When David Lynch cryptically revealed a few weeks ago that the much-maligned Twin Peaks movie prequel Fire Walk With Me was going to be an important touchstone for the 2017 series, it was cause for alarm for some. But, for me, it was reason for rejoicing and, then, some reminiscing. I consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool Twin Peaks fan, but, oddly, it was Fire Walk With Me and not the actual television show that was my first entry point into the series. When the movie came out at the tail end of summer 1992, I’d never seen a single episode of the original ’90 to ’91 Twin Peaks ABC run. I’d heard rumors, of course, murmurings from friends and relatives about this groundbreaking new show featuring a Log Lady, a Man From Another Place, a Black Lodge and a White Lodge, the occasional irritable llama traipsing through scenes. It sounded right up my alley, actually.
At the time, though, I was much too distracted for network television. I was trapped in suburban Virginia under the yoke of a pre-college curriculum, immersed in AP classes I wouldn’t really need for the New York City film school I ended up attending. Every spare moment I had was sacrificed to the cinematic medium—sweeping popcorn and congealed Gummy Worms from the floors of the local multiplex where I worked or traveling to D.C. art house theatres on the weekends to see “the good movies.” I was a film snob in training, and my dating life was accordingly nil. At that point, there was no such thing as Prestige TV, Peak TV or even Must-See TV. There was no Netflix and Chill. Except for Wild at Heart, which I’d seen on my hometown Diet Coke-bombed multiplex screen, I’d watched all the pre-Peaks Lynch film essentials (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man) on a bulky 4:3 cathode ray monstrosity attached to a clunky VHS machine. That was as far as I’d gotten with David Lynch on TV.
It wasn’t until late one August night in 1992 during my first summer after college that I finally discovered the mythology of Laura Palmer ass-backwards and out of order (though chronologically correct!). Teresa Banks (not Laura) was the first dead girl wrapped in plastic I would meet. I wasn’t unlocking the secret diary pages of Laura’s troubled past week-to-week the way most everyone else in the country had. I was meeting her un-cut and uncensored on the big screen, in relation to her dead doppelganger, Teresa. I also happened to be meeting her for the first time on an acid-fueled movie date with my summer girlfriend, the first and only time I ever tried LSD.
DISCLAIMER: Anyone who’s seen a David Lynch movie KNOWS that you don’t need to take hallucinogens to appreciate a David Lynch movie. The man may be the last filmmaker on Earth who requires recreational drug accompaniment. Lynch movies are the trip in and of itself, awash in sublime sensory overload. The dense, spooky soundtracks. The haunting, indelible visuals. The heightened emotions, absurd behaviors, and weird narrative strands sprung entirely from dream logic. Lynch is the LSD; he does the hallucinating for you. You can be stone cold sober, put on Eraserhead in the middle of the afternoon and still experience something close to a brown acid freak-out on your couch.
So why choose Fire Walk With Me for my first and only dance with lysergic acid diethylamide? Truth be told, it was more of a serendipitous accident than a well-deliberated plan. My girlfriend at the time was a weekend raver. It wasn’t uncommon for her to have a few smiley face tabs or Ecstasy pills bouncing next to the Chapstick at the bottom of her purse. She definitely came with some Laura Palmer parallels. Platinum blonde hair. Wise beyond her years. Secrets swirling furiously around her and hints of trauma in her past. There was the recreational drug use, and, less importantly, the fact that her name also ended in an “a.” She may not have been the literal homecoming queen, but, at the time, she was definitely my suburban hometown’s preeminent goth/rave princess. I’d nurtured a mad crush on her in high school, one which had never developed past the fumbling-for-words-while-passing-her-at-the-locker stage.
But that summer after my freshman year of college my luck suddenly changed. The first week home in Virginia, I got a call from a female friend (different story, different high school crush, no Lynch connection). She said she’d heard rumors that ******a really liked me, was also home for the summer from the University of Virginia and gave me her number. I’d lived in New York City for a year and, apparently, earned some degree of interest and mystery to her during the time. “New York. Peter Gatien. The Limelight. They have great raves, right?” I wasn’t about to spoil the charade and tell her that I’d spent most of my time in New York that first year watching art house movies at the Angelika and eating my weight in Cozy Burgers. After many hours of pacing (and perhaps some murmuring into a handheld tape recorder), I finally made the fateful, nerve-wracking call. One very awkward telephone conversation turned into an entire summer of romantic nights. Up until that late August night, they were mostly chemical-free.
