by Sydney King ’26 on November 6, 2025
A&E - Film & TV
“I always thought you knew it was me,” is perhaps the most haunting line in all of cinema,uttered by the character Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) in David Lynch’s surreal thriller Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). The film is a prequel to the series Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and follows the character Laura Palmer in the final days leading up to her murder, which serves as the catalyst of the entire series. Although the film is a prequel chronologically, it contains immense spoilers for the series, so if you’ve yet to watch the series (which you should), please proceed with caution as you read this article.
There is a peculiar sense of perturbation that is covertly woven into the foundation of this film. A teenage Laura Palmer navigates her double life: on the surface, she is the smart, philanthropic, and beautiful homecoming queen. Underneath this surface, however, she is a haunted and abused girl who develops a cocaine addiction to cope with her trauma and begins to sell her body to afford her addiction. Laura Palmer had a secret relationship while maintaining a boyfriend, and combined with her increased lack of sleep, everything in her life begins to unravel until she is murdered.
But who killed Laura Palmer? Although this question has been technically answered for decades, the topic still initiates a heated debate amongst viewers. Laura Palmer starts exhibiting absurd behavior at age 12, which is when she begins documenting her visits with BOB. BOB is an evil spiritual entity who looks entirely like a normal man. He only shows up when Laura Palmer is alone, and starts “having her” from ages 12 to 17. The twist is that BOB cannot manifest without a host, and he possesses Laura’s father, Leland Palmer, who goes on to abuse her nightly. Because BOB appears as a different person when Laura Palmer sees him, it is not until shortly before her death that she realizes it is her father who’s been enacting this abuse on her.
Leland Palmer, while “possessed” by BOB, ends up murdering Laura Palmer, leaving her body floating in a lake where she’s found the next morning. The debate about who killed Laura Palmer comes from how much BOB is metaphorical and how literal he is. Is BOB just the manifestation of generational abuse (as Leland Palmer goes on to comment in the series that BOB visited him when he was a child), making the spiritual entity responsible for Laura Palmer’s abuse and murder, or is BOB just “the evil that men do?” Was it Leland Palmer the whole time, and Laura Palmer just visualized BOB to deny that her father was hurting her? Personally, I lean more toward the second option. There are signs that Leland Palmer is abusive even when he is not being possessed, and I believe that Lynch wanted to show that BOB is less of a character and more of a metaphor for sexual abuse predators. I’m certain many would argue that the actual answers to these questions are somewhere between the surreal and the literal. Ultimately, the abuse Laura Palmer endured was real. It led her to addiction and to her being taken advantage of by all the adult men in Twin Peaks. The only true moment of happiness Laura Palmer experiences in the film is in the closing shot, when she is crying tears of joy in the afterlife, finally relieved of her suffering.