31 Days Of Feminist Horror Films: TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME
“She’s dead, wrapped in plastic.”
While filming the pilot for TWIN PEAKS, David Lynch hand-placed the grit and grime of death on Sheryl Lee’s face — this kind of care is indicative of the way TWIN PEAKS treats Laura Palmer, a “dead girl” so iconic that even after three seasons of television and a movie (with two hours of accompanying deleted scenes) we’re still left pondering her myriad mysteries — and probably always will be. The ending of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN solidifies the fact that we can never know Laura Palmer fully: her holy purpose, spanning timelines, lives, and identities, is simply too complex for we mere mortals to ever fully comprehend.
Death is only the beginning for Laura Palmer — even in death, her secrets prove too potent for Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and the town of Twin Peaks. Both Cooper and the town of Twin Peaks struggle to bear the weight of her loss for a quarter-century, only finding more questions than answers about what made Laura Palmer so rare, so special, so tragically destroyed. In the first two seasons of TWIN PEAKS, we come to know Laura only in the past tense, but in FIRE WALK WITH ME, David Lynch unwraps the plastic on his beloved Laura to show her as a tender, deeply troubled, lost teenage girl who was too pure to survive a ceaselessly cruel world.
Laura comes alive in FIRE WALK WITH ME, and as we spend time with a walking, talking version of the living dead girl that haunts the entirety of TWIN PEAKS, her absence only becomes more acutely felt, the trauma she’s endured more vivid and visceral. FIRE WALK WITH ME is a vital piece of the TWIN PEAKS puzzle as Lynch forces the audience to confront the very idea of “dead girls” in cinema by making Laura so very alive after we’ve already learned the brutal manner in which she’s died. And in doing so, FIRE WALK WITH ME becomes an essential look at the interior lives of female victims of male violence.
“So you wanna fuck the homecoming queen?” Laura asks a man old enough to be her father one evening inside the Roadhouse’s Pink Room, a den of depravity which Laura happily participates in — at least, she seems to be happy. In fact, Laura is doing anything she can to numb the pain of sexual abuse she’s enduring from her own father, Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) possessed by the entity Bob (Frank Silva) who’s been “having her since she was twelve years old.” But Laura cannot numb the totality of the trauma she’s endured even with constant cocaine use, passionate sex with the sensitive boy at school, or secrets shared with older men — the pain she takes on is simply too immense for Laura to bear on her own. Like the boogeyman, Leland/Bob “comes through [Laura’s] window at night” and rapes her, but his torture of Laura is present throughout every moment of their domestic lives together — whether it’s finding and ripping pages from Laura’s secret diary (a violation acutely felt in THE RETURN), obsessing over how clean her hands are, or screaming at her during a traffic run-in, Leland/Bob has turned every moment of Laura’s life into a waking nightmare, with Laura never knowing when the monstrous Bob will appear.
Lynch’s work is sometimes critiqued as being misogynist given the amount of violence women are asked to endure, but for me, Leland/Bob is emblematic of the ways in which Lynch explores patriarchal evil at its root — what’s more frightening for a daughter than a malicious, abusive father from whom she cannot escape? A father who wants not only to violate his daughter, but allow the eternal evil of Bob to possess her completely? A father who one minute showers Laura with love, and the next, screams at her about supposed disobedience? Laura Palmer is the homecoming queen, the blonde bombshell, the girl next door, and she represents the kind of platonic American ideal of a “good girl gone bad,” but FIRE WALK WITH ME forces the audience to consider how she got there — Laura’s misbehavior stems from the trauma she’s survived, and has no outlet to to process. Leland/Bob then becomes representative of the poisonous patriarchy America was founded on —he’s the “perfect” American dad that’s gone so far beyond the pale that his every action becomes nauseating. Even Laura’s mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie) a woman with the capacity for great violence when necessary, is unable to protect her daughter from the pervasive evil of Bob, a maternal failure that haunts every moment of her booze-soaked existence twenty-five years later.
