Troubling Abstractions
Part 8 - S3e8
Version 1.0

“Troubling Abstractions”
Part 8

This episode is a two-parter. The first ~15 minutes follows the structure of every other episode of “The Return.” The remaining time is more of a short art film. I really don’t have much of an eye for spiritual or philosophical insight, so I recommend reading “Our Collective Transcendence” for these aspects. (Direct Link) (Archive)

INSIDE A CAR, SD | 0

We concluded the previous episode with Mr. C blackmailing his way out of prison and riding away with Ray – and that scene may have been a re-staging of the Primal Scene between Leland and Laura in “FWWM.”
2 reflections of bright street lights passed between them before Mr. C took out his phone. Let’s take a closer look at his screen: The tracking devices: Also of note: Daria’s “waiting for a phone call.” Remember that her murder is a re-staging of the train car Primal Scene, with her taking the role of Laura.

Ray knows time-space coordinates that Mr. C wants, to find Phillip Jeffries and/or Judy, but Ray won’t give them away for free.
Ray has more awareness and knowledge of the situation than he appears, and we’ll see this when he makes a phone call to Philip Jeffries in a few moments. Remember: he’s a double agent for the positive forces in the Twin Peaks Dream. By demanding payment, Ray is trying to trick Mr. C into giving him jackpots/gold – the Truth Itself rendered in a way that Laura Palmer’s mind won’t try to bury it by vanishing a character or timeline.
This request made Mr. C suspicious and displeased, but he did not act on it in any way.

On the road: 2 lanes became 1 as the brainwave motif filled the screen, in the curves of the road itself and in how the streetlights rippled on it. A red light appeared behind the men as Mr. C directed Ray to take a right turn, and this is a small motif that we’ll see a few times over the course of this episode. Between the road chevrons on the curve, two red tail-lights glowed dimly in the dark. To me, this imagery suggests that Mr. C’s submitting the license plate somehow replaced the truck into this black space between the chevrons on the side of the road.

Ray shot Mr. C 2 times, with that odd stuttering effect that we saw in the Phyllis Hastings murder.
Ray is a double agent working for the positive forces in Laura Palmer’s psyche. He is trying to help her by murdering Mr. C, the BOB orb inside Mr.C, and the delusions that they represent. But the stars are not aligned, and the co-ordinates are wrong. Laura isn’t ready. This is why the Woodsmen and flashing lights appear to resolve the problem by maintaining the delusions. Ray can only manage two shots because three is the sacred number that represents all three Lauras: Red Laura, Blue Laura, and Odessa Laura/Carrie Page. Carrie Page has not been created yet, and these particular circumstances (co-ordinates!) are not the ones to do it either. That comes much later.

The Woodsmen danced as if in ritual while Ray literally twisted and turned in the glow of the flashing lights. In this moment they are all abstractions of the Bad Transformer at work as Laura’s mind twists and spins over itself to continue believing in BOB – to literally resurrect him in these deep abstractions of her mind. The Woodsmen smeared blood all over Mr. C’s face until he could barely be recognized, and the Orb was shoved inside in an un-birthing, or is it an inversion of the Experimental Model’s vomiting that we will see in a few moments?
This scene may be a re-staging of the orginal series’ finales, in which Dale Cooper is shot in the stomach and bloodies his face through a mirror, respectively. Through all this, Ray could only bellow like a terrified animal. This is a Lynchian motif that appears in several other works and later in this very episode.

A few notes on the BOB Orb itself: Returning to the episode, The Split happened again when Ray shot Mr. C. What makes Ray different than the other Living Scapegoats is that he has the means and the knowledge to discuss what he knows. Red Room Laura and American Girl are exiled to a world of spiraling abstractions and broken speech. Ronette, post-coma, is a character with low awareness and has no frame of reference for what she saw that night. Ray, however, is working directly with Philip Jeffries; an abstraction of the forbidden knowledge itself.
This is why and how he’s able to tell Jeffires that he saw “something” important in Cooper, even though he doesn’t quite understand it. This could be reflected in the half-moon in the sky of this night; it’s his half-understanding. Or maybe it’s Laura’s, with one half of her still dead and in the dark while the other half shines with awareness and knowledge. As it’s swept over by clouds, we’re left wondering about the Log Lady’s “what will be in the darkness that remains?”

THE ROADHOUSE | 13

This is my favorite performance scene in the series.
This is Nine Inch Nails’ “She’s Gone Away,” a song that was written specifically for this show. These are the lyrics, courtesy of The Unofficial Twin Peaks Wiki.

You dig in places, till your fingers bleed
Spread the infection, where you spill your seed
I can't remember what she came here for
I can't remember much of anything anymore

She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
Away
Away

A little mouth opened up inside
Yeah, I was watching on the day she died
We keep licking while the skin turns black
Cut along the length, but you can't get the feeling back

She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away
She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away

Away
Away
Away
Away

(Are you still here?)

