Here’s where we address the white horse in the room: the performance of top-billed stars Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise as Laura and Leland. They are, without qualification, the two best film performances I’ve ever seen in my life. Even in a series stuffed with gifted actors tasked with doing difficult work and succeeding, there’s nothing like these two. There’s nothing like them anywhere. They touch the sun.

I reviewed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me for Pop Heist. I poured my whole heart and soul into this, in an attempt to due justice to one of the greatest films ever made, and the girl at its center.

Stefan and I enter the town of Twin Peaks in this episode on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark series. It’s geared to newcomers, so hopefully everyone can listen and enjoy!

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

“I’ve already gone places. I just wanna stay where I am.” Stanton’s role as tired-looking trailer-park owner Carl Rodd in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel was as cryptic as everything else in the film, lasting just a few short minutes and some spare lines of dialogue. But he packs decades of world-weariness into his brief screen time; nobody could turn “It’s just more shit I gotta do now” into a punchline that doubled as a declaration of existential despair. Stanton reprised and expanded the role in Peaks’ astonishing third season this year, cracking jokes about defying death one minute, bearing witness to unspeakable tragedy like an earthbound angel the next – a moving, bonus grace note in a long, legendary career. STC

I consider it one of the great privileges of my career as a writer to have written about Alien and Twin Peaks for Rolling Stone’s list of 10 Essential Harry Dean Stanton Movies.