[page 179] Abstract: In Twin Peaks: The Return, places and characters exist in liminal spaces. The mother, Sarah Palmer, and the daughter, Laura Palmer, are no longer the same entities they were in the original series of Twin Peaks. Both characters have crossed thresholds involving a radical transformation. The in-between, transitional spaces of liminality are important, but so are the human reactions to liminal spaces because they can show how people are shaped by agency and thought and experience in the liminal. Sarah and Laura are shaped by the liminal and changed by crossing the threshold, an ambiguous process that can cause disorientation for the viewer because the cultural illusion of stability dissolves away. However, this transformation shows how David Lynch uses this instability to reveal that which has been hidden—the powerful bond and inescapable trauma between mother and daughter—allowing an experience of transcendence.
Keywords: Laura Palmer, Sarah Palmer, liminality, threshold, trauma, transcendence, Hinduism, illusion of the marketplace
Liminality, a term with its origins in the study of anthropology and made popular by the folklorist Arnold van Gennep and the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, involves the ambiguity one experiences during a rite of passage from one status to another through the process of ritual. The idea of liminality originally had its roots in folklore and anthropological study, but the concept evolved to include other areas of exploration, including literature, film, and television. Human reactions to liminality and liminal spaces are important because they can tell us how people are shaped by agency and thought and experience in the liminal. In film, characters can be shaped by the liminal, and the audience witnesses how the characters are shaped by this experience. The filmmaker David Lynch in particular explores the ambiguity of liminality in his works. For Lynch, the liminal space and thresholds serve as a rite of passage away from the “marketplace,” a cultural illusion of [page 180] stability, into an experience of transcendence. Lynch invokes both his knowledge of quantum physics and Hinduism to demonstrate how matter and myth transform in liminal spaces. For women in particular, the liminal experience is about existing outside of societal norms and transcending the rite of passage through radical transformation. In Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) and Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) enter the threshold and emerge outside the boundaries of conventional society. They are changed but do not return in the conventional sense. Laura and Sarah each undergo a radical transformation as a result of their experiences. The liminality of the Palmer home, the liminality of mothers and daughters, and the liminality of Sarah demonstrate how Lynch utilizes the ambiguity of the threshold experience that ultimately results in a positive radical trans-formation for the traumatized mother and daughter because it releases them, and the viewers, from the illusion of the “marketplace” of “reality.”
Liminality as Ritual and Threshold
The study of liminality is a study of ritual and a study of threshold. In his 1960 work Rites of Passage, van Gennep explained how liminality functions as “ceremonial patterns which accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another” (11). In “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” Turner expands upon van Gennep’s argument by exploring the rites of transition. During the liminal phase of a rite of passage, participants are often rendered symbolically invisible, forbidden to interact with non-participants. They become “not yet classified” and are symbolized by their cultures as embryos or newborns (236). Because the participants in the threshold argument are not their usual socialized selves, they become in some ways deified or otherworldly. After the ritual, they become imbued with “gnosis” or “arcane knowledge” (239). In discussing this ritual, Adam Engel argues that the “passage through the ritualized threshold, whether part of a coming-of-[page 181]age ritual or a graduation, is a point of no return. Participants have been permanently altered, either in their own eyes or in the eyes of their culture. After temporary dissolution, those who undergo threshold rituals return not to their old selves but to new ones—albeit embedded within the same society” (2). In this context, the threshold ritual can be seen as a ritual of transformation of self, although the self does not necessarily transcend society but returns to it.
However, scholars have challenged Turner’s and others’ concepts of liminality by critiquing the limitations of the threshold theory through a feminist lens. Jan Berry argues that rituals can challenge thresholds that are often presented through a patriarchal lens by introducing new symbolic meaning (278-279). Berry claims that there are some stories that resist telling. She mentions how Heather Walton “argues that some stories cannot be told without domesticating the pain and the horror of the experience, and that new ways of speaking need to be found” (287). Caroline Walker Bynum challenges Turner’s concept because “liminality itself—as fully elaborated by Turner—may be less a universal moment of meaning needed by human beings as they move through social dramas than an escape for those who bear the burdens and reap the benefits of a high place in the social structure” (34). For women and marginalized people, Turner’s concept of liminality is not only not universal; many people don’t have the ability to improve their status by withdrawing. Berry argues that “women’s ritualizing of the liminal phase will look very differently from that of men” (276). Citing Berry, Engel argues that women’s threshold rituals are “concerned not with an orderly questioning of and recommitment to social norms, but with a performance outside of those boundaries” (4). Engel explains that “to enter liminal territory is not necessarily to be a consciousness divorced from a body. Rather, it is to abandon one’s conventional limits—conventional in the sense of conforming to an established, rational collection of social rules and assumptions dictated by one's culture—and open oneself to radical transformation” (4). Therefore, women perform outside [page 182] of the social norms of boundaries, and in doing so, forego the conventional limits of social norms. This process can lead to a radical transformation of self.
