By Leeann Remiker.

Laura Palmer is at the epicenter of Twin Peaks, the sun around which it revolves, and thethematic core of the saga’s ethos. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is a haunting mystery meditating ontrauma, identity, and the representation of female trauma. Across the original television series (which aired from 1990-1991), the prequel film Fire Walk with Me (1992), and the sequel series 25 years later, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Laura’s character shifts from a mythic absence, to a painfully embodied subject confronting her own abuse, and finally a cosmic, fractured figureforced between timelines and identities. This progression, and Sheryl Lee’s brilliant performance as Laura, reflects a wider engagement with the ethics of portraying violence against women rooted within the specific eras of their production, a progression that forced viewers to reconsider the allure and horror of Laura’s story beyond nostalgic melodrama. In doing so, Lynch makes a radical move in granting Laura, a nuanced and agent female character, cosmic significance on the grandest scale, transforming her trauma into a profound symbol of resistance, loss, and the limits of salvation.

Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: The Absent Presence

The opening scene of Twin Peaks tracks the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body by Pete Martell (Jack Nance). “She’s dead, wrapped in plastic,” Martell states over the phone (“Pilot,” Twin Peaks). She, Laura, becomes the emotional core of the series and a radical departure from the “Murder of the Week” victims of episodic crime shows of the 1980s and 90s. In shows like Miami Vice (1984-1990) or Columbo (1971-1978), the victim of the murder was often little more than a narrative prop, her body examined coldly by forensic technicians, her body parts atomized by a voyeuristic cameraman, her personality and inner life left invisible and unspoken. The camera, like a moritician’s scalpel, cuts open the physical form for the audience to peer into, with little engagement from her as a fully realized subject (Lopez, 284). The men around her, whether police or potential perpetrators, become the characters of interest. These shows perpetuated a “murdered woman” trope, in which the victim existed primarily as a catalyst for the male investigators’ quests, her story fading quickly once the case had been solved.

The original series of Twin Peaks radically transforms this trope by positing Laura Palmer not as a forgotten corpse but as a mythic and haunting center of the entire narrative universe. Originally cast to play the corpse of Laura and pose for archival photographs, Lynch was so moved by Sheryl Lee’s allure that he crafted flashbacks for Laura to bring Sheryl to the screen. Awash in a silky, soft lighting in the flashbacks, Lynch takes his first steps towards dissolving the fantasies of the town’s inhabitants and its audience by first crafting it. Although nearly every character claims some sort of privileged insight into Laura’s secret desires and true nature, none can fully comprehend her complexity or inner life. According to Christy Desmet, she becomes the “objet petit a”– an impossible object of desire that propels the mystery forward yet remains fundamentally unknowable (Desmet, 130). This deliberate absence cultivates a tension between yearning for easy answers and the impossibility of ever grasping Laura’s subjectivity.  Her fundamental unknowability forces the audience to reckon with the unsettling nature of her premature death and its obsession with the allure of the dead woman, as they become obsessed with the way she lived, not just the way she died. By denying viewers the comfort of fully knowing their innocent victim, the creators preserve Laura’s subjectivity. 

The presentation of Laura’s body is likewise a direct subversion of the aestheticized, clinical depiction of female corpses in crime TV. From the moment Pete finds her body on the lakeshore, Laura’s death is imbued with a cosmic weight. The opening montage of the show, as the camera swaps between a humming Josie Packard (Joan Chen), flowing Douglas firs, and Pete preparing for his morning fishing, the idyllic images and mournful foghorn build a quiet dread of discovery. Her corpse becomes not just a piece of evidence, but a rupture in the fabric of a town propagated on a wholesome sheen, a sacred wound that cannot be easily sutured. Lynch’s camera lingers, not to objectify but to mourn. As Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) drives into the “town of Twin Peaks,” he approaches the woman who would come to define his career and his life, the white knight who will only discover her murderer after loosing another, reinscribing Laura into a long history of female figures who are failed by structures of government and patriarchy (“Pilot,” Twin Peaks). Laura, her face blue yet serene, is made into an icon: homecoming queen, golden girl, America’s daughter, but she will not remain that way– her death is not the end of her presence, her spirit lives on in her community and sets Twin Peaks on a course towards a cosmic battle between good and evil. She is a dead victim of rape, and a measureless angel of good.

