Willow Catelyn Maclay reflects on the lonely last days of Laura Palmer in David Lynch's Twin Peaks prequel.
When Twin Peaks was the hottest show on television, viewers were obsessed with “Who killed Laura Palmer?” (Sheryl Lee), but David Lynch was haunted by imagining how she felt at the end of her life. Laura is burdened with secrets about her history of having repeatedly experienced instances of childhood sexual assault. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me chronicles the last week of her life, and she carries her loneliness, and an intuition of her impending death, like a saint who can sense their looming martyrdom.
Laura is intentionally evasive. She always has her defences up in order to protect herself, and all those around her, from what she has experienced. Lee brought her to life with a nervy realism of fractured dramaturgy visible in the emotions that are percolating in her many close-ups. Laura is obviously vulnerable, but when her friends approach her about what’s going on she has a tendency to deflect. It’s a strikingly layered depiction of someone in need of help, and she is complicated further by the lens in which audiences came to know her as a dead girl on television. Who was she really underneath all of this pain?
The ambient threat of violence reverberates as the low-humming engine that powers David Lynch’s “women in trouble” pictures, and that sinister, familiar dread is sometimes used to make poignant moments of grace register more powerfully. We see the real Laura Palmer exactly one time, and it is when she is stopped by the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) one sombre evening, before entering The Bang Bang Bar. Draped in a searing red light, the Log Lady places her hand atop Laura’s forehead the way a caring mother might for a sick child, and she tells her, “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender bows of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”. She’s needed to hear these words for so long and on instinct she lets her head fall slightly into the waiting palm of this woman who can actually see her. Her eyes close, and she goes to an innocent place before all this started to happen, and for a moment she doesn’t feel doomed.
Laura longs for an angel. Fire Walk with Me codifies her desire for rebirth to be like that of symbolic Christian imagery, echoing concepts such as the cleanliness of the lamb. In the sharp red lights, and with the angular background imagery of the windows of the bar, Laura is seen in what feels like a holy image reminiscent of stained-glass paintings in churches. When she places her hand over heart and looks at herself reflected in the window of the bar, she is stunned by what she sees. The years of her life seem to flash before her, and there’s a startling look on her face that seems to be asking, “how did I get here?”. It feels like this is the first time she has seen herself in many years.
When she enters the Bang-Bang bar, Julee Cruise, that effervescent siren, whose voice hovers over the emotional valleys of Twin Peaks, can be heard performing “Questions in a World of Blue”, and she sings, “when did the day, with all this light, turn to night?”. Laura cries, deeply, soulfully, from a newly excavated place she had long since buried, but when reaching for a cigarette, and with the comforting burn of nicotine emanating throughout her body, those healthy tears transform into the familiar sorrow she calls home.
To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.
Published 3 Feb 2025
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