What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

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NewtoTwinPeaks
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What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by NewtoTwinPeaks »

Was this Leland or Leland under Bob's influence?

Since he puts in his mark underneath the fingernail, it has to have involvement from Bob. However, Leland also has reason due to the blackmail? The way I look at it is that Bob uses Leland's emotions (anger over the blackmail) to take control and satisfy his urge on getting off on the pleasure and fear. At that point, I'm not sure if Leland is aware about Theresa being dead or not. The show never really talks about that, but do you believe Leland has locked those memories away or that he is also aware that he had a role in killing Teresa when he is being 'himself'?

Another scene that's interesting is him looking at the magazine and saying how Teresa looks like 'his Laura'. This can probably be taken in 2 ways; the second being that Bob considers Laura 'his' and Teresa reminded him of her. Or do you think that Leland on his own was attracted to his daughter, which obviously adds quite a different element to it. Are you of the opinion that Leland was seeking out Teresa initially or that this was Bob?
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Agent Sam Stanley
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Agent Sam Stanley »

This is pretty debatable, but IMO Leland was under BOB's influence during the whole thing w Teresa.
Last edited by Agent Sam Stanley on Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by tmurry »

I approach Twin Peaks primarily as a David Lynch phenomenon, secondarily as another set of concerns related to Mark Frost, and finally as a TV show that many people worked on. This influences my answers to these kinds of questions. You presume that when he is "with Bob" that he is not 100% acting of his own volition. I think this is incorrect.

From my perspective, Leland did all those things (every single thing) himself - Bob is an epiphenomenon in terms of the choices made. But that doesn't mean Bob does not exist... the metaphor of the violent, rapacious aspect of the masculine given form is completely real - realer than real. From a Frost angle this is because there is a nexus of the paranormal that makes this place special and manifests things, but then Frost and the rest of the TV people seem to favor Bob as a controlling entity anyway. From the Lynch end, it doesn't matter if you "explain" why people see Bob - Leland acts out a pattern that makes complete sense as a victim of abuse that becomes an abuser, and sensitive souls see his "true face" as a collective-and-individual psychological phenomenon. Bob is just the part of Leland that maps to an archetype in the collective unconscious and those who see him (the gifted and the damned) may try to separate the monster from the man. Laura sees the presence of Bob because she is damned. The literal and the metaphorical are both entirely true, and cohere even when you ignore the other.

So Leland killed Theresa because Leland did everything and, when you pull back, the movie was the pure Lynch version and he clearly believed Leland did all of these things on the "real world" level just as "Bob" also did all of these things on the archetypal level. Quantum superposition.
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Cappy
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Cappy »

Yeah, I'm of the opinion that it's always Leland as well. The movie is just more explicit about this than the tv show is.

BOB is a real force however. My reading of BOB is of sort of a 'devil-on-the-shoulder' trope that pushes and compels weak persons to do things, perhaps things they want to do but can't because of their morality/empathy/basic human decency. The fact that angels hover at the scene of Laura's murder play to this idea as well, as she has a choice of listening to the BOB on her shoulder or the angel.

In the final scene, when Cooper breaks down laughing, it's not because he's acting out BOB's will, it's because BOB has freed him from the strict moral code that he has lived his whole life by, and all that things that Dale has repressed his whole life just completely take him over. Maybe even with BOB destroying his moral center he is absolved of his guilt for Caroline's death, sending him into a state of delirious joy.

This is just my reading of BOB though.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by dronerstone »

Cappy wrote:Yeah, I'm of the opinion that it's always Leland as well. The movie is just more explicit about this than the tv show is.

BOB is a real force however. My reading of BOB is of sort of a 'devil-on-the-shoulder' trope that pushes and compels weak persons to do things, perhaps things they want to do but can't because of their morality/empathy/basic human decency. The fact that angels hover at the scene of Laura's murder play to this idea as well, as she has a choice of listening to the BOB on her shoulder or the angel.

In the final scene, when Cooper breaks down laughing, it's not because he's acting out BOB's will, it's because BOB has freed him from the strict moral code that he has lived his whole life by, and all that things that Dale has repressed his whole life just completely take him over. Maybe even with BOB destroying his moral center he is absolved of his guilt for Caroline's death, sending him into a state of delirious joy.

