By Nicole Veneto

For all the accusations David Lynch faced over the supposed emotional and ironic detachment of work, his films are wellsprings of love for their subjects.

Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) finds peace in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Photo: Janus Films

I got the news while I was at work.

I had a missed call. When I checked my phone, there was a text: “David Lynch has passed on. Are you okay?”

I wasn’t.

For the next hour I sobbed uncontrollably. The day when Lynch would leave my life was inevitable, though he’s the one filmmaker who could, theoretically, live forever. News of his emphysema diagnosis last year rendering him housebound to an oxygen tank precluded any chance of another film. The last I heard of Lynch was that he and his longtime producer Sabrina S. Sutherland had evacuated from the wildfires engulfing Los Angeles. But as Deadline noted, Lynch’s health took a turn for the worse soon after. Smoke inhalation from Hollywood in flames, if I were to guess, killed one of the greatest American filmmakers. The tragic irony isn’t lost on me.

What makes this loss all the more heartbreaking is that when I think of David Lynch, I don’t think of deformed children, little dancing men, or the nebulous concept of what makes something “Lynchian.” I think about his empathy. For all the accusations he faced over the supposed emotional and ironic detachment of work, Lynch’s films are wellsprings of love for their subjects. Nowhere was this empathetic streak more profound than with women, particularly women subjected to sexual violence. Lynch’s “women in trouble” were neither one-dimensional victims nor props whose pain and suffering were exploited for entertainment value. Simply put, David Lynch found these women worthy of his — and the audience’s — love. It is here that my relationship with Lynch and his films takes on a personal tenor, one I have seen shared by many other women in the wake of his passing.

But before we talk about Laura Palmer — because this piece really is about Laura — there was Dorothy Vallens, the subverted femme fatale at Blue Velvet’s center and Laura’s predecessor. Blue Velvet is in many ways a precursor for what Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost would do with Twin Peaks: small town Americana masking a deep rot beneath manicured lawns and white picket fences. Lynch locates much of this foundational evil in violence against women, something he would continue to revisit in different American institutions, from the suburban nuclear family to Hollywood itself. In Dorothy, Lynch tapped into an early trauma that’s recreated in the film. While walking home with his brother as a child, Lynch saw a naked woman limping down the street. He knew that something terrible had happened, but being so young, he didn’t know how to respond.

Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) gets her happy ending in Blue Velvet. Photo: Janus Films

It’s easy to read Dorothy Vallens as just a perpetual victim of patriarchal violence. It’s the very thing Roger Ebert (wrongly) took issue with in Blue Velvet. But Lynch not only extends empathy to Vallens’s situation — her husband and child held hostage so she can service Frank Booth’s sexual sadism — but gives her the happy ending femme fatales and survivors were (and still are) frequently robbed of. Before the blue curtains close on the film, the last thing we see is Dorothy, alive, healthy, and smiling as she embraces her son. It’s a beautiful image of good triumphing over evil, in a way a gesture toward the nameless woman Lynch encountered as a boy. This empathy would extend into Lynch’s next project, eventually elevating its subject into a cosmic force of good 25 years later.

As Twin Peaks’ murdered homecoming queen, Laura Palmer’s death sets the plot in motion. The short-lived but influential television series became a bona fide sensation around the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Laura’s homecoming portrait is a piece of All American iconography: blonde, blue-eyed, a perfect pearly-white smile frozen in time. This image made its way onto T-shirts and posters, commodified to the point of pure cultural saturation. There’s nothing more American than how we consume images of dead women, reducing their tragedy into cheap trinkets and 60-minute entertainment. That Laura was also a CSA victim makes this commodification all the more salacious knowing the truth of who raped and killed her. When Phil Donahue polled his audience for who they thought killed Laura, only 3 percent responded that it was her father Leland. The idea that Laura was a victim of incest and filicide wasn’t even in the realm of possibility to most American viewers. But it happens every day — it’s the very rot under our white picket fences.

