The Twin Peaks hiatus is over! Apologies for the delay, but as this film was rated 18 and the IMDB Parental Guidance section is somewhat graphic I deemed this would be unsuitable for my usual Twin Peaks viewing environment of my laptop on a public train, and it’s taken me several months to find an evening devoid of other more pressing activities in order to actually watch this film. But watch it I now have, and my thoughts I will soon distribute.

As with the first two seasons of Twin Peaks I went in knowing precious little of Fire Walk With Me, other than it was a prequel to the original show. My assumption was that this might follow Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) on the Theresa case, and whilst that was partially correct, this is far more about Laura Palmer’s week leading up to her washing up on the river bank encased in clingfilm, and my what a horrendous week she had. We’ll get there, though. For now, here’s my regular stream of consciousness from watching the film, albeit more edited this time due to the film’s length, otherwise we’d be here all day.

First off it turns out we’re following neither Cooper nor Laura, but some guy, special agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak), who share’s Cooper’s degree of eccentricity, without much of the charm. It’s always a delight to see David Lynch as Gordon Cole, and I feel him yelling too loudly in that reedy voice cannot possibly get old. Alongside Desmond is rookie recruit Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), and it was a welcome surprise to have Sutherland playing against type as a bow tie-sporting newbie with a lot of naivety. Desmond and Stanley receive a coded message in the form of the coral-clad dancing Lil, from whom every motion and aspect of her appearance is a significant clue as to what the mission ahead will hold, but why this couldn’t just have been expressed in a simple, non-choreographed conversation is just part of the Twin Peaks experience.

I loved the diner waitress who doesn’t have time for Stanley’s nicotine and coffee aspersions (“Who’s the toe-head? You wanna hear about our specials? We don’t have any.”). She reminded me a little of the diner waitress from Hell or High Water (“What doncha want?”).

Wait, hold on, David Bowie is in this? As the long lost Philip Jeffries? And Albert (Miguel Ferrer) is here too! I’m assuming pretty much the whole cast will crop up at some point, even if it’s just for a cameo, goodness knows this film is long enough to allow that. We get another vision of the man from the Red Room (Michael J. Anderson), declaring a table is formica, and green is its colour, and there’s the despicable Bob (Frank Silva), and the creepy mini David Lynch kid with the cream corn. He never came back and was never explained even a little bit, so I’m thrilled he’s here! Getting a Longlegs vibe from this scene, and I didn’t much care for that film.

Cooper is on the CCTV, and Jeffries is just walking past him, oblivious? Hmmm. Not sure what’s going on here. It turns out special agent Chester Desmond has disappeared, and Cooper is now looking for him.

OK, thirty minutes into the film we get a “One year later” cut and we’re now actually in Twin Peaks, so that’s probably it for Cooper in this picture, shame. Guess we get to spend a lot of time with Laura Palmer *Sheryl Lee) then. Here she’s alive and well-ish, walking to school with someone that she’s calling Donna but looks a lot more like Moira Kelly than Lara Fynn Boyle. I like Kelly fine (though to be fair I only really know her from the first season of The West Wing and as the voice of Nala), but I already miss LFB. Laura takes a bump of cocaine in the school toilet and meets with a brooding James (James Marshall) whilst Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) kisses the glass in front of her photo.

The following dialogue is presented without comment:
Laura: “I’m long gone, like a turkey in the corn.”
James: “… you’re not a turkey, turkeys are one of the dumbest birds.”
Laura: “Gobble gobble gobble.”

Bobby gets annoyed, Laura smiles and wins him over, it’s hard to tell whether he or James is the biggest dumdum. Laura also pops over to the orchid guy (Lenny Von Dohlen), then gets scared by Bob and a close-up shot of his screaming uvula. To be fair, Laura just told Mr. Orchid that “Bob is real, he’s been having me since I was twelve,” which would make anyone be scared of him. The fact that he’s just the creepiest man ever committed to film doesn’t help things either. When Laura flees the house we see Leland (Ray Wise) following her, and Laura screams “No, it’s not him!”, which says to me that she has known that Leland was Bob for some time. Has Leland been Bob since Laura was twelve? Oh hell. This is way less fun that Twin Peaks normally is, but is that the point? Is this Lynch doing his usual seedier side of suburbia schtick, but here he’s delving into the seedier side of showing suburbia, as in are we, the viewers, sick for enjoying his twisted little melodrama, despite knowing it centres around death and untold horrors? For the fun of Twin Peaks to exist, the juxtaposition of the soap opera mundanity to the sordid misanthropy, there are characters who must suffer those heinous misdeeds, and is it fair for us to enjoy watching them without suffering actually witnessing the horrific acts? I feel like I’m descending a spiral here and there’s still over an hour of film to go.

