[...] This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. [...] But I submit that that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy both_ness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy _both_ness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a _both_ness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but _acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself--this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we're going to feel, in Premiere magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."