Leland Palmer Retracts His Confession

Abstract

This chapter reads Twin Peaks as a sustained meditation on demonic possession, culpability, and the failure of liberal narrative forms to contain sexual violence. Focusing on Leland Palmer’s deathbed confession and its retraction across the series, the chapter argues that possession in Twin Peaks functions not to exculpate the perpetrator but to expose the incoherence of agency under conditions of trauma. By tracking the displacement of the whodunnit (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”) into recursive structures of repetition, doubling, and genre breakdown, the chapter shows how Lynch and Frost abandon forensic closure in favor of a metaphysics of ongoing harm. The analysis extends to Twin Peaks: The Return and to survival-horror video games set in the Pacific Northwest, where whiteness, primitivism, and control reappear as iterable technologies. Demonology here names a refusal of sovereign judgment in favor of ethical uncertainty.