Jude Inquires

So, Twin Peaks is founded on the idea of taking a weekly serialized murder mystery and applying soap opera logic to it. The reason is because victims were treated as disposable and Frost/Lynch wanted to highlight Laura Palmer as more than just a murder victim. She had a rich inner life and eventually we get to see it in Fire Walk With Me.

That movie displays her as an entity being used above all else. Pulled in different directions by people who want to place her in a box. FWWM uses angel and devil iconography for this as if every social link she has in the town earns her morality points but at the heart of it you have this woman that EVERYONE is both projecting ideals onto and USING. The show itself is just a continuation of this consumption of Laura as an idea more than a person.

FWWM displays Laura as a victim who uses what little power she has to try and corrupt her best friend, the literal ONLY person in the town who is trying to help her for no reason other than wanting to be a friend.

For more info on Laura trying to corrupt Donna please read this amazing post. My tags include our thoughts on it. The Pink Room sequence remains one of my absolute favorite sequences in any film and I adore how Laura is so convinced that Donna is another user that she ends up pushing her to the point of dragging her into hell herself just to prove that care/affection is ALWAYS conditional. Everyone is always trying to use her to do SOMETHING and until that scene I think Laura just thought Donna wanted to use Laura to feel like a good person/a good friend.

Lowkey I think getting Donna out of that situation is the moment that Laura's soul is "saved", if anything about her fate is even possible to make positive for anything other than the viewing audience...

After all. Laura still dies. Her memory is still used for people to martyr themselves on. No aspect of her soul is truly saved. Even her diary, the personal record of her rich inner world is treated as nothing more than a treasure map for plot navigation. No one (other than perhaps Donna) knew who she was and even after two and a half decades of purgatory, a heroic man simply uses her as a vehicle to Rescue Her™ which does nothing good for anyone.

And that's where I feel Utena may be a better show.

Anthy is also treated consumptively by the world of the show and like Laura has her own rebellious streak of using her limited amounts of power to harm the people around her for any sense of control and because she's been modeled exceptionally terrible behaviors.

But the big difference is that Anthy is an active player in her story and thus we are able to get more direct interaction with how disposable and consumable she is to her world. The first arc displays this with how Utena makes huge assumptions about Anthy based on watching her abused and spending much of her time within a literal birdcage tending roses.

The show, always eager to tell the audience what to look for, reveals this in the climax of the arc that all of the personality traits that Utena claims are Anthy's when she is 'won' by Touga are things that she had projected upon her. The Rose Bride obeys the winner of the duels.

Both Twin Peaks and Utena are dealing with the theme of people projecting onto a victim and denying them agency, care and protection.

Like, I love Utena and she grows through the show but in the first arc she is a blind hero who treats Anthy as nothing more than a damsel. She has NO curiosity of her inner life.

She doesn't learn she has a brother until episode 14. She notices Anthy goes missing every Saturday night but would rather ask Chu-Chu than Anthy herself.

But over the course of the show their intimacy becomes more emotionally entangled. Truth and honesty isn't flowing fully (and never gets the chance to) but it's symbolized in the repeated animation sequence of the heart weapon summoning becoming a mutual and consensual act rather than something that Anthy merely submits to and the ying-yang bed emphasizing they are sleeping together but not physically intimate but emotionally intimate.

Just not enough to confide. That's a step too far. Anthy may not be used and consumed by Utena in the tail end of the show but the bridge is only being built...

Much like Donna and Laura we have a situation where there is an outside party to the sexual abuse but we then have the thing which pushes Utena into the lead for me.

In Twin Peaks, Laura's own despair is what ties her down. The conversation about angels being the thesis statement on how Laura views herself and her situation. She believes that she will continue to fall and fall forever and eventually be consumed by fire. The angels will not do anything to help. The angels have gone away. She's focused her entire ability to escape this abuse upon rescue and no one is coming to rescue her.

In Utena, Anthy is tied down by a controlling abuser who outright controls people's access to Anthy.

To give example - when a person "dies" in the show the academy buries them. No one talks about them ever again. People forget they exist. It's like they never existed.

First Mikage is erased like this. Then Ruka. Then in the final sequence Utena herself.

This is my read but I think the sudden forgetting and refusal to acknowledge a history is what happens when communities are forced into silence on a topic. The information and the person themselves is buried. Whether it be for an unspeakable crime, for shame or... because a person has become persona non-grata and it is a social faux pas to even acknowledge that they EVER existed.

When an abuser wants someone to be cut off from a life/group then that person is NEVER SPOKEN OF AGAIN.

