And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
David Lynch---Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
I’ve already gone places. I kind of like to stay where I am.” The great Harry Dean Stanton tearfully recites these words to FBI agents Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) in David Lynch’s 1992 masterwork Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Though this scene seemingly has nothing to do with Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), it’s a perfect summation of the film’s tragic protagonist. Someone attempting to find light in a nightmarish world. Unfairly lambasted by critics during its original release, Fire Walk with Me is a terrifying, tragic look into the last days of a young woman experiencing the worst kinds of abuse.
Serving as a prequel (and a semi-sequel) to the cult TV series, the film mainly focuses on the last week of Laura Palmer’s life, the teenage homecoming queen whose murder became the focal mystery of the show. In 1990, television audiences were constantly asking who killed Laura Palmer but, in Fire Walk with Me, Lynch tried to answer the question: who was Laura Palmer?
The director became notable for his depiction of evil mustering behind an idyllic facade within American society; beneath the Norman Rockwell exterior lies a Kafkaesque nightmare. Think the white picket fences contrasted with Dennis Hopper’s sociopathic Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Or the hopeful Hollywood dream v its unattainability in Mulholland Drive.
The series also continued this line of thinking, with the boy scout-like FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) uncovering the secrets of the charming small town of Twin Peaks. Cooper saw the world with infectious optimism, even during the darkest moments of the series.
But Twin Peaks was really about Laura Palmer, the connective tissue that brought everyone and everything together and her presence is felt throughout the entire series. There’s maybe no better example of a protagonist in Lynch’s work that embodies every theme that he has explored. Externally, a girl who personified purity and kindness. Internally, someone battling addiction, abuse and an almost prophetic knowing of her violent fate. In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is about finding the light within a cruel, bleak world. In contrast to Cooper, she sees the world with complete pessimism. When her friend Donna (Moira Kelly) asks whether she would go faster or slower while falling through space, she replies “Faster and faster. And for a long time, you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever ... And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away.”
At first, Lynch tricks the audience into expecting something more like the show. A prologue focusing on agents Desmond and Stanley investigating the grisly murder of Theresa Banks feels more tonally in line with the original series, with Isaak and Sutherland boasting a great rapport that almost feels like a buddy cop spinoff. It’s when a missing FBI agent (played by a decidedly terrifying David Bowie) shows up unexpectedly that the film becomes a Francis Bacon-like nightmare. Lynch has always been a master at creating a sense of impending doom. Bowie’s preacher-like ramblings feel apocalyptic, as if hell has burst through. It’s a perfect tonal setup for the claustrophobic fear that is about to grip Laura’s world.
._V1_SY200_CR85.jpg)
As the film is mostly from her perspective, the show’s fantasy elements feel more ambiguous. Killer Bob (Frank Silva) feels less like a supernatural being and more of a personification of the evil that can exist in even the most loving of people.
But the film-maker’s vision would almost be completely tattered if it were not for an extremely powerful performance by Sheryl Lee. There is no other actor who could’ve played every note of Laura’s character more perfectly. One great example of this is when she talks with her drug dealer boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) at school. At first she starts a fight, acting combative to Bobby’s accusations of cheating. When realising this will get her nowhere she becomes the flirty, angelic girl seen in her prom photo. It is not just one of the great performances in a Lynch film but one of the greatest screen performances ever, most reminiscent of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. Like Falconetti, Lee has incredibly expressive eyes that get to the heart of Laura’s pain and suffering.
MORE ABOUT FILM
David Lynch’s surprise small screen outing remains one of the most fascinating and compelling pilot episodes ever made.
For cinephiles of a certain generation, the premiere of Twin Peaks on 8 April 1990 was a seismic event in popular culture, the sort of experience where you remember exactly where you were when you saw it. I was a senior in high school, working at a movie theater in suburban Atlanta, and I watched it alongside a concessionist with whom I used to trade enthusiasms about Marin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which we had smuggled under our parents’ noses at the video store. It was the one and only time I’d ever spend at his house, and I don’t recall a word spoken between us until it was over. It was like nothing we had ever seen on television, and like nothing we had ever seen in a theater either.
