In which David Bowie disappears, a severed arm introduces itself, and the FBI apparently forgets to investigate anything properly.
This article contains spoilers for both seasons of the original Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me, but not theThe Return.
A guest post by JC Pass from Simply Put Psych
My Twin Peaks viewing progress when this article was written.
Spoiler boundary: Fire Walk with Me
These interpretations are preserved as written. Later discoveries haven't been used to tidy up earlier theories.
At the end of Season Two of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper was trapped in a mysterious supernatural realm, something resembling him had escaped, and the series had concluded on what I can only describe as a deeply inconsiderate note.
I wanted to know what happened next. I wanted to understand the Red Room, the Black Lodge, and why a perfectly respectable FBI investigation had developed into something resembling an administrative dispute between supernatural entities.
Fortunately, there was a film.
Unfortunately, the film was a prequel.
So, having spent twenty-two episodes waiting for the television series to stop discussing the sawmill and return to its central mystery, I now found myself watching an earlier murder investigation involving people I had never met.
This was not quite the progression I had expected.
Still, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me had something rather important to offer. The television series had spent two seasons investigating Laura Palmer's death. The film was finally going to let us meet Laura Palmer while she was alive.
I was interested to see what that would change.
As it turns out, quite a lot about how I felt about the story, and rather less about how much of it I understood.
The FBI Has Another Peculiar Day
The film opens with the investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks, whose death preceded Laura Palmer's.
We're introduced to FBI agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley, who seem considerably less interested in the everyday pleasures of life than Dale Cooper. There are no prolonged celebrations of coffee, no enthusiastic appreciation of trees, and very little evidence that either man is enjoying his assignment.
Instead, we get a strange woman dressed in red, an elaborate and thoroughly unhelpful demonstration, and a mysterious blue rose.
The whole business feels rather like an induction course designed by someone who has never successfully explained anything to another human being.
The blue rose is particularly interesting. Blue roses don't occur naturally in the ordinary botanical sense, which makes one a rather fitting symbol for something that should not exist. I initially wondered whether it might connect to the medication used by Philip Gerard, the one-armed man, to suppress his supernatural passenger.
That was probably reaching.
But this is Twin Peaks, where reaching occasionally turns out to be the correct investigative method.
What bothered me more was the FBI's involvement in the first place.
Why had federal agents been sent to investigate Teresa's murder? They didn't yet know about the letter beneath her fingernail, the detail that would eventually link her death to Laura's. The film seems to assume that describing something as a blue rose case is sufficient explanation for the Bureau's interest.
Perhaps the FBI has an entire department dedicated to suspicious flowers.
Desmond eventually discovers a green ring beneath a trailer and promptly disappears.
Which seems a rather severe occupational consequence for looking under a mobile home.
At this point, I was beginning to suspect that the film wasn't going to provide the straightforward detective story I'd been hoping for.
Then David Bowie arrived.
David Bowie Has Entered the Building. Possibly.
The appearance of missing FBI agent Phillip Jeffries is one of the film's most delightfully bewildering sequences.
Cooper is behaving strangely around a security camera. Jeffries appears, seemingly possessing information about something extraordinary. We glimpse a gathering of bizarre figures, including characters we've encountered in the television series, and then Jeffries disappears again.
None of this seems to alarm the FBI quite as much as I would have expected.
Personally, if a missing colleague materialised in my office, began describing a gathering of supernatural beings and promptly vanished, I'd probably want to cancel the afternoon's appointments.
Instead, the film moves along.
The gathering itself interested me because I'd previously entertained the possibility that the supernatural figures represented competing forces. Seeing them together suggested something else: perhaps they were cooperating, or participating in a system whose purpose remained unclear.
The idea became more plausible when the film connected the entities with garmonbozia, apparently representing pain and sorrow.
Were they feeding on human suffering? Trading it? Producing it? Did BOB's violence serve some larger purpose?
These were genuinely interesting questions.
The film offered very little assistance in answering them.
