Lau­ra longs for an angel: On Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

When Twin Peaks was the hottest show on tele­vi­sion, view­ers were obsessed with ​“Who killed Lau­ra Palmer?” (Sheryl Lee), but David Lynch was haunt­ed by imag­in­ing how she felt at the end of her life. Lau­ra is bur­dened with secrets about her his­to­ry of hav­ing repeat­ed­ly expe­ri­enced instances of child­hood sex­u­al assault. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me chron­i­cles the last week of her life, and she car­ries her lone­li­ness, and an intu­ition of her impend­ing death, like a saint who can sense their loom­ing martyrdom.

Lau­ra is inten­tion­al­ly eva­sive. She always has her defences up in order to pro­tect her­self, and all those around her, from what she has expe­ri­enced. Lee brought her to life with a nervy real­ism of frac­tured dra­matur­gy vis­i­ble in the emo­tions that are per­co­lat­ing in her many close-ups. Lau­ra is obvi­ous­ly vul­ner­a­ble, but when her friends approach her about what’s going on she has a ten­den­cy to deflect. It’s a strik­ing­ly lay­ered depic­tion of some­one in need of help, and she is com­pli­cat­ed fur­ther by the lens in which audi­ences came to know her as a dead girl on tele­vi­sion. Who was she real­ly under­neath all of this pain?

The ambi­ent threat of vio­lence rever­ber­ates as the low-hum­ming engine that pow­ers David Lynch’s ​“women in trou­ble” pic­tures, and that sin­is­ter, famil­iar dread is some­times used to make poignant moments of grace reg­is­ter more pow­er­ful­ly. We see the real Lau­ra Palmer exact­ly one time, and it is when she is stopped by the Log Lady (Cather­ine Coul­son) one som­bre evening, before enter­ing The Bang Bang Bar. Draped in a sear­ing red light, the Log Lady places her hand atop Laura’s fore­head the way a car­ing moth­er might for a sick child, and she tells her, ​“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The ten­der bows of inno­cence burn first, and the wind ris­es, and then all good­ness is in jeop­ardy.”. She’s need­ed to hear these words for so long and on instinct she lets her head fall slight­ly into the wait­ing palm of this woman who can actu­al­ly see her. Her eyes close, and she goes to an inno­cent place before all this start­ed to hap­pen, and for a moment she doesn’t feel doomed.

Lau­ra longs for an angel. Fire Walk with Me cod­i­fies her desire for rebirth to be like that of sym­bol­ic Chris­t­ian imagery, echo­ing con­cepts such as the clean­li­ness of the lamb. In the sharp red lights, and with the angu­lar back­ground imagery of the win­dows of the bar, Lau­ra is seen in what feels like a holy image rem­i­nis­cent of stained-glass paint­ings in church­es. When she places her hand over heart and looks at her­self reflect­ed in the win­dow of the bar, she is stunned by what she sees. The years of her life seem to flash before her, and there’s a star­tling look on her face that seems to be ask­ing, ​“how did I get here?”. It feels like this is the first time she has seen her­self in many years.

When she enters the Bang-Bang bar, Julee Cruise, that effer­ves­cent siren, whose voice hov­ers over the emo­tion­al val­leys of Twin Peaks, can be heard per­form­ing ​“Ques­tions in a World of Blue”, and she sings, ​“when did the day, with all this light, turn to night?”. Lau­ra cries, deeply, soul­ful­ly, from a new­ly exca­vat­ed place she had long since buried, but when reach­ing for a cig­a­rette, and with the com­fort­ing burn of nico­tine ema­nat­ing through­out her body, those healthy tears trans­form into the famil­iar sor­row she calls home.

To com­mem­o­rate the life and cre­ative lega­cy of the peer­less film­mak­er David Lynch, Lit­tle White Lies has brought togeth­er writ­ers and artists who loved him to cre­ate ​‘In Heav­en Every­thing Is Fine‘: a series cel­e­brat­ing his work. We asked par­tic­i­pants to respond to a Lynch project how­ev­er they saw fit – the results were haunt­ing, pro­found, and illuminating.