Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — the David Bowie scene explained. Lynch cut most of it, then took 25 years to finish it
David Bowie shot one sequence for David Lynch's 1992 prequel and most of it never reached cinemas. Here's what the scene contains, how much was restored two decades later, and what it took to put the character back on screen afterwards.
Bowie is on screen for roughly two minutes of Fire Walk With Me, most of them spent shouting. Lynch spent the next quarter of a century dealing with what he left on the floor.
Bowie plays Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who went missing in 1987 and has not been mentioned in the television series at all. The scene is dated on screen: 16 February 1989, 10:10 in the morning, at the Philadelphia field office. Gordon Cole (Lynch), Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer) and Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) are already there. Cooper has been pacing in front of the security monitors, checking his own image on the feed, when one of the pictures freezes. The lift opens and Jeffries walks out in a pale suit, two years late.
What he actually says
Very little of it parses, which is the point. He tells the room he is not going to talk about Judy, refers to a meeting held above a convenience store, mentions a ring, and asks who they think Cooper is. While he talks, the film cuts away into the meeting itself: the Man From Another Place, BOB, Mrs Tremond and her grandson, the Electrician, the Jumping Man. Static bleeds across the image. Then Jeffries is gone, Cole reports him vanished, and word comes back that the Buenos Aires hotel has no record of him ever having been there.
Bowie played Jeffries in a Louisiana accent, which he came to regret and Lynch never did.
The film premiered at Cannes on 16 May 1992 to a famously hostile reception. Lynch had shot well over five hours of material and cut it to 2 hours 14 minutes, choosing to keep the focus on Laura Palmer. Jeffries was among the heaviest losses.
The restoration, twenty-two years later
Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces premiered at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles on 16 July 2014: 91 minutes of deleted and extended material assembled by Lynch as a special feature for the CBS Home Entertainment box set Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery. Criterion later carried it alongside the film.
The restored Jeffries material fills in the Buenos Aires end of the sequence:
- The Palm Deluxe hotel — Jeffries collects a letter left for him, addressed to Miss Judy.
- The lift — he steps into it in Argentina and out of it in Philadelphia, in the same clothes.
- The stairwell — he rematerialises in Buenos Aires the same day, screaming, scorching the wall beside him and clearing the staff out of the corridor.
- The office, extended — a longer version of the Philadelphia scene, with more of the convenience-store vision intact.
Finishing it in 2017
Lynch wanted Bowie back for Twin Peaks: The Return. Bowie's lawyer told him the singer was unwell — his illness was not public — and Bowie died on 10 January 2016, having given permission for the 1992 footage to be reused on one condition.
"We got permission to use the old footage, but he didn't want his voice used in it," Lynch said in 2021. "I think someone must have made him feel bad about his Louisiana accent in Fire Walk With Me, but I think it's so beautiful."
Lynch hired Nathan Frizzell, an actor from Louisiana, to redub the archival lines, and judged that "the guy did a great job". Jeffries himself returns in an entirely new form: a bell-shaped machine venting steam, emitting a white glowing orb, sitting in a room behind a convenience store that the characters call the Dutchman's. Cooper's doppelgänger goes to him for coordinates. Cooper, later, asks him for a date — 23 February 1989 — and is sent back into the week of Laura Palmer's death.
Twenty-five years is the interval Laura promises Cooper in the Red Room. It is also, exactly, the gap between Bowie stepping out of that lift and the character being given an ending.