Laura Palmer’s Final Days: Fire Walk with Me and the Darkness Beneath David Lynch’s Twin Peaks!

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The first two seasons of Twin Peaks left everyone intrigued and mystified. No wonder. TV at best is a 100-piece puzzle. But with David Lynch you get the 1000-piece puzzle instead. As regular readers know, I go into way too much detail for film reviews and tend to consider it more ‘film analysis’ instead. I like to take each scene of movies I love, put it up to the light, and examine it in some depth. This probably comes from watching most of these movies far too young and having to retroactively pick up on the things I originally missed the first time around. That is why there was such a lag in my review as I was really giving myself time to absorb this movie, which even Lynch himself, underrates as a classic. Which I found it to be, despite Lynch himself. With this preamble done, let’s get into the review of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Janus Films. Oh! Fancy!

The blurred wavy blue static of TV resides behind the opening credits to thoughtful, salient jazz. We pull back to find a TV set. Darkness. A woman screams.

That familiar female body in a white body bag from episode 1 of Twin Peaks that Jack Nance (Eraserhead, minus the mustache) finds, floats solitarily down the river. The body of Laura Palmer we would suspect. But later we would be found to be wrong.  It is the body of a prostitute named Teresa Banks, in fact.

Agent Chester Desmond from North Dakota is requested by that transcendental dispatcher himself, David Lynch.  He’s calling from Portland Oregon, i.e. the other end of America, basically.

Agent Chester Desmond is busy arresting two trashy women who hijacked a bus (across state lines presumably, for the FBI to be involved). Chester is played by the Witchsmeller Pursuivant musician & singer himself, Chris Issak (Wicked Game). He is flown in a small plane, cross country to investigate what we learn is Teresa Bank’s death. He is partnered with Keifer Sutherland. Keifer is an odd choice for this ensemble. He brings the wrong energy to this role and film. He wasn’t diminutive enough. Not somber enough. He’s a part that just doesn’t fit. Ironically, unlike David Bowie’s performance which we’ll get to soon.

Chris Issak and Keifer Sutherland analyze a completely random women with a sour face. Piecing together a non sequitur puzzle that shows these guys can look at the most minuscule, minute details and still miss the plot altogether. These guys are about as useful when facing true evil as the detective in The Exorcist. Not very. They’re just zigzagging all over the country but they’re always too late to prevent any really motivated evil.

Issak and Sutherland go to a local sheriff’s office where the locals get uppity and confrontational and try to dominate the FBI. Issak ain’t having that and gives a nose hold to the local deputy. He then strolls into the sheriff’s office and notices a newspaper article about this sheriff’s claim to fame: bending iron bars. Lol. No seriously. It’s a comical achievement!

Sheriff warns him they close in half an hour. Issak reminds him the FBI has their own clock, and they’ll lock up when they’re done. For now, he wants to see the body.

I’m pretty sure this is where that comical fight sequence between Issak and the sheriff occurs. I can see why they removed it because it sets too comical of a tone. Also why set him up as a tough guy when this whole duo’s existence doesn’t lead to Sarah Palmer in any meaningful way. The meat and potatoes are all Agent Cooper who is even abandoned for the real star, Sarah Palmer (played as always by Sheryl Lee). It’s not even clear why this subplot exists.

Anyway, they enter a woodshed where the victim “Teresa Banks” is kept. A fresh corpse. A waitress at Hap’s Diner. That’s a Twin Peaks adjacent diner. (Not to be confused with Arlyene’s in Blue Velvet but it looks awful similar!)

Keifer Sutherland puts Teresa’s hand under a microscope and pulls off her fingernail. There is a little square piece of paper with the letter “T” on it. Again, how’d they know it’s there? They wouldn’t, is the answer. And the way it’s filmed I can’t tell if it’s a press on or her real fingernail. Looks natural. Just absurd, surrealism giving the impression of the kind of details the FBI can find without any real research behind it. It seems an intentionally mystical impression of how the FBI operates, intentionally cryptic, like much of Lynch’s work.

Is the “T” for Teresa? Twin Peaks? Lol. Another non-sequitur of course. Lynch loves to provide irrelevant potential clues next to valid clues and leave it to you to sort it out, like a real case.

They talk to the locals and find out Teresa did coke from an elderly waitress. But she says she thinks Teresa’s death was a freak accident. 

Keifer wants to question a local man who has a way too hot and sophisticated looking girlfriend with him who asks if they’re investigating the death of that little girl. Keifer asks if they should question him. To prove intellectual superiority, he sees Keifer has his finger deep in the cup handle of his coffee. Quickly he asks him what time it is. Keifer checks his watch and spills coffee all over himself.

