The Wild Reed: Finding Laura

I’ve only sparodically watched the long awaited third season of director David Lynch's landmark series Twin Peaks. What I’ve seen is both mesmerizing and disturbing, much like the original TV series.

Recently I came across a fascinating piece about season three by Crit Hulk. Following are excerpts.

In the end, there is only one real question . . .

Why is Laura Palmer so important?

Because at the end of [Twin Peaks], when a million choices could have been made, [director David] Lynch had to go back to her. Just like he had to go back to her years ago with Fire Walk With Me. In a way, Twin Peaks has never been about anything BUT Laura Palmer.

To many, she started as a narrative’s “murdered body.” A version of a trope we’ve seen in a thousand shows and a thousand movies. But to Lynch, she was never just a simple motive. She wasn’t a dead girl’s picture on a wall. She wasn’t a fridge to be stuffed, just so that some dude could feel all aggrieved and seek revenge. What set Twin Peaks apart was how much this small town cared about the girl’s death, and more, how they cared about her life and the way she affected everyone around her. The narrative of the show itself was not a whodunit, but a Rebecca-like investigation of who she really was in the first place. The whodunit was more about what lies at the dark heart of the American town and the American family, unveiling the echoes of abuse across the spectrum, along with the many contorted faces we force young women to wear just to keep up the facade. Twin Peaks is a story about what shouldn’t have been done, but what was done a thousand times. A girl who experienced so many tragedies before the inevitable one that took her life. It’s a set of tragedies that continues in many forms, even 25 years later.

As the new season tells us, “Laura is the one.” But righting this wrong isn’t as simple as catching a killer, nor somehow finding a way to return a single girl from the dead. I go back to the episode eight “origin” scene where we learn that Laura’s light was put into the world as a response to evil [represented most powerfully in the third season of Twin Peaks by the entity known as Judy or Jowday].

But what we’ve seen is not exactly fighting evil, is it? In fact, she ends up being a victim to evil. Was this show saying that women were put on Earth to be victims of men? Is she more akin to the female Jesus, dying for our sins? What does it mean? What is her light? Well, I think episode eight is telling us to see these forces as part of a larger system. If the story of Twin Peaks is about the story of abuse itself, then stopping abuse would require understanding all of the cycles that go on without end. It would mean disappearing into the history of time and violence and echoes of generations. It would mean facing the entirety of the truth.

. . . There’s always a question driving us, but it is also what traps us. We always want to fast-forward through the anguish to the alleviation. Here and now, it is more pronounced than ever precisely because I do not know if we will get another season of Twin Peaks. No one does. Even David Lynch doesn’t know. And so, we sit like a ball on the curved track of infinity, forced to wait in our point in time. It does not feel so great.

This is the forever state of Twin Peaks. Whether it’s waiting a week or 25 years, the cycles of plots and cliffhangers and expectations meet at the nexus of ad infinitum, the same way forever, over and over again. It’s frustrating because we may never get “out” of it through resolution or definitive ending. But like life itself, there is only that which may come to be, and that which is cut down before its time. We are the trapped magicians, longing to see between two worlds, to see through time and what the future of a show may bring. We are the ones who risk being burned by the fire itself.

But what is the fire metaphor anyway? It is the chant used to walk between worlds. It is what we say when we let the demons try to get inside us and “cross through” with the difficulty of that which may burn us. It is that which may devour us whole. That’s why we need to hone the demons of time. We need the fire to effectively “walk with us.” Which essentially means we need to open our hearts and make it through such barriers undamaged. This is so completely necessary because you cannot break cycles without facing them. Without knowing how they permeate yourself. Without really finding a capacity for change in yourself, which is the hardest thing in in the universe. As Gordon Cole once called it in different terms, it is “fixing your heart.” And so, we must be like Laura and embody the hope of eradicating the impossible. Of somehow burgeoning through the annals of time itself, having taken in so much fire and surviving it. Because when we’re trapped in the recesses of such despair, the way out is always through.