Ultimately, I view this space unto which I post interminable screeds about issues only occasionally and tangentially having to do with movie reviews and more often than not being little more than the gory scribblings of a man in decline, a rainbird of neurosis soaking the children like a grim Shamu at my own personal Sea World, the mind-frownies loosed by some puncture in my unripe psyche by an indifferent and eternally encroaching universe, to be a feel-good wellness blog. I aspire to sooth, and to get us to a kinder, gentler place, brain-wise. But I can’t help you realize that better and more Scandinavian version of yourself until I, with the same parochial steadfastness of a farmer harvesting a man-sized potato from the dirt and loam of his own formative emotional crises, have dug out a better version of me, first. So instead of further stultifying us all by doing the usual this week (reviewing a movie from the austere remove of my superciliousness, only even beginning to approach it intellectually after having reduced it through the same emotional withholding you’d expect from a personality-disordered parent to some neatly parameterized and coldly inert thing, taking all of these empathy precautions so the work will be rendered unspectacular to me and therefore more easily accosted by my various sarcasms) I’m going to analyze/opinionate about a film in real time. I think the kids call this blogging. Or live-Tweeting. Or eating Tide Pods. I’m going to write a review/analysis/whatever while watching the movie in question, is what I’m saying, so my takes will be a little less curated, a little more guts-and-nuts-based. That’s why this preamble is so hilariously overwritten – I’m trying to get all of the haughtiness out of my system before I start, so I can be reborn fresh as a newborn babe, a veritable Star Child of reconstituted purpose and form, freed from the violent constraints of evolutionary necessity after getting all Close Encounter’d by pure unfathomable unconstraint, just kind of rotating all naked and weird in the embryonic sac/spaceship of my second crack at existence. It’s going to be great.

(Also, to further deny myself the snark-inducing benefit of pre-knowledge I’m even going to specifically choose a movie that comes to us from some larger media entity, which I will also in no way familiarize myself with before watching the film. Goodbye, Cody? More like Goodbye, Pretensions. Let’s fucking boogie.)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

(I’m not even doing my usual theme/silly name-based organizational schema for this one – just plowing through this mother from start to finish. Also, I’m going to talk about things as they come with the assumption that you’ve already seen the movie.)

Opening Credits

This is some deliciously lo-fi shit, right here! If I didn’t already know what year Fire Walk came out in I wouldn’t even have to look it up because this is like if River of Grass had a headwound it refused to seek medical treatment for. It’s like jazz kitsch. It’s great! We’re getting this classy yet vaguely mournful arrangement over what I’m assuming is static, or as static always seems to represent in the other David Lynch works I’ve seen, the collected weight of all creation shitting itself in horror at the uselessness of its own being, indifferent in its loud decline to the lives caught in the riptide of its cosmological mourning, the whole haunting thing inevitably resolving into a scream that will never be heard in its fullest meaning because the impetus of its unloosed madness is the very same unending space through which it now tries in vain to escape from. So we’re off to a cheerful start. But really, that simple use of image and sound is so beautifully direct. It’s high art and banality not just blandly placed next to one another with a dinky title card that says “Postmodernism!” like a school project thrown together the morning it was due but rather informing one another, letting you know that one is not just a direct consequence of the other, but its own dark sister simply viewed through another lens. It’s like a balletic dip into hamburger grease. It’s like a student film but without the sweaty desperation of someone trying to justify film school. “Cerebral-and-searching-without-being-pretentious” is one of my favorite things. It’s so damn effective! The loss and longing of a borked television screen is like artisanal PB&J. Lynch, you’ve got me so far. Keep it coming, you big-haired freaky weirdo.

(Also, random aside: the cast for this movie apparently consists of every human who has ever lived or ever will live. A24 movies and their standard cast size of “the remaining survivors of a plane crash two weeks after landing in the Andes and one week after resorting to cannibalism” makes for the kind of lean and vicious fare we expect from everybody’s favorite budget-conscious doom-distributor, but there’s always something so appetizing about being teased a huge cast, because you get to go through the movie with the promise that every new scene might introduce a new character, or relationship, or just send the story in a direction you never expected. Unwieldy, or at least the appearance of the unwieldy, is fun.)

