Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – 20 Years of David Lynch’s Nightmare Vision
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the North American release of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the prequel to his revolutionary television series Twin Peaks. Two years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the television series, there were dozens of articles online about the significant cultural impact the series had, not only in popular culture at the time, but also in television in general over the subsequent next two decades. Needless to say, there probably won’t be that many articles besides this one talking about Fire Walk With Me. When the movie came out twenty years ago, it opened at number eight at the box office, and only playing in 691 screens. It never went up from there, making only $4 million in it’s theatrical run. And for the most part, critics hated the film when it was released. Only the LA Weekly seemed to get what Fire Walk With Me was really about, and I remember the writer of that review even said that the collective whole of the Twin Peaks television series combined with the movie represented the work of David Lynch’s life. Two decades later, I still agree with that sentiment.
I don’t think that Fire Walk With Me as a film is Lynch’s best work, or even his second or third best film. It relies too much on knowledge of the television series to work on its own as a film really (although I do know people who came into Peaks fandom through the film first, which always seems weird to me) David Lynch’s two finest movies are almost always cited as Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive, and I firmly believe that either one of those fits the bill. Fire Walk With Me doesn’t even stand on its own enough to really even be superior to Lynch’s 1990 road picture Wild at Heart. But while Wild at Heart is ultimately more solid as a film, but it also has less going on subtextually than Fire Walk With Me, and it doesn’t get under your skin the way Fire Walk With Me me does either. In that sense, Fire Walk is one of Lynch’s most memorable movies.
Before I go any further, I must put massive SPOILER warnings here; If you are one of those people who is still discovering Twin Peaks on Netflix streaming or via the DVD box set (and I know there are a lot of you out there based on the tons of new people joining Twin Peaks fandom every year, many who could not even have born when the series debuted) then please DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE. As Fire Walk With Me is a prequel to the television series, there is no way to talk about it without giving away the show’s biggest secret. The television series is completely built around the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” However, the movie assumes that the audience already knows that answer, in all its gory detail. So if you have not seen Twin Peaks, please…go watch it, or at least the first seventeen episodes or so, then watch the movie, and then come back and read this piece. It’s all good, it’ll still be here, barring a zombie apocalypse or whatever.
The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Twin Peaks, and the Birth of Fire Walk With Me
When David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks premiered on ABC in April of 1990, it was an instant phenomenon, greeted with an outpouring of love from critics who hailed it as the show that would save television. But it wasn’t just the critics who loved the show, audiences watched the premiere episode in record numbers, and the pilot was among the highest rated pilot episodes to any series of the 90’s. The series was built up mostly around the question “who killed Laura Palmer?”, a beautiful 17 year old town beauty, who washes on shore one morning, wrapped in plastic. During that first season, the question of who killed Laura was on everyone’s lips, and Twin Peaks was on the cover of every magazine under the sun in the Spring of 1990. When the first season ended with no answer to the question of who killed Laura, mainstream audiences were furious. Think people were mad about the end of season one of The Killing last year? That ain’t got nuthin’ on how mad America was when Peaks failed to resolve their central mystery at the end of their first year.
When Twin Peaks aired its final episode in June of 1991, the series ended with multiple cliffhangers, hoping that would force the network to order a third season. They had used a similar tactic at the end of season one of the series a year prior, and it worked. It didn’t work this time. Almost as soon as the final episode aired, the news was announced that David Lynch would reward loyal Peakers with a big screen follow up. But instead of bothering to answer any of those series cliffhangers, David Lynch decided his big screen Twin Peaks movie would go back to the storyline that was at the heart of the show’s original success, and make the film a prequel to the series. The movie would focus on the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life, ending where the series began, with her muder.
