Twin Peaks, criminal responsibility and the comforting fiction of evil as something other than human
Content note: Discussion of child sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, murder, coercion and domestic violence.
This article is an interpretation formed after watching both original series and film. It contains spoilers for both, but none for The Return.
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.
One of the most disturbing moments in Twin Peaks arrives after the murderer has been identified.
Leland Palmer is dead. His daughter Laura has been murdered, as has her cousin Maddy Ferguson. Another young woman, Teresa Banks, was killed the previous year. The investigation has uncovered sexual abuse, exploitation, violence and a network of secrets running through the apparently respectable communities of the Pacific Northwest.
Yet when Dale Cooper visits Sarah Palmer, he offers an extraordinary reassurance. Her husband, he explains, was the victim of something terrible. Leland did not commit the crimes. Not the Leland she knew.
It is a compassionate gesture towards a woman who has lost almost everything. It is also one of the most morally complicated statements in the series.
Because regardless of what we believe about BOB, the crimes have happened. Laura was abused from childhood. Teresa was murdered. Ronette Pulaski survived a violent assault. Maddy was killed in the same family home in which Laura had suffered for years. The discovery of a supernatural perpetrator does nothing to diminish the consequences.
But it offers something psychologically appealing: the possibility of separating evil from the familiar people and institutions among whom it occurred.
This is not an argument that BOB is imaginary. Twin Peaks provides substantial reasons to accept that its supernatural entities exist within the fictional world. Reducing BOB to a psychiatric condition or a convenient metaphor would require us to disregard much of what the series shows.
The question is more difficult than that.
Even if the demon is real, what does blaming it allow everyone else to avoid?
First, Consider the Crimes
Strip away the Red Room, the mysterious rings and the shifting identities, and the central investigation concerns the sustained victimisation of a child.
Laura Palmer has been sexually abused since the age of twelve. The perpetrator operates within her own household, occupying a position of parental authority while presenting himself to the outside world as a loving father. Her behaviour subsequently develops within circumstances shaped by fear, secrecy, drugs, exploitation and the difficulty of recognising danger when it comes from someone she has been taught to trust.
By the time Laura is murdered, the abuse is not an isolated act of violence. It is part of a prolonged history.
Then there is Teresa Banks.
At first, Teresa appears to have little connection to Laura beyond the strange similarities between their murders. But Fire Walk with Me reveals that Leland had been meeting Teresa and arranged an encounter involving two additional young women. When he discovered that Laura and Ronette Pulaski were among them, he withdrew.
The film subsequently shows Leland remembering Teresa's murder.
This makes a recognisably human motive available. Teresa had begun asking questions that could connect Leland to Laura, and her knowledge may have threatened to expose his secret life. Silencing her is therefore one plausible explanation for the killing.
But plausible is not proven. The film also operates within a supernatural mythology in which BOB's purposes may differ from Leland's. We cannot confidently distinguish a calculated attempt to prevent exposure from other motives, or establish where one begins and the other ends.
Teresa's death is no longer inexplicable without recourse to supernatural appetite. The film establishes circumstances in which an ordinary motive for murder becomes conceivable.
And Teresa deserves more than to be remembered as the woman whose death provided Cooper with an earlier case. She was a person drawn into a world of sexual exploitation, whose vulnerability and eventual murder become useful to the investigation only after she is dead.
The other murders complicate the picture further.
Laura's death occurs after prolonged abuse and an apparent struggle over possession. Maddy is killed after entering the Palmer household, where her physical resemblance to Laura becomes inseparable from the danger surrounding her. Leland also murders Jacques Renault in hospital, apparently believing or claiming that Jacques was responsible for Laura's death.
These acts do not necessarily share a single motive.
From a criminological perspective, the immediate purpose of an offence may involve eliminating a perceived threat, exercising control, retaliating against someone or inflicting suffering. The same offender may act for different reasons on different occasions.
The letters found beneath victims' fingernails provide an apparent connection between murders, but even that pattern is inconsistent. Jacques is not shown receiving such a mark. The ritual is therefore not simply a feature of every killing associated with Leland.
The series eventually connects the letters to BOB's name, but the supernatural explanation does not clarify every distinction between the crimes.
Nor does it settle the question of legal responsibility.
In criminal law, motive, intent and the capacity to control one's actions are distinct. Someone may intend an act for a motive that remains unknown. Conversely, an action committed without meaningful voluntary control raises very different questions about culpability. Literal supernatural possession is not something ordinary legal doctrine is designed to assess.
And Twin Peaks never provides a trial in which those questions can be tested. Leland dies after the truth emerges, leaving Cooper and the audience to interpret what happened.
