Laura
NB: Significant spoilers for both Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me below. Also, some fairly heavy/sensitive topics are discussed herein, so if that bothers you at all, you don’t have to read this.
Despite loving David Lynch, I only started watching Twin Peaks this year. All this boiled down solely to my natural contrarianism; I’d started on Lynch’s “tougher fare” like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Inland Empire and presumed Twin Peaks — despite what I’d heard about the bananas surrealism of Fire Walk with Me and The Return — was ABC’s bastardization of Lynch for a mass audience (the pretension of some of its fans — many of whom never really moved onto Lynch’s other works — didn’t help matters).
While I will say the first two seasons of Twin Peaks are less intense than the high weirdness of Eraserhead or Lost Highway, they’re more than worthy of their place in the Lynchian pantheon. Forcing Lynch to comport his style to the strictures of network TV allows him to provide his signature pleasurably head-spinning waking-nightmare aesthetic but with characters which — via the repetition of the weekly series — one feels more love and sympathy for than, say, Betty from Mulholland Drive or Sailor from Wild at Heart. There’s something intrinsically lovable and deeply human about Cooper, Audrey, Harry, Donna, and the rest that you just don’t get in his films — which makes the eruptions of severe Lynchian violence and head-fuckery all the more effective and terrifying.
What really makes the series work, though, is that it’s haunted. The eccentric townspeople and coffee cups and cherry pie all belie the show’s central conflict: that once this town was home to a beautiful homecoming queen named Laura Palmer, and now she is dead. Indeed, the show’s mid-to-late second season drift is precipitated by the (forced-by-ABC) early reveal of Laura’s murderer. The mistake everyone makes — fans and network executives alike — is that the story of Twin Peaks is that of Agent Cooper, but it’s not. Cooper is the audience stand-in, the one outsider in this strange little Washington state logging town. He’s funny and charming and gentlemanly and quirky in his own right, but he’s not the heart of the series. His story, ultimately, is not Twin Peaks’.
No, the story of Twin Peaks is that of Laura. Laura, the girl found wrapped in plastic on the riverbank. Laura, the pretty young lady whose life was troubled far beyond what anyone knew or suspected. Laura, the woman living in hell. Laura. Laura. Laura.
Your silence is deafening, you have to watch this right now. I can’t believe you liked that, that’s so soy. That’s such a basic thing to like. South Park did a lot of damage. Wouldn’t it be funny if one of the Chapo Trap House hosts died in an ax-throwing contest? What do you mean, you’re tired? Why are you tired all the time?
There is such a thing as being in hell. I’m not talking about a physical place, somewhere with demons holding pitchforks and billowing clouds of sulfur. One may or may not believe in such a place — and indeed, the idea of a place of endless torment has been rejected by numerous philosophers and theologians for almost fifteen hundred years. There is likely no such thing as a place called hell, but it is perfectly possible to dwell there here on earth. Hell is where you have to bury a part of yourself so no one sees it. Hell is where you live two lives, one which you present to everyone you know and another where you’re tormented by someone or something else. Hell is where you’re controlled by a significant other or friend or parent or really anyone at all and you can’t ever tell anyone because they simply wouldn’t understand. Hell is where you’re trapped in an artificial prison and can’t escape.
Laura Palmer lived in hell. From her twelfth birthday on, she was molested by her own father, Leland, who was possessed by the evil spirit BOB. Leland was himself a victim of molestation at BOB’s hands; it was via this supreme violation of childhood innocence that BOB seized control of Leland. On the surface, Laura was gorgeous, poised, and popular, but inside she was dead. Her entire adolescence was engulfed by nightly rounds of rape from BOB/Leland. Her only respite came via cocaine abuse-as-self-medication and promiscuous sex, working at the One Eyed Jack’s brothel just over the Canadian border and fucking every man in sight — most of them a) older and/or b) violent thugs. She never knew what it was like to have a normal relationship with a man, only the experience of constant violation from the very person she should love and trust most in this world.
Most of us, fortunately, manage to escape hell. We escape with scars and anger and fear but we eventually get away. Sadly, Laura couldn’t. Laura’s only release was in death — and yet how beautiful this death was! The tears Laura shed in the Red Room — the antechamber to heaven, with a vision of her guardian angel above before her — was one of relief and release. Whatever happened on earth, whatever she did that would make her a sinner in the eyes of many, these are all forgiven now. BOB wanted to possess her next after Leland, and she knew it and broke the cycle. She would never have this greasy haired monster live inside her as he lived inside her dad. She would transcend the world by escaping from it. Her death was joyful. For the first time in years, Laura was happy. That’s all she ever wanted, really: for Laura Palmer to be happy.
