Red curtains, milk cartons, and the girls we can’t let die
On Women haunting the Narrative Across Pop Culture, Laura Palmer as the blueprint, and the Enigmatic Dead Girl archetype in Media.
I recently rewatched Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me with three of my friends who had never seen it. As a result I once again fell into my Twin Peaks obsession which I don't think I'll ever leave. I'm constantly thinking about the red curtains and chevron floors, endlessly large forests, drinking hot coffee in diner booths, and of course, Laura Palmer. My patron saint, I carry a picture of her in the back of my phone case so she is always with me.
If you are unfamiliar with Twin Peaks Laura Palmer, homecoming queen and seemingly perfect girl next door, unexpectedly turns up, dead. Her death leads to an FBI investigation that uncovers the double life she was living and reveals that the town of Twin Peaks was not as innocent as it appeared on the outside. Created by the king of surrealism, David Lynch, Twin Peaks laid the foundation for the modern archetype of the “Enigmatic Dead Girl” in media. She’s beautiful, unknowable, and laden with secrets only fully uncovered after her death. She’s captivating; everyone wants her or wants to be her, and she somehow becomes even more present in death.
Laura Palmer always was the centerpiece of the show, despite not being physically present in the narrative, but her memory, and everything about her influenced the story throughout its entire run. Laura is everywhere, Laura is everywhere, we share her fear, we share her panic. She's entirely inescapable. She’s a ghost, lingering in all characters' actions, reminding everyone that she’s the center of every event.
Laura Palmer is far from the first girl on television whose death launches a story into motion. Countless films and TV shows open with a girl’s murder, but how many of them truly take the time to explore who she was? How many give her complexity—flaws, dreams, inner conflicts? Laura is the archetype, the model I see as the updated version of the "Hot Dead Girl"—a trope I’m referring to as the Enigmatic Dead Girl.
In Twin Peaks and its 1992 prequel film Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch reimagines Laura Palmer. He starts with the image we first see—a golden-haired, popular girl, discovered lifeless and wrapped in plastic in the pilot’s opening moments—and transforms her into a layered, tormented character. She becomes someone grappling with addiction, haunted by literal and metaphorical demons, and ultimately a young woman who exhibits control over her choices despite her suffering. Before Laura, the dead girl’s function in storytelling was simple: she needed only to be lovely and lifeless. That was it. Her identity didn’t matter. She was a tool to move the plot, her individuality irrelevant. Any girl could have played that part because her death was what mattered—not her life. But Laura marked a shift. With her, the dead girl became more than a symbol; she became a person whose death opened the door to her story. The Enigmatic Dead Girl still dies, but now her death is the entry point to understanding her, not the end of her.
One of the most striking things about Twin Peaks is how thoroughly Laura Palmer saturates the show. She’s not just the victim—she’s a constant presence, lingering in every storyline. Even after Agent Dale Cooper, sent by the FBI to investigate her murder, discovers who killed her and the mystery is “solved,” the story can’t let her go. Everything collapses back onto her. That’s because Lynch never intended for the mystery to be tied up neatly. Solving Laura’s murder wasn’t supposed to happen—network demands forced Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost to reveal her killer early in the second season. Despite that premature resolution, the show remains forever tethered to Laura. Her death leaves a permanent mark on Twin Peaks, turning it into a town trapped in memory, clinging to the idealized vision of the life she led before her tragic end.
Ethel Cain
I think Ethel Cain stands out as one of the most inventive approaches to the idea of haunting a narrative—especially because she doesn’t follow a conventional path. Her album Preacher’s Daughter revolves around the character of Ethel Cain, a young woman raised in a strict Southern Baptist home. She eventually runs away, crosses the country, faces relentless hardship, and ultimately meets a violent end—murdered and consumed (yes, it’s as grim as it sounds). I’m a huge fan of concept albums, and Preacher’s Daughter is one of the most intricate and thoughtfully constructed I’ve encountered. As the story unfolds, we see Ethel Cain wrestling with trauma, strained family ties, and the lingering effects of abuse by men throughout her life. What she longs for is simple: love, affirmation, and safety. She’s not some identityless victim; her story is deeply personal, a heartbreaking tale of a girl searching for trust and a way out of her painful past.
