Sexualisation, exploitation and the adults who failed Twin Peaks
This article is an interpretation formed after watching both original series and film. It contains spoilers for both, but none for The Return.
Content note: Discussion of child sexual abuse, coercion, exploitation, drug use and violence.
My Twin Peaks viewing progress when this article was written.
Spoiler boundary: Fire Walk with Me
These interpretations are preserved as written. Later discoveries haven't been used to tidy up earlier theories.
In Twin Peaks, an FBI agent declining to pursue a high-school girl is treated as a moment of exceptional moral restraint. Dale Cooper does the right thing, certainly. But the scene is revealing for another reason: the series seems to expect us to admire him for maintaining a boundary that ought never to have been negotiable.
This is the peculiar moral landscape of Twin Peaks. Teenagers pursue relationships, experiment with drugs, conceal things from their parents and make increasingly questionable decisions. In other words, they behave rather like teenagers. Yet the adults surrounding them repeatedly interpret their apparent maturity as permission to expose them to situations they are neither equipped nor obliged to navigate alone.
It is tempting, watching the programme decades later, to conclude that these teenagers are unusually sexualised, reckless or prematurely adult. But much of their behaviour would have been entirely recognisable to audiences in 1990. The more disturbing question concerns the adults who encourage it, profit from it or fail to recognise when an adolescent's experimentation has become somebody else's opportunity.
And the problem extends beyond the fictional town. Twin Peaks was made within a culture that could condemn the exploitation of young people while simultaneously finding entertainment in their sexual availability. Sometimes the series exposes that contradiction. At other times, it seems rather comfortable participating in it.
This is not simply a story about a town that failed to protect Laura Palmer. It is also about the assumptions that allowed those failures to appear ordinary.
It Was a Different Time. That Isn't an Explanation.
The usual defence of older television is that attitudes were different then. Sometimes this is a useful observation. Social expectations change, safeguarding practices evolve, and the language available for discussing coercion, consent and vulnerability develops over time.
But historical context is not moral absolution. Nor should we assume that behaviour once depicted casually was universally accepted or went unchallenged. The late 1980s and 1990s were not an era in which nobody understood that adults could exploit children. Concern about sexual abuse, coercion and the objectification of women already existed, alongside the cultural practices that made such exploitation easier to overlook.
Research published during the period itself provides useful evidence. Finkelhor and Browne (1985) had already developed a framework for understanding the psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse, including betrayal, stigmatisation, powerlessness and traumatic sexualisation. Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) later articulated objectification theory, examining how women and girls can learn to understand their bodies through the perspectives of those who evaluate them.
These were not discoveries made after society finally emerged from some uniquely unenlightened decade. They were attempts to describe problems already embedded in social life.
The wider entertainment culture of the period frequently presented teenage sexuality through an adult gaze. School settings, youthful innocence and the supposedly precocious girl were familiar ingredients in films, television and advertising. Sometimes these portrayals explored adolescence sympathetically. Sometimes they made youth itself part of the attraction.
The distinction was not always treated with much care.
A later American Psychological Association task force examined research on the sexualisation of girls in media and culture. Its report distinguished healthy sexual development from sexualisation, which can involve reducing a person's value to sexual appeal, treating them as an object for others' use or imposing sexuality upon them inappropriately (APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 2007).
That distinction is essential to Twin Peaks. A teenager being interested in sex is not the same as an adult exploiting that interest. A young woman experimenting with her appearance is not necessarily inviting an adult's attention. Curiosity about adult experiences does not confer adult power.
Yet these distinctions become remarkably unstable in the town.
The teenagers themselves are not necessarily the historical anomaly. The more revealing feature is how frequently their developing independence is treated as an opportunity by people old enough to know better.
Audrey Horne and the Problem with Admiring Cooper
Audrey Horne is one of the most interesting examples because her behaviour is so easy to misinterpret.
She is confident, flirtatious, perceptive and determined to establish an identity outside her father's influence. Her attraction to Cooper forms part of that exploration. None of this is particularly unusual for an adolescent discovering the possibilities of adulthood.
But confidence is not the same as equality.
When Audrey enters Cooper's bed, the scene presents a genuinely difficult moment for a character we have been encouraged to admire. Cooper acknowledges his attraction to her while refusing to pursue the relationship. He recognises that she is a high-school student and he is a federal agent, invoking his professional oath and the values he has sworn to uphold.
He explicitly tells her the situation is wrong.
