Watching The Missing Pieces before Fire Walk With Me

The deleted scenes alone are worth the price of the set, I can't believe how great they look. Now I fully "Get" why David deleted most of them from the film. Now that doesn't mean that there not worth watching they are. I think my favorite deleted scene however comes at the end. The last deleted scene! After I saw that scene I wanted more!!!

Wow, I actually did just that! Thinking that it was the actual movie, I saw the deleted scenes first and watched the movie about two weeks later (just now, actually) since I obviously realized immediately after watching the scenes that it hadn't been the real movie. I'm not sure what you'd like to know specifically but I was definitely surprised. I had thought Lynch had chosen to set up the movie as "deleted footage" from the television series which definitely would have been an interesting choice had the scenes spanned the series more than just the Lodge sequences. It was confusing to say the least. I hadn't expected the focus to be on Laura and I was still waiting to see so many things I'd heard about or seen pictures of online. There were also parts- the agents especially, that it made me crazy wishing I could know more about.

While I agree with you that in terms of heaviness, the deleted scenes were definitely closer to the series, I actually felt that in tone & the way it was edited the footage chosen for the movie itself was much closer. While I did understand the context of what was happening in the deleted scenes (for the most part- about as much as I would have if I'd watched Fire Walk With Me first) I did feel very spoiled watching them before the movie, but maybe that's just the kind of viewer I am, I don't even like watching promos for new television episodes. But I personally would not recommend it. For that reason and that I think seeing the deleted scenes afterwards would prove to be good closure. Especially since, as you said, it is more similar to the series in some ways, but also because of the extended scene of Cooper in front of the mirror in his hotel bathroom. Obviously a great scene, I think it's a nice tie-in and a good way to help wrap things up. It also might be easier to appreciate that the film really is all about Laura without having seen those extra scenes with other characters from town.

TMP might make sense as a link to the series when taking into account the vast majority of scenes later in the piece but the first half hour is all FWWM related odds and ends that make no sense if they are watched before watching the film. I think The Missing Pieces is an apt name. It's not a cohesive continuation of Twin Peaks nor in my opinion can it be viewed as a bridge between the show and the film. It just is what it is: missing pieces. An independent epilogue if you will.

In this comment I discuss why new viewers should probably watch FWWM first but why I still think return trips to Twin Peaks should DEFINITELY slip the Missing Pieces between the series and film. As such, there are spoilers!

Thanks for all the thoughtful responses (you wouldn't believe the vitriol that gets hurled when this is brought up in other forums!). While TP/FWWM remains challenging viewing with or without The Missing Pieces I can see that perhaps the whole concept of the Pieces - that they are at once deleted scenes and standalone narrative fragments - can be a bit overwhelming & distracting for the first-time viewer. I still think they COULD work between the series and film for a newbie but only if approached with a certain mentality: one which ignores their genesis as extracted footage (something Lynch reminds us of in the very opening credits!) and which also considers the series, the missing pieces, and the film as chapters in one long story so that the question of the scenes "belonging" to the film doesn't even arose. The scenes AND the film both "belong" to the larger story, if that makes sense. But for a viewer to do all this while simultaneously hooked into the narrative for the first time, aware of all the historical circumstances, and conscious of the film and series as separate entities, is probably too much to ask. As such I'd probably say the best route for a newbie is to more or less ignore the missing pieces first time around and/or treat them as ephemera, or a bonus, after the main viewing is done. Maybe even watch a documentary first to clear the air (there's a great one on FWWM on the disc, Moving Through Time, as well as a really frustrating one, Reflections on the Phenomenon etc...). Sadly, this means the challenges of FWWM, which have alienated many a viewer first time around, remain unmitigated. But if watching the Missing Pieces introduces more complications than it resolves, I suppose that's unavoidable. Maybe Twin Peaks has to be indigestible on first viewing, and only return visits can make it seem whole?

With that said, reflection and a revisit over the past month has only further convinced me that The Missing Pieces fits best between the series and film, even if viewers should probably wait for the second time around to experience it this way. Once the film has been experienced on its own, for what it is independently of the series, the scenes can be watched as a stylistic and dramatic bridge that doesn't take away from FWWM's narrative. Indeed, watching these fragments first enhances FWWM for me, making what might appear elliptical or curtailed flow better in comparison: by NOT restoring the deleted scenes to the film, Lynch has ironically enhanced the original film! I think that to see the big picture, to understand Twin Peaks as not just an abandoned series and controversial film but a complete if unconventional narrative cycle, watching the scenes in this order can help immensely.

It's also important, I think, to keep two things in mind.

1) Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me are meant to be of a piece, but it can be hard to see them that way. Every addition Lynch has made to Twin Peaks after the series ended has been an attempt to take the jumbled TV series (which changed course, was prematurely aborted, and only intermittently engaged Lynch's involvement - long stretches don't bear his imprint at all) and reconfigure it as a cohesive whole. And he did so through the character of Laura Palmer, who had been almost entirely forgotten by the time the series ended. For Lynch she remained the key to everything in Twin Peaks: the sense of mystery, the darkness in the woods, the tonal mixture of light & dark, the unsettled malaise of the town itself, even perhaps Cooper's ultimate inability to survive the Black Lodge in the finale. So, when most fans demanded a follow-up he hit the reset button instead and devoted an entire film to the as-yet-mostly-unseen Laura. The film flopped, ending tentative plans for sequels, but in the process reinforcing Laura's firsthand experience as the appropriate endpoint of Twin Peaks.

Think about it: the pilot is almost obsessively centered around questions about Laura Palmer, not so much "who killed her" but "who was she, really" and the film finally gives us this. Critics often celebrate Lynch for his air of moody mysteriousness and praise him for offering more questions than answers, but I think this misses the point. His works almost always take us "all the way" and his peculiar power as a filmmaker is that what he eventually shows us is usually more powerful than whatever we could have imagined. Despite all the open ends and confusing elements, Lynch's art is one of revelation not concealment. However, many viewers were so startled by the film's abrupt shift in tone and style that they couldn't see it as part of the saga. Initially, this mostly resulted in angry fans (not all, but many) rejecting or ignoring the film. Later on, many fans and non-fans have reevaluated and appropriated it but often from the standpoint of treating it as independent from the show, a separate phenomenon altogether (this is true whether critics and fans were proclaiming it better or worse than the series). This was mostly my own approach before the blu-ray; I loved the film, more than the series even, but felt that it was more about destroying the show than fulfilling it and that the two probably had to be appreciated in isolation.

But Lynch didn't see them this way and since the possibility of a new entry in the saga was curtailed in '92 he had to find more subtle ways to nudge viewers into experiencing Twin Peaks as the story he wanted it to be. And he had to do this alone; here it should be noted that Mark Frost, who started out on the same page as Lynch, diverged from him in his eventual view of the series. For Frost, Laura was a way into the town but not the be-all, end-all; although he's since changed his mind, in 1990 he felt ending Laura's mystery would be healthy for the show and allow it to go in new directions. He certainly did not have the almost spiritual veneration that Lynch did for Laura Palmer and her mysteries as the hub around which all of Twin Peaks must spin (which is one reason Frost had virtually no involvement with FWWM: he thought a sequel, rather than a prequel, was what was needed). For Frost today, the series remains incomplete and while he wouldn't mind creating new chapters - something Lynch has refused - he also seems ok with the open, inconclusive ending of the finale, which he's compared to The Sopranos. So we have the unusual case, with Twin Peaks, of a work firmly rooted in two co-creators but completed - and to a certain extent reimagined - by only one of them.

Anyway, Lynch's first step in reconfiguring the messy Twin Peaks into something whole, Laura-centered, and ending with FWWM, was the Log Lady intros in 1993. He wrote and directed them for Bravo's re-airing of the show and these short little pieces do two essential things: they give viewers a point of continuity before each episode, even though the episodes themseles vary wildly in tone, story, and quality over the course of the series, and they reframe the show, even the parts that Lynch himself had nothing to do with, around Lynch's own sensibility. Most importantly the very first Log Lady intro emphatically identifies Laura Palmer as the key to Twin Peaks: "The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one." Fade to black. Later, when the mystery ends with Leland's capture and confession, the Log Lady says, "So now the sadness comes - the revelation. There is a depression after the answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning." That's the part everyone always quotes. But more important, I think, is what follows: "But there is still the question: why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. And then the knowing is so full there is no room for questions." This of course has many spiritual and philosophical implications, but in terms of Twin Peaks itself it implies the mystery has not ended and points forward to the feature film which does address the question of why.

For twenty years, this was all the help Lynch could provide. Then, this year, he was able to complete his most radical re-configuration yet with the blu-ray release. Proclaiming "“During the last days in the life of Laura Palmer many things happened, which have never been seen before," Lynch remastered and re-edited the deleted footage into a standalone collection of fragments which simultaneously served to hype the film more than the series, to remind us of Laura's centrality to Twin Peaks, and to emphasize that the pieces were "missing" from the overall story of Twin Peaks NOT from Fire Walk With Me itself. He also interviewed the actors who played the Palmers and wrote a short script (the morning of the interview) in which he spoke to the characters they played. Called Between Two Worlds, the segments ends with Laura's little speech, which is not only the most Lynchian of the three monologues but the only one to which the interviewer (Lynch himself, of course) responds with unqualified enthusiasm. Finally, the presentation of the package itself underlined a sense of continuity between Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me: the cover art (unlike that on the earlier Gold Box or the earlier Season 2 DVD) centered around a dark image of Laura herself, an the box set was dubbed "The Entire Mystery."

