LostInTheMovies

This is interesting. Season 1 confused me a bit. About halfway through I felt like it was digging really deep, getting really raw with its depiction of Cohle's and Hart's dark side. And then the last 2 episodes seemed to go in a really different direction. It left me wondering how much of that was the director digging into the subtext with the actors vs. what Pizzolatto intended (especially because when I saw his interviews, I got a very different, generally more straightforward vibe from what the show had given me). Seeing a Fukunaga-less (indeed a single director-less) season 2 will probably clarify all of that somewhat.

Gonna try to follow along w/ the s2 podcast though I'm having trouble accessing HBONow. Listening to your intro podcast plus another podcast on s1 has me really itching to figure out a way to see this. It's been such a long time since I watched a show in real time - I think Lost was the last tbh (and I didn't even follow its final season). Hopefully it works because among others things could be sort of a fun dry run for the new Twin Peaks (watching an episode, digesting my own thoughts, reading others' before the next airs, etc). ^This. I enjoyed the episode but its standalone plotting felt odd in the context of the rest of the series, which was more like a tight miniseries or even movie. It felt the most "TV episode"-ish if that makes sense. Best thing about that episode, besides the justly celebrated long take, was the actor who played Ginger: really great screen presence. I wouldn't have minded seeing more of him but I guess he served his purpose. Kind of odd they don't really explain what happened to Ginger, though (someone on another podcast pointed this out). Cohle says he "left him in a ditch" but then what? Was he arrested? Did he escape? Did he die? The natural assumption is they had the cops pick him up, but wouldn't that incriminate Cohle since he wasn't supposed to be undercover? It doesn't really matter, but it does seem like an odd, accidental loose end.

re: season 1 threads I also had some issues with the characterization, but ultimately that's not something that would be resolved by continuing with the character and location (their story is finished, for better or worse) so for the most part I'm looking forward to a whole new story. It was interesting watching it closely after Twin Peaks because I felt many of the things it did right, Twin Peaks did wrong and many of the things it did wrong, Twin Peaks did right. They are interesting companions in that sense and I'm really psyched to see how this community feels about True Detective so hopefully there's a fair amount of overlap in the forum activity!

Just wanted to let people know that I started a thread a while back on dugpa's "World of Blue" forum for fans to discuss their first reactions to various turning points on the show (you can find it here: http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2600&start=60). There are a lot of really interesting responses and I'm going to sample & compile them into a blog post sometime in the next month. I feel the juxtaposition of different reactions, from different times and places, could be really interesting. Before I do that, I wanted to give more people a chance to respond. It's open to newbies and veterans alike, though given how many first-time viewers are on this forum it will be especially interesting to add their voices to the mix (so far most of the replies on that original thread are from people who watched it years, even decades, ago). Here are the turning points I was curious about (I'll spoil it in case new listeners come to this thread before they've finished the rewatch): If you think you've already answered these elsewhere in the forum, and would like to have those responses included too, let me know and I'll track them down which shouldn't be too difficult. Anyway, thanks to everyone for making these discussions so great. I feel like I learned a lot about the show from participating in the Rewatch community, not just from long-time viewers but from people experiencing it with fresh eyes.

Given how Either way, I look forward to hearing you guys' perspective on the show. I recently watched season one and was overall very impressed despite some frustrations.

I never thought about Laura standing and screaming in the Pink Room as an echo of the Red Room in the finale. I really like that connection and it makes her earlier motion (where she snaps her fingers down) make more sense as a callback to me - whereas before it just seemed kind of arbitrary. It's as if in the Red Room, she (or her doppelganger anyway) is trying to communicate her dark experiences to Cooper but he can only process her as is terrifying, inexplicable banshee. One of Cooper's problems seems to be fully understanding the trauma of the people he is trying to help (Caroline is an earlier example of this) so these parallel actions actually makes sense, in a Lynchian way. This also makes me think differently about the "Let's Rock" scrawl on Desmond's car. What if, rather than the graffiti being a callback to the dream, the dream is actually the callback to the graffiti? Bear with me here, and recall that FWWM is after all a prequel so Cooper is seeing this before he has a Red Room dream. Lynch has made various comments suggesting that the Red Room reflects the subconscious of whoever enters into it so perhaps in Cooper's dream, faced with an eerie, inexplicable situation that echoed his colleague's disappearance a year earlier, "Let's Rock" came to mind? This is obviously similar to how actual dreams work, and it also seems to be how the Lodge creatures like to communicate with humans, using objects and motifs familiar to them (like rings and creamed corn). As for the angels, I think Cooper "is Laura's angel" in the same sense that Laura is Ronette's angel (as discussed in last week's email): in both cases, I'd argue, the angels appear because one character cares about another and wants to help them. I think the angels are similar to the Lodge creatures that way, summoned by the subconscious desires of the characters - but in the angels' case characters can only manifest them for others, not for themselves. That's my read, anyway, on an extremely ambiguous presentation. Glad to hear you'll be covering True Detective. Will you have a spoiler section on your season 1 rewatch for listeners who haven't watched season 2 yet? If so, it will be interesting to finally be in that category myself.

Good to know, and it's been a blast listening to you guys since the fall. Thanks for the great food for thought & discussion.

Any word on the next episode - has it been recorded, or will it be a while yet? Me being me, I'm holding off on some errands in the hope that I can listen to the new podcast as I do them. Or maybe I'm just lazy and looking for an excuse not to do them haha...

Me too. That's one reason I quite like The Missing Pieces scenes with Sarah and Laura. They show their relationship independent of Leland and also provide more evidence that Sarah is prone to mental lapses and nervous breakdowns. It gives extra weight to the "wash your hands" scene where she timidly tries to stand up for Laura and gets shut down (Laura shoots her a look of desperation while Leland is clenching her hand and that's when Sarah chimes in only for Leland to brutally respond with "How do you know what she likes?"). One of the big realizations for me was that the thread connecting all of Leland's murders is his need for control. Maddy's death, which always seemed sort of random to me - just a roundabout way of showing the audience he killed Laura - makes much more sense in this light, and Teresa's death really does become the key to the whole mystery and goes a long way toward justifying the first part of the film as essential to the second. Anyway with all of this in mind - particularly Sarah's role in this dynamic - "What is going on in this house?" (in episode 3 after Leland dances with and breaks Laura's portrait) becomes perhaps the most valuable line of the whole series! Mark Frost has mentioned that he and Lynch weren't sure yet who killed Laura when they wrote the pilot, but that it was decided very early in season 1 (long before ABC forced their hand about the reveal). I like to think it was that scene, and maybe even that line, which did it. But the funny thing is there are really strong hints from the pilot onwards that the "scene of the crime" was the home and not the woods. So there's some truth to Frost's phrasing that the "killer revaled himself to us" rather than "we chose the killer." It's like Laura's story had to be told and forced its way out from the inside, until by the end of the saga it was the only story being told. Interestingly, Leland wiping blood on Laura's portrait wasn't supposed to happen. Ray Wise actually cut his hand on the glass and just rolled with it. It would be pretty wild if that gesture clinched him as the culprit, considering Wise himself was really averse to Leland being the killer when the truth came out.