The refusal matters. Cooper maintains a boundary, and the series deserves recognition for allowing him to do so. But his reasoning is not presented solely as an uncomplicated moral objection to an adult pursuing a teenager. Professional duty, the responsibilities of his position and his previous experience of someone being harmed through a romantic entanglement all inform his decision.
There is something uncomfortable about the romantic framing of the exchange. Cooper tells Audrey that she is beautiful and desirable, making his attraction clear even as he declines to act upon it. The scene invites us to see his restraint partly as a personal sacrifice, as though an otherwise promising romance has been frustrated by unfortunate circumstances.
And perhaps that is the revealing part.
Cooper does the right thing, but the series still wants us to recognise what he is giving up.
A contemporary drama could certainly portray the same attraction. The difference would lie in how it framed the imbalance of authority and experience. Would the scene primarily invite sympathy for an honourable man resisting temptation, or would it focus more closely on the vulnerability of the younger person and the responsibility attached to his professional position?
That is not a question we can answer simply by assuming contemporary television is morally superior. But it is an important question to ask of the original.
It would also be a mistake to equate Cooper with Ben Horne. One man maintains a boundary while the other profits from sexual exploitation. Their actions are demonstrably different.
Nevertheless, liking Cooper should not make him exempt from scrutiny.
His warmth, intelligence and evident conscientiousness make it easy to interpret his behaviour generously. We have spent enough time with him to believe in his goodness. That favourable impression can itself become a form of moral leniency, encouraging us to overlook complexities we would readily identify in a less sympathetic character.
Perhaps the problem is not that Cooper fails to behave responsibly. It is that we are encouraged to regard a fairly basic exercise of adult responsibility as unusually admirable.
And in Twin Peaks, perhaps it is.
One Eyed Jacks and the Respectable Adult World
Audrey's involvement with One Eyed Jacks exposes the same contradiction on a larger scale.
Her decision to investigate the establishment is reckless, but it is also consistent with her intelligence, curiosity and determination to uncover her father's secrets. She believes she can manage the situation through confidence and deception. The danger emerges partly from her limited understanding of the world she is entering.
The adults operating that world understand its rules rather better.
One Eyed Jacks presents sexual exploitation within the familiar trappings of luxury: expensive surroundings, costumes, gambling and influential clientele. Its apparent sophistication helps obscure the power relationships that sustain it.
Ben Horne's involvement makes the setting particularly disturbing. He is not an outsider invading the town's respectable social order. He is a prominent member of that order, a businessman and a father whose public standing coexists with his willingness to profit from the sexual availability of women.
The establishment's location across the Canadian border provides an additional convenience. Wrongdoing can be geographically separated from the wholesome American community that helps sustain it.
But crossing a border does not transform the moral character of the people travelling there.
There is a broader social pattern here. Places associated with vice are often imagined as the source of corruption, while the customers, investors and intermediaries who generate demand escape comparable scrutiny. The location acquires the reputation; the respectable visitor returns home.
The problem is not Canada. It is the behaviour of people from Twin Peaks who find it useful to imagine that their misconduct belongs somewhere else.
For Audrey, however, the consequences are more immediate. Her apparent sophistication cannot protect her from an environment organised around adult power. She has learned to perform maturity without necessarily acquiring the means to resist exploitation.
And the series initially treats much of this as an entertaining undercover adventure.
That tension between danger and entertainment is one we should not ignore.
Laura Palmer and the Illusion of Choice
Laura's circumstances make the distinction between adolescent independence and genuine autonomy far more difficult.
By the time we encounter her in Fire Walk with Me, she is familiar with drugs, sex, secrecy and environments that would be dangerous for many adults. She can be manipulative, affectionate, reckless, protective and cruel. Her behaviour resists any easy division between victimhood and agency.
Viewed without context, some of her choices might be described as self-destructive teenage rebellion.
But that reading fails to account for the circumstances in which those choices developed.
Laura has experienced prolonged sexual abuse within her own family. The person who should have offered protection has become the central threat to her safety. Her home, relationships and understanding of herself have been shaped by a betrayal extending back into childhood.
Finkelhor and Browne's (1985) framework is useful because it does not require us to reduce the consequences of abuse to one psychological mechanism. Betrayal, powerlessness, stigmatisation and traumatic sexualisation may interact in different ways, affecting how a young person understands trust, intimacy, danger and personal worth.
Laura's drug use can be understood partly as an attempt to obtain temporary relief from unbearable circumstances. Some of her sexual experiences may be connected to coping, control, avoidance or the complicated meanings intimacy has acquired in her life.
But we should not turn those possibilities into a comprehensive diagnosis.