In this space, Lynch interrogates and disassembles the Madonna-whore dichotomy, rather than reinforcing it: “Laura and Maddy seem to illustrate the familiar patriarchal division of women into virgins and whores” (Desmet, 99). As Desmet notes, Laura is both a saint and a sinner: she helped Johnny Horne (Robert Davenport), tutored Josie Packard, and assisted with Meals on Wheels, while she is also a prostitute and is addicted to cocaine. However, what Desmet fails to reckon with is that Laura is also everything in between– through the brief glimpse we get of her in the original series, mainly her and Donna dancing on the video recording, shows a girl who is both adventurous and innocent, rambunctious and loving, rebellious and looking for order (Ledwon, 268). While the first season does leave Laura mostly silent, defined by others’ stories, her overwhelming presence reveals the cultural and psychic structures that obscure real violence beneath fantasy. She embodies the contradictions enforced on women by the patriarchy, yet Twin Peaks breaks from its contemporaries by using Laura to indict, rather than reinforce, the genre’s casual misogyny. Laura’s dignity in death, her angelic high school photos, and the intimacy of her wrapped body make viewers complicit in the myth-making that so often follows violence against women. By refusing to grant Laura full personhood in the original series, Lynch does not fully erase her voice. Her silence indicates the systems, both fictional and societal, that demand women remain beautiful, voiceless, and dead. That silence will be ruptured in Fire Walk with Me, finding Lynch reexamining his own culpability in selling the myth of Laura, and ensuring the public sees her walk, talk, cry, and laugh, whether they like it or not. 

Fire Walk with Me and Embodying Trauma

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) is perhaps his magnum opus, representing a significant reconfiguration of Laura Palmer’s character, shifting audience understandings of her as the absent, mythic object of desire to a fully embodied female character and subject enmeshed in trauma and psychological fragmentation. Sheryl Lee’s performance is central to this transformation, her eyes, sexuality, and bated breath conveying Laura’s complex interiority with a nuanced blend of vulnerability, cruelty, defiance, and despair. Her nuanced work captures Laura’s oscillations between mocking vamp and tender girl, revealing the instability and fragmentation of a young woman suffering under unbearable trauma, with nowhere to run. Through Lee’s fearless work and the insistence on narrative focus around Laura (well, despite the first 30 minutes spent in Deer Meadow), Lynch disrupts the detached, voyeuristic fantasy of the original series and the conventional crime genre’s objectification of murdered women, and the patriarchal domination of film output in the 1980s and 90s.  

Where the original series constructs Laura primarily through the perspectives and fantasies of others, rendering her a mysterious, unattainable figure, Fire Walk with Me foregrounds Laura’s own experience in the last week of her life, thereby challenging the audience’s desire to maintain her as an inscrutable icon and regrounds the Twin Peaks saga in its core, Laura. While Desmet argues that the film “both clarifies Laura’s status as a saint and simplifies her relationship to the Twin Peaks community,” I contend that this perceived sanctification, especially when Laura is visited by the angel in the Red Room in the final moments of the film, is a complex process that challenges and reconfigures Laura’s role within the wider narrative (Desmet, 98). Fire Walk with Me resists reductive hagiography by foregrounding Laura’s interiority and agency, revealing the complexity of her interpersonal relationships– her viciousness to Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), her unsettling interaction with Harold (Lenny Von Dohlen), and her simultaneous vulnerability and antagonism towards James (James Marshall)– dimensions that remain unarticulated in the series. In doing so, the film complicates the idealized community’s (and the audience’s) memory of Laura, offering a more nuanced and intensely empowering female “saint” who embodies subjectivity and disrupts simplistic dichotomies of victimhood and sainthood.

