Spoiler warning: this article contains explicit references to Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and The Return.
In Twin Peaks, pain never remains an entirely private experience. It takes on a form, circulates through places and people, and—most disturbingly—becomes nourishment.
The series even gives it a name: Garmonbozia.
In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, it is identified through a phrase as simple as it is horrifying: pain and sorrow. Yet Garmonbozia is more than a metaphor for evil. It behaves like a substance, a commodity, and a kind of food. The entities produce it, claim it, and consume it. Human suffering becomes part of an invisible economy.
But who is truly feeding on Laura Palmer’s pain?
The beings connected to the Lodge certainly are. BOB, the Man from Another Place, and the other presences inhabit a world in which trauma generates energy. Yet Twin Peaks never allows the viewer to observe this mechanism while remaining entirely outside it.
Behind the hunger of the entities, we begin to recognise another hunger:
our own.
When Pain Becomes Food
The first image we see of Laura Palmer is her dead body wrapped in plastic.
Before we hear her voice, know her thoughts, understand her fears, or encounter her desires, we see her body transformed into an image. Her death sets the town, the investigation, and the television series itself in motion.
From that moment on, Laura’s pain generates an endless supply of narrative.
Every secret uncovered opens another story. Every testimony adds another face to the dead girl. Every episode promises to bring us closer to the truth. Her suffering becomes the engine that keeps the entire mechanism running.
In this sense, Laura produces Garmonbozia not only for the entities that torment her, but also for the television structure that displays her.
Her tragedy produces suspense, ratings, conversation, theories, and the desire to keep watching. Her pain is divided into episodes, interrupted at precisely the right moment, and returned to the audience as a weekly appointment.
Garmonbozia therefore also raises a question about spectacle:
What happens when one person’s suffering becomes another person’s narrative pleasure?
BOB and the Viewer Are Not the Same
To suggest that the viewer participates in this circuit does not mean that the viewer is morally equivalent to BOB.
BOB inflicts suffering. The viewer watches a fictional representation of it. The distinction is obvious and essential.
Yet Lynch and Frost construct a subtler and more disturbing resemblance: both need the story to continue.
BOB needs trauma to repeat itself. Serial television needs the narrative to generate another episode. The viewer needs to know what happens next.
These are different desires, but they meet at the same point: Laura cannot yet be allowed to rest.
As long as there is another secret to uncover, another clue to interpret, or another buried image to bring back into view, Laura’s body and suffering continue to be reactivated.
The series does not accuse us merely for being interested. Without interest, there could be no storytelling, empathy, or remembrance. But it does ask us to recognise that curiosity is not always innocent.
We may sincerely wish to understand another person’s pain while simultaneously turning it into something we consume.
Laura’s Photograph
One of the most powerful images in Twin Peaks is Laura Palmer’s school portrait.
Laura smiles. She appears young, radiant, and untouched. The image returns repeatedly until it begins to resemble a religious icon.
But the photograph is not Laura.
It is a perfect, repeatable, instantly recognisable surface. The town can mourn it, idealise it, and claim it. The audience can do the same.
The photograph allows Laura to remain still. She cannot speak, contradict anyone, or make a decision. She becomes an ideal surface onto which the mystery can be projected.
Fire Walk with Me shatters that stillness.
The film restores Laura’s body, voice, and painfully concrete subjectivity. We see her moving through a life that the original series had largely reconstructed through the memories and testimonies of others.
She is no longer merely the girl in the photograph. She is a person trapped among abuse, addiction, desire, fear, lucidity, and despair.
For many viewers, the film was initially difficult to accept partly for this reason. The seductive question—who killed Laura Palmer?—gave way to the unbearable experience of being Laura Palmer.
The mystery became trauma.
Garmonbozia stopped being an abstract or esoteric concept and acquired a human face.
Television Is Still Hungry
Traditional television is built upon repetition.
Every week, the viewer returns. The opening credits begin again. The characters reappear. Suffering is suspended and resumed. The end of one episode must create hunger for the next.
Twin Peaks uses this mechanism perfectly while simultaneously making it visible.
The series offers clues and then withdraws them. It promises answers and postpones them. It introduces new mysteries just as we begin to believe that we have understood the previous ones.
The audience is kept in a state of appetite.
The word is not accidental. Garmonbozia makes literal something already embedded in the language of television. We devour a series, consume content, and wait to be fed with new stories.
Within Twin Peaks, that metaphor becomes obscene. What is being consumed is not an abstract piece of content, but the suffering of a young woman.
The series seems to ask whether it is possible to watch without devouring.
Trauma as Serial Form
Trauma does not move in a straight line.
It returns. It repeats. It reshapes the present. It collapses past and future into one another. It can remain silent for years and then suddenly reappear through an image, a sound, or a phrase.
The structure of Twin Peaks closely resembles this movement.
In The Return, the past is never truly past. Laura continues to fall, scream, disappear, and reappear. Cooper attempts to intervene retroactively, as though it were possible to enter the trauma and alter its point of origin.
His desire is understandable: prevent the murder, save Laura, erase the suffering.
But does erasing the event truly free the victim?
When Cooper leads Laura away from the place of her death, the series appears, for a moment, to rewrite its own origin. The body wrapped in plastic disappears. The story we knew is deprived of its founding image.
And yet Laura disappears again.
Trauma cannot be corrected like a mistake in a narrative.
Suffering cannot simply be removed by changing the plot, because it has already transformed the world, the characters, and the viewer. The hunger for a reparative conclusion may therefore become another form of possession.
Cooper wants to save Laura, but he also wants that salvation to assume a form he can understand. He wants a home, a return, and a completed mission.
The series denies him that satisfaction.
“What Year Is This?”
The final episode of The Return brings Cooper and Carrie Page to the Palmer house.
The scene appears to prepare us for recognition. We have returned to the central location of the trauma. We wait for a sign, a revelation, perhaps even a restoration.
But the house no longer belongs to the family we remember.
The name Cooper calls out does not produce the expected response. Time is uncertain. Laura’s identity is unstable. Reality itself seems to have lost its address.
Cooper asks:
What year is this?
Then comes the scream.
That scream cuts through every attempt at explanation. It does not resolve the mystery, restore the chronology, or give the audience the reassurance of having finally understood.
It is pain refusing to become an answer.
The lights in the house go out. The screen returns to darkness. The hunger remains unsatisfied.
Perhaps this is the series’ most radical ethical gesture: its refusal to serve us one final portion of Garmonbozia in the form of a definitive solution.
Watching Without Consuming
We cannot watch Twin Peaks from a position of complete innocence. The series exists because we want to see it, and it continues to live because we continue to interpret it.
The question, then, is not whether we should stop taking pleasure in mystery.
It is whether we can distinguish attention from consumption.
To consume is to demand that suffering continually produce new entertainment. It is to reduce Laura to a secret, a theory, or a narrative object.
To pay attention is to accept that part of her experience must remain irreducible. It means recognising that the victim does not belong to the investigator, the town, the creators, or the audience.
Garmonbozia is the food of the entities, but it is also a mirror held up to a culture that transforms every form of suffering into an image, a story, and a spectacle.
Twin Peaks asks us to examine that mechanism while we are still inside it.
It does not forbid us from approaching pain.
It asks us to consider what we are seeking when we do.
Perhaps the viewer’s deepest hunger is not simply to know the truth.
It is to extract from suffering a form that can be watched, understood, and finally left behind.
Laura Palmer, however, continues to return.
Not to feed us again.
But to remind us that not everything shown on a screen belongs to us.