Jake

Twin Peaks Rewatch 31: Fire Walk With Me

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Donna does; Maddy just sees weird carpet movement if I recall correctly. Mrs. Palmer also sees him crouched behind the bed, so it seems to be possible to see Bob without anything directly happening. I'm not sure what his rules are, exactly, for harming or possessing people. To hurt someone he may need his human "host", or prefer it that way.

 

It might just be that they're sensing Bob and that he's not actually present, too.

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Stanley and the spilled coffee.

You guys seemed uncertain about whether Chris Isaak deliberately caused Kiefer Sutherland to spill the coffee on himself. You whippersnappers are clearly too young to remember the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. This is one of their signature gags. My take on the scene is that Agent Desmond knows his partner's name is Stanley, sees the way he is holding his coffee cup and wonders if he can reproduce the Stan Laurel/Oliver Hardy gag. His smug look is justified by his success.

I couldn't find a YouTube of Laurel and Hardy doing this bit but I found an homage with Dick Van Dyke taking the role of his hero Stan Laurel.

https://youtu.be/wuAq_ql-TeY

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Hm, I don't think David Lynch understands how cocaine works. Laura first takes it right before bed, then later asks Bobby for some so she can sleep. It is a drug for doing the opposite of sleeping.

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Then again, most people don't expect to be assaulted mid-sleep by a Bob.

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I'm pretty sure that the coffee thing was intentionally done and to demonstrate that Chet is different to Cooper, because it's so antithetical to what Cooper would do in that situation.

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Maddy sees Bob and I don't think Donna ever doe

Oh, that's right. That ol' soap-opera brunette wig trick got me again!

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For the record, it was Leland's. When he describes his neighbors at Pearl Lake he mentions the Chalberts --and points out that they lived in the other house.

 

Just to clear this up, Leland says that the neighbors on the one side of his summer home at Pearl Lakes were the Shelberts, but on the other side was a white house. Hawk investigated that boarded up house and interviewed two lesbian schoolteachers over chamomile tea to find out that the former occupants of that house were the Kalispells. What that has to do with Leland's experiences with "Mr. Robertson" is beyond me.

 

 

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.

 

You know I have seen people repeat this over and over, but you know what's funny is that ever since I first saw that scene I didn't feel like Lynch was poking fun at his fans at all, but I thought he was trying to say that Twin Peaks, the series and the film, has a lot of seemingly strange, nonsensical imagery, but that if you pay attention and think, there is actually a deeper symbolic meaning to things. Of course maybe that just means I'm guilty of being "that fan" haha!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I just watched this movie for a second time with a couple of friends (one who had never seen it because he'd been warned off of it but ended up loving it). One thing I noticed that I haven't seen pointed out before is that when Gerard is driving erratically behind Leland and Laura you can hear the sound The Man from Another Place makes in Laura's dream after he identifies himself as "The Arm." Just another interesting connection between Mike and him that I hadn't noticed before.

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haha wow i just now made the connection between the missing arm and The Arm oh boy i'm smart

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I just finished watching FWWM, and the series, for the very first time and I wanted to get down my thoughts.

 

First off, what a beautiful, beautiful film. I was incredibly taken with the film, and I feel like the total shift in feel helped me take FWWM in as a separate but related work to twin peaks.

 

I think what I loved about it the most was the character of Laura being so fleshed out, so brought to life, and beyond that, what a life. I cannot think of another depiction of a victim of abuse that felt so honest and real to me. I'll still be thinking about it for a while to come, I'm sure.

 

One thing I'm confused about is that final scene made me deeply happy for Laura, which is odd, because I don't believe in heaven, and I certainly don't think that's the intent in the film either. Perhaps it was just because she was, at that point, at peace, and at rest. 

 

Chris, Jake, thank you for doing this podcast. I never would have made it through without you. Looking forward to some wrap-up episodes!

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I suggest a Wayward Pines watch to fill the gap until new Twin Peaks is out.

 

Now that I have actually seen an episode of this show, I take back my joke suggestion. Woof. Wayward is right. The speed at which the first episode 100% confirms that there is a conspiracy happening in a small Idaho town is shockingly fast. There are at least four major reveals in that first episode. Maybe the showrunners are intentionally trying to avoid the Lost trap by actually answering their mysteries, but the rapid pace at which information is thrown at the viewer destroys any atmosphere the show tries to establish. Compare that to Twin Peaks where it takes so long for anything overtly supernatural to occur. Bob doesn't even (officially) show up until the second or third episode. Comparing Wayward Pines with Twin Peaks is really unfair, especially since the former tracks more as a lost clone than a Twin Peaks clone, but watching both has really made me appreciate the importance of pacing when establishing your quirky town show.

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I personally think the film is much more valuable if Leland is responsible, so I'm probably seeing only the angles on the discussion that make this true, but I don't find anything in this paragraph that necessarily implies that Bob is in control.