If we consider Episode 8 of THE RETURN — in which Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost explain the origin of Bob’s specific evil as being born out of a nuclear test, and Laura as a divine messenger sent to earth to provide a counterweight to that unleashed evil —then the idea of evil being loosed onto the world by men only becomes stronger. After all, sustained war, nuclear power, and the ensuing mass death that each provides do stem from an American military industrial complex that is inherently male in its conception. The devastating impact of male violence is present in most all of Lynch’s work, but through Laura’s relationship with Leland/Bob, we see that larger patriarchal evil brought into our own homes, pulsing beneath the surface of our own nuclear families.
In TWIN PEAKS, we come to know Laura Palmer through the long, inescapable shadow her death casts over the town — the legendary, omnipresent prom photo that brings ex-boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) to tears 25 years later, the secret diary and late night phone calls that Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle in the series, Moira Kelly in FIRE WALK WITH ME) and James (James Marshall) so desperately try to decipher, and, through Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s dark-haired double, also played by Lee (and also killed by Leland/Bob for being too pure.) The critical and commercial failure of FIRE WALK WITH ME is likely responsible for Lee not ascending into movie stardom, and that’s a damn shame — her work in FIRE WALK WITH ME is absolutely Oscar-worthy, and she brings Laura Palmer to life in unshakably haunting detail. The role of Laura requires titanic emotional swings, and Lee meets each challenge handily — in one dreamy FIRE WALK WITH ME scene, Lynch uses an excruciatingly slow push in on Lee’s face as she talks to Donna about James and other boys in a living room, and as we move tighter and tighter on Laura’s face, Lee conveys the enormity of her pain, guilt, shame, and misery with only the tiniest facial movements.
In the Pink Room, Lee turns Laura’s raw sexual energy into an extended seduction scene not of the characters within — just being around Laura is seductive enough for them — but for the audience as we’re asked to unpack the implications of what Laura’s sexual confidence means in this moment, given what we know about her relationship with Leland/Bob. Sheryl Lee, like Laura Palmer, feels unstuck in time — the scream she lets out during the climax of her rape by Leland/Bob echoes through the ages to become the same scream she unleashes in front of “Dale Cooper” at the end of THE RETURN, her pain so transcendent that it ripples through time and space, her agony bigger than both Laura and Lee herself. Lee feels like she was transported from the Golden Age of Hollywood, where her huge eyes, capricious smile, and suggested wholesomeness could’ve filled screens for decades, but in the 1990s and 2000s, Lee’s association with Laura Palmer likely made it too difficult for audiences to see her as anyone else. That’s the burden of playing an iconic character, particularly for actresses, but Lynch solidified Lee’s legacy as Laura by giving her one hell of a final moment in THE RETURN — a shriek so bone-chilling that it’s still reverberating months after the show ended.
In FIRE WALK WITH ME, Lynch finds an emotional center for Laura in Donna Hayward, her BFF, confidante, and occasional romantic rival. Donna was recast after difficulties with Lara Flynn Boyle, and she’s totally absent from THE RETURN, but in FIRE WALK WITH ME, Donna is one of Laura’s only lifelines, and their friendship informs much of Laura’s emotional journey in the film. While Donna envies all that Laura possesses as the perfect, blonde homecoming queen (including James Hurley’s “everlasting love”, the one thing Donna is able to claim from Laura in death) Laura’s greatest fear for her best friend is that she’ll begin to become too much like her — the last thing she wants is for Donna to understand the true depths of her darkness in her “bad Laura” moments at One-Eyed-Jack’s, in the Pink Room, and beyond.
It’s a black swan/white swan dichotomy, with Laura and Donna standing in for so many teenage girl duos where one of the girls is always trying to live up to the exploits of the other, and that other wants to protect her friend from the adult awareness that such exploits bring. But when Donna joins Laura in the Pink Room, it’s her debasement at the hands of an older man that breaks the spell of forgetting that the Pink Room provides for Laura — she can walk on the dark side and come back to home rooms, winter formal, and study-sessions, but Laura knows that Donna hasn’t experienced enough pain to engage with that kind of darkness and return to regular life as if nothing has happened like she can. The next morning, Donna and Laura tell each other they love each other, and Laura implores Donna not to “be like me” — it’s a final act of protection among best friends.