At first, Ethel Cain doesn’t seem to haunt her own story in the overt way Laura Palmer does in Twin Peaks. Her presence is more quietly woven through the songs. But as you listen, you’re constantly reminded of her fate. Take “Thoroughfare”—it’s the track that resonates most with me. In it, Ethel appears to have found peace, a sense of freedom, even happiness. It feels like a moment of light in an otherwise dark narrative. But it’s an illusion. That car she’s in is actually taking her to her death. It’s the eye of the storm, a false calm. Preacher’s Daughter stays with you—it’s a sorrowful, poetic warning cloaked in beauty. In the final track, “Strangers,” Ethel Cain includes this heartbreaking lyric:
When my mother sees me on the side
Of a milk carton in Winn-Dixie's dairy aisle
She’ll cry and wait up for me
Her mother—left behind—is forever stuck in that grief, hoping for a daughter who will never return. She’ll never know the full horror of what happened. Ethel Cain's story is a different kind of ghost story. Instead of overtly haunting the narrative, it slowly sinks in, piece by piece, through a character crafted with haunting precision and care.
The Virgin Suicides
Another girl I can’t let go of—one who lives permanently in a pastel haze somewhere between dream and memory—is Lux Lisbon. Like Laura Palmer, Lux is more than just a girl who dies. She becomes something else entirely: a ghost that doesn’t just haunt the narrative but defines it. In Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon sisters aren’t simply remembered—they’re mythologized, flattened, projected onto, and ultimately consumed. The boys who narrate the film remember the Lisbon girls not as people, but as shimmering, half-formed ideals. They don’t know them, but that doesn’t stop them from worshipping their image. Sound familiar?
Lux, in particular, feels like a direct ancestor of Laura Palmer. Both girls are trapped under suffocating expectations of perfection and purity. Both are surrounded by adults who refuse to see them for who they are. And both are slowly erased until all that's left is a story told by others. In The Virgin Suicides, the boys recount every fragment of Lux’s life like religious relics—scraps of diary entries, cigarette butts, her record collection—as if they’re trying to piece together a girl they never truly understood. They’re not mourning her, exactly. They’re possessing her.
One scene from the film won’t leave my mind. It’s near the end, when the girls—desperate, isolated, suffocating under the control of their parents—reach out to the neighborhood boys with a playlist of melancholy songs. It’s a quiet cry for help. A coded transmission of suffering. But instead of hearing them, the boys turn it into fantasy. They think they’re being invited into a romantic adventure, not realizing they’re stepping into a requiem. The Lisbon girls feel spectral even before they die—lifeless in the way that girls often become when they’re no longer granted the right to grow up. Lux’s brief moments of freedom—like dancing at prom or sneaking out to the rooftop—become flashes of what could’ve been. Fleeting glimpses of a life she was never allowed to fully inhabit.
Even her name—Lux, from the Latin for “light”—feels like a cruel irony. She's the brightest, the most vibrant, the most alive, and yet she’s doomed from the start. We only see the real Lux in rare moments: when she’s laughing, kissing, spinning in her dress, free. That’s the part that hurts the most. Like Ethel Cain in Preacher’s Daughter, Lux is reaching for something simple—joy, safety, escape—but the narrative never lets her have it for long. Her light is always dimmed, commodified, remembered more than it was ever seen.
My Issue’s With It
Where I struggle with this archetype is the commodification of death, and even the ownership of the “Enegmatic Dead Girl”. Laura was never her own to own - everyone wanted a piece of her. Other people only got something out of her death in the show, and now in real life. With people across platforms whether that be tiktok to pintrest posting things along the lines of “I couldve saved Laura Palmer” or “rip laura palmer i would have done tons of coke with you and kept you alive forever”. This takes away all autonomy making Laura feel nothing more than an object for someone elses fantasy.
Death holds a strange allure, and the figure of the victim becomes an easy canvas for projection. Audiences, even in their empathy, often transform it into something symbolic—an ideal, an icon, a beautiful kind of sorrow. Laura Palmer’s story has often been dulled, misunderstood, or consumed as aesthetic, her suffering repurposed for tragic imagery.
Ethel Cain follows in this lineage, though her haunting is more subtle. In Preacher’s Daughter, she crafts a character whose doom is inevitable, but never flashy. Like Laura, Ethel is mourned in advance—her presence lingers over the music like a ghost. Her narrative invites projection too: she becomes a symbol of loss, longing, and girlhood marred by violence. But beneath the mythology, there’s still a raw, intimate story about a young woman trying to survive the weight of her past and find something like peace.
And yet, the archetypal shape of the “enigmatic dead girl’s” downfall makes her endlessly relatable—whether to survivors of abuse or to disillusioned teens assembling digital altars out of mood boards and lyrics. Both Laura and Ethel blur the line between character and symbol, real girl and tragic archetype. They haunt not just the stories they're in, but the people who carry those stories forward. 30 years later Laura Palmer still haunts pop culture, and she isn't going anywhere.