Nor did it explain what had happened to Agent Desmond, why Jeffries appeared when he did, or precisely how any of these events related to ordinary time.
But I was beginning to notice something else.
The film was considerably more surreal than much of Season Two, yet somehow less distracted.
There was no competing sawmill conspiracy. Nobody had decided to recreate the American Civil War as psychiatric treatment. James Hurley had mercifully been prevented from acquiring another married woman.
For the first time in quite a while, nearly everything seemed connected to the central story.
And then we returned to Laura.
The Laura Palmer We Thought We Knew
There is something strange about finally meeting a character whose death has already dominated two seasons of television.
By the time Fire Walk with Me reaches Laura's final days, we know an extraordinary amount about her. We've encountered her diary, heard recordings, listened to conflicting descriptions of her behaviour, and witnessed the town gradually discover how little it understood the person it had been mourning.
We know about the drugs, the relationships, the exploitation and the abuse. We know what happened to her, at least in broad terms, and we know who was responsible.
That knowledge fundamentally changes how the film operates.
In an ordinary mystery, we watch events unfold because we want to discover what will happen.
Here, we already know.
The film uses that knowledge against us.
One of the first things I noticed was the musical direction. Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack was still recognisable, but the familiar warmth of the television series had largely disappeared. The music could be oppressive and abrasive, while extended silences made seemingly ordinary interactions feel increasingly threatening.
It wasn't simply creating suspense.
It was creating dread.
We know Laura is going to die. She doesn't yet understand everything that will lead to her death, and every moment of apparent normality carries the weight of what we already know.
That gives the film an emotional quality the series could rarely achieve.
But I also found myself questioning how much genuinely new understanding it provided.
The television series had already established Laura's abuse and much of her troubled life through her diary and the investigation. Seeing those experiences directly gives them a different force, particularly through Sheryl Lee's performance, but it doesn't necessarily reveal an entirely different Laura.
And I don't think that's an unfair criticism.
A film can be emotionally effective without being especially revelatory.
Fire Walk with Me often seemed more interested in making me experience what I already knew than in explaining what I didn't.
The Father, the Demon and the Dinner Table
What I found most compelling was the film's treatment of Leland Palmer.
The television series had revealed that BOB, the supernatural entity associated with Laura's murder, inhabited Leland. This offered a disturbing explanation for the violence while creating considerable uncertainty about the father's own responsibility.
The film complicates that division.
During one particularly uncomfortable dinner scene, Leland becomes fixated on Laura's hands. He is controlling, intimidating and frightening, while both Laura and Sarah appear visibly uneasy.
Then, almost immediately, we see the affectionate father again.
That transition struck me as more disturbing than much of the supernatural imagery.
We could interpret it as BOB temporarily giving way to Leland. But the same sequence also works as a recognisable portrayal of the unpredictability and emotional confusion present in abusive relationships.
A person can be frightening and affectionate. The affection doesn't cancel the intimidation, and the intimidation doesn't necessarily make the affection entirely insincere.
Laura must somehow navigate both.
The film also appears to establish that Laura only fully recognises the connection between BOB and her father relatively late. Until then, the figure she fears and the parent she knows may not have been understood as the same person.
That makes the abuse even more psychologically complicated without requiring us to dismiss the supernatural explanation.
And another detail stood out: Leland's behaviour towards Sarah, particularly the disturbing implication that he may be deliberately incapacitating her.
Whatever role BOB plays, the situation is no longer simply a question of a demonic entity appearing and committing violence.
There is secrecy, control and the management of other people's awareness.
The supernatural and the painfully ordinary are occupying the same room.
Why Teresa Banks?
One question bothered me throughout the film.
Why Teresa Banks?
If BOB had been abusing Laura since childhood, and his objective was eventually to possess or destroy her, why kill another young woman approximately a year earlier?
If he simply enjoyed murdering people and placing letters beneath their fingernails, why weren't there considerably more victims?
The film eventually gives us an important connection.
