The Impossible Dream Of A Walking Fire (Twin Peaks: Part 2) [The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer]

"The girl who received this diary on her twelfth birthday has been dead for years, and I who took her place have done nothing but make a mockery of the dreams she once had."

Like the people of Twin Peaks reacting in shock and horror at her sudden and untimely death, I thought I knew Laura Palmer. What I knew was a half-remembered dream, an ethereal echo of happening upon a book long long ago and reading through it. A nightmare in prose form, a horror story of a girl descending into darkness and eventually being killed by it. Years later, I saw how the town she lived in reacted to that loss and the secrets which came to light about her. Then, at the halfway point of that show, we learned who killed her. The network practically strong armed the creators of the show to solve the mystery, and they did. What the show became after that is sort of a mess, and the fact that it both righted itself near the end is a small miracle. It even managed to full circle itself back to the story of Laura Palmer, in an esoteric way. Still, the need to answer the question, to reduce the feeling and emotion of the loss of Laura Palmer into something to be solved, revealed, put back onto the fucking shelf as a closed case... it hurt the show. I could summarize what the show decayed into, but I'll just point you to this Tumblr post.

We can go back to first principles however. It's something that David Lynch himself did with the Twin Peaks movie, and something we will be talking about very soon. Before that, I have to get you on the same wavelength as I was. As I'll likely argue later, this is on much the same wavelength as David Lynch was on when he made the movie. To understand the movie, we need to understand Laura Palmer. To understand Laura Palmer, we need to delve into her deepest darkest thoughts. We need to go back to where my journey with this series started, to full circle things just like the show did as it ended. That's how I found myself with an audio book copy of The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer. The very same book I picked up off my neighbor's bookshelf on a whim, 20 years ago. The book I read, was fascinated and horrified by, and mostly forgot save for the really lurid stuff. Here I was, though, having finished the series and eager to prime myself for the big movie! Here I was, ready and excited to unearth the long-buried fossils of my memory of this book from long ago. 

What a misguided series of emotions to feel, in hindsight.

The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer is wrong. I do not mean that anything in the book is incorrect. I mean that, morally, it made me feel wrong for reading it. Everything that happens in this book, even the act of reading it, is a transgressive violation. Really think about the artifact which lays before us. Really and truly consider the ramifications of what it is. It is a secret diary of a girl who was killed. When you read it, you are reading the private thoughts of a teenage girl. Her deepest darkest fears and anxieties, all of the things meant to be kept between herself and her diary, exorcised from her internal landscape and onto the page for closure and coping. These are thoughts never meant to be shared with the world... and yet, here we fucking are. At one point, fairly early on, there is an entire entry where the young Laura is furious at the thought that someone has invaded her privacy and read her diary. Her anger, her condemnation, her sheer hurt and betrayal are poured onto the page, and she swears to never write in the book again after this violation of trust. Yes, there are hints and context as to who in-universe has been sneaking a look at her diary, but that's not the only person Laura's fury is directed at.

It's me. God help me, it's me. The Secret Diary is kind of like a novel version of a certain type of video game, the kind that actively condemns you for playing the video game. The kind of video game which places a value judgment on you for directly participating in doing bad things in its fictional world, for your own selfish desires of recreational entertainment. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, or the No Mercy route of Undertale. Everyone who ever picked up The Secret Diary is reading a dead girl's diary for recreational entertainment. Why the fuck are you doing that? Some may have picked it up for the selfish desire to solve the mystery, to maybe uncover a clue hidden in the words that will reveal Laura Palmer's killer. I came to it with slightly more noble intentions, but also with a selfishness at heart: wanting to uncover a hidden memory from long ago, when I read the book with no ethical hang-ups about it. I also wanted to empathize more with Laura Palmer and her plight, and that sentiment will be important going forward. It's also important to highlight the sheer shame I felt in engaging with this book. My intentions were better than most, but I don't think Laura Palmer would be so forgiving. I read her innermost thoughts. I peeked at her diary. I'm going to write about how it made me feel on my blog, my own diary, for many to see... and you may come along this far, and read it as well.

Damn me, I guess, for not only reading it but bookending this post with quotes from it... but none is more damned than Laura Palmer.

Laura Palmer, a woman damned by dualities. On the one hand is the Laura Palmer most of Twin Peaks sees by the daylight. The homecoming queen, the sweet and kind daughter of the Palmers who has her very own pony and a cute cat and is a shining beacon of the town. Then there is the Laura Palmer who thrives after dark, the one most don't know about. This is the Laura that comes to the forefront over the pages of the diary, the Laura who awakens to a cocaine-fueled sexual awakening of sadomasochistic desire. Here is where I warn you, in case the warning of trespassing into a dead girl's diary wasn't enough for you. This book does not shy away from her exploits, or her descent into the darkness of the soul. It is lurid in its details, and it does not hold back. Something easily forgotten, if one ventures through the world of Twin Peaks, is that Twin Peaks was a TV show. There are rules for what you can depict on a TV show. Rules that this book are not bound by. In a land with no rules, we are shown the unlimited black heart of Laura Palmer's depravity. I gazed upon it with shock and horror, but there was an element of recursion. As Laura Palmer felt herself committing what she saw as transgressive wrongs, so too did I commit the transgressive wrong of reading about it.

Yet, there is a tragedy to it all, and not just where Laura's darkness will lead her. She condemns herself in the pages of her diary, calling herself a fucked up monster when the town sees her as an angel. She cannot grapple with her duality, and thinks she is the only one who has such monstrosity within her. If only she knew that half the damn town of Twin Peaks were having illicit affairs. If only she could realize that the seedy underbelly she cavorts in, the place where she does unspeakable things in her drug-fueled haze... that is also Twin Peaks. There's a great degree of self-loathing, and nowhere is this more apparent than one particular scene. For reasons too dark and terrible to explain, Laura finds herself meeting a 12 year-old girl named Danielle. It's a terrible mirroring for Laura, as Danielle represents the innocence that Laura lost. This young girl is everything she used to be, before the drugs and sex twisted her into the fucked-up form that she is now. One of Laura's deepest nightmares, later, is worrying that Danielle will fall victim to the same monstrous cycle that befell her. Worrying that she will be prey for Bob.

Bob, then, is a fascinating thing in this book. It could be argued that Bob is not a dark spirit made manifest, but merely another facet of Laura, a creature born of her self-loathing. A creature which knows her deepest secrets and intrudes upon her diary to call her vile names, names which Laura believes she is even as she writes back for Bob to get the hell out of her diary. Is Bob a real being abusing Laura Palmer, or some twisted part of her psyche? As we'll see in the movie, both can be true. For now, though... I want to get the hell out of this diary. It is a deeply disturbing artifact, a thing which should not be looked at and shows the darkest depths of one fucked-up little girl's soul. I looked, damn me... but I did gain more empathy for Laura Palmer. David Lynch looked too. That's why he followed up Twin Peaks with a movie all about Laura, a movie which combs more of these darkest depths to horrifying effect.

Oh god. Buckle the fuck up. It's going to get bumpy.

"On these pages I have written things sometimes too scary or too embarrassing even to read again myself. . . . I trust that these pages are turned only by me, only when I wish. Many things are hurting and confusing me. I need my private pages, in order to see my mind outside me, push it away.

Please stay away from this diary. I mean it. 

Laura"