In film and television, liminal spaces can serve as a threshold, a transition between one world and another as well as a psychological transition within a character who is in a liminal headspace. Martha Nochimson describes a significant departure from Lynch’s earlier work in his later work, including the way that he explores the threshold experience, a departure beginning with Lost Highway in 1997. Nochimson explains,
the Lynchian threshold experience is a key departure point for understanding the arc of action and meaning in each of Lynch’s films, from Lost Highway to Inland Empire [2006]. . . . In Lynch’s earlier works, some of these thresholds occur in dreams, but, from Lynch’s earliest days as a filmmaker, his most provocative and evolved depictions of threshold experiences are emphatically not dreams or fantasies as we commonly understand them. (2)
Nochimson also describes a conversation with Lynch which confirmed for her how Lynch’s films were going in a new direction:
the climactic moment came on March 18, 2010, when Lynch and I spent three hours talking in his compound in the Hollywood Hills. In a long, frank, unguarded conversation, Lynch told me about his vision of the physical world as an uncertain place that masks important universal realities, enunciated for him not by Carl Jung, but by the Holy Vedas of the Hindu religion. (x)
It was the Holy Vedas as well as quantum physics that inspired Lynch’s new direction.
Lynch approaches his work through the concept of the “marketplace.” According to Lynch’s spiritual mentor, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the “marketplace” refers to the “level of reality at which illusions of stability are promoted by culture. The ‘marketplace’ expresses the Maharishi’s sense of the inad-[page 183]equacy of everyday transactions to support human happiness” (Nochimson 5). For Lynch, the “marketplace’ refers to the “problematic limits of ordinary domestic and public transactions” (5). Lynch’s characters often begin from a place of danger and uncertainty that is embedded in the seemingly ordinary. The Maharishi views the “marketplace” as rooted in the uncertainty of quantum matter, which is the opposite of the Vedic idea of matter (5). Nochimson argues that the idea of quantum matter and Vedic matter are two ways of understanding the concepts of reality in Lynch’s work. (5). For Lynch, science and myth interact to demonstrate the limits of the illusive “real” world and the power of transcendence through Hindu myth.
The Vedic texts come from Hindu holy texts such as The Upanishads, The Bhagavad-Gita, The Ramayana, and the Yoga Sutras. As Nochimson and John Thorne have pointed out, Lynch and his work have been heavily influenced by the Vedic texts. Thorne explains that the appearance of the Vedic is apparent in Lynch’s 2007 book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, demonstrating their importance to Lynch both philosophically and creatively. Thorne argues that the Vedic texts also influence The Return and explains how in Hindu belief, Vishnu sends ten avatars to Earth during a time of chaos to help humanity during crisis. The tenth avatar, Kalki, descends onto Earth on a white horse to destroy evil and restore order (145).1
One can see the Vedic mythology play out in The Return. On 16 July 1945, the U.S. government detonated the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Lynch recreates the historical event of the Trinity Test in Part 8 of The Return. The nuclear explosion unleashes chaos and a time of crisis in the form of not only a formidable weapon but also the figure of BOB (Frank Silva) in the aftermath of the mushroom blast. Immediately following the destruction, a god-like figure, The Fireman (Carel Struycken), releases a golden orb with the iconic image of Laura Palmer inside. Thorne makes a compelling case for The Fireman as Vishnu and Laura Palmer as the [page 184] tenth avatar who is sent to earth in a golden orb to defeat evil and usher in a golden age (Thorne 146). In Part 8, it is interesting to view how the tensions between quantum matter (in this case, the atomic bomb) and Vedic matter (the god-like orb of Laura) are revealed. The way that these two concepts of matter interact are the key to understanding Lynch’s work.
In many ways, The Return is more evocative of Lynch’s later films Lost Highway and Inland Empire than of the original series (1990-1991) or the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). There is a shift over time in Lynch’s concept of the threshold, which is linked to both the science of physics and the mythology of the Vedic texts. While the threshold experience was often rooted in dreams or fantasy in Lynch’s early work, his later work explores the materiality of the threshold through myth and matter. Nochimson argues that “the disorientation encountered at the threshold can be positive, a prerequisite to liberation from the false marketplace of security” (14). The threshold experience is unnerving and destabilizing, but it is a place of liberation and transcendence from the “reality” of the “marketplace,” which is rooted in illusion.