To rewind the topic for a minute, I recently came across a passage from Greil Marcus that offers his take on some of the questions people were asking - Does Lynch accept Leland's responsiblity? Is this just a supernatural tale of possession? How seriously does the film take its subject as a real-world phenomenon? It's an interesting perspective worth sharing: This is from Marcus' 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice in which he draws together everyone from Martin Luther King to John Winthrop to Phillip Roth to Pere Ubu to "Bill Pullman's Face" (the actual title of a chapter, focused on Lost Highway) to ponder America's betrayal of the covenant with itself. It's portentous to be sure, and some would likely label it pretentious too, but I've found it to be an interesting, thought-provoking read. An entire 55-page chapter, about a fifth of the book, is entitled "American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer" (this at a time when that film and that performance were still barely mentioned by anyone). It wanders into a lot of other topics while addressing that subject, including 50s noir literature, folk singers of the Great Depression, Ronald Reagan's "city on a hill" farewell address, and the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s. I found a copy in my local library, and would definitely encourage others to do the same if they haven't had enough of Fire Walk With Me yet. It's one of the most expressively written explorations of the film (and particularly Lee's performance, which Marcus astutely compares to silent cinema) that I've come across. You can read some of it online, but unfortunately many of the best pages are excised, including a discussion of the Olympia, WA punk scene (with its implicit and explicit connections to Laura's story): https://books.google.com/books?id=iALd6WoGtPEC&pg=PA148&dq=shape+of+things+to+come+sheryl+lee+as+laura+palmer&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ND52VcrDMI73yQSC-IOYBg&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false There's also an interview with Marcus about this book. Cued up to the relevant passage:

Good post. I'm generally onboard with the Keaton hate (or rather, dislike). However, I've rewatched the show several times and there have definitely been occasions where Keaton's episode was a relief for precisely the reasons you say: if we're going to have garbage, let's at least have garbage that calls attention to itself, having fun with visual non sequiturs and a heightened, exaggerated iteration of the first season's Invitation to Love self-consciousness. On other viewings, however, the decadence of this conceit (and at this point the show has become completely decadent) just grates even more than the previous mediocrity. So it depends what mood I'm in, and even in the best mood Keaton's playfulness is weak sauce. But it's worth pointing out that (to my understanding) when this episode originally aired, quite a few commenators - those that were still paying attention anyway - cited this as a comeback, precisely for the reasons you mention. I think for a lot of 1990-91 critics Twin Peaks' great significance was almost ONLY as a wickedly clever quasi-satire/subversion of TV tropes (although the pilot was treated with much more gravity, the buzz around the show quickly went in another direction - even while it still remained positive buzz, for a time). In fact, I'd submit that one of the reasons for the second season backlash was that these same critics that had grinned along with the Log Lady and Jacoby in season one felt like they were suddenly being left out of the joke (not realizing that the show had never JUST been a joke). In that light, Keaton's arty but not-too-serious approach may have felt like a breath of fresh of air for some viewers, a reminder of why they tuned in originally for something that doesn't take itself too seriously. I think this image of Twin Peaks is also another reason almost nobody got Fire Walk With Me when it first came out, but that's another story.

Just wanted to chime in on the actual topic of the thread (since my previous comments were OT) and say that, for the most part, I really like The Missing Pieces. But I'm also glad they aren't in the film. I think they were shot because Lynch didn't really have a grasp on the kind of film he wanted to make yet, and the idea that somehow these belong to the same film Lynch ended up cutting strikes me as odd, to put it mildly. Restoring the deleted scenes into a massive fanedit seems pretty terrible, except just as a kind of experiment for people who've already seen them several times, properly separated. Honestly, on a rewatch my preference is to watch them before the movie because I find they make a nice bridge between the scenes & film, tonally and stylistically. Now that 2016 is coming, though, they may fit better after the film especially given the ending. I do think TMP will be treated as canon given how Lynch presented them, saying something to the effect of "Many things happened in the last few days of Laura's life that we will now be seeing for the first time." One more thought...it's worth noting that The Missing Pieces were cut by Lynch, not Mary Sweeney (his editor and ex-wife, who cut Fire Walk With Me in '92). All of the post-production work, to my understanding, was done in 2013-14. So to a large degree, the presentation of these scenes - the rhythm of the cutting, the sound design, some of the digital effects (like that video zoom in the middle of the convenience store) - actually belongs more to the current phase of his career than his 1992 aesthetic. That's another reason I don't think it makes sense to conceptualize The Missing Pieces & Fire Walk With Me as part of the same meta-movie.

Hey, she never responds so it's still possible. Maybe he's just asking her to make his coffee because he's crazy.

I think it's almost the reverse in a way, although the power dynamic is the same (blondes always seem to be more powerful and/or troubled than brunettes in Lynch's world). Well it starts off similarly in that the blonde woman is protecting/looking out for the brunette. But then Also Lost Highway has a brunette/blonde duality too, although this time they are played by the same actress. In Twin Peaks, of course, the blonde Laura is the mysterious, dangerous dead girl while her brunette cousin is the sweet, innocent living one. Blue Velvet is the only film of his I can think that completely flips this dynamic on its head. The blonde Sandy is the girl next door, naive and idealized, while the brunette Dorothy is troubled, mysterious and threatening to Jeffrey (although she still is a victim figure, like the brunettes in most of the other works).

A couple things about the Engels alt.tv post. First off, what I took from that anecdote was that Engels told the crowd about the longer cut and the missing footage, not that they actually saw it there in the theater. I'm pretty sure Lynch cut a lot of those scenes really early so they were never in a condition to show an audience until 2014. As far as I know, no audience ever saw a different theatrical version of FWWM than the one we've been watching all these years. Also, re: Engels' statements about making another movie with Bowie & not Cooper...frankly I don't buy it. Engels has a tendency to contradict himself and to focus on fairly bizarre minutia about the movie whenever he's interviewed. Most notoriously the planet of creamed corn. Have you heard about that? According to Engels, Lynch's origin story for Mike and Bob was that they came from a planet of creamed corn and were collecting it on earth to find their way back home. This sounds like something he and Lynch possibly joked about one morning over coffee, and not remotely anything Lynch would actually execute. Although who knows, maybe we'll have a surprise visit to Planet Garmonbozia in 2016 - though I doubt it. I suspect the Lynch-Engels partnership was based on the shared sense of humor that we see in Deer Meadow. I don't think Engels ever really took the film very seriously - indeed he's expressed curiosity and surprise about what people are still getting out of Twin Peaks 20 years later. Last fall I interviewed Martha Nochimson, who has written some really excellent studies of David Lynch (based on conversations with him and research into his work). This was her take on Engels, which I think is worth reprinting for the light it sheds on the difference between his and Lynch's views on Twin Peaks. It also ties into what you guys were saying about different types of lore & storytelling: "Bob Engels is a very particular case. I did have a very short and not very nice interview with him. He was very different from David. David is about 'I would tell you if I could, but I can’t tell you what you’re asking.' Him, it was like a striptease, like 'if I wanted to, this shoulder that I’m showing you,' that sort of thing. He gave the impression that it was all very tricky and more like a puzzle. But for David, it’s not a puzzle. With David, it’s that what happens comes from a very deep place. And that’s why he can’t tell you." Engels contributed a lot of great stuff to the series and film but I tend to take his perspective on FWWM with a grain of salt.

