Subject: PEAKS: LAURA'S EVEN BETTER ALIVE - Buffalo News FWWM Review PART II From: v075q5fr@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Scott J Gorcey) Date: 1992-09-06, 15:15 Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks (Part One is under the subject heading: TWIN PEAKS AWAKENS THE MOVIE LOVER IN ALL OF US - Buffalo News FWWM Review) It's both frightening and beautiful. That's at the end when Lynch's movie means business and tess us of the night that led to the murder of TV's favorite corporse, Laura Palmer. That it is also hilariously funny at the beginning should come as no surprise - Lynch himself plays a deaf FBI man who shouts all the time; Kyle MacLachlan, as agent Dale Cooper, keeps running back and forth trying to watch his own image on a building's security monitor, as if he could somehow be in two places at once. And then, in one frozen, glorious Margitte moment, he DOES (Magritte-like imagery abounds in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.") The very opening of the movie announces "This isn't TV - not by a long shot." The flaky blue field that you see behind the credits turns out to be a TV screen on which we're seeing "snow." The image ends with a lance crashing through the TV and a cut to shrieking, piercing, murderous darkness. That is the movie in digest form. At 2 and a half hours, it is too long. No argument therre. But then, its length contributes to its strange, dreamlike languor. And yet, for all of its dreaminess, there is inside "Twin Peaks" the movie a horror story that may have an emotional resonance far beyond anything Lynch has done since "The Elephant Man." Underneath all the surreal hacking around, this is the story of a young teenage girl who is endlessly falling into a pit of drugs, incest and degradation. Incredibly, the tale is moving. It isn't just drenched in that knowing, post-modern irony that turns everything into a joke: it is wild and sexy and finally, very sad. And it establishes Sheryl Lee as a superb young actress. On the TV show, she was wrapped up in a plastic tarp and stuffed into the odd flashback. She may be a good decade beyond the age she's playing, but in the movie she gives a full performance, an erotic, decadent, traumatized, terror-stricken performance. She's another actress entirely from what we saw on TV. What Lynch has done in "Twin Peaks," the movie, is to wrench father- daughter incest and child murder out of the hands of Oprah and the TV movie of the week and put it back into the incoherent horrors of the collective unconscious where it belongs. "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" is so many lightyears beyond what is usually acceptable as a movie in the local malls that it might as well come from an alternative universe. It's a movie in which a fat epicene drug dealer tells a stoned-out Laura Palmer, "I am the Great Went," and she answers, "I am the Muffin." It's a movie in which its authors made up a word ("garabazonia" - I think [sic - garmonbozia]) to mean "your pain and sorrow." It's a tragicomic pop dream universe with its own languages that is bounded by pain and sorrow on all sides. It has true junk poetry. It couldn't possibly bear less resemblance to the corrupt film-cult horseplay of Brian DePalma's "Raising Cain" and the rote slasher denouments of the summer's thrillers. Now that the film culture era ushered in by Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" has turned into a squabbling, trivial and declining babble of tedious but film-savvy filmmakers and critics, the great figures in the ascending generation of American movies seem to be the ones who have avoided the corruptions of film culture all together - Lynch, and Tim Burton (who both come from art school) and Ron Shelton (who came from the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles). They create a film and narrative film language of their own, not one that's been patched together out of overly familiar cinematic dialects. And of those members of the film culture generations who HAVE emerged from film school, the powerful ones have reasons for being powerful that transcend it [their roots in traditional film] - Oliver Stone has Vietnam and Spike Lee is black, two tragically good reasons in America for not letting film savvy overwhelm what Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life." "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" is a film that asks for trouble in many many ways - its length, its origins in a TV phenomenon, its radical dislocation from almost everything else that you can see in movie theaters. And trouble it got - right from the beginning, when its distributors delayed screenings until the very last minute because it was too strange. And yet it seems to me one of the films of the year, and one of those rare movies that makes some people remember what they loved about the movies in the first place. II [Posted by Scott Gorcey]