TWIN PEAKS: Fire Walk With Me Bluray Review
The original television broadcast of Twin Peaks in 1990 coincided with my recent interest in David Lynch films after renting a copy of Blue Velvet on video and the hiatus between the first and second seasons also saw the premiere of Wild At Heart in the cinema that launched a sudden and unexpected wave of Lynch mania that spread across both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Around the same time I first visited the United States, I landed in Los Angeles in January 1991. I couldn’t wait to buy a copy of the LA Reader so I could watch Lynch’s famous cartoon strip The World’s Angriest Dog with my own eyes!
Twin Peaks has recently been celebrating its 20th anniversary and is back in the public consciousness with current shows like Psych reuniting some of the original cast members in the Dual Spiers tribute episode revolving around a Laura-style copycat murder. Palmer. After the initial battle over distribution rights kept the second season from being released on DVD for years, CBS Paramount has now released the entire show in its David Lynch-approved Gold Box set and it’s even available to download on iTunes in HD. , which has caused talk of a potential Blu-ray edition to follow.
When I met my future wife, one of the first things we did was watch the original series, she was instantly hooked and we watched the pilot and all 29 straight episodes of Fire Walk With Me in the space of one. long weekend. To commemorate our recent wedding anniversary, we’ve just seen them all again for the first time in 5 years and it remains an amazing milestone in the annals of mainstream television history; all credit goes to creators Mark Frost and David Lynch, as few shows can claim to have been as groundbreaking or influential as Twin Peaks.
The show was canceled midway through the second season due to falling viewing figures once Laura Palmer’s killer was revealed and a series of weak, largely comedic subplots failed to fill the void despite a spectacular performance by Kenneth Welsh as ex-agent Cooper. partner and nemesis, Windom Earle and the introduction of a science fiction element with Project Blue Book’s investigations into the local mythology of the Black and White Lodge; There was still plenty to enjoy on the show and many questions were deliberately left unanswered in the final episode, which is very reminiscent of the finale of Patrick McGoohan’s seminal 1960s series The Prisoner.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was released theatrically during 1992; a year after the puzzling final episode left Agent Dale Cooper trapped inside the Black Lodge. The film serves as a prequel, as it examines the death of Killer Bob’s first victim, Teresa Banks, and the last 7 days of Laura Palmer’s life before her murder, providing psychological insight into her father Leland’s deranged mind, and a sequel as it clarifies Agent Cooper’s fate, expands on Dugpas’ backstory, and puts Laura’s troubled spirit to rest in the final moments. For many unfamiliar with David Lynch’s darker films, this came as a total shock, as the show’s hilarious supporting characters weren’t around to make up for the deeply disturbing secret that had always been at the heart of the series and in actually was booed by hostile audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. festival first.
There’s no getting away from the fact that there are some harrowing scenes in the film that tackle head-on the psychological pain of acknowledging that, stripped of all its fantastic mystery, this is the story of long-term physical abuse of a teenage girl. by her father and this is something that Lynch had felt he had long since forgotten at the end of the second season and was still worried about the character of Laura Palmer. Actress Sheryl Lee, who had only been able to play Laura in stylized flashbacks or her lookalike cousin Maddy on the TV show, wanted to honestly bring her to life and give her doomed existence an element of closure.
There are many Hitchcockian influences in Lynch’s work, the obvious one here being the name Maddy Ferguson, a nod to Vertigo in which Kim Novak had a dual role; she plays Madeleine, with whom Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) falls madly in love, as well as Judy, whom Scotty meets after witnessing Madeline’s apparent suicide and, while in a psychotic state, redesigns Judy in the image of Madeline. of Madeline, changing her hair and clothing to evoke the woman he is morbidly obsessed with.
When Hitch was asked if he could cut the “rape” scene from his 1964 film Marnie by contract writer Evan Hunter, who felt it would make Sean Connery’s character unsalvageable at least in the eyes of women From the public, Hitchcock refused to explain that the only reason he wanted to make the film in the first place is because of that scene and replaced Hunter with renowned feminist playwright Jay Presson Allen, who reworked the script keeping the scene from ” non-consensual sex” between Connery and Tippi Hedren. firmly in place. Similarly, I think the only reason Lynch wanted to do Twin Peaks was because of the abusive father-daughter relationship at the center of the story, and Fire Walk With Me is his way of emphasizing that point.
French distributor MK2’s Blu-ray release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me will never be the definitive edition, while the full 1080p picture quality is a marked improvement on the DVD version and the DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack it is solid and solves the problem. infamous mixing problem in the “Red Room” sequence that was subtitled due to the excessive volume of live club music; on the previous DVD release, the music had been turned down to the minimum so you could clearly hear all the dialogue, making the on-screen subtitles ridiculous.
I’m pleased to report that after nearly 25 years, the entire mystery has been released on a Blu-ray box set, including the coveted 90 minutes of deleted scenes! It’s not for the faint of heart and probably only true fans of Lynch’s oeuvre as a whole. Fire Walk With Me is a fitting footnote for a landmark television series and a cathartic launch and fitting close for a story steeped in the indignant suffering of its central character. , also marks the end of a period where, for a fleeting moment, David Lynch was the coolest cat on the planet.