First comes a warning.
SOME SPOILERS FOR ‘TWIN PEAKS’ & ‘TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME’ CONTAINED
Everyone has their white whale; that elusive treasure or goal that they fetishise and dare to find and covet. For some it was the lost footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For others it was the mythical buried reels of The Wicker Man, which rather ludicrously had been rumoured for years to be buried in the concrete foundations of an English motorway. For me it was always the deleted scenes of David Lynch’s much maligned Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk with Me. Even in a pre-internet, pre-DVD extras age, I obsessed over this rumoured material and what possible insights it may offer into Lynch’s labyrinthian mystery. And now, thanks to the Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery Blu-ray set, they are finally here. So how do they stack up? What do they tell us? Are they the Rosetta Stone of meaning I long thought they might be?
Some context. Twin Peaks ran for two seasons, totalling thirty episodes from 1990 to 1991. It featured mysteries both literal (who killed Laura Palmer?), metaphysical (was the killer possessed or mentally ill?) and symbolic (what does the ghostly appearance of a horse in a living room mean?). It made co-creator David Lynch a household name and was an opening salvo in what we now call the current Golden Age of Television; the legitimising of the form as an artistic competitor to film and not a poor, aesthetically inferior relative. Due to a number of factors (depending on who you ask) but primarily due to (now Disney boss) Bob Iger’s pressure to curtail the central mystery of the murder of Laura Palmer, the show started a commercial decline a third of the way into its second season. The show ended at the end of that second season, leaving us with a cliff-hanger or an aggressive conclusion (again, depending on who you ask) that infuriated and shocked the small cult of fans that had stuck with it.
Like many others I poured over details of the drama which I recorded on VHS and discussed it with fellow fans (again, remember: pre-internet) in ways that fans of Lost would repeat a decade and a half later. I owned The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, The Autobiography of Agent Dale Cooper (book and tape) as well as a subscription to Wrapped in Plastic Fanzine (remember fanzines?).
The final episode of season two was rewritten on the fly by Lynch (based on a script by co-creator and unsung hero, Mark Frost), upon learning of the shows cancellation, to be a caterwaul against the show’s treatment and the absurd restrictions of television, that Peaks would retroactively decimate. It ended with our hero, the Jimmy Stewart-esque Cooper, in the bathroom, bloodied, beaten and inhabited by the shows spectral manifestation of evil, Killer Bob. Personally I found this ending to be appropriate, and felt that it spoke to the circular, closure-resisting nature of the soap operas that Peaks parodied and subverted. We even see several characters die in an explosion in the same episode as they reach of a long mystery, as though the narrative simply could not cope with revealing its secrets and would sooner combust.
But I wanted more. When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me premiered the next year at Cannes it was straight into a confused shit-storm of backlash. Not only did Lynch refuse to clarify the show’s remaining secrets, by making a prequel that ignored the comedic lightness that was a part of the series appeal and success, he obfuscated, darkened and deepened the show’s mysteries with a film that was explicit, depressing, thrilling and frustrating. This was Laura’s story, the story behind the Prom Queen photo that featured over the closing credits of the majority of episodes, a deconstruction of the image of the perfect teenager in the same way that Goddess, the aborted Marilyn Monroe biopic that brought Lynch and Frost together, would have scraped away at the surface of that other blonde icon.
Most people just wanted to see Cooper come out of the bathroom and be redeemed whilst enjoying some quirky piece of business about pies, coffee and Douglas Firs. The film died. And Lynch went to movie-jail. It would not be until Mulholland Drive that he would be back in critics’ good-books, despite the gentle Straight Story and the complex, horrifying and fascinating Lost Highway.
This was not the case for everyone. A core group of Twin Peaks die-hards, critics and film fans have always understood and championed the value of Fire Walk with Me, and it was not long until tantalising word of deleted scenes and a mythical four hour ‘supercut’ began to spread.
As early as 1992 I heard through the pages of fanzines about an extended version being screened at Cannes (this is a myth, the version seen there was the same 135 minutes the rest of us got) and saw tantalising screen shots of Chris Isaak’s Agent Desmond fighting the uncooperative Sherriff Cable and middle aging sweethearts Norma and Ed cuddling up in a car. Not only did these photographs (along with the mammoth two hundred page shooting script) confirm the existence of these scenes it also proved that a lot of the endearing secondary characters not directly associated with the Laura Palmer story featured. References in the script to events set after the final episode of the show also offered us the Holy Grail: could an honest to goodness, normatively logical ending exist? Or at the very least an explanation?
