Thanks for sharing the comic! I agree that Twin Peaks' legacy of dealing with sexual abuse is tangled. The show broaches it, then flubs it, and then the film redeems it. Not only does the emphasis return to Leland as a perpetrator rather than a victim, but Laura's death is no longer presented as essentially a suicide to escape the cycle of abuse as it is on the show, and as it was in the script (unfortunately, most people seem to interpret this anyway in the film).BlackMoonLilith wrote:So yeah, personally, the idea that Leland was molested as a child is one of my least favorite aspects of it and IMO dates the show pretty clearly. Luckily, it is pretty ambiguous and never outright connected to Leland's own sexual abuse of his daughter.
It's so odd to me that Lynch and Frost agreed to make Leland the killer/abuser and then didn't think it mattered, to the point of not wanting to reveal it at all. But they must have known on some level that it mattered very much. And then when it is revealed, quickly explaining it away. But nobody (pardon the expression) held a gun to their head and said, "You must make this a tale of incest." They chose to go there at the same time they chose to run away from it. So strange.
I suppose in a sense they discovered it, following the logic of "the girl with dark secrets" that was the initial idea. And both had dealt with abuse as subject matter before, Lynch obviously in all of his films and Frost on several early Hill Street Blues (one of the shots even looks like Maddy in the body bag). Frost says they didn't know the killer in the pilot but soon after so in a way I guess the creative process was the one holding the gun to their heads.
While your points about abuse victims not by any means being destined to become abusers is well-taken, this aspect of the story does not trouble me perhaps because I've seen stats suggesting that while most victims don't abuse, most abusers were once victims (though the comic you linked to suggested this is not the case either, it is at least true that a disproportionate, if not majority, number of abusers were abused themselves).
And admittedly my view is colored by the fact that the real-life family sexual abuse I am most aware of was perpetrated by someone who was abused as a child, and shared this fact with very few people. That's one reason FWWM rings really true to me because in a sense Leland's abuse results from his denial as much as his denial results from abuse. If there's a cycle in the film, it is a cycle of silence, of living within a web of "secrets" kept even from oneself.
I am ok with finding out that Leland was abused himself, but what's important to me is that he still be held responsible for his own decisions. The show does not do this, going so far as to even suggest that they weren't his decisions (which makes the inclusion of an incest theme completely pointless). The film does, perhaps still too ambiguously, but much more clearly than the series.
What I am curious about is how the 2016 series will explore the topic, if at all (that is, if there even is a 2016 series!). The Laura investigation has long been solved. Leland is dead. Yet Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise are coming back and all of Lynch's efforts within this universe except episodes 2 & 29 have the slow revelation of Laura's abuse at their center (and even 2 and 29 touch on it - I sometimes wonder if the accident of Ray Wise bleeding on the picture didn't seal the deal as far as his character was concerned).
Even Frost, who seemed to want to get the mystery over with back in 1990, has spoken of the importance of the abuse theme and said he only realized it after the fact.
