375 - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, United States, 1992. Dir. David Lynch.
Laura Palmer is alive!
Well, at least for another year and seven days, anyway.
Meanwhile, another girl has died. In another town. A similar girl. In a similar town.
The case will be worked by an FBI agent. A similar agent. On a similar case.
David Lynch is an aural filmmaker. His soundscapes contribute significantly to the development of his universe.
The opening credits scroll to the steady strains of Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score. Buster Williams and David Tate lay down an acoustic bass and drum subfloor with Vinnie Bell's soft guitar floor above it. Badalamenti himself carpets the room with his keyboard so that Jim Hynes can fill the spaces with his mournfully muted trumpet.
Of course a muted trumpet. This is David Lynch.
The credits appear over an extreme close-up of a blurry, pulsating screen. Analog television noise. Pixel static. TV snow. A world without transmission. Loss of signal.
Before the credits finish we are already intoxicated.
We float on the raft of those sounds. Floating freely. Down the river. A lazy day. The lazy river. Letting it take us where it will. As the warm sun embraces our skin. Just listen.
We slowly pull back until the points of random dancing light come into focus, until we leave the TV frame, until . . .
Suddenly.
A crash. Some kind of heavy iron bar has crushed the top of the television. Sparks fly in light rays. A blinding white. Glass smash. Electric fireworks. A scream. Nooo!
Everything goes dark.
A body floats atop the shallow muddy river. In white plastic wrap. Cinched with twine like linked sausage. To the thrumming of those underpinning sounds. Undertone. A single title appears.
Teresa Banks.
Found near the banks. In Dear Meadow, Washington. Not far from Twin Peaks, Washington.
Cut to Portland, Oregon.
The first person we see is David Lynch himself. As Gordon Cole. Young. With swept-back hair with no white in it. Standing in profile before a mural. A mural which portrays what can already be seen outside the window. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest. A lake. Old woods. Cumulus clouds in a sky only half as blue as the water itself.
A land of Conifers. Pine. Spruce. Hemlock. Cedar. Cypress. Fir. Sequoia.
He stands before it like a small-station weather man about to deliver the forecast. Both ears plugged with oldstyle earbuds. He yells.
"Get! me! Agent! Chester! Desmond! out! in! Fargo!, North Dakota!"
Is he deaf?
His secretary is standing right there.
He is in his office. An empty wooden desk. An amber lamp. A black phone. An ashtray.
You had better believe these things are important in a David Lynch film.
To the left a red floor lamp. To the right a floor lamp with a green shade. On the black file cabinet a fourth lamp. On the brown file cabinet an old radio. All of the lamps are on and none of them are needed, as daylight smashes into the room from what may be an open window, shadowing his figure against the mural, as though his shadow is the one talking face to face with his secretary beneath the pine fascicles.
His secretary is a young brunette in a charcoal dress with a wide black belt and a pearl choker.
She exits the room.
Cut to Fargo, North Dakota.
A yellow school bus is parked in a grass field. Four men wearing khaki London Fog trench coats over black slacks stand in pattern, apprehending a man and two women, dressed like hookers, outside the school bus, the children inside screaming. No explanation is given as to why the apprehension is taking place outside a school bus. Get used to it. No explanation is given for many of David Lynch's narrative and symbolic choices, and that is what makes him such a delicious filmmaker.
FBI Special Agent Chester Desmond calls Jake to take over so that Chester can answer the car phone. The car honks to let you know the phone is ringing inside. He lowers the antenna to reduce static. The phone is large. Gordon calls him Chet. He yells at him. It is still hard to hear.
"OK, Gordon."
"OR! RE! GON!
Gordon tells Desmond about Theresa Banks. 17. He is assigning him to the case.
Cut to Portland.
Gordon's secretary brings him his coffee. Another secretary.
She is a slightly older dirty blonde in a purple dress with a gray print suit jacket and a pearl choker.
Two secretaries. Two pearl chokers.
Gordon tells Chester to meet him at "the private airport" in Portland. We see a shot of us flying. A single engine low-wing plane with two seats, single-file. The camera in the back looking over the pilot's shoulder, over the controls, out the window as we come in for a landing. For 7 seconds of screen time. Because we can.
Chester Desmond is played by Chris Isaak. The singer whose music sounds so much like it fits onto the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie. And in fact, it does. Three of his first hits came from the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1990 film Wild at Heart. Do you remember the song "Wicked Game"? It came out in 1989. It begins with a simple guitar, sounding like a steel guitar, a note, followed by a higher note, with Isaak's plaintive and anguished vocal. And the refrain, "No, I . . . don't want to fall in love . . . with you." There is the famous black-and-white music video featuring Isaak and model Helena Christensen walking on the beach. Before that one, David Lynch himself had directed a music video for the song.
