David Lynch, 1992, US, 134 mins
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Moira Kelly, Ray Wise
“It really was not fun.” Such was David Lynch’s typically understated assessment of the reception Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me received at Cannes in 1992. Critics booed and jeered and the reviews that followed chastised him for cashing in on a show whose story had already been thoroughly digested over the course of some 30 episodes. Now we knew who had killed Laura Palmer and why, just what was the point of this prequel?
The answer lies in a photograph – the portrait of Laura herself that haunted Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks and was the icon of innocent femininity behind which the series dug to find a more grisly, sordid truth. Fire Walk With Me is, in its turn, an enquiry into that very series. From the moment a woman performs a bizarre mime that FBI agents are encouraged to read as a code, Lynch primes the audience to interpret the movie as a series of signs. Nothing is to be taken for granted. A lakeside vista is revealed to be a blow-up photo and the background of the opening credits becomes static on a TV that is promptly smashed with an axe – a brutal indication of the distance the film is putting between itself and the original show.
Lynch’s traditional milieu is the small-town America immortalised in the photographs of William Eggleston. The diners and caravan parks found in his work are recreated lovingly here and Lynch adds an element of ‘50s pastiche with slicked-back hairstyles and sitcom décor. Everything is soaked in primary colours from the bright reds of a pick-up truck to the blue of a school locker room. The result is a world that looks distinctly less than real, almost too good to be true, in opposition to Eggleston’s aim of capturing modern America as it is. Instead, Lynch is trying to show this image as a fake, a mask to hide ugliness. Frequently, interiors are filmed like stages, with actors posed like subjects amongst the furniture, but the effect is one of increased artifice. In fact, Lynch’s very assumption of Eggleston’s style serves only to identify it as a phantom world where the homespun archetypes emerge as ogres and villains.
Colour is not treated naturalistically but as a key to states of mind. Thus, blue becomes the hue of nightmare and invades the screen whenever Laura is menaced by her father. Sound, too, is exaggerated with the soundtrack music allowed to completely drown out the dialogue in a key scene at the strip club. Lynch originally added subtitles but these appear to have been removed on the UK DVD release. I would argue, though, that the sequence works better without them. Because the audience can only hear certain phrases or words over the din, the sense rather than the content of the conversations is conveyed, just as the rumblings and eerie crashes behind other scenes create an air of menace that is only understood subliminally.
The overall effect is one of a dream where the relationships between characters are registered in the unconscious rather than in explicit plot developments. In this sense, Fire Walk With Me marks Lynch’s first step in the direction of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, where the narrative unfolds according to dream logic. Though these films are more controlled and successful, it’s gratifying to find in their prototype a greater arbitrariness in the connections made between nightmare and waking life.
It’s commonly acknowledged that Lynch’s true subject is the corruption hidden under the surface of small-town America. Even so, Fire Walk With Me is his darkest film to date, in which the familiar coffee-and-doughnuts kookiness gives way to a disturbing – and surprisingly acute – study of incest and its psychological effects. But despite this subversive edge to his work, Lynch can never quite let go of innocence. This may be a world in which Santa Claus only exists as a code word for cocaine, but the angel that comes to redeem Laura at the end is very real. Indeed, the evil that inhabits Lynch’s stories can only exist precisely because there is a concomitant force of Good. And herein may lie the real clue as to why Lynch repeatedly returns to the Americana landscapes of William Eggleston – he wants to believe in them. As a director, he is often cast as the dark poet of US cinema, but, in fact, he is its eternal child, digging away at its myths to expose the dream behind the nightmare – just as Laura finds redemption follows her ordeal.
Michael Bartlett
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