Laura Palmer Lives Forever
On mourning a girl who never existed
I’m aware that it seems chronically online, parasocial, and even slightly disturbed to mourn the death of Laura Palmer. First of all, she died in 1989. Second of all, she isn’t real. But David Lynch’s works while steeped in wonderfully macabre fantasy, are grounded in a palpable, tragic sense of reality. In his tales of secret suburban treachery and dreams gone awry, Lynch takes our grainy sense of reality and distorts it just enough to make the horrors a little more terrifying, the goodness a little more out of reach.
I’m not writing this to meander endlessly about the meanings of Twin Peaks (however, being offered a book deal to do so is my ultimate dream), I’m here to talk about Laura – reality, fantasy, doppelganger, homecoming queen. She was the catalyst, the Pacific Northwest princess that was promised, the unanswerable tragedy. Her character embodies the goodness of the world, as it becomes tormented and disturbed. The scary unearthing of American suburbia which Lynch dissects in so many of his works can be culminated in the essence of Laura. She is this Lynchian metaphor, toeing the line between the mundane and the macabre (as David Foster Wallace would put it). She is the homecoming queen and she runs the Meals on Wheels. She is addicted to cocaine and is a victim of abuse. She exists between two worlds, and it seems both of them wage for her soul.
Though mourning character deaths is common across fans of many different television shows, no singular death feels as monumental as Laura’s. Her death is not merely essential to the narrative, to building drama and mystery, but to what all of Twin Peaks can represent. This loss of innocence, American fantasies and dreams washed away, tarnished by the evils that languish in the quaintest of towns. Laura Palmer’s death, and all the circumstances of it, upend everything that the town’s identity is built upon. Everything that American culture praises and seeks out in young women – innocence, untarnishable beauty, and kindness – are shattered through the truths unearthed following Laura’s death. And the evil that tormented her is from both an otherworldly demonic force in the form of BOB, and an unsuspecting evil of her own family, in her father. Laura’s piercing screams shatter and collapse the naive dream of the American family, demonstrating the disaster of the idyll.
As bleak as the world Lynch paints is, Twin Peaks is still supplanted with love and goodness, and that goodness is most palpable in Laura’s story. There is kindness and goodness that persists even throughout the horrors of her final days. Her final encounter with the Log Lady outside of the Double R Diner, and the scene in The Missing Pieces that mirrors it with Donna’s father, demonstrate that despite the predestined tragedy, there was love in Laura’s life – just not enough to save her.
And as tragic as her death was, Lynch also asserts to us that it was necessary. Although Laura absolutely deserved a better, longer life, there was no possibility of that. For as long as the evil forces in the town existed, so would the tragedy of her death. It is this eternal, inescapable tragedy that makes Laura’s death so palpable. And as it was explored in The Return, no attempt at saving Laura can work – the tragedy persists as strong as the love does.
The Return’s terrifying and bleak ending emphasizes the inescapability of evil, that no time travel or well-intentioned FBI agents could undo what was done. But as I believe the ending of Fire Walk With Me indicates, the goodness that Laura still embodies, even beyond her death, persists as well. Twin Peaks, at its core, is about the struggle between good and evil, and though Laura’s death was undeniably tragic and horrifying, her final moments demonstrate her powerful determination to refuse to give into this evil. Her death is marked by an almost Biblical sense of selflessness, sacrificing herself for the sake of others.
Laura Palmer, despite being a fictional television character, is a phenomenon. Twin Peaks fans, and Lynch himself, have an enduring love for her. In the uncanny, eerie world that Lynch and Frost built, Laura’s bravery in toeing the line between good and evil, tormented by the harrowing mysteries of BOB and Judy, asserts a sense of goodness that buoys this eternal Lynchian metaphor. Good does not always win, but even when surrounded by timeless and inescapable evil and apathy, it manages to persist.