They go to Big Trout Trailer Park in Twin Peaks where Teresa Banks lived. Harry Dean Stanton is the outraged, barely not homeless looking guy in a robe he always is. He begrudgingly lets Issak into Teresa’s trailer, unmolested since her death.

Issak notices a picture of Teresa with a green ring.

Harry Dean brings them all a cup of coffee. “Best damned coffee you’ll get anywhere, buddy!“

An old dirty lady with a busted eye and a cross walks bye. Harry Dean stares at her and cries. A band aid on his forehead is seen prominently now. Did he have a fight with this old lady? He’s crying like he’s sad and guilty that he or many people all did something monstrous he is trying to forget.

“I’ve already gone places. I just want to stay where I am.” Where? Jail? Afraid of going back? He’s guilty of something in his past but they don’t investigate him further. The people who act guilty or are noticing the girl died they don’t press them. They go out of their way to avoid questioning them somewhat.

The tree branches wave in the breeze like evil hands conducting a horrible symphony.

Local sheriff says Isaak can’t take Teresa’s body back to Portland. Isaak disagrees and says he can do whatever he wants.

Isaak asks what happened to her green ring. Local sheriff says, “our phone’s got a ring,” after pursuing his guilty lips. How low to steal jewelry from the dead!

I don’t know. Maybe this is where that fight sequence was going to go? He has a very punchable face, this sheriff!

Isaak goes back to the trailer park and notes the close, proximity of the deputy to Teresa’s trailer domicile. It’s close by. He looks under the deputy’s trailer and finds the missing green ring under there. It has a masonry symbol. [To be one, ask one].

Cut To: Philadelphia, Cracked Liberty Bell… straight to the cracked reality of Agent Cooper. (D.B. Cooper, get it? Google it!). He comments on having a dream to Gordon Cole (a.k.a. David Lynch). Lynch is constantly shouting into a telephone like it’s a new technology.

Agent Cooper stares into a security camera then looks at himself in the security room but he’s not on camera. He does this several times. Checking for delays perhaps?

The 7th Floor elevator opens (7 as opposed to that “6” engraved on the wooden telephone poles near the crime scene and deputy’s trailer), same floor that Cooper’s on, and out gets Mr. David Bowie! (Yes, THE David Bowie!). He walks right behind Cooper only now there’s a time delay when he goes to see himself his imagine is there; time delayed now. Bowie has a strange influence on time and space you see. 

Bowie marches into Lynch’s office saying, “we’re not going to talk about Judy.”  I know this will eventually relate to Twin Peaks Season 3 like 30-years-later which is so psycho a commitment to ethereal crypticism that it beggars the imagination. But I’m just analyzing this movie in and of itself within its time, which is tricky enough.

Bowie then says, “don’t you know who this is?” And points to Cooper which fades to television static and into the mad house with decrepit torn black curtains. On the back couches are the lying Pinocchio minstrel character, David Lynch as a child, a grandmother, a long-bearded lumberjack, and a 2nd more distant lumberjack played by Jürgen Prochnow. At the head table is the slow talking in reverse/played forward midget and “Bob.” Bob is an absolutely demonic looking mental patient who personifies every compulsive human urge all in one man.

Is it insinuated these guys are all in Cooper’s head? Herman’s Head style? That’s what Bowie is suggesting here. Accusations. Bowie is a God mode of sorts. Electricity personified, that cuts through the haze of TV to help attempt to bring clarity but he’s tortured back into nonexistence after a brief cameo.

After Bowie accuses Cooper, we then get that sequence from earlier in the deleted scene only now we see an added bit of information with child Lynch wearing the minstrel face mask with elongated nose. There’s some symbolic connection between the liar and the child just putting on the liar’s mask. (A confession of detachment of Lynch from reality, to avoid the ugliness of “Bob.” When we find out who “Bob” really is later, I think we can demystify all these defenses hiding the truth of this story!) Now we’re getting somewhere. This whole story works better in dream analysis mode anyways rather than a linear film. “With this ring, I thee wed.” proclaims the midget, denoting the green ring Desmond found. Hiding behind the curtain, hides the monkey behind the boy. “Fell a victim” the young boy/young Lynch says of Bob. 

Word gets back that Agent Desmond is missing oddly just as Bowie appears and disappears himself. Cooper goes to the Fat Trout Trailer Park to see last known whereabouts of Isaak (i.e. Agent Desmond) and is guided by Harry Dean Stanton. Isaak’s car is still there, dirty, with the words written in pink lipstick, “Let’s Rock” on his front windshield.

Is this one of those transferences or transubstantiations Lynch is so fond of, like in Lost Highway when Bill Pullman turns into Giovanni Ribisi? Fuge state split personality moments? Is Bowie equivalent to the Robert Blake distillation of the essence of a purer form of cryptic, undecoded blockade? Even more opaque? A split personality hiding the truth even further in obscurity? Or just a transdimensional being requiring transcendentalism to summon? 