Birthing Pains
Pre production on Fire Walk did not go smoothly. Series co creator Mark Frost felt strongly that loyal viewers were owed a resolution to the series’ many cliffhangers, and didn’t agree with the prequel route. He gets a producer credit on Fire Walk, but in reality had nothing to do with the movie. Fire Walk With Me is pure David Lynch, from start to finish. Then there were the cast problems; Both series stars Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn refused to return as well. Lara Flynn Boyle’s character of Donna Hayward, Laura Palmer’s best friend, was recast with Moira Kelly from The Cutting Edge. Sherilyn Fenn’s character of Audrey Horne was easier to write out of the film, as the television series established that Laura Palmer and Audrey were not close friends. However, Fenn’s character of Audrey was so iconic and was such a big part of the appeal of the show that her absence was keenly felt. I can’t tell you how many hard core Peaks fans I’ve met who have told me flat out they simply don’t like the movie “because Audrey isn’t in it.” I’ve yet to hear one person tell me they dislike the movie based on any other single cast omission.
The final straw for Lynch was when series star Kyle MacLachlan refused to return as FBI Agent Dale Cooper. This decision forced Lynch to recast the part of the lead FBI agent with musician turned actor Chris Isaak. Lynch had given Isaak his big break when he included the song Wicked Game on the soundtrack to his movie Wild At Heart. Wicked Game eventually became a huge hit, and as a thank you to Lynch, Isaak agreed to play the part. But all of these cast desertions were said to feel like a slap in the face to Lynch, who who helped get all those actors started in their careers. Eventually, due to his friendship with Lynch, MacLachlan agreed to return to play Dale Cooper, and did one week’s worth of shooting for the movie (instead of firing Chris Isaak though, Lynch simply had multiple FBI agents in this story) Lynch had discovered MachLachlan when casting Dune, and even though that movie bombed, he gave him the lead in Blue Velvet and eventually, Twin Peaks. Lynch pulled the “you owe your entire career to me” card, and Machlachlan caved. Rumor has it though, that their friendship never really recovered, and once can only point to the fact that MacLachlan never was asked again by Lynch to participate in any project again after Fire Walk With Me as proof.
For every cast member from the show that didn’t come back though, they were replaced by a well known name. Veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton has a small part, as does Kiefer Sutherland as an obsessive compulsive FBI agent. And blink and you might miss him, but even David Bowie shows up as a dimension hopping FBI agent in one of the movie’s trippiest sequences. Despite all these obstacles, production finally got underway in the Fall of 1991 in Washington state, where the original pilot had been shot. Perhaps most importantly, also returning was composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose iconic score for the series had proved so popular.
The Horror Film No One Expected
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in the Spring of 1992, a mere two years after Lynch had won the Palme d’or there for Wild at Heart. There have been anecdotes for years that the screening was greeted with boos from the audience, but that has been refuted by movie screewriter Robert Engels and well as others in attendance. If anything, it seems the audience was baffled; the movie only really makes sense if you’ve seen the series, and yet many fans of the series hated the movie, too, for its lack of quirky humor that was a hallmark of the show, and the film’s unrelenting dark tone. Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s first straight up horror film, and it seems no one was expecting that.
While the movie was never advertised as such, Fire Walk With Me is a flat out horror movie. It follows almost all the classic horror tropes; a beautiful young woman stalked and victimized by a horrible monster, only to be killed by the same monster in the climax of the movie. Peppered in between are tense moments of genuine terror, especially one particular moment when Laura Palmer silently tip toes through her house, only to open her door and slowly find the demon BOB in her room. And yes, BOB is in all caps. Don’t ask me why, that is just how it is spelled.
The opening shot of Fire Walk With Me is that of a television set getting smashed in with a lead pipe. Not very subtle, but it hammered the point home that this was not television Twin Peaks anymore; the gloves were officially off. The movie would show the audience things that could only be hinted at in the show. While the Twin Peaks television series certainly had elements of supernatural horror bubbling beneath its surface, the series also had lots of comedic moments, as well as standard prime time soap opera elements to entice the casual viewer as well. For all it’s weirdness and surrealism, chances are your mom could still follow the series if she wanted to. Fire Walk has almost none of that whimsy or standard television tropes at work, and the horror elelments only hinted at in the series are in full display in the theatrical film.
