David Lynch's films are chimeras constructed of grossly disparate materials. In a typical Hollywood film, classical decorum is observed with respect to style and substance. Ciizen Kane or The Best Years of our Lives are all of one piece and, therefore, emotionally coherent. Even work made by independent film makers observe this principle of stylistic unity: a movie by Kelly Reichardt or Harmony Korinne may violate some norms of studio film production -- but the pictures themselves are emotionally and stylistically consistent. Lynch's pictures violate these rules in the most flagrant ways possible -- I can't think of any director whose different stylistic and thematic elements are so remote from one another. In 1992' Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, at least, five distinct sensibilities can be readily discerned within the film's lurid, crime-film format. First, there is Eagle Scout Lynch: this material is weirdly banal, somewhat like a deranged episode of the Andy Griffith Show -- Eagle Scout Lynch admires dedicated government bureaucrats, hard-bitten sassy waitresses, firefighters and cops, cups of boiling hot coffee and pie. Second, we encounter creepy uncle Lynch -- this aspect of the director's sensibility is obsessed with underage girls, frilly underpants, girlish diaries and the transgressions of barely post-pubescent young women. Then, there is Lynch de Sade, a pornographer who seems to enjoy the torture of his jailbait victims and takes obvious sadistic pleasure in dramatizing their misery. Lynch de Sade uneasily jostles up against Soap Opera Lynch -- this is the director specializing in complicated teenage love affairs, with kisses rendered against swelling, swooning music. The music reminds us of another avatar of the director, MTV Lynch -- this is the sensibility that pauses the action in his films to spend four or five minutes simply observing Isabelle Rosseliini crooning "Blue Velvet" or Julee Cruise, seemingly in a trance, whispering incantations against a lush buzzing drone of legato chords. Finally, we have Brakhage Lynch, the uncompromising experimental film maker who dissolves images into clouds of color, intercuts anatomical footage of screaming vocal chords into his mise-en-scene, and sends characters catapulting through eerie fields of energy -- Experimental Lynch shoots images through microscopes and telescopes, runs voices backward on his soundtrack, and prosecutes odd essays into complete abstraction. (At least an entire one-hour program on Lynch's majestic Twin Peaks, The Return was almost completely abstract -- generally experimental films are terribly tedious, but, somehow, Lynch's abstractions, because rooted in a narrative, avoid dullness.) I said that there were five distinct versions of David Lynch -- so let's count them: Eagle Scout Lynch, creepy uncle Lynch, Lynch de Sade, Soap Opera Lynch, MTV Lynch and Brakhage Lynch: in fact, I guess, the director is even more versatile than I thought, manifesting in no less than six wild divergent avatars.
In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is a work of great significance to an understanding of Lynch's central themes. In this movie, Lynch's obsessions are displayed in their essential form without dilution or obfuscation. Lynch's persistent subject is the duality of human beings -- everyone has a public persona and a dark private self. (Lynch characteristically expresses this concept by using Doppelgaengers: the best example, perhaps, is the bifurcation of FBI agent Cooper into loathsomely evil and transcendentally good characters in Twin Peak: the Return. (In fact, if I recall that series correctly, Cooper was split into, at least, three selves: good, evil, and the strangely dimwitted insurance salesman under assault by demonic entities in Las Vegas.) Lynch's concept that every person has a solar and lunar self is formally expressed by sharp divisions in his films -- often, a Lynch film will suddenly split apart in the middle, the narrative inexplicably traveling down a completely different (although obscurely related) path. This is the structure in Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and, of course, Fire Walk with Me. The latter film begins with a peculiar apparent indirection -- somewhere in Washington State, a young woman, said to be a "drifter", has been murdered, her body wrapped in plastic, and thrown in a river. Two FBI agents are dispatched to investigate the murder -- exactly why the FBI would be involved is unclear: we don't recognize these agents, although one of them is played by Mel Ferrer (and will be very prominent in The Return 25 years later) -- the other naif is no less than the very young Kiefer Sutherland. The agents encounter unpleasant law enforcement officers who seem to be the evil side of the helpful and kind cops in the original Twin Peaks series. An autopsy of the corpse is conducted and, then, one of the officers inexplicably vanishes. (I am leaving out characteristic Lynch grotesquerie including the apparition of a woman in a skin-tight outfit whose dance can be decoded as indicative of the first half hour's plot in the film.) David Lynch appears as FBI agent Gordon -- he literally, as well as figuratively, directs the action in the movie. After the disappearance of the FBI agent (played I think by Kiefer Sutherland), the film abruptly shifts gears with a title that says "one year later." The swooning Twin Peaks theme by Angelo Baldamenti takes over the soundtrack and we see, to our surprise, Laura Palmer, the dead woman from the earlier TV series, walking down a sidewalk in the idyllic small town of Twin Peaks. Gradually, it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a prequel to the events in the original TV series. For the next ninety minutes, the film documents the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, showing us how she came to be murdered by a nightmare figure that she calls "Bob." Palmer has been raped from the age of 12 by her father and she is