An Image of David Lynch in an Image by David Lynch
From the chapter “American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer” in The Shape of Things to Come (2006)
The first victim is seventeen-year-old Teresa Banks, supposedly a drifter passing through Deer Meadow, Washington. As Fire Walk With Me begins, it’s a year before the death of Laura Palmer. Banks is floating down Wind River, her body cinched in billowing white plastic bags. Anyone who had followed Twin Peaks on TV—the only sort of person likely to pay money a year after the show was canceled to see a movie called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—would have known that Leland Palmer, Laura Palmer’s father, killed her. Fourteen episodes into the show, one would have seen Leland Palmer kill his niece Maddy Ferguson, played by Sheryl Lee is a dark wig; then he wrapped her body in plastic and threw it into the river, thus revealing that it was he who killed Laura Palmer in the exact same way—he, or rather, as the character was allowed to insist in the TV series, the demon Bob who has possessed him, making him as much a victim as the girls he kills. He was only a child when he was initiated into the satanic cult he has served ever since, the television version of Leland Palmer says in a dying confession after smashing his head against a cell door. He was forced to recruit for them, “They wanted others they could use like they used me,” but Laura refused, she said she’d die first: “They made me kill her.” But as Fire Walk With Me opens, the premise is that nobody knows this, and when it ends, none of the excuses Leland Palmer was permitted on TV will be offered. The TV series closed the plot with a cover-up of its own horror: “I’ve lived in these old woods most of my life,” Sheriff Truman says to Dale Cooper after Laura’s father has confessed, and died. “I’ve seen some strange things, but that is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing.” “Harry,” says the FBI agent, who in a dream where he inhabits Laura Palmer’s red room has already heard the dead girl tell a dead version of himself, “My father killed me,” but who is now changing before your eyes into Mr. Smooth-It-Away, “is it easier to believe that a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” Yes, answers Fire Walk With Me. “Any more comforting?” Cooper says on TV. Comforting? asks Sheryl Lee out of the film. Is that why I made this movie? To comfort you?