Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The new Twin Peaks sees David Lynch up to a LOT. Casino business, dark glass boxes with ghost monsters inside, bright green blazers, and more guest stars than one closing credits crawl can possibly handle. What Lynch is ultimately up to is anybody’s guess, but one thing he’s definitely up to is reckoning with the legacy of the original Twin Peaks. It’s there when Shelley and James show up at the Bang Bang Club, when Lucy and Andy’s weird Brando-obsessed kid shows up, and it’s there when we met the character of Becky Burnett, played by Amanda Seyfried.
Becky is Shelley’s daughter, and we first see her making a delivery to her mom, who’s still a waitress at Norma’s diner. Becky is beautiful and friendly, but as Norma can plainly see even from across the diner, she’s also troubled. We see her later with her husband, Steven (Caleb Landry Jones); they’re trying to make ends meet, and they’re both into cocaine. One particular shot, which appeared to accompany every article written about Twin Peaks in the last week, sees Becky tossing her head back, high on coke, her face halfway washed out in sunlight. It’s a classic David Lynch shot, reminiscent of other Lynch leading ladies (Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr.; Laura Dern in Inland Empire), putting Becky decidedly in the pantheon of troubled women in Lynch productions. And in the town of Twin Peaks, that means it ties her closely to the legacy of Lynch’s greatest troubled woman of them all: Laura Palmer.
It’s more than just one bathed-in-sunlight shot that ties Becky to Laura, however. Everything about Becky seems to call back to Laura. The bread delivery at the diner recalls Laura’s job delivering food for Meals on Wheels. The bad boyfriend/husband comparisons are pretty apparent. And you don’t have to be a student of Poirot in order to make the connection from Becky’s cocaine habit to Laura’s cocaine habit.
It’s safe to say that fans and critics noticed: Indiewire said Becky’s pose in the car “carries echoes of that of a homecoming queen, who had been wrapped in plastic.” Entertainment Weekly wondered whether Becky might be a target for Red Room creeps. And the Hollywood Reporterput it right up on front street , asking “Is Becky Burnett the New Laura Palmer?”
So IS Becky the new Laura? In a word … probably. Certainly Becky is being visually and narratively twinned with Laura for a reason. And remember that the last time we got a Laura Palmer lookalike, she got murdered in the exact same way that Laura did. This show isn’t afraid to draw really stark parallels. But while we await Becky’s fate on the show, it deserves to be mentioned that this won’t be the first time that Amanda Seyfried plays a “New Laura Palmer.” She did so all the way back in 2004 on a little show called Veronica Mars.
The central gambit of Veronica Mars was that it was about an eponymous high-school girl (played by Kristen Bell), formerly popular but now outcast, trying to unravel the mystery of who murdered her best friend, Lilly Kane, played in flashbacks by Amanda Seyfried. While the fictional town of Neptune, CA, wasn’t the idyllic small-town-with-secrets that Twin Peaks was, the socially and economically stratified town played a big part in Lilly’s fate. Like Laura Palmer, she was a beautiful and popular high-school blonde who seemingly had it all, but the more Veronica digs into the case, the more she finds out about Lilly that she never knew.
Moreso than the particulars of her storyline, though, Lilly Kane is at her most Laura Palmer-esque in her function within the story. Namely she’s the engine that drives the entire first season, with a carnival of local intrigue swirling around her. Veronica’s flashbacks to her friendship with Lilly are so crucial to giving Veronica Mars such a strong center in its initial year. It’s in this arena where Seyfried doesn’t get enough credit. Veronica Mars launched the career of Kristen Bell, and Seyfried’s own career was already rocketing upwards after Mean Girls anyway, but Seyfried was basically the secret weapon of Veronica Mars. There is a LOT of narrative fuss made about Lilly, and if the actress playing her wasn’t able to pull it off, the mystery would seem pretty hollow. But in those flashbacks, Lilly is every bit the firecracker that people say she is, and as a result, the audience is as rabid as Veronica to find out who killed her.
Despite how big Kristen Bell’s career got later on, Veronica Mars remains a decidedly cult show. If nothing else, Amanda Seyfried’s buzzy new Twin Peaks appearance should drive people to check out the other show where she plays a troubled blonde reincarnation of David Lynch’s most celebrated doomed girl. And if you’re already a Veronica Mars partisan? No time like the present for a re-watch.