Opening Scenes

What the fuck. The film just delivered on the portent of its opening image with more urgency than a parent chasing their not-too-bright child into traffic. That salvo of image and sound was like a Mormon farmer’s nightmare guest-edited by Margaret Sixel. But this is also a perfect vertical slice of Lynchian horror: we get a television being smashed, a murder, a body floating in a river, an arrest being made on some idyllic countryside road but shot from a creepy dream-like low angle, children lining the windows of a school bus in the background and all of them just fucking wailing, and while all that is happening the frame is dominated by the incongruity of a prostitute placed against all of this surreal provincialism. The cruelty of the world is shown to you so unabashedly in the company of the hokey that it tickles even as it terrifies. All of it – the rapid-fire editing culminating in a cavernously-still wide-shot, the rot at the heart of Americana, the nightmare-logic of the blocking, the way in which darkness is constructed almost entirely from wholesome images, just rearranged into a milieu you never would have expected – is such a damned brilliant and unique way to unnerve the audience and plunge them immediately into your world. And there are people out there that don’t like David Lynch movies. Those barbarians.

(I want to say this introduction of Agent Desmond is like someone filmed the dream of, like, a mid-Westerner who knows what crime is intuitively but has never actually attempted to visualize it before so he’s only capable of generating images of iniquity through the building blocks of his charmingly pastoral life and the result is a conception of horror so superficially innocent but pulsating at the seams with implied meaning that it’s funny even as it terrifies with an uncanny kind of portent. Right off the bat Lynch is making me wonder about the relationship between what is supposed to be taken seriously and what isn’t. Like, I know what is serious and what isn’t, but how the two are supposed to relate, or if they’re just two parallel paths along what seems to be shaping up to be a supremely fucked up journey, is what is keeping my brain on its brain-toes.)

The Town, The Investigation

See, this is what confidence can do for you. We’re only a few minutes in but the descent into increasing weirdness is matched perfectly by an unerring confidence in the necessity of that weirdness. The girl in the red dress, the seemingly-doped-up police officer and secretary as they harass agents Desmond and Stanley – any of this could set off my “ugh, quirk-for-the-sake-of-quirk” alarm, but it all fits so well into the fabric of a world that’s already asserting itself as surreal and darkly humorous but also deadly serious in its human implications. After a completely random introduction, for instance, that girl in the red dress is explained (with perfect reasoning!) to be a vital instrument to solving the case. And the behavior of the almost drunkenly and certainly unnecessarily belligerent weirdos in the police station stresses how strange and difficult this town is probably going to be. It’s like Lynch crafts his worlds by just opening up the sense-memory part of his brain and letting it pour across the frame, but then – and this is the vital part – is brilliant enough to know when to redirect it, if only gently, towards the obligations of plot and tone and character. Characters originate as pools of feeling, but instead of being left that way in the name of lazy-indulgent “artistry” are built up into actual people who make perfect sense in context of the story he is telling.

Also, the low-budget aesthetic of this film is great. I don’t think I’ve seen a single establishing shot yet. Characters are just kind of in mid-conversation when we first see them; nobody ever walks in anywhere, they’re just kind of there, and on the rare occasion when someone does walk through a fucking door they step directly into their side of the master, which in turn almost always plunges immediately into shot-reverse-shot, with almost no frame-sharing. It’s like the whole movie could’ve been filmed industrial-style. And it’s not just the framing – even the script makes it ambiguous as to whether or not the lo-fi approach is due to budgetary constraints or is a stylistic choice. Agent Desmond demands all pertinent information on Theresa and the sheriff just immediately hands him a box, because apparently he has a container labeled “all pertinent information on Theresa” just sitting under his desk. It’s like something from a comedy sketch, but it’s all played so straight it just makes it seem like we’re descending deeper and deeper into dream logic, which of course is the precursor to nightmare logic. I don’t even know the name of this town yet but Lynch has managed to fully realize it in just a few scenes through a masterful weaving of the materially improbable but the psychologically consistent.

