“I’m so afraid that no one will believe me until after I have taken the seat that I fear has been saved for me in the darkness,” Laura Palmer writes in her secret diary. “I have come to take what is mine, I was there in the dark when you spilled your first blood, I am here now, as you run from me still,” the curse sings to Ethel Cain on ‘Ptolomea’.
Two sides of the same coin; two haunted girls, similarly and seemingly doomed.
The world of Ethel Cain is made of many moving parts: there are characters to know, a plot to follow, and details to pay attention to. There are clues to consider as the artist, Hayden Anhedönia, has hinted that this story goes beyond her two albums: Preacher’s Daughter and the recently released Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. Both tell the story of Ethel Cain, a young girl raised in a strict religious community by a religious father, certain that she’s doomed and bound to suffering by her bloodline, and inevitably succumbing to that as she moves from tragedy to tragedy until eventually being murdered.
The story is the creation of Anhedönia’s visionary singular mind. In early interviews, she spoke about almost feeling possessed by Ethel Cain, as if this character and story were being spoken through her. But by now, as she’s hinted at a novelisation of the tale and a desire to expand it further and explore more characters, Anhedönia appears more an author or director than merely a mouthpiece as she crafts this whole world.
It’s a full world, and it’s a Lynchian world. Not only does Anhedönia lean into several tropes that David Lynch was characterised by, like non-linear storytelling including dreamlike sequences that seem to sit outside the narrative, or his ability to mix glamour, horror and emotion, the artist herself has made it clear time and time again that if any one person can be credited for inspiring her creative world, it’s Lynch.
“Eraserhead and his factory photographs impacted me in ways I can’t describe in words. The world is darker without you, Mr Lynch,” Anhedönia wrote on social media upon hearing of his passing. She credited him as a major influence on Perverts, her ambient, drone project that was spiritually connected to Lynch’s own interest in industrial settings and the sound of powerlines. But as the story of Ethel Cain becomes clearer, it’s like her face comes more and more into view and morphs into the face of Laura Palmer.
The fact of Laura Palmer is essential. For so much of Twin Peaks, the original series, that’s all she really is, a concept. A figment, more of an idea than anything else, as the viewer predominantly sees only one of two things: the image of Laura the prom queen or the image of Laura the dead girl. The whole point is that as the series goes on, it becomes less about the mystery of who killed her and more about the questions of who she was. At each step, more hidden depth is added to this figure until eventually, the revelation of her killer actually provides no catharsis at all; instead, the viewer suddenly understands the depths of her suffering.
If you haven’t seen the show and don’t want to know the sad answer to the mystery, go and watch it. This line of thought is going to require some spoilers — you’ve been warned.
In episode 14 of season two, the truth of Twin Peaks all comes into terrifying view. Up until this point, it always felt like a standard murder mystery to a degree. Laura Palmer was murdered, a villainous presence called Bob seemed to be behind it, and Agent Dale Cooper was trying to figure it out. But in the final moments of this episode, Leland Palmer, Laura’s father, morphs in the mirror.
Suddenly, he’s smiling like a demon, as the demon, Bob, smiles back at him. At Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s cousin and her double — given that the same actor plays her — walks into the room. The viewer’s stomach clenches; she’s attacked. As the violent figure morphs between Bob and Leland, it’s understood: Laura Palmer was abused and eventually murdered by her own father.
The episodes grow even darker as you move forward, especially in Fire Walk With Me, where Lynch returns to Laura during her last days alive. Suddenly, the full picture comes together, and a story of life-long abuse emerges with the added sinisterness of Bob as a physical manifestation of a kind of curse that Laura forever sees crawling towards her, destined to doom her and being utterly inescapable.
The doomed destiny is akin to the story of Ethel Cain. As her debut opens with ‘Family Tree’, the artist sings “The fates already fucked me sideways / Swinging by my neck from the family tree / He’ll laugh and say, ‘You know I raised you bеtter than this’ / Then leavе me hanging so they all can laugh at me”. As the album’s overture, she lays it all out, opening up the story of a girl who paints her trauma and her father’s abuse as a bloodline curse.
As the story of Ethel Cain unfolds across the records, the spiritual connection between Laura Palmer and Ethel grows. Both become hypersexual due to their trauma, as the track ‘Gibson Girl’ may as well be set at One Eyed Jacks. Both feel estranged and abandoned by their best friend as their own lives darken, with ‘Janie’ feeling like a theme tune for Laura and Donna. Both feel abandoned by God as Cain’s line, “God loves you by not enough to save you”, mirrors Laura’s devastating monologue, “And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away”.
Given Anhedönia’s deep love for Lynch, it can’t be a coincidence. “Every day it was wake up, work, Twin Peaks, work, Twin Peaks, work…” she told The Guardian about the making of Ethel Cain’s second chapter. She was so hooked into it that she got the exact synths that the show’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, used and said that it “felt kind of like an homage. A way to keep David and Angelo and Laura alive in some small way”.
It’s almost as if Ethel Cain is a new way to keep the idea of Laura Palmer alive. “Maybe that’s all Bob is, the evil that men do,” FBI agent Albert says once the mystery of the character’s murder has been resolved, bringing it back to the truth of the story, which is ultimately abuse and real-world cruelty beyond the paranormal fog.
At each turn, Cain’s story mimics this darkness, sometimes even word for word, akin to how the insane Wisdom Earle asks Major Briggs for his biggest fear and gets the response, “The possibility that love is not enough”, and where Ethel Cain shares as some of her final words, singing to set the story’s stark foundation: “Love is not enough in this world”.
