Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

by Maura McHugh

Twin Peaks is one of the first true Cult TV shows that thrived upon fan interest in the nascent Internet era, and colonised space on the World Wide Web from an early stage. Despite comprising only 30 episodes, the world of Twin Peaks has endured and fascinated its adherents long after the show was cancelled.

While Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is hugely indebted to the TV series, the film exists as a separate artefact and possesses its own unique identity. It functions as a prequel to the series, but ultimately it is a hymn to Laura Palmer, the fetishised mystery girl of the original series, who was only glimpsed in death through a kaleidoscope of epistolary details: diaries, video tapes, and second-hand recollections.

In this book I will indicate the themes that thread through some of David Lynch's films prior to Fire Walk With Me, and also touch upon the original TV series to offer context, but my primary interest is to explore and open up Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as a powerful account of trauma and a nuanced portrait of a complex young woman trying to hold together her shattered personality for the cosy community which wishes her to conform to their ideals and never speak of her torment, or their complicity in it.

Genres: Film

119 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2017

About the author

Maura McHugh is a writer living in Galway, Ireland.

She has a MA in Irish Gothic, and a MA in Screenwriting. Her short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in publications in America and Europe. She's published two collections - Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths - in the USA, and her new collection The Boughs Withered When I Told Them My Dreams was published by NewCon Press in 2019.

She's written several comic book series for companies like Dark Horse and IDW, and most recently Judge Anderson for 2000 AD, and is also a screenwriter, playwright, a critic, and has served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards. She's written a monograph on David Lynch's iconic film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, published by Electric Dreamhouse Press/PS Publishing, which was nominated for a 2018 British Fantasy Award for Best Non Fiction.

Her short story 'Bone Mother' was adapted into a short stop-motion animated film by Sylvie Trouvé and Dale Hayward of the See Creature animation company, produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s Animation Studio, and premiered at Festival Stop Motion in Montreal in September 2018.

Maura's sf rom-com radio play The Love of Small Appliances was broadcast on NearFM in Ireland in June 2019.

Reviews

[Jay Slayton-Joslin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really easy to get through which is a nice change from plenty of academic and books that look at works like this. Yeah, plenty of recapping and too many points. Also, and no fault to the author of this, but some of the stuff that comes from THE RETURN makes some of the points made a bit flimsy. Overall a nice reconstruction of FWWM and some points well made but I did feel a bit like I was reading a summary sprinkled with analysis. It was really strong comparing the tonality of the series to the film and did make some good points.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quick read that walks you through every scene of FWWM from start to finish (preceded by a largely redundant summary of David Lynch's career and an introduction to the TV show), while making occasional interpretive observations, most of which are pretty flimsy and superficial. It can be an exasperating book to read due to the high number of sloppy errors of phrasing, spelling, and (sometimes) accuracy: particularly embarrassing to find the author referring to Sherilyn Fenn (whose name she also misspells) as the actress who played Donna on the show.

[Steven West · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fire Walk With Me is one of the most distressing and subversive mainstream horror films of all time...but sadly this book is the equivalent of a "say what you see" audio commentary and prone to stating the obvious. It also has some howling errors, including citing "Sherilyn Fen" as the actress who played Donna in the TV series.

[Carlsagansghost · Rating 3 out of 5]

This nearly-100-page analysis of Fire Walk With Me is, ultimately, hugely disappointing. Published by PS Publishing, as part of their Midnight Movie Monograph series, this book is plagued with too many editing errors and too much plot regurgitation to be taken seriously as an important work of film criticism.

It's a shame, too, because Fire Walk With Me deserves better. There are a few bits of insightful commentary here, but McHugh spends most of her time simply telling what is happening in the film; the book reads more like a plot synopsis, or an extended episode re-cap than it does a deep-dive analysis.

There is a great book about Fire Walk With Me out there, waiting to be written, but unfortunately this is not it. I don't mean to be so critical of this work, it's just that I was expecting so much more. Probably because I admire Fire Walk With Me so damn much. It's my favorite thing from Lynch. I saw it when it was first in the theaters, and left the showing feeling as though I had just witnessed something utterly profound. I was absolutely dismayed to learn that the film was largely hated by fans of the show, and by the critics at the time.

It was at this moment, in the early '90s, that I realized something about Lynch and Twin Peaks. There are Lynch fans, and there are Twin Peaks fans, and the overlap of those two is not 100%. I approached Twin Peaks as a fan of Lynch, and found most of the original series to be underwhelming to say the least. For me, coming from the hardcore Lynch camp, Fire Walk With Me was like a breath of fresh air.

At least the film is getting this kind of treatment now, and I hope there is more of it to come in the future.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

While there are some fine insights, a whole lot of this book is dedicated to recycling standard Lynch biography and interview tropes as well as an albeit-detailed re-telling of shots and sequences of the film. For such a short book, though, it seems imperative to wage sustained but crisp arguments.

[Jon Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straightforward but thorough monograph consisting of context in terms of Lynch’s career and the TV show and a close reading of the film itself. Lynch himself would probably hate it for removing the mystery but it’s an excellent place to start for anyone wanting to delve into a deliberately awkward film.