TWIN PEAKS FIRE WALK WITH ME
A film review by John Oswalt
Copyright 1992 John Oswalt
2 hours, 10 min., R (violence, nudity, adult situations) Director: David Lynch Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Kyle MacLachlan, Moira Kelly, plus various famous people in cameos.
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is a terrible movie. I was quite fond of the television series, but this movie has none its charm I always suspected that all the mysterious little phrases (e.g., "the owls are not what they seem") and weird symbolic objects in the series didn't mean much, but I didn't care because there were so many great characters to watch. The subplots were interesting.
In the movie, there are no subplots. It is the story of how Laura Palmer died, and we already know how she died. The bulk of the movie consists of Laura Palmer acting weird, crying, snorting cocaine, running around with her good boyfriend James and her bad boyfriend Bobby, and turning into a prostitute. Her friend Donna tries to stop her by going along with her. Has David Lynch jumped on the war-on-drugs bandwagon?
If this were done well, depicting the gradual degradation of Laura's life due to drug use, the pressures of adolescence, and living with a nutty father, and showing the parallel development of the evil forces which eventually kill her, TWIN PEAKS: FWTM could have been a good movie. A lot of Stephen King's best stuff is like that. But there is no character development. The scenes follow each other in no logical order. Mix them up and you would have the same movie. Laura acts pained. Her father, Leland, acts possessed. Laura gets over it and seems okay but meek. Leland smiles and seems ashamed of his outburst. Laura hangs out with the wrong crowd. Shea cries a lot, a weird kid jumps around in a mask, there is a lot of meaningless, empty symbolism, etc, etc, and when it becomes time for the movie to end Laura dies. And about that title: "Fire Walk With Me." It comes from an utterance by Laura in one of here pained periods. She says, slowly, as if each word were loaded with significance, "Fire ... Walk ... With ... Me." It means nothing. She could just as well have said "Elvis ... Ate ... My ... Left ... Foot," and then the title would be "TWIN PEAKS: ELVIS ATE MY LEFT FOOT."
Many of the characters from the television series put in an appearance: the Log Lady, the One-Armed Man, the Midget, the folks at the diner with the damned good coffee, the bellowing Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself), and the young man who never leaves his house. But they contribute nothing. They are in the movie just so we can point at them and say "look, there's so and so." Remove them and you have the same movie. David Bowie walks on for no apparent reason other than to be able to advertise that he is in the movie. I doubt that he spent more than five minutes on the set.
Even special agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, doesn't look like he belongs here. His role is more than the walk-on that the others I mentioned are, but his part makes no sense, and could easily have been left out. It should have been.
The first reel or so of the movie has some new FBI agents investigating the murder of Teresa Banks a year before Laura Palmer's. This gives them a chance to insert Kieffer Sutherland and Harry Dean Stanton. But then, abruptly, the words "One Year Later" appear, the familiar "Twin Peaks" theme music wells up, and all that early stuff is forgotten, except for the characteristic empty symbolism of a ring.
What's good about the movie? Well, as somebody said, "No movie with Harry Dean Stanton in it is all bad." He does fine as a trailer park manager. In fact, all the performances are good, considering what they had to work with. The script is really, really bad.
We have the usual David Lynch offbeat camera angles and scene cutting. When Laura and Donna walk out of her house, the camera follows them to the door. One naturally expects a quick cut to them walking down the front steps. But the camera stays in the empty room a couple of beats longer than normal, just long enough for you to get a sense of unease, of other-worldness, without really knowing why, before cutting to the outside shot. I like this sort of thing, but I would rather the movie was interesting enough so that I could just experience their effect, and not be reduced by boredom to watching for them.
Rainier Ale (brewed in Seattle, but I think they've been bought by Miller or one of the other big brewers) is very visible in one scene. I doubt that they paid any product placement money for this. If I were president of Rainier Brewing, I would have paid to keep my logo out of this movie.
I visited Snoqualmie a couple of months ago to ride the historic train (one of my hobbies), and it was fun to look for places I recognized. Most scenes could have been anywhere, though.
I rate it 3 on the 0-10 scale, which to me means "Poor. Not totally hopeless. I wouldn't have seen had I known more about it." Probably about a -2 on the Mark Leeper -4 to +4 scale. You don't have to worry about paying full price, because this movie won't last long in the theater.
John Oswalt (..!sun!megatest!jao)
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