And everybody has such a practical and nonchalant response to the surreal, which only tightens up and makes even more credulous the otherwise insane parameters of this world. When we get to the diner (where we as usual just kind of are, without any of the walk-up establishing stuff) Jack (whoever the fuck that is!) tells Desmond and Stanley to ignore the electricity and go eat some damn food, all while blue-white terror lightning flashes around them. And then he turns to some guy fixing a lamp and tells him to hurry up, all while suddenly framed in this weird, nearly Dutch-angle shot while a homeless guy (whoever the fuck that is!) is randomly introduced into the scene and looks on wordlessly. And that waitress! She notes all these suspicious and grotesque things about Theresa the same way you’d note what her favorite color was or something. (Here’s the hackneyed version of this scene: we push in on Agents Desmond and Stanley on one side of a booth and the waitress on the other while she recounts the month Theresa worked there, getting choked up, being reluctant to talk, having to be gently encouraged by the boys to keep going. They thank her for her time and being willing to open herself up to such a traumatic memory while she nods, gulps down tears. But in Lynch-ville? Fucking nooooope. In Lynch-ville the waitress just sports a smug and almost supercilious smirk – like she is intimately familiar with the terror that haunts this town, and likes it more than she does the agents – as she matter-of-fact-ly describes yet another instance of reality decaying to madness.) This whole sequence reminds me of the scene in Drive when Ryan Gosling’s character marches into the dressing room of a strip club and threatens to hammer a bullet into some dude’s skull. Instead of giving us the response we expect from the various assembled strippers – ugly naked chaos as the girls run screaming for the exit, the obligatory handheld shaky-cam in case the whole thing wasn’t blandly visceral enough for you – we just get the girls staying put in the background, silent and awkward, like they’ve seen this kind of shit before and understand that it’s better to just wait it out. The emotion of the scene in both cases veers in a direction you’d never expect but makes perfect sense in the context of the film’s tone. I love this movie.

(Random aside: who the fuck was that French girl next to the old dude in the diner? I know that “random quirk!” will be a popular explanation but with what we’ve seen from Lynch’s imagination so far, how it teems with logical weirdness, he probably had a whole canon fleshed out for them. Like how in Tarantino’s screenplays he gives names and elaborate descriptions to throwaway henchmen. Love of characters, flavor of the world, I can dig it!)

Well, we’re finally getting establishing shots, and they’re creepy as hell. And equally as important, they do nothing to alleviate the tremendous feeling of being hermetically sealed off from reality, grace, redemption, anything not actively trying to worm its way into your skull and feast upon your dendrites if not your memories, etc. If anything, by showing that outside of the characters’ immediate unease there is only more unease these wider shots increase the feeling of isolation. There’s nothing out there except more of the same nothing. No pickup shots of people piling into the stands for a Friday night football game, no old timers sitting on folding chairs in front of the gas station… space is being meekly presented to highlight confinement, and to remind us that what the town is represents a steeper intellectual hill to climb than the quotidian things it may contain. This place is way beyond housing people. It’s set its sights higher, or maybe lower.

(Random aside: Harry Dean Stanton’s face acting is honestly the best I’ve ever seen. That moment where his whole grizzled gizzard warbles unattractively before he starts explaining himself to Agent Desmond is so expressive they probably could have just cut the part where he starts talking because everything that needs to be conveyed has already been gotten across courtesy of that weathered jelly-mug of his.)

(Bonus random aside: David Lynch checking his watch after Kyle MacLachlan tells him the time and date might be my favorite visual gag in a while, from this, a movie about people investigating a coke addict whose skull got bashed in and also hell is probably real. It’s just such a perfect moment of quiet comedy that has literally no reason to be included but just works with the established tone. But even this seeming irreverence helps to illustrate a deeper point: Lynch (the director) is operating with, like, the quantum version of the Homer Simpson Sliding Scale of Intelligence. Lynch (the actor) is comic relief in the first scenes we see him in, but now he is yielding the uncanny baton to Kyle MacLachlan, who barrels into the film for the first time acting even stranger. Now, this would normally be a, let’s say Newtonian example of the Sliding Scale, except that Lynch’s character keeps slipping, like a contrapuntal bass player, these goofy affectations of his into the beats between Kyle MacLachlan’s own stream of strangeness. So instead of Lynch’s character simply getting smarter as necessary and becoming the straight man to accommodate MacLachlan’s wag – which he does to some extent – he also continues to exist on a parallel plane in which he has remained the comic relief. Lynch can bend even a basic comedy formula to the will of his vision.

(Also-also, this scene further establishes that to work at Lynch’s version of the FBI on Lynch’s version of planet Earth it’s pretty much mandatory that you be fucking nuts, which of course like all of his other seemingly-random weirdness has beautifully satisfying logic and justification behind it, because you need that oblique approach forever kicking your vision and perception out of the comforts of the usual context and into the realm of the uncanny in order to make sense of the kind of horror you’ll be investigating. This is masterful tonal balance and world-building. Oops, my aside became a paragraph-and-a-half. Sue me, it’s Silly Sunday and I have two hours to get this done!)

(Actual aside: I like how the FBI’s response to Agent Desmond disappearing is to send an even stranger agent out there, like maybe his brain might be able to withstand the concentrated waves of pure creepiness coming off the town better than the guy before him.)

