David Lynch (1992)
David Lynch followed his brilliant film Blue Velvet (1986) with an exceptionally original television series, Twin Peaks, which Lynch created with Mark Frost. Blue Velvet, beginning on a sunny day in a middle-class suburb in Lumberton, North Carolina, takes the audience on a fascinating, often frightening journey to the dark side of town, and the dark side of the psyche of the film’s young hero (Kyle MacLachlan). The first series of Twin Peaks took familiar TV genres – crime procedural, continuing drama (everyday life department) – and infused them with qualities unusual for those genres: visual flair, thoroughly eccentric wit, surreality. Set in a fictional town in Washington State, the story centres on a murder investigation: Special FBI Agent Dale Cooper (again MacLachlan) arrives in Twin Peaks to work with the local sheriff’s office on solving the killing of teenager Laura Palmer. Here too, Lynch contrasts the conventional surfaces of a place with its dangerous underbelly, again explores his characters’ public and private worlds. Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), high-school homecoming queen, is also a cocaine addict and victim of sexual abuse. Clean-cut Agent Cooper, enduring fan of a Twin Peaks eatery’s ‘damn fine coffee’ and cherry pie, dreams weird, troubling dreams.
First shown in the US in the spring of 1990, the eight-episode series was an unexpected piece of TV scheduling – ABC boldly gave it a primetime slot – and an even more unexpected ratings success: who killed Laura Palmer soon turned into a widespread cultural obsession. (Before the year was out, on both sides of the Atlantic; over here, Twin Peaks first aired on BBC2 in autumn 1990.) The fusion of, and tension between, the series’ format and David Lynch’s imagination made Twin Peaks exhilarating television, but these two elements also sowed the seed for greater tension and problems not far down the line. Lynch was eager for more self-expression, happy for Laura’s murder to remain unsolved while he kept expressing himself. ABC didn’t want to lose viewers, and Mark Frost agreed with the channel’s view that the killer’s identity needed to be revealed. That happened in the sixth episode of the second series, which was much longer than the first (twenty-two episodes). After that, although Lynch and Frost were still, technically, showrunners, their involvement in and control of Twin Peaks declined, and so did its ratings. ABC cancelled the show in 1991 by which time a feature film was already being developed. The result, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, premiered at Cannes in 1992.
Lynch and Frost disagreed about whether this should be a prequel or a sequel. Frost wanted a sequel because he ‘felt very strongly that our audience wanted to see the story go forward’. Lynch wanted a prequel and this time won the argument. What’s more, Fire Walk with Me is a prequel with a prologue. In Deer Meadow, Washington, police discover the corpse of a young woman called Teresa Banks. FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (Lynch) assigns Agents Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) to the case. The pair head to Deer Meadow, whose unfriendly citizens and unhelpful law officers are negative reflections of their Twin Peaks counterparts. After touching a ring in Teresa Banks’ room, Desmond unaccountably disappears. Back at FBI HQ, Cole dispatches Special Agent Cooper to take over the investigation. The action then switches to Twin Peaks and ‘The Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer’, which occupy the film’s remaining two hours.
Fire Walk with Me fared quite well in France and Japan but badly, with critics and the public, in North America. I must have seen it in the aftermath of that mauling, which I’ve a feeling I thought undeserved. I could barely remember the film, though, and hadn’t watched it since, until now. Things have changed considerably. Not too unusually for a high-profile movie that bombed on its first appearance, there’s been a ‘critical reappraisal’ over the course of the last thirty-five years: this culminated in Fire Walk with Me’s earning a place in the foothills of the top 250 list in Sight and Sound‘s latest decennial poll of critics et al in 2022. This viewer, on the other hand, is sorry to say he now finds the film not just disappointing but dire.
