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.

Twin Peaks: Season 2

Received wisdom is a weird thing, because even when it's right in spirit there's always some catch or complication. The standard brief on Twin Peaks season 2 is either “the show loses track after Laura Palmer's killer is revealed”, which is not quite true for two reasons. For one thing, there's a gap of about three episodes after Laura Palmer's killer is revealed and when the killer is caught, and that gap (as well as the lead-up to it) contains probably the best run of episodes in the entire show – I'd go to bat and say that “Lonely Souls”, the episode that finally shows the audience who killed Laura Palmer, is Twin Peaks's finest hour. Even though the show stumbled a bit speeding up so that they could get to the point where that scene takes place, they certainly don't blow their one shot – they deliver a memorable, horrifying, astonishing sequence to reveal the killer.

It's also not quite true that the show loses track, or at least that's not quite the right word for what it does – it makes what the show does sound boring. And it is boring, with the latter part of the season being a big slog to get through, but it's not boring because nothing happens – rather, everything happens. Twin Peaks just throws itself at several ridiculous plot points and can't get any of them to stick. Nadine spends most of the season thinking she's a high-schooler, James ditches the town and gets framed for murder, Andy gets caught up in the behavior of an adopted child he thinks might be the devil.. these are all plot threads that act fine and dandy, having beginnings and climaxes and resolving, but they're not in any way derived from who the characters are. Is there any reason Pete Martell is a chess expert and we had no clue about it? It's certainly not baked into the character and not remotely foreshadowed. Ben Horne has a psychotic break and starts reenacting the Civil War, but what on Earth does the Civil War say about Ben Horne? He's never shown any interest in it in the past. The only compelling plot in the season is that of Bobby and Shelley, which sets itself up as a tragic tale of a relationship coming apart as a couple that has only ever been in its electric honeymoon phase starts getting in over its head and falling apart. But, of course, that's squared away and reset by the end of the season. A huge letdown.

The reason it's so disappointing is that it so clearly violates what Lynch and Frost started the series for – instead of having a show focused on the lives of the characters, in the last half of the season the characters start taking on frivolous and ridiculous subplots and become infinitely less interesting than the newly developing metaplot of Dale Cooper's power struggle with Windom Earle. And that part, at least, is something that can't be squarely laid at the feet of the network. The new overarching story is, frankly, great. I loved Windom Earle's character. The developing exposition about BOB and the White and Black Lodges was great, especially since the Laura Palmer plot opened those doors and left them unresolved. One can only chalk this up to Lynch and Frost having a much more hands-off approach this season because of other commitments. It shows every sign of the writers not having a firm guiding hand, approving plots that they only casually looked at and didn't realize how they would come across to viewers when filmed and transmitted.

It's not a bad season of television – the first half or so is quite propulsive and the final episode benefits greatly from having David Lynch back on board, including a cliffhanger ending that's so evidently one of the all-time greats that it still worked when Fringe essentially lifted it 20 years later. But, as I said with the first season, the elements contained in this show were such a volatile mixture that without its previously strict overseers, it spilled out and ended up focusing on the wrong things. One imagines that given a third season with tighter control and more hands-on management from Frost/Lynch, Twin Peaks could have pulled it together again. Fortunately, we are in the age of revivals and as soon as next year we could see the show done justice. Here's hoping.

Twin Peaks: Season 1

The second season of Twin Peaks is quite a thing. I'm not just talking about how it's supposed to be uneven and hard to love, but also how the tone and plot of season two completely subsumes all the discussion of the show's plot and approach as a whole. This isn't unfair – the first season only has 8 episodes, and the second season has 22, meaning that 73% of the show's content is in season two, after David Lynch, one of its principal creative forces, had left, and with Mark Frost, its other co-creator, having a much more hands-off position. Therefore – and I'm entirely going off a few disconnected plot elements here, because I haven't watched any of season two yet – as I understand it, the second season of Twin Peaks becomes something significantly different from its first season, as much concerned with mysterious supernatural phenomena as it is with the ongoing plots of its rural townsfolk.

Without the supernatural elements to discuss, one thing becomes clear about the show's approach – it's really just a soap opera. I do not mean that in a remotely degrading way, for the record, because soap operas in general are far too put-upon despite the fact that soap-opera plotting is a considerable influence in how many modern shows serialize their character arcs. When I say the first season of Twin Peaks is a soap opera I mean that, like a soap opera, it has a diffuse cast of characters, all with their own plotlines, and advances everyone's plotlines just a little bit every week. Seriously, if you cut out the part's of Cooper's dream that hinted towards the supernatural masterplot, and handed the show to some directors more mundane than David Lynch, this would be a straightforward, pure soap opera.

But of course I've always hated that “if X took away Y it would just be Z!” kind of criticism, because it's removing not only vital context but also important pieces of the work itself. Lynch's directing work (and the tight influence he exerted over the series's other directors) is, in fact, the vital piece that makes this show unique. What you have here is a series that manages to have it both ways – it both focuses on the mundane lives of its citizens and the ongoing murder investigation of Laura Palmer. It has an eye on the supernatural and uncanny enough to justify its cracked, often creepy take on small-town drama. But... see, here's the thing. The unresolvable tension that fuels this season can't last forever. Twin Peaks almost has to get worse from here.

There are many, many ways in which the show is already conceptually doomed – that it's traversing a tightrope act that it can't possibly walk forever. Lynch and Frost wanted the show to gradually transition away from Laura Palmer's murder and just focus on the townsfolk, which, fair enough, the townsfolk are in fact the more interesting part of the show, but at some point you have to either justify why Dale Cooper is still there despite the murder investigation plot being dropped, or you have to solve the murder. This is a challenge that could only work for maybe two or three seasons before you have to pull the trigger on one of those things happening. And of course, once you introduce supernatural elements like BOB and MIKE, you have to eventually explain them in some capacity, and once you do that, you've introduced something necessarily bigger and more important than the everyday goings-on of a bunch of people in Wisconsin or Michigan or wherever this actually is set, which undercuts the whole point of the show. You can do your best to introduce this aspect extremely slowly so as to preserve the mystery and tension for as long as possible, but how long can you do that before viewers get frustrated at a non-advancing plotline? Four seasons?

So much of what makes this season special is just the fact that it's in a place where it benefits the most from all these contradictory impulses – this early on is the only time when a show with this attitude and premise can have its cake and eat it too: invest us in the supernatural by placing it amongst compelling characters, and enliven the characters by having one foot in the supernatural. It's a good hat trick, but at some point the show has to pull the trigger and show its hand – the issue, just from what I've heard, is that it didn't need to show its hand as quickly and clumsily as it ultimately ended up doing. But that's a discussion for season two.

I don't mean to put this season down just by implying that its ingredients are an unstable mixture that must eventually explode – they sure are, but for now they add some real, palpable fire and elevate what would be, even without them, a show of really compelling characters and dramatic events. This is probably the best season of television I've watched so far this year, and it's no wonder that it was such a huge smash and big talking point among people. As much as I've talked about the unsustainable blend of things that went into making this season great, they undeniably did make it great, and however season two turns out – maybe it's secretly brilliant, maybe it crashes and burns in the most fascinating way – I'm super on-board to dissect it, and that's in no small part due to the quality of this season.