Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Did David Lynch just really hate Sheryl Lee? Her character Laura Palmer first appeared as a corpse washed up on a river bank in the opening minutes of the Twin Peaks TV series, and every chance Lynch got after that, he depicted her suffering in dreams or recordings or a multitude of other circumstances. Lee was always up to the acting challenge, but holy shit does she get put through the wringer and then some in her lead role in Fire Walk with Me, a deeply disturbing prequel that vividly dramatizes Palmer's miserable final week before she became that corpse. After an extended prelude, the movie's perspective is almost exclusively Palmer's for the next 90 minutes, showing us her torment, devastation, and fruitless attempts at numbing her pain with drugs and sex. That we know her doomed fate only intensifies the dread. Lee gives an incredible performance, veering from darkly funny to utterly terrifying, and the film only works because she can make those challenging leaps. "Torture porn" wasn't a concept in film criticism yet, but surely this would have qualified for that descriptor upon the film's widely-panned original release. Viewers expecting more of the show's quirky comedy about lumber-town weirdos and "damn fine coffee" were in for a jolt.

So, why make such a disturbing film merely to show us the psychological suffering and death of a teenager? And furthermore, why do it when the story merely re-enacts details from the TV murder investigation without adding any new revelations? I didn't have an answer upon finishing it. The movie was an intense emotional experience for sure, but it didn't seem to have any point to its existence, other than maybe Lynch working out some of his own issues with sex and violence. But reading about the film, I saw comments by Lynch that made clear its purpose. To paraphrase, the film was made to bring Laura Palmer to life and to argue that her suffering mattered. So often in media, women are merely victims of violence for men to investigate or avenge, and stories concern themselves with the affairs of those men while treating the experiences of those women as mere plot details. Twin Peaks was as guilty of this as any other TV series (and it was deeply misogynistic in many other ways), but its follow-up movie wanted to right this wrong, by tacitly arguing that Palmer's story was the real story and that she deserved to be dramatized as a whole person, not just a name on a death certificate. The same goes for victims of the specific kind of sexual violence that Palmer endured (I'm avoiding spoilers for anyone catching up on the franchise after Lynch's recent death), a kind of sexual violence that is usually just deployed in morbid crime procedurals for a cheap shock, but here is given its proper horrifying measure. After watching this, how wrong it now seems for the Twin Peaks TV series to have made quirky comedy out of the aftermath of someone's death. How wrong all dehumanizing entertainment now seems. Of course audiences rejected this film; we have no interest in deeply contemplating the darkness in our stories. Fire Walk with Me forces us to stare at it and bear witness to its victims. I won't call this a perfect film, since that aforementioned prelude wastes far too much time laying the foundation for cinematic sequels that would never happen, but I do think it's a major achievement in media criticism, and a worthy follow-up for anyone who has graduated from the series and is ready for something darker and deeper. (Don't even try this if you haven't seen the show. It will make zero sense.)

− February 10, 2025 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply