"I'm Not Laura Palmer": David Lynch's Fractured Fairy Tale

Unfortunately, people call me Laura Palmer. A few years ago, having just collected blue books from my students, I noticed that on the front cover, where the students had dutifully written their names, the date, and the course section number, one student had also volunteered the name of her instructor: Laura Palmer. I, Laura Plummer, thought this novelsuspiciously Freudian-slip vaguely amusing, and attributed it to the student's TV habits, which, like mine, evidently included David Lynch's Twin Peaks. But the same thing happened the next semester. Again, I circled the name and jokingly wrote "I hope not!" Having become used to clever little remarks about "damn good cherry pie," I took little notice. But then, a full year later, it happened again. A student typed "Laura Palmer-L 141" at the top of one of her literature papers. With Sisyphean angst, I circled it, corrected it, and wrote some humorous reproof. But this student, unlike the others, persisted in writing "Laura Palmer" on all her papers and calling me "Ms. Palmer." Perhaps this was only to annoy me, but I'm really not that paranoid. Why did she do this? Why did she prefer to think of me as a dead woman? And of course the larger question: why did one dead woman among so many on TV continue to irrupt unconsciously into the academic task of writing her teacher's name? The answers, I think, are at once obvious and concealed. Of course, the similarity of our names explains the ease with which students confused us. Clearly, wanting to inscribe me as the non-threatening-because dead-other explains the psychic work thus accomplished. But these answers do not satisfactorily explain the phenomenon. Certainly dead women are a lauded topic for poetry, as well as fiction, painting, and film, as the overworked Poe quotation attests. I suggest that the student has internalized the neo-misogyny-what Susan Faludi calls the "backlash"-of Hollywood film production (see 112-39); her act of renaming reflects the larger, cultural work begun (for her) by David Lynch's attempt to update this lauded topic. Packaged as hip, politically correct, post-modern entertainment in which assumptions and subjectivities are fragmented and disintegrated, what Lynch hands us-with the blessing of a large audience of intellectuals-is merely a new treatment of a familiar plot all the more horrifying for the retrogressive politics it camouflages. Twin Peaks is most recognizably a detective plot. A crime has been committed, and Special Agent Cooper arrives to solve that crime. Although the narrative works to ferret out Laura Palmer's killer, it also works to discover Laura Palmer; Lynch collapses her secrets with that of her killer. Laura Palmer must be "detected" in the same manner; she is essentially treated like and revealed to be a criminal as well. Yet the secret turns out to be a common one: the Twin Peaks mystery is sex. Sex with whom finally becomes incidental (this is in itself disturbing), and the sexual relationship between Laura and her father, Leland, is located not only in the father's illness-his fractured subjectivity-but also in Laura Palmer's secretive, wild lack of subjectivity. In a recent essay, Ann-Louise Shapiro asserts that in all the processes of protecting patriarchal, middle-class values, "the actual and symbolic presence of the criminal woman [is] centrally important." The criminal woman becomes "a site where some of the contradictions about women's position in society [can] be located and temporarily managed, in rhetoric if not in fact" (47). In turn, artistic projects "work to stabilize a shared, gendered vision of the social order" (47). That order in Twin Peaks, as in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), subjects women to the violence of husbands and lovers, and reveals female sexuality to be the fulfillment of violent male fantasy. In Blue Velvet, Dorothy (Isabella Rossalini) is brutalized and loves it-enough to seduce Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) by insisting that he hit her. …