One Year Later

Let’s take a minute to appreciate how masterful cultivation of tone and place can elevate even quotidian storytelling devices into the hell-flushed glare of narrative urgency. This introduction of a new town in which the grim is going to grow once more into a material and hungry darkness obviously apes the opening credits from the first murder-town, as we are once again introduced to a location in the story via heartbreaking music played incongruously over seemingly meh imagery. But instead of this being a mindless and eye-roll-inducing application of Storytelling 101 principles (“it’s like poetry, it rhymes!”) it feels more like we’re turning to another chapter in an anthology on the collapse of reality, one in which the decaying bits of the first story, so overwhelmingly monolithic in their own context, will barely register as more than some flavor and context sprinkled into this, the main course. There’s no “oh, they’re doing a thing, how cute” moment because the film has done such a great job cultivating feelings of doom in its opening act that this repetition just feels like another revolution down the spiral staircase to whatever hellzone Lynch is taking us to. Things don’t exist in a vacuum, is what I’m saying; they are informed by the quality of the material around them. Flank a standard storytelling device with pitch-perfect tone and rich characterization and that storytelling device just feels better by virtue of its august-ass company.

(Another huge aside: I love how Lynch doesn’t just throw some inarguable conception of grim and evil at you, but rather shows the rot forever present at the corners of our chosen and safer reality manifesting itself in ways that seem at times so far afield that you can’t help but laugh even as the sadness and longing inherent in that strangeness break your heart; so many exchanges in this movie feel like a conquered people trying to commiserate but are only able to do so through some demeaning language forced upon them by their new foreign sovereign – you may laugh at the dumb lilt of how they’re talking but some deeper and more human part of your mind can’t stop lamenting the tragedy of what they’re trying to say, and how they continue failing to say it. Case in point: the conversation between Laura and her man-friend who has possibly the blankest expression I’ve ever seen on anything that wasn’t about to be thrown down on my plate next to a side of asparagus and a baked potato. Their conversation includes multiple turkey references, with Dead-Eyes informing Laura, as if this information were vital to know and steeped in romantic necessity, that turkeys are dumb as hell, to which Laura, who I’m pretty sure gets fucking murdered, responds by tearfully gobbling. And, oh yeah, this constitutes the most heartfelt exchange seen at any point in the movie so far. We are being reminded of the surreal logic that governs these conversations, laughing at the characters’ terribly stupid attempts to express themselves against a creeping horror that defies explanation, and also getting our hearts broken at how helpless but still yearning they all are. Honestly, David Lynch’s understanding of tone is some of the best I’ve ever seen. He weaves in so many different affectations into a scene without ever disrupting the arc of the through-line, giving you multiple ways to appreciate what is being rendered and prioritizing none of them.)

Dinner at the Palmer’s

 All of these performances are great. It’s not just Lynch’s direction or the script but the amazing corral of actors he’s assembled that makes this film so compelling. The helplessness of Laura Palmer’s mom but the uniquely-her way in which she responds to that helplessness – how she never looks directly at what’s happening, and has this narrowness to her gaze that superficially resembles disapproval until you realize it’s her trying to shutter her vision against cruelties both domestic and otherworldly. Then there’s the psychotic faux-concern of the abusive father, who is terrifying, but who softens and laments believably during those moments of clarity when I assume he’s not being possessed (huge The Shining vibes, here); the best friend character (Donna? let’s go with Donna) and her attempts to combat the increasing insanity (Laura’s drug use, hell-demons) around town with nearly weaponized earnestness, even as she herself is clearly overwhelmed and terrified at what is going on. Really, every time the movie introduces another benchmark of crazy it seems to always masterfully match it with an equally human response, and in doing so keeps the film from spiraling off into too much indulgent, unevocative weirdness. It kind of reminds me of that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street when Belfort and his wife are arguing and it’s all cocaine pillows and butt candles and tee-hee aren’t the rich boorish and tiresome and then Belfort just punches her in the stomach and drops her to the ground and whatever incipient grin was working its way across your features now seems like evidence that you’re complicit in Belfort’s crimes and you feel terrible that you’ve been exposed as no better than him.

(Basically, this: complete dedication to a bit on behalf of actors, in large parts and small, allow everything from rapid to gradual transitions of tone to happen butter-smooth and completely explicable. Just like Jacques seeming to be little more than some fat dude who runs the local roadhouse until he’s talking to Bobby on the phone and the camera just keeps pushing in on him in direct relation to how his affect is changing to something nearly mad. It’s done with such unwavering confidence by both the actor and the director that whatever impulse you may have to giggle at fat man gettin’ weird is washed away and replaced with terrified incredulousness at what you’re seeing.)

