Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Neo Noir From The Twilight Zone

"The Last Days of Laura Palmer"

Anybody with a working imagination can invent the mythology that works for them. Others without,  have to have a Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, a Bible, a Koran along with a common core of understanding and support.

Its fitting that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me starts with the original blue screen "the tube." It's the cold blue hearth of the modern world. The flickering images on the screen replace the flickering firelight and the ancient traditional stories.
                                                                      
When I was a kid if we weren't out playing out in the street at night we were inside glued to the tube. Everybody watched the tube. Its the reincarnation of the ancient Circus Maximums. Instead of 135 days of the year devoted to circus we could now do it for 365.

Twilight Zone, on the tube, was one of my favorites. It was a gateway to a world of imagination, fantasy, and even Film Noir. It was visually stylistic, it had a voice over narration by its creator/ringmaster Rod Serling, it featured some Classic Noir stars and future Transitional and Neo Noir stars in an anthology series that was pan generic.

Supernatural and fantasy based Noir have been around since the beginning. During the Classic Film Noir Era films like Alias Nick Beal (1949), Repeat Performance (1947), The Amazing Mr. X (1948), Fear in the Night (1947), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Nightmare  (1956), covered roughly the same territory, there are probably a few more. You can possibly even include  the the Noir-ish "Potterville" sequence in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)as another example and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943). There are even cases to be made for SiFi Noir. Films like Invasion of The Body Snatchers, The Thing From Outer Space and The Day The Earth Stood Still to name a few.

You pretty much should be familiar with the TV Series Twin Peaks (1990–1991) it would enhanced your viewing experience if you are familiar with all the quirks of the full Twin Peaks Universe. In the series you were introduced to a plethora of quirky minor characters who flickered in and out adding an extra dimension of small town realism on one hand and a bizarre eccentricity that hides beneath on the other. It was something that became expected.

If you watch Fire Walk With Me cold turkey you could almost treat the whole first half hour as a McGuffin that serves mainly to both trigger the main story and to replicate the feeling of the TV series. Characters appear make their impression or serve their plot point and then disappear never to be seen again. Its almost like a pilot for the future series. Parts of the first half hour do connect up however, so pay attention.

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Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer

The real story begins with the chronicling the last days of high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer. Laura Palmer at the very beginning of the TV series washed up dead on the shores of a Pacific Northwest lake near the town of Twin Peaks. We never definitively found out how she got there in the series.

Laura and Moira Kelly as Donna Hayward

Laura was much more than she seemed. By day a sweet, frumpish, conservatively dressed (baggy sweaters and Catholic school girl plaid skirts) who volunteers for meals on wheels, and has a childhood sweetheart/steady boyfriend James Hurley. Her best friend is Donna Haywood.

snorting coke

Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs

James Marshall as James Hurley

By night and behind closed doors the voluptuous town pump who is cheating on James with high school jock and drug dealer Bobby Brigs, and stringing along a handful of high school seniors and some townies on the side.

She is also a choke addict. To support this habit she sells her ass at the Band Bang Bar. She also participates in "private sex parties" along with Ronette Pulaski and Teresa Banks. On top of all this, Laura has been engaged in an incestual relationship with her overprotective father Leland Plamer since she was 12.

Ray Wise as Leland Palmer

Frank Silva as BOB

She coped with the incest by completely blanking out her father and inventing a hairy wild ass-ed character named Bob. It was Bob who would turn on the ceiling fan at night. It was Bob she saw climbing into her room through the window. It was Bob who would orally stimulate her before taking her. She had never acknowledged her father Leland's indiscretions. Leland in his own weird, screwed up mind thought that she loved him equally. He felt safe, but pressure has been building in Leland ever since Laura has started going out on real dates with James, he's actually jealous of her high school steady.

 Serving as a sort of eerie aura surrounding all of this is David Lynches own Black Lodge mythology "The lodge presents a horror that is both grand and intimate (he relates as an equivalent to Loveraft); it reaches as high as the cosmos in regards to its spiritual intrigue, yet it also looks to capture the minds of those who roam its corridors. In other words, it is a “dark world” that exists purely as a part of the universe while also acting to warp and torture those who inhabit it." (Mihael Pementel)



Two events start things drifting seriously towards Noirsville. The first happens before the actual start of the events depicted in the film but, is not revealed until later. It occurs when Leland, arriving at the four-way he's set up with Teresa Banks at a hot sheet motel, sees in the window, Ronette and his daughter Laura sitting on the bed in their bras and panties waiting for Teresa and the "john" they were expecting. Seeing Laura as a hooker shatters his illusions and crosses some wires in Leland's head. For "corrupting" his daughter Leland murders Teresa Banks.

The second event is when Laura discoverers that her self coping, self delusional invention Bob could actually her father.

This is all triggered after she discovers pages missing from her diary. She takes her diary over to a friend she trusts and tells him to hold on to it for her. Upon coming home early a few days later she sees Bob looking in the hiding place behind her dresser for her diary. She runs from the house and hides under a bush. Instead of Bob leaving the house its her father.

Noirsville

Grace Zabriskie as Sarah Palmer

Harry Dean Stanton as Carl Rodd

Julee Cruise

Chris Isaak as Special Agent Chester Desmond and Kiefer Sutherland as Special Agent Sam Stanley

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was directed by David Lynch. The film was written by David Lynch, Robert Engels, and Mark Frost. Music by Angelo Badalaenti, Cinematography was by Ronald Víctor García.

The film stars Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, Ray Wise as Leland Palmer, Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper, Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs, Phoebe Augustine as Ronette Pulaski,
Pamela Gidley as Teresa Banks, Chris Isaak as Special Agent Chester Desmond, Moira Kelly as Donna Hayward, Harry Dean Stanton as Carl Rodd, Kiefer Sutherland as Special Agent Sam Stanley, Grace Zabriskie as Sarah Palmer, Michael J. Anderson as The Man from Another Place, Frank Silva as BOB, James Marshall as James Hurley, and Walter Olkewicz as Jacques Renault.

The Pink Room - Clip

Screencaps from Criterion Bluray. 8-9/10