Old grandmother and child rented an empty trailer spot. Two sets of “Chalfonts” rented this space. “Weird, huh?” I look up the name Chalfont and it gives me Chalfont/Mrs. Tremond played by Frances Bay (every creepy old lady in cinema ever). But she was the grandma earlier with the young Lynch stand-in / young Chalfont grandson on the back couches of Agent Cooper’s mind. Convoluted enough for you? As Wallace Shawn from Princess Bride said, “Wait till I get going!“

The grounding question to all this sprawling intrigue at this time should be: is any of this relevant to Laura Palmer’s death? The answer is soon summarized by Agent Cooper who thinks the disappearance of Agent Desmond, the “T” in the fingernail of Teresa Banks and the fact she is wrapped in plastic and sent down the river suggests to him the killer will strike again. And in this timeline Laura Palmer is still alive at this point. Fire Walk with Me is a prequel you see. We’re building up to Laura’s murder very slowly.

34:07 in and we actually get the Welcome to Twin Peaks sign and the opening theme song.

Caption: “One Year Later.“

Laura Palmer walks down the quiet American suburb sidewalk, shady trees above, aloof, detached, compromised with a quick coke snort, nose twitch, carrying her schoolbooks.

Her joyful friend, Donna, comes out from her house to meets her, doors all unlocked, of course. (Ah the high trust society.  How I miss you!)

They pass the high T, low brain jocks from the TV series. Bobby and I forget the other jocks name. Laura and friend don’t really acknowledge them. Just as they didn’t acknowledge them in the deleted scenes. That explains that deleted scene. I agree, it was pointless.

In school Laura comes face to face with motorcycle boyfriend, the handsome, innocent, dummy “James.” The one who had a movie career in the early ‘90s a bit. James Marshall. 

Laura Palmer parts with her happy friend and proceeds to the bathroom by herself for a tootski.

Cut to: Dumb suitor, James Marshall, who comes to Laura. She just appears in an abandoned corridor of her high school, coming around a corner, to have a secret rendezvous, wearing only a strategically placed towel. Wow, that’s hot. She warns James Marshall, there, not to fall in love. And don’t hold on so tight. She calls him a dumb turkey. Nudity! Sweet! They make love. She likes ‘em dumb and innocent… sometimes… until she needs to score that is.

Bobby bumps into her later and gets possessive of where Laura was and who she was with. He threatens not being around… she suddenly gets suspiciously friendly, no hard feelings style with a severely demonic smile on her face. Oh, Bobby must have drugs. That’s why she puts up with his possessiveness here and the extra strained, fake, submissive smiling.

Donna and Laura lounge around Donna’s parent’s house. Bobby is a goon and James is sweet. They agree. But Laura is NOT in love. She’s just having fun. She dismisses the notion of everlasting love with James. Her virginal friend is in a different league of innocence than the ultra jaded Laura Palmer.

Donna asks if you were falling in space would you slow down or go faster and faster. Being a metaphor for Laura’s uncontrollable behavior, and life, she hypnotically responds, “Faster and faster and then you burst into fire, forever. And the angels wouldn’t come for you. Because they’ve all gone away.” Damn!

Laura returns home. Nobody’s home. She enjoys a smoke as she moves her dresser drawer out to grab her personal diary. She begins to read it and find pages are ripped out from it. Pages where drugs were attached to them, I think.

Laura drives to a shrink and she believes “Bob” stole pages out of her diary (with drugs in it). Shrink affirms “Bob is not real.”

“He’s been having me since I was 12. He says he wants to be me, or he’ll kill me. He comes through my window at night.“

“What does he say to you?” asks the shrink.

With all due hideous fury Bob says to Laura “Fire…Walk…With…Meeee!” (literal demon faced, jump scare). {GOT ME!}.

Laura returns to normal, crying, scaring herself even with unrepressing dark memories.

“You have to hide the diary?” she asks of the shrink. Sheryl Lee is putting her soul into this performance. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe never.” Excellent stuff.

In slow motion Laura Palmer stares at a ceiling fan, high as fuck, as Bob says he wants to taste through her mouth. Laura cannot fight the rapture of light she is drowning in. Drug induced, fugue denial mixed with some hypersensitive trigger memory that is still repressed perhaps.

Agent Cooper is talking with the always excellent and criminally underutilized Miguel Ferrer (Robocop, The Night Flier), son of Jose Ferrer (Ship of Fools, Lawrence of Arabia).

Agent Cooper confides to Miguel Ferrer that he has an intuition that a blond, sexually active, drug using teenager will be murdered. Miguel replies “that really narrows it down, that describes half the girls in America!” 

