Come home to the world of Twin Peaks David Lynch creates a "prequel," "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," that is sexy, violent, wild, and very, very strange Take the two-lane blacktops through the land of software moguls and 50-foot yachts east into the foothills of the Cascade mountains. There, the true nature of David Lynch´s warped reality lies, somewhere between the road´s sunspots and shadows, where a healthy slab of Twin Peaks cherry pie waits around the next curve and the corpse of a homecoming queen follows the lazy twists and turns of a glacial river. Like the fictional Twin Peaks, Snoqualmie, Washington, is a sleepy mountain town where the locals seem grateful for the extra revenue generated from the hype. Most are unaware of the impending new round of screen perversity and violence that Lynch is about to unleash in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, his film "prequel" to the ABC TV series. Pickups and logging trucks still rumble down the main highway thoroughfare, while dogs wander smaller, quieter streets in front of modest clapboard houses. The weather changes as frequently as the temperature of Lynch´s characters. Aside from an occasional suicide over Snoqualmie Falls, there is certainly nothing to signal any sort of crime, though as one lifelong resident put it, "The longer I live here, the more Twin Peaks seems like the real thing." Yet last May, halfway around the world in the hothouse atmosphere of the Cannes Film Festival, the altered, tongue-in-cheek consciousness of Fire Walk with Me showed signs of strain. Even before the film´s secrecy-shrouded Cannes premiere, Lynch fanatics vacillated wildly about its worth (did it expand the Twin Peaks world or merely rehash it?), while the director´s detractors dismissed the film as a blatantly opportunistic bid to elevate a failed TV series to more profitable film sequel status. Lynch doesn´t take himself nearly so seriously as the social critics standing in line to dissect him, though he´s continually goaded about his films´ violence. "We´re attacking films for violence," he says, "but not doing much in the world about it. If this film were championing violence, that would be one thing. I don´t believe it is. I don´t know why there´s such violence in American films, but believe in very strong films and I don´t apologize for it one bit, as long as there´s balance. I like contrast, perversity and nonperversity. A film is a safe place to have experiences, like reading a book." Fire Walk with Me begins seven days prior to the murder of Laura Palmer and offers no real surprises except that Lynch´s depiction of Laura´s hidden lifestyle and murder by Leland, her "Killer Bob"-possessed father, wouldn´t qualify her for any awards at Sunday school. The first half hour works like a charm. The film´s droll humor then descends into a more predictable, yet distinctly Lynchian, sex-and-horror show. Kyle MacLachlan reprises his special agent Dale Cooper; David Bowie appears as the ghost of another agent; Kiefer Sutherland and Harry Dean Stanton do walk-ons. Moira Kelly assumes the role of Donna Hayward, Laura´s hesitant yet equally decadent best friend. But this Fire Walk with Me clearly belongs to the beguiling Sheryl Lee for he seductive portrayal of Palmer. Like all of Lynch´s screen habitués, her Palmer is simplicity personified, so seemingly simple she´s dangerous. The morning after his celebratory bash in Cannes, which was thrown by CIBY 2000 (the film´s French financiers) and rumored to cost a cool million, Lynch is situated in the rarefield atmosphere of the Hotel Carlton. This is far away from Missoula, Montana, where the director spent his youth, often riding around in his daddy´s pickup (his father was an agricultural research scientist). "He experimented with disease, bugs, the things that affect trees," says Lynch. "I love trees. There´s something about the mystery of the woods that I believe is responsible for Twin Peaks´ popularity, something like a fairy tale." He insists he isn´t out to pervert the American dream: "I love the idea of the American dream but right now, it´s only an idea and not really happening in a pure way, and not for the majority." As for Lynch´s dream of a continuing Twin Peaks saga, he says it has seen its final TV incarnation, but Fire Walk with Me may lead to other film sequels. "I have not a clue to what is reality, and would have to sit down with a psychiatrist to tell you why I like this world of Twin Peaks, but I really do. For me, there are still loose ends, lots of clues." His next film could be One Saliva Bubble, which he terms "a goofball, whacko, infantile, bad-humor" comedy set in Newtonville, Kansas, another fictious small town. "I like the freedom of B-movie," he adds, carefully avoiding that category for his own productions. "But I´m not really a film buff, because when I go to see a movie I worry so much about the director, it´s hard for me to digest my popcorn." How does he swallow the acclaim he has received? "Fame is separate from me, and nothing you can control," Lynch says. "It goes on outside yourself and you continue doing what you do. The danger is that success and failure affect you, differently but strongly. The important thing is to concentrate on the ideas and the next thing. To keep on trickin´."   KELLY GIRL "Movies aren´t reality but they do give you clues about life," says Moira Kelly, with all the earnestness a 24-year-old actress who describes herself as a "good Irish-Catholic girl" can muster. And what did she deduce from being part of the mysterious world of David Lynch? Playing Donna, Laura Palmer´s best friend (a role played by Lara Flynn Boyle in the original Twin Peaks TV series) was "like being in a freak show. The big scene takes place at this truck stop in the middle of nowhere: there are all these naked midgets and strippers with whips! And I have my clothes off too. That was really hard for me. When we were filming, at first I kept thinking about my body, then it seemed normal to be naked and to be around other naked people, even strippers and midgets. That´s what the Twin Peaks world is like: it didn´t seem abnormal until we were finished and I came back into 'normal' life. That´s when I realized David has an incredibly strange mind." To judge by her choice of roles, Kelly is no slouch in the strange department herself. She began her career by playing a mental patient in the unfortunately titled The Boy Who Cried Bitch. A wrenching performance as the brain-washed daughter of a psychopath in the NBC TV movie Love, Lies, and Murder followed; then came a quirky part as Billy´s girlfriend in Billy Bathgate. Mental patient, murderess, moll: what gives with this serious young woman? "It´s acting," Kelly says. "Everybody would like to do something crazy, and acting lets you do that." Kelly confesses that she sought a priest´s advice about her choices, and that if he had told her not to take a part, she would have turned it down. What else could you expect from a young woman who admits to a lifelong fantasy of being a nun? "I have an image of myself as this really cool sister," she says. But Kelly has also played her share of more "normal" women, too. Her leading role debut in The Cutting Edge was as teenage "rich bitch," an Olympic-caliber figure skater who learns to lighten up and love a rough-and-tumble hockey player. Her character´s struggle to grow up displayed a feminine persona closer to any young woman´s concerns, and Kelly´s performance in a story that threatened to become maudlin was honest and touching. Her portrayal of Oona Chaplin in the upcoming Charlie taught her another sobering truth about love: "Oona is a strong woman, but her life was nothing without Charlie." The next roles for this young actress could be equally disparate. This fall, she will appear in HBO´s Daybreak, a grim, 1984-ish sci-fi fable set in a bleak world 10 years from now, after a fascist uprising; her love interest is Cuba Gooding, Jr., the homeboy from Boyz N The Hood. "It´s very scary," says Kelly of the film. But her performing dream is to appear in a Broadway musical, "something where I get to sing and dance and be in love in a really nice way." Although Hollywood is beating down her door with proposals, Kelly admits to an unconventional notion of a future "project": "to be a good person, someone who made good changes through whatever they did." Coming from Kelly, what sounds like a truism spoken by Dan Quayle´s dream daughter seems more a sincere belief with some real truth to it. This is one successful actress with her feet firmly planted on the sod. "I am who I am, and I´m not going to sacrifice that for anybody else´s idea of who I should be." John Howell Article found on the following website: http://www.davidlynch.de/comehome.html