, ? Rochester City Paper 1992

A flick for the Lynch mob

by George Grella

The appearance of his latest movie should once again provide an occasion for the cultish adoration that greets all of David Lynch´s films, especially "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart." Since the new flick employs the same material that made his television show "Twin Peaks" a hit with certain viewers and reviewers, the Lynch mob will presumably greet it with the usual raves. Those fans who spent long nights discussing the murder of Laura Palmer, the fate of FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and the possible meanings of the Log Lady´s favorite objects should be ecstatic - many of their favorite characters appear in the new picture, escaping the censorious eye of the television networks to display the full glory of a hot R rating and the whole truth about that strange little town in the Northwest.

"Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" - the title, like everything else in the movie, means absolutely nothing - exhibits at great length all those elements of style and content that have made David Lynch the darling of the newspaper arts sections. For those with requisite patience - and I assume that includes his legions of admirers - the film constitutes something of a laboratory of Lynchism, the perfect place to study all the individual touches that have made the director so beloved among students of the cinema and practitioners of the higher sorts of theoretical inquiry. "Fire Walk With Me" seems so much a compendium that it may perhaps even serves as the director´s own comment on his work, a self conducted autopsy of his cinematic corpus.

His attitude towards character, for example, emerges in his treatment of the gallery of the grotesqueries who inhabit the dreary town of Twin Peaks, Oregon. Aside from a few superficial people who hang out around fro the full two hours and 14 minutes, most of the characters enter the picture for a while, then disappear, never to be heard from again; none of the others, of course, make any sense at all, but then, that´s the Lynch manner, which his admirers defend as droll and clever. Several characters who appear to inhabit the world of dream and hallucination recur throughout - a one-armed man (his allusion to "The Fugitive"). a midget dressed in red, a floating psychic FBI agent - and the dear old Log Lady, an embarrassing joke on TV, makes one wordless appearance.

The movie is what they call in the trade a prequel, which indicated just how similar to the traditional Hollywood schlockmeisters this supposed rebel really is; the plot purports to trace the events of the week leading up to the murder of Laura Palmer, whose floating corpse, fans will recall, initiated the television series. It takes a very long time to tell its very simple and generally unbearable story, mostly because of the endless empty digressions and glacial pacing of the alleged action. The action involves drugs, sex, incest, madness, violence, murder, and all the other aberrations we are accustomed to associating with small town life in this great country.

The manner in which the script and direction recount the succession of horrors, of course, constitutes the greatest source of Lynch´s appeal; the style of "Fire Walk With Me" is undeniably his. Probably his most striking mannerism is the resolutely deadpan treatment of every emotion, person and object in the film, and attitude that seeps into acting styles, camera movement, and character development - everything appears to possess exactly the same value and importance, so that the camera lingers on the least and most important objects with the same loving scrutiny. He likes to show a blank space, an empty room, or an unpopulated set for quite a while before anyone turns up in it or any action occurs, giving precisely the same attention to a blank wall as to the person who eventually moves in front of that wall. The love of emptiness and stasis, naturally results in a very long and very slow movie.

Monotone most appropriately describes the marriage of matter and manner that propels his films. The actors mostly utter their lines with a diligent avoidance of affect, maintaining a stolid demeanor and uttering any number of arch non sequiturs, giving almost any reaction an equal emphasis. In contrast to the general impassivity, the principals - Sheryl Lee as Laura and Ray Wise as her father - overact outrageously, exaggerating their statements, expressions, and responses hyperbolically for no discernible reason, making horrible grimaces or screaming uncontrollably when nothing appears to be happening. If almost everything else receives the same emotional focus, they exhibit no logical connection whatever between cause and effect, a technique both unsettling and repulsive.

Like a lot of cults, however, the Lynchites attribute mystical powers of purpose and design to their leader; as a result, any clumsiness turns into purposeful artlessness, and stupidity into deliberate parody of others or the self. It´s a wonderful way of achieving perfection, and Lynch has benefitted more from the convoluted logic of such critics than any living director. He always manages himself to mock his characters, actions, and scenes so that he can assume the invulnerable position of claiming that it´s all a joke anyway.

According to his supporters, Lynch is a daring film experimenter, making the sorts of movies no one else will attempt. In reality, his movies, as the very idea of a prequel suggests, belong solidly in the tried and true traditions of film making: they display nothing experimental in technique, but imply a dreadfully conservative sense of their art. Their cheap, garish drive-in color, their B-movie horror plots, their tiresome academism, and their general nihilism of theme suggest a reactionary thinker and artist; luckily, "Fire Walk With Me" is so amazingly terrible that only the pathetic cultists will take it seriously enough to think it can influence anyone else.