The first glimpse viewers had of Laura’s blond and blue-lipped corpse came when the town doctor arrived and, as gently and insistently as a groom lifting a veil from his new bride, lifted away the filmy plastic cerement in which her body had been concealed. 2 She was also the town’s darling: When her body was found, her classmates and teachers all but rent their garments in grief, and the lumber mill closed for the day. The Laura Palmer described in the show’s pilot was a beloved daughter and friend who dated the captain of the football team and whose homecoming portrait hung in the school trophy case. They must, I concluded, have been content with going to Washington State.) In many ways, Laura Palmer was a precise analogue for the character of the town itself: pristine on the outside, but corrupted at the core. (She was also a very busy one: I watched “Twin Peaks” for the first time when I was in high school, fretfully applying to college and cramming for AP exams, and spent more energy than I would care to admit feeling jealous of Laura and the surviving teens of Twin Peaks for apparently having so much time for motorcycle trips, affairs with married adults, drug trafficking, and all manner of other life- and GPA-threatening extracurriculars. If the first few astonishingly widely viewed episodes of “Twin Peaks”made anything clear, it was that Laura Palmer, the show’s star victim, was a very troubled young woman. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities. Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.1 Though Diana’s youth certainly played a role in the public’s near-universal mourning, it seems her death did not destroy her persona so much as it allowed it to reach a kind of apex: Diana, made famous by her passivity, was now as passive as it was possible to be, and all the more loved for it. Yet the adulation Diana enjoyed in life paled in comparison to the outpouring of grief inspired by her untimely death: bouquets left by mourners outside Kensington Palace reached a height of five feet, while across Great Britain, businesses closed and streets emptied so Diana’s public could watch her funeral on television. Her gaze could be tragic, thoughtful, maternal, icy, playful, or vixenish, depending on the kind of woman one wished to gaze upon in return. Princess Diana, when she first emerged into the public eye as the nineteen-year-old bride-to-be of Prince Charles, was lacking not just in defect but in visible personality of any kind, allowing her admirers to imbue her with whatever attributes they desired. This type of stardom, though perfected via celluloid, has long since transcended the medium. This is visible in the earliest of silent films, in which men must do-must seduce, swashbuckle, prank, and pratfall-while women may simply be: be beautiful, luminous, still. For all the power we imagine stardom must grant-or, perhaps more to the point, for all the power we imagine we give to stars-female stars, for the century or so that stardom as we know it has existed, have usually become famous for an essentially passive set of attributes. As the corpses multiply in this fictive crime wave, it’s time for us to ponder a more enduring mystery: Why this is one of the only narrative questions we feel so compelled to answer.Įven when we don’t have Nielsen ratings to tell the story, it’s clear that there’s little that interests the American public quite so much as a young woman’s body. ”Again and again television narratives-to say nothing of other forms of media-use a dead girl as a point of entry into a story that the girl herself is powerless to tell. Now more than ever, seemingly every show on television replicates the question that “Twin Peaks” posed when it premiered on this day in 1990: Who killed the girl? We see it in countless episodes of “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, in “CSI” and its spinoffs, in “The Killing” and “Top of the Lake,”and most recently in “True Detective. Laura Palmer has been dead for twenty-five years, but her legacy has dwarfed that of countless other living female characters.
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