In The Return, Sarah and Laura Palmer experience this type of transcendence through the threshold and the liminal experience. Again, Berry argues that women and marginalized people will experience the threshold ritual distinctly from Turner’s concept. Women will not have an orderly transition back to societal norms after crossing the threshold and will not necessarily recommit to norms after questioning them. In fact, women will perform outside the boundaries of the “marketplace.” Sarah and Laura enter the threshold and emerge outside the boundaries of conventional society. Their experience is defined by trauma but also by transcendence.
Liminality and the Palmer Home
In The Return, the Palmer home is a site of liminality and a place of threshold experience. It exists within the series as both the Palmer home and the home of Alice Tremond (Mary Reber); it is both of this earth and otherworldly. The home is [page 185] supposed to be a place of safety and security, but Lynch demonstrates the illusion of the “marketplace” by revealing a space of horror, of violence, of chaos, and even of transition. In both the original series and Fire Walk with Me, the hallway ceiling fan between Leland (Ray Wise) and Sarah Palmer’s bedroom and Laura’s bedroom acts as a transitional space of transgression. Leland Palmer/BOB traverses the threshold of Laura’s bedroom to commit a violent sexual act, a transgression of the spiritual boundary between father and daughter. The ceiling fan, once activated, becomes the mechanism for silencing the abuse of Laura. The Palmer home is a site of trauma, but it is also a liminal space: a space of transition.
In The Return, the home is both the home of Sarah and of Alice Tremond, a woman with the same last name as the enigmatic Mrs. Tremond (Frances Bay) who traverses worlds in the original series and in Fire Walk with Me. The Palmer home is caught between the two worlds of Sarah and Alice Tremond, both occupants of the house. And in both of these worlds in The Return, people approach the threshold but never cross: Deputy Chief Tommy “Hawk” Hill (Michael Horse) does not enter Sarah’s home, and when Richard/FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) brings Carrie Page/Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) to the house near the end of the final episode, they do not cross the literal threshold of the home, as it is not Sarah who answers the door but Alice Tremond, who does not invite them in. Shortly afterwards, though, Carrie/Laura hears the voice of Sarah call Laura’s name, and she screams: something has awakened in Carrie/Laura, and something is awakened in the home. There is a spiritual traversing of the threshold even though there is not a literal traversing of the space when Carrie/Laura’s scream ignites a crash of electricity in the Palmer/Tremond house and the lights go out. The audience cannot definitively know what has transpired here, but they witness the lights go out. Something or someone has crossed over. Something has changed, and that change involves a brief connection between mother and daughter. [page 186]
Liminality and Mothers and Daughters
Outside of the Palmer home, Laura and Sarah also exist in liminal spaces. They are, at the same time, both transformed and caught in their respective worlds. As women, they have transgressed outside of society into somewhere or someplace otherworldly. In opposition to Turner’s idea of liminality and threshold ritual, Laura and Sarah are not returning to society to recommit themselves to the norm—far from it. Mother and daughter are no longer the same entities that they were in the original Twin Peaks. In The Return, Laura is, at the same time, a golden orb, a memory, an otherworldly figure in the Red Room, and Carrie Page, a diner waitress from Odessa, Texas. She is dead yet she lives. Sarah is both herself and an otherworldly character—possibly an Experiment or Jowday, a powerful and mythological negative force who haunts the town of Twin Peaks and the world. The mother and daughter look like themselves from the original series but have also transformed into someone, or something, else entirely, a transition that is not simply negative or positive but ambiguous.
The anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen, in analyzing Turner’s concepts of liminality, argues that liminality was not just about identifying why the in-between, transitional spaces are important but also why the human reactions to liminal spaces are important, as they can tell us how people are shaped by agency and thought and experience in the liminal (70, 201). Both mother and daughter exist in liminal spaces, shaped by the horror of what happened in the home, which appears inescapable. Sarah seems to be stuck in a never-ending loop of consuming alcohol and watching violent images on television (as in a scene in Part 13 in which she drinks and watches a loop of a boxing match over and over), consumed by ritual and in her agency of acting violently—she murders a trucker in a bar in Part 14. But the thing that she cannot stamp out in this space—her own psychological headspace of the liminal and the liminal space of the home—is the memory of her dead daughter, a death in which she is arguably complicit. Even though Sarah is a victim (Leland Palmer/BOB drugged her so that he [page 187] could rape Laura), she is also a bystander to her daughter’s abuse in the home. Sarah has agency in allowing Laura to be abused but also in allowing whatever is inside her, inside her. Thorne, however, argues that, despite the incursion of the “frog-moth” into the mouth of, apparently, young Sarah and despite the fact that Sarah murders the trucker (John Paulsen), she is no master villain. Thorne writes, “I choose to believe that Sarah was a good person who harbored a latent kernel of horror which could not bloom until infused with evil” (47). Sarah is a tragic figure and a traumatized person just as Laura was a victim of trauma. In this site of trauma and the home, Sarah and Laura are forever connected.