Because there is zero acknowledgement of Donna ever existing in THE RETURN, these final moments between Laura and Donna in FIRE WALK WITH ME become especially poignant — on TWIN PEAKS, we only know the grieving, detective Donna, not the vibrant teenage girl who’s biggest worry is whether or not her best friend is dating the right guy. FIRE WALK WITH ME celebrates the sacred bond between female best friends by showing us a Laura and Donna before tragedy, and thus, the moments they spend together are all tinged with extreme melancholy — these sweet girls don’t even know how precious their time is together.
The replacement, then removal of Donna Hayward from the TWIN PEAKS narrative between TWIN PEAKS, FIRE WALK WITH ME, and THE RETURN speaks to a larger truth about the malleability of identity as created by Lynch and Frost throughout the entire TWIN PEAKS mythology. The central plot of THE RETURN follows “good” Dale Cooper as he tries to come back from the The Black Lodge and defeat “bad” Coop before he returns to the town of Twin Peaks, but in exploring this idea of doubles, dopplegangers, and tulpas — an idea that’s present in most of Lynch’s work since TWIN PEAKS — Lynch and Frost end up providing one of the single most horrifying endings ever. Coop is able to interrupt the timeline of FIRE WALK WITH ME in THE RETURN and keep Laura from making her fateful trip to the train car (and thus, resetting the entire timeline for the town of Twin Peaks), but his saving comes too late: again, we hear Laura Palmer’s iconic scream in the woods, and she disappears. In his male do-gooder stubbornness, Coop takes Laura’s whisper about “the little girl who lives down the lane” back in The Black Lodge to mean that he can still save her, so he tries to do just that — instead, he finds Laura living as waitress Carrie Page in Texas, a sad woman with an inexplicable dead man on her couch, and insists that he must return her to Twin Peaks despite Carrie’s protests.
Dale and Laura’s titular “return” ends up being an exercise in absolute terror: when visiting the Palmer home, they instead find Alice Tremond (who purchased the home from Mrs. Chalfont, another Black Lodge spirit) who claims to not know a thing about the Palmers But when they begin to leave, Coop asks “Laura” what year it is, we hear Sarah Palmer cry out for “Laura” from within the Palmer family home. Then, Sheryl Lee lets loose with another blood-curdling scream before the show smashes to black, leaving the audience with only the terror of Sheryl Lee’s shriek. But, the question of whether or not Coop could save Laura is clearly defined — he couldn’t, and in trying to, discovered that he was only causing pain and anguish for the various Lauras “living” in various timelines related to the happenings in and around Twin Peaks.
Because of Cooper’s inability to admit his failure as a man and as a law enforcement agent, he’s caused Lauras throughout space and time to endure more suffering, each of them trapped in a hellish limbo state created by Coop’s drive to fix a past that cannot be fixed. Cooper’s now created a ripple in which Laura is doomed to suffer even more thanks to his own obstinance in believing that he could still save her. In THE RETURN, there no closure on the Laura Palmer case for Cooper, no reconciliation for mother and daughter, and certainly no happy ending for Laura herself— there’s only her scream, howling through infinity, and the black void of an empty TV screen and an ending.
I first found FIRE WALK WITH ME to be alienating after watching the original series — did we really need to see Laura Palmer at the moment of death? Wasn’t the power of the original series partially in what we didn’t know about Laura? However, as we consider the whole of TWIN PEAKS, FIRE WALK WITH ME becomes essential in providing a bit of closure for Laura Palmer. While THE RETURN leaves Laura’s (and Lauras) eternal fate in a far more existentially frightening place, FIRE WALK WITH ME allows Laura to find peace in death, even if only for a moment. There’s no glamorization of Laura’s murder in FIRE WALK WITH ME — the time we spend with Laura, Leland/Bob, and Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) in the train car at the end of the film is beyond harrowing, and once again, Laura’s scream reverberates not only through the train car in which she is killed, but through all of time.
