A cigarette cherry fills the screen, burning like a meteor. Sailor and Lula strike a match and smoke in bed. “My mama smokes Merits now. Used to be she smoked Viceroys,” says Lula dreamily. “I started stealing ‘em in 6th grade. When’d you start smoking, Sail?” “I guess I started smoking when I was about… four,” he answers, staring at the ceiling. “My mama was already dead then, from lung cancer.” “What brand did she smoke?” Lula asks. “Marlboros, same as me. Guess both my mama and my daddy died from smoke or alcohol-related illness.”
“Did I ever tell you how my daddy died?” asks Lula a bit later. “In a fire, as I recall,” Sailor replies. “Yeah,” says Lula. “Mama told me he poured kerosene all over himself and lit a match.”
Each time after they make love, the couple light a couple smokes, and when Lula admits she’s pregnant, Sailor lights two for himself.
*
In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Laura pours herself a drink in the Palmer living room, listening to jazz and dressed head-to-toe in black. “Nowhere fast. And you’re not coming,” she snaps when Donna asks her where she’s going, lighting up a smoke with melodramatic flair. Donna notes the overflowing ashtrays beside Laura’s framed portrait. “If I had a nickel for every cigarette your mom smoked, I’d be dead,” she Donna deadpans. Despite her friend’s best efforts, Laura heads into the night alone.
Outside a bar, Laura runs into the Log Lady, who lays her hand on the girl’s forehead as if checking for fever. “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out,” the Log Lady says gravely. “The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.” Laura reaches for her hand, but the Log Lady pulls away.
Later that night, two men in flannel and two girls enter the Pink Room — brothel-red and strobe-lit and soundtracked by evil bluegrass, to which women are dancing as if possessed. “Hey slow pokes, guess what?” announces the Canadian drug traffickerJacques Renault. “There’s no tomorrow. Know why, baby?” He turns to Laura. “Cause it’ll never get here.” The camera pans the barroom floor: a world of ash, beer bottles, and 2,000 cigarette butts.
*
“Do you want to see?” the Lost Girl asks from far away. “You have to be wearing the watch. You light a cigarette. You push and turn right through the silk. You fold the silk over, and then you look through the hole.”
With a cigarette, Sue—one of at least three characters played by Laura Dern in Inland Empire— burns a hole into a silk chemise; it looks like an eclipse. The cigarette burn is a portal, and through it you can see another world.
*
“What do you find so fascinating about electricity?” asked a member of the audience at an Inland Empire screening in 2006. “The fact that it controls us,” Lynch answered without pause. Electricity — our modern analogue for fire. Fire is the chosen sign of Lynch (a Scorpio Rising), and in its potential to enlighten and annihilate, it is neither good nor evil but a force of transformation. Fire opens the passageways between different dimensions, like the Trinity test’s fire, which cracks the world in two.