Yet there are two important things about the pilot that tend to get forgotten over time. One is that Twin Peaks did not start as the cult phenomenon it would become later, as diehard fans clung to the series through diminishing ratings and a 1992 feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, that caught the zeitgeist too late. The pilot was a bonafide smash, the highest-rated of the 1989-90 season and the fifth ranked show of the week, and about 35 million Americans tuned into ABC to watch it. For perspective, only two primetime telecasts in 2019 had a higher viewership, and they were both football games. It was an impossible (and fleeting) moment when art infiltrated the mainstream, and the Sunday night mystery that introduced characters such as the Log Lady and Nadine, the eyepatch-wearing housewife with a drape obsession.
The other surprise, revisiting the pilot, is how emotion defines it as much as eccentricity. Twin Peaks is remembered as a strange show, and it would certainly get stranger as its mythology spun out over three seasons and a movie. The death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) would become a Lynchian mystery box that had no bottom, just an unending series of dark and surreal revelations about a secret, insinuating evil that lurked on the edges of an idyllic north-western town. But in the pilot, it’s treated more simply as a tsunami of grief that crashes over its characters, who have never experienced losing one of their own, which makes it seem like a sudden death in the everyone’s family. It’s not just Laura’s mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), who breaks down in inconsolable anguish, but the high school principal delivering the news over the PA system and poor Andy (Harry Goaz), the crime scene photographer.
Four years earlier, Lynch had explored similar territory with Blue Velvet, which emphasized the innocence of small-town America in an opening sequence of shimmering green lawns and red roses, and a gleaming fire truck with a Dalmatian on the sideboard. Out of sight was a severed ear and some terrible, unacknowledged truths about what was happening in the shadows, and the arc of the film is Kyle MacLachlan’s naive hero confronting that darkness – and finding some of it within himself. In Twin Peaks, as in Blue Velvet, the concepts of good and evil and innocence and guilt are contrasted as sharply as those red roses against a white picket fence, where the distinction really pops.
Lynch and the show’s co-creator, Mark Frost, would have plenty of time to drift into the darkness, including the extra-dimensional terror within The Black Lodge, but the pilot puts a premium on collective decency. The fisherman who discovers the body, Pete Martell (Jack Nance), can’t bring himself to look at who has washed up onto the shoreline. All he can say, famously, to the police is, “She’s dead … wrapped in plastic,” and hide behind a rock as Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) and the coroner, Dr Will Hayward (Warren Frost), peel back a layer to reveal her identity. (Hayward later refuses to perform the autopsy due to his close relationship to Laura, who’s his daughter’s best friend.)
._V1_SY300_CR50.jpg)
Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2014)
Twin Peaks before Twin Peaks (1990) and at the same time not always and entirely in the same place as Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). A feature film which presents deleted scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) assembled together for the first time in an untold portion of the story's prequel.
Twin Peaks : The Return (TV Series 2017)
In the third season, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost unleash their unique vision in all its surreal glory; the result is strange, sometimes excruciating – but always compelling
Despite the often violent content, entire families sat down to watch, and groups of friends had viewing parties where they ate cherry pie, drank damn fine coffee and dressed up as characters – including wrapped in plastic as poor Laura. The broad appeal was because of writer-director David Lynch and writer-producer Mark Frost’s compelling style, which transformed a small-town murder mystery into an oddball drama, replete with profound tragedy, supernatural forces and complex relationships.
Across two seasons and a prequel movie (1992’s Fire Walk with Me), Lynch and Frost’s uncompromising and unique vision and pastiche of genres and tones – from soap opera to film noir, zany comedy, tragedy and horror – forever changed what television could look like.
Fast forward 25 years and Twin Peaks: The Return landed in 2017 – a third season, featuring 18 episodes, all directed by Lynch. No longer beholden to network constraints, Lynch and Frost used their full creative autonomy to execute a vision entirely their own – and the result is strange, sometimes excruciating, but always compelling TV.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jan/08/twin-peaks-the-return-david-lynch-masterpiece-reboot
.webp)