I still can't get over you crying at the end of Edward Scissorhands, it’s so funny that you did that. Tim Burton is the Antichrist. This bitch has overdosed on fandom. Another day in Wokeadelphia, I see. Mick dago dago mick. STOP HEARTING MY TEXTS!!!!!! WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT?????
I’ve never been the victim of incest or sexual assault or any of the myriad horrors visited upon Laura Palmer — and yet watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me yesterday afternoon, I connected with her deeply. It felt odd, given the extreme nature of the crimes against Laura, and our differences in gender and age and location — but I felt her pain on an almost subconscious level. My pain was not her pain — fortunately, most people will never experience anything of that awful intensity. But I knew what she went through. There is no greater pain than your life being controlled and damaged on some level by another person — in my case, a person I viewed as a friend, but with whom I had no mutual contacts. A friend who I was initially kind towards but still hesitant to socialize with. A friend who glommed onto me against my will and who then — almost unknowingly, perhaps, though I doubt it — proceeded to torment me and sap the meaning from my life until one day I had enough. I needed to escape. I needed to cut this person off for good. There were good times, to be sure; we joked around and made each other laugh and had quite a few overlapping interests and supported each other through some truly stressful moments in our lives. Remember, Leland was Laura’s father, the man who raised her, who genuinely did love his Laura, who wanted to stop BOB but couldn’t. He was too weak; BOB’s evil had controlled him for so long that he could never physically escape him.
I met [REDACTED] online, back during the dark days of 2020 at the height of the pandemic. I was a much lonelier and more immature person back then; I was only just starting to move on from a long and persistent depression which had gobbled up the back half of high school and a first year-and-a-half or so of college. We were both members of a Discord server dedicated to [REDACTED], which — as a nerdier interest, to say the least — attracted a number of socially maladjusted geeks lacking hobbies, friends, or significant others. There were plenty of lovely, average people in there too — people who were socially well-adjusted and did have hobbies, friends, and significant others — and in fact they were probably the majority. They were just usually drowned out by the others.
At first, I sympathized with [REDACTED]. I defended them against these loser-y types, many of whom were extremely thin-skinned and up their own asses; even the mildest criticism of their ideology — or just an admission that you weren’t terribly keen on BreadTube or Marvel movies — would send them into a tizzy. In a way, [REDACTED] was almost a rare pool of sanity in this mess. From the beginning, though, I noticed things about [REDACTED] — negative things. A hair-trigger temper; a tendency to similarly not brook any disagreement and dismiss advice; a sense of humor marked by an uneven melding of edginess with oversensitivity. I never really wanted to be friends with them, not really. They appreciated my posts, which were generally more thoughtful and analytical than the others on the server. We did, in fact, have quite a bit in common — we were both Pennsylvanians, both on the spectrum, both had liked dinosaurs and animal documentaries as kids and history now. We had roughly congruent political sensibilities.
If we merely had different interests, I could live with that. The issue was that my interests weren’t respected like theirs — and if someone liked something they didn’t, that was more than just a preference but a character flaw. I never particularly cared about Seth Rogen or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Don Bluth’s cartoons — and to a large extent still don’t — but I’d never think someone was a bad person for liking them. There’s something so hateful in that, especially because there were things they liked that could easily come in for the same harsh treatment: professional wrestling, the Ant-Man comics, the band XTC. To this day, I struggle to listen to XTC; I love their quirky lyrics and beautiful harmonies, or at any rate, I want to love them. Somehow still, XTC retains the taint of everything they did or said. When I read interviews with their frontman and chief lyricist Andy Partridge — who is himself autistic — I see admissions of tantrums and panic attacks and Christmas Day meltdowns ending with mom-directed hollering. Partridge is, of course, contrite, and has received the help he’s needed to stay relatively calm and normal. I have no doubt in my mind that Partridge is a genius and a genuinely pleasant person despite his occasional rages and episodes (Lord knows I’ve had them in the past, too). It’s just that what I see in Partridge is also present in [REDACTED], too much so for their fandom to be a complete coincidence.
You’ve gotten worse since rejoining Instagram. Actually you loved Disney World and there are photos of you hugging Goofy! Oh, you watch Jeopardy? You truly are a boomer. I was annoyed you made that joke, that was so fucking soy.
Because [REDACTED] and I lived in different parts of the state, we never actually met one another. Because they had a completely fucked-up sleep schedule — staying awake all day and night save the afternoon — their moments of greatest activity overlapped with either a) the times I wanted to go hang out with friends or do coursework (i.e. the period between 4-5 and 10-11 p.m.) or b) the nighttime sleeping hours of a normal person. There were times when I’d sacrifice evenings where I wanted to write essays or chill at a bar because I knew the other option was a deluge of a million notifications from [REDACTED] while I tried to smooth out a paragraph or chat with a buddy. Any on-campus club meeting or event occurring in the late afternoon or evening was haunted by this. I knew the flood was coming as soon as the “Do Not Disturb” setting came off. I knew that I had no option but to answer every one of these texts. I was at my wit’s end and I couldn’t tell a soul. It was too much to explain, too many strange, niche events and fixations to hash out, too much of everything, really.
