Finding the Missing Pages: interview w/ Lindsay Hallam, author of Devil's Advocates - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

This is the fifth entry in 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me, concluding the series.

With the explosion of Twin Peaks literature following Brad Dukes' 2014 oral history Reflections, it's become easy to forget how thin that library was for several decades. Despite its presence in David Lynch monographs and the occasional TV history, virtually no books broached the series as their central subject. Now, thankfully, our shelves have been well-stocked with scholarly studies, episodes guides, fan theories, and historical overviews. Even so, until very recently there remained a glaring blind spot in this collection. The 1992 prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, has grown in reputation since its initial critical savaging and box office disaster, but most Peaks books still - of necessity - treat it as an offshoot of the series (occasionally, it's even sidelined as an irrelevant tangent). Certainly no tome took the film as its sole focus until now. Two books have been published since the premiere of The Return in 2017, one by Maura McHugh for the Midnight Marauders series (which I've not yet read but am looking forward to) and the other by Lindsay Hallam for the Devil's Advocates series.

Devil's Advocates - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is primarily divided into four big chapters: "Filled With Secrets: Fire Walk With Me as a Twin Peaks Film"; "Cherry Pie Wrapped in Barbed Wire: Fire Walk With Me as a Horror Movie"; "'Since I was Twelve': Fire Walk With Me as a Trauma Film"; and "We Live Inside a Dream: Fire Walk With Me as a David Lynch Film". These thematic studies are interspersed with a selective study of the film's plot (not exactly chronological, different scenes are aligned with different topics) and make ample use of both an overflowing bibliography and Hallam's own keen insight; the book manages the neat trick of being a grand survey and a personal perspective. Hallam, a British film scholar who specializes in horror and trauma cinema, doesn't just cite her fellow authors, she engages directly with their words: amplifying arguments, contesting claims, and connecting different points of view. She concludes her study by looking at the paratexts that surround the film (including not just the original series and supplemental spin-offs but Showtime's 2017 third season) and, perhaps most interestingly, tracing Fire Walk With Me's echoes in recent art horror films like It Follows and Personal Shopper.

While her scholarship breaks new ground, Hallam's enthusiasm is also contagious. She's a diehard Twin Peaks fans going back to her teenage years in Australian suburbia. We decided to start our conversation not in the bracing clarity of her final analysis, but the intoxicating confusion of her first encounter...

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Twin Peaks: The Return

This is the fourth entry in 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me. Next week I will conclude this series by interviewing Lindsay Hallam, author of a book about the film in the Devil's Advocate series.

Sixteen and a half episodes into Showtime's revival of Twin Peaks, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) - the unquestioned (if multifaceted) hero of this series, as well as the old one (two seasons, 1990-91) - is speaking to a character who never appeared in the old show yet whose familiarity is taken for granted. Portrayed by a monstrous steam-spewing machine, and articulated by voice actor Nathan Frizzell, yet visualized in flashback as none other than late pop legend David Bowie, this "Phillip Jeffries" is sending Cooper back to a particular date: February 23, 1989. Cooper's one-armed companion (Al Strobel, Jr.) intones, "Eeee-lec-tric-ity..." - a curious motif for anyone who came to this decades-delayed third season after close study of seasons one and two (in the old series owls, not electrical currents, were the harbingers of spiritual energy between two worlds).

And then our protagonist closes his eyes as the camera pushes toward him, a whoosing sound filling the soundtrack before we realize it belongs to a ceiling fan. Another sound emerges - a motorcycle - and we are faced with perhaps the most important, if infrequently-glimpsed, location in this two-part finale, perhaps in the whole series. It is, we have previously been told (in parts two and twelve), the Palmer family household even though it's a distinctly different house than the one used in the classic first and second season. And then we see actors: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, and James Marshall (as Laura and Leland Palmer and James Hurley, respectively); all have been glimpsed in earlier parts of The Return but now they look much younger, much younger than CGI or makeup could achieve. What's going on here?

This whole passage - the Bowie-initiated time travel, the view of a tall foreboding "Palmer house" ascending from a sidewalk, the actors who've leapt back in time a quarter-century - represents not only a return to the winter of '89. It is a return to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the controversial 1992 spin-off film that was for years left out of many discussions of Twin Peaks, often treated as an odd footnote at best and an irrelevant cast-off at worst. This crucial sequence of the "third season" (as Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost call it, though Showtime's designation The Return remains catchy and telling in its own right) begins with overt references to Lynch's onetime bete noire and concludes with direct immersion into that very work.

For most of the next five minutes David Lynch (who directed only six episodes of the first two seasons, but all of the third season as well as Fire Walk With Me) will play footage from his own movie, with color and score extracted and some new shots (along with a few previously unused old ones) sprinkled throughout. Having promised (or warned) viewers before the season's May premiere that his prequel film would be very important to the new work, Lynch certainly delivers. And yet this time, his Fire Walk With Me ideas are filtered through Frost's own strong vision (rather than reinforced by Robert Engels, co-writer of the film, who came closer to Lynch's own sensibility and was generally more deferential towards him). Frost was not involved at all with the film, but now he has been able to re-interpret its motifs in collaboration with Lynch. How does this impact the prequel project's legacy as well as the new material?