We were nowhere near Barstow when the drugs began to take hold, but somewhere around “Get lost, Bobby.” It was about the 38-minute mark of Fire Walk With Me, a few minutes into the Laura’s Final Days portion. Lanky, leather-jacketed Bobby Briggs approaches Laura Palmer on the high school quad and scolds her for disappearing on him. Laura dryly jokes that she was standing right behind him but he was too dumb to turn around. Bobby persists, grabs her by the arm, demands to know who she was with (James, naturally). Laura tells Bobby to “get lost,” and in that moment something very strange happens to her lips. They slowed down, WAAAY DOWN, as if the film’s soundtrack were suddenly out of sync with the picture. But, really, it was me that was out of sync. I watched nervously as Laura continued to stare Bobby into submission with a vague tilt of the head, a lost-in-the-ether smile, a simple “Come on, Bobby.” In that moment, Lynch’s troubled homecoming queen hadn’t just calmed Bobby Briggs; she’d hypnotized me.
From then until the end of the movie, I was riveted to the screen, soldered to my seat. Thanks to LSD’s nifty perception-distorting properties, the usual ironic distance between the projected image and myself collapsed. I became Laura Palmer. For a number of scenes, it felt like I’d actually entered Laura’s body, the same way that opportunistic killer Bob hop-scotches the souls of his fleshy hosts. When Laura later finds Bob in her bedroom and runs out of the house to see her father, Leland, emerge, I experienced her world-shattering revelation as if it were my own. When Laura and Leland are accosted by the One Armed Man, his shouting and Leland’s convertible engine revving to an unbearable fever pitch, I literally wanted to jump out of my/Laura’s skin. Don’t even get me started on The Pink Room scene: the strobing red lights, the sleazy PDAs, the boozy jazz cranked so loud that it drowns out the dialogue and necessitates subtitles that, even in my native tongue, didn’t make much sense (“Welcome to Canada. Don’t expect a turkey dog here.”) Try as I might, I couldn’t get a handle on who was piloting this very frightening, very rickety alternate reality ship. Was it the acid, the movie, my subconscious? Was it Laura Palmer or David Lynch? And what was ******a, my girlfriend and movie/trip companion, thinking about all of this?
If I was the sort of reprobate who talks during movies, I probably would’ve leaned over and asked. But, by that point, I couldn’t form anything resembling human speech. I was too busy seeing angels. First, the hazy ones superimposed behind Laura’s head in the Black Lodge. Then, the literal ones floating above the front row theatre seats. The Camus-quoting non-believer in me didn’t know what to make of it. This was definitely cause for existential concern. Were the angels really there or just my residual mental projections? Was I going to turn into one of those crazy people on acid who routinely experience religious epiphanies? What was going on here? Did David Lynch shoot this damned thing in CherubVision 3D?!
Years later, during a second sober viewing in higher definition, I confirmed that the hazy angels were indeed present onscreen in two dimensions. This gave the pragmatic skeptic in me no end of relief. At the time, it didn’t stop me from chattering like a crackpot Descartes on the ride home from the movie. Suddenly, I was consumed with the fear that human life had no “base” (i.e., no objectively quantifiable metric for reality). When we arrived at ******a’s parents house and she left me for two minutes to go open the back door to her bedroom, time stretched out infinitely like warm saltwater taffy. To this day, I’ve never felt more alone in the world than in those few short moments. Things got trickier when ******a introduced me to her bathroom mirror. Pro Tip for LSD newbies: Stay away from mirrors unless you’re willing to get lost in the dark corners of your mind and the spotty landscape of your facial blemishes for up to three days.
