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When David Lynch's neo-noir movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me premiered 25 years ago at Cannes, the audience, famously, booed. That's not unheard of, but the reaction probably had less to do with the film than its television predecessor: By 1992, Twin Peaks had gone from critical darling to drag. To many, Fire Walk with Me played like a glorified TV movie. Instead of continuing the creepy, off-kilter vibe of Twin Peaks or attempting to answer its many mysteries, detractors said, Lynch jettisoned the show's goofy charm in favor of a tale of domestic horror.
But that tonal shift is essential. In fact, it saves the Twin Peaks universe from itself. Far from the straight Twin Peaks prequel it appears to be, *Fire Walk with Me—*which Lynch has said is key to understanding the new series that premieres Sunday on Showtime—serves as a redemption more than an introduction. It's still about Laura Palmer, the young woman whose murder sparked one of TV's oddest phenomena. Only this time, she's alive.
As the original show established, Palmer is the center of the universe in the small Washington town of Twin Peaks, and in Fire Walk With Me she's falling apart. Palmer is richly complicated: gracious and cruel, as secretive as she is generous. She needs cocaine to get through a school day, and treats the men in her life with shocking ferocity. Laura represents every stereotype of a teenaged girl, overlapping so tightly you can't pick them apart. She feels, in short, real.
There's more, though, as fans of the show *Twin Peaks *know. For years, Laura has been haunted by an evil spirit called Bob, a greasy-haired monster who sneaks into her bedroom at night to rape her and whisper cruelties into her ear. His visits exist somewhere between hallucination and waking nightmare: Bob might actually be her father, Leland. Then again, he might not be. (This is Lynch, after all, whose love for ambiguous duality permeates most of his work.) When Laura confides in a friend that Bob has torn pages from her diary, he insists Bob isn't real. "Bob is real," she hisses.
She's right. But it's not that simple. As the movie plays out, Laura's downward spiral becomes a helix—two parallel strands, coiling around each other. One of those strands is fantastic: a young woman caught in a demon's clutches. In a more earthly reading, however, she's an abuse survivor struggling to keep from replicating the patterns that have defined her. She walls her heart off with secrets. She turns to drugs and sex, trying to burn away any remaining innocence, out of fear that she's beyond redemption, or determination to deny Bob/Leland the innocence he fetishizes so dearly.
In the film's last moments, Laura receives an emerald ring only seen in glimpses and visions up until this point. She puts it on, and in doing so takes up a weapon against her father. In the world of the supernatural, it's a talisman against Bob, who intends to depart from Leland to possess Laura instead. Through the movie's horror lens, though, the ring links Laura to its previous owner: Teresa Banks, a young woman from a nearby town whom Leland was paying for sex, and whom Leland killed before the events of the movie. When Laura puts on the ring, everything clicks into place. The deconstruction of Twin Peaks, the nearly unwatchable intimacy with which it depicts Laura's trauma, all exist to rewrite the story of Laura Palmer to focus in on this moment, when a living woman embraces her own agency and resists her abuser. Fire Walk with Me is the redemption of Laura Palmer.
But she didn't need redeeming. Our understanding of her did. And it still does.
FunkoPop recently released a line of commemorative figures, one more tie-in for the long promotional campaign for this year's *Twin Peaks *revival. Its Laura is a corpse, half frozen, wrapped in plastic. This is the Laura as we know her in pop culture. Her mythology and fate came to us from the original show: Laura as an absence, a wound, less a person than a collective tragedy. And that's never been rebuked.
Laura Palmer was never intended to survive Twin Peaks. When Sheryl Lee was cast for the pilot, she was cast as a dead girl, acting only in flashbacks and posed photographs. But her presence was so magnetic, so raw and expressive, that her character captured Lynch's imagination. "I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside," he says in the book Lynch on Lynch. "I wanted to see her live, move, and talk."
When Lynch returned to Twin Peaks for the movie prequel, he did so to set Laura free. Fire Walk with Me overhauls the meme of Laura Palmer. It gives her agency and purpose; it portrays her as a tragic hero fighting against an evil that she resists even as she's powerless to fully stop it. By retelling the foundational myth of Twin Peaks, Lynch's film subverts it and corrects it. Twin Peaks is no longer the story of a girl who died. It's the tragedy and triumph of a girl who fought her abuser to the death.
When the world of Twin Peaks returns on Sunday, with David Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost again at the helm, Fire Walk with Me will stand as a reminder. Even 25 years later, Twin Peaks isn't about a dead girl. It's about a living one.