Laura is preparing meals on wheels. When the Chalfont Grandma and young masked Lynch appears as ghosts. “This would look nice on your wall.” she says to Laura. And it’s a picture of a bloody red open door. Metaphors, much? Open doors to murder, or sexual violence or murder and sexual violence as her fate.

The boy behind the liars mask very tellingly says, “The man behind the mask…is looking for the book with the pages torn out. He is going towards the hiding place. He is under the fan now.” That is precisely where Bob was talking to her before in her hallucinatory state. She runs away from Meals of Wheels.

Returning home she nervously approaches the ceiling fan. Then enters her room. And she lets out a blood curdling scream as Bob is there behind her dresser looking for her diary. Bob screams into infinitude. Laura runs out of her house and hides under some bushes. She watches her house, just then Leland Palmer (Laura’s Father) exits the front doors calmly. Not Bob, Leland Palmer. Got it now?! Am I clear enough to ya? If not, I’ll spell it out in the summary.

Laura freaks out in a drug induced paranoia. (Either that or a moment of frightening clarity, realigning with reality). She drops the picture with the open red door and many pink and red rose patterns on the walls. (One little open red door and look at all these little pink and red lovers come leaking out metaphorically). Reality terrifies her of course. “Oh my God!  Oh my God!” She runs to Donna’s house, crying in hysterics.

Leland Palmer, Laura’s Father, meanwhile sits at his dinner table, alone. Leland is played by the evergreen maniac talents of Ray Wise (another Robocop actor, Jeepers Creepers, Swamp Thing). Laura walks in. “Hi honey.” says her dad. “Are you hungry?” He asks. “Not really.” She replies with reddish coke eyes.

“You didn’t wash your hands before sitting at the table. These hands are filthy. There is dirt under this fingernail.” (Allusion to the “T” under the other dead girl’s fingernail?)

Is this just normal fear of judgement for getting caught using drugs or fear induced by withdrawal? Or is something more nefarious and grosser being implied here. We will examine as the movie continues…

The tension mounts as Leland asks her if she got the two-part split hearted locket from Bobby the jock or is there someone new now? Laura is frozen.

Laura’s mother screams “Stop it! She’s not like that!”

“How do you know what she likes?” Leland grotesquely offers.

“Stop it!“

“Not one of us is going to start eating until Laura washes her hands.” 

Leland feels horrible and loves his daughter. He cries and goes into her room. “Laura honey. I love you.” He kisses her forehead sweetly. Laura is in shock with the familiar teenage look of a wild animal with the leg caught in the trap. While also shocked by her father’s teary confession. She stares at a picture of child angels and cries like she’s condemned.

Is it just drugs? Is her father a pervert? Or is he just a normal father who is just sad his daughter is so lost? Or worst of all worlds? All of the above? Lynch (and Frost) really dare you to conclude Ray Wise is an incest pedophile. Or is it just drug fueled recklessness and paranoia and innuendo inside the mind of Laura Palmer? They walk that razor’s edge as straightly as Laura razors those white lines for herself. We all knew drug addicts willing to lie about all of reality just to get their next fix. Everyone enables Laura or doesn’t pay attention to her. And the guy that does, her dad is as bad as Bob for trying to discourage her. Stealing her drugs is LIKE rape to her depraved drug addicted mind. Like rape. Ray Wise is such a magnificent maniac we are kept guessing till the end.

“Is it true?” Laura whispers to herself.

She then falls asleep staring at that picture of the open red door. Less red since her dad kissed her. But still red. Laura now dreams entering that door. Beyond is the famous, Twin Peaks dream sequence, red curtain. Beyond and within is the grandma and grandson Chalfont again… young Lynch snaps his fingers and through the wavy static lines, denoting the TV waves, and we fade back to the green ring on an alter and in walks Agent Cooper from behind the red curtain.

“Don’t take the ring, Laura.”  Says Agent Cooper.

How does he know her name? Earlier he had no idea who she was.

With this ring, I thee wed. Don’t take the ring. Don’t get married? Don’t leave your father? Don’t do drugs. Your father loves you. Is this just all Lynch’s sad way to impart his sadness of his daughter leaving him and that whole metaphorical death when a daughter leaves her father and all the confusing feelings that go with that? Sort of like all the horrible, unsaid feelings as metaphors that go along with having a baby explored in Eraserhead?

Laura sees a dead girl in her bed named Annie. Then the green ring that Desmond found before disappears from Laura Palmer’s palm.

Jade ring. Don’t get jaded, that way lies to an early death and separation from your father. Lol. Just playing with all these ridiculously convoluted metaphors and dream symbolisms and TV waves, red curtains, electricity, and fire etcetera. The Masonry is a symbol for a secret underworld, like the drug underworld Laura is totally part of as dream metaphors go.

