Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Prequels are always a weird thing, because the question inevitably arises: “If this was such an important part of the story that it needed a whole other installment to tell it, why wasn't it shown in the first place?” Most successful prequels don't so much solve this problem as plug their ears and ignore it, and then just tell a really good story anyway. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, though, is lucky in this respect, as that question isn't applicable to it. Most of the content here was covered in dialogue or alluded to in Twin Peaks, so there's no worry that it's an extraneous or tacked-on part of the plot. It just has the advantage of showing and dramatizing things that we had taken for granted before.

What the movie turns out to be, then, is a character piece for someone we (out of necessity) never spent much time with in the series: Laura Palmer herself. It's also an acting exercise for Sheryl Lee, who does magnificent work in the role. In the series, Madeleine Ferguson was conceived to give Lee an excuse to be on, since she had shown so much skill just being Palmer as a corpse or in flashbacks. But Ferguson was always just a contrivance, and was never as multifaceted or interesting as the deeply flawed, charismatic figure of Laura Palmer. And this movie finally rectifies a long-standing wrong and gives us an unflinching focus on her final days.

But Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is oddly at war with its own role as a follow-up to an unresolved television series. It would work so, so well as a standalone film, the tragic tale of a young woman whose circumstances are the exact wrong place for a person with her self-destructive tendencies to be in, and end up leading to her death. Take out most of the first thirty minutes and replace that length with proper introductions for the characters and their situations, and you've got something that could easily be watched and understood by itself.

Even though the film finds itself having to pull double duty in this regard – the lip service paid to the question “what happened after the end of the original show?” is basically perfunctory and doesn't actually resolve anything at all except for offering a possible escape for Dale Cooper from the Black Lodge – it doesn't hurt it all that much, just kind of distracts from the main thrust of the film. And you can forgive the film for these distractions because, after all, this is a movie made to follow-up a TV show and one could assume the biggest connoisseurs of it will be fans of the TV show that won't mind seeing these characters again.

The only part where the film suffers for show-watchers is, actually, the ending, where Laura Palmer spends the last night of her life aimlessly drifting between scenes whose existence and specifics had already been successfully surmised and summarized for us in the show proper by Dale Cooper. On the show, it played better, because it was just a monologue describing her actions, and it was the end result of several episodes worth of investigation and poking at the edges. Strung together and shown on-screen, though, it plays more like Laura Palmer drifting aimlessly around and checking up on the film's subplots. But I can mostly forgive that for the ending shot of Laura in the afterlife, laughing and crying, superimposed over the image of an angel as the orchestral soundtrack slowly deafens everything else. Few enough movies end with what is essentially a purely tonal shot, and fewer still feel like they deserve it. But as the “final” image of Twin Peaks, that shot captures in one fell swoop the feeling of the series – unsettling, surreal, but oddly beautiful and easy to get invested in. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me feels like one last scoop of Twin Peaks and wraps the whole feel of the show up in a microcosm, and in that sense it's a good reminder of what was special about this show.