minute ensemble feature would have lost much of the intensity the final feature has with its rigorous focus on Laura Palmer. Two, while some of the cut scenes are wonderfully instructive in pointing out the direction Twin Peaks would take in Season 3 (including a number of cut scenes in which the Man From Another Place asks FBI agent Cooper if “this is the future or if it’s the past”), they don’t quite feel there yet.

Maybe Lynch did benefit from having twenty five years to marinate how exactly to approach the time dislocation he and Frost would so brilliantly nail in Season 3.

Ultimately, Twin Peaks FIre Walk With Me is a beautifully strange intense chamber piece of deep mystery, melodrama, tragedy, and transcendence. Lynch has often talked about how he experienced two real critical beatings in his life: one for 1984’s Dune and one for FIre Walk With Me. But, Lynch points out, he died twice on Dune because he knew he had sold out while making it and then died again when the movie didn’t make money and took a critical drubbing. On Fire Walk With Me, he died once with the critical circular gangland murder in reviews and reception. BUT. . .Lynch felt proud of the movie and felt he had made the movie he wanted to make.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me has only grown in estimation year after year since its release. It now has its own Criterion release. It is routinely shown in rep theaters more than almost any other Lynch movie save Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive. It usually appears at the top of any “Best of” David Lynch list.

But these accolades mean less than the reality of what Lynch accomplished. Lynch truly committed to taking Twin Peaks from a network TV show with episodes and moments of artistic brilliance to a unified work of art. It’s almost unfathomable that he would return twenty five years later to make one final Twin Peaks feature film, in 18 parts, running roughly 18 hours, that would somehow finally accomplish what he had wanted to achieve from the beginning: a true deepening of the mystery itself rather than resolving the mystery in a superficial way.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.