Laura Palmer’s famous homecoming portrait as shown in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Photo: Janus Films

Laura Palmer originally wasn’t supposed to be anything besides a corpse and a photograph. That changed with Sheryl Lee’s casting. Lynch was so enamored by Lee that he found ways to keep bringing her back into the fold, hence her dual role as Laura’s cousin Maddy (who would also be killed by Leland/BOB). More importantly, Lynch fell in love with Laura. Telling Chris Rodley what motivated him to make Fire Walk with Me after the show was cancelled, Lynch said, “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’m endlessly moved by how Lynch speaks of Laura. He didn’t simply love her as a character, but as a beautiful, complicated person who really existed. Because Laura Palmer does exist. She’s in every woman who has experienced sexual violence.

Despite the vitriolic response from critics, fans, and general audiences in 1992, Fire Walk with Me is now recognized as one of Lynch’s most empathetic works for how it recenters Laura in the story. Twin Peaks was never really about cherry pie or locals who talk to logs, but the rape and murder of a teenage girl by her father. By allowing Laura to transcend her immanence as a memory image and a corpse wrapped in plastic, to “live, move, and talk” as a person, Lynch shows us the Laura everyone loved but never truly understood. Lee’s stunning performance matches Lynch’s intentions, displaying a manic spectrum of emotions swirling within a young woman subjected to unfathomable evil. It’s one of the most haunting performances any actress has given, tantamount to watching someone self-immolate. Through Lee, Laura becomes so achingly real that it’s all the more painful knowing she’s already dead.

Laura’s self-destructive tendencies speak to the myth of the “perfect” victim who struggles to process what’s happening to them. All the sex, all the drugs, all of Laura’s flirtations with Twin Peaks’ darker half are desperate attempts to escape her situation and misplaced self-blame for what’s happening to her. The angels have all gone away because Laura no longer believes she’s even worth saving. And we, the viewers, are powerless to help Laura and are ultimately complicit in her demise: the entire series hinges on her death. This partly explains why Fire Walk with Me was treated with such hostility upon release; Lynch held a mirror to the audience that watched Twin Peaks every week and reminded them what it was they were actually watching. If there’s any truth to the criticisms leveled against Lynch regarding the film’s brutality, it’s because that’s the reality at hand. To his credit, he never sanitized Laura’s life or death for the sake of viewer comfort; forcing us to sit with Laura’s pain transforms her from an image into someone we statistically know, perhaps even ourselves.

Laura Palmer reconfigured into the ultimate force of good in Twin Peaks: The Return, “Part 8.” Photo: Showtime

For decades, the last we saw of Laura Palmer was of her smiling. Fire Walk with Me ends on Laura bathed in heavenly light as her long-lost guardian angel hovers overhead, finally at peace in death. But Lynch wasn’t done. As Laura foretold, we would see her again in 25 years. Twin Peaks: The Return now stands as the magnum opus of Lynch’s entire career, wherein Laura looms over every episode as a haunting specter. The Return expands the supernatural “good versus evil” mythos of the original series, elevating Laura to something like godhood in its universe. Part 8 shows the birth of modern, man-made evil with the first atomic bomb in 1945, bringing BOB into existence with it. To combat BOB, a force of good is born: Laura Palmer. In a shimmering, golden orb, we see Laura’s homecoming portrait reflected within. Seeing this moment, when it aired in 2017, took my breath away.

What David Lynch was able to do with (and really, for) Laura transcends the relationship between creator and creation. For as much as Lynch’s films, art, and music affected people, I believe his greatest gift was Laura herself, a glittering bubble imbued with his love and empathy in a world where survivors are frequently denied justice, never mind understanding. Lynch held immense love for anyone relegated to society’s margins, from the beautiful John Merrick in The Elephant Man to transgender Special Agent Denise Bryson, whom Gordon Cole (Lynch) told those clown comics at the FBI to “fix their hearts or die” for. But Laura will always hold a privileged place in his filmography. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her to the point of tears.

There will never be another David Lynch. His work will live on and through other filmmakers — as in my two favorite films of 2024 — but the man himself leaves a gaping hole in cinema and in my heart. We were so lucky to have him and Laura Palmer in our lives. Wherever you are right now David, I know it’s beautiful. In heaven, everything is fine.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.