Secret Lives of American Beauties
What happened to Laura Palmer?
I had originally planned on writing about a completely different topic for today, but something about film director David Lynch’s sudden recent passing made me want to stop the presses, so to speak.
In the opening moments of David Lynch’s 1990 television series Twin Peaks, the town for which the show is named also completely shuts down. Even the town’s commercially important lumber mill closes in response to the tragic news that local teenage darling Laura Palmer has died.
As Twin Peaks begins, Laura Palmer’s dead body is found wrapped in plastic on a local shoreline. She has clearly been murdered. From there, we enter a uniquely Lynch-ian universe that is luscious, gorgeous, weird, disturbing, surreal, and so much more. It is also both genuinely funny and scary at points. This combination of elements is part of what still gives Twin Peaks such cultural cache, even today. Designed to fit into a “soap opera” format for a mainstream viewership, the actors deliver at times overwrought lines and exaggerated bodily movements amid the ethereal, creepy scoring by Angelo Badalamenti. All these details aid in building the story’s sense of terror.
Even people who haven’t seen the series are familiar with the central premise of Twin Peaks. A New Yorker cartoon features Lynch at the gates of heaven, with St. Peter asking him: “O.K., but who really killed Laura Palmer?”
Part of David Lynch’s intellectual project—if I can be so bold—was to insist on showing viewers the shadow side of so-called all-American fantasies. For every beautiful blonde, blue-eyed woman with bright-red lips in Lynch’s world, demons of both the human and metaphysical variety surround her. Laura Palmer is a paragon of that pattern. A super-popular high-schooler possessing every marker of all-American beauty, Laura Palmer seems from the outside to have it all. Doted upon by her parents in their large house, Laura Palmer is surrounded by friends. She dates a football player named Bobby.
As Twin Peaks unfolds, however, we learn after her death that Laura Palmer’s real life was one of unending horrors. She was addicted to cocaine, likely as a response to what we learn was a terrifying, brutal childhood. No place was really safe for Laura Palmer. Her eventual involvement in a dark world of villains is what ultimately entraps and kills her. (More of Laura Palmer’s origin story can be found in Lynch’s scary prequel Fire Walk with Me.)
David Lynch loves dispelling myths around American beauty. Lynch often seems to say through his directorial work: If something—or someone—seems too perfect, look closer.
Coincidentally, the tagline “Look closer” was actually used in promotions for the film American Beauty (1999), another exploration of the dark and violent side of the American dream. Like Twin Peaks, American Beauty features a beautiful, blonde teenage girl onto whom other characters project their own fantasies. The designation “American beauty” can apply to women, but it’s also a type of rose. Deep-red roses feature prominently in the film. They are snipped from a garden with a white-picket fence by an unhappily married woman, and huge beds of luscious red petals populate romantic fantasies in various sequences. Anyone alive during the 1990s will remember the ubiquitous posters for American Beauty, which featured a red rose positioned over a woman’s navel.
Red is the color of roses, of lipstick, and of America, especially these days. In Judaism we associate the color red on a linguistic level with earth and all that earthiness entails. In Twin Peaks, the color red is deployed liberally. Eventually Laura Palmer is trapped in a red-drenched room located in some distant time-space continuum, or something. David Lynch doesn’t provide many answers during the series.
Everyone wants a piece of Laura Palmer. They want her time, her attention, her validation. They want to live vicariously through her; some of them want to be her. People are literally obsessed with this beautiful and popular young woman. Even Laura Palmer’s wacky middle-aged therapist, it turns out, was in love with her.
Female beauty—especially a certain white-coded, “all-American” kind—is viewed from the outside as a sort of superpower. Yet in Lynch’s world, the beauty of women like Laura Palmer cannot save them. Moreover, their beauty even makes them highly visible targets for all kinds of predators. Socially, their beauty turns these women into totems—they become symbols instead of people. Their high status isolates them.
Over the course of Twin Peaks, we discover that Laura Palmer kept multiple diaries. She knew that people so badly wanted access to her that they were even willing to trespass upon her innermost thoughts. People seemingly feel entitled to possess Laura Palmer, even after her death. In one scene, two of Laura Palmer’s friends read a passage from one of her diaries. Laura Palmer writes of her friend Donna: “...I’m afraid to tell her of my fantasies and my nightmares. Sometimes she’s good at understanding. Other times she just giggles, and I don’t have the nerve to ask why things like that are funny to her…I love Donna very much but sometimes I worry that she wouldn’t be around me at all if she knew what my insides were like.”