The different iterations of Laura Palmer throughout the original series, Fire Walk with Me, and The Return reveal different forms of her persona. Simon Baré argues that
each time we see Laura in a different form, we, the audience, and the characters who encounter her are asked to reappraise what each of us know of her. Was she the idealised prom queen, the lover, the friend, the charity worker, the drug dealer, the prostitute, the abuse victim, the frightened and traumatised teenage girl? (Baré)
One could say the same for Sarah. Was she the traumatized mother, the victimized wife, the bystander to her daughter’s abuse, the entity of Jowday/The Experiment, or something else entirely? Baré argues that identification of characters within the liminal space becomes difficult to ascertain, particularly concerning their evolving entities: “everything becomes fluid and changeable, causing us not only to re-frame the real within Twin Peaks but also to recast this entire space as ambiguous” (Baré). It is ambiguity that Lynch is most comfortable with in his work, and this ambiguity certainly plays out in The Return. The reframing of the real involves the audience questioning reality itself, which is what Lynch is doing by showing what the “marketplace” is—an illusion. The experience of liminality and threshold allows this questioning and ambiguity to take place in the reactions of the viewers. [page 188]
Baré explores how Sarah’s entrapment suggests that Twin Peaks is located in a failed liminal reality: “Even if you argue Sarah’s circumstances are a device through which trauma can be examined, it is still obvious that she remains trapped figuratively, if not literally.” While there is much merit to this distinction, and it is in alignment with Turner’s argument, Sarah is a woman who is both a victim of violence and a bystander. Her evolution into what she becomes in The Return inhabits a liminal space and a threshold crossing that is not defined by a return to societal norms. Sarah’s murder of the truck driver who is harassing her and her revelation of the otherworldly face that exists beneath her human one (Part 14) are evidence of transformation. Sarah fights back against an aggressor and reveals that she is someone else. The someone else behind her face is not necessarily demonic, but Sarah has changed. In Part 17, Sarah wails inside her home as she tries to destroy the iconic Homecoming photograph of Laura, but the glass frame is impenetrable. Laura has become someone or something else just as Sarah has. Perhaps Laura is Kalki, as Thorne argues, sent to earth to destroy chaos and usher in a golden age after the age of darkness. Whatever Laura is, Sarah cannot eradicate her memory, which peers eternally, smiling at Sarah through the photograph in the Palmer living room.
Sarah and Laura Palmer are connected in The Return. They are, of course, connected as mother and daughter from the original series and film, but the connection is also through their liminal and threshold experience: when viewers see Carrie/Laura, they are reminded of Laura’s tragic story, and when viewers see Sarah, they are reminded of Sarah’s tragic story as well. These two characters come together in the end in a primal moment of connection. They are in the same place, figuratively if not in reality. The audience sees the character of Laura Palmer/Carrie Page, and the audience hears the voice of Sarah Palmer. This is the moment of true transcendence of the threshold. And the lights go out. [page 189]
The Meta of Liminality: Who is Sarah Palmer to Me?
In Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks, Grace Zabriskie explores the character whom she played in an essay that describes her own conception of who Sarah Palmer is in becoming that character, including her participation in The Return. The essay is, in many senses, a metacommentary on a fictional character imbued with Hindu myth commenting on Sarah’s lived trauma. Zabriskie writes, “It's very complex, this life. Sarah’s life. From the beginning, a sense of lives before this one. They are known by Sarah on some level. Not forgotten. She lives with all the pain of this life and others, but this time she is all mother. This time nothing more important than this beautiful new child. Oh, Laura” (Stallings 203). Zabriskie says that Lynch gave her very little of Sarah’s backstory, so she, as she always did when preparing to perform a character, created one. Although Zabriskie says that she does not believe in past lives, her character Sarah does. In the essay, Zabriskie brilliantly and cryptically speaks about her character when she claims, “Protect Laura. Laura? This is not even the worst. Leland. She knows she can’t protect Laura. Of course she knows Laura is already dead when she gets the phone call from Leland. She’s been waiting for this call and for too many others all her entire lives” (204). What is striking about Zabriskie’s description of Sarah is how the character is imbued with the Hindu belief in reincarnation, or saṃsāra. Sarah has lived many lives of karmic birth, death, and rebirth. Zabriskie said that she and Lynch had a shorthand of communication when he was directing her, so one wonders how Lynch’s own concepts of Hinduism seeped into Zabriskie’s understanding of Sarah and her many lives. There is an ambiguity to who and what Sarah has become in the liminal space of The Return, and Zabriskie’s insight reveals the ways in which the viewer can understand Sarah as being karmically caught in multiple reincarnations while, at the same time, evolving into someone or something else. [page 190]
Sarah and Laura Palmer are a mother and daughter who break through liminal spaces, allowing themselves to be changed/to shift—a radical transformation. But there is ambiguity in transformation. Who or what is Sarah Palmer? What happens when Carrie/Laura’s scream destroys the electricity in the Palmer/Tremond home? Does this usher in a new age or simply vanquish the old one? The disorientation that the viewer experiences at the end of The Return can be a positive experience because the ambiguity of the threshold experience can function as a stepping stone to liberation from the false “marketplace,” which provides the illusion of security. Nochimson argues, “[T]his is a paradox of at the heart of Lynch’s films: the recognition of uncertainty is mandatory if one is ever to arrive at the kind of stability that some modern physicists fear they destroyed” (14). The Return is more in line with Lynch’s later films like Inland Empire rather than the original Twin Peaks because of the “depiction of uncertainty, even as they are more boldly emphatic in their belief that an enduring insecurity is possible for humanity—as long as the shattering of illusions about matter doesn’t paralyze us with fear” (15). In addition to the characters, the audience must also confront the shattering of illusions in The Return as thresholds are crossed.
When Carrie/Laura hears Sarah’s voice call Laura’s name, and Carrie/Laura screams, a transformation occurs in which she seems to remember the past, including past trauma. Although there is no literal crossing of the threshold of the Palmer home, there is a spiritual crossing in this ending. Something has happened. With Sarah’s story, the audience witnesses liminality as a place of baseness, ritual, knowledge-sharing, and transcendence. It is also a place where grief and guilt collide. Sarah is living with the knowledge of the violence and sexual abuse that her husband Leland committed against her daughter. This experience has transformed her just as it has transformed Laura.
The last scene in The Return is the moment when the audience experiences the mother and daughter connection and what pain and grief lie in that communal experience and mem-[page 191]ory. At its core, Twin Peaks has always been the story of taboo trauma and served as a way for the audience to process that trauma. Through witnessing the relationship between a murdered rape/incest victim and her mother encountering liminality, the audience can be active participants in exploring that process of transcendence away from the illusion of the “marketplace” as long as the “shattering of illusions” does not “paralyze us with fear.”
Works Cited
Baré, Simon. “In the Between.” 25 Years Later, 2018, 25yearslatersite.com/2018/04/19/in-the between/.
Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford UP, 1992.
Berry, Jan. “Whose Threshold? Women’s Strategies of Ritualization.” Feminist Theology, vol. 14, no. 3, 2006, pp. 273–288, doi :10.1177%2F0966735006063769.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality.” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Zone Books, 2012. hdl.handle.net/2027/heb30799.0001.001.
Engel, Adam J. Between Two Worlds: The Functions of Liminal Space in Twentieth-Century Literature. 2017. U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Doctoral dissertation, doi:10.17615/a47z-ef67.
Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. TarcherPerigee, 2007.
Nochimson, Martha. David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire. U of Texas P, 2013.
Stallings, Courtenay. Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks. Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2020.
Thomassen, Bjørn. Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. Taylor Francis, 2016, www-taylorfrancis-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/pdfviewer/.
Thorne, John. Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks. John Thorne, 2022.
Turner, Victor W. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1964, pp. 4-20.
Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, CBS Media Ventures, 1990–1991.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch, New Line Cinema, 1992. [page 192]
Twin Peaks: The Return. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Showtime, 2017.
van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, U of Chicago P, 1960.
Courtenay Stallings is an adjunct professor and the assistant director of Pepperdine Graphic Media at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Her research focuses on horror, trauma and the intersection of pop culture, film, and history. She is the senior editor of The Blue Rose Magazine and the author of Laura's Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks, a Bram Stoker Award longlist for superior achievement in nonfiction.
MLA citation (print):
Stallings, Courtenay. "Mothers and Daughters in Liminality: Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 179-192.