Very quickly petitions started for the release of this material. The failure of FWWM ensured that this was probably the last opportunity for ‘new’ Twin Peaks we would ever see, and it came to represent a notional future for the world we had grown to love. This intensified with the introduction of DVD. The ‘bonus features’ they offered seemed like a legitimate opportunity for these now legendary sequences to be seen. DVD releases came and went, always with the rumours of this scene’s inclusion. Wild at Heart’s mass of deleted sequences got a release, edited together as essentially a new sidequal to the original. Blue Velvet had a really nice release with a movies-worth of deleted scenes. Even Inland Empire received this treatment. We even got some Blu-ray releases of FWWM itself. But still nothing. Then it happened.
First the confirmation. Then a trailer. Finally we saw glimpses of Desmond’s confrontation with Deer Meadow’s uncooperative Sheriff, Norma and Ed in the car, Cooper post-possession and even the particularly out-there sequence of David Bowie beaming down into a Hotel that we had read about in the shooting script. This week the Blu-ray was released and I have soaked up the material.
So; is it good? Does it hang together as a work in its own right? Does it give us a deeper insight into the mysteries of the series?
First of all, to be clear, this is a collection of deleted scenes that have been given the full post production treatment. They look and sound great, but wisely no attempt has been made to try and edit them in a way as to suggest any kind of narrative (in the fashion that the Wild at Heart, or the Inland Empire: More Things That Happened scenes were). They are presented chronologically (within the context of the film) and it is clear that Lynch decided to cut a lot of the lighter scenes when the pruning began, which does give these scenes a collective tonality that might make it tempting to have presented them as a ‘piece’.
There are however, non-cinematic fades between most of the scenes to clarify that these are separate. Many of these vignettes are character sketches that were not designed to meaningfully add to the plot but to either present something we had been told in the series or to give us another chance to spend some time with a character, or indeed gain greater insight into them (as is the case with sad, quiet scenes featuring diner owner Norma and complicated Dr Jacoby). As somebody who has seen the series and its prequel many times, there is surreality (beyond the intended one) to seeing new material, particularly in crisp High Definition. When every utterance and gesture of these characters has been committed to memory, seeing them in new situations takes a moment to readjust to. The lushness of the pre-digital cinematography and detail of mise en scene creates the odd feeling that this is a flawless recreation of a very familiar production. The same but different.
In many of the lighter moments we get to spend time with characters from the show that did not feature in the theatrical cut, including a suitably amusing set of scenes in the Sheriff’s office with secondary characters Andy and Lucy, as well as an appearance by Sheriff Truman. There is some similarly fluffy business with Josie and Pete and a goofy scene of the Palmer family at lunch which plays dark due to the knowledge we have of what is really happening in the house. We also finally get to see the resolution of the pissing contest between Agent Desmond and Sheriff Cable which proves to be quite satisfying.
As is to be expected, the lion’s share of the footage is of Sheryl Lee’s shell-shocked Laura. One moving scene with Moira Kelly’s Donna ends with a genuinely heart breaking line reading by Lee and a note read by Donna’s father that gives us a deeper insight into the film’s final shot of an angel that now reads even more like the image of the Robin at the close of Lynch’s earlier Blue Velvet; a perhaps futile totem of hope in world of ugly weirdness and hypocritical brutality.
We do get glimpses of some post-TV moments with Cooper’s tragic-love Annie in the hospital issuing a warning about Cooper’s predicament (that we saw from Laura’s point of view in the theatrical version) and a few seconds set after Cooper’s possession-reveal that reinforce, if not inform, the horror of what has happened. These moments, particularly the former, might help less eagle-eyed viewers interpret the circular nature of the narrative (the ring is a returning motif in the film, that is reinforced in these materials) but there is nothing added story wise by their inclusion, beyond solidifying a few pre-existing fan theories.
On the whole, it was worth the wait. Nothing can live up to the expectation of twenty years, and if these scenes show us one thing, it is how fully formed FWWM was in the first place. Let us not forget, the film released in 1992 was Lynch’s completed vision. This was not a producer-led compromise in the way that his Dune was. These cuts were made to make the film a little leaner and to keep the running time sensible. And to those who are claiming that these scenes should make us all realise what a great film FWWM actually is? Nonsense. It always was. What we do get is another opportunity to spend some time with characters we like (and some we fear) in a place where the birds sing a pretty song and there is always music (and mystery) in the air.
Twin Peak: The Missing Pieces is out now on Blu-ray. You must.
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Image credit: MyComicShop.com.