The real reason that Fire Walk is such a harrowing experience though, more than almost any other modern horror movie, is that at its core, it is the story or how a young girl copes with her ongoing sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, a sexual abuse she isn’t even aware is even coming from her own father till it is way too late. In the film, Laura Palmer describes a feral man named BOB who has been “having her” since she was 12 years old. BOB, who looks like a rejected member of the Manson family crossed with some crazy meth head biker, creeps into her window at night and molests her for years, leading Laura to a series of self destructive relationships, drug abuse, and prostitution. When Laura Palmer finally discovers the true identity of BOB, there is no turning back, leading to her untimely and brutal demise. Unlike so many standard horror films though, Fire Walk follows Laura after her death, as she is greeted by angels in the afterlife. In a sense, death was Laura’s happy ending, as she is now free from the cycle of abuse for good. Not the way your average Nightmare on Elm Street sequel ended, that’s for sure.
The film and the series clearly come down on the side that BOB is an actual supernatural entity that possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to do unspeakable things to his only child. But the movie also hints strongly that Leland is at least partially knowledgable of what BOB does, and is complicit to a certain degree, making Leland just as much of a monster. Incest and child abuse are subjects that American entertainment almost totally stay away from, despite the fact that there are thousands of survivors of such abuse all over the country. It is a real life horror that goes on in places you would never expect it to, and Twin Peaks, both the series but especially in the film, shine a light on this horror and force you to look. And clearly, judging from audience and critical reactions twenty years ago, people were not happy about being forced to look.
The Movie We Didn’t See
Despite noticeable absences from Sherilyn Fenn, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle and Piper Laurie, almost the entire rest of the cast from the series returned to shoot scenes for the movie. Something like a dozen other members of the main television cast shot scenes, in what would end up being their last moments as Twin Peaks characters ever. But due to time (at one point the movie was running nearly four hours) almost all of those scenes had to go. Ever since then, those scenes have been like the Holy Grail for Twin Peaks fans. Back in the Laserdisc days, petitions were made to include those scenes on a potential special edition disc, only to have that never materialize. Then, around 2001, New Line Cinema decided it would release Fire Walk With Me on DVD, with seventeen of the deleted scenes included. But while New Line wanted to include them as raw footage, Lynch wanted to master the visuals and audio for each scene and present them as separate Twin Peaks vignettes on the DVD. New Line balked at the price it would cost to master those scenes, so they went back in the vault, where they have remained for twenty years now.
With Blu ray the last bastion of physical media for movies, the hope is that maybe a Blu-ray release of Fire Walk With Me will finally include those long wanted scenes. New Line Cinema effectively no longer exists, and the hope is that Warner Brothers will license out the movie to CBS HomeVideo as part of a complete Twin Peaks Blu-ray set. It would be a great incentive to get fans to double dip on the Twin Peaks complete set if the scenes fans have waitied twenty years to see are included.
The Legacy of Fire Walk With Me
While Fire Walk With Me was more or less reviled when it was released, the attitude towards the movie has changed considerably over the past twenty years. For the most part, the movie is now seen as essential part of the the overall Twin Peaks viewing experience. Contemporary bands like Mike Patton’s Fantomas did a cover version of the theme song from the film, and You Say Party’s video for their song Laura Palmer’s Prom was inspired not only by the show, but clearly the movie as well. (Not to mention shot on many of the original locations) And just this year, Fangoria magazine ran a cover story on the movie’s 20th Anniversary, which they now regard as a horror classic. Fans online are still coming up with new theories regarding many of the movie’s key mysteries, some which even long time original fans like me never even pondered before.
Most recently, this year Corpo Gallery in Santa Monica held a Fire Walk With Me themed art show, with dozens of artists contributing pieces inspired by the movie. When I attended this show, it was a packed house, and several members of the cast of the series showed up, proving how time has altered the perception of this movie. Sure, Fire Walk might have been beaten at the box office that long ago opening weekend by the Nicolas Cage/Sarah Jessica Parker rom/com Honeymoon in Vegas, but you don’t see many gallery shows dedicated to that one these days, do you? David Lynch’s vision of the horror behind the facade of small town America continues to live on now in ways that few movies will ever get to achieve. Once it gets into your brain, it stays there, the mark of a something that will truly stand the test of time.
All photographs of the Corpo Gallery show are by Alicia Friedman.