 

I've seen y'all mention that this movie shows Leland has more responsibility for what he does, but I still didn't see it. To me it looks like he's just a puppet of Bob, and whenever given the chance he tries to apologize for Bob's actions. Although it's an interesting theory that Leland is in control at the dinner table scenes, I just didn't see any evidence for it really. Isn't Bob capable of subtlety sometimes? The other thing you'd have to explain is why Leland is sometimes apologizing/crying and sometimes relentlessly domineering. It just seems easier for me to accept that Bob is capable of two modes than Leland being at once sincerely caring and yet abusive. Especially given that Bob's whole narrative purpose in the show is to explain the evil in Twin Peaks including Leland's crimes.

 

It has been my impression that Bob isn't capable of subtlety at all, that he is basically the id doing what he wants, when he wants, and any sense of subtlety is Leland's fear of getting caught (or resistance to doing wrong) that holds back Bob. I'd also like to point out that shifting back and forth between apologizing and domineering is actually a trait of real abusers. "Losing control" and then apologizing afterwards is one factor that's kept people in abusive relationships long after they should have gotten out of there.

 

On the other side of the coin, I interpret Bob ripping the blood out of Leland as him taking the memories of pain and suffering, ripping them out, and handing them over to replace the stolen creamed corn. Thus, I'm of the opinion that Leland doesn't necessarily remember the murder during the TV series, and that makes his revelations while dying on the prison floor make more sense. Just because he doesn't remember them doesn't make him not culpable though.

 

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Finally caught up with reading this thread. I think most of what I would have said has already been said by various people! I will share this grantland article about FWWM, which I thought was very good: http://grantland.com/features/twenty-things-david-lynch-fire-walk-its-20th-anniversary/

 

I quite like the author's observation of the 'meaning' of the traffic light.

 

"Remember the traffic light? It’s in the pilot — a long, lingering shot of a light changing from red to green, a signal that this was going to be a show where the camera would linger for long periods of time on weird things a normal TV show’s camera would never linger on. And in the movie, we find out why, more or less. The night she dies, Laura goes to meet James, the sweet, dumb biker who thinks he can save her. They talk in clichés: “We have everything,” James says. “Everything but everything,” Laura replies. She’s messed up; she mocks James, slaps him. He laughs it off. 

      James says her name, begging her to stay; she says, “What about this, James?” and gives him the finger. He tries to pull her to him. She says, “I think you wanna take me home now” — coldly. She gets on his bike, then jumps off at the next light. She screams, “I LOVE YOU, JAMES” and runs off into the woods, where — like monsters in a fairy tale — Jacques and a few of his lowlife pals are waiting just a few feet past the tree line, at the mouth of a forest access road, leaning on a red Corvette. Before the night is over she’ll be tied up on a dirty mattress at the conclusion of a really gross four-way log-cabin sex party, which is where her father finds her. In this moment, though, James could easily follow her; instead he stares at the traffic light, waits for it to change, guns it, and speeds off. So the traffic light is Laura’s last chance; the scene gives the shot in the pilot a retroactive dramatic resonance. In a way, it’s the most prequel-y thing in the movie."

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Concerning Dale Cooper's knowledge/sense of the Red Room/Black Lodge prior to Twin Peaks season 1: I do think that the Red Room exists out of time and therefore cuts threw the timeline of the show. I also think that real world Cooper is in tune with his later Red Room self. It would explain his uncanny intuition and his knowledge of coming events (like in the last episode, the scene when he knows that the Log Lady will arrive in one minute). I think that the scene with Annie lying bloody in Laura's bed further strengthens this (and of course, Cooper being in the Red Room during the film, prior to his investigation in Twin Peaks). 


 


If you focus on Cooper, Fire Walk With Me is not so much a prequel to the tv series as it is a sequel. The Cooper who is looking at the surveillance footage had gotten a glimpse of the future and acts on it, maybe giving Jeffries the opportunity to break through and manifest for a short time? I also like that the running back and forth in the scene, which mirrors Coopers running in the Red Room in the last episode. The "logic" of how to traverse the space of the Red Room bleeds into reality and has some kind of effect there too. And! all this before Palmer's death.


 


Anyway, the Cooper of the future can affect some parts of the past. You could even say that the movie we've watched may not be the reality of what happened before season 1, but what happened to the past AFTER Cooper got stuck in the Black Lodge.


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You're breaking my brain, Malcolm. I definitely agree that the Red Room is timeless... and maybe you're right. I think it would be *incredibly* interesting for the new series of TP to start with the red room scene from S1E3, but reshot with the actors today -- suggesting that it's happening now, and Cooper of S1 actually does visit his future self in order to get the information of the killer from Laura.

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Exactly! The crazy thing is that the timelessness of the Red Room is introduced in the last episode, strangely eluded to in the end of the European pilot, and made "clear" in the movie (with Cooper's contact with Laura and Annie's message, etc).