This is just my reading of BOB though.
+1 on that. Exactly.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Agent Sam Stanley »

It's one way to look at it. I don't think there's a "right" or "wrong" when it comes to Lynch's work, but I can't see Leland as someone who secretly wanted to rape his daughter since she was 12, and BOB was mainly just a whisper on his ear saying "yeah do it, be free". In some cases it could be, like Jacques' murder or even Teresa's, but not when it comes to Laura's corruption or Laura and Maddy's murders.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Snailhead »

Cappy wrote:Yeah, I'm of the opinion that it's always Leland as well. The movie is just more explicit about this than the tv show is.

BOB is a real force however. My reading of BOB is of sort of a 'devil-on-the-shoulder' trope that pushes and compels weak persons to do things, perhaps things they want to do but can't because of their morality/empathy/basic human decency. The fact that angels hover at the scene of Laura's murder play to this idea as well, as she has a choice of listening to the BOB on her shoulder or the angel.

In the final scene, when Cooper breaks down laughing, it's not because he's acting out BOB's will, it's because BOB has freed him from the strict moral code that he has lived his whole life by, and all that things that Dale has repressed his whole life just completely take him over. Maybe even with BOB destroying his moral center he is absolved of his guilt for Caroline's death, sending him into a state of delirious joy.

This is just my reading of BOB though.
That's a great take on the situation, I'm into that!
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asmahan
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by asmahan »

I don't think it's supposed to be cut-and-dry. Lynch may well have minimized the blackmail plot to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it throwaway line because he wanted to keep the motive for the murder ambiguous. After all, Leland says "Who am I?" to which Teresa says she doesn't know .
However, I don't think that BOB was looking to make Teresa his next host as he was with Laura.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Driftwood »

tmurry wrote:I approach Twin Peaks primarily as a David Lynch phenomenon, secondarily as another set of concerns related to Mark Frost, and finally as a TV show that many people worked on. This influences my answers to these kinds of questions. You presume that when he is "with Bob" that he is not 100% acting of his own volition. I think this is incorrect.

From my perspective, Leland did all those things (every single thing) himself - Bob is an epiphenomenon in terms of the choices made. But that doesn't mean Bob does not exist... the metaphor of the violent, rapacious aspect of the masculine given form is completely real - realer than real. From a Frost angle this is because there is a nexus of the paranormal that makes this place special and manifests things, but then Frost and the rest of the TV people seem to favor Bob as a controlling entity anyway. From the Lynch end, it doesn't matter if you "explain" why people see Bob - Leland acts out a pattern that makes complete sense as a victim of abuse that becomes an abuser, and sensitive souls see his "true face" as a collective-and-individual psychological phenomenon. Bob is just the part of Leland that maps to an archetype in the collective unconscious and those who see him (the gifted and the damned) may try to separate the monster from the man. Laura sees the presence of Bob because she is damned. The literal and the metaphorical are both entirely true, and cohere even when you ignore the other.

So Leland killed Theresa because Leland did everything and, when you pull back, the movie was the pure Lynch version and he clearly believed Leland did all of these things on the "real world" level just as "Bob" also did all of these things on the archetypal level. Quantum superposition.
nice. I'm in 100 percent agreement. I love this about lynch movies, a dream can be just as real and substantial as the "real world," a character can be a symbol representing some concept just as much being a existing person, they can be both these things with contradicting anything, etc.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Agent Sam Stanley »

asmahan wrote: However, I don't think that BOB was looking to make Teresa his next host as he was with Laura.
I don't think so either. That could be BOB pushing Leland to do certain things he wouldn't otherwise (fooling around with hookers and then committing a murder when pressured). But Teresa was wearing the ring and there's been a lot of discussion that the ring protects its wearer from being possessed by BOB. Hopefully S3 will give us some new perspectives on it.
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Cappy
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Cappy »

"Leland's been a good vessel, but he's full of holes"

BOBLeland said that during his 'confession' to Cooper and Truman, and it suggests the process by which BOB gradually eroded Leland's moral core over a long period of time.

I don't think the BOB/Leland relationship is merely just BOB sitting on his shoulder and egging him on to do awful things that he otherwise wouldn't do. Sure, he might not've had an affair with Teresa Banks without BOB's prodding. He might not've killed her in response to her blackmail attempt without BOB's prodding. He might not've killed Jacques Renault without BOB's prodding. One could argue that Leland killed Teresa to protect his image and his family's reputation, and that he killed Jacques to avenge Laura, and that makes logical sense. His actions are still extreme and awful, but BOB exists to give him just enough push to do these things that he wants to do anyway.

