From: v075q5fr@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Scott J Gorcey)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
Subject: PEAKS: LAURA'S EVEN BETTER ALIVE - Buffalo News FWWM Review PART II
Keywords: Jeff Simon, NEWS Critic.
Date: 6 Sep 92 22:15:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41


   (Part One is under the subject heading: TWIN PEAKS AWAKENS THE MOVIE
    LOVER IN ALL OF US - Buffalo News FWWM Review)

   It's both frightening and beautiful.  That's at the end when Lynch's
movie means business and tess us of the night that led to the murder of
TV's favorite corporse, Laura Palmer.  
   That it is also hilariously funny at the beginning should come as no 
surprise - Lynch himself plays a deaf FBI man who shouts all the time; Kyle
MacLachlan, as agent Dale Cooper, keeps running back and forth trying to
watch his own image on a building's security monitor, as if he could 
somehow be in two places at once.  And then, in one frozen, glorious 
Margitte moment, he DOES (Magritte-like imagery abounds in "Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk With Me.")
   The very opening of the movie announces "This isn't TV - not by a long
shot."  The flaky blue field that you see behind the credits turns out to
be a TV screen on which we're seeing "snow."  The image ends with a lance
crashing through the TV and a cut to shrieking, piercing, murderous
darkness.
   That is the movie in digest form.
   At 2 and a half hours, it is too long.  No argument therre.  But then, its
length contributes to its strange, dreamlike languor.  And yet, for all
of its dreaminess, there is inside "Twin Peaks" the movie a horror story that
may have an emotional resonance far beyond anything Lynch has done since
"The Elephant Man."
   Underneath all the surreal hacking around, this is the story of a young
teenage girl who is endlessly falling into a pit of drugs, incest and
degradation.  Incredibly, the tale is moving.  It isn't just drenched in
that knowing, post-modern irony that turns everything into a joke: it is
wild and sexy and finally, very sad.
   And it establishes Sheryl Lee as a superb young actress.  On the TV
show, she was wrapped up in a plastic tarp and stuffed into the odd flashback.
She may be a good decade beyond the age she's playing, but in the movie she
gives a full performance, an erotic, decadent, traumatized, terror-stricken
performance.  She's another actress entirely from what we saw on TV.
   What Lynch has done in "Twin Peaks," the movie, is to wrench father-
daughter incest and child murder out of the hands of Oprah and the TV
movie of the week and put it back into the incoherent horrors of the
collective unconscious where it belongs.
   "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" is so many lightyears beyond what is
usually acceptable as a movie in the local malls that it might as well
come from an alternative universe.  It's a movie in which a fat epicene
drug dealer tells a stoned-out Laura Palmer, "I am the Great Went," and
she answers, "I am the Muffin."  It's a movie in which its authors made
up a word ("garabazonia" - I think [sic - garmonbozia]) to mean "your pain
and sorrow."  It's a tragicomic pop dream universe with its own languages
that is bounded by pain and sorrow on all sides.
   It has true junk poetry.
   It couldn't possibly bear less resemblance to the corrupt film-cult
horseplay of Brian DePalma's "Raising Cain" and the rote slasher 
denouments of the summer's thrillers.
   Now that the film culture era ushered in by Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and
Clyde" has turned into a squabbling, trivial and declining babble of tedious
but film-savvy filmmakers and critics, the great figures in the ascending
generation of American movies seem to be the ones who have avoided the
corruptions of film culture all together - Lynch, and Tim Burton (who
both come from art school) and Ron Shelton (who came from the farm system
of the Baltimore Orioles).
   They create a film and narrative film language of their own, not one 
that's been patched together out of overly familiar cinematic dialects.
   And of those members of the film culture generations who HAVE emerged
from film school, the powerful ones have reasons for being powerful that
transcend it [their roots in traditional film] - Oliver Stone has Vietnam
and Spike Lee is black, two tragically good reasons in America for not
letting film savvy overwhelm what Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life."
   "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" is a film that asks for trouble in many
many ways - its length, its origins in a TV phenomenon, its radical 
dislocation from almost everything else that you can see in movie theaters.
   And trouble it got - right from the beginning, when its distributors
delayed screenings until the very last minute because it was too strange.
   And yet it seems to me one of the films of the year, and one of those rare
movies that makes some people remember what they loved about the movies in
the first place. II

[Posted by Scott Gorcey]       
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks