David Lynch
Fuoco Cammina Con Me

"Visually elegant but chaotic film" was how the prequel to the famous and tormented TV series, which captivated half the world with the question: "Who killed Laura Palmer?", was labeled the day after its release in theaters.

The Film recounts the events and misfortunes of the beautiful and fatal blonde Laura Palmer, as she progressively sinks into the grips of a tragic destiny, amid the ambiguity of a dark and self-destructive desire and the nostalgia for distant innocence.
The day after its release, the film was criticized by almost everyone, primarily because it was excessive in its intent to conceal the meaning of a largely revealed story at all costs, by the "Twin Peaks" fans because it was far from the ironic and parodic atmospheres of the series, and by critics for its excessively convoluted narrative structure.

If it’s true that the film was undervalued in the past, we cannot help but make a point: Lynch, as usual, plays with the audience, subjecting them to a visual tour de force from which it will be difficult to grasp the definitive meaning of the entire story (although it’s not difficult to grasp the "meaning" of the truly significant scenes), on the other hand, however (here more than in the "road trilogy" of Lost Highways, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire), it seems to want to tell a story: a girl suffers horrible violence to which she reacts with the voluptuousness of death and the perversion itself of which she is a victim.
This is not new: even in Dorothy from "Blue Velvet" the same mechanism seems to be triggered, and it’s fundamentally a defense mechanism. In fact, it cannot be denied that the themes that were present in Blue Velvet are essentially revisited in Twin Peaks: the corruption hidden behind the normality of daily rituals, the swarming of vile insects lurking under a splendid laughing lawn, the clot of bad feelings housed in the hypocritical expression of Leland Palmer are fundamentally the same thing.

It’s true, therefore, that "Fire Walk with Me" may appeal much less to the not particularly Lynchian viewer than a "Blue Velvet" or a "Wild at Heart": the film is objectively chaotic, some elements deliberately aim to sadistically mislead the viewer, the blue rose, for instance, or even the ring, not to mention the scene of Philip Jeffries' apparition, which could equally be Cooper narrating a dream of his, the realization of the dream itself, or a way of saying that only mistakes (in this case, the mistake of the camera getting stuck on an image of Cooper) can put us in touch with hypothetical extrasensory realities ("It’s a dream, we live inside a dream").
But right from that scene, it becomes clear that the film splits into two components: a narrative one, which describes the last seven days of Palmer's life and one constituted by a whole set of citations, references, of playful circles and often deliberately contradictory: I followed the first one even though I did not disdain playing with the second, and I did not come out disappointed.

"Fire Walk with Me" if experienced as an excellent dramatic film, leaves no breath and not even for a moment does it offer the relaxation that certain wholesome finds of the TV series could offer: there are no mysteries or plot twists, there is only the splendid and moved participation in the pain and loneliness of a lost soul.

Bob, the dwarf, the black lodge, the ring are semi-serious expedients to confer a symbolic substratum to the whole affair: just remember the role of the robins in the seemingly happy ending of "Blue Velvet" to understand the penultimate sequence of FWWM in which the dwarf and Mike ask Bob for the garmonbozia: as the robin feeds on the insect, so the lodge demands its tribute of blood, in the inextricability between good and evil of the figures that just a moment before we thought entirely opposed and antithetical.
One of the main dilemmas of the entire series remains unresolved: Does Bob "possess" his victims or is he merely the grotesque figuration of the evil they harbor within?

Ultimately, FWWM is one of Lynch's most critiqued films, one of those you feel you can only recommend to die-hard fans: it is not as extreme as "Eraserhead", it is not as frantic as "Wild at Heart", it does not offer the viewer the chance to reposition every detail in a unified framework as was possible in "Mulholland Drive" and yet, you know what?
I liked it.