Oh cool, much sooner than expected! Looking forward to next week too. I mentioned in the e-mail itself, but please please feel free to select/trim as much of the message as you need to. After sending it, I realized it was even longer than I had thought haha. [EDIT: Didn't realize you'd read it this episode. I feel badly if its length curtailed some of the other feedback, so hopefully that was not the case...] Can't wait to hear what everyone else has to say about the film and show. I mean obviously there has been a lot of discussion in this forum but I'd imagine there will be emails from a lot of lurkers and/or people who've never even visited the forum but listen to the podcast. Any plans for further episodes? I think Hulk is generally right, especially about the stuff onscreen having meaning. But I do also think a lot of Lynch's creative process is genuinely intuitive & subconscious rather than meticulously planned out. So much of it feels right and "falls into place", I think, because he is genuinely more in sync with the subconscious than most people are, either because of meditative practice, natural ability, or some other reason. Thus he's able to create works that resonate like dreams because they are created by a similar process. But of course it's all essentially speculation. Only one person knows: David Lynch, and he ain't telling!

In light of the Leland/Bob questions, I thought it would be interesting to share some exchanges from the book Lynch on Lynch, a collection of interviews between Chris Rodley and David Lynch. What's interesting to me is that the conversation reads like a match (tennis, chess, fencing, wrestling - take your pick; I'm not sure which analogy works best). Repeatedly, Rodley attempts to pin Lynch down, particularly about Bob, but Lynch tends to evade direct answers. Anyone who has read or seen Lynch interviews knows about this trait - there is nothing Lynch seems to hate more than explicitly discussing meaning. Generally, though, I think Rodley is one of the better Lynch interviewers because he knows not to ask blunt, specific questions which Lynch has a habit of easily tossing aside. Instead, he makes assumptive statements which invite some sort of response. Nonetheless, it's difficult for him to get a straight answer out of Lynch and we have to essentially read between the lines. Here are some exchanges about Leland/Bob, annotated by myself in brackets for context and perspective. RODLEY: "There are similarities to Blue Velvet, in that Twin Peaks is a lumber town and things are happening behind closed doors. But the new element here seems to be that the evil is not even of this world. It literally comes from beyond." [This is Rodley's first attempt to broach the subject of Bob's nature.] LYNCH: "Or it's an abstraction with a human form. That's not a new thing, but it's what Bob was." [This opens an interesting door, suggesting that Bob's purpose is less to provide an escape hatch from human behavior than a clarification of it. From this point on, though, Lynch will retreat from addressing this point...] * RODLEY: "Do you think that the introduction of Bob helped to prevent the story from ultimately being just one of incest? Was that a worry?" [This is about as directly and bluntly as Rodley will be able to push this question forward, although it seems to be an underlying question through the rest of the conversation.] LYNCH: "No, it wasn't. What makes you worry about things like that is when you start thinking about what certain people might say about it later. Because you're not really sure what they might say. ..." etc. [Lynch continues for a paragraph addressing only the second of Rodley's questions, "Was that a worry," by answering that he tries not to worry about what other people will think because it interferes with his work. The response is very generalized and non-specific. Lynch never addresses the first question, of whether or not Bob helped to prevent the story from being about incest. Rodley tries again:] RODLEY: "The great thing about the presence of Bob is that Leland can almost remain a nice guy. He's not horrible, he's been possessed." [sincerely or not, Rodley is putting forward the straight-up possession line to see if Lynch bites.] LYNCH: "He's a victim. Everybody that has done bad things is not all bad. It's just that one problem which becomes a little too great. People are always saying, 'He's such a nice neighbour. I can't believe he could do that to those children and to his wife!' It's always the way." [While affirming that Leland is not all bad, Lynch compares him to real-life killers and frames his actions as choices. It's an odd response, essentially ignoring Rodley's own terms.] RODLEY: "By the time we get to the answer - that it was Leland - it doesn't really seem to matter any more. By then it's clear that an evil force - Bob - is operating from within the 'host' character anyway. So pointing the finger at Leland isn't really answer at all." [immediately following the previous statement and Lynch's non-response, Rodley seems to be attempting to pin him down again.] LYNCH: "It's not an answer. That was the whole point. Mark Frost and I had this idea. The way we pitched this thing was as a murder mystery but that murder mystery was to eventually become the background story." ... etc. [Lynch continues for two paragraphs, talking about how he wishes the network hadn't forced him and Frost to reveal the killer. Again, he essentially avoids the point Rodley was making, changing the subject to being about wanting to avoid answers, rather than the specificities of this particular "answer." Very meta.] * RODLEY: "Perhaps the problem was that by concentrating on Laura Palmer's last seven days, the movie reminded people that at the centre of Twin Peaks was a story of incest and filicide." [Again, not a question but a statement/suggestion. This time Lynch will respond with surprising frankness:] LYNCH: "Maybe so. Incest is troubling to a lot of people because they're probably, you know, doing it at home! (laughs) And it's not a pleasant thing, you know. Laura's one of many people. It's her take on that. That's what it was all about - the loneliness, shame, guilt, confusion and devastation of the victim of incest. It also dealt with the torment of the father - the war in him." [it's interesting to me that Lynch voluntarily brings up Leland this time, when Rodley didn't even ask about him. Again, the language is ambiguous. "The torment *of* the father" - is Leland simply a victim of Bob? "The war *in* him" - or is he battling different sides of himself? Incidentally, the whole "victim of incest" line is pretty much the most specific statement I've ever heard Lynch offer on the broader social implications of his work, a subject he usually avoids like the plague. It's perhaps worth pointing out that comparing Lynch's statements to FWWM with other directors' statements about their own work, he is maddeningly cryptic and evasive, and perhaps even irresponsible. But comparing Lynch's statements on FWWM with his statements on HIS other films, he is quite forthcoming and willing to place it in a larger context in a way he usually is not willing to do. It's a matter of perspective, I suppose. Lynch in general is not someone who likes to discuss meaning. And yet he may be more willing to discuss meaning in relation to this film than any other.]

I think there are a whole slew of reasons why it's untenable for "good Leland" and "bad Bob" to cleanly separated, but I'll save those for another post. I do agree that Lynch "plays with fire" (pardon the expression) by mixing a tale of demonic possession with a story of real-world abuse, but I think ultimately the mixture works to condemn Leland - although I also sometimes wish Lynch had made it clearer. To some specific points... Leland appears on one side of Laura, saying that line, and immediately afterwards Bob appears on the other side, to say another line. I'm not sure Lynch could make it any clearer that it's Leland himself saying the first line, unless he included them both in the same shot. Also, what reason would Bob have for delivering that line, especially as it's delivered ("you *knew* it was me" not "you *thought* it was me")? Well, it's supported by his depiction of Laura which is certainly nuanced and deep. So the question isn't if he has a nuanced, deep understanding of abuse in general so much as if he has a nuanced, deep understanding of the abuser's responsibility. Is his depiction of the abuser's side of the experience as true as his depiction of the victim's?