Leland had been seeing Teresa. She arranged an encounter involving additional young women, only for Leland to discover that Laura was among them. Teresa's subsequent questions about Laura's father suggest that she may have been approaching a very dangerous realisation.
Suddenly, her death has a possible human motive.
Perhaps she knew too much. Perhaps Leland feared exposure. Perhaps BOB had entirely different reasons for wanting her dead.
The film doesn't settle the matter completely, but it provides enough information to make the murder look considerably less arbitrary.
Which makes the supernatural details even more peculiar.
If Leland was killing to conceal his activities, why leave such an identifiable signature beneath the victims' fingernails? Why perform a ritual that helped Cooper connect the murders?
And if the letters are something BOB compulsively leaves behind, why doesn't Jacques Renault receive one when Leland murders him in hospital?
I am prepared to accept that supernatural beings operate according to rules I don't understand.
I would simply appreciate being informed whether there are rules.
The Ring, the Arm and Other Items of Questionable Usefulness
Then there's the ring.
It appears in connection with Teresa Banks, Agent Desmond and Laura. It bears the same strange symbol associated with the mythology of the woods, and it becomes important during Laura's final confrontation with BOB.
Cooper even appears in a dream warning Laura not to take it.
Naturally, this made me extremely interested in understanding what the ring actually did.
The film did not share my enthusiasm.
Does it prevent possession? Mark someone as belonging to the Lodge? Allow the wearer to perceive supernatural reality? Why did Teresa have it? Why was it beneath the trailer? And why was this apparently important object absent from the original television investigation?
I finished the film with several theories and no especially satisfying explanation.
The one-armed man wasn't much easier.
Philip Gerard is associated with MIKE, a supernatural entity who once worked alongside BOB before renouncing his former activities. We eventually learn that the little dancing man from the Red Room is apparently the severed Arm.
This is the sort of revelation that makes perfect sense for approximately three seconds before you start thinking about it.
MIKE appears to oppose BOB, yet remains connected to the same supernatural world and its strange interest in pain and sorrow.
Is he helping Laura? Preventing BOB from doing something? Enforcing some mysterious arrangement between the entities?
Again, there are possibilities.
Again, the film seems quite content to leave us with them.
The angels are similarly mysterious. One appears associated with Ronette's survival, another disappears from Laura's picture, and an angel eventually appears to Laura in the Red Room.
Perhaps they represent protection, hope or spiritual release. Perhaps they indicate supernatural forces working against BOB and the other entities.
But they don't arrive with an explanation either.
At this point, I was beginning to wonder whether the most powerful supernatural entity in Twin Peaks was the unanswered question.
And Apparently Time Is Optional
If the film had merely introduced new mysteries, I might have been content to regard them as additional parts of an already complicated mythology.
But then it started interfering with chronology.
Cooper warns Laura about the ring. Annie Blackburn appears and tells Laura that the good Dale is trapped in the Lodge and cannot leave, instructing her to write this information in her diary.
Which is a considerable problem, because Annie and Cooper's predicament belong to events that, from Laura's perspective, haven't happened yet.
During the television series, I'd already suspected that the Red Room might exist outside ordinary time. Cooper's earlier dream, his apparently older appearance and the strange relationship between past and future all suggested that the place wasn't operating according to conventional chronology.
The film seems to support that interpretation.
But it raises an even more interesting possibility.
If Laura receives information from the future and writes it in her diary, does that mean the information was always there? Or has something changed?
And if the past can be changed, what else might have happened differently?
At one point, the grandmother and grandson's painting of a doorway had me wondering whether Laura might have entered another reality and returned as someone different.
Perhaps the Laura whose murder we investigated wasn't quite the Laura we'd been watching.
Perhaps somewhere, somehow, another Laura survived.
There wasn't enough evidence to establish any of this, of course.
But that's the pleasure, and occasional danger, of Twin Peaks. It encourages you to take apparently disconnected details seriously, then offers very little guidance about when you should stop.
I have previously constructed an elaborate theory around hospital food.
I am therefore in no position to criticise anyone else's interpretive excesses.