Laura sees herself in a dream in the picture coming out of the red door now. Inside out and the green jade ring is gone from her hand now. She’s awake now. She removes the picture from her wall and turns it around. Good idea or just more denial to avoid ugly truths? Still elusive. Still inconclusive.

Next, that abusive, possessive asshole dude, “Leo,” who sells the higher quantities of cocaine in town, bullies and tells his submissive girlfriend how to properly clean the tiles. She gives the sass; he kicks her ass. He drags her to her knees “the first thing you need is a good attitude. Anyone will tell you that.” He then slaps her in the back of her head. Irony! Leo then gets a call from that other possessive asshole who wants Laura, Bobby, i.e. the only jock in a leather jacket. He’s gunna buy from Leo, five thousand bucks worth. Leo’s submissive party girl, girlfriend is impressed with the sound of five thousand dollars. That’s to share with Laura, of course.

Bobby calls Jacques. Jacques is a familiar looking fat actor. He’s a shady bar tender who deals drugs, only his stuff is 10k. Our stuff is the best, he says. A real drug world underbelly is getting revealed now, boy. Bobby laughs “you crazy, fucking Canadians.” Jacques is a Canuck, eh?!

Back to the Palmer house where Laura is drinking booze like an adult, alone as her innocent friend, Donna, swings on by to get close to Laura’s fire. Her friend asks, “Where are you going dressed like that?” “I’m going nowhere fast. And you’re not going.” Donna wants to be near risk but not lose her best friend. “Fix me a drink?” Laura’s smoking a cigarette. She glances over coyly and takes off without her friend and cabs it to the “Bang Bang Bar.“

That woman who carries a log like a child, from the original Twin Peaks series, puts her hand on Laura’s forehead “The fire you’re in puts all goodness in jeopardy.” Yeah fine. GTFO!  Anyway, Laura internalizes it, holds the lady’s hand and looks at her dark reflection in a black, clear window. 

Inside the club we hear Julee Cruise, not singing “Falling” this time (the Twin Peaks theme song) but some lovely angelic melody as Laura comes in, compromised and helpless.

Laura stares at Julee as her face gets the Blue Velvet lighting. Literally. Laura loves Julee Cruise’s heavenly set. And begins to cry like she was Frank Booth or something over here! What do you want? A Heineken?? No! Fuck that!!! Pabst!!! Blue Ribbon!!!!!

Anyway her innocent friend followed her to the bar.

Laura looks over at Fat Jacques. She nods at him as if to confirm “sex for coke tonight, hun”. She nods back, teary yet sultry an affirmative “Tonight? Hell yeah!” Jacques invites two gentlemen towards Laura. Her innocent friend, Donna, watches, shocked by the adult decisions Laura is daring to make out of small-town boredom.

The men ask the innocent friend. “Is she part of the bargain.”

“No she isn’t.” Laura says. But the innocent friend, Donna, drinks one of the dude’s hard shots. Laura kisses the other man. In retort her innocent friend kisses the other man the same sultry way. Well, I guess it’s on now! Gunna be one of those nights!

Now we get to the roots of it. They enter a secret, after hours section of the Bang Bang Bar. “Welcome to Canada” they say as the coolest dive bar ever is revealed with slow, sexy dancing and an amazing Canadian maple leaf colored strobe lights flicker. As a Canadian I appreciate the jizz. It makes our side of the border pretty fucking rad looking “Welcome to Canada” may as well be “Welcome to Hell” the way David Lynch directs it. So fucking cool! Where the real debauchery goes down!

Laura kisses Fat Jacques who is all fucked up on something. Laura digs the vibe and kisses him. They’re going off that deep end now. It’s a chilling vibe. I wanna join this debauchery just watching this. One man mixes some drug in innocent girl’s drink. Foul move.

“Chug-a-lug Donna,” Laura tells her, encouraging her friend’s fall from grace rather callously.

Laura then dances with the man, and he takes her shirt and bra off. Fabulous breasts. Her innocent friend finally senses danger like now it has gone too far. And at the same time her drugged drink kicks in. 

Her party girl friend she hardy remembers comes up to Laura. Fat Jacques says, “Hey my high school sandwich. Let’s put some meat inside.”

Clue? Party girl friend brings up that the murder of Teresa Banks was a year ago (if we can remember that far back in this 2-hour fifteen-minute movie plus forty-five-minutes of deleted scenes). Jacques says Teresa was asking about what both Laura and party girl’s fathers looked like. That’s seedy underbelly shit. Then the girl points down to the man she’s been flirting with for money & drugs all night. He obliges and goes down on both of them under the table rather salaciously.

“Here we go again. Like back at One Eyed Jacks.” Must have gotten kicked out for prostitution.

