Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me
I saw this film in the Downer Theater in Milwaukee when it came out. I recall how stunned I was by the colors: reds, the golden blonde of Laura Palmer's hair, the blacks of shadowy scenes in the woods, the brilliant sunshine moments. The film, too, has a 1950s look. Moira Kelly as Laura's best friend, Donna Hayward, has liquid dark eyes showing off compassion much needed by the lost girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
Deriving from a two season TV series created by David Lynch, Fire Walk With Me came out a full year after the second season ended with a mystifying sense in viewers that nothing had been resolved, mainly the answer to the question, Who Killed Laura Palmer?
In Season Two we do find out that Laura's father, Leland (Ray Wise), possessed by a malign spirit, Bob (Frank Silva), killed his daughter and also her lookalike cousin (Sheryl Lee again, but a brunette). The business dealing with the Black Lodge, though, caused much perplexity in viewers. The 1992 film, covering the last few weeks of Laura Palmer's life, thus, the period immediately preceding the opening of Season One, does illuminate many aspects of Laura's dual life as a popular high school kid and a cocaine-sniffing victim of child sexual abuse by her own father who has no memories of the wrongs he visits upon his flesh and blood.
Laura, during these frightening visitations, sees only Bob, a man with intense eyes and long gray hair smelling of oil and an odor of something burning. "Fire, walk with me," is a request followed easily by the night version of Laura Palmer, the girl who sneaks out of her bedroom window to meet with boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), her cocaine supplier, or Jacques Renault (Walter Olkewicz) and Leo Johnson (Eric DaRe), with whom she parties, seeking degradation, to sexual excess in a crappy little cabin in company with her friend, Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine).
Twin Peaks viewers, thinking back to 1990, may recall the shocking image of Ronette Pulaski in a dirty chemise, barefoot and bruised, stumbling in a daze along railroad tracks a day or two after the discovery of Laura Palmer's corpse. From what or whom was Ronette walking away from? In the film we see the party she attends along with Laura, Jacques and Leo. We see who witnessed the party through a cabin window. We see the result leading back two years, image-wise, to Ronette dazedly walking on the tracks' uneven surface, so fucked up from a concussion she probably wouldn't even notice an approaching train.
In Season One she's in a coma for a while, her story has to go on hold as Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI (Kyle MacLachlan) follows clues to Laura's murder, fitting his own peculiar personality into the strangenesses of Twin Peaks, Washington. A woman who receives prophetic pronouncements from the log she carries around at all times. A one-eyed woman obsessed with creating soundless drapes. In the Black Lodge, incidentally, red drapes play a visual role, blocking off spaces within a labyrinthine area not subject to laws of time and space.
In this place that is no place, a little man speaks and moves backwards. Bob seems to be an escaped denizen of the Black Lodge. A one-armed man aids Agent Cooper with cryptic statements. Laura Palmer finds herself more and more drawn into the Black Lodge, or at least subject to its influence. A weird old woman, Mrs. Tremond, and her mask-wearing grandson, give to Laura a disturbing framed photograph depicting a wall with old-fashioned wallpaper and a door, partially ajar leading to a room or hallway beyond. Laura hangs it on her bedroom wall, dreams herself into the image, enters, apparently, the Black Lodge. A man beats time on his knee, grinning stupidly, the little man from Dale Cooper's encounters eats creamed corn. It's weird to the extent of being sickening.
Laura's good influences include her friend Donna and a biker high school student, James Hurley (James Marshall). These two she pushes away over the course of the movie, favoring time with Bobby Briggs and, fatally, with Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault. Her descent reflects a typical trajectory seen in past bad girl/bad boy movies of the 1950s, a decade that clearly influenced David Lynch strongly. In this case, though, the psycho-supernatural elements pull Laura into a death spiral. She's simultaneously affected negatively, as if pulled into a vortex, by the Black Lodge influence in her life, and also, as a regular person, ruined by her home life with her nutcase father and ineffectual mother, all of this pain and misery exacerbated by cocaine abuse and the furtiveness that goes along with leading a double life.
As Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives one of the greatest performances by an actress in any film I've ever seen. She doesn't even appear until about thirty minutes into the movie, but she offers a compelling and powerful portrait of a completely screwed up human being. Her acting range in this film, vast and varied in tone, includes moments of sweetness, of high school girl viciousness towards boys, being fucked up on cocaine and alcohol, a half-crazed compulsion to know the truth about Bob, indifference to her fate, indifference to human life as when Bobby Briggs shoots a man in the woods in self-defense, sleaziness, beatific deliverance from suffering. Laura Palmer gets squeezed through the wringer--Sheryl Lee shows us this process in a full range of emotional displays. That she wasn't at least nominated for an Oscar for this role is a sign that the Oscars don't mean shit.
Lynch, with this film, demonstrated his patience in telling a story to such an extensive degree that the movie contains clues for resolution in a future Twin Peaks film or TV series. In 2017, he got to make Season Three, eighteen episodes for the Showtime network. It's a great wrap-up to the previous two seasons and the film. The astonishing final scene in Episode 18 does feature the great Sheryl Lee, her last action before the end ripping the attentive viewer to shreds, when the implication is contemplated. I thought about this ending for days.
