deeplyshallow // firewalker with me

firewalker with me

Two nights of little to no sleep, and close proximity to a pretty little sick girl, always leads to the same thing: taking a sick day. Spent today home nursing a fever and hacking up goopy stuff. Good times, let me tell you. We’ll just stop with the details right there.

So. I have this thing about cult entertainment — namely that I have no idea it exists until many years after the fact. Still haven’t ever seen Rocky Horror Picture Show, though I have seen The Last Picture Show, and I prefer having seen the latter to the idea of seeing the former. It’s taken me nearly eighteen years, but I’ve finally gotten around to finding out what this whole Twin Peaks thing is about.

Felicia came home a while back with the complete series run of the show; she’d seen it a few times years ago, but it was basically as new to her as it is to me. We’re about ten or fourteen episodes deep right now, and I must confess I’m not getting it. There’s enough curiosity generated by the protagonist (Kyle MacLachlan IS Special Agent Dale Cooper) and by the outright weirdness of it all that we can’t stop watching, but I’m wondering if it’s ever going to come together to actually mean something.

Here’s how I imagine David Lynch wrote the show (and let’s try to ignore the fact that the biggest problem here is David Lynch writing anything at all):

Lynch: Hrm. This whole movie game, it’s just boring me lately. There’s a certain, eh, lacklusterishness I feel whenever I think about making another movie. Movies schmovies, I say.

Crazy Lynch: Dude. Television. All I’m sayin’.

L.: Television?

CL: Television. How hard can it be?

L.: So I tell lots of little stories?

CL: Or one sustained big story.

L.: What if I kill a girl in the first episode, and then solve the murder?

CL: Make sure you solve the murder slowly, though.

L.: Ooh. Ooh, ooh. Listen, listen. What if I kill a girl in the first episode, and then never solve the murder?

CL: I’ve got a better idea: Kill a girl in the first episode, and then introduce a few suspects, and then introduce a few more, and then introduce a few more, and then a few more, and then some more, and a couple more, and by the way, everybody should be half-crazy and if possible also having an affair with everybody else.

L.: SOLD!

CL.: Sweet. And can you find a way to work donuts into it?

L.: Oh hells yes. I already have that figured out.

Here’s the thing: the acting is some of the most hackneyed I’ve ever seen. The special effects are insanely bad, the plotting is slapped-together all willy-nilly, and Lynch seems to introduce a wild and ridiculous new element any time he gets stuck — another extramarital affair, another affair on top of that, a whole lot of donuts, a giant, some owls, a whorehouse, French-Canadian killers, truck drivers, thirteen-year-old skanks, agoraphobics, borderline bordello incest, a dwarf who walks and talks in reverse, etc. And Lynch desperately needs an editor, a point never more clear to me than during the opening of an episode following a cliffhanger involving a gun and some bullets and a tuxedo — Cooper’s on the floor of his hotel room, a couple of bullets in him, and the world’s oldest bellhop comes in and out of his room looking all bewildered and oblivious at the same time; the scene is amusing at first, but plays out so slowly, and repeats itself so many times, that by the seven-minute-mark I was ready to beat the shit out of my TV.

Still, we can’t seem to stop watching, if only to see just where the hell it’s all going. All of these random strings had better come together, and come together good, because I’m expecting one hell of a payoff, and if it’s not there, I’m going to call up Mr. Lynch, all these eighteen years later, and I’m going to call him a jerk.

Also, all these years I’ve somehow managed to confuse the show’s mystery phrase — “Fire walk with me” — with that Indiana Jones-style buddy comedy — Firewalker — that Chuck Norris and Lou Gossett, Jr., headlined back in the mid-eighties. That’s neither here nor there, I know, but I can’t help the association. I’m also a little ashamed to admit seeing this movie several times as a kid and thinking it was good. Good! Can you believe it? I like to look back on my childhood and think of myself as a discriminating film aficionado — and certainly there’s my appreciation of movies like The Mosquito Coast and, of course, that bastion of filmmaking excellence, D.A.R.Y.L., to support this theory — but then I go and remember liking something like Firewalker and I swear it’s like watching evolution in reverse.

Last note: Do you suppose the person responsible for painstakingly painting a Chuck Norris Indiana Jones knockoff was aware that he was contributing to the sad destruction of mankind? At first I thought that it looked like Drew Struzan’s artwork; everybody knows Struzan for his work with Spielberg and Lucas to produce posters for everything from Star Wars to, yes, Indiana Jones, but I can’t seem to find confirmation of that suspicion anywhere. God knows Struzan’s done a few stinkers — Adventures in Babysitting, anyone? — so I can’t rule it out. But I can’t help but wonder if the last thought on the artist’s mind when he is at the brink of death will be Goddammit why did I waste all those weeks painting that fucking Firewalker poster? What the hell was I thinking? I could’ve been watching Twin Peaks instead! Fuck. And then he will think that Firewalker sounds very much like Fire walk with me and he will give a little giggle, and then he will die.