Ah, I see. Well I think there is an element of this here - critics having changed their opinion of Lynch are more forgiving of FWWM now. But I honestly don't think it has much to do with the show's rebound in reputation and more to do with a - Lynch himself and b- the theme of the film. But there may be a difference here too between critical re-evaluation of the film and that of the average viewer. Most of the published re-evaluations I've read make a point to separate the film from the show, to say something to the effect of: "Part of the problem in '92 was that viewers judged this as a part of Twin Peaks. Fans of the show wanted something like the series, and it wasn't. Haters of the show condemned the film for being connected. It was in a lose-lose situation. But hey, look this is a different beast altogether." In fact, I would say up until last summer (when The Entire Mystery blu-ray release encouraged people to look at Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me as part of the same entity) this was virtually the ONLY form of FWWM re-evaluation. To the extent the series was considered in the analysis, it was considered for the way the film rejected or subverted it. What WAS the film praised for, then? Well, I think the first turning point in re-evaluation may have been Mulholland Drive which essentially restored Lynch's reputation (Lost Highway had not been as controversial as FWWM but it was still regarded as a bridge too far, and Straight Story had been widely praised - paving the way for MD - but it was praised as Lynch scaling back his "pretensions" and delivering something sincere and straightforward). Roger Ebert even made this explicit in his review, stating that MD made him reconsider all the earlier Lynch films he hadn't liked (and Ebert was one of Lynch's harshest critics, disliking even The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, which I believe he initially gave zero stars). You are quite correct that in '92 the film was judged in light of the series. And the lesson most critics, columnists, reporters, etc. had learned from Twin Peaks was, "David Lynch is trying to pull one over on us. He isn't a sincere artist at all, he just does what he randomly feels like doing and tricks is into thinking it's meaningful." Because these same people connected emotionally and intellectually to Mulholland Drive they were inclined to go back to Fire Walk With Me and say well, maybe there was something there after all. The other factor is that the film deals with abuse, something almost nobody commented on in the media in 1992, when it was taken purely as a TV spin-off/horror film/exercise in random surrealism. In fact the very earliest champions of FWWM that I can find were scholars penning extensive essays that explored the feminist aspects of the film (and, to a lesser extent the series), authors like Diane Stevenson and Martha Nochimson. This also involved separating the film from the series to a large extent, ignoring the supernatural lore in favor of a more psychological reading - and this too was made even more tenable by Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, in which the dreamlike surrealism seemed to fall more neatly within a psychological explanation (although the earliest social/psychological re-evaluations long preceded those films). To a certain extent, I think both of these viewpoints have been present in the wider re-evaluation of the film by viewers who aren't critics; however, I think appreciation of the series in general has also been more of a factor here. Especially since last summer, the film is increasingly being appreciated not just as its own thing, but as a part of the larger Twin Peaks phenomenon. In that sense you may be right that Twin Peaks' renewed reputation plays a role in people overlooking the things about FWWM that bothered the original audience. But I would say the other factors - Lynch's non-TP resurgence and the subject of sexual abuse - also play a big part, maybe equal to the general TP re-evaluation. I don't know if this really addresses what you were saying, but hopefully it does! EDIT: Btw, I've posted this in the forum before but I think it may be helpful here. It's a round-up I did last year of quotes from 100+ pieces of commentary on TP & FWWM, organized chronologically: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2014/06/gone-fishin-collection-of-commentary-on.html. Obviously it's selective but it's still comprehensive enough to offer an impression, via perusal of the various quotes, of how the film's reputation evolved and where that evolution sprang from. The post-FWWM stuff begins about halfway down the page.

Oh weird. I wonder if it would make sense to conclude that he is now beginning to merge with the other Cooper? How are his eyes when he is chasing through the strobe-lit Red Room and comes right up into the camera? It's interesting that in utiltyfrog's screencap, and also in the final image as Coop looks sideways and laughs, his eyes are still lit (or underlit) kind of cloudy and dark, almost like a shark's eyes. I don't think it's a matter of contact lenses in THAT case (as it obviously is for the milky blue eyes), but maybe I'm wrong. Man, Lynch does so much crazy hidden stuff...