We’d have Google Chat calls which went on and on for hours. They’d take up entire weekend afternoons; in the colder months, there were points when the call’s duration extended far past sunset. I had good times, to be sure; I was good at making them laugh. But there was something so draining about them. Hours and hours consumed, the calls becoming more common with time, me wanting to keep my weekends open so I could — once again — hang out with friends and go to bars and restaurants and cafes and movie theaters and museums and bookstores and God knows where else. Any refusal could be met with belligerence, and I didn’t want to experience said belligerence. I couldn’t tell anyone I knew besides my parents; I didn’t want them to know how bad things had gotten, and I didn’t think I could explain all the details. I lived two lives: one where I had friends and acquaintances galore and I could have both deep conversations and witty small-talk with kindred souls and not worry about getting bitched out, and another where I had to essentially babysit someone who was deeply, deeply lonely.
That’s what [REDACTED] truly was: lonely. They’d acquire friends — nearly all of whom were online, rather than in-person — and then eventually drive them away through meltdowns and immaturity. The people they didn’t like had to become my enemies, too. Sometimes, I wished I could reach through the screen and shake [REDACTED] and tell them: this is also you. Sure, they may be smug assholes who think they’re always right, but you’re no better. You want me to laugh at all these weirdos online, all these people with nonfunctional social lives, all these people who are autistic or LGBT or otherwise different — and remember, hypocrite, you fit some of these categories too — and I just can’t. I feel bad for them. I just do. It’s not funny. It was never funny. You’re not allowed to get upset about a comedian or sitcom you think is annoying and then do this. Narcissism of small differences and all that.
I wished, deep down, that I’d said that shit directly. I wished and I wished and I wished but I didn’t. I thought this person could grow but they just couldn’t. My graduation was nearing, my senior thesis paper was due, I had an entire new world — a world apart from undergraduate life, whether that was a job or a master’s program or whatever — laying ahead of me. Whatever this was was totally nonfunctional.
I managed to end the friendship. I hemmed and hawed because I truly did feel bad for [REDACTED], but I realized that what I wanted them to be — even in some distant time far into the future — would likely never come to pass. I was creating an idea to save my own sanity that had no bearing in reality. Only a week or so post-graduation, I did it. [REDACTED] was left in shock, and proceeded to lob insults at me: I was an “autist” and a “fake friend” who “secretly hated me, just like all the others.” I was stung by these, but I really didn’t care. There was nothing left to say. The dysfunction was over, and the fog was lifting, and I felt truly happy and free for the first time in what felt like forever.
The long, sclerotic period of dysfunction coming to its sad, perhaps pre-ordained close. The feeling of being at your wit’s end. That the world as you know it cannot continue like this and there needs to be some way out, some kind of liberation. That sheer exhaustion as you feel hell getting hotter and hotter around you, and the red curtains part before you and Agent Cooper beckons. What is this release? Is it life or death? Who knows, but it is an escape.
— I said all that stuff because of [REDACTED], who, long story short, is not my friend anymore. I feel bad for everything I said, and I still want to be your friend.
— Thank you, but I don’t think I’m in a place where we can reconnect right now. I wish you well.
We are so different: one of us is real, the other fictional. One of us is a teenage girl, the other a man in his twenties. One of us lives in a podunk down in the Pacific Northwest, the other in the sixth-largest (really fifth — fuck you, Phoenix, you land-annexing bastard) city in the country. One of us was brutally murdered in 1989, the other is still very much alive. One of us escaped intact, the other escaped only through death. Maybe I’m being solipsistic and trivializing what Laura — and so many others like Laura in our very own world — endured — and I’ve gone so far up my own ass that nothing makes sense anymore.
And still: as Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me drew to a close and I felt the shimmering bittersweet beauty of the final sequence as Angelo Badalamenti’s take-off of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings swelled to full heartbreaking ripeness, I felt this connection which appeared to transcend the banal. The entire sad tapestry of her final week of life, the pity and terror and sweet, joyful, tear-streaked release of the ending — I realized what this was, and who Laura was.
Laura is everyone who’s suffered in secret until they can no longer take it. Laura is sadness and terror and most importantly courage. Laura was courageous and stronger than she knew. You don’t need to go through all that singular violation and trauma to feel like Laura, to see her struggle in yours, to find redemption in her bravery and final, beautiful release from pain and suffering.
One chants out between two worlds…