I know from first hand experience. This is how it works.

My read is that Akio had Utena expelled (literally and metaphorically) for the events of the final arc and everyone had to just go along with it and forget. I may be wrong, but I firmly believe that theory. The memory of who Utena was is what helps people break out of Ohtori during the events of the movie. Again, personal read but I don't think Utena is even in the movie. The memory of her is just a literal vehicle for characters to find absolution and agency in their revolving cycle of abusive control that the school depicts.

Which is where I end things with.

Anthy and Laura were both being violently abused by a member of their own family. Someone they couldn't escape from. Someone they were terrified to confide in anyone regarding because they may be rejected, disbelieved or offering power to someone who has displayed willingness to use that power over them.

Both young women were shamed, coerced and scared into remaining trapped in their abusive cycles. Laura through regular reinforcements of fear (think of how Leland reacted to her dirty hands at the dinner table) and Anthy through a web of controlled access and systemic barriers enforced by her abuser.

Both women were coveted by their communities and treated as something to be won, fought over, protected. No one in either show ever gets close to understanding what aspects of their personality are legitimate and what are just facades they put up to cope with their situation and engage with the people surrounding them.

...do either of them even know for themselves? If they take off their masks... is there anything beneath?

For Laura? Long after the town have forgotten her and the world has moved on from her murder (both in show and in reality finding out whodunnit was the only thing that mattered) Dale forces himself on to rescue The One Who Got Away, yanking her out of the past and displacing her entirely until she's not got an identity, a home, a life. She's just saved and no one cares about the person who was saved. She was just a victim and rescuing her (or post-posthumously capturing her killer) was the objective.

For Anthy, though? She saves herself. Because no one can pluck a person from hell. Emotional bonds can become a prison and they are not so easily broken. One does not simply break ties with family or lovers or those you are obligated to. Breaking those bonds takes so much work and that work is a constant thing that begins long before one steps out the door and ends long after the remnants of an old life have been escaped.

Again. Lessons I've learned in reality.

No one can do it for you. God I wish they could but they can't. The person entangled in a web of emotional (and physical) abuse MUST choose to walk through the gates of hell themselves.

I'll always thank Abigail Thorn for that. Her video on emotionally abuse relationships and relaying it to Sartre is what got me to end my marriage.

I ended up watching Utena after the break-up. I buried it deep. Couldn't internalize what the show was trying to say even though I watched it from the safety of our best friend's house where we were temporarily living after the divorce.

Saving yourself is not an act. It's an odyssey. Some lessons take a while to sink in.

It's 5 years later now. I'm ready to watch the show and internalize it and... god damn it is such a better show for it.

Twin Peaks was my favorite TV Show when I related to Laura as an imperfect victim. Someone I could feel a connection in straining against the bonds and not being able to break free, someone who believed that the angels would never come and all that was left was to fall and burn.

Now, upon revisit, I'm starting to like the magical girl sword fighting show more. Because it gives its "victim" agency. It displays their web of abuse in more light than mere despair.

Laura is, was and remains a disposable victim for a murder mystery. The audience was able to see her shine in the movie a movie that was violently rejected by the USA at time of release - though now is a beloved member of the Criterion Collection and legitimately one of the greatest movies ever made.

Her tragedy is used to shame an audience for how it treats consumptive violence in media and maybe inspire more empathy and introspection to help them see every person as a full complex human full of positive and negative elements - more than what was done to them.

Though the movie being rejected says that maybe people didn't learn that lesson.

Anthy does not remain a disposable victim. For so so many reasons she is a fully fleshed character who is gifted the power to make her own decisions and live by her own rule.

Her tragedy is one that speaks to an audience who may understand what it is like to be in (or complicit in) a cycle and inspires them to act. Whether you go for the movie or TV versions of her ending, she leaves. She walks through the door to hell. She'll be okay.

I hope she found Utena again in the wide world. I hope they are together. But they need not be. Because Anthy didn't need to be rescued or saved and a relationship is not a prize. It's something forged between two people who take time to know, care, listen and grow together. Anthy has the tools to grow more relationships now. She'll have to do a lot of healing. A lot of growing. These scars will be lifelong. But she's taken the first step and I'm so fucking proud of her.

Now I'm starting to feel proud of my younger self. For escaping England, for escaping abusive online relationships, for escaping a controlling marriage.

For growing. For not being just the thorns but the flower, too.

Regardless of anything, if Utena becomes my "best show ever" then Fire Walk With Me remains in the contention for best movie.