“Is that Donna Heyward?” Asks party girl. Hey, party girl was Leo’s submissive girlfriend from earlier. Aha! Okay.

Laura is upset as her innocent friend, Donna, is upside down getting her tits sucked by the other man. Laura is now shocked. Laura screams and stops the man and Donna from going further. Laura’s fine with her own debasement but not her friends. She’s a hypocrite but decent friend.

The Next Day, Laura and Donna are home. They cry. Trying to understand last night. “I love you, Laura,” Donna says platonically and sincerely. “I cannot let you end up like me.” Haven’t seen that expressed genuinely in a while! You only have to go back to ’92 to see an actual platonic friendship. What an artefact!

And like that Leland arrives. He, for a solitary second, he smiles at the warmness of the two girl friends hugging, before he instantly overlays the innocent moment with Laura and party girl in lingerie together… Leland had that memory? Is he an addict too and slept with his own daughter, Laura, and party girl, only Laura was so high she forgot it was her own father? What an implication!

Leland drives Laura home only for some maniac behind them in a motor home to swerve and drive too closely behind them. Captions label him “Phillip.“

This poor driver, Phillip, drives around the traffic jam and pulls up beside Leland, driver side, and screams at Leland as Leland overrevs his car repeatedly to drown out the truth. He shouts, “The thread will be torn, Mr. Palmer.” “It’s him. It’s your father!” As a black dog barks. All kinds of cryptic shit Phillip says, “Your corn was opened, you were still when it was opened.” This has all kinds of rape analogies… as Leland looks guilty as fuck overrevving his engine on a red light, reacting super guilty. As Laura freaks out, acting guilty as well, teasing a full unrepressing of some horrible, unspeakable memories. Laura just wants it all to stop. So, we’re back to pedophile dad, Leland as a suspect, eh? Toggle, toggle. Where this movie stops, nobody knows (or remembers!)

Back to a seedy situation in the past. Now we’re getting somewhere. Nowhere ‘good’ but somewhere in this mystery. Bout time! Leland says “Teresa Banks. You look just like my little girl.” as he hires Teresa for his prostitute. And like that it’s back to speculation but back again “Can we party with those girls you know?” Sure, says Teresa. Uh huh… Are the party girls including Laura??? 

Cut to Laura screaming at her dad in the car, still at that red light he can’t escape. Who was that screaming at you? He looks familiar! She says as she freaks out.

Does Laura go into a fugue state and purposefully forget what her and her dad do together? Was her dad selling her out for money? What is Laura suppressing in her fugue states and memory blackouts?

Leland comes with Teresa to the “party girls” and sees his daughter Laura is one of them! Citizen Q time! 

Leland runs away and pays Teresa and says, “I’ve chickened out.” Whew! Leland runs away back home. No wonder he’s asking her to wash her hands. He knows what she’s up to. Hypocrite that he is, like Laura earlier. Like father, like daughter, I see. And like that the ghostly trace of the boy with a Pinocchio white mask hops around denoting truth is being squeezed out of us, as a lie against the true art of obscurity Lynch would have preferred to giving a straight answer like he was apparently forced to on this project by Frost and other producers.

Laura is paranoid in one of her forgetful drug binges she forgets and is paranoid… did I sleep with my father? 

Laura remembers the ring again from earlier. It was on Teresa Banks’ finger. And the midget’s finger. Don’t be a prostitute. Got it!  Subliminals… to who? His daughter who made Boxing Helena? Was she into drugs and this was his attempt to stop her, futilely?

“Who are you really?” Laura asks. The lights flicker. That familiar fugue state falls upon Laura but she is angry and defiant this time. 

Cut to Leland pacing downstairs. He breaks the TV. We then see Leland killing Teresa Banks! The prost that looks like his daughter. He beats her head in with a pipe. Damn! Kicking it into high gear with actual clarity! The hell you say?!

Laura is told she’ll score big if she hangs with Bobby tonight. She’s so there for the score. 

They get high and laugh in the woods until the deal goes wrong and the seller pulls a gun to which Bobby pulls his own, shoots him twice then blows his head off, back to front. Damn!

Laura is in shock. But then laughs at Bobby for killing him and trying to bury him. She’s a super lost soul!

Laura snorts a bunch of the dead man’s coke.

Leland enters his bedroom and hands his wife almost ritualistically a drugged milk. Probably with tranquilizers. His wife’s face is one of knowing and being complicit in her lack of will to stop what comes next.

Leland goes in the hallway and turns on that goddamned fan, that Laura was obsessed with in that fugue state of hers earlier. Laura hears it click on and is hypersensitize to this ritual she’s been inured too, on an unconscious level.

The fan is on. (And so is the shit about to hit it!)