(...and here's the rest of the multiquotes) I agree. And while I can think of other films that have been sympathetic, I can't think of very many others that have been so centralized around someone who experienced sexual abuse: although I'm given to understand Mysterious Skin (which I haven't seen) also takes this route, and that in fact the filmmaker Gregg Araki counts FWWM as one of his favorite films. Martha Nochimson addresses this in her book The Passion of David Lynch (sorry to keep dropping this reference so frequently, but I really love her analysis), pointing out that the usual trope is for an intervening doctor-figure, usually older and male, to be our gateway into her experience and also to mitigate it in clinical/cathartic fashion. To a certain extent, Cooper serves this role on the show. The film's great power is that it plunges us headfirst into Laura's trauma without ANY mitigating/soothing framework to understand it. I think there is definitely a sense of a more pervasive culture but I'd also point out that Lynch is drawing an even more sweeping conclusion. The whole "homecoming queen/pure madonna" aspect of Laura's identity is also linked to her psychological distress and it's another way of putting her inside a box and stripping her of her identity. Just to be clear: I am not trying to make some argument that crowning someone a prom queen is equivalent to abusing your daughter! But I think it's important to realize that, at every turn, Laura is set up as this object for the community to revere and/or denigrate and this loss of identity are two sides of the same coin. I think the film is also in a way a critique of the show, which both points out this divergence and exploits it to the max (the publicity for Twin Peaks made good use of the "dead girl" allure, and one of the series' central hooks was this widespread fascination with the madonna/whore aspects of Laura's identity). That's one thing I love about it: this isn't merely Lynch calling others to task - the townspeople, the press and public reaction to the show; to a certain extent he is calling himself to task as well. I see Argobot just pointed this out too - the "dead girl" hook can be as cheap as it is alluring. I am hard-pressed to think of many other "dead girl" stories which go to such great lengths to turn "the object into subject" (which David Foster Wallace pointed out in regards to FWWM, calling it "the most morally ambitious thing any Lynch film ever attempted"). Only Laura (1944 noir) and Vertigo come to mind. But in both cases the detective protagonist is retained even as we get to glimpse the actual personality behind the iconic image of the victim (although in Vertigo our identification tends to shift much more toward her than him in the final part of the movie). In a sense, Blue Velvet - Twin Peaks pilot - Wild at Heart - season 2 premiere - Maddy's murder - FWWM represents a trajectory in Lynch's work, beginning with an outside fascination with tormented/conflicted female suffering, sympathetic but exterior, and ending with a complete and total identification with the victim herself (Wild at Heart, with Lula's flashbacks, and the s2 premiere stand in the middle, beginning to allow us inside of the victim's head rather than peering at them through the closet door). Lynch's gateway into making FWWM was that he was in love with the character of Laura, but in the process of the movie it seems like he want beyond even that empathy, essentially becoming her - or unveiling a part of himself that felt just like her - before the film was finished, passing this opportunity on to the viewer. The effect of this, to me at least, is overwhelming, and I wouldn't hesitate to identify Laura as my favorite film character for that reason: I can't think of another person whose inner life feels so fundamentally synced to the viewers' experience. It's a good question. It sounds like, essentially, you are asking if the screenplay is as good as the direction, or even if it's in the same class. I would say no, although it's tricky because in many ways the screenplay provides the perfect blueprint for Lynch to knock it out of the park. The film is uneven and a bit messy in its structure. Later, Lynch would master this dual storytelling with Mulholland Drive and (arguably) Lost Highway but here it does seem to contain traces of the original practical intention: to include a Cooper part of the story alongside Laura's. I really like these sequences, and I feel they add to the film in an interesting way (and I'm actually glad that MacLachlan backed out, as I think Chet's presence makes for a stronger disorienting effect). But I agree that they suggest a fundamental imbalance and confusion at the source of the movie. The fact is that when Lynch & Engels wrote Fire Walk With Me they did not have a tight conception of the film they wanted to make. Instead the long shooting draft seems less like a focused feature film and more like a sprawling audiovisual project. Lynch wanted to explore Laura's last days, and this obviously turned out to be the most important thread, but he also wanted to play around with the FBI, the spirit world, and the other townspeople. Laura's last week was more like a laundry line on which he could hang all of these different elements, including but not limited to Laura herself. Had Frost participated, he probably would have reigned Lynch in, and focused his vision, but - as evidenced by the second season - restraint was not Engels' forte and besides, his relationship with Lynch was somewhat different and more subservient (which may be partly why Lynch wanted to work with him on this project). I would definitely encourage you to read the screenplay at some point: it often really reads like a shaggy dog/kitchen sink tale. But it's a double-edged sword. I don't think Lynch would have been able to hit the heights he did if he hadn't thrown off all restraints in his conception. The way he seems to operate is by keeping his antenna up, following his instincts, and then organizing the raw material after the fact rather than beforehand (Fire Walk With Me is not the only Lynch film to have copious deleted material). This leads to some dead ends and non sequiturs, but it also makes possible flights of brilliance and power that he would not be able to reach otherwise. I've come to accept that there isn't a more ideal version of FWWM possible; its strengths are too deeply intertwined with its flaws and since those strengths are - to me - stronger than those in just about any other film I know, I'm willing to accept the flaws. (Plus, I kind of like a lot of those flaws!) Besides, even if the first 45 minutes of the movie, especially the Philadelphia sequence, is questionable in its detour from the film's mainline, Lynch DID do a lot of pruning. I may have mentioned this in an earlier thread, but Lynch feeds a lot off his collaborators. Engels brought out his wacky/abrasive/arch side, but in production and post-production I think Sheryl Lee's committed performance and editor Mary Sweeney's wise judgement helped to convert FWWM into a sleeker, tighter, more ruthless beast. Actually, I think Sweeney's role in Lynch's work is greatly underrated. The first piece of Lynch she ever edited was actually the episode of Twin Peaks in which Maddy is murdered which is arguably more of a turning point than anything else in his career. She wrote the only movie he directed without co-writing (The Straight Story), produced many of his works, and was his romantic partner for 15 years, longer than any other woman he was with. Anyway, I'm getting off-topic but just wanted to say I definitely see where you are coming from but I think it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that in this movie - indeed, all movies - ultimately the direction is more important than the screenplay (not to say the screenplay isn't important at all but a great movie needs great direction more than it needs great writing, imo, given the nature of the medium). I'm not saying I necessarily go with this, but a lot of people have interpreted this scene as Lynch & Engels making fun of overzealous Twin Peaks analysis, especially the kind that is very literal and on-the-nose about the 1:1 relationship between image and coded meaning. Many fans have actually taken personal offense at this sequence for this reason, and felt that Lynch was mocking his audience. I definitely think there's an element of that there, albeit more playful than nasty. But I also think - perversely - that Lynch himself is indicating there will be a kind of code to the movie. Which may be having his cake and eating it too (or rather having it and throwing it in someone else's face, I guess). Here you are essentially demarcating the difference between Lynch and Lynch/Frost, I think. The upshot is that I'm not sure Lynch/Frost could/would have been able to create the stuff you did like in the movie (maybe I'm wrong about that). Frost, while he may have actually invented her character, doesn't seem to have had the same grasp on Laura that Lynch did and at this point their partnership seems to have been very broken. For me, I like the way this pans out, in that Lynch/Frost together gives us the strong, balanced opening to the series, Frost's hand over Lynch's later establishes a larger framework and stakes to this universe (Cooper's self-doubt, the Lodge mythology, even the Leland/Bob divide since Frost wanted to reveal the killer more than Lynch), and then finally Lynch's hand over Frost's allows us to delve into the heart of darkness/insanity beneath this structure. That crazy seesawing effect between the creators might actually maximize every possible triumph of Twin Peaks, pilot through film, even is it also facilitates a lot of messiness. Well, yes and no. On this board the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive so far, but it's worth pointing out that the movie has been described as one of the most reviled films of the nineties, ranked alongside Showgirls(!). Metacritic, going mostly off contemporaneous reviews, ranks it 28/100. And most of the negativity was angry rather than lukewarm: Fire Walk With Me was attacked in terms I've hardly ever seen any other film attacked. And most of the vitriol was focused emphatically on Lynch himself. If you're a Neon Genesis Evangelion fan, picture the attack of the Mass Produced Evas on Unit-02 in End of Evangelion. That's pretty much what the critical response to Lynch was at this time - no wonder he couldn't get another movie made for 5 years! All of which is to say you are probably seeing a bit of an overcorrection for a historical oversight. Many people come to the movie having heard negative things about it and are pleasantly surprised that it works as well as it does. Personally, I think the film is a masterpiece but I think all of the points you raise are also fair and valid. I do not really think it's a great screenplay, even if we toss out the stuff in the shooting draft that Lynch himself already tossed out. A lot of the stuff that plays onscreen, because of performance/direction/cinematography/editing, falls flat on the page. Mulholland Drive, despite its equally precarious/haphazard production and conception, ultimately plays as a tighter, more focused film than FWWM (although many of the same objections could be raised about it, I suppose). But I tend to privilege power over perfection so FWWM is my favorite Lynch film. I would actually disagree with the people saying that. As much as I love watching them on their own, I think including the Missing Pieces would have made Fire Walk With Me a much less effective film. The deleted scenes don't really address any of your concerns and they just add a lot of material that would make the movie seem even more disorganized and scattered then you already felt it was. I think Lynch was very wise to extract almost all of them, though one or two might have added an interesting texture. I was really excited to read this, but pulled up the scene in ep. 12 when Hawk delivers this dialogue and couldn't find any reference to Chalfonts. Is it in an earlier episode? I would so love for this to be true - if it is, you just blew my mind! Mentioned this above in the response to AppleCider but just wanted to +1 it again. True Detective is a great contrast here (for several other reasons too, actually). I don't begrudge a story for deciding to focus where it focuses, but when most stories go that route it does make something like Fire Walk With Me feel even more rewarding.