Just seeing Isaak as Desmond step off the plane and approach Gordon on the tarmac makes you think of this song, even though the actual score has moved to jazz at that moment.
Kiefer Sutherland stands next to Cole, as Sam Stanley. From Spokane. Sam's the man who cracked the Whitman case. Congratulations.
A woman in a red dress named Lil the Dancer emerges from the hanger and does a strange choreography in front of the men.
Cole explains, yelling, "She's my mother's sister's girl."
Her appearance and posture are clues to the case. Because in this world you cannot just tell your fellow agents what they need to know. Even when alone. You must send them signals. Clues. This is Lynch's universe.
So later in the car Desmond explains it to Stanley.
Lil is wearing a sour face. Meaning: They are going to have problems with the local authorities.
She blinks both eyes. Meaning: Trouble higher up. The eyes of the local authority. Sheriff and deputy.
She had one hand in her pocket. Meaning: They are hiding something.
She made her other hand into a fist. Meaning: They are going to be belligerent.
She was walking in place. Meaning: There is going to be a lot of legwork involved.
Cole said she was his mother's sister's girl. Meaning: The uncle is missing. The sheriff's uncle is probably in prison!
The dress was altered. There is a different colored thread where it was taken in to fit her. Meaning: The tailored dress is our code for drugs.
A blue rose was pinned to her dress. Meaning: Well, Desmond cannot tell Stanley about that. We will have to wait to find out.
We have seen those blue roses before. In Tennessee Williams. And in The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/10/275-thief-of-bagdad-1940-united-kingdom.html
In addition to the mystery of Lil's blue rose, Teresa Banks had a jade ring. And it is missing. It too is a mystery.
Strange things pass through the electricity wires.
Meanwhile, Gordon Cole goes to the Philadelphia office. Your man Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) appears and tells him about his dream. It features David Bowie as the missing agent Phillip Jeffries.
Then we go into the Red Room where strange people talk backwards.
What is garmonbozia?
Pain and sorrow. Canned corn.
ONE YEAR LATER we go to Twin Peaks.
Laura Palmer is popular at school. She and her best friend Donna Hayward hang out together. She is dating Bobby Briggs. She is seeing James Hurley. She is hooking up with Jacques Renault. She is doing Leo Johnson. She does things at the roadhouse with her friend Ronette Pulaski and the men they pick up there. The Bang Bang Bar. She confides in Harold Smith. She is keeping secrets from her parents Leland and Sarah.
But what is really going on?
Why is she taking cocaine in the bathroom? Why is she so troubled when she seems to have everything going for her? All the boys like her. All the girls want to be her.
Could it be that strange man named Bob who either does or does not break through the window into her room at night? Since she was 12. (It could be real. It could be her nightmares.)
Or is he possessing someone closer to her?
Someone is ripping pages from her secret diary. She gives it to Harold to hide. Bob does not know about Harold. Maybe Harold will be safe.
She has a painting of a room and a door. Her room. There was an angel in the painting. The angel has disappeared. She has another painting of other angels. Does she have an angel? Someone to look out for her?
She wears a half-heart on her necklace. Who gave it to her? Who has the other half? And why is her father, of all people, jealous over it?
A man named Mike might know. He appears out of nowhere like a prophet to drop hints. To give clues. To speak truth. There are many prophets. The woman at the trailer. The mother and her son who wears the mask. The woman who approaches her outside the bar. Puts her hand on her forehead. And speaks directly into her life. Before Laura enters for her penultimate binge.
The good Dale is in the lodge and he can't leave. Write it in your diary.
We fall ever more deeply inside the dream as Laura enters the bar and Julee Cruise sings the aching, otherworldly ballad, "Questions in a World of Blue." Composed by Badalamenti. Lyrics by David Lynch himself. Transporting us. Transporting us. Into euphoria.
To try to hide the pain. To try to hide the pain.
Laura wants to keep her friend Donna from these darker experiences. To protect her. No one should know what she knows. See what she sees. Live what she lives. Donna sees. Donna does. Poor, innocent Donna. Get Donna out of here.
Something is going down tonight.
Bobby thinks she is now only using him for scores.
James really loves her.
She agrees to go with James and immediately regrets it. They go to where Bobby killed that man that night. Was it Bob? She changes her mind. Take me home. She makes him stop in the middle of the street. She jumps off his motorcycle before he comes to a complete stop.
And then . . .
And then.
At the end of this strange, fun, not so fun, way no longer fun, trip, this hallucinatory dream, this oneiric elegy, at the bottom of this free-fall drop down the rabbit hole with our floating Ophelia, we find an innocent little girl, a damaged girl, a broken girl, who had her innocence ripped away from her by someone she most needed to trust.
And who needs the good Dale.
And who needs her angel.
And who finds them.
And is finally, finally free.
No comments:
Post a Comment