The Film Without the Mystery
For all my complaints, the film's greatest strength may be that it doesn't require us to solve everything in order to understand Laura's suffering.
One of the most revealing moments occurs when Donna follows Laura into the Pink Room.
Donna wants to experience the world Laura has been keeping from her, without understanding the dangers involved. Laura, who is herself living through exploitation and abuse, recognises what is happening and tries to protect her friend.
That distinction stayed with me.
Laura is not simply passive or resigned to her fate. She can recognise danger, intervene and act with considerable determination when someone she cares about is threatened.
She seems similarly concerned about James, recognising that his involvement with her could place him in danger if Leland discovered their relationship.
Yet Laura struggles to extend the same protection to herself.
She seeks escape through drugs, sex and experiences that might briefly offer relief or control, even when those experiences expose her to further harm.
That doesn't mean she lacks agency.
It means that having the capacity to recognise danger is not the same as believing you possess a realistic way out of it.
The film gives us a more immediate understanding of that distinction, even if much of Laura's history was already established.
And it makes the series' original treatment of her death feel rather different.
For two seasons, Laura has largely been a mystery for other people to solve. Her secrets become clues, her relationships become evidence, and her life is reconstructed through people who frequently misunderstood her.
The film finally gives us the person whose experiences made that mystery possible.
It doesn't necessarily tell us more about the Red Room.
It tells us considerably more about what it felt like to be Laura Palmer.
So, Was It Worth Going Backwards?
I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Fire Walk with Me.
It is more focused than much of Season Two. Its atmosphere is oppressive, its performances are compelling, and its willingness to abandon the comforting warmth of the original series makes Laura's story considerably harder to distance ourselves from.
But it also creates new mysteries while refusing to resolve old ones.
After two seasons and a film, I still don't know precisely what the ring does, why the fingernail letters matter to BOB, what happened to Chester Desmond, or how the different supernatural entities relate to one another.
I have a better understanding of Teresa Banks's involvement with Leland, but still question why the FBI was investigating her death in the first place.
I understand more about Laura's experiences, although I knew much of the outline already.
And Dale Cooper remains trapped.
That last point is especially remarkable when you consider the film's original audience. Imagine finishing Season Two with Cooper's fate unresolved, waiting for the next instalment, and discovering that the story was going backwards.
It's a strange kind of continuation.
But perhaps my expectations were part of the problem.
I approached the film hoping for explanations. The film was more interested in changing my relationship with the things that had already been explained.
The television series had taught me to ask who killed Laura Palmer, why, and what supernatural forces were involved.
The film seemed to be asking whether those were the most important questions.
That doesn't automatically make it a better story. Nor does it mean every unexplained detail becomes a profound artistic statement. Sometimes a mysterious ring is fascinating. Sometimes it's simply a mysterious ring that nobody has adequately explained.
Still, I came away with a greater appreciation of Laura as a person rather than the organising principle of somebody else's investigation.
And perhaps that was the film's most important contribution.
It made me less interested in solving Laura Palmer and more interested in understanding her.
Which is a considerable achievement for a film that also features David Bowie disappearing from an FBI office, a dancing man identifying himself as a severed arm, and a monkey appearing for reasons known principally to the monkey.
Where Do We Go From Here?
At the end of Season One, I thought I understood what Twin Peaks was.
At the end of Season Two, I thought I understood what had happened to it.
Now, having finished Fire Walk with Me, I'm beginning to suspect that understanding Twin Peaks may not be an especially realistic objective.
I have theories. Some have proved surprisingly useful, while others should probably be sealed in an evidence bag and quietly disposed of.
I know considerably more about Laura Palmer than I did when I began.
I know considerably less about the administrative structure of the Black Lodge than I would like.
And somewhere outside ordinary time, the good Dale Cooper is still waiting.
Apparently, the original audience had to wait almost twenty-six years to find out what happened next.
I think I'm going to take a short break before continuing.
After all, if the Red Room exists outside linear time, I'm not entirely convinced there's any reason to hurry.