Sound and Structure

(An actual aside: Going back to Eraserhead Lynch’s sound design has always been fantastic. During moments of rising tension the use of sound isn’t just for stingers – although it’s definitely used for that, too – it’s to give form to something that he seems to feel can’t be captured in images, like a difficult emotion or the presence of something too otherworldly to be reduced to simple material form. It’s goddamn creepy as hell, and might be my favorite part of the David Lynch Film Terror Experience.)

Also, I want to talk structure. Commentary on the actual, physical form of this movie has been barking around the gooier parts of my brain from the first couple of scenes but I have enough ammunition now to write about it with something vaguely approximating intelligence: so I know that Fire Walk comes from a TV show, a medium which tends to be bigger on subplots and details than features because, well, they have the time. Typically a film adaptation of a television show (like, say, Serenity, or really any of the Star Trek movies) simply drops the various accoutrements of serialized storytelling and reorganizes itself into a monolithic rendition of Movie, not so much because it’s ashamed of its small-screen origins but because it can’t think of any way to include those uniquely-television details in the scope of a large-screen version of the story. But this movie really synthesizes the prerogatives of TV (more subplots, more characters, less urgency) with the prerogatives of film (lean and focused, go, go, go, titties and explosions) better than I’ve ever seen. We keep getting glorified (and massively-appreciated) flavor text in the form of the characters who populate Twin Peaks, whose actions and responses to the events around them help to contextualize and enrich Laura’s plight but aren’t really essential to progressing the story – but whenever we’ve spent enough time with them and might be starting to impede the tick-tick-tick obligations of cinematic storytelling we jump right back to the focused horror of Laura’s descent into the grips of the creature that’s stalking her. Just like his use of tone and sound design Lynch can walk right up to a cliff labeled “indulgence” and just kind of soft-shoe on the edge without falling over.

(An aside: just like Laura’s turkey conversation with Very-Handsome-Man-It’s-Just-Too-Bad-His-Eyes-Are-The-Expressway-To-Hell is the most unabashedly human interaction in the movie, her walking into the roadhouse is the most unabashed acknowledgement of how the real world and the monstrous one exist concurrently in this town. That blue sourceless light against the red curtain background separates the singer from not just the rest of the roadhouse but fucking reality itself and makes you wonder if anyone besides Laura can see or hear her. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking moment of pure isolation rendered in striking visuals and sound, like redemption and grace do exist but are at this point in the story so far out of Laura’s grasp that she can never return to their comforts no matter how hard she swims against the tide. The angels aren’t singing her tribute, they’re singing her swan song and she knows it. And then to have Donna there to bear witness to the whole thing, to understand simply through the bonds of friendship what is happening even if she can’t see what Laura can see, and to try to, so loyally and stubbornly, pull her friend out of it… a masterclass in how overwhelmed humanity, action in the face of insurmountable odds, is beautiful because of how pathetic it ultimately is.)

Gettin’ Towards the End

We shouldn’t do this movie the injustice of getting bogged down in the obvious “this all represents the rot at the center of the idyllic, white, mid-Western existence!” analysis. I mean, sure, that works just fine as far as thesis statements go, and lord knows I’d over-analyze oatmeal if someone would pay me to, but it’s the texture of how this story is unfolding that’s more important than some vague “what it all means” approach. It’s the classical horror elements (like the point-of-view camera angle of Laura investigating her house for signs of Bob, a trick that’s repeated when she ventures into the dream room later in the film); the way in which a roadhouse just transforms from one end to the other, through perfect dream logic, into a rendition of hell whose lo-fi nature would both tickle and terrify Rudy Ray Moore; the way in which the actors know exactly where the dial should be set at any given moment – a bland and hokey mid-Westerner, or literal demon, or mid-Westerner who isn’t a demon but is still kind of a dick – and exactly how to calibrate mid-scene or mid-monologue to maximize the feeling of dread, or of just plain sadness at how there’s no escape from this town; those moments of clarity when the evil disappears and suddenly they’re all just people again (Laura snapping out of her fugue state when she sees Donna getting undressed and yelling at Jacques to rescue her and suddenly even Jacques has returned to earth and is a desperate and helpless human again). It’s these discreet moments that give the movie its impact, not trying to gauge from their collective inclusion what the thrust of the movie is “supposed” to be. I’d rather enjoy the moments then try to sew them together, Human Centipede-style, into some kind of easily-digested one-sentence summation. A story isn’t what it’s about so much as it’s about how it’s about it (Ebert!) and this movie knows exactly how it’s about what it’s about.

