1992, USA
David Lynch’s feature film follow-up to his acclaimed television series is a prequel that examines the events that led up to the murder of the enigmatic and tragic Laura Palmer, beginning with the murder of Teresa Banks (the crime that led Special Agent Dale Cooper to believe the Laura Palmer case was the work of a repeat killer) and then jumping a year ahead to the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life.
Laura is the all-American high school girl – homecoming queen, community volunteer, recreational drug user and lover of a bevy of admirers, including the supernatural predator Bob, who – as she confides in her agoraphobic friend Harold – “has been having her since she was twelve”.
At the film’s halfway point Laura’s already figured out Bob’s identity, and she spends the second half accelerating her own obliteration, falling farther and farther towards the mythical Black Lodge like its many other lost and secret souls.
She is unable to hold it together, crying in class, her vision blurry, desperate for drugs to blot out her grief.
Her chain-smoking mother Sarah Palmer (Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie) self-medicates, leaving her witless and unavailable for emotional support.
While it is revealed in the second season of the show that Leland Palmer, ‘possessed’ by a demonic entity known as ‘Bob’ was his daughter’s murderer, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me allows Laura’s story to be told from her own perspective rather than through the (often conflicting) accounts of others who thought they knew her.
In retelling the tale, the film becomes much more of an honest, horrific examination of incestual sexual abuse and subsequent trauma than the television show allowed.
hexafu 