Now, that said, how does Lynch want us to view the scenes? Aside from ensuring they aren't a part of the movie, I'd argue Lynch isn't much concerned with this. They appear on the menu where one would expect, as a bonus after the movie (although not lumped in with "special features" on the label) and clearly labelled as deleted scenes. Yet he also presents them, in the quote above, as part of the story and his repeated emphasis on Laura and the importance of the film implies that her angel's appearance at the end of FWWM is the proper end to the story. How to square this circle? Frankly, I don't think Lynch thinks in linear terms: to him what's important is how we hold the various pieces in our minds as a whole not which order we assemble them in. Since we (or most of us anyway!) are trapped within linear time, we have to determine the order which satisfies us. With the above in mind - Lynch's concern for Laura's story, the dramatic impact of Fire Walk With Me, the canonical position of the missing pieces, the sense that there is "an entire mystery" and not just fragments or multiple mysteries in Twin Peaks - to me at least points to both including The Missing Pieces and preserving Fire Walk With Me as the climax of Twin Peaks...which of course leaves the scenes between the series and film. Maybe not on the first pass, but then perhaps the "entire mystery" cannot be experienced in just one trip? That would be very Lynchian. ;)

2) (Forgot there was a second point coming, didn't you? This may turn out to be my longest comment - hopefully it will be my last for a while...) Most of Lynch's later films - certainly Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire - are, to put it mildly, unconventional and nonlinear in structure. When taken as a whole (pilot through feature film), the Twin Peaks cycle belongs in their company. All of those films also feature transitional sequences in which the character's - and viewer's - place in reality becomes unmoored, before we settle into a new, different and disorienting, reality (well, in Inland Empire, we never quite settle and the bulk of the film is that "transitional sequence"). This is usually preceded by a visit to an unsettling location. In Lost Highway, Fred is locked in prison and there he experiences a kind of psychic/physical transference in which he "becomes" Pete. In Mulholland Drive, Betty & Camilla visit Club Silencio where they discover the blue box - opening it sends our viewpoint careening through shifting hallways before we "wake up" with Diane at the Cowboy's request. And Inland Empire sends Nikki through the Axxon N doorway in the alley, which leads her to a soundstage on which her earlier incarnation is sitting, before she flees into a house set and goes down the rabbit hole with shifting landscapes and visions of dancing girls.

In each of these sequences, a threshold is crossed "between two worlds" in which not only space but time is warped and folded over itself. Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me were made as Lynch was just gearing up for this second stage of his work, and as such they are very transitional. More importantly, when re-invented with latter-day tinkering, I think the "Twin Peaks cycle" definitely fits with these later works and The Missing Pieces underlines this correspondence. Just as Nikki, Fred, and (dreaming?) Diane pass through a new, foreboding location in their stories, so we enter the Black Lodge with Cooper in the finale of Twin Peaks (in an unscripted improvisation which Lynch added to the show after a long absence; we could see this as the beginning of his ret-con). But while those shorter films represent the passage between "present" and "past" with fragmented, moody visuals, until 2014 we had to leap directly from the end of the series to the feature film. To my eyes, the Missing Pieces offers the lengthy saga what it needs: a long, at times surreal, always fragmented transition "between two worlds," lasting over an hour rather then a minute or two which is appropriate given the overall length of the story (30+ hours). I think of the Missing Pieces as occurring in a moment when Cooper's shocking fragmentation and possession has shaken us up and sent us reeling back through time, a fragmented and bumpy ride for 90 minutes until FWWM takes us in for a landing. Indeed, I already saw the relationship between the Twin Peaks series and Fire Walk With Me as corresponding to the relationship between the first 2/3 and the last 1/3 of Mulholland Drive: the reassuring if at times disquieting investigation followed by the darker and deeper reality which informed it, the "answer" we almost didn't want (yet had) to know. The Missing Pieces is like the opening of the blue box and passage between the hallways: perhaps unnecessary, but it smooths the transition, solidifies the link, and adds to the experience for me.

So, in conclusion, yeah it might be best to leave the Missing Pieces out/treat them as a footnote on your first trip to Twin Peaks. But definitely consider using them as a passageway between two worlds when you return.

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