I remember "Twin Peaks" from when I was a kid, meaning that I remember the hype surrounding the series when it came out, and the way its increasingly gratuitous weirdness eventually alienated all but the hardest-core fans. I remember those commercials in which you'd see the face of "BOB" morph into that of an owl, etc. It all looked really strange and occult and obscure. I was too young to get into it, but the fascination of the show kind of stuck with me through the years. Later I became a fan of Lynch's films, particularly the brilliant "Mulholland Dr.," and from time to time I'd think oh yeah, this was the "TP" guy, but the general unavailability of the series as a whole kept me away from it. (Which is why it's just plain stupid to stall the release of the second season of a show like this - especially when there are only two seasons total! But I digress.) Eventually I wound up borrowing the pilot and first season DVD from a friend. Guess what, I got addicted, so I had to "acquire" the second season online. I even read the (likewise generally unobtainable) "Secret Diary of Laura Palmer," a truly gripping and powerful piece of writing by (if I recall) David Lynch's daughter, which recounts in first person the gory details of Laura's years of abuse and torture at the hands of the mysterious entity known as BOB. Take out the supernatural elements in this book and you're left with a convincing case study of the psychological impact of incest, drug abuse, and secrecy.



After all this I felt prepared to see the film. It's probably ideally best to watch "Fire Walk With Me" last, as a capper. If you've watched the whole series you already know who killed Laura, and whether you have or not, "FWWM" will probably raise more questions than it answers - that's why we love it - but so much of it depends on the viewer's acquaintance with the show that it still makes sense to see the film last.



As with the show, the movie bears interpretation on many levels at once, and Lynch is always teasing you with suggestions of diverse "working theories." On the one hand, it often feels like a perfectly straightforward after-school special on the topics of sex, drugs and incest. There are hints that all the "supernatural" aspects are simply elaborate imaginary ways for Laura (and maybe her father) to deal with the unspeakable. Maybe there really is no BOB, as indeed shut-in Harold Smith remarks early on in the film - maybe he's just a cypher for Laura's father, rather than a demonic entity that possesses him to molest her.



And yet there's an equal insistence on the supernatural, with repeated references to the mysteries brought up in the series, as well as some new symbolism unique to the movie, e.g. the "blue rose." There are sections in which "FWWM" dissolves into abstract stream-of-consciousness-style hallucinations in the midst of what almost looked like it was going to be an ordinary narrative, most notably the bizzare segment at the Philadelphia headquarters in which Cooper splits in two, missing agent Philip Jeffries suddenly turns up out of nowhere and the next thing we know we're above the notorious "convenience store" with BOB, the Little Man From Another Place, the "Chalfonts" and others, all spewing typical symbolic rhetoric about formica tables and "Garmonbozia." It's extremely suggestive, but I doubt anybody really knows EXACTLY what it's about, Lynch included, although the references will stick in your head and tease you as you try to puzzle through them.



This is the secret of the undeniable fascination of the whole "TP" phenomenon, and much of Lynch's work. I've watched the hell out of "Mulholland Dr.," and every time my theory changes, and I actually doubt that there's any one all-purpose solution to the cluster of mysteries. There are various explanations for various events, sometimes mutually exclusive, but all seeming to relate to the same nexus of intrigue in some indeterminate sense. But Lynch never gives the secret away completely. He claims in interviews that he doesn't always know what his own symbols mean at the time, and that he's as shocked as anybody when he "figures them out." And actually, I believe him!



A common remark in these reviews, whether the reviewers have seen the series or not, regardless of how they interpret the story, is that this film stays with them and haunts them for hours afterwards. It has an undeniable archetypal power. It's definitely much darker than the series, which overemphasized the light comedy elements to appease tame network viewers, but after all, this IS the story of the brutal rape and murder of a teenage girl, and the film depicts this quite vividly.