Mr. C, alone and soaked in his own blood, sat up and stared blearily into the darkness before fading into the next portion of the episode. Does this suggest that we’re looking into his mind, and his recollections? The song’s closing line creates an interesting variation on a previous scene.
This begins the “art film” half of the Episode. It contains many layers of abstraction and symbolism, so I’ve decided it’s probably best to begin with a summary before going over each sequence in more detail.
Surface Layer
- The abstractions and realities they represent

White Sands, NM | 16

Our first scene is an overhead view of the Trinity nuclear weapons test in New Mexico. The slow zoom into the heart of the explosion recalls the slow zoom into Laura’s homecoming portrait in the opener of the first episode of “The Return.”
As established, nuclear explosions are an abstraction for the incest that destroyed Laura’s concept of the “nuclear family.” Why Trinity? Trinity was the first such explosion in human history. It’s likely that this episode is an abstracted recollection of the very first incident of abuse.

The slow crown-zoom of the camera brought us to multiple scenes of atoms and debris clashing through plumes of fire and flashing lightning. This is Laura’s origin point of multiple pieces for symbolism: fire, flashing lights, Black Orbs, frogmoths/insect imagery, and the Black Dot as The Thing You Don’t Ever Want To Know About.

THE CONVENIENCE STORE | 21

The convenience store was empty until the fog/smoke and flashing lights started to roll in, stuttering. Only after that did the Woodsmen appear. It seems that they were literally created by fire-smoke and the flashing lights of the Bad Transformer at work. Their function follows this genesis: keep the delusion going, help the Bad Transformer make sense of these horrific things that are happening to Laura. They are black angels of denial itself.
It has also been theorized that the Woodsmen represent the “world of truck drivers,” the “dirty bearded men in a room” that Laura would have serviced as a prostitute. I think both interpretations have merit, and are not mutually exclusive.

The store seemed to be rattled by an unseen explosion and more flashing lights. My first thought was that this explosion was another nuclear detonation, but the fading of the convenience store lights suggests problems with ELEC-TRI-CITY, such as an exploding transformer. Regarding the lights, themselves there are four: one for each gas pump, and two on the corners of the rooftop. As of this version of the writing, we have yet to discover a numerology meaning for 4. One idea: it could be a reference to 4 Lauras that existed before the end of Season 2/start of “The Return.”

Suddenly, we were taken through a black hole, or a black tunnel, and this brought us to the Experimental Model.
Some maintain that the being in the glass box in NYC and this being in Episode 8 are two different entities. I do not agree with this position.

THE EXPERIMENTAL MODEL | 24

”Listen to the sounds.” Unlike the glass box scene, we can hear that the Experimental Model has a distinctly female voice as it gags and chokes. This is a crucial piece that might just tell us what the EM truly is. The Experimental Model is Laura’s dissociative disorder given form, or perhaps a reflection of how she sees herself in those moments. Now that we have this key, let’s look at this sequence more closely. I apologize for the repetitive nature of this writing, but the abstractions of Episode 8 are very dense and it’s difficult to keep all layers in mind. We ended this sequence by slow-zooming (again) into a liquid glob of golden light, beating like a heart, that suddenly became drops of blood showering the camera. The liquid light is an abstraction of the golden orb that is given to Senorita Dido. The golden orb is an abstraction of the Twin Peaks Fantasy itself. By abruptly turning gold to blood, we’re reminded that this fantasy cannot exist without Laura Palmer’s sudden and violent, bloody murder.

THE MAUVE ZONE | 25

We now get a good look at this building from the outside: a massive electrical transformer with two black holes-as-windows. It resembles the glass box fortress in NYC, or is it the other way around? One of these windows is a triangle, the other is a rectangle. We enter using the latter. Inside, Senorita Dido sat on the couch with another transformer, swaying gently to the music.

An alarm and flashing lights sounded as the Fireman walked out from behind this smaller transformer. This action is another iteration of the Lost Highway Corner Shots that we’ve been noticing. Senorita Dido looked between the alarm and the Fireman with concern. The Fireman stopped to stare directly into the audience instead, with the White Hole Ceiling prominently behind him.
The last character to stare directly at us was MIKE speaking of “The Gifted And The Damned.” However, this episode as not directed by David Lynch, and is thus not relevant to “Find Laura.” What is relevant is the idea that the camera is Laura, just like everything else in the series after “FWWM.” It’s her dreamscape, her psyche, her perspectives. The Fireman is not concerned for the audience, he’s concerned for Laura.
He goes upstairs into the theater after this, taking the right side as Mr. C and Ray also took “the little road to the right.”

THE THEATER OF THE MIND | 33

A quick review on the role of The Fireman in “Find Laura:” Inside the theater itself, we saw an alcove to the side headed by Dr. Amp’s hat, with 2 black doorways that resemble the windows of the Mauve Transformer outside. The doorway on our left – that is, the right side of anyone standing in the alcove – had an oddly umbilical pipe coming from it.
We saw the Fireman watching the same apocalyptic footage that we just watched, up until the point of the BOB Orb appearing on screen. At that, he stopped the playback and started to float upwards, assuming the same straight-limbed supine position that Laura did in the train car. The flashing lights intensified as Senorita Dido approached, backlit, her shadow curiously emphasized before her. As soon as she touched hands with her shadow, the Fireman began to emit golden light.

Lou Ming wrote that the Golden Orb is The Fireman’s creation of a filtered, comfortable alternative reality for Senorita Dido. Let’s examine it in more detail.