A Pilgrim's Peaks - Episode 16
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch. Begin here.
[cw: brief mentions of fictional child abuse and incest]
The supernatural aspects of Twin Peaks are one of the show’s most defining and alluring characteristics. The haunting, prophetic visions of Special Agent Dale Cooper of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the communications received from the Log Lady and Elderly Waiter, and the inhabiting spirits of MIKE and BOB which suggest a battle between good and evil being played out in a plane beyond the one mortal one we know and on a time scale that our lives only scratch the surface of. This suggestion of something bigger than life, beyond death, pulls you into a fantastic breadcrumb trail that runs through the otherwise grounded everyday lives of the residents of this small city in the Pacific Northwest that’s hanging on to its own existence by a thread.
The danger is that in leading us through those lives, we run the risk of ignoring the humans who are living them and who suffer at the furies called forth by otherworldly forces. At one point in this episode, Cooper asks Sheriff Truman which is harder to believe, that BOB took over Leland Palmer to perform the actions we’ve been sorting out the consequences of for sixteen episodes now, or that a father raped and murdered his own daughter. It’s a question designed to lead you to a specific answer and frame of mind, one that leans too heavily away from an unfortunate truth to reality while also ignoring other aspects of the more fantastic elements the story has built.
Leland Palmer says he was taken by BOB as a child, when, “I was just a boy. I saw him in my dreams. He said he wanted to play. He opened me, and I invited him, and he came inside me.” Whether you choose a more figurative interpretation likely intended by the writers that plays into the supernatural elements of the story or one that’s a frank reading of the text, it’s hard to ignore that Leland was a victim of some form of abuse early on in his life. This left its own set of scars that included, “a large hole, where his conscience used to be,” enabling BOB/Leland to commit at least three murders and the ongoing sexual abuse of his daughter from her early adolescence.
Laura’s abuse at the hands of BOB/Leland caused an irrevocable harm the likes of which has been hinted at from her audio and written journals and described in the memories of those close to her. She developed an addiction to cocaine, sexually humiliated and used her power over Bobby Briggs to turn him into a drug dealer, and worked in a brothel, all before graduating high school. We don’t know if BOB was part of some dissociative act on her part to separate her father from her abuser until she later became aware of his supernatural force in her life, but we do know that she was able to resist it in a way that Leland never did. That continued resistance would eventually cost Laura her life, but it underscores the presence of choice in actions of those in BOB’s sphere of influence. That potential for choosing to defy one’s abuser sounds out the hollowness which lies in the heart in Cooper’s rhetorical question; when faced with a similar set of circumstances, Leland continued to act as he did, while Laura fought to the death against her oppressor even as she was used and taken advantage of by so many of those around her.
When Truman suggests that BOB may just be another name for the evil men do in response to Cooper’s question, he’s right in more ways than he could have guessed. Local magnate Ben Horne confesses that he had sex with Laura at least once when she was employed at his brothel, One Eyed Jack’s. Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault used her for their own rough trade of drug running and bondage-inflected sex. There’s a strong, but not confirmed implication that her psychiatrist Lawrence Jacoby may have overstepped the bounds of his doctor-patient relationship. Any and all of these men could have helped her. Jacoby came the closest by answering the call of his profession and maybe not having sex with a victim of incest and sexual abuse. In the end, he too used her, if for nothing else than as a subject of fascination rather than a patient capable of healing.
All of the people listed above also fall into the multifaceted definition of, “men,” suggested by Sheriff Truman’s question; the still common placeholder that acts as an interchangeable word for, “person,” and as the statistical category that is overwhelmingly a perpetrator of serial and gun violence. Stepping back for a moment from all these men who do evil by their own choice or as a vessel of something from another place, and setting aside Laura Palmer for a moment, we’re left with the apparent outlier that is Maddy Ferguson. She had no idea what she was getting herself into when she came to Twin Peaks two weeks ago to help her aunt and uncle until she was murdered by the latter. In that act, she became exemplary of a statistic sadly endemic to the real world; the victim of fatal violence at home. The commonality of her death itself becomes an unsatisfyingly real answer to the questions about evil that the show elides with its hypnotic supernature.