13. THIS IS A TINY TOWN: The sheriff would prefer you left before “something bad” happens.
My hometown is like Twin Peaks. I mean, we don’t have any industry other than meth, but we do have bars with backrooms where if someone said, “This is Canada,” you wouldn’t be surprised. There’s also a swinger’s club right off the turnpike, owned by funeral home owners and high school teachers. People just disappear. So when folks watched the first season and were shocked that that kind of weirdness could exist in a small town, it told me they hadn’t grown up in a small town. Like John Cougar obviously knows what this kind of strange life is like, because he learned to daydream in that small town and be another boring romantic. He’s probably gonna die in a small town.
When David Lynch took the corpse of television’s most famous dead prom queen, unwrapped her from the plastic and dragged her kicking, screaming and weeping into theaters, mainstream audiences lost their collective minds. The snooty suits at Cannes booed it. American critics called it brain-dead and pathologically unpleasant. Quentin Tarantino famously popped off about how Lynch had vanished so far up his own auteurist rear-end that he wouldn’t touch another one of his films.
But years later, all of this feels like idiots.
Fire Walk with Me isn’t just a prequel. It’s a middle finger to network executives who canceled a cash cow, an insult to fair-weather fans who wanted easy answers, and, above all else, a brutal, empathetic monument to a victim the TV show only ever allowed to be a punchline or a corpse. It’s dark, messy, frustrating and an absolute masterpiece of cinematic agony.
Right away, Lynch signals that the rules have changed. We don’t start in the quirky, timber-scented diner of Twin Peaks. We start down in the dirt of Deer Meadow, Washington, where the local cops are hostile, the diner coffee tastes like sludge, and FBI Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) disappears into thin air while investigating the murder of poor Teresa Banks.
As bad as your town is, as bad as Twin Peaks is, somewhere is always worse.
Lynch seems to be saying, “You want an FBI investigation? Fine. Here’s an investigation that goes absolutely nowhere, anchored by an agent who vanishes like a ghost while a mysterious blue rose and a green ring mock everyone in uniform. And here’s David Bowie stumbling out of a Philadelphia elevator like a time traveler who just survived a bad acid trip in a warehouse.”
For two seasons, Laura Palmer was an idea. She was a prom queen with a diary full of secrets, a saintly martyr wrapped in polyethylene, a catalyst for a town full of oddballs to act weird. But television has a habit of smoothing down the rough edges of trauma until it fits neatly into a 42-minute slot between detergent commercials.
Lynch refused to let her stay a symbol.
By shifting the focus to Laura’s final seven days on earth, the film gives us something infinitely more terrifying than a supernatural demon: it gives us the suffocating, inescapable reality of abuse. Sheryl Lee gives one of the greatest, most emotionally eviscerating performances in the history of movies. Watching Laura juggle her homecoming queen smile by day with cocaine, double-dealing, prostitution, and a soul-crushing nocturnal visitation by Bob is nothing short of harrowing.
Speaking of Bob, is Frank Silva’s denim-clad, mane-shaking monster a literal interdimensional spirit from the Black Lodge, or is he the psychological armor a terrified teenager uses to block out the fact that her own father is the monster crawling into her bed at night? The series leaned heavily into the supernatural fantasy because network television can’t stomach the raw, unadorned horror of incest. But Fire Walk with Me leaves that glorious, bleeding crack wide open. When Laura looks past the demonic visage and sees her father Leland’s face staring back, the film achieves a level of psychological devastation that most directors wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Leland isn’t just possessed; he’s trapped in a cyclical hell of generational trauma, and he’s dragging his daughter down into the pit with him.
It’s almost poetic that a movie about chaos and abandonment was birthed by a deeply chaotic production. Terrified of being typecast as the coffee-drinking G-man, Kyle MacLachlan cut his schedule down to a meager five days. This forced Lynch to completely rewrite the first act and bench Cooper in favor of Chris Isaak. Honestly? It works in the film’s favor. Cooper’s absence makes the world feel even more untethered and dangerous. Then Lara Flynn Boyle decided she didn’t want to return, so Moira Kelly stepped in as Donna Hayward. Kelly plays Donna with a heartbreaking naivety, especially in that agonizing trip to the Canadian roadhouse where Laura has to pull her naive best friend out of the jaws of absolute ruin.
Lynch shot over five hours of movie, much of it featuring the beloved, quirky townspeople everyone tuned in for. He hacked it down to two hours and fourteen minutes, leaving characters like Pete Martell, Audrey Horne and Sheriff Truman on the cutting room floor. Fans cried betrayal. It’s hilarious to read contemporary reviews of this movie from 1992. Critics acted like Lynch had personally broken into their houses and slashed their upholstery.
Roger Ebert called it “shockingly bad.” Janet Maslin labeled it “pathologically unpleasant.” Variety wondered why anyone would make a prequel when we already knew the ending. They missed the point entirely. Moviegoers wanted tidy resolutions to the cliffhangers left by season two. They wanted closure. Instead, Lynch handed them an unyielding, hypnotic nightmare that demands you sit in the dirt with Laura Palmer and feel every ounce of her degradation, her terror and ultimately, her defiance.
As David Foster Wallace brilliantly noted, the film requires an “empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves.” American audiences didn’t want muddy bothness; they wanted good guys and bad guys. Time has been kind to Fire Walk with Me, as it usually is to art that is too fierce for its contemporary moment. The British Film Institute ranked it among the best films of the 1990s and modern horror fans recognize it as the foundational text for modern trauma horror, though Lynch does it with a hell of a lot more style than any modern A24 knockoff.
That final scene in the Red Room—where Laura sits crying tears of pure, unadulterated joy as an angel finally appears above her—hits every time. No matter what happens to her body afterward, the rumors, the talk, Laura gets her dignity back. She didn’t let Bob win. She didn’t take the ring on his terms; she took it on hers to stop him from possessing her. She died a victim of a monstrous world, but her soul walked out of that red-curtained room completely unbowed.
Lynch said of the film, “Fire Walk with Me was a beautiful experience, in a way. When you’re down, when you’ve been kicked down in the street and then kicked a few more times till you’re really bleeding and some teeth are out, then you really only have up to go. It’s so beautiful to be down there.”