But how does that explain Leland raping and murdering his own daughter? I think BOB's influence wouldn't be enough to push Leland to do these things. However, what we think of as Leland is not static, it is a dynamic and changing thing, like any living person. I think BOB was needling away at Leland for a long time. Leland claimed that he met BOB when he was young, so Leland's moral decay has probably been ongoing for most of his life. It probably started with small transgressions. Shotting squirrels with a slingshot, putting firecrackers in mailboxes. By the time he was a young lawyer, he was probably the archetypal 'bad' criminal defense lawyer we see on shows like Law and Order, getting rapists and murderers freed, and intimidating victims on the witness stand. And he worked for Ben Horne, so there's that as well. But each little act put a hole in his personality.

As time went on, he became full of more holes. With each new hole his moral compass became more askew, and the bounds of what were permissible and just shifted just a little. Obviously by the time he began raping his own daughter he was covered in holes, his sense of self halfway gone. The only way he could protect himself from his heinous acts was to disassociate from reality, and lose himself in the manufactured idea of himself as kind of a wholesome TV dad archetype. Surely BOB aided in that process of denial. But Leland's only way to cope with his evil was to create another Leland altogether, one that sang showtunes and practiced Norwegian phrases with his family.

But he kept accumulating holes, and committing progressively worse acts. Teresa was killed not of any genuine blood lust on Leland's part, but her blackmail attempt threaten to expose his entire facade, and would force him to see himself for what he truly was. Killing Teresa was just a way to preserve TV dad Leland, so he could continue to see himself as someone he never really was. But Teresa's murder might have also had the effect of putting a giant hole in him, making it that much harder for him to convince himself and others that he was Mr. Nice Guy.

After Teresa's murder, Leland was such a genuinely terrible excuse for a human being that it wasn't that hard for BOB to nudge Leland and compel him to murder Laura. Why would Leland ever have the thought to kill Laura to begin with though? It's hard to say. She was writing about BOB in her diary, maybe he was nervous she was close to telling her mom or the authorities about him. Or maybe he was crazy with possessive jealousy, the thought of having to share her with James and Bobby drove him nuts. At this point in the narrative Leland is a twisted sociopathic person, and it's hard to gauge his motives.

I do think though, that he killed Jacques not specifically out of a sense of vengeance, regardless of whether he was fully aware that he himself killed Laura or not. I think Leland killed Jacques for roughly the same reason he killed Teresa: he wanted to preserve his image of himself. Leland felt guilt over Laura's death, and killing Jacques, her alleged killer, allowed him to play the role of a caring father, even if he was committing another murder in the process. Killing Jacques helped him to convince himself that he was a good person.

While this is going on, Leland is almost completely filled with holes. He has almost no sense of self anymore, he just becomes this facade of a person who sings and dances like a movie character. He is reduced to being like a character because he is always playing a role, and he is never being a true authentic human being, as some semblance of guilt prevents him from looking at himself and what he has become.

Why Leland kills Maddie, I'm still not sure. But again, by this point there was hardly anything left of Leland's moral center. He drives off the road, dances like a loon, he doesn't even think it odd that Cooper asks him to represent Ben against charges that Ben murdered Laura, his daughter. He had completely given up on making sense of his own self and confronting his own truth, and subsequently, his own existence just becomes a random series of violent acts and old songs. He becomes so full of holes that he can't even maintain his facade of normalcy anymore, and just randomly attacks Maddie in his own home.

I think Leland as a person dissolved over time, each horrible act eroded him just a little bit, and made him capable of committing even worse atrocities as time went on. By the the end there was nothing left, just a big hole.

Naturally, BOB would be looking for a new vessel.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Snailhead »

^ We can't forget the link between the Maddie & Theresa murders - they both physically resemble Laura, and I'd say that definitely has something to do with why they were killed.
Perhaps in Maddie's case, her imminent return to Missoula was a painful reminder of the shame of Leland/BOB's failure to possess Laura, triggering an uncontrollable rage.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by The Jumping Man »

I've always thought of Bob as more parasite than controller. (Mike even describes him as such at one point.) Leland did the things and Bob attached to him to feed on the things he did. That's not to say that every writer and director on the show felt that way, though, which is why other readings are equally valid. But I agree that in Fire Walk with Me, it's pretty clear Leland is responsible for his own actions.
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What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by Agent Sam Stanley »

The Jumping Man wrote:But I agree that in Fire Walk with Me, it's pretty clear Leland is responsible for his own actions.
I disagree, I think this is left ambiguous, especially in the film.
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Re: What is the general take on 'Who killed Teresa'?

Post by laughingpinecone »

Lynch calls it a movie about incest (certainly in the OOC section of BtW, possibly elsewhere), so there's that.
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