SOURCE: Birns, Nicholas. “Telling Inside from Outside, or, Who Really Killed Laura Palmer.” Literature Film Quarterly 21, no. 4 (October 1993): 277-86.

In the following essay, Birns asserts that the television series Twin Peaks combines postmodern elements of self-referentiality with Romantic elements of heightened emotional affect.

The question of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” received its determinate answer on November 10, 1990. But this does not mean that the question has been fully decided. Indeed, much of the force and interest of the mystery in the first place proceeded from the inherently undecidable fashion in which the series posed the question.

There was a primary, very dramatic ambiguity in the way the question was overtly answered. In the classic style of the romantic doppelgänger, Laura's killer, although utilizing the form of Leland Palmer, seemed to in fact have had an entirely separate identity, the psychotic “BOB.”¹ The show maintained interest in what is...