Twisted Nostalgia: Chris Isaak in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Two years later, when Lynch decided to revisit the haunted residents of his beloved TV series Twin Peaks in feature-film form, he made a whole bunch of bold choices—ignoring the cliffhanger ending of the series finale and making a prequel, cutting out many of the series regulars altogether, highlighting almost exclusively the darkness and depravity of Laura Palmer’s life and grisly death . . . and casting a singer-songwriter as the film’s protagonist for the opening half-hour. Twin Peaks fans would have expected to be greeted at the beginning of the film by the charming, coffee-loving agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan)—the central figure and beating heart of the TV show—but instead were met with Isaak’s unsmiling, somewhat stiff Chet Desmond. And even though Desmond isn’t in the majority of the movie, he’s in it more than poor Coop.

Lynch’s adoration of musicians has been a constant, and he’s often blurred the line between musical and on-screen performance. In Blue Velvet (a film named after a 1950 ballad), Frank Booth is almost driven mad by the beauty of Roy Orbison’s 1963 song “In Dreams,” as lip-synced by Dean Stockwell’s character. Composer Angelo Badalamenti has played an outsized emotional role in every Lynch project since Blue Velvet, where he also appears in-world as Dorothy’s pianist. Lynch loved “Mysteries of Love” singer Julee Cruise so much that, after making an entire album with her, he planted her among the residents of Twin Peaks as a performer at the Roadhouse. Twin Peaks’ James Hurley (James Marshall) is a would-be Chris Isaak, a sentimental singer with a guitar, a motorcycle, and a heart of gold. Lynch also frequently uses musicians as actors, as he did with Sting in Dune, Henry Rollins in Lost Highway, Chrysta Bell in Twin Peaks: The Return—and David Bowie, who appears alongside Isaak in Fire Walk with Me. “Musicians are very close to actors,” Lynch told me, simply. “They go in front of people on a stage, and they have really no problem being in public, just like being in front of a camera. And they perform.”

Isaak certainly looks the part of a straitlaced “J. Edgar” in Lynch’s quasi-’50s netherworld. He’s introduced wearing a Columbo-style trench coat over his black suit, handcuffing a hooker next to a school bus full of screaming children in Fargo, North Dakota. Isaak holds his own in scenes with Lynch as FBI boss Gordon Cole, Kiefer Sutherland as his co-agent Sam Stanley, and Harry Dean Stanton as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park. But he also symbolizes the film’s knowing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. The film opens with a downbeat, gloomy jazz piece instead of the comfortingly familiar Twin Peaks TV theme. Chet Desmond isn’t the G-man audiences turned up to see, much like Moira Kelly isn’t the Donna (a role originated by Lara Flynn Boyle) they expected. As Gordon Cole loudly points out: Chet has his own M.O.! Everything is off in the Isaak-led prologue. He descends on a small northwestern town like Twin Peaks, but Deer Meadow is decidedly not Twin Peaks. The sheriff station is similar but wrong, and the staff is downright hostile. The local diner is like a bizarro version of the beloved Double R, with rude service and damn bad coffee.

Isaak is given scant opportunities to be fun and playful like the old Dale Cooper—there’s really only one such moment, when he pranks his absentminded partner Sam by asking for the time and watching him obliviously overturn a cup of hot java when he turns his wrist. Isaak smiles, then immediately apologizes and drops the smile. For the bulk of his time on-screen, he’s placid, stoic, all business. The tone of Isaak’s performance is a stark contrast to the fever pitch of most of the other characters and the rest of the movie, led by the volcanic Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer. There are no big swings in his choices, not as there are with the quirky and almost theatrically emotional denizens surrounding him on every side. (Even Bowie gets to wear a loud shirt and sport a Kentucky-fried accent!) And then . . . he’s gone. Twenty-seven minutes into the film, Desmond goes back to the Fat Trout to investigate a mysterious trailer, discovers the green ring missing from Teresa Banks’s body, and disappears. By the time you get to the end of Laura’s harrowing, horrifying journey, you forget Chris Isaak was even in this movie.

But that isn’t to say he doesn’t leave an impression. Like many other short-lived Lynch characters—whether it’s the “bum” by the dumpster in Mulholland Dr. or Michael Cera’s Elvis-like Wally Brando in The Return—Isaak feels utterly natural in the Lynch dreamverse. And his dry, unaffected delivery and calm presence ground the surrealism in reality, keeping this house from flying off to Oz on the tornado of Sutherland’s tics or the implausibility of a woman in a red dress doing an interpretive dance for the two agents instead of a traditional FBI briefing.

He looks and sounds like he stepped out of the Hoover era, but unlike the whimsical, carefree Agent Cooper, he seems much more haunted, like the humor has been siphoned out of him by life’s demons. He is the Lynchian contradiction in human form. In the scene below, Agent Desmond visits the sheriff of Deer Meadow (Gary Bullock), and his pleasant formality is met with hostility and mockery. Suddenly taking command, Isaak shows he’s not merely a cardboard cutout of a G-man. He grabs the snickering deputy’s nose and bends him into submission, then orders a fresh batch of coffee from the stunned receptionist. He storms into Sheriff Cable’s office, keeping his cool even as the sheriff calls him “little fella,” and struts out with the Banks evidence box.

At first glance, Chet Desmond may be Leave It to Beaver or Elvis with a badge—but underneath, the worldly Isaak plays a detective who’s seen too many strange and twisted and horrible things to waste time messing around.