SOURCE: Romney, Jonathan. “Nothing to Declare.” New Statesman & Society 5, no. 229 (20 November 1992): 33-4.

In the following excerpt, Romney criticizes Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as having nothing new or original to offer its audience.

David Lynch's long-awaited Twin Peaks film would have provided the ideal opportunity to mull over, for one last time, cinema's obsession with America's dark underbelly. The Twin Peaks TV series was the last word in the suburban surreal, which had already received its definitive expression in Blue Velvet. But that once-disturbing genre has become so thoroughly domesticated that it now provides the premise for American prime-time fodder like Eerie Indiana, in which two boys discover their hometown is the centre for all earthly weirdness, and a new series knowingly entitled Picket Fences. …

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me exudes the strangeness of exhaustion. Exhaustion dictates its pace and its imagination. Its business is filling...