The Horror of Twin Peaks: Re-Visited

This photograph is capable of destroying me. It's of Laura Palmer, a character, played by actress Sheryl Lee, on the television show Twin Peaks. 

Perhaps you need to know the story of that show to be moved by that image or be interested in anything I'm going to say here. I'm not writing this for those of you unfamiliar with the show. This one is for everyone who already knows, or tried and couldn't make it through the first episode because you didn't know what to look for, or maybe this one's just for me. Let's call it posterity.

Laura Palmer is a tragic character. You can see it in the eyes, red-rimmed and a bump too glassy. Her life isn't her own, due to her age, the problems of her parents, drugs, sex and forces beyond her own, or anyone's, control. (There's a little bit of Laura Palmer in all of us, I always say.) Things definitely did not end well for Laura, 25 years ago today, but there probably wasn't ever much of a chance that they would, once she was born the daughter of a man named Leland... Or, Le Land...  Or, The World. And, when Leland was just a boy, he had this neighbor...

Four Horrific Authors: Jeremy Robert Johnson, Stephen Graham Jones, John Farris & Dennis McKenna

Much as discussed in last week's article on caffeine/coffee, tolerance to a drug builds quickly. One needs a bigger hit and more concentrated a dose. When the addiction is to myth - this need to experience fiction as allegory for what lies beneath the veil of Maya - all roads lead to Horror. Whatever your preferred Cosmogony of Consciousness, existence as self-aware entity is not possible without a symbolic system to explain away those moments. You know the ones. The time your walk became a run towards your back against the other side of the front door, slammed shut before the realization struck - you hadn't even looked behind you to see if anything was there. The time you never really could remember that dream but the feeling - and whatever Thing(s) causing it - clung to your day, just under the surface.

Hey, it's okay. We don't have to talk about it if you don't want.