What is Laura Palmer's significance for David Lynch?

Each week, as part of David Lynch Month on my blog I'm proposing a "Question in a World of Blue" related to whatever I'm posting. This week I'm featuring a video essay investigating the theme of abuse, violence, and the presence of evil in Lynch's work: http://tinyurl.com/mqrcdxe. So my question of the week is:

Does Laura Palmer have special significance in David Lynch's body of work?

You can answer the question here or reply on my blog (I will be cross-posting replies - with attribution of course - either way, so that my readers can see everyone's responses). Last week's question was "What killed Twin Peaks?" which is also posted on this forum and got some interesting responses.

Incidentally, I had a 4-part conversation with the critic Tony Dayoub last month on Fire Walk With Me, published on the blog To Be (Cont'd). He addressed this question himself in his final piece, which is worth reading: http://tinyurl.com/lcsrlar

I address the question myself in the video piece but since that's non-narrated and rather indirect (it uses the juxtaposition of clips to make its point), I'll elaborate a bit here.

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From what I gather, Laura Palmer was initially intended to be simply a MacGuffin on the show. Her murder would be solved eventually, but both Lynch & Frost conceived her as a mysterious hook into this strange world. And that's how she was presented at first, both on the show and especially the media, which had a field day fetishizing her "wrapped in plastic" corpse. It was all very Hitchcockian and playful, though of course the series treated her death with seriousness at times too (most notably her parents' grieved reaction, although this is often interpreted as camp, and in small moments like when Cooper gently places her hand back on the morgue table after a played-for-laughs fight which ends with Agent Rosenfield mounting her).

I'm not sure exactly when the change began to take place - perhaps it was Jennifer Lynch writing the diary as a raw tale of sexual abuse (though she doubts her father actually read the book), perhaps it was the network forcing Frost & Lynch to resolve the storyline and thus focus more heavily on Laura, perhaps it was something offscreen we'll never know, but clearly at some point Lynch became more and more fascinated with Laura as a character, an individual, not just a story device.

Beginning with the first episode of season 2, which flashes back to her grisly murder, we begin to get a better sense of Laura not as a "bad girl" but an abuse victim and Lynch's tone and focus begins to shift subtly. I'm not just talking about the series here, but his whole body of work. Up until season 2 of Twin Peaks, every Lynch film featured a heroic male figure/redeemer, usually perceived as pure (even Henry in Eraserhead has childlike aspects), who intervenes to rescue victims of abuse (the only exception is Eraserhead, in which Henry himself could be seen as the abuser, though the film doesn't really present it that way and indeed encourages you to sympathize with him).

Meanwhile, the villains in these movies, at least from The Elephant Man on, were usually lower-class, caricatured and somewhat exaggerated in their evil - a point that Lynch addresses in the Rolling Stone interview published before season 2. He's asked, "What I'm wondering is whether, outside the films, you see the world as having these very strong dichotomies between Good and Evil as opposed to a kind of complex, integrated -" And he responds, "No, I know it's complex. Everybody's got many threads of both running through them. But I think in a film, white gets a little whiter, and black gets a little bit blacker, for the sake of the story. That's part of the beauty of it, that contrast, that power of it. Maybe it would be very beautiful to have a character that had an equal mixture of both. Where the forces were fighting equally. But maybe they would just stand still."

Well, within a few weeks of this interview being published (perhaps before, depending on when the second season was shot) we are actually seeing these forces fighting inside someone. As evil is re-located in the home and the family, stripping our identification with authority figures and conventional heroes, Lynch's sympathy and identification drifts toward the victim instead. We see this process completed, of course, with Fire Walk With Me, a film that was reviled upon its release precisely for focusing on and identifying with Laura Palmer and her story.

Lynch said, wearing his heart on his sleeve more than usual, "At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn't get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move, and talk. I was in love with that world and I hadn't finished with it." Ironically, his motives were construed as cynical; people couldn't seem to accept that Lynch was sincerely attached to this character. Just as she's won over the various townspeople of Twin Peaks, and left them stranded after she died, so Lynch himself had become captivated by his own creation.

It's worth noting too that Sheryl Lee played a part in Lynch's capitulation to Laura. When he discovered her in Seattle, she was chosen simply to play a corpse but, impressed with her acting in the brief video sequence he invented the part of Maddy for her. In interviews, Lee almost appears like a character in Lynch films, a sweet, good-natured person who is able to go to deep, dark places in dedication to her mission (in this case, the art of performance). Lynch was deeply impressed by her ability and commitment (especially at a time when other actors were beginning to flake out on him - to be fair, many would accuse him of flaking out on them first by getting distracted from the show when it was in trouble).

Yet even as late as the production of Fire Walk With Me, Lynch still didn't quite seem to know what he had in his hands. The screenplay (as the "Missing Pieces" will soon remind us) made time for various other characters and subplots, and even in the finished film we wait 45 minutes or so to meet Laura. As written, Laura also didn't play a very active role in her own climax, something the use of the ring was intended to rectify (some have even speculated that the ring footage was added in post-production and that the scene was shot more or less as written, with Laura more passive). Clearly the process of making the movie - watching Lee completely invest in this part, spending time each day exploring Laura's world and character - only committed Lynch further to the idea that Laura Palmer was at the heart of Twin Peaks and everything he wanted to say in this movie.

The film came out and was, of course, a flop and critical disaster. But diving deeply into Laura's perspective changed Lynch as a filmmaker and storyteller. All of his subsequent films have mixed light & dark within the same character (although often these characters themselves fragment into different personalities). He has also preferred female to male protagonists, focused on emotionally vulnerable and psychologically fragile characters, and located evil inside home & family instead of outside.

There's much more to be said, but I'll wait to see what others have to offer before pitching in.

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