Fire Walk with Me: how abuse fractures reality

News about the Jeffrey Epstein files is everywhere right now. The Department of Justice has released over 3.5 million pages under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in November 2025. FBI interview records, flight logs, draft indictments that were never filed. The headlines cycle through names and faces. And underneath the political spectacle, the same question that always surfaces: how did nobody say or do something?

If you've never experienced sexual abuse as a child, the silence around it is probably the hardest part to understand. Why didn't the victims report it? Why didn't the people who knew (and someone always seems to have known) do something? It looks like a conspiracy. In Epstein's case, it was one. But the silence around child sexual abuse is usually less organized and more deeply rooted. It's psychological, not strategic. It lives inside the victim's own mind, in the people closest to them, in the communities around them.

There's a film that tries to explain this experience from the inside out. It was booed at Cannes in 1992 and made $4.2 million on a $10 million budget. It's David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and it may be the most psychologically accurate depiction of childhood sexual abuse put on screen. Not because Lynch set out to make a clinical document. Because he found a way to show one version of what it may feel like from the inside, the fractured reality, the silence, the people who could see but didn't, and most audiences weren't ready for it.

What the film is actually about

Here's the surface plot: Laura Palmer, a high school homecoming queen in a small town in Washington state, is being sexually abused by her father, Leland. She doesn't fully know this. She knows a figure called Bob comes to her room at night. She knows she's terrified. She does not connect Bob to her father until the end of the film, and the recognition kills her.

The film follows her last seven days. She uses cocaine. She has sex with multiple partners. She volunteers delivering meals to elderly shut-ins. She can't emotionally reach her boyfriend. She slowly falls apart as the wall between her two realities cracks open. None of this is random. Almost all of it matches patterns documented in decades of clinical research.

Bob is a coping mechanism

The central trick of the film is Laura's inability to see her father as her abuser. She sees Bob instead. Several scenes show Bob's face flickering into Leland's and back, the dissociative defense holding and then cracking.

This is not a screenwriting invention. Bessel van der Kolk's research on trauma processing has shown that traumatic memories from repeated childhood abuse don't get stored like normal memories. They fragment into sensory impressions, emotional states, body sensations, all disconnected from any coherent narrative. The child being abused by the person who feeds and houses them faces what van der Kolk calls a biological paradox: the source of safety is the source of danger. The mind resolves this by splitting the abuser in two. The safe parent stays safe. The monster becomes something else, something external.

Clinicians hear this constantly. Survivors describe the abuser as having "become a different person" during the abuse, or say the face changed, became unrecognizable. These aren't hallucinations. They're dissociative perceptions. The mind does what it has to do to keep the attachment relationship intact.

Bob is that split, walking around in a denim jacket.

Laura's behavior is not moral failure

Her double life gets read wrong if you see it as hypocrisy or a "secret wild side." Judith Herman described this pattern as compartmentalization in complex trauma: the survivor runs two separate modes of being because no single integrated self can hold both the normal life and the trauma life at the same time. Laura's daytime self is the adaptive one, built to function in public. Her nighttime self carries the unprocessed damage.

The cocaine is self-medication. Research on the link between childhood sexual abuse and substance abuse is clear: survivors use at far higher rates. Cocaine numbs shame, enables dissociation, overrides the constant hypervigilance that comes with complex PTSD. It also makes the nighttime behavior possible by disconnecting Laura from the emotional weight of what she's doing.

The sex with multiple partners is what clinicians call sexual dysregulation. The survivor's sense of bodily autonomy was never properly built, so the internal alarm that says "I don't want this" doesn't fire reliably. Sexuality became the language of intimacy during a developmental period when it shouldn't have been, so it becomes the default.

Her boyfriend Bobby gets the surface of a relationship but nothing underneath. James, the one who actually seems to see her, is more threatening, because genuine intimacy means someone might see behind the wall. For a trauma survivor, being truly known can feel more dangerous than being hurt.

For a trauma survivor, being truly known can feel more dangerous than being hurt.

Why sexual abuse breaks people differently

Something in the research I keep returning to: sexual abuse produces a distinct kind of damage that other forms of maltreatment don't replicate. Physical abuse hurts, and the body knows it was hurt. There's no ambiguity in a beating.

