Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A lamp starts to stutter. Nobody in the room looks up. Under the flicker there is a low roar that isn't traffic and isn't weather, a room tone grown too big for the room, and it keeps going after the light steadies. The plot has not moved an inch. Something has happened anyway.

That stutter is the whole method, and it is roughly why Fire Walk with Me was booed at Cannes in 1992. People came for the mystery engine of the television show and were handed a condition of the nervous system.

Deleuze has a name for images like that lamp. He calls them pure optical and sound situations: opsigns and sonsigns. Normally an image is a link in a chain. You see a situation, you understand it, someone acts, the story moves. A flickering light in a thriller means the fuse box, means the killer, means run. Deleuze's argument is that a strain of postwar cinema cut that circuit. Perception stopped discharging into action, and once it did, time was no longer something you measured by what happened next. You just felt it. Lynch and Alan Splet had been building the hardware for this since Eraserhead, where an enveloping low-frequency drone did the work dread usually needs a plot to do. FWWM turns it into a weapon. The roar in the Red Room and in the terror scenes is not information. It will not tell you who killed Laura Palmer. You already know who killed Laura Palmer.

Before it reaches Laura, the film spends its first long stretch taking apart its own genre. Agent Desmond goes to Deer Meadow to investigate a murdered teenage girl and then simply disappears out of the movie. The killer is never caught. Cooper has visions, and the most he can do with them is predict: another girl will die. This is Deleuze's crisis of the action-image happening in front of you, and Lynch stages it with real nerve. He takes the detective, the figure whose entire job is to convert perception into decisive action, and demotes him to a man who sees clearly and changes nothing. Deleuze's word for that figure is the seer, the voyant, and it is the hinge on which his two great categories turn: cinema of people who act, and cinema of people who can only witness. Deer Meadow is where the switch gets thrown. It looks like Twin Peaks with the warmth surgically removed, a place that has stopped working as a stage for action and become a fragment of bad feeling with streets in it. Deleuze calls that an any-space-whatever, a space that serves the affect instead of the plot.

Then Laura, and the face. Sheryl Lee was originally hired to be a corpse wrapped in plastic, a premise, a puzzle piece. The film's central act is to give the puzzle piece a face and then refuse to cut away from it. Deleuze reads the close-up as an affection-image, feeling that registers with nowhere to go, and he separates two kinds. There is the face that reflects, held still around one quality. And there is the face where small movements accumulate toward a threshold, a face in the act of becoming something. Lee's is the second kind almost throughout, which is why the performance is close to unbearable: so much of it lives in her eyes that you can watch a decision to survive and a decision to die cross the same shot. Bergman's Persona is the ancestor, the extreme close-up as a record of psychic fracture with identities bleeding between women. Lynch widens the bleed. Laura, Donna and Teresa keep half-becoming one another.

Under the town, the slope. Deleuze borrows a category from literary naturalism for the cinema of pure appetite: the impulse-image, where a recognizable milieu turns out to be the thin upper layer of an originary world of drives. Lynch had found the move in Blue Velvet, dropping the camera to a victim's eye level as the placid surface peels. FWWM does not peel slowly. It starts you at the bottom and keeps you there while Laura goes down through cocaine, the lowlifes, the men and the money, along what Deleuze calls the line of slope, naturalism's irreversible descent to ruin. What saves this from being a morality cartoon about a wild girl is that the film never locates the appetite in her. The slope is being run through her. Abuse produces the drives and dissociation manages them, and the hunger belongs to whatever is using her body.

Which brings us to the doorway. Laura walks into a picture on her wall. A ring keeps returning and matters more than any clue. Deleuze's crystal-image is the point where the actual and the imagined can no longer be told apart, and the crystal has a seed: a small entrance through which an interior world starts to grow its own reality. Maya Deren wrote that grammar in Meshes of the Afternoon, looping dream-logic edits organized around charged objects, and Polanski hardened it in Repulsion, where hallucinated intrusions are filmed as literal events. What Lynch withholds is the convention that tells you where the dream stops. There is no waking frame, no it was only. That is not obscurity for its own sake. It is dissociation rendered accurately, because from inside the split there is no announcement. Cooper's visions work the same way, free-floating rather than anchored to any dated memory. The stuttering lamps and liminal dread come from Carnival of Souls, a cheap film Lynch mined for something sublime.

The invention is this. A murder mystery uses its victim as a premise, and the series had done exactly that for two seasons. Lynch went back and made the victim the subject of her own case, and to do it he had to break the case. That is what the Desmond prologue is for, and the uncaught killer, and the visions that arrive too late to help. Once the investigation can resolve nothing, the only thing left to attend to is Laura's time: the last week of a life, held at length, ending known in advance. Suspense is structurally impossible here. The film is better for it.

The Return in 2017 is unthinkable without this, and so is most of what we now call late Lynch, where duration and sound carry the load plot used to carry. The reappraisal took decades because viewers had to stop asking the film for answers before they could see what it was doing.

Watch the lights next time. They tell you in the first flicker that the apparatus of ordinary seeing is failing, and that the failure is where the truth is kept. The hard question the film leaves is not who killed her. It is what we are doing there at all, present at a week we cannot change. FWWM answers with the oldest and least fashionable thing cinema has. Someone should have been looking at her. Now someone is.