It Came From the '90s: The Harrowing, Heartbreaking Excellence of Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade.

Sheryl Lee is extremely talented, and should've become a massive star. She has one of the most evocatively expressive faces in all of cinema and television. Her bedroom eyes are especially hypnotic, as is her smile. Few actresses have ever been better at portraying both seductively blissed-out melancholia and pure, absolute terror. These are the two emotional states she toggles between most as Laura Palmer in David Lynch's brutal, powerful, disturbing film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). For my money, Lee is responsible for one of the finest performances in the annals of horror cinema. It's an astonishing tour-de-force, the kind of acting that haunts you forever.

A prequel to the original Twin Peaks televisions series—which chronicled the search for Laura Palmer's killer—Fire Walk With Me explores just how fucked up Laura's life was before her gruesome death. Eschewing many of the series' deliciously weird humor, the film can feel like an unrelenting exercise in psychological misery porn. As viewers, we know Laura's fate, which only enhances the sense of doom that practically suffocates every frame of the film. It's difficult to watch, as Laura's life spirals straight down to hell (or, the Black Lodge). You'd be hard-pressed to name an actress put through the ringer quite like Lee is in this film. At various points, she's screaming, being screamed at, crying, naked, coked out of her mind, and losing her grip on reality. It's almost cruel, and it must've taken quite the psychological toll on Lee. Our hearts ache for Laura, and that's almost entirely due to Lee's monumental performance.

Women in horror are routinely made to suffer. Fear and hysteria are essential ingredients to a horror actress's performance. Here, Lee is asked to portray Laura's slowly deteriorating mental state as she descends further into madness as the film progresses. In a role that other actresses might steer towards overwrought showiness, Lee instead simply inhabits the fragile heart of a woman being abused both physically and psychologically. The mania and depression arise naturally out of her assured performance.

There's a popular meme about Laura that has circled the Internet for a while now (see above). No question, Laura's a busy girl during her final days among the living. The meme is certainly funny, but also heartbreaking. Laura's teenage life was spinning wildly out of control. On the surface, you had meals on wheels and homecoming queen honors. On the flip side, you had stripping and copious sex with seemingly everyone (even Benjamin Horne!), not to mention the unspeakable horror of being repeatedly raped by her father (who was possessed by BOB). Then, during an orgy in the woods, she's murdered (again, by BOB).

Lee makes the distressing final week of Laura's into a poignant elegy for a life that once held much promise, but was defiled and destroyed by a supernatural force that, pointedly, wore the face of a man. Laura's life and ultimately her fate offer powerful commentary on the often sad treatment of women in both films and real life: used and abused, then left for dead.

In the recent series Twin Peaks: The Return, Lee got to add to Laura's story in rich, complex, and wonderfully confounding ways. Once again, she was marvelous. Over the course of two series and one film, Lee was able to make the mysterious dead girl at the center of Twin Peaks into a exquisitely complex and beloved character.

As good as she was in the two television series, her work in Fire Walk With Me is on another level, even. She inhabits the role with a frightening intensity that few have ever matched. I would rank her performance in Fire Walk With Me as one of the best of the '90s, one of the best in the history of horror films, and even one of the best in all of modern cinema. That last one may seem hyperbolic, but few performances have ever left me quite as emotionally shattered as Lee's in this film.

One of the absolutely essential performances of '90s cinema—and beyond.