Love how much this thread has taken off since Chris & Jake posted this episode. Hope it keeps going strong for a while, as there's so much about this movie to discuss. Rather than just drop an insane amount of posts in a row, I'm going to try to respond to various posts (some addressed to me, some not) in two replies (I was prohibited from posting this as one), with the multiquote button. Hopefully this does not make further responses to complicated! In order, then... There are a lot of different takes on the Red Room/Lodges out there. Some people feel that the Red Room straight up equals the Black Lodge, and that whenever we see that space (including in Cooper's initial dream) we are seeing the Black Lodge. This is problematic because, among other reasons, we see Laura get her angel there in the final scene which probably would not happen in the Black Lodge. Others claim that we never see EITHER Lodge, and that the Red Room is the waiting room (since the Little Man says "this is the waiting room" at the beginning of that long sequence in the finale). It's where it is determined where souls would go. My take is a little different. Taking cues from Hawk's speech in ep. 18, as well as Lynch's own sensibility, I think the Red Room can be the White OR Black Lodge depending on the mindset of the person entering it. Since we're talking about a psychic rather than a physical space anyway that makes sense to me and I think when the Little Man says "this is the waiting room" he means that it is about to be determined which Lodge Coop will experience and/or both Lodges are themselves waiting rooms for some even more cosmic space that has no visual analogue. Hopefully that makes sense. Just to be clear, I do think Bob inhabits the Red Room too. But I think the Little Man either is more powerful than Bob or is equally balanced, with the scales tipped in his favor at the end of FWWM probably because Laura took the ring. I also think it makes sense to consider the Little Man, who is the "arm" of Mike, as representative of Mike proper but that's sort of a complicated argument. Here's a video someone made that takes a stab at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJgBQdCcvbI. Don't agree with all of it, but given the way Little Man/Phillip and Bob/Leland "face off" at the end of the film I think that's the parallel that makes the most sense. It begs the question of why Mike/Phillip WANTED to chop of his arm, and if the Little Man is therefore evil, but good God that opens a whole other can of worms which I'll hold off for now haha. EDIT: It's also worth pointing out, on a practical level, that the Black vs. White Lodge idea was Frost's and Lynch seems to have done everything he could to obscure it without outright contradicting it. Notably, there is only one reference to "the Lodge" in Fire Walk With Me (in Annie's speech) and even then there is no Black/White distinction made. In interviews, Lynch prefers to use the term "Red Room" to the "Lodge," if I'm not mistaken. Really great points here, and stuff I've been pondering a lot. I held off on my overarching interpretation of Laura taking the ring and dying in the train car because I want to save it for the on-air email but briefly I'll just say that I don't think Laura accepting herself triggers her death except indirectly. That is to say in the end I think Laura's choice is not between life and death, but between freedom or possession (in EVERY sense of the word). Freedom means acknowledgement of her abuse (and Leland as her abuser), acceptance that there is more to life that trap Bob has put her in, and perhaps most importantly a willingness to feel and perhaps address the suffering of others rather than closing herself off in her own pain and/or hurting other people as an expression of that. It's my own interpretation, and requires something of a leap of faith (though it's perfectly consistent with what we see in the movie), but I think that last point is actually fulfilled with Laura, Ronette, and the angel in the train car in a way that explicitly parallels Laura's intervention to save Donna in the Pink Room. I think the ring, rather than symbolize death, symbolizes this freedom - or rather, in Lynch's terms, an attachment to a greater force and unity in the universe of Twin Peaks (linked to Mike, among other characters/elements). Bob then chooses to react to this newfound power of Laura, her spiritual resistance to him, the only way he can - with physical destruction, killing her body since he can't have her soul. So while her decisions lead to physical death, that is a byproduct of the decision, and due entirely to Bob's (admittedly predictable) reaction rather than the direct result of it. That's maybe a very fine distinction, but I find it valuable. I'll try to delve a little deeper in the eventual email! EDIT: Also, I suspect that the issue is less Laura's descent into drugs/sex than the self-loathing of which this is just a symptom. Lynch definitely has a conservative streak but in his films he never seems particularly judgmental of the characters' decisions from a moralistic, social-rules position - more like he is concerned for their well-being based on the decisions they make. For that reason, I also find it hard to believe that Ronette's self-hating prayer is what brings her angel into play - something I address below in the response to "Twin Peaks Podcast" so I won't reiterate it here. And when I say Laura accepts her dark side, just to clarify, I don't mean to suggest she embraces and/or goes over to it, but that she accepts that her shadow is a part of her in a way Leland does not. So I mean "accepts her dark side" in a positive sense if that helps! No, I agree and feel similarly. I would say the first 5 or 6 times I saw it, the film seemed to be saying that Laura's only possible escape from abuse is death. I accepted that as Lynch's vision but I obviously don't agree with its real-world applications and thought it kind of odd that his own view was so pessimistic when, for all the darkness of his movies, his general philosophy on life seems to be positive and most of his films actually have silver linings/vaguely happy endings (hell, even FWWM ends with Laura getting her angel). It's also worth pointing out that Lynch was stuck with this ending. When Twin Peaks and Laura were invented, she was the dead MacGuffin who triggered everything we would see on the show. Only much later in the process was he filled with the desire to animate her as a human being, to give her some agency and opportunity but it was too late to save her physically. He could only retcon so much. That said, when I began to read some of the pieces I shared above and mull them over in my mind a new viewpoint slowly emerged. If the ring was not so clearly associated with a death wish, what was it associated with? Why does the train car scene, ostensibly about Laura's murder and torture, relegate her physical torment to just a few seconds of screentime in favor of some sort of metaphysical struggle? If Lynch sought to make Laura a more active protagonist in the movie how did he do so, and did he fail? Eventually I came to the conclusions described above. The film is wildly open to interpretation and I honestly suspect Lynch himself doesn't quite know what he was doing with all the symbols but he does operate on instinct. And I strongly suspect his instincts were telling him: find a way to give Laura choice, find a way to turn her death into the least important part of her climax, find a way to earn her that angel in the end instead of just having it be a gift from you & the universe. I agree with all of this. I do think the film makes many compelling links between the ring and Mike/the Little Man but I also think it is rooted in Teresa's mundane story for a reason. It is her connection to the ring which is arguably most important to the actual narrative of the film - Laura's self-discovery - though Lynch, who loves doubling, also makes it a throughline to the mythological substream. Matt, really glad you seem to have jotted down notes or bullet points while listening - you addressed a lot of the things I was hoping to, but forgot! I'm pretty much on the same page with everything here. However, I have a few observations about these parts here. - The angel who appears to rescue Ronette is a different angel from the one that appears in the Red Room for Laura (different actress, different hair length). The one in the Red Room has short, curly hair like the one in Laura's picture but the one in the train car has long straight blonde hair like Laura herself. It's worth noting that throughout the film, it is suggested that the other elements of the spirit world are subconsciously summoned by the actions/feelings of the human characters (as noted in a previous post, Mike appears after Leland has the flashback of Laura/Ronette, the Tremonds visit Laura when she is entrapped by her diary, and Bob repeatedly emerges when Leland himself is agitated about something). In that sense, the angel who appears to Ronette in the train car would be there not so much because of Ronette's prayer (which is very self-loathing, a quality that Lynch doesn't usually reward) but because of Laura's compassion for her. And the angel who appears in the Red Room might have been summoned by Cooper's compassion for Laura. There is a "doubling" effect here, in which the angels are both representatives from a larger order (and/or White Lodge) and stand-ins for the human characters themselves. Because Laura is in a sense Ronette's guardian angel in the train car, and Cooper is in a sense Laura's guardian angel in the Red Room. - I agree that Mike is probably the one who throws the ring into the car. It's worth noting though that Lynch doesn't explicitly show this in the movie, though it can be heavily inferred. The door opens, Ronette (hit by Leland) falls out and as the camera moves down, we see Mike's legs move across the frame suggesting that he is moving toward the opening. Then we see a close-up of the ring rolling into the train car. I believe Al Strobel said something like "If the ring was there, I wasn't carrying it" in a Wrapped in Plastic interview. This suggests that when they were shooting the scene there was no plan for Phillip/Mike to toss the ring to Laura (it isn't in the script). So it must have been added either when they shot the train car interiors in L.A. or even later, with pick-up shots in post-production. Some people still interpret the ring as coming from somewhere else but I think Lynch manipulates the editing to support your conclusion. - Technically, you may be correct that when someone puts the ring on Bob wants to kill them (although as noted above, I don't think that's the ring's primary significance). However, I'm curious what you make of the fact that Teresa is not wearing the ring when she is killed in the Chalfonts' trailer. The shot is really quick and shaky but if you pause the image you can see that, for the few seconds we see her, Teresa does not have the ring on her finger. Morever, she is tightly grasping her left arm in front of her, suggesting both that it is numb - as her co-worker mentioned in the Desmond investigation - and that Lynch wanted to provide visual evidence, however fleeting, that Teresa was not wearing the ring when she died. This suggests that simply wearing/not wearing the ring does NOT have a Pavlov's dog effect on Bob which may not have been what you meant, but is something I've seen a lot of viewers assume; I think I assumed it at one point too. (h/t to StealThisCorn for pointing out the absence of the ring when Teresa dies. For the reason mentioned above, I don't think this will be the purpose of the ring here because I don't think its primary significance is to indicate death/victimhood (quite the opposite of victimhood, in fact). Which of course begs the question, what is the purpose of Annie having, and the nurse stealing, the ring? The obvious answer is that when Lynch scripted and shot the scene, early in production, he had a different interpretation of the ring or hadn't come to any interpretation of it yet. But by including it in The Missing Pieces 22 years later, he's now suggested that somehow this is consistent with stuff he added later (like Laura getting the ring in the train car) so I guess it's up to us to make sense of it until, perhaps, the 2016 series addresses this thread. My take? Both times Annie passes the ring to another person she is also passing the message about the good Dale being in the Lodge. Since the ring's appearance usually has something to do with Bob's identity (Lynch emphasizes it on Teresa's finger when she links Leland to Laura, Phillip waves it at Laura when yelling about her father, Desmond can't quite grasp it when he's trying to figure out who killed Teresa), perhaps its significance her is that Annie is passing on knowledge of Bob's whereabouts. The nurse obviously wouldn't understand this at the time but given the strange circumstances she will probably always remember what her comatose patient said, just as in literal/physical terms she takes the ring from Annie's finger because it is so striking to her. I think maybe in 2016 the nurse (like Laura's diary notes that Lynch says she wrote) could provide clues that Agent Cooper is not what he seems. I can't remember if I first heard this on your podcast or elsewhere but this is such a great detail. Lynch plant tiny clues like that throughout his work - it's never just as random as it seems on the surface. I love the Diary too, but Chris & Jake mentioned at one point that they, or at least the one of them who had read it, didn't like it. Maybe after this latest journey through the show and film they'd have a different take? Either way, positive or negative, I'd be interested in hearing their reactions and discussing the book on the forum for sure. I would definitely recommend it to first-timers and longtime fans alike. (further multiquotes follow in the next post)

