“Who killed Laura Palmer?” was the hot question in the early 90s as America fell in (and out of) love with David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television phenomenon Twin Peaks. With the rise of similar drawn-out crime dramas today, the trope of the dead girl as an impetus for narrative structure has become fairly popular; however, what at first appears to be a passive, dead girl with no agency to tell her own story is actually turned on its head as Laura is revealed to the audience through diaries, dopplegangers, dreams, memories, and reconstructions. Laura is simultaneously Laura and not-Laura. Without her death, there is no reason to enter the town of Twin Peaks and get to know all of its 51,201 inhabitants. Yet Laura’s death also reveals several interesting facts, including the roles of men complicit in her death and that through death, Laura has defied the masculinized forces of evil. The solution to who killed Laura Palmer becomes a debate over the evil that men choose to do versus the inherent, unstoppable, and unexplainable evils that exist in the world which men have no control over. More importantly, Laura’s death shows a sense of agency through martyrdom and Lynch and Frost manage to give her more life and more strength through the circumstances of her death. I argue that what appears to be a dead girl “full of secrets” and with no voice to tell them, in fact becomes a fully developed character with more agency than one expects. Laura becomes stronger than the male-dominated forces of oppression and death through the circumstances of her death.
About the presenterSamantha Przybylowicz Axtell
Samantha is a recent PhD graduate from Northeastern University. Her dissertation was about women who kill in Victorian literature with a focus on gender, genre, sympathy, and representation. Her work combines Victorian fiction with modern true crime in a way that shows the ways we talk and write about crime haven’t changed all that much over the years. Samantha also works with aspects of true crime that emphasize victimology and advocates for the wrongfully convicted. She is the current Graduate Rep for MAPACA and co-chair for the True Crime Area.