All Goodness Is In Jeopardy
All Goodness Is In Jeopardy
by Karenna Umscheid
photograph: IMDB
My digital footprint contains no shortage of articles, essays, and rants about my second favorite movie of all time, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I’ve written about the film for Latent Images Magazine, for Boston Hassle, multiple times on my Letterboxd, for my Freshman honors thesis, and maybe one day, I’ll even write a book about it.
Like most of David Lynch’s filmography, Fire Walk With Me is so rich with ambiguity and meaning, entrenched in grief and loss, that it is simply impossible to fully understand. I can empathize with those who find his films too open-ended or too frustrating in this sense, but I think his work is a necessary challenge, one that provokes far more questions than it answers, inviting imaginative perspectives and interpretations. The unexplainable nature of Twin Peaks is what makes my love for it so endless, there’s always something I haven’t noticed, something I should be thinking about deeper than I am.
The world of Twin Peaks is caught between the ultimate forces of good and evil. Cheesy as it sounds, that’s perhaps the most straightforward way to describe it. Laura Palmer was the good, what killed her was the evil, an evil that continues to plague the town, as Lynch examines the grief left, scattered throughout her small town, in her wake. Fire Walk With Me is a disturbing investigation that prods through Laura’s nightmares, the inescapability of her fate; audiences are forced to sit, terrified, and watch it all unfold.
Where Twin Peaks blends soap operas with supernatural horrors and an off-kilter and witty sense of humor, Fire Walk With Me is solely mysterious and terrifying. Even Agent Cooper’s delightful presence isn’t enough to ease the weight of the evil surrounding the town. The main tragedy of Twin Peaks, which wrenches at the souls of the characters, audiences, and co-creator David Lynch himself is Laura’s doom, that no one could do anything to save her from her fate. Fire Walk With Me unpeels the layers, it shows the last seven days of her life in all its viscerality and fear, anything shielded by the quirky fun and comedy of the show now impossible to escape.
One of the saddest horror films ever made, I fervently believe Fire Walk With Me is in a league of its own, it’s thrilling, horrifying, and horribly sad, a painstaking investigation into inescapable evil, and is effective because of the light Laura Palmer’s glimmered with. Perhaps the saddest, most dark aspect of the whole story is that the love so many had for her was, and would never be, enough to save her.
Twin Peaks was the blueprint for so many future mystery shows, set in small towns with big secrets, and new stories yearning to tell a story as sad, beautiful, and tragic. But Twin Peaks is anything but formulaic, the most wholeheartedly original television could be, that was as heartfelt and genuine as it was supernaturally chilling and mysterious. I’m a proclaimed horror fan, but nothing keeps me up at night like the menacing face of Bob.
Everything I write about Twin Peaks is a little bit different, but it still feels like I’m writing in circles, wondering why she had to die, why no one could save her, and what all of it could possibly mean. The exercise of watching, writing, thinking, living, and breathing Twin Peaks (and perhaps the David Lynch canon as a whole) is an endless, beautiful mystery. Hopefully, I’ll end up writing many, many more pieces about it for years to come. A girl can dream!
Until next Wednesday,
Karenna