(An aside: Bob looks like if an elderly Adam Driver was extremely proud of the fact that he was a pedophile. Maybe a dash of Waluigi in there, too.)

Gasp! A complaint! It’s fairly minor but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bitch about something over the course of several thousand words. Also, I’m going to draw a parallel to my Ten Things I Hate About You essay in order to facilitate said bitching, because I paid good money for this website and I can do whatever I want with it. In the latter parts of both films, the silly teen comedy and the demon-sexed nightmare-hellscape, as we focus more and more on our main narratives the story loses a little bit of steam. This isn’t because the storytelling gets noticeably worse (Ray Wise is still phenomenal in what is essentially a dual role, and Laura’s descent certainly deserves the focus that it receives) but because we lose what has been established at this point to be an essential facet of each film: community. When I saw Laura’s mom smoking apathetically and staring into the middle distance the morning after Leland tried to rape his own daughter I thought to myself “oh, right, the fascinating supporting characters whose responses to the chaos adds so much more texture to the film and who themselves have been caught in the vortex that is pulling Laura under, thereby constituting a significant part of the movie’s impact. I remember them.” Just like in Ten Things it’s like Lynch did such a good job establishing the world in question that when he hones in on our primaries for the home stretch there’s some momentum-by-association that feels drained from the narrative. At the point where most films are heating up it almost feels like both this movie and Ten Things slow down and become, it pains me to say, fairly rote. Now there’s still so much goodwill built up by this point, so much, let’s call it narrative inertia, that we get across the finish line safely and satisfactorily, but it’s interesting how much a movie can lean on its supporting structure to give its main story greater momentum.

(Final aside: forget demons for a second, it’s so damn sad how everybody in town just uses everybody else. Laura is cheating on Bobby and only wants him for the drugs, Laura’s mom is completely apathetic as her husband abuses their daughter, Laura goes out with Potato Eyes (whose name is James I guess, but he’ll always be Potato Buster, Charisma Failure to me) because she wants protection from Bob. The rot at the center of Americana is Lynch’s focus in a lot of his movies, but he’s too smart to always render it as a slow zoom towards insects in the grass like in Blue Velvet. In this movie we get the visceral stuff (drugs, rape, backroom demon dancing), sure, but just as horrifying is how pretty much everybody (except for Donna, who is a treasure) is in it entirely for themselves, and can’t even fathom not selfishly sacrificing someone else to achieve their own end. Horror comes in a lot of different forms, eh?)

One last bitchy bitch: the only part of the story that doesn’t really work for me are the emotional moments with Laura, which is unfortunate because 1) she’s the main fucking character and 2) those moments become increasingly frequent as we go along. This could of course be Lynch trying to make his protagonist’s impending death as moving as possible by redoubling her moments of humanity, to stress that she’s fighting like hell to remain herself as all of this vileness rises to her neck, and then above her head, and that these moments of unabashed, teenage-drama-esque emotionality are deliberately-placed to, if only momentarily, break through the challenging and unrelatable elements of the story and bring us all back to a more human place, to be reminded that a life is at stake, but it just seems incongruous. In fact, going back to how I said Lynch dances on the edge of tonal inconsistency and always makes it work, this seems like the only part of the movie where it doesn’t. I’m all for giving Laura as much humanity as possible, unburdened by the director’s love of the ironic, but it just doesn’t seem to quite fit with what he’s going for. There are multiple moments when I expected her to yell “you just don’t understand me, dad!” and then run away while the theme song to Dawson’s Creek starts to play.

(OK, one more aside: after a certain point in the movie pretty much every scene between Leland and Laura is just them both screaming and making crazy faces. On the one hand, he’s a demon now so, sure, but on the other I’d be lying if I didn’t giggle a little at their relationship devolving into them trying to out roar each other.)

The End

I imagine that room with the little dude would have more relevance if I knew anything about the television show this movie comes from. All I know is that it sucks that Laura is apparently stuck there now (hell, purgatory?) and I’m not going to let little details like the inclusion of fairly inexplicable characters (who was that dude trying to save Laura at the very end? Why is Kyle McLachlan also in low-budget hell?) stop me from loving the hell out of this movie. Maybe I’ll check out the show, because damn.