The Angels Have All Gone Away

Editorial Assistant Daniel Palmer examines how Twin Peaks has managed to tap into audiences’ repressed urges and unconscious desires.

Much can be said, and even more unable to be said, about the symbology ever-present in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The density of its symbolism allows Twin Peaks to mean many things to many people, a testament to the timelessness Lynch’s work has come to be associated with. Particularly pervasive in the show’s symbology is the idea of the shadow self: a subconsciously repressed element of the human persona. Upon a recent rewatch of the show, I was struck by how this concept of a shadow self extends to the audience through our engagement with the show, forcing us to reckon with our own repressed desires as consumers of trauma, spectacle, and mystery. 

This engagement with Twin Peaks’ representation of trauma and humanity bundled into a soap-opera, detective story pastiche is an element of the show in and of itself. This relationship between the viewer and the show brings to light the shadow self within the very audience, confronting us with the same idea of subconscious repressed desires and qualities that Lynch subjects his characters to. 

An interpretation of Laura Palmer’s most heart-wrenching dialogue between her and her best friend supports this: 

“[Falling] Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever... And the angels wouldn't help you. Because they've all gone away.”

This is Laura’s despair at feeling abandoned. By her parents, by her friends, by anyone who might have intervened. The angels she imagines are not abstract; they are whoever is close enough to see and still fails to help. By the structure of the show alone, that role belongs to the audience as much as to anyone in Twin Peaks. As the show progresses, we watch Laura fall faster and faster as her troubled and tragic life leaves her numb, before she finally bursts into fire, her story cut short. The show enacts this literally: once ABC executives pressured Lynch into prematurely revealing Laura’s killer as her father, Leland, resolving the mystery that had hooked viewers since the pilot, ratings and critical acclaim infamously collapsed almost immediately. The audience itself abandoned Laura once her story stopped being a mystery to solve and became simply a tragedy to sit with. 

That abandonment is the audience’s shadow self made visible, our suppressed and shameful desire to view trauma as a method of entertainment. What audiences and executives at the time wanted was never Laura as a person; it was Laura as a vehicle for sensation and spectacle, a mystery box dressed as a girl. Once the box was opened, the subconscious desire that had sustained the show collapsed, and so did the audience. Later reexaminations of the show by viewers show an audience’s reckoning with their own prior relationship, as they grew to engage with Laura’s story as a tragic representation of trauma, not as an entertainment plot, seen, for example, in the newer acclaim of Fire Walk With Me as a cult classic character study after critical panning upon its release. 

Twin Peaks: The Return takes this further. Here, after a 25-year wait by an audience desperate for answers and more content, Lynch directly confronts our shadow self. This is seen in the penultimate episode, a campy, pastiche-heavy and clean resolution in which characters are reunited after decades apart, and join forces to defeat the embodiment of “the evil that men do”, BOB, the main antagonist of the show. This ending is followed by Agent Cooper quite literally watching scenes of Laura from Fire Walk With Me leading up to her death, and attempting to change it for an even happier ending. It’s as if Lynch is looking at the audience and saying, “Here you are, here’s your happy go-lucky ending.” A final resolution to Laura’s traumatic story, in which evil is vanquished, Laura is saved, and the good guys win; an attempt at absolution for our previous abandonment of her. 

But Lynch knew the audience still wouldn’t be satisfied, and punishes us for it. After saving Laura from her death depicted in the original show, Cooper finds himself thrust into an altogether different reality. Laura Palmer is no longer Laura Palmer, and Cooper is no longer the Cooper that we knew. Laura is now Carrie Page, a woman who knows neither him nor the town that has spent decades mythologising her suffering. Twin Peaks now feels alien and hollow, stripped of the nostalgia that audiences have cultivated over decades of rewatches, theories, and longing for resolution. 

Cooper acts as an extension of the audience, his mission mirroring our own. He is convinced that Laura’s story can be fixed, that enough determination and goodness can rewrite tragedy into something meaningful and complete. This is what the audience has spent decades doing, theorising and mythologising Laura Palmer’s suffering to point towards some greater truth or satisfying conclusion. Cooper himself becomes an avatar for our inability to let the dead stay dead. 

Cooper then brings Carrie back to Twin Peaks, to Laura’s house, the place of her suffering for years, endeavouring to confront an even greater evil: Judy. Judy, taking the form of Laura’s mother, is the embodiment of voyeurism. The ability for people to turn a blind eye to suffering, and in doing so, enable that harm. She is Laura’s mother, who is suggested at times to have been aware of her husband’s abuse of her daughter. She is also a new facet of the audience’s shadow self, an evolution of our previous desire to consume Laura’s suffering as merely spectacle. Judy is our subconscious desire to watch that suffering unfold across decades of episodes and theories without ever being able to, or willing, to step in and stop it. It’s important to note that, while vague references to Judy are present throughout the original run, her arguably sudden presence in The Return’s final stretch as another antagonist, one even worse than BOB, feels almost like Lynch toyfully poking fun at our desire for more, and in doing so, being the very villain we watched Cooper set out to destroy. Just like Judy, our shadow selves desire to act as bystanders to such a tragic story drives the cycle of trauma forward.

Carrie’s haunting scream in the final moments of the finale shatters our shadow selves’ desire. In bringing her back, she seems to remember, or to feel, Laura’s trauma, which we had kid ourselves into believing could be wiped clean, if only we kept watching. The mystery is not resolved, the evil is not vanquished; we have only succeeded in subjecting Carrie to the very trauma we had guiltily consumed for two seasons and a movie beforehand. We wanted Laura not to be saved just for her sake, but as a means of satisfying our desire to continue watching her story play out, never satisfied with the answers we are given. 

This tension has always been at the heart of Twin Peaks. The series simultaneously invites and condemns voyeurism, inviting audiences into the seductive pleasures of mystery whilst constantly reminding us that a murdered teenage girl lies beneath the spectacle. Laura Palmer acts as both a television icon and a confronting depiction of abuse, a duality that forces the audience to reckon with their own shadow selves.

by Daniel Palmer

References:

[1] Ferrier, A. (2024, May 22). Why David Lynch Was Forced into Revealing Laura Palmer’s Killer in Twin Peaks. Far Out. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-lynch-forced-into-revealing-killer-twin-peaks/.