What follows is an exploration of all the Fire Walk With Me references in The Return.

4 Ways to Watch Fire Walk With Me: Art Film, Horror Movie, Lynch Project, Twin Peaks Episode

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.

"5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" (finally) resumes this week

Just over a year ago, I announced a loose series of posts: "5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" to celebrate the release of the Twin Peaks movie as part of the Criterion Collection. Some of these pieces were more ambitious than others, and I had to pause my schedule after a couple weeks. I never thought it would take an entire year to come back!

Now, however, the remaining entries are either completely or almost ready and Halloween seemed like a good time to return, not only because the first post discusses the film within the horror genre (among several contexts) but because the last day of Fire Walk With Me's production happened to fall on October 31, which is also - believe it or not - the birthday of both the actors who played Bob and the Man From Another Place.

So this Wednesday, look for "4 Ways to Watch Fire Walk With Me," a study of the film in light of art cinema, horror, Lynch's filmography, and Twin Peaks. The following week, hopefully by Wednesday, I will publish "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Twin Peaks: The Return," a collection of connections between the film and the third season (which featured many callbacks). And finally, in a concluding entry that wouldn't have been possible if the series stayed on schedule last year, I will interview Lindsay Hallam, author of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a new book in the "Devil's Advocate" series.

See you in three days.

BECOME A PATRON

Fire Walk With Me belongs in the Criterion Collection

This is the second entry in 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me. Next week I will discuss the history of the movie's production, reception, and legacy. (UPDATE: the next three entries were postponed for a year, eventually resuming with an entry on four different lens to watch the film through: art film, horror movie, Lynch project, and Twin Peaks episode.)

What is this movie? Is it a movie at all? Of course it is, and attempts to claim otherwise dissolve into babbling mystification. Yet they persist - primarily because the TV show which Fire Walk With Me descends from remains more legendary than the film but also because the film itself is so abrasive and overwhelming that it makes sense to retreat into the most convenient explanation: this is a TV spin-off and, good or bad, it can only be appreciated in relation to the series. Furthermore, many viewers, probably a substantial majority, reach Fire Walk With Me after watching two seasons of a surreal soap opera, so it's difficult for most to disentangle their knowledge of the show from their experience of the film even if the relationship is subversive rather than complementary. In a few weeks, I'll write about Fire Walk With Me both as a component of a larger story and as a standalone film (or perhaps several: a lucid psychodrama, a formally hypnotic art film, a hybrid slasher/American giallo/psychological horror flick, an entry in David Lynch's own unique bigger-than-life - and certainly bigger than TV - filmography). For now, I don't merely want to isolate Fire Walk With Me from Twin Peaks but to explain why it can stand side by side with the other titles in the Criterion Collection, which it officially joined two and half weeks ago. Fire Walk With Me needs defending not just for its place within a saga, or even as a bold rejection of that saga defined precisely by said rejection (still therefore dependent on what it negates), but as a movie movie, a piece of cinema history valuable on its own filmic terms.

Lost in Twin Peaks #8: discussing Fire Walk With Me & the end of season 3 w/ Twin Peaks Unwrapped

This is the first entry in 5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me. Next week I will discuss why the movie belongs in the Criterion Collection.

Although I initially planned to kick off my "5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" series with a review/response to the new Criterion Collection edition (look for that as next week's entry), it makes sense to begin with what I recorded first. A couple weeks ago, in anticipation of this upcoming release, I joined hosts Ben and Bryon of the Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast for our first post-season three discussion. This is also the first official "Lost in Twin Peaks" segment since before the third season began (my appearances since then have been to discuss films or the ongoing series); hopefully there will be more to come this fall and winter.

We cover Fire Walk With Me from several angles, focusing on how the new season does or doesn't change our view of the material (particularly the ending of the film), why it would be a bad idea for David Lynch to release a recut of the movie including The Missing Pieces (as producer Sabrina Sutherland has said he would consider), and if the film functions as a standalone. My segment appears in the latter half of the episode; the rest is devoted to a fascinating discussion of the UK Twin Peaks Festival, sprinkled with snippets of Sutherland's Q&A. (And make sure you check out this episode's amazing cover art, which doesn't show up in the embed.) See you next week for more Fire Walk With Me.

"5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" begins next week

UPDATE: “5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me” will begin next week (the week of October 22) rather than this weekend as originally announced, and the podcast posts before the Criterion review.

This week the Criterion Collection released DVD and blu-ray editions of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Considering its inclusion in a deluxe Twin Peaks boxset three years ago, this may seem anticlimactic; aside from a couple new interviews, it's nothing we haven't seen before. However, I think Criterion spine number #898 is significant and worth celebrating, for reasons I'll explain more in-depth in a few days, after I've had a chance to rewatch the film.

This review/statement of "Why Fire Walk With Me Belongs in the Criterion Collection" will discuss the new interviews and older special features, but will particularly pay attention to Fire Walk With Me's legacy as cinema, and not just a part of Twin Peaks. It will also kick off "5 Weeks of Fire Walk With Me" during which I am planning to celebrate this great, still underrated film with a new post each week. (This ended up appearing as the second entry instead.)