The criminal case reaches a narrative conclusion without producing anything resembling a complete judicial reckoning.
Leland Palmer: The Loving Father and the Abuser
One of the most uncomfortable sequences in Fire Walk with Me contains no overt supernatural manifestation.
At the dinner table, Leland becomes fixated on Laura's hands. His behaviour is intrusive, humiliating and frightening. Sarah appears disturbed, while Laura struggles through the encounter under her father's scrutiny.
Shortly afterwards, Leland becomes affectionate and remorseful.
The shift is disturbing precisely because neither version of him can be dismissed as irrelevant. Laura must live with both.
We can interpret the contrast through the supernatural mythology. Perhaps BOB is responsible for the threatening behaviour, while the loving Leland returns afterwards. That reading is supported by the series' broader account of possession.
But it risks making the relationship more straightforward than Laura experiences it.
In abusive relationships, affection does not necessarily contradict intimidation. Tenderness, remorse and apparent normality can coexist with prolonged patterns of control and violence. Indeed, such contrasts may deepen confusion when the person responsible for harm is also someone upon whom the victim depends.
Evan Stark's (2007) work on coercive control is useful here. Stark challenges understandings of abuse that focus exclusively on individual violent incidents, examining instead the cumulative restrictions, intimidation and patterns of domination through which a person's liberty can be diminished.
His framework primarily concerns intimate-partner abuse, not the precise circumstances of a fictional parent-child relationship. Nevertheless, its attention to power and restricted freedom helps illuminate what a purely incident-based account of Laura's suffering might overlook.
Laura's difficulty escaping cannot be understood simply by asking why she did not leave the house.
Her father is the source of danger. Her home is the setting of the abuse. Her relationships, coping strategies and sense of what is possible have developed within those circumstances for years.
This does not make Laura passive.
The film repeatedly demonstrates her capacity to recognise danger and act protectively towards others. She intervenes when Donna becomes vulnerable in the Pink Room. Her behaviour towards James can also be understood partly through concern about what might happen if Leland discovered their relationship.
Laura can imagine danger threatening other people with considerable clarity. What she struggles to imagine is a realistic means of escaping it herself.
There is nothing contradictory about that.
Recognising exploitation, resisting it in particular moments and possessing the practical means to escape prolonged abuse are not the same psychological capacities.
And this is why the division between BOB and Leland is so important. If we identify every frightening act as BOB's and every affectionate gesture as the real Leland's, the father can remain morally intact.
But Laura does not experience two neatly separated relationships.
She experiences one father, one home and a history of fear that cannot be erased by identifying which supernatural entity was apparently in control at a particular moment.
Sarah Palmer and the Limits of Looking Away
The film's treatment of Sarah introduces another complication.
Leland gives her a glass of milk before she becomes heavily drowsy and sees a white horse. The sequence strongly suggests that Sarah has been deliberately incapacitated, although the film does not establish the precise substance or mechanism.
If that implication is correct, her apparent failure to intervene cannot be interpreted simply as passive ignorance.
Someone may have been actively preventing her from doing so.
Discussions of domestic abuse often drift towards the behaviour of people surrounding the perpetrator. Why didn't the mother notice? Why didn't she intervene? Why didn't she leave?
Such questions can have legitimate investigative purposes, but they become morally misleading when they ignore intimidation, deception, dependency and unequal access to information.
Sarah's fear during the dinner scene and her apparent incapacitation should make us cautious about attributing responsibility to her without evidence of what she knew or could realistically have done.
We should apply the same care to the rest of the community. Not recognising concealed abuse is not automatically equivalent to knowingly permitting it.
But neither should sympathy for those surrounding a crime prevent us from examining the relationships and institutions that allowed the harm to remain hidden.
That distinction becomes especially important when we move beyond the Palmer household.
The Geography of Respectability
In Twin Peaks, wrongdoing has a peculiar habit of being located somewhere else.
One Eyed Jacks sits across the Canadian border, removed from the apparently wholesome American town. Its clientele can enjoy the benefits of sexual exploitation while maintaining respectable identities at home. The establishment's location creates an apparent division between public decency and private transgression.
But the distinction is largely geographical theatre.
Ben Horne's involvement demonstrates that the business is not some foreign corruption imposed upon Twin Peaks. Its profits and clientele are connected to the same community that presents itself as respectable.
The border may make the contradiction easier to manage. It does not resolve it.
There is a wider pattern here. Places associated with vice often acquire reputations that distract from the people travelling there, the demand they create and the economic arrangements that make exploitation profitable.
The destination carries the stigma. The customer returns home.
Fire Walk with Me makes the distinction less comfortable through the Pink Room. Unlike the theatrical glamour of One Eyed Jacks, the Pink Room is oppressive and chaotic. The music overwhelms conversation. Donna's vulnerability becomes increasingly apparent, and Laura is forced to intervene to protect someone who has entered a dangerous environment without appreciating its rules.
Yet the underlying mechanism remains recognisable.
Sexual exploitation is sustained not simply by the existence of disreputable places, but by people willing to exploit others within them.
And that brings us to the most disturbing geographical contradiction in the series.
Laura's principal danger is not across the Canadian border.
It is at home.
There is something significant about a story that directs so much attention towards supernatural evil in the woods while its central victim is being abused in an ordinary family house.
The threat outside the community may be real. The threat within it is no less consequential.
A Town That Struggles to Recognise Harm
Twin Peaks possesses a police department, a school, medical professionals, local businesses and an unusually close network of personal relationships. Its residents know one another, and the series frequently treats that familiarity as evidence of community.
Yet drug dealing, sexual exploitation, coercion and violence persist within the same social environment.
This does not establish that the sheriff's department or other institutions knowingly ignored Laura's abuse. The series does not give us sufficient evidence to make that accusation.
But it does raise a distinction between investigating a crime after it has occurred and recognising the vulnerabilities that existed beforehand.
Cooper and Truman can pursue a murder investigation once Laura's body is discovered. Their ability to reconstruct events does not establish that the town had been effective at recognising the circumstances in which those events became possible.
And the community's social hierarchies matter.
Leland is a familiar father and professional man. Ben Horne is a prominent businessman. The people occupying these positions benefit from reputations that may discourage scrutiny, even when their conduct warrants it.
Respectability is not evidence of wrongdoing.
It is equally not evidence of innocence.
The challenge for institutions is to recognise vulnerability without allowing familiarity, social standing or loyalty to substitute for examination of the facts.
Here, Twin Peaks repeatedly finds itself more capable of recognising extraordinary danger than ordinary exploitation.
The Bookhouse Boys devote themselves to confronting mysterious forces in the woods. Meanwhile, some of the most consequential wrongdoing occurs within businesses, relationships and domestic settings that the community regards as familiar.
The irony is difficult to miss.
Whatever waits in the woods, supernatural vigilance is no substitute for protecting vulnerable people.
When the Explanation Becomes an Excuse
Now return to Cooper's reassurance to Sarah.
Within the series' supernatural mythology, his statement has a defensible basis. Leland describes encountering BOB as a child and experiencing periods of missing awareness. The series gives us reasons to believe an external entity has exerted control over him.
If that control genuinely eliminated Leland's capacity to choose, then questions about his responsibility for particular acts become profoundly complicated.
It would be unreasonable to insist that supernatural possession is real within the story while refusing to consider its implications for agency.
But Cooper's explanation does more than describe a possible mechanism. It offers Sarah emotional relief by distinguishing the husband she loved from the person through whom the crimes occurred.
That is where its moral significance becomes difficult to ignore.
The statement may comfort Sarah, but it also establishes a version of events in which Leland's goodness can survive largely untouched by the violence committed through him.
The person remains familiar. The evil belongs to an intruder.
Psychologist Albert Bandura (1999) examined processes of moral disengagement through which people can reduce the conflict between harmful conduct and moral standards. Among them are the displacement and diffusion of responsibility, the minimisation of consequences and the reframing of actions in ways that make them easier to accept.
Bandura's framework concerns human moral functioning, not supernatural possession. It would therefore be inappropriate to claim that Cooper is demonstrating a specific form of moral disengagement simply by acknowledging BOB.
But the theory raises a useful question about the effect of an explanation on the person receiving it.
Does it help us understand the harm, or does it make the harm easier to set aside?
Those outcomes can overlap, and they are not automatically equivalent.
Sarah deserves compassion. So, potentially, does Leland, if we accept that he too suffered through an entity's control. There is no need to deny either possibility in order to take Laura's suffering seriously.
The problem arises if compassion for one person becomes a reason to minimise what happened to another.
Consider the emotional treatment of Leland's death. His final moments are marked by grief, apparent remorse and spiritual reassurance. Cooper offers him comfort. The audience is invited to recognise his suffering.
Laura, meanwhile, has spent most of the original series speaking through photographs, tapes, diary entries and the memories of other people.
Her story has been reconstructed, interpreted and contested, but she has rarely been allowed to occupy its centre.
That imbalance is one of the most consequential aspects of the series' storytelling.
It is also why Fire Walk with Me earns its screentime, even if much of the information it reveals was already available through Laura's diary and the original investigation.
The film does not simply provide additional facts.
It changes whose experience we inhabit.
We are no longer principally watching a compassionate detective struggle to understand a grieving father. We are witnessing the fear, confusion, resistance and suffering of the daughter whose life has been organised around that father's violence.