In direct opposition to the fetishized depictions of women (and their deaths) common in crime films of the 1980s, like Blow Out (1981) or Dressed to Kill (1980), Fire Walk with Me offers a graphic, unflinching portrayal of abuse and rape, most harrowingly embodied in the train car murder scene. Rather than voyueristically dissecting Laura’s body as a spectacle for male pleasure or narrative convenience, Lynch grounds Laura’s suffering in Lee’s eyes, eyes encapsulating the cosmic weight and spiritual significance of the suffering of women within the Twin Peaks universe. As Leland (Ray Wise) and BOB (Frank Silva) fade in and out of frame, bright white lights flash onto Laura’s lipstick-stained face, and she stares are herself in the mirror below, Laura’s death becomes neither aestheticized nor dismissed. It is rendered with painful dignity and complexity; her anguish and resilience coexist. The face the audience has gazed upon in every homecoming photo transformed into a shrieking face of fear, yet in being forced to watch, the audience sees Laura transformed from a purely tragic victim into a figure of resilience. Lynch’s film exposes how Laura embodies contradictory patriarchal fantasies collapsed into one figure, virgin and whore, innocent and manipulator, thus forcing viewers to endure the “objective position” of the Americana they find satiating and reckon with its reality (134). Laura’s refusal to recognize her father, Leland, as BOB underscores the places she is forced to go for resistance against the emptiness and violence imposed by patriarchy. When Laura takes the ring and seals her fate, the moment becomes the ethical defiance of Laura, her only outlet an act of self-possession in the face of systemic violence. The angel’s return near her death offers a fleeting salvation, a matriarchal vision of safety, suggesting that beauty, evil, and spiritual endurance coexist, complicating the idea of Laura as a simple victim.

Fire Walk with Me initially confounded and alienated many viewers and critics who were invested in returning to the comforting mysteries of Twin Peaks established by the original series. By not following up with what happened to Dale in the film, Lynch forces audiences to confront the painful reality of Laura’s experience, an experience they reveled in when clues were revealed and mysteries were solved, rather than allowing her to remain a distant, unknowable icon. Significantly, Fire Walk with Me also functions as a pointed response to the prevalent cinematic depictions of women in contemporary media of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Films such as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and Dressed to Kill (1980) often rendered female characters as either disposable victims or sexualized objects, frequently instrumentalized to further male-centered narratives of crime, power, and violence. The death of the female protagonist at the end of Blow Out does little but render the arc of John Travolta’s character as tragic, wherein female suffering merely serves as a plot device without an ethical reflection or deeper subjectivity. Lynch’s film confronts and radically subverts this tradition by centering Laura’s interiority and trauma with a level of complexity and dignity absent from many genre counterparts. Lynch had contemporary 1990s audiences, saturated with bloody crime films, to watch the day in the life of a teenage girl, as she experiments with sex and drugs, and also writes in her diary and chats with her best friend. Fire Walk with Me demands ethical engagement and empathy, highlighting the systemic patriarchal violence often glossed over or fetishized in mainstream cinema. As Desmet articulates, the film “marks the possibility of an ethical subjectivity” (136). 

Laura Palmer in The Return: A Cosmic, Unsavable Heroine

Just as the original Twin Peaks exposed the emotional and structural void at the center of procedural crime television’s “dead girl” trope, and Fire Walk with Me gave Laura Palmer interiority and ethical subjecthood, The Return presents a daunting metaphysical and conflicted depiction of our fallen heroine. Arriving amid a media landscape dominated by morally ambiguous men– the “prestige TV” anti-heroes of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and True Detective– The Return critiques this paradigm through the base evil of Mr. C and the failed mission of Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). Through the bifurcation of our beloved Dale Cooper into the malevolent, calculating Mr. C and the near-blank Dougie Jones, David Lynch stages a narrative and aesthetic investigation into the fantasy of the white male savior. The Return concretely elevates Laura to a cosmic status; “Part 8” sees The Fireman (Carel Struycken) transport a golden orb of Laura’s face onto Earth after the detonation of the atom bomb and the creation of BOB by Judy. She becomes not only the mythic center of a small town, nor a human survivor of violence, but a force of spiritual resistance designed to combat the abstract evil represented by Judy. In this way, Laura becomes a piece in a cosmic chess match, a disquieting element of The Return that transfigures Laura into a metaphysical counterweight, wherein the narrative risks stripping her once again of her agency, flattening her trauma into a necessary step in the universe’s grand scheme.