The twofold reasons for disappointment are, to different degrees, inherent in this being a prequel. First, the thriller and suspense aspects are much reduced: anyone familiar with the TV Twin Peaks knows how Laura Palmer ends up, and who’s responsible. Second, there are many characters and performances you got to know and enjoy watching each week, who are absent from Fire Walk with Me: Sheriff Harry S Truman (Michael Ontkean) and his variously surprising colleagues (Eric Goaz, Kimmy Robertson and Michael Horse); magnate Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and his wilful daughter Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn); businesswoman Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) and her husband Pete (Jack Nance); Dr Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), the singular town psychiatrist. To name just a few. And, of course, Dale Cooper himself isn’t much in evidence – he’s marking time in Deer Meadow because his services aren’t yet needed in Twin Peaks. Most of Cooper’s appearances in Fire Walk with Me are in the notorious, extra-dimensional Red Room.
Much of what’s dire about the film is essentially what’s also dire about Lynch’s Wild at Heart, which won the 1990 Cannes Palme d’Or, a few weeks after the first Twin Peaks series began airing in America. As in Wild at Heart, the synergy of daytime and nighttime worlds, so potent in Blue Velvet and the TV Twin Peaks, is almost entirely missing. Instead, Laura Palmer’s shadow side and the horrors this entails are relentless and protracted. Lynch’s bravura quite overshadows the interest of the story he’s telling and the people in it. Which relates to another problem – with the performances. That might seem astonishing, given the all-round quality of the acting on the TV show. Yet it may well relate, in some cases, to the material’s television origins.
The TV cast did include some actors who’d made their mark in significant cinema roles – Laurie, Beymer, Tamblyn, Ontkean and Nance, as well as MacLachlan. Near-contemporaries like Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie – who played Laura’s parents, Leland and Sarah – were more familiar to television audiences. The young cast members, for obvious reasons, were relative unknowns and, as far as cinema’s concerned, have stayed that way. The TV Twin Peaks, while it didn’t lampoon TV soaps, did make use of soap tropes, and comfortably accommodated acting styles often associated with soap melodrama. It’s just not the same once the material is translated into cinema – especially when the main characters in Fire Walk with Me are played by some of those young actors and by Ray Wise.
On TV, Sheryl Lee was chiefly – and memorably – a framed photograph of Laura Palmer, the beautiful homecoming queen. In Fire Walk with Me, Lee is playing the lead. She proves herself capable of more than one great look: her face certainly draws and holds the camera. But she lacks the resources and range to carry the human side of the film, which she’s virtually expected to do. Ray Wise is at a particular disadvantage. Since we know that Leland Palmer killed his daughter – or, at least, was possessed by the mortiferous evil spirit Killer Bob to do so – there’s probably not much point in Lynch and Wise’s concealing what lies beneath Leland’s regular-guy, white-collar exterior. Even so, Wise telegraphs the devil-inside signals, to hyper-intense and tedious effect. What’s wrong with the film is epitomised by Killer Bob himself. On television, Bob (Frank Silva) appeared and disappeared so rapidly he was a nearly subliminal image, and his rationed brief appearances were terrifyingly effective. In Fire Walk with Me, when this incubus is on Laura’s bed, repeatedly pawing at her exposed flesh, it soon gets boring.
Fire Walk with Me begins with a shimmering blue screen that naturally calls to mind the Blue Velvet intro. The camera eventually pulls back to reveal this as a ‘snowstorm’ on a television set (the way screens used to look outside transmission hours in the days before 24/7 broadcasting). The sequence ends abruptly with someone smashing the TV set and a woman’s scream. It’s a promising start, and strong memories of the original, many-splendoured Twin Peaks keep you hoping that Fire Walk with Me will improve – each time there’s a burst of Angelo Badalamenti’s wonderful music, for example, or when the Log Lady (Catherine E Coulson) momentarily arrives on the scene. Things don’t look up, though. Decades before David Lynch and Mark Frost collaborated again on a third TV season of Twin Peaks (in 2017), their creation had acquired an insatiable and knowledgeable fan base that the term ‘cult following’ hardly begins to describe. I can see why those aficionados regard this movie as an invaluable contribution to Twin Peaks studies. For those who cherish the original merely as terrifically inventive, exuberantly entertaining TV drama, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is painful.
13 January 2026