The supernatural explanation remains possible.
It simply becomes much harder to experience as reassuring.
The Victim Who Became a Mystery
There is one further form of displacement, and this time the audience is involved.
From its opening episode, Twin Peaks encourages us to investigate Laura Palmer. We collect clues, interpret dreams, examine diary entries and speculate about the motives of those who knew her.
The mystery is absorbing precisely because Laura's life appears increasingly complicated.
She was popular and admired, yet kept extensive secrets. She helped people in the community while participating in activities those same people might condemn. She was loved, desired, exploited and misunderstood, often by individuals who believed they knew her well.
The investigation gradually dismantles the idealised image of the young woman whose photograph occupies such a prominent place in the series.
But there is a danger in treating the destruction of that image as evidence that Laura has become less deserving of sympathy.
Criminologist Nils Christie (1986) developed the influential concept of the ideal victim: a person whose circumstances make it particularly easy for society to recognise them as innocent, vulnerable and worthy of protection.
Laura initially appears to fit that image almost perfectly.
Then the investigation reveals her drug use, sexual relationships and hidden life.
What changes is not the seriousness of the violence committed against her.
What changes is how comfortably she fits the town's expectations of a victim.
The distinction matters because questions about Laura's behaviour can shift the burden of explanation towards the person harmed.
Why did she visit those places? Why did she use drugs? Why did she remain in dangerous relationships? Why didn't she simply leave?
These questions may help us reconstruct her experience, but they become misleading when separated from the prolonged abuse, exploitation and limited options within which her choices occurred.
Laura did not need to be innocent in every sense to deserve protection.
Nor did her life need to be respectable before her death could count as a tragedy.
There is also an uncomfortable question about the audience's investment in the mystery.
The supernatural mythology becomes increasingly elaborate. We wonder why BOB inserts letters beneath fingernails, what the ring signifies, why FBI agents disappear and whether the Lodge entities share some larger purpose.
These questions are part of what makes Twin Peaks extraordinary.
I spent much of my own viewing experience trying to answer them.
But the fascination produces a peculiar imbalance. The mechanisms of the supernatural world can become more compelling than the ordinary crimes surrounding them.
We become intensely interested in what BOB wants.
We can become comparatively less interested in what Laura needed.
And although the two questions are connected, they are not interchangeable.
A murder mystery has every reason to encourage curiosity about its perpetrator. But when the victim becomes principally a means of accessing a mythology, something of her humanity risks disappearing into the investigation.
Fire Walk with Me challenges that tendency by returning us to Laura's perspective.
The film may not resolve many of the supernatural questions raised by the television series. In some respects, it makes them considerably more confusing.
But it provides a different kind of answer.
Laura was not simply the person whose death revealed the secrets of Twin Peaks.
She was a person living within those secrets, attempting to survive them.
That distinction is more important than any explanation of the ring.
Simply Put
It would be easy to argue that Twin Peaks would be morally stronger if BOB did not exist. If Leland were simply an ordinary human abuser, perhaps the story could not offer the consolation of supernatural possession.
But I am not convinced that removing the demon would improve the story.
The uncertainty surrounding agency, culpability and evil is part of what makes Twin Peaks so disturbing. The possibility that Leland is both a perpetrator's physical presence and a victim of supernatural domination creates a problem that cannot be resolved through ordinary moral categories.
The challenge is to resist allowing that complexity to make the crimes themselves less visible.
We should be capable of recognising Sarah's suffering without assuming she knowingly permitted the abuse. We should be capable of considering Leland's diminished agency without ignoring the circumstances through which Laura was harmed. We should be capable of acknowledging supernatural violence without overlooking sexual exploitation, coercion and the protective failures of ordinary institutions.
And we should be capable of recognising Laura's psychological complexity without making her choices the explanation for what was done to her.
The same principle applies beyond the Palmer household.
Canada does not create the desires of the men who travel there. The woods do not explain every crime committed within the town. A respectable public identity does not guarantee private decency.
The most consequential harm in Twin Peaks repeatedly emerges from relationships and institutions that should have offered familiarity, stability and protection.
BOB may be real. He may be powerful. He may even be responsible for acts that Leland could not voluntarily control.
But identifying him cannot tell us everything about the conditions in which those acts occurred.
When we blame the demon, we may gain an explanation.
What we risk losing is a clear view of the people harmed, the relationships that failed them, and the ordinary forms of power that allowed their suffering to continue.
The monster is frightening.
But the most disturbing possibility is that recognising him might allow us to stop looking at everyone else.
References
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0303_3
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
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: The entrapment of women in personal life. Oxford University Press. Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life.
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