The wife is drugged. She hallucinates a white horse (drugs and powerful white sex). Horrid implication of foreknowledge. The horse disappears, just like her sense of right and wrong it would seem.

Transubstantiation again. Bob magically enters Laura’s bedroom window at night. Laura sees the fugue flicker of light. And knows what comes next. The fiend, Bob, enters the room in surreal motions. Bob rapes her with partial consent. Irresistible to Bob.

“Who are you? Who are you?” she asks. Part way thru making love, she looks up and Bob has indeed transformed into Leland!

Alright! It is incest. No more back and forth, is he isn’t he bullshit they all knew was just a way of priming our pumps. Tonight, they tell us. Tonight, Bob comes out as Leland at long last! Bob’s your uncle! Pardon my punning. She sees Leland’s face instead of Bob’s and screams into the blackest of midnights.

The next morning at breakfast Laura knows the truth now. “Honey. I really would like to talk to you.” She can’t even look him in the eyes. That’s a confirm on incest. We have internal story confirmation! Also, now we know why Laura’s mother smokes so goddamned much and was encouraging Laura to smoke, to commit suicide secretly to end the shame one death stick at a time. A confession of foreknowledge if ever there was one.

For a hated film, Lynch sure made an underrated masterpiece here, if I may say so.

“Honey. What’s wrong this morning, sweetheart?” Leland just stares at her like a psycho like he never did anything wrong, gaslighting her hard.

Laura, thankfully is awake partially from her fugue state. “You stay away from me.” she snarls.

Leland is blankly optimistic. No experience of guilt. His blankness turns to psychotic intention, like with Teresa Banks?!

The clock spins every which way at school. Laura is fucked mentally. She leaves at the end of class crying and ghosting out realizing the shit of family she must return too. Ad nauseam.

Bobby makes out with Laura. Bobby wants to know where she must go. “I have to go home.” she says fatalistically in tears.

Laura sits around nude-ish, hot as fuck, and stares at a picture of the child family and the angel in the picture disappears. She crawls down the trellis and hops on the motorcycle of James Marshall in her sexy black lingerie. James peels off.

Leland’s face peers behind the curtain, in slow motion, in pure rage filled, red, possessive facial expressions.

Laura slaps James. “You always hurt the ones you love.” James instantiates. “You always hurt the one you pity.” she retorts. He insists they love each other. She falls in his arms. Helpless. Realizing she can’t love who she loves because of the drug addiction telling her what to do with her body instead. She screams, suddenly remembering they’re in the spot where Bobby killed that drug dealer. James thinks she’s crazy.

“You don’t even know me.” Laura confesses. She’s been lying by even humoring his notion of love. How quaint. “Your Laura disappeared.” Upswell of TV music. “It’s just me now.” Laura looks down in shame.

Driving her home she jumps off the motorcycle. “I love you, James!” She shouts hysterically in his ear. She runs off in the woods. 

She meets the worst enablers, Fat Jacques, Leo and his skank, party girl… that sultry rock music plays again. In a shitty little love shack they go to ‘frolic.’ In other words, they have a bondage styled foursome. Jacques flips Laura over for anal which party girl yells about not being Laura’s consent. (Is it anal or just the fact that he’s a fat fuck and will crush her?) In any event, while at the window, who should appear, but the narcissistic, and eternally optimistic face of Leland Palmer!

Jacques comes outside and Leland kicks the shit out of him. Leo wants to exit. Laura asks, “Can you untie me?” “Shut up!” Leo replies then walks out and speeds off on his Corvette. Leo has such a way with words…

Leland shows up and out of narcissistic rage screams at Laura while she’s tied up. Phillip arrives mysteriously, like he’s gonna do something to stop Leland. Doesn’t make any sense he’d know where everyone is so fuck this plot convenience! 

Meanwhile Leland is riding the party girl and Laura his daughter like two screaming, terrified dogs on leashes and Leland is the dog sled rider.

Tied up, facedown over a coke mirror, Leland confesses to Laura: “I always thought you knew it was me.” How horrid. Then Bob appears to Laura, “I always thought you knew it was me.” Well, that clears things up.

We now see Philip is one armed. Earlier the midget referred to the idea he was “the arm.” Alrighty. I don’t care. He lost an arm to what? Bad drug injections? Another impotence metaphor? (Dick Laurent is dead! Wrong movie!).

The ring of Teresa Banks that was on party girl falls off as a clue… fine.

Laura puts on the ring.

“Don’t make me do this!” says Leland as he kills his own daughter. 

He wraps her in plastic, then, as Bob. But it’s Leland.

He drops her body in plastic in the river. 

Mystery complete. Episode 1 of Twin Peaks can now commence.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is a soup to nuts prequel. There you go!

In the last-minute metaphor we see the angel was there causing the fugue instead of the direct reality as an act of corrective mercy. Life is Pi styles. Hmm. How horrid all the same!

