Spoiler warning for Fire Walk With Me and Twin Peaks (TV Series)

Enveloping totality: the scalding heat of violence tears open the moment. In simultaneity, violence is birthed and combusts, an eclipsed instant of creation and destruction. White-hot, flashing and brazen, shattering the present into fractals of unspooled being. In these still frames of bloodied frenzy, a scream speaks manifestation to the unutterable presence of evil. Its figure, physical and otherwise, finds prevalence.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a tapestry of inflicted violence, a throbbing suture between its moments of rearing horror. The suffering inflicted upon Laura Palmer, each assault, rape, and her eventual killing, is a blinding mirror set equally between a symbolic and lived experience. Much like her representational force as idol and character, her experience pertains to the violence inflicted against all women, non-conforming, and non-masculine flesh; it is that of total debasement at the grasping hands of a masculine force. Inflicted by Leland as individual, his abuse choking Laura’s corporeal self, and tied to Bob as ephemeral, his perversion of Laura’s after-self constant, violence is foundational to the masculine. It is crafted in the image of omnipresence, a suffocating replication pasted upon every figurehead of our society, and beyond the confines of anything singular. David Lynch does not tie violence and its masculine face to one character, rather, infects all his creation with its miasma – the opposing symbol of Laura’s idolatry. Violence, captured upon film, is not bound to the hopeful tangibility of death.

Primarily, it is in this complete lack of anchoring that Lynch most deftly renders violence, severing it from the possibility of a solely physical presence. The constancy of The Black Lodge and Bob, their totality in dreamscape placing them aside from the binds of place and time, lives in all myth, religion, and folkloric tale. Violence and its channels are found woven into all pieces of scripture, consecrated or otherwise, fluid in position and clung, parasitic, to the very base of spoken human narratives. FWWM draws close to collagic, pasting together iconic images of religion, the capital-W Woman, vague esoteric grafts, and America to craft a motion of feverently worshipped visual language. Lynch recognises the near-blandness of their appearance, their complete crossover in implied meaning, and brings them close enough together to sap all simularity from them, conclusively drawing out an unspoken through-line of pervasive evil. Vitaly, it is in these images’ perversion, sullied in flashing light and drawn blood, that the violence begetting the impetus of our stories, in all their forms, becomes visible.  Narrative, at Lynch’s level, is the retelling of the same story. Precisely like the violence that imbues it, narrative is cyclical and told in circles. Laura Palmer’s story will happen again. It will be told again. Violence finds no end in the image.

To watch FWWM is to watch Laura Palmer’s torture play out in repeat, her construct destined to be mutilated by the desire for conclusion we have bred narrative to bring. Linearity, in perspective and construction, grants nothing but the constancy of violence, birthing itself without the shackles of temporal structure.

FWWM deems violence to be its own progenitor, lacking in origin, and granted creation only in its moments of infliction. Its nature is that of transness, of mutability, and fluidity, tied into the fabric of being and time, separate from binary constraint, and enacted by all through misguided action. Our hand feeds the presence that kills: it is our ignorance that lets cyclicality form imposition, riding as companion to humanity. It is not inherent to us, merely sickness regurgitated. Lynch does not offer the comfort of plain hope to this, nor gives away the blanket of conclusion – so what lies in solution?

An equal transness, one of total encompassment: perspective beyond linearity and vision struck from the restraint of expectation. We cannot do-away with violence, with the reenactment of Laura’s story, without existence as mutable as violence itself. Lynch sees the oppositional, binary tone of people (“The good Dale is in the Lodge…”)  and acknowledges these selves in flux, caught in forever-battle. To welcome transness, as Lynch’s ‘absurdity’ does, is to challenge every force, structure, and institution that upholds the present evil. Transness must be brought to the iconic image, to faith, to belief, to system, to society, in order to rid visual distraction and view the maliciously plain, logical, and glaring simpleness of violence. FWWM sees violence configured beyond the hopes of language, if anything, utilising the inbetween of meaning to generate potency – it is without a real or defined syntax. It speaks through absurdity, resting in dream, and must be matched with the full force of feeling. Opposition comes most ferociously when the burden of expectation, of translatability, is shed. Lynch’s work cries for us to build our own dream, to occupy the possibility of its genuine hope, and to relish in its transness. Dreams, seemingly, come unfettered from ignorance, capable of pulling all weight from evil.

The tragedy of FWWM is exactly that: inevitable and blandly foretold. Laura’s horror, our own reflection of that, is destined to repeat, fed by an apparatus of suffering. Do away with your ignorance, point to the violence that lives among you and within you, and finally open the ground for the capacity of betterment.

Written in response to the David Lynch: Between Two Worlds season at Hyde Park Picture House

Alfie White
Good Boys Film Club