Sexual abuse is different because the body gets recruited. A child may experience involuntary physiological arousal. Their own body appears to cooperate. Survivors consistently name this as the worst part, worse than the pain. The betrayal isn't just from the parent. It's from themselves.

Martin Teicher's neuroimaging research at Harvard has shown that childhood sexual abuse affects brain areas involved in self-perception and bodily awareness in ways other maltreatment does not. The child isn't just being hurt. They're being rewired during the window when identity is being built.

And the secrecy is different. Physical abuse is often impulsive, sometimes visible. Sexual abuse is almost always deliberately concealed. The child carries a hidden reality through every school day, every dinner, every normal moment. That double existence is itself a factory for dissociation.

Sarah Palmer knows

Laura's mother is anxious, medicated, visibly disturbed throughout the series and the film. She calls out for Laura at night. She seems unsettled by Leland's behavior. She does not intervene.

Research on intrafamilial sexual abuse identifies the non-offending parent's response as one of the strongest predictors of the child's outcome. In a significant number of cases, the non-offending parent had some awareness but did not act. Clinicians describe "knowing and not knowing simultaneously." Warning signs get noticed individually but never connected.

The reasons pile up. Economic dependency. The cost of admitting who you married. And often the mother's own trauma history. If she survived her own abuse by not knowing, then not-knowing is the only tool she has.

Laura is not just trapped by her father. She's trapped by her mother's failure to see, by a family organized around concealment, and by a community that doesn't look too closely at its respectable citizens. Twin Peaks is Sarah Palmer at scale.

The numbers make it worse

A 2025 study in The Lancet, covering 204 locations globally, found that nearly one in five women and one in seven men experienced sexual violence as children. The US came in at 28% for women. The Netherlands was 30%. Between 70 and 90 percent of cases are never reported. One national survey found 28% of victims never told anyone at all, and 47% waited more than five years.

About 90% of perpetrators are someone the child knows and trusts, according to the CDC. Strangers account for roughly 7%.

The public narrative puts the danger outside the home. The data puts it inside. The gap between those two stories is its own kind of dissociation.

About 90% of perpetrators are someone the child knows and trusts - strangers account for roughly 7%.

Why the booing matters

Lynch did something unforgivable by entertainment standards: he made a film that demands you sit inside the experience of a sexually abused child for two hours. Not from the detective's perspective, not as a mystery to solve, but from Laura's. You watch her father's face become a monster's face and then become her father's face again.

Most people don't want that. They want the quirky small-town mystery. Cherry pie and damn fine coffee. Not a teenage girl recognizing that her father has been raping her and dying because she can't survive the knowledge. The film ends with Laura in the Red Room, weeping. An angel appears. She smiles through the tears. It's not a happy ending. It's relief. She doesn't have to hold the split anymore.

Lynch put all of that on screen in 1992. People booed. The Epstein files are out now, and the same questions are circling: how did nobody say or do anything? How did people who knew stay silent? Fire Walk with Me tried to answer those questions thirty years ago.

References

• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Finkelhor, D. (2009). The prevention of childhood sexual abuse. The Future of Children, 19(2), 169-194.
• Teicher, M. H., & Samson, J. A. (2016). Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(3), 241-266.
• Cagney, J., Spencer, C., Flor, L., et al. (2025). Prevalence of sexual violence against children and age at first exposure: a global analysis by location, age, and sex (1990-2023). The Lancet, 405(10492), 1817-1836.
• Pereda, N., Guilera, G., Forns, M., & Gomez-Benito, J. (2009). The prevalence of child sexual abuse in community and student samples: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(4), 328-338.
• Perez-Fuentes, G., Olfson, M., Villegas, L., Morcillo, C., Wang, S., & Blanco, C. (2013). Prevalence and correlates of child sexual abuse: A national study. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 54(1), 16-27.
• Smith, D. W., et al. (2000). Delay in disclosure of childhood rape: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24(2), 273-287.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). About child sexual abuse. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-sexual-abuse.html
• Finkelhor, D. (1984). Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research. Free Press.