This is the third entry in 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me. Next week I will discuss connections between the film and the new Showtime season last year.
David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) is a confounding experience for many viewers because it can be so hard to contextualize. Cinephiles may feel too alienated from its connections to a TV series to appreciate its qualities as an art film; horror enthusiasts may be tripped up by its reliance on surreal experimentation over genre tropes; Lynchheads may be perplexed by its raw, grisly intensity, its ingredients less balanced than they are in other, equally strange entries in his oeuvre; and Twin Peaks fans may be the most bewildered of all. This is all the more true if those TV viewers came to the beloved ABC series thanks to soap opera, sci-fi, or quirky comedy but are unfamiliar with the more abrasive work of its auteur. Haunted for many years by its undeserved bad reputation, the Twin Peaks prequel wandered in the wilderness like a lost soul, a film without a home. The truth, however, is not so much that Fire Walk With Me doesn't belong in any of those contexts - in fact, it belongs to all of those contexts. If the movie doesn't fit neatly into any one category, it still spills over into many, in deeply fascinating ways. Here are four ways to watch Fire Walk With Me, each gripping on its own but even richer when viewed in conjunction with the others.
Inevitably, major plot points will be discussed below. And if you're hungry for an additional "Four Ways" analysis, in this case placing the movie inside different junctures of the series, check out the brilliant "The Four Placements of Fire Walk With Me" by Julius Kassendorf. My own analysis will eventually explore Fire Walk With Me's connections to the series (in the most extended section of them all), but first I want to start as far away from that perspective as possible.
