Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

When Fire Walk with Me came out, everyone hated it, and now everyone loves it, and I’m the guy in the middle.

I don’t mind so much that it doesn’t really offer any details on Laura Palmer’s final days that weren’t already covered in Twin Peaks, and I appreciate that it gives us the chance to directly empathize with Laura’s perspective for the first time. But I’ve always found her more compelling as a spectral being, a still photograph with a haunting smile whose interiority could only be half-understood through unorthodox police work, arcane diary entries, and second-hand remembrances.

Fire Walk with Me also feels detached from the series in several ways. Its preponderance of location shooting makes the world of Twin Peaks feel much more open than the series’s confined soundstage setups, and yet the film’s dearth of returning characters makes the community feel much smaller. Donna, the returning character who gets the most screen time after Laura and her father, has been recast, which is an irredeemable distraction. And most of all, the film is relentlessly bleak, offering almost none of the soapy, eccentric levity the series was known for, which admittedly wouldn’t have gelled with the film’s laser focus on a years-long case of incestuous abuse of a minor.

So for now I’m still in the “it’s fine but incongruous and mostly unnecessary” camp, but maybe Twin Peaks: The Return, my overdue next stop, will shed some favorable new light on it.