Not every decision Laura makes must be explained by her abuse. Doing so would erase precisely the complexity the film attempts to restore. She remains a person with desires, loyalties, contradictions and intentions of her own.
What matters is that the existence of a choice does not tell us how freely that choice was made.
A young person can make decisions within circumstances they never chose, using coping strategies developed in response to dangers they cannot realistically remove. Being able to act does not necessarily mean possessing the resources, power or confidence required to escape.
This is where Fire Walk with Me contributes something that the television series and Laura's diary could only partially communicate.
It allows us to witness the difference between Laura's capacity to make decisions and the extraordinary difficulty of using those decisions to secure her own safety.
She is not simply resigned to death. She seeks escape, relief and moments of control. Yet the methods available to her repeatedly lead back into situations that expose her to further harm.
That is not evidence that she welcomes what is happening.
It is evidence of how narrow her available world has become.
She Could Protect Donna. She Could Not Save Herself.
The distinction becomes particularly apparent when Donna follows Laura into the Pink Room.
Donna's behaviour is recognisably adolescent. She wants access to a world her friend has kept hidden, perhaps motivated by curiosity, loyalty or the desire to prove that she is no longer sheltered. She is experimenting with adulthood without fully understanding the environment she is entering.
Laura understands it rather better.
When Donna becomes vulnerable, Laura recognises the danger and intervenes. She attempts to remove her friend from the situation and protect her from experiences that have already become part of Laura's own life.
This is one of the most revealing moments in the film.
Laura is capable of recognising risk. She understands exploitation and can act decisively when someone else is threatened. Her problem is not a general inability to distinguish safety from danger.
She appears better able to defend another person's right to protection than to imagine that protection as a realistic possibility for herself.
Something similar may be happening with James. His affection offers Laura the possibility of a more ordinary romantic relationship, but she also appears conscious of the danger he could face if Leland became aware of their involvement. Her attempts to distance herself from James can be read partly as protective, although their relationship is too complicated to reduce every rejection to self-sacrifice.
There is a painful asymmetry running through both relationships. Laura can imagine futures in which Donna and James escape the dangers surrounding her. She has much more difficulty imagining a comparable future for herself.
Jennifer Freyd's work on betrayal trauma offers a useful perspective on this difficulty. When harm comes from someone on whom a child depends, recognising and responding to that harm can become entangled with the need to preserve relationships essential to everyday survival (Freyd, 1996).
It is important not to treat this as a diagnosis of Laura. Nor should we assume that every survivor of prolonged abuse responds in the same way. The film is presenting one fictional experience, not a universal psychological profile.
But Laura's behaviour illustrates a distinction that is easily overlooked: recognising someone else's vulnerability does not mean we possess the same perceived options when confronting our own.
And there is something particularly cruel about a child who has learned how to protect her friends from an adult world that nobody adequately protected her from.
Boys, Consequences and the Freedom to Become Someone Else
The treatment of Bobby Briggs complicates the picture further.
Bobby's involvement in drug dealing and violence is established early in the television series. Fire Walk with Me reminds us that these activities carried potentially fatal consequences. He is not merely a rebellious teenager who occasionally makes a nuisance of himself.
Yet Season Two increasingly presents Bobby through comedy. His relationship with Shelly, his business ambitions and his attempts to become a respectable young man gradually overshadow the darker aspects of his earlier behaviour.
James is afforded a different kind of narrative mobility. He can leave town, enter unfamiliar relationships and pursue plots that become almost detached from the central tragedy. His decisions are frequently questionable, but the series gives him opportunities to continue making them.
Laura has no comparable opportunity for reinvention.
This is partly because the story begins with her death. A murder mystery necessarily reconstructs the victim's life through the testimony and discoveries of other people. Her behaviour becomes evidence, while surviving characters retain the capacity to change.
It would be too simple to argue that the series deliberately excuses boys while condemning girls. Bobby and James both experience vulnerability, and other characters suffer consequences that cannot be neatly divided by gender.
But the contrast still raises a worthwhile question about how audiences assess adolescent behaviour.
Bobby's wrongdoing can eventually become part of his comic personality. James's romantic mistakes can generate another storyline. Laura's mistakes are gathered after her death and interpreted as clues to what happened to her.
She is denied the future in which those mistakes might have become merely part of growing up.
There is a wider cultural expectation at work here. Young men are often granted considerable narrative room to be foolish, sexually adventurous or irresponsible. Young women's sexuality, by contrast, can become evidence of character, moral worth or supposed maturity.
Laura's story exposes how dangerous that distinction becomes when a young woman's experiences are interpreted primarily through the expectations of others.
Her behaviour does not need to be respectable to deserve understanding.