Lynch follows this shattering moment by placing Laura back in The Black Lodge (wearing her signature Black Lodge suit, fully glamorized, miles away from the rictus of mascara, lipstick, and tears she wears in the train car) where she’s joined by Coop and an angel that’s seemingly been looking over her for the entire film. In this moment, Coop can provide some comfort to a weeping Laura, who basks in the light of her protective female angel, laughing through her tears — what other emotion could Laura be experiencing besides the diametric opposites of laughter and tears after such a grueling ordeal? It’s a cathartic release for Laura, as her emotional response can finally be expressed fully, and for the audience too — we’re able to engage with the enormity of Laura Palmer’s pain through seeing her calm for a brief moment in time.
FIRE WALK WITH ME allows Laura to close the loop on her suffering (even if THE RETURN proves that this is not her ultimate fate) and in closing that loop, it provides Laura with some peace, however temporary. This film is a necessary part of TWIN PEAKS because like Lynch carefully placing the dirt on a dead Laura Palmer’s face, it delicately unwraps Laura from her plastic cocoon of death, and shows the full, robust life of a girl we thought we’d only know in death. FIRE WALK WITH ME also ends up becoming an incredibly powerful story about what it’s like to live with an abusive, violent father — the entire film is dedicated to exploring how living with that kind of trauma affects Laura daily, and provides a totally empathetic insight as to why she’s become such a “bad girl.”
Every bit of Laura’s transgressive behavior is now contextualized within the abuse she’s endured, and we end up learning so much more about the entirety of her being because we fully understand the toll of this abuse in FIRE WALK WITH ME. Because we go into FIRE WALK WITH ME knowing that Laura Palmer has been raped, violated, and murdered in incredibly grotesque fashion, the whole film ends up providing her with a voice she doesn’t have in the original series — we come to know Laura as a completely tragic figure, a young woman who personifies light and yet is dragged back into the darkness continually.
In the first episode of THE RETURN, (presumably) Laura Palmer tells us “I am dead, yet I live,” as a sort of thesis for the entirety of TWIN PEAKS. For better or worse, Sheryl Lee will be Laura Palmer and Laura Palmer will be Sheryl Lee until the end of time— the two women are forever tied because Laura Palmer has become bigger than TWIN PEAKS itself. FIRE WALK WITH ME forces the audience to spend time with Laura Palmer while knowing that she’s already died — a glimpse into her “normal” life (or, as normal as life with a murderous drug-trading boyfriend, a rapist father, and predatory older men everywhere can be) only makes her death (and resurrection in THE RETURN) all the more tragic.
Laura Palmer is the American ideal of wholesome girlhood gone totally bad through no fault of her own — ultimately, it’s men and their power in the world that push Laura into a darkness from which she cannot return. Whether its in grinning in her prom photo, dead and blue on a beach, or howling into the blackness of infinite space, Laura Palmer has become one of the ultimate faces of female suffering in the world, and of the ceaseless, corrupting influence of men. Even when Sarah Palmer tries to destroy Laura’s prom photo in the final moments of THE RETURN, she cannot — Laura Palmer’s legacy is bigger than her family, bigger than the town of Twin Peaks, and bigger than the show itself.
Laura Palmer’s the patron saint of teenage girls who have always and will always straddle the line of effervescent girlhood and the darkness of adulthood. Laura’s inherent purity and good simply shine too bright for this awful world, or any other — her screech cuts through the darkness of past, present, and future as an exclamation of not only her own suffering, but of the suffering of women at the hands of men throughout time immemorial. TWIN PEAKS turned Laura Palmer from a dead girl on a beach to an immortal archetype of teenage girlhood, one filled with unknowable secrets; FIRE WALK WITH ME contextualized those secrets within Laura’s personal history and gave her a voice of her own; THE RETURN allows Laura’s voice — personified in a final scream that amplifies the pain of women throughout history —to echo through infinity.