Leland is being extra creepy, who knew he had even more levels to steep to, and his wife Sarah (Grace Zabriskie) also seems to acknowledge what’s going on, but is powerless to stop it. Laura presumably has a dream in which the cream corn kid and old lady point her towards a door, which she goes through and encounters the red room and Cooper. The red room concierge declares “I am the arm, and I sound like this” before a kind of siren noise? Laura awakens next to Annie (Heather Graham), who I’m shocked is in this given her character didn’t show up in Twin Peaks until well after Laura died, at this point isn’t she a nun somewhere? Annie tells Laura that the good Dale is in the lodge, which is what happened at the end of season 2. Are there time loop shenanigans going on?

Oh good, of all the original series cast members we get to check in with, why does it have to be Leo (Eric DaRe) being abusive to Shelley (Madchen Amick)? Where’s the Log Lady? Bobby tries to get drugs from Leo, but when Leo refuses Bobby tries Jacques (Walter Olkewicz) instead. Some pieces are fitting together now, but not ones that I was overly confused about first time around. Ah, there’s the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson), wonderful. She recognises a difference in Laura and prescribes a warning that I fear may go unheeded.

Laura and Donna are at a bar, where they end up moving on to a night club with some strangers, including Jacques. Donna gets a spiked drink, and lots of uncomfortable-to-watch topless dancing ensues. Aren’t these characters supposed to be children? I’m not a fan of any of this, but I do appreciate that Laura doesn’t want Donna falling down the same path she has. Laura reminisces with Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) about being thrown out of One-Eyed Jacks. Jacques confirms my disgust when he dances with Laura and Donna, “My high school sandwich! Let’s put some meat inside!” Where’s Andy, someone needs to shoot Jacques again. Apparently before Theresa died she asked about Laura and Ronette’s fathers, in which Leland was described as being movie-star attractive, and Ronette’s, by comparison, was Paul McCrane at the end of Robocop.

Hey, it’s Mike (Al Strobel)! He tries to warn Laura in the car that Leland is not her father, but Leland revs the engine so he can’t be heard, then drives into a garage that, sadly, isn’t run by Big Ed. Apparently Leland had an affair with Theresa Banks! This is news.

Laura and Bobby get high in the woods waiting for a drug delivery, and Bobby just SHOOTS THE GUY DEAD. This is also news, what the heck, I feel like this should’ve come up in the show, but it does explain why Bobby is often quite nervous and acting like a moron all the time. Laura laughs that Bobby killed Mike, I assume she means his friend Mike, but that can’t be the case because we see him alive in the actual show. At this point I’m willing to entertain the thought that this is an alternate reality to the TV show world, where things are slightly different. I guess we’ll see. Or we wont. Either way, Laura is doing quite a lot of drugs, and I fear she may have a problem.

Ah, Leland has been drugging his wife, and that’s what the vision of the white horse in the lounge has been. If that was meant to have been obvious during the show I never fully put that together, and I’m going to claim it’s because I’ve never done illegal drugs in any way and am a great big square. Bob creeps (though, to be fair, it’s the only way he can move) through Laura’s window and ascends her sleeping form in the grossest manner possible even without factoring in he’s inhabiting the body of her father. So Laura is seeing Bob as Leland, Jesus what a life she had. In her mind Laura was raped multiple times by her father, an upstanding member of the community, and it seems she didn’t tell anyone, not even her therapist. Though this does seem a little beyond the capabilities of Dr. Jacoby.

An understandably fraught Laura later gives James some very mixed signals (again, understandable, after what she’s been through there’s nothing Laura could do that would be considered odd), after which he shows he’s as awful a person as I’d always suspected by just riding his motorbike off and leaving her alone in the woods at night. What a dick.

And now of course we get the events of the night Laura died, including the cabin in the woods with Jacques, Leo, Ronette and the Dictaphone bird from the Flintstones. This film has, frankly, way too much drugged or drunken nudity, rape and non-consensual bondage. I don’t know whether I’ll watch the rest of Twin Peaks again, but there’s no chance I’ll ever voluntarily sit through this film a second time. Such an unpleasant experience. Given how much of the TV show was spent figuring out the events of the night, I really don’t feel they need to be depicted as graphically as this. I’d seen enough of the show to not expect a heap of answers from this, but for the majority this just repeated things we already knew, but with more underage nudity. No thank you. And never, not ever, should anyone show me a close up shot of someone eating creamed corn ever again. No.

Choose Life 4/10

I’ve been told I need to watch The Missing Pieces. I’ve now done this. I’d like people to stop lying to me. Here are my quick thoughts on the deleted scenes (or at least the ones that are on a playlist on Youtube, if there are any missing that I haven’t seen, well that’s just a big old shame that’ll never be rectified. Sorry not sorry.)

• This fist fight is too long.
• Yay for more David Bowie, but it sure would be nice if he got to do something, you know, relevant.
• I’m annoyed a scene featuring Josie, Pete and old man Nibbler debating the actual size of a two-by-four was cut, this is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted.
• They cut Big Ed and Nadine too!
• Laura and Donna call each other muffins for a bit, that’s fun.
• Seven whole huckleberries in each muffin! Who knew huckleberries were real actual berries?
• Andy, Hawk, Harry, Jacoby, Lucy, Major and Mrs. Briggs were all also cut, what even was the point.