Laura becomes the savioric force against the evil borne of contemporary America, the atom bomb, and the counterpoint to BOB’s darkness, the soul to his soulless hunger. While mythical and radical, as positioning a complex female lead populated with moral failings and bad decisions as savior of the universe can be considered uniquely feminist, the moment also displaces Laura from her historical and psychological specificity into a spiritual abstraction. Her trauma is no longer purely hers, but cosmically instrumentalized. Throughout “Part 8,” it could be understood that Laura’s suffering is necessary for universal equilibrium. The political implications of this reframe are unsettling, but can also be generative. This narrative move does something uniquely radical: it grants a female victim, not a male detective, superhero, or chosen one, the status of the universe’s savior. In a televisual landscape where cosmic importance, spiritual design, and symbolic destiny are overwhelmingly reserved for men, Lynch places a teenage girl at the center of the metaphysical order.

Yet, this gesture is not without tension. Cooper’s intervention into Laura’s timeline in “Part 17”, however well-intentioned, enacts a familiar form of patriarchal control. In attempting to undo her death by leading Laura into the woods and away from her fate, he therefore revokes the exact agency she claimed in the film when she donned the Formica ring. Laura never got the chance to choose the ring, choose death, or choose to deny BOB’s possession of her soul and her continued abuse at the hands of her father. His journey into the past is not just a failure to save Laura; it’s a failure to recognize that she had already done her best to save herself, and releasing her back into the community that watched her suffer and die would only retraumatize her.  As Todd McGowan states, “The Return, by playing out the logic of fantasy [of saving Laura] to its endpoint, shows how fantasy exposes the inescapability of traumatic loss” (McGowan, 125). The Return confronts us with the limits of the savior fantasy, not only its futility but its capacity the retraumatize the very person it aims to redeem. Still, the image of Laura as Carrie Page (the final missing page of Laura’s diary, personified), screaming as the lights of her former house go out, does not merely signify defeat. It is, perhaps, a final act of resistance. Her scream ruptures Dale’s (and the audience’s) fantasy of resolution, exposing the failure of masculine heroism to contain female trauma. While The Return is heavy-handed in its mythologizing of Laura, it never allows her to become fully legible or controllable. In this sense, her cosmic elevation is not a silencing, but a refusal to be anything other than vast. Lynch reimagines the rape victim not as broken or passive, but as essential. She is the secret history of the universe, and she still screams.

Laura is the One

Taken together, the evolution of Laura Palmer across Twin Peaks’ three major texts charts a radical reimagining of the murdered woman in American television and film. No longer just the haunting catalyst of mystery, Laura becomes a complex embodiment of ethical inquiry, formal experimentation, and feminist critique. Her trajectory, from absent icon to embodied woman to mythic redeemer, mirrors shifts in cultural attitude towards female trauma, authorship, and genre itself. At each turn, Lynch interrogates not just who Laura is, but how we see her– what it means to watch, desire, romanticize, pity, or attempt to save her. In a media landscape long saturated with the aesthetics of violated women, Twin Peaks dared to unravel the fantasy, expose its violence, and then refigure its central woman as a figure of cosmic consequence. That she resists coherence and containment, and ultimately cannot be saved by the beloved heroic male, only underscores the power of her scream. Her scream does not restore order, but ensures her pain is never forgotten, that her pain can inspire change, and disrupt the forces of evil that killed her.

Works Cited

Christy Desmet, “The Canonization of Laura Palmer” (pp 93-108) and Diana Hume George, “A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks” (pp 109-119).

Ledwon, Lenora. “‘Twin Peaks’ and the Television Gothic.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 4, 1993, pp. 260–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43798696. Accessed 11 June 2025.

Lopez, Francesca. “Between ‘Normalization’ and Spectacularization: Representing Violence Against Women in TV Crime Series.” Journalism and Mass Communication, vol. 8, no. 6, June 2018, pp. 277–286. David Publishing, doi:10.17265/2160-6579/2018.06.001.

McGowan, Todd. “Waiting for Agent Cooper: The Ends of Fantasy in Twin Peaks: The Return.”Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain, edited by Jamie Ruers and Stefan Marianski, Karnac Books, 2023, pp. 119–38. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.23338243.15. Accessed 11 June 2025.