a review of 双峰：与火同行

In spite of being a huge fan of the original series when it first aired, I didn't get around to watching this movie until the whole series was finally issued on DVD in the late '00s. Part of the reason was because as a 15-year-old Twin Peaks fan in the summer of 1992, there was no way my parents were letting me see or rent any hard-R horror movie, let alone one that we'd probably have to drive all the way to a downtown arthouse theater someplace to see. (Ironically, I did end up going to see Bram Stoker's Dracula in the theater with some friends and their parents a few months later, which was on a similar level in terms of violence and sexual content.) Another part was that the film was critically savaged by mainstream critics and festival crowds alike, which led me to assume for a good long while that it was merely Lynch trying to make a racier/edgier version of the TV show and failing. The fact that it was a prequel (in an age where Star Wars had yet to normalize that concept) was also totally bewildering to me, because I thought I already knew what happened to Laura Palmer, and was more interested in Lynch resolving that doozy of a Season 2 cliffhanger. I had a few opportunities to see it in college, but had held off because by that time I barely remembered what happened in the series and didn't want to be lost. This was back when owning an entire TV series on home video was a fairly expensive proposition, and renting or borrowing one was tough unless your local video store or library had the whole thing. I knew a few people who had the VHS "log" box set, but wasn't able to finagle anyone into letting me watch theirs. So when I finally caught up with the movie after doing my first complete series rewatch in 2007 or so, I was dumbfounded by how wrong I had been about the whole thing. This movie was a crazily off-center and heartbreaking masterpiece, filled with all the strangeness that I remembered from the show but with a totally different emotional core in Sheryl Lee's performance, having finally been given the chance to embody the living, breathing version of her iconic character. The adage "Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole" was amusingly quoted by David Lynch in connection to 2017's sequel series "Twin Peaks: The Return", but that equally applies here. Whereas the original series' first half was largely concerned with making sense of Laura Palmer's absence from the story, the prequel is instead focused on the reality of her existence and her trauma, and in making the audience feel it and empathize with it.