I always felt that BOB's character was diminished more in the film than in the diary. In the series (and to a lesser extent in the diary), it's pretty straightforward; BOB, the demon in the woods, possesses Leland at an early age, then for years, through Leland's body, terrorizes and ultimately brutally kills Laura. So tragic and deeply fascinating and mysterious. In the Diary, we don't know that BOB has been doing his dirty deeds through Leland and he remains, despite his maniacal ramblings, a pretty dark and frightening enigma –just a little more fleshed out than we see in the series. The film, however, (in my view) takes a lot of BOB's characters power away by implying that he is merely the dark side of Leland and/or a fantasy-being fabricated by Laura in order to block out that fact that her father has been having his way with her. The mystery surrounding the Theresa Banks case in the series is made compelling by its very vagueness, as it seems that the direct responsibility for her murder lies in the supernatural hands of BOB rather than Leland's. I prefer the idea of Leland as the mere week vessel of BOB's fiendish evil-doings. The film portrays Theresa's murder as the result of her threat to Leland that she'll expose their affair to Sarah. To me, that's pretty lame. Where does BOB come into that equation at all? It just paints Leland as this stock dad/husband who's willing to kill his mistress to save his marriage and reputation. Though I truly love aspects of the movie, in my more cynical moments my synopsis of the film is this: A disturbed husband/father has an affair with a waitress and is driven to murder her when she threatens to expose him. His daughter, whom he's been molesting for years, breaks through to the reality that her father has been screwing her, not the demon she's created to deal with such a an ugly truth. Father realizes that she's caught on and kills her before she too can expose him. Ho hum.
While I do respect this as an alternate interpretaion of Laura's life and death, and enjoy it on its own as a film, I'm consistently bummed at how much it takes away from the supernatural side of the story (namely BOB and the "evil in the woods"), which is what I enjoyed so much about the series and the diary.
As Comic Book Guy from The Simpson's might put it, best post ever. I would have written that myself if I didn't have a short attention span. Over the years the sexual abuse theory has become more and more prominent and gone from being one of many different interpretations to the interpretation.
I've always seen Leland as a victim and the tragedy of the series is that he was forced to sexually abuse and kill the daughter he clearly loved. To reduce him to an deranged child molester reduces the series, the film and the book to self-indulgent bollocks. The woods aren't mysterious or dark, it's just mass hysteria, and Cooper enters the lodge only to come out posessed by... what exactly?... his own animal impulses? Zzzzz. I don't think DL endorses the idea that Bob's just a metaphor... I think his words have been taken out of context by the newer fans and over-enthusiastic academics. To quote the Log Lady's poem;
Pain for the victim, pain for the inflicter of pain.
A circle of pain, a circle of suffering.
That concept drives the whole narrative of Twin Peaks. It's the reason the One Armed Man says to Bob (in the script) "That's his own daughter you're killing". I find the idea that Leland is forced to murder Laura as horrifying as anything Laura goes through. A lot off people don't get that because they're so paranoid about misogyny.
I ran from the noise and the silence, from the traffic on the streets