after watching the show, i thought this was a very heavy film, lots of disturbing scenes and the ending had a strong gore-ish feeling. i missed agent cooper and the overall funny, nice wave of TP. but i liked the movie, although i expected something else, i guess.
shareIn spite of it being gorier, I consider the Laura death scene in FWWM slightly inferior to the Ronette's dream-sequence flashback of the murder in episode 8 of the show.
share^^^ This. I recently watched the Northwest Passage edit of the show and the series' depiction of Laura's murder wasn't only far more brutal and gruesome; it was downright chilling. The way they flash Laura's terrified face in the boxcar... It's just haunting.
shareRonette's flashback of BOB killing Laura is not only my pick for the best scene in Twin Peaks but probably my all time favorite scene in anything David Lynch ever directed, and he did direct that episode ("May The Giant Be With You," episode 8). The shot that really gets me is the sudden "whack!" sound effect right when zooming in on the (darkened) train car, with the green Satanic fire bubbling in the window so that you realize right away what you're about to see, the central event in the entire show, although it's distorted through Ronette's memory (after all, she doesn't visualize herself in the train car.) Laura's screaming face is horrifying, the flashing lights are horrifying, the shots of Bob stabbing are horrifying, the hideous "THUCK!!!" sound effect of stabs are horrifying, the shot of Laura dead is horrifying, and the shot of the "FIRE WALK WITH ME" note with flashing lights is terrifying, and then BOB screaming.
I still to this day can't believe it got past the censors!!! In 1990?!? Granted, it's not like we see the knife going in or anything (didn't see that in FWWM either, though)
Then they showed you the real thing in FWWM, after all that time. Still pretty horrifying, not only due to the flashing lights but Badalamenti's creepy music, which you can hear isolated right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5qf1BZGUOw
I've never been able to get the image of the train car out of my head--we only see it three times in the entire show/movie, but they're my three favorite TP scenes--the murder, the flashback to the murder, and (from the best episode, the pilot), Cooper and Truman investigating the murder scene. (I mistakenly thought when I first watched the show that Laura had been killed with that bloody hammer we saw laying around.)
I think I've gone back and watched the Youtube clips of these scenes about thirty times apiece now. They're really damn well done!!!
They serve different purposes. The series flashback is all about the terror and the violent energy pulsating through the moment: Laura herself even seems at times like an evil spirit. The scene in the film is, ultimately, about Laura's redemption so while it is intense and haunting, we're not peering through memory at the scene, we're peering through the scene itself at something deeper (the mystery of Laura's salvation through the ring). If that makes sense!
It's also interesting because they are two POVs of the same event. The first, Ronette's, is a series of fragmented, incomprehensible yet viscerally horrifying images. The second perspective, Laura's, understands and sees what's going on beneath - the Bob/Leland dynamic, the appearance of the angel, the final involvement of the ring. It's still fragmented, but in this case, the pieces we are seeing are essential rather than jumbled. Ultimately, the two scenes make good complements and bookends to one another.
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