Eventually, we made it back outside for a late-late night stroll around her suburban neighborhood. The LSD was finally beginning to wear off, but I was still fumbling like a slapstick lunatic through the revolving Doors of Perception (see also: newly re-emerged Agent Cooper trying to negotiate a casino entrance in Twin Peaks: The Return). I couldn’t put into words the worrisome premonition I was having—the fact that, as a budding writer and cineaste, I was likely to spend large chunks of my life observing events on screens rather than directly engaging in them. At that moment, in that cul-de-sac, it was a disturbing realization, and it felt like I had to make a major life decision right then and there. To ******a’s credit, she indulged my fevered pseudo-intellectualizing every step of the way, smiling and nodding and feeding me mentholated cigarettes. She was an Old Acid Pro by then and probably heard similar epiphanies at some D.C. rave the weekend prior. The only difference was that mine contained more Luis Buñuel references, less Skinny Puppy.
The next morning, still coming down from the dodgy chemicals coursing through my serotonin receptors, I lay in bed beside her but couldn’t go to sleep. I watched her snooze peacefully for a while, enjoying the quiet moment, just a guy watching his best girl dream after a night of too much cerebral frenzy. It wasn’t long before the cotton bed sheets tucked around her morphed into plastic wrapping. ******a was becoming Laura Palmer’s corpse right before my eyes, and suddenly I felt like leering Bob in her bedroom. The feeling freaked me out; I had to leave. I roused ******a awake, thanked her for the previous evening’s chemicals and companionship, offered up a forehead kiss and a hurried goodbye.
Driving home into the dawn, I was overcome with a strange combination of sadness and appreciation. No matter how much fun we’d had, my summer relationship with ******a always had a melancholy, after-the-fact quality. We were doomed to the vagaries of a long distance relationship in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era. A five-hour car ride, an eight hour Amtrak. No texts or emails. Only a cordless landline to hold us tight. She did come to visit me in New York once later that fall, but the weekend ended poorly. After an argument in Washington Square Park over the fact that we’d both slept with other people (the standard long-distance college relationship intrigue), ******a abandoned me again, this time to go meet a friend who just so happened to be in New York that same weekend. I assumed he was the “other guy,” but I knew for a fact he must be holding better drugs than me (at best, $5 worth of skunkweed). I was playing the naïve James to her world-weary Laura, this other guy her fun loving, coke-supplying Bobby. Afterwards, I didn’t take a sad highway motorcycle ride home to an haunting Angelo Badalamenti score. I stumbled back to my dorm room past the Washington Square sensimilla dealers (“Smoke, smoke, ses, ses!”), waited for her return the next morning, and joined her in a deathly quiet cab ride back to the airport.
Ever since that late August night, Twin Peaks has occupied a special place in my mind. Sometimes it’s a hopeful place, sometimes it’s just plain scary. For years I was hesitant to revisit the movie or play catch-up on the original series, in fear of angelic acid flashbacks or more goofy suburban cul-de-sac epiphanies. I finally caved in 2007 when they released the Twin Peaks: Definitive Edition Gold Box Set. I gorged all 30 golden episodes in the course of a week. As originally suspected, the show was right up my alley, infused with the same signature surrealistic David Lynch ambrosia (or garmonbozia?) I’d always appreciated on the big screen. I spooned a second giant helping again a few weeks ago in preparation for the new Showtime series. Fire Walk With Me still hits the hardest, of course. For me, it will always be what came first and, judging from what I’ve seen so far of Twin Peaks: The Return, a good portion of what’s to come after. When David Lynch says that you can watch the new episodes out of order if you like, I take his words literally. It worked for me the first go-round, but, this time, I’m leaving the hallucinogens to the younger folks. A fat slice of cherry pie, a steaming mug of damn good coffee and eighteen hours of pure, streaming un-cut Lynch is all the psychedelics I need.
POST-SCRIPT: In case you’re worried about what happened to ******a, my hometown
“Laura Palmer,” don’t be. Google informs me she’s not wrapped in plastic but holds a secure job in finance. She still lives in Virginia, has two cute towheaded children, and is married to an old elementary school chum of mine who used to go by the name “Buddy.” His real name? It’s James, appropriately.
MATT BURCH 