The Adults Who Failed to Notice
It is tempting to describe Twin Peaks as a town that knowingly ignored Laura's suffering. But that would attribute knowledge and responsibility too broadly.
There is no reason to assume that every adult understood what was happening in the Palmer household. Abuse within families is often concealed, and apparent respectability can make the warning signs difficult to recognise or interpret.
The more defensible criticism concerns the culture of the community, particularly the assumptions that influence which people appear trustworthy and which forms of behaviour attract attention.
The town has a police department, a school, medical professionals and numerous adults who know one another personally. Its residents can recognise financial misconduct, investigate criminal conspiracies and organise themselves against mysterious threats in the woods.
Yet exploitation, drug dealing and domestic violence remain embedded within familiar social structures.
This does not mean the police could simply have solved every problem had they looked more carefully. It means that recognising crime is not the same as recognising vulnerability. Investigating a murder after it occurs is different from identifying conditions that allow harm to continue.
The Palmer household demonstrates this distinction particularly painfully.
The hand-washing scene in Fire Walk with Me shows Laura and Sarah visibly unsettled by Leland's controlling behaviour. His subsequent display of affection does not cancel the intimidation. Instead, it creates a disturbing uncertainty about which version of him the family will encounter.
The film also strongly suggests that Sarah is deliberately incapacitated, complicating any simplistic accusation that she merely chose not to intervene.
These details remind us that responsibility cannot be distributed carelessly. Sarah's circumstances are not equivalent to Leland's, and the adults who lacked knowledge of the abuse cannot be treated as though they knowingly permitted it.
Nevertheless, the broader community contains institutions and individuals whose conduct helps normalise exploitation. Ben Horne is not simply unaware of the sexual economy operating around the town. He participates in it.
There is a difference between failing to recognise danger and knowingly profiting from it.
Twin Peaks contains examples of both.
The Ideal Victim and the Problem with Laura's Reputation
The town initially remembers Laura as an almost impossibly ideal young woman.
She is beautiful, popular, charitable and apparently beloved. Her photograph becomes a symbol of lost innocence. The community mourns not simply a person but an image of who it believed that person to be.
Then the investigation reveals her secrets.
Laura used drugs. She had sexual relationships. She moved through environments considered disreputable. She maintained different versions of herself for different people.
The discoveries complicate the town's idealised portrait, but they should not complicate her entitlement to sympathy.
Criminologist Nils Christie (1986) described the concept of the ideal victim: someone who readily receives legitimate victim status because they fit familiar expectations of innocence, vulnerability and respectability.
Laura initially appears to qualify. But as her behaviour becomes known, she begins to violate some of those expectations.
This is where the concept becomes especially useful.
A teenager does not become less vulnerable because she is sexually experienced. Drug use does not reduce the seriousness of abuse. Secrecy does not establish that someone willingly accepted the conditions they were concealing.
Yet the investigation repeatedly risks turning Laura's experiences into questions about her character.
Why was she involved with these people? Why did she visit those places? Why did she keep secrets? Why didn't she simply leave?
Some of those questions are legitimate when reconstructing events. But they can become morally misleading when the choices of the person harmed attract more scrutiny than the conduct of those harming her.
And this is where the series' own storytelling deserves attention. Laura is initially absent, leaving other people to construct her identity through memories, rumours, evidence and competing claims about who she really was.
Fire Walk with Me finally allows her to occupy the centre of the story.
But even then, the audience must resist the temptation to turn every aspect of her behaviour into a symptom. Laura was more than an idealised daughter, but she was also more than a collection of psychological injuries.
She was a teenager whose life was considerably larger than the circumstances of her death.
When the Show Itself Becomes Part of the Problem
There is an uncomfortable question that any serious examination of Twin Peaks should be willing to ask.
Does the series merely depict the sexualisation of young women, or does it sometimes participate in it?
The distinction is not always clear.
One Eyed Jacks is presented as a dangerous establishment, yet the television series also draws entertainment from its glamour, secrecy and sexual intrigue. Audrey's investigation provides suspense, but her attractiveness is clearly part of the appeal of the storyline. Her relationship with Cooper is ethically constrained within the plot while remaining romantically charged for the audience.
The series does not necessarily endorse the exploitation it depicts. Nor should every portrayal of sexual attraction be treated as exploitation. But a work can criticise a cultural practice while still relying on some of its conventions to entertain viewers.
That possibility deserves more attention than it usually receives.
It also helps explain why Fire Walk with Me feels so different.