horribly damaged. We learn that she is addicted to cocaine and moonlights as a prostitute -- this is notwithstanding the fact that she is a prom queen and loved by two young men, the evil and belligerent Bobby Briggs and the gentle, rebellious James. Lynch's narrative structure is complex with frequent flashbacks. But we gather that Laura's father, Leland Palmer is on the verge of a crack-up. In fact, when he plotted an orgy with his teenage girlfriend, who turns out to Theresa Gates, she intended to set him up with two willing and nubile girls -- when Leland glances at the half-naked girls, he sees that one of them is his own daughter, Laura. This causes Palmer to beat Gates to death -- thus, providing us with a solution to the murder mystery posed in the film's first half-hour. As the film progresses, Laura is more and more abused and degraded until, in the end, Bob, the evil avatar of her father, beats her to death. This is very dire material and, I think, critics were put off by Lynch's graphic depiction of something that the dream-characters call Garmonzio -- that is, "pain and suffering." In an interview on the DVD, Sheryl Lee (the actress who plays Laura Palmer) says that since she has become a mother, she has been very alert to the fact that Lynch shows innumerable clues that Laura is the victim of violent, soul-destroying rape -- "Bob has been doing this to me since I was twelve," she wails to one of her friends. But, as Lee points out, no one helps her. Thus, the film can be read as an indictment of a particularly horrible kind of child abuse. But the problem with this analysis (to which Sheryl Lee is blind) is that Lynch glories in the abuse -- he presents Laura Palmer's sexual degradation pornographically, as, in fact, erotically thrilling. Thus, there is an enormous divergence between the grievous subject matter and Lynch's pornographic approach to this material -- he wants us to be come sexually excited at what happens to Laura Palmer and, indeed, presents many of the sex scenes (Lee is naked for about a third of movie) as glamorous and titillating. Thus, we have a complete fission between the good Lynch, who is telling us something important and tragic about his heroine, and the evil Lynch who designs his shots to estheticize the sexual violence and, even, sadistically delight in it. The closest analog to this film that I know is G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box -- in that film, Pabst shows Louise Brooks in all of her unforgettable glamour and allure, while, simultaneously, chronicling with a great deal of sadistic pleasure, her ultimate sexual abasement including her being butchered, at the end, by no less than Jack-the-Ripper. I make this comparison advisedly: I would argue that Sheryl Lee's performance as the doomed Laura Palmer is one of the most startling, erotic, and terrifying images of a young woman ever filmed -- she is simultaneously victim and destroyer of men, simultaneously pathetic and intensely seductive. The ambiguities in her performance, Lee's eyes half closed in some kind of dreamy ecstasy, are astonishing and the acting is non pareil -- in fact, Lee says in the interview (she's 52 now) that the role all but destroyed her and her willful misunderstanding of the movie as a warning against child abuse and incest seems something that she has constructed to preserve her own sanity.
Of course, the film is often difficult to understand and Lynch complicates the material with all sorts of supernatural events. The supernatural occurrences are intended as commentaries on the action or embody some of the film's more perverse concepts -- these flourishes act to distance the otherwise grievous material and keep the film from becoming too tragic to be entertaining, that is, too tragic to be a work of art. The one-armed man's missing limb has become a dwarf who speaks in very slow and garbled cadences. A white horse appears to Laura Palmer's mother, the beast standing aloof in her bedroom. At the same time, Leland Palmer is bringing a tall glass of milk to his half-crazed long suffering wife, we see Laura inhaling vast amounts of cocaine, writhing in her lingerie as she awaits rape by Bob. At an orgy, an evil whoremaster says: "I am the great went." to which Laura responds: "and I am the muffin." A whole series of objects symbolize the action: there are the coded rings worn by the sexual perverts, eerie paintings that come to life, the rotor of an ominous ceiling fan, a cheap picture of children at a table protected by a hovering angel. Nightmare winds stir the dark forests of the Pacific Northwest and there are rocky peaks descending in cliffs to cold rivers and lakes Like all great film actresses, Sheryl Lee can look like a half-dozen women -- sometimes, she is childish and naive, in other shots, she looks like a vamp from the silent era, sometimes, she is just an ordinarily teenage girl, but, in many images, she seems to be in some kind sexually induced trance verging on coma. At the film's apotheosis in the so-called "red room", a space of pure fantasy, Laura Palmer looks like the most beautiful woman ever shown on film, like Helen of Troy, idealized with her hair and make-up exquisitely done, an angel hovering in the air extracted from a child-like picture in her room, the winged white form praying for her, as her evil father, Leland Palmer floats in the air. Bob, Palmer's monstrous alter-ego, rips a pouch of blood from Leland's belly and naming it Garmonzio, throws the gore onto the lightning zig-zags on the tile floor. The gore somehow vanishes. Agent Cooper stands next to Laura Palmer, the embodiment of reason and compassion, a sort of secular Bodhissatva, also protecting her. This film was universally derided when first released. It's impossible now to see the cause of this rage and derision. In fact, as I have earlier argued, this film is the central work in the canon of Lynch's films. On its own terms, it's close to flawless.
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