Beautiful women are aware that they are sometimes idolized by others. Yet they have just as many reasons as anybody else to think: I’m broken. I’m ugly. If people knew my whole story, they would never love me.
Beautiful women of the Laura Palmer variety may not have the same problems as everybody else, but they’ve definitely got them. Laura Palmer had so many problems that she wound up dead.
David Lynch is an auteur, so it may seem strange to compare Twin Peaks to the comparatively light-stepping 1999 rom-com Notting Hill. But while thinking about Laura Palmer, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Notting Hill’s main character Anna Scott. Played by Julia Roberts, another all-American beauty, Anna Scott is a movie star who wanders into a London bookstore and falls in love with its unassuming, shy owner, played by Hugh Grant.
When Hugh Grant’s character takes this movie star to meet his friends, they cannot believe that a person of her beauty and social stature would be socializing with them. They don’t really see her as a peer.
These friends play a game in which every participant articulates his or her various inadequacies. They skip Anna Scott entirely, assuming that this rich American movie star with her dazzling smile couldn’t possibly have anything to contribute. Anna Scott insists on participating. During her turn, she shares that she’s had what is basically an eating disorder since her teenage years, that she is a survivor of domestic violence, and that she’s had multiple surgeries to look the way she does. These are not everyone’s problems, but they are problems, ones that are amplified further by their invisibility.
In high school, I was friends with a real-life Laura Palmer. She was beautiful in a way I would categorize as striking, and everyone was afraid of her. She seemingly had everything, but her interior life contained real reasons for suffering. Once in a reflective moment, she said to me, “You lose some, you lose more.” That sentiment—with its cynicism, despite her young age—left a lasting mark on me.
For most of Notting Hill, Hugh Grant’s character refuses to believe that someone like Anna Scott would ever actually want him. In a final appeal to win him over, Anna Scott turns up at his bookstore and delivers Notting Hill’s now-famous line: “I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking her to love him.” Notions of status and beauty have proved needlessly divisive and harmful for these characters. Beautiful women also suffer, and they often do so in contexts that others may not understand.
Anna Scott’s famous line narrowly avoids cheesiness due to the skill of both Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, and probably to the overall strength of the film’s script. It feels strange to compare Notting Hill—a well-done rom-com, but a rom-com nonetheless—with the highly aestheticized, surreal world of David Lynch, where viewers still argue today over the unclear fates and motivations of his detailed, oddball characters.
Yet there was a wholesome quality to David Lynch. He was an aesthete, but I don’t think he was a snob. I think he deeply valued the full range of the human experience, and amid all the darkness in Twin Peaks, true love also makes a poignant and sweet appearance. In an endearing plot line, FBI Agent Gordon Cole falls in love at first sight with another character named Shelly. It is telling that David Lynch himself plays this role. Gordon Cole is hard of hearing and he speaks at a shouting-level volume all the time due to his disability. Yet with Shelly—and only Shelly—can he hear perfectly and speak at a normal volume. He calls the experience a miracle. Another character replies: “What’s wrong with miracles?”
David Lynch of all people understood that life is really weird. As we progress through it, we sometimes experience things that would be very difficult to explain or translate to other people. The build-up of those experiences can become isolating, no matter who you are. There are some stories that are too complicated or even unbearable to tell. Sharing them can feel terrifying or simply impossible. True love, David Lynch understood, cuts through that fear. It eliminates that need in us to justify, or translate, or explain ourselves. Some people just hear us—just get us—the first time.
Today is Valentine’s Day. It’s a red-letter day for American beauties, both the women and the flowers. It’s also a great day to celebrate the people who hear us—really hear us—without judgment, and without requiring us to constantly explain or translate ourselves. Finally, it’s a day to remember David Lynch, a visionary director and a believer in true love whose work looked like no one else’s and who made us appreciate beauty.
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Rabbi Dov Linzer (The Bronx, NY) and Abigail Pogrebin, winners of the 2025 Independent Press Award for Religion Nonfiction for It Takes Two to Torah.
Reading this in April! Behind in emails. I love taking a break reading the substacks I have waiting for my attention. I guess my “substack email pile” is my new version of a nice stack of issues of the old Vanity Fair and NY Magazine. Sigh…. As always your articles are nostalgic, artistic, thought provoking and fun! Thank you!!!!