Great episode, guys. Glad to hear there are at least a couple more episodes on the way, plus I guess a whole new podcast when the (18!) episodes of Twin Peaks come around. I wish I'd taken notes on your discussion as there were a bunch of things I thought would be interesting to address/respond to. I loved your description of Twin Peaks seeming more suburban in this film than on the show which seems apt both for the film's slasher-like aspects and more everyday, relatable vibe (vs. the ethereal, idealized world of the show). But most of all, I wanted to talk about some of the more confusing, even bewildering stuff in the movie, as I've given it a lot of thought over the past year. Ok, long post ahead... I'll definitely write in for next week's episode, probably focused on the final scene. For now just wanted to say that I think the film works both as an surreal, inexplicable nightmare trip (which I suspect I'd still appreciate aside from Twin Peaks) AND a densely-layered capstone to the series' themes and mythology. The first 3-4 times I saw the movie I was definitely focused on the raw experience of Laura's final week and didn't really consider it in terms of a character arc or thematic exploration. In fact, at least the first time I saw it, I felt the weird tangents and fragments - the ring, the angels, the Tremonds, the one-armed man, the Little Man, the Red Room, the garmonbozia stuff - detracted rather than added to Laura's psychodrama. Even as I got more used to them, growing to appreciate their presence, I didn't feel much urge to "make sense" of them. However, as I continued to watch, read about & think about the film a certain intuitive logic emerged. The seemingly erratic way the Lodge creatures act throughout the film betrays a larger order at work. I am inclined to agree that Lynch, working from his subconscious, probably cannot (and certainly would not want to) articulate this significance of his images or the structure that holds them. But I think that significance/structure still exists and it's less a matter of coincidence than the fact that Lynch is digging deep, through meditation or whatever, into the collective unconscious and a lot of stuff falls into place better than it would if he was rationalistically planning it all out. To my surprise, the more I dig into this flawed masterpiece, the less flawed it seemed to me. Basically, the film is not just a document of Laura's decline and destruction, but an actual - positive! - journey for her character. Most obviously, she discovers that her father is Bob, a grim but necessary truth that he himself seems to have trouble facing. But more importantly, Laura grows in crucial ways throughout the movie, rendering her a dynamic rather than passive character (despite the fact that she began her narrative "life" as a corpse). She faces at least three huge challenges as she navigates her disintegrating life, but unlike even Cooper (as we see in the finale) she is able to overcome all of them. First, she actually confronts and rejects her father, rather than denying the awful reality as he has always done (the scene in the car after Mike's "attack" is particularly chilling, note the way he asks her "Where were you? I didn't see you there?" as if to say "Hey, what are you saying? You KNOW we aren't supposed to TALK about this stuff."). Second, she discovers a generosity toward her friends (she saves not only Donna, but James - by abandoning him at the stoplight she is preventing Leland from killing him too, something she explicitly references in the woods scene). Third, she discovers the world beyond Twin Peaks, realizing that even though its small-town pleasantries are a facade concealing the darkness of Bob, there's something even MORE fundamental than that ugliness. The creepy but helpful figures of the Little Man, Phillip Gerard, and the Tremonds all contribute to this understanding, but it's most clearly defined by the overwhelmingly positive images of the angels in the end. All three of these threads - the need for rejection (of Leland/Bob), compassion (toward other potential victims and ultimately her own hated self), and transcendence (so that her rejection is positive rather than negative) - come together in that train car scene. I saw the film many times before this scene worked for me. For a long time it seemed like a grueling necessity: obviously in a movie about Laura's final days we need to see her die, but I found myself wondering what it added to the story, really? We'd already seen her death in flashback (season 2 premiere), re-enactment (Maddy's murder), and our own imaginations. And if Fire Walk With Me redeems Laura's tragedy by finally giving her a voice, doesn't it take something away from that realization to send her to the slaughterhouse in the film's climax? Well, I no longer feel that way - in fact I think the train car seen is the (pardon the expression) linchpin to not just the film, but the whole series; the reverse image of Cooper's fall in the finale. But I'll address that more directly in the email I'll send for your feedback episode. For now, just wanted to say I loved your discussion of Leland-Laura in the aftermath of Mike's attack in traffic. You're absolutely right: Laura is less shaken by the one-armed man's verbal assault than her father's distress, and he seems less tormented by this random stranger than the flickering memories of Teresa...and her link to Laura. I think this is a crucially important point and something that gets lost sometimes when people get heavily into the lore aspects without tying them back in to the psychology of the human characters. Every time these spirits appear, it can be directly linked to a crisis in these characters' lives. Think about it: the Tremonds (or should I say Chalfonts?) appear at the diner shortly after Laura has lost her diary. That was her one escape hatch from her claustrophobic world and now it too has been interfered with. So what happens? This strange duo presents her with the image of a door, a literal and figurative image of both escape and eerie discovery (what's through that door?). They also encourage her to go home and get her first big clue that Leland is her father. Later she will use this portrait to explore the possibilities beyond her everyday oppression - note that just before she places it on the wall, an unusually loving and gentle Leland bids her goodnight...and closes her bedroom door, shutting her into her room as the protected princess/prisoner of his fantasy. And just as the Tremonds are triggered by Laura's crisis, so Mike seems to be triggered by Leland's. When Leland comes across Laura and Donna innocently cuddling on the couch, he is reminded of Laura and Ronette (the film links Donna and Ronette numerous times, as projections of Laura's innocent and corrupted sides - something I'll also address in the email because I think it's REALLY important). Immediately following this, Mike comes storming down the highway like a bat out of hell...or a repressed memory rising to the surface. It is his confrontation with Leland (in which he shouts "You stole the corn," most likely referring to the murder of Teresa and also "It's him! It's your father!" to Laura) which in turn triggers the most open discussion Laura and Leland have ever had (which isn't saying much, considering how much remains unsaid - but it's enough). Finally, Bob does not just randomly push Leland to kidnap Laura that last night out of bored bloodlust or something. The event is triggered by Laura telling her father "stay away from me," the final nail in Leland's we-have-an-understood-secret self-delusion. Note that everytime Leland kills, his victim is a woman he cannot control. Teresa guesses Leland's identity and threatens to blackmail him. Killed. Maddy, whom Leland is essentially adopting as a replacement for his daughter, tells the Palmer she is going back to her independent job, home, and life in Missoula. Killed. And Laura makes it emphatically clear to Leland that she has never consented to incest, that she was so traumatized she blocked his identity, and that she wants nothing to do with the father whose sentimental "protection" and lustful assault are dual aspects of his desire for possession. Killed...although in this case I don't think that was Leland's original intention when he took her to the train car. And it certainly wasn't Bob's. He wants Laura to give in the way her father has, the way Leland continues to give in (because if FWWM tells us anything, it's that Bob doesn't "capture" innocent victims at one weak moment and render them helpless from then on; he grooms them, rots them away from the inside, makes them partners in their own fall). Bob wants Laura in that train car to force the issue. I would argue that the appearances of the ring and angel (signifying Laura's defeat of Leland and Bob) are also precipitated by her thoughts, feelings, and actions - same as all the other spiritual visitations in the film. A final word on that ring, which I think is often mischaracterized - associated with death or victimhood since both Teresa and Laura wear it. But look at how and when it is featured. Teresa is NOT wearing it when she is killed (a fact easy to miss but Lynch actually has her holding her left hand in front of her for a few moments so that we can see it isn't there). Nor can we see it on her finger when Leland has the upper hand over Teresa. In fact Lynch makes a point of hiding her hand from view up until she realizes Leland might be Laura's father (in their first scene together, her left arm is crushed under Leland's body in bed and later Lynch conspicuously covers her left hand with an ice tray - remember the left arm going "numb" for both Teresa and Laura - until he's ready to link the ring to her realization). Likewise, Laura receives the ring in a dream which also signifies her escape from the oppressive reality of her home life. Note that she doesn't just pass through the door on the wall, but opens the door to her bedroom which Leland closed earlier. And when she does, Lynch makes a point of showing us that the fan is immobile: no Bob attack tonight - she is free, at least for this moment. Note too when Laura's arm is numb (she drags and grasps it limply before seeing Annie) - BEFORE she discovers the ring in her palm, after which her limb is reanimated. By appearing on Teresa's finger (which Laura sees when she is acting as a prostitute), on Phillip's finger (when he is confronting her as a daughter, and asking her to suspect her father), and in the Little Man's hand (when he is showing her a vision of the Red Room, a space in the spirit world which is not controlled by Bob), the ring also unites the fragments of Laura's identity, empowering her to discover a cohesion in the mess of her life. In this light and especially given Leland's reaction in the train car, Cooper's worried advice to Laura - "Don't take the ring" - appears to be flat-out wrong. There are many interpretations of why this is so, but my take is that this is a further demonstration of his fallen state. We are most likely seeing "the good Dale in the Lodge" but while he is well-intentioned, he wound up in there precisely because he COULDN'T do what Laura must: confront his own dark side, accept that the good and evil are intertwined, and swim with the currents of the subconscious rather than resist them (compare the temperament and purpose of Cooper's first visit to the Red Room, in his dream, to his final entrapment in the Black Lodge) And that's not to even get into garmonbozia...! At any rate, the supernatural and the psychological are deeply interrelated throughout FWWM, essentially two sides of the same coin in a war between denial/repression and discovery/freedom (however painful). If people are digging this sort of analysis, I'd offer the following resources which went a long way toward shaping my own perceptions. I have significant disagreements with all of them but taken together they all encouraged me to question things I'd taken for granted and to look at the film in a new light: The Subject of Laura Palmer, by John Thorne: http://abovethestore.blogspot.com/2009/06/subject-of-laura-palmer.html Cherry Pie Wrapped in Barb Wire, by Brett Steven Abelman: https://babelwright.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/cherry-pie-wrapped-in-barb-wire-understanding-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me/ & especially The Passion of David Lynch, by Martha Nochimson (excerpts from the chapter on FWWM, though I'd encourage anyone who's interested to borrow/buy the whole book, it's great stuff): https://books.google.com/books?id=2rNQAePxT8QC&q=fire+walk+with+me+laura+palmer#v=snippet&q=fire%20walk%20with%20me%20laura%20palmer&f=false