And we get a token scene of Agent Cooper with his hand on Laura’s shoulder looking down knowingly. Yeah, but he didn’t solve the fucking crime, or anything so fuck that tool! 

I’m sorry but Sheryl Lee should have gotten an Oscar for this performance as Laura Palmer. Straight up and down.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Uppers:

Sheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer is magnificent, showing an incredible range and hyperrealism to her character’s nightmarish circumstances, trapped in between fugue states and drowning her reality in sex and drugs. It is the clearest portrayal of this very particular scenario I have ever seen. The intensity and certainty and self-conscious loss of control is chef’s kiss. She keeps us guessing to the last second whether Bob is the addict in her mind, or it really is the next level of terror, coming from within her own family.

David Lynch’s direction and David Frost’s input and other producers’ insistence Lynch clarify what the hell happened to Laura Palmer. Especially with a fully fledged ending. Bang on! I am not simply happy with the blasé attitude of ‘I don’t like to explain things’ that some artists get off on. When it comes to murder mysteries, denying that is a crime in an of itself. If you’re going to play God, you cannot avoid the Judge role or assigning accountability. Someone causes the crime. In this case, Frost’s influence and producers forced Lynch to explain the mystery of “Bob” in relation to Laura Palmer. But they played deep cat and mouse with whether Bob was Leland the entire time. Was it just Laura’s drug fueled paranoia? Was Leland just taking her drugs? Eventually the dam broke and the truth comes out in the end. Leland was raping his daughter and killed her, just like he killed the prostitute that looked like her, Teresa Banks. I found this ending terrifying, cathartic and eternally one of the darkest pits of hell every committed to film, and it’s right in your own backyard in the highest of trust environments, right under you nose! Bravo, Mr. Lynch, despite your better judgment, you made a very underappreciated masterpiece.

Overall, I appreciate the way Lynch leaves hundreds of false clues down blind alleys of all sorts alongside legitimate clues to Laura’s and Teresa Banks’ murders. Twin Peaks in general gives you a real case to solve, including the false leads. It took time to determine what was wank and what was a case fact. There are plenty of both, as we examined. I appreciated the dedication to both.

And a special shout out to Ray Wise, as Leland who knocked it out of the park as a very believable maniac, as always. Ever since I saw him in Season 1, collapse at the news of Laura’s death in the lodge, in comedic, slightly exaggerated ways, he was on my suspect list. Bravo in playing it through till the bitter, twisted end.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Downers:

I appreciated the cameo of David Bowie. I’m a big fan, like, well, everyone! But the purpose of the transubstantiation between David Bowie and Agent Desmond is a nebulous, non-sequitur. Just as it was in Lost Highway, as referenced earlier. It leads nowhere and is basically a big gag, leading to Agent Cooper (D.B. Cooper mystery, google that). It’s a lame joke, just like the FBI themselves, showing up late to the party, after true evil has long had its way in the moment. They are Johnny-come-latelies.  Perhaps it is the same commentary that No Country for Old Men and Zodiac flirted with many years later, that evil wins and is still too sly and fast for humans to catch.

And consider this, 30-years-later there was Twin Peaks Season 3, and they still never solved the damned case! 30 years of stupid, incompetent, never solve nothing, dumb-fuck FBI. 30 years and 3 seasons and nobody solves the fucking murder!  Agent Cooper just goes right on drinking that damn good coffee forever! Pour it on your head, moron.  You suck!

Overall, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was an underrated classic that amplifies and aids Seasons 1 and 2. It does not detract in the slightest. But like Murder on the Orient Express, sometimes it takes a village to commit a murder. Who murders Laura Palmer?  It’s not just Leland, but it is Twin Peaks itself that murders Laura Palmer. The underground drug scene helps her escape, the one that everyone in town is a secret part of, sex and drugs at every corner of this small logging town. That escape she thinks would help her away from her father, lead her right back into his embrace, fatally, forever. The depravity and narcissistic rage that leads him to unmake what he had made, like some precious possession that only he could possess was the most terrifying reality of all. It’s the darkest finale I’ve ever seen, and it was, of course, only the beginning of Twin Peaks Season 1. An underrated masterpiece.

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Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch, Robert Engels
Produced by: Gregg Fienberg, John Wentworth
Cinematography by: Ronald Víctor García     
Edited by: Mary Sweeney
Music by: Angelo Badalamenti   
Special Effects by: Wizards, Riggs Production
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, David Bowie, Keifer Sutherland, Chris Issak
Year: 1992
Country: USA, France
Language: English 
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 2h 14min

Studio: New Line Cinema, CiBy 2000, Twin Peaks Productions
Distribution: New Line Cinema, The Criterion Collection, Janus Films

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