David Lynch: Wisteria, Laura Palmer

Rumors have been swirling lately that David Lynch is at work on a new television series for Netflix. It would mark the first original series for the filmmaker since Twin Peaks debuted in 1990. But is Wisteria actually an original program? Or is it really another Twin Peaks series? Lynch’s projects are always super secretive. So there’s a good chance we won’t know what Wisteria is until it appears on our TV screens. But there are a few clues that point to this possibly being a continuation of Twin Peaks. And it might just center on a character we met in the show’s final episode. A character named Carrie Page, who is actually an alternate reality Laura Palmer. Here’s some speculation about Wisteria, the mysterious new David Lynch project, and why it could be another Twin Peaks story. During a Q&A at the Theatre at ACE Hotel in Los Angeles, David Lynch said he was interested in continuing Carrie Page’s story. It’s possible Showtime, the network that aired The Return, was nervous about pouring money into another long, esoteric season of TV. Either way, Carrie’s story is still largely untold. Even there is a street in Odessa, Texas called Wisteria. In Twin Peaks: The Return‘s final episode, Part 18, Dale Cooper attempts to prevent Laura Palmer’s murder. In doing so, he winds up traveling through a portal and into another reality. There, he meets a diner waitress named Carrie Page, who lives in Odessa, Texas and looks identical to an adult Laura Palmer. He attempts to convince her that she’s actually Laura, and desperate to leave Odessa, Carrie agrees to travel with Cooper back to Twin Peaks. They drive to the town and arrive at Laura Palmer’s house, which is now owned by a strange woman who doesn’t recall the Palmers. As they’re about to leave, Carrie hears Laura’s mother Sarah call out her name from the house. Suddenly aware that she is, indeed, Laura Palmer, Carrie screams into the night and everything plunges into darkness. Source: nerdist.com

Laura Palmer’s revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to her sins. We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and screwed roadhouse drunks for the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as in her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it's a tour de force. Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence, of damnation, or [get ready] both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither. The Globe and Mail called the film "A disgusting, misanthropic movie." This transformation of Laura from object to subject was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Sheryl Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying. —"David Lynch Keeps His Head" (1996) by David Foster Wallace

In 2017, Vice called James Hurley (Laura Palmer's secret boyfriend) “the original sad lad”. Hurley is clearly meant to be a walking cliche, a cypher of American masculine teenage rebellion a la James Dean: you can tell because he wears a biker jacket and shades, and drives a motorcycle. Spooner points to Hurley’s biker jacket as an item that operates symbolically. Reprising his guitar playing for the new series, the jacket was noticeably absent – perhaps because a middle-aged man wearing one might spell something different, namely a mid-life crisis. James’ love for Laura was sincere. But it’s unclear whether Laura’s love for him was equally authentic. On an audiotape sent to Dr Jacoby Laura says “God, James is sweet, but he’s so dumb, and right now I can only take so much of sweet.” In the end James Hurley was too much of a sweet boy to really understand Laura’s world. He couldn’t control her dark thoughts or protect her from the things she was involved with. “I remember this one night when we first started seeing each other. She was still doing drugs then. We were in the woods when she started saying this scary poem, over and over, about fire.” Source: visittwinpeaks.com

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures in 1995, John Kennedy Jr's assistant Rose Marie Terenzio recalls how Carolyn Bessette looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit, carrying a velvet purse that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy, with an aura of mystery like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. John Perry Barlow: John wanted to maintain a platonic relationship with Carolyn until he and Daryl Hannah had broken up. In fact, there were not many women in his life that he took seriously. And there were even fewer that he took casually. In this regard John was anything but a Kennedy. It's kind of goofy to say, but he was like a Norman Rockwell character. I didn't meet Carolyn until the fall of 1994. At once, I found her to be as charismatic as John was. "Charisma" was once a theological term meaning "grace." She had that quality. I was also impressed with the fact that she was more than a little eccentric. She was not conventional in any sense. I think she was actually some kind of angel. But like many angels, her empathy was her main enemy. She was too raw to the pain of others. She felt it as deeply herself. John was ecstatic in Carolyn's company. John told us they'd barely left the hotel room during their honeymoon. John was truly a monogamous guy. And he was a loyal guy. And it wasn't just loyalty amongst guys. It wasn't like he was just a great pal with men and not with women. He respected women probably more than he did guys. —NY Fix News interview by Sheila Tasco (2004)