Well, there is a theory that the first 45 minutes of FWWM is Cooper's dream, in which he reimagines the investigation, exaggerated, with Chet Desmond in his place. I don't really buy it but find it fun to consider, especially tracing the parallels with Laura's dream later in the movie (begins with omniscient view, then dreamer appears within the dream, confronted by a time-traveling character delivering a message - Bowie vs. Graham, and sees themselves in a framed image, two places at once - Coop in monitor, Laura in wall picture). There's a lot more stuff to it too; it was written down by John Thorne, editor of the fan magazine Wrapped in Plastic, in 2001. spoilers for other Lynch movies (bet you thought you'd seen the last of the spoiler tags):

He does have the clouded eyes: This is what makes Lynch so invigorating and maddening at the same time! Just when you've concluded that there is no cohesion and it's just dreamy stream-of-consciousness experimentation, you discover a hidden structure or pattern that is extremely suggestive. And when you think you have a grasp on the structure's existence (if not its meaning) another element enters to throw you for a loop and make you question if you are inventing significance. I find Inland Empire takes this is-it-or-isn't-it tendency to the extreme. Not sure if you've read it before, but Martha Nochimson's essay "Desire Under the Douglas Firs" (http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/papers/nochimson.html) makes a heavy (but not TOO heavyhanded) psychoanalytic analysis of the final episode (as well as including some behind-the-scenes details of how the show developed in this direction). She expanded on the essay in her chapters on Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me in the book The Passion of David Lynch, which is for my money the best analysis of his work out there. I think so too. The way I'd put it is "duality" (i.e. the two sides of a single thing) vs. "dualism" (cleanly divided dark & light squaring off as separate forces). I think Twin Peaks strays toward the latter but in Lynch's hands it very much chooses the former in both the finale and FWWM. Which I find much more dramatically compelling and true-to-life.