 

The fucked up thing is:

 

1) The old Dale Cooper in the foreign pilot / dream sequence of the series proper, is in the Red Room talking to an unchanged Laura (he lives, she's dead), foreshadowing his prolonged imprisonment in the Lodge.

 

2) The final episode ends with Cooper being possessed, pitched as a cliffhanger with the hope of a third season (which doesn't happen). The episode also includes the "see you in 25 years", a callback to the ending of the European pilot.

 

3) Fire Walk With Me, fully entrenching the timelessness of the Red Room, was made with the plan to continue the story as upcoming movies (which doesn't happen either).

 

So, all this works together perfectly now in hindsight, despite the fact that the creators wanted to continue the story twice! It was like they hedged their bets and said "let's stick this in here in case Twin Peaks never gets picked up again". And NOW we're going to get a third season, circa 25 years after season 2. Too much fun! Too weird!

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This is perhaps a bit of a random observation, but since no one else overtly made this connection I figured I would throw it out there.

So there's the whole thing with Teresa Banks' arm going numb and also the bit in Laura's dream sequence before she sees the ring.

So the obvious connection is that it's the left arm going numb and Mike is missing his left arm and is seen later to be connected closely with the ring.

As with all things in Twin Peaks, I'm not certain what the connection means or if it should have to mean anything, but it feels deliberate.

If I were to speculate, I would probably mostly be wondering if the numbness of the arm is casually linked by Mike missing his arm. I can't remember if they did some shot flipping when the ring is shown on Mike's hand as he is yelling at Leland/Laura. It would certainly be spooky there if the ring was on what appeared to be his right arm.

Anyway, just thought I would toss that out there and see if it resonated with anyone else as spooky.

 

EDIT:

 

Another random and probably meaningless connection: Why a formica table? Is it just because FOR-MIKE-A? Hmmmm????

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Don't forget the random arm/hand tremors of various people around Twin Peaks in the lead up to the finale and the opening of the doorway.

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Those shaky arms seem to call back to Harold Smith's in the one moment he steps outside of his house.

 

What a weird choice of a running theme. Arms.

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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:

 

"The suggestion is that Agent Desmond has been abducted by supernatural forces, just as the mystery of Laura Palmer's death was solved on television by pinning it on a demon, not a man, on a satanic cult rather than a father who rapes and kills his own daughter. There is mumbo jumbo all through Fire Walk with Me, just as there was when Twin Peaks was running through the woods on TV. But where on Twin Peaks the aliens and spirits and incorporeal villains finally turned the characters into fairy folk and the story into a shaggy dog, wagging its tail like a finger, in Fire Walk with Me the mystification draped over the story is repelled by the desperation of its subject and the woman who plays her, and Lynch fails to carry out the betrayal of his story that he himself has plotted.

 

There is no way for Lynch to explain away what he has put on the screen. There is no way for him to erase what he knows actually happens, or what he doesn't know: when it is that the true secret of a town is revealed, and how it is suppressed."

 

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:

 

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I personally think the film is much more valuable if Leland is responsible, so I'm probably seeing only the angles on the discussion that make this true, but I don't find anything in this paragraph that necessarily implies that Bob is in control.

 

 

It has been my impression that Bob isn't capable of subtlety at all, that he is basically the id doing what he wants, when he wants, and any sense of subtlety is Leland's fear of getting caught (or resistance to doing wrong) that holds back Bob. I'd also like to point out that shifting back and forth between apologizing and domineering is actually a trait of real abusers. "Losing control" and then apologizing afterwards is one factor that's kept people in abusive relationships long after they should have gotten out of there.

 

On the other side of the coin, I interpret Bob ripping the blood out of Leland as him taking the memories of pain and suffering, ripping them out, and handing them over to replace the stolen creamed corn. Thus, I'm of the opinion that Leland doesn't necessarily remember the murder during the TV series, and that makes his revelations while dying on the prison floor make more sense. Just because he doesn't remember them doesn't make him not culpable though.

 

This post combined with some of my backchannel discussions with Lost in the Movies regarding who has "ultimate" control of Leland is basically why I feel that Leland is the ego, even if Bob is the Id. Leland knows that there's bad/wrong stuff going on but he gives into a lot. I see Bob responsible for a lot more of the visceral violence but Leland is more than capable of being an abusive person all on his own. It's why I feel the presence and the times we feel the abuse most strongly are all tied to the house - because that's a physical stage for the kind of person Leland was even if Bob was in there too. Bob was merely a vector because Leland refuses to acknowledge his own guilt and suffering twisted up in all of this. 

 

The movie is a lot scarier when you take Leland's participation in all of this as being a factor. It's easy enough to explain away "possession" but not that your dad likes underage girls, incest and emotionally abusing his family.

 

Edit: I took contention with Jake's idea that Sarah Palmer should have "known" and the thing is that I does think she knows on some level. But given that dinner scene, I extrapolated that Leland is not just secretively sexually abusive but emotionally abusive as well. Sarah strikes me as a wife who's been through this before Laura was ever born and has internalized it on some level. 

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