The Pink Room abandons much of the seductive presentation associated with One Eyed Jacks. It is oppressive, loud and disorientating. Conversations are difficult to hear, the atmosphere is uncomfortable, and Donna's vulnerability becomes increasingly apparent.
The film brings us much closer to Laura's experience of this world, rather than allowing us to observe it principally through the excitement of a mystery.
Yet the film raises its own difficult question. We already knew much of Laura's history through the diary, the investigation and the testimony of those around her. What is gained by depicting her suffering more directly?
There is no automatic moral virtue in making an audience witness additional trauma. Nor does a work become more psychologically insightful simply because it becomes more explicit.
Sheryl Lee's performance gives Laura a voice and presence that the original series could only partially provide. But the film's achievement lies less in revealing previously unknown horrors than in changing our proximity to a person whose suffering was already established.
Whether that makes the film more effective is open to debate.
What it does accomplish is to make it harder to enjoy the sexualised world of Twin Peaks without considering the people living within it.
And that is a challenge the television series occasionally avoided.
What Does It Mean to Let a Teenager Be a Teenager?
There is an irony at the centre of all this.
The teenagers of Twin Peaks are frequently portrayed as unusually adult, but many of their experiences are recognisably adolescent. They experiment, develop attractions, pursue independence, keep secrets, make poor decisions and sometimes profoundly misunderstand the people around them.
None of this necessarily indicates that childhood has disappeared.
Adolescence is not an extended period of moral innocence. It involves the gradual development of independence, identity, sexuality and responsibility. Protecting teenagers does not mean denying those processes or insisting that young people remain untouched by adult experience until some arbitrary birthday.
The problem arises when adults mistake that developing independence for a surrender of their own responsibilities.
A teenager's confidence does not erase an imbalance of power. Sexual experience does not remove vulnerability. The ability to make a decision does not guarantee that the decision is free from coercion, dependency or fear.
And perhaps most importantly, adult attention is not necessarily evidence of adolescent maturity. Sometimes it is evidence of adult misconduct.
This is the distinction Twin Peaks repeatedly struggles to maintain.
Audrey's confidence does not make her Cooper's equal. Donna's curiosity does not prepare her for the Pink Room. Bobby's criminal involvement does not mean he no longer needs adults capable of recognising the danger he poses to himself and others.
And Laura's apparent sophistication does not make her responsible for the exploitation she has endured.
There is a temptation, when revisiting the series decades later, to congratulate ourselves for recognising these problems more readily. But that would be another easy conclusion.
The cultural conditions that encourage adults to mistake adolescent vulnerability for sexual availability have not simply vanished. Social attitudes have changed in important ways, but exploiting inequalities of age, authority, experience and dependency is hardly an exclusively historical problem.
The more useful question is whether we are now better at recognising those inequalities, and whether that recognition consistently changes how we respond.
Twin Peaks provides no easy reassurance.
Simply Put
What makes Laura Palmer's story so disturbing is not that she behaved unlike other teenagers. It is that she experienced the consequences of adult exploitation while being denied the protection her age and circumstances demanded.
She could recognise danger. She could make choices. She could protect Donna, care for James and resist the forces threatening her identity. Her struggle was never evidence that she lacked the intelligence or character required to understand what was happening.
Rather, it illustrates the profound difference between understanding danger and possessing a realistic means of escaping it.
The town's mistake was not simply that it failed to see Laura as innocent. Innocence was never the condition on which her right to safety should have depended.
And the audience faces a related problem. We are invited to admire Cooper for declining to cross a boundary, sympathise with Bobby as his criminal past recedes into comedy, and become fascinated by the details of Laura's secret life. Each response is understandable. But each deserves examination.
Because the central question is not whether these teenagers were behaving appropriately.
It is why so many adults treated their behaviour as permission to behave inappropriately themselves.
For all the supernatural horrors in Twin Peaks, there is something particularly ordinary about the failure at the centre of Laura's life. Adults could recognise her beauty, her popularity, her sexuality and eventually her suffering. What they could not adequately recognise was the vulnerability of the person beneath those identities.
The town spent two seasons investigating what happened to Laura Palmer.
Perhaps the more difficult question is why a teenager had been expected to survive so much of the adult world in the first place.
References
APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. (2007). Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report
Christie, N. (1986). The ideal victim. In E. A. Fattah (Ed.), From crime policy to victim policy: Reorienting the justice system (pp. 17–30). Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08305-3_2
Finkelhor, D., & Browne, A. (1985). The traumatic impact of child sexual abuse: A conceptualization. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 55(4), 530–541. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1985.tb02703.x
Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T.-A. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women's lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(2), 173–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press. Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse.
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