Re: HD Online Player (Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me Q2 Exte)
Sondra Pevy
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch's follow-up prequel to cult classic television series Twin Peaks, has always been an odd beast. It recounts the final seven days of the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose inexplicable and brutal murder is the impetus for the short-lived drama that riveted viewers when it aired between 1990 and 1991. It is also about the similarly brutal murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), a woman killed a year before Laura in a similarly ritualistic manner whose death puts FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) on alert, following the disappearance of one of his colleagues investigating her murder.
One would expect that the film is a strict prequel, but it is not: Fire Walk With Me plays with time in a unique and nonlinear fashion, making it both prequel and sequel in an odd, contradictory sense. Like Twin Peaks, it is both dreamy and nightmarish, making the conflation of time make sense slightly more. There are visions and sigils, haunted rings and groves of trees, whirring ceiling fans and rustling curtains. The film itself is cryptic and strange, embracing a full-tilt Lynchian mode that the director successfully curtailed in the ethereal Mulholland Drive. Fire Walk With Me is about dreams, desire, and death. It is about answers and more questions. And it is also an unflinching look at the horrors of incest.
And yet those looking for answers within Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me discovered only more questions and more than a little "garmonbozia" (pain and sorrow), in the form of creamed corn and a lot of head-scratching imagery. A cliffhanger ending for Twin Peaks found Cooper in the Black Lodge, attempting to rescue his girlfriend, Annie (Heather Graham), only to find himself trapped while BOB escaped into the world into his body. Quick flashes of Cooper and Annie turn up in Fire Walk With Me, offering a glimpse at what happened after the final episode of Twin Peaks, a glittering lure in the darkness.
Some of the scenes are little more than fragments. Laura becomes transfixed by the ceiling fan in the hallway outside her bedroom, an otherworldly voice calling to her and freezing her in place, a creepy smile slowly passing across her face, until she's awakened from her reverie by her mother. In another, she snorts cocaine from a small plastic bag with a key in it, secreted in a locked diary, a clue that will play into the murder investigation in the show. In another, she hides in the bushes, waiting for James (James Marshall), as Leland arrives home: As he makes his way up the stairs towards the house, Laura waits in terror that he will spot her, his eyes darting wildly towards her hiding place. There's a phone call between Laura and Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), in which he begs her to make him a tape and we sense Laura's vexed frustration with these silly, stupid men who want to own her. There's a high-speed drive to a redneck bar for Laura and Donna and some drunken guys, a sign that reads something like Cana-DUH and the U.S. of Fucking "A" slung above the wooden bar. The sight of logging trucks passing by as they walk down the road is a glimpse at the world of the past, of another time, of wood and death and possibility.
Some of these deepen the aura of dread surrounding the overarching plot or Laura's inevitable end. Others are simply unnecessary detours. There is a long scene in which Chris Isaac's Agent Chester Desmond beats up a local police officer in order to transport Teresa Banks' body to Portland. Another has Desmond and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) interviewing Teresa's employer as a worker noisily fixes a light bulb. Another has Stanley showing Cooper the letter "T" that was found beneath Teresa's fingernail. A quick scene has "the dashing" Cooper playing a game with the always-unseen Diane, in which he has to guess what the secretary has changed about her office. (It's sort of adorable.) The terrifying world of the Little Man From Another Place and his cohorts is given a little extra time, with a series of scenes capturing a bizarre meeting between the Little Man, BOB, Mrs. Tremond (Frances Bay) and her grandson, a jumping child in a pointed white mask, and what appear to be demonic lumberjacks. There are additional close-up shots of a mouth screaming in agony or pleasure, unnerving in both in its intensity and shot composition.
One subplot involving David Bowie's long-lost Phillip Jeffries is somewhat fleshed out while left deliberately vague. In the film, Jeffries mysteriously appears at the FBI field office in Philadelphia, muttering about "Judy," an encounter he had with the Little Man and BOB, the month of Laura Palmer's murder ("February, 1989"), and that Cooper isn't who he appears to be... before vanishing in front of Gordon Cole (Lynch). What is revealed here is that (A) Jeffries appears to teleport from an Argentine hotel and (B) when Jeffries vanishes from Gordon's office, it's to return to that same hotel in a flash of smoke and fire, the wall behind him singed and black. (That a terrified hotel bellhop loses control of his bowels is also part of this odd scenario.) Just who Judy is remains a mystery, and there are no further scenes that indicate her identity or just what is causing Jeffries to teleport around the world.
When Cooper appears in the Black Lodge in one scene, that ring appears on an ornate pedestal in front of the Little Man; in another, the scene replays the same way but this time the ring is not visible, and Cooper realizes that Annie must have it. And then the ring is slipped off Annie's finger in the hospital. Just what Cooper's epiphany means is unclear: Is Annie now vulnerable to possession from the spirits? Is this nurse marked for death? Putting on the ring is what seals Laura's fate: When BOB is unable to possess her, he stabs her in a fit of rage.
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