Vic Neptune
I saw this film in the Downer Theater in Milwaukee when it came out. I recall how stunned I was by the colors: reds, the golden blonde of Laura Palmer's hair, the blacks of shadowy scenes in the woods, the brilliant sunshine moments. The film, too, has a 1950s look. Moira Kelly as Laura's best friend, Donna Hayward, has liquid dark eyes showing off compassion much needed by the lost girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
Deriving from a two season TV series created by David Lynch, Fire Walk With Me came out a full year after the second season ended with a mystifying sense in viewers that nothing had been resolved, mainly the answer to the question, Who Killed Laura Palmer?
In Season Two we do find out that Laura's father, Leland (Ray Wise), possessed by a malign spirit, Bob (Frank Silva), killed his daughter and also her lookalike cousin (Sheryl Lee again, but a brunette). The business dealing with the Black Lodge, though, caused much perplexity in viewers. The 1992 film, covering the last few weeks of Laura Palmer's life, thus, the period immediately preceding the opening of Season One, does illuminate many aspects of Laura's dual life as a popular high school kid and a cocaine-sniffing victim of child sexual abuse by her own father who has no memories of the wrongs he visits upon his flesh and blood.
Laura, during these frightening visitations, sees only Bob, a man with intense eyes and long gray hair smelling of oil and an odor of something burning. "Fire, walk with me," is a request followed easily by the night version of Laura Palmer, the girl who sneaks out of her bedroom window to meet with boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), her cocaine supplier, or Jacques Renault (Walter Olkewicz) and Leo Johnson (Eric DaRe), with whom she parties, seeking degradation, to sexual excess in a crappy little cabin in company with her friend, Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine).
Twin Peaks viewers, thinking back to 1990, may recall the shocking image of Ronette Pulaski in a dirty chemise, barefoot and bruised, stumbling in a daze along railroad tracks a day or two after the discovery of Laura Palmer's corpse. From what or whom was Ronette walking away from? In the film we see the party she attends along with Laura, Jacques and Leo. We see who witnessed the party through a cabin window. We see the result leading back two years, image-wise, to Ronette dazedly walking on the tracks' uneven surface, so fucked up from a concussion she probably wouldn't even notice an approaching train.
In Season One she's in a coma for a while, her story has to go on hold as Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI (Kyle MacLachlan) follows clues to Laura's murder, fitting his own peculiar personality into the strangenesses of Twin Peaks, Washington. A woman who receives prophetic pronouncements from the log she carries around at all times. A one-eyed woman obsessed with creating soundless drapes. In the Black Lodge, incidentally, red drapes play a visual role, blocking off spaces within a labyrinthine area not subject to laws of time and space.
In this place that is no place, a little man speaks and moves backwards. Bob seems to be an escaped denizen of the Black Lodge. A one-armed man aids Agent Cooper with cryptic statements. Laura Palmer finds herself more and more drawn into the Black Lodge, or at least subject to its influence. A weird old woman, Mrs. Tremond, and her mask-wearing grandson, give to Laura a disturbing framed photograph depicting a wall with old-fashioned wallpaper and a door, partially ajar leading to a room or hallway beyond. Laura hangs it on her bedroom wall, dreams herself into the image, enters, apparently, the Black Lodge. A man beats time on his knee, grinning stupidly, the little man from Dale Cooper's encounters eats creamed corn. It's weird to the extent of being sickening.
Laura's good influences include her friend Donna and a biker high school student, James Hurley (James Marshall). These two she pushes away over the course of the movie, favoring time with Bobby Briggs and, fatally, with Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault. Her descent reflects a typical trajectory seen in past bad girl/bad boy movies of the 1950s, a decade that clearly influenced David Lynch strongly. In this case, though, the psycho-supernatural elements pull Laura into a death spiral. She's simultaneously affected negatively, as if pulled into a vortex, by the Black Lodge influence in her life, and also, as a regular person, ruined by her home life with her nutcase father and ineffectual mother, all of this pain and misery exacerbated by cocaine abuse and the furtiveness that goes along with leading a double life.
As Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives one of the greatest performances by an actress in any film I've ever seen. She doesn't even appear until about thirty minutes into the movie, but she offers a compelling and powerful portrait of a completely screwed up human being. Her acting range in this film, vast and varied in tone, includes moments of sweetness, of high school girl viciousness towards boys, being fucked up on cocaine and alcohol, a half-crazed compulsion to know the truth about Bob, indifference to her fate, indifference to human life as when Bobby Briggs shoots a man in the woods in self-defense, sleaziness, beatific deliverance from suffering. Laura Palmer gets squeezed through the wringer--Sheryl Lee shows us this process in a full range of emotional displays. That she wasn't at least nominated for an Oscar for this role is a sign that the Oscars don't mean shit.
Lynch, with this film, demonstrated his patience in telling a story to such an extensive degree that the movie contains clues for resolution in a future Twin Peaks film or TV series. In 2017, he got to make Season Three, eighteen episodes for the Showtime network. It's a great wrap-up to the previous two seasons and the film. The astonishing final scene in Episode 18 does feature the great Sheryl Lee, her last action before the end ripping the attentive viewer to shreds, when the implication is contemplated. I thought about this ending for days.
Vic Neptune
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