Symbolism of the Evolution of the Arm (SPOILERS)
Posted: Sun May 28, 2017 2:58 pm
David Lynch (and Twin Peaks in specific) creates master symbols that evoke multiple different things at once. Once you can feel the overlap, this yields a very powerful synthesis. One good example (which made the rounds on this sub recently) is the white horse that Sarah sees. The horse calls to mind: 1) soporific drugs (think heroin = white horse in common parlance) in the milk; 2) the unconscious mind (Jung's horse symbol); 3) Impending death or doom (death riding a pale horse into the apocalypse, Revelation); 4) an absent savior or the need for a hero/rescue that does not come (Christ on a pale horse, Revelation, and common folk tale understanding of the white horse as a hero or princess mount – the horse being unridden suggests an absence of this). This is a great symbol to associate with Sarah who is the human personification of the feeling of utter doom that is unique to the transitional state from conscious to unconscious. Maybe she crawls across the floor to try to mount the horse, to save the young women of her family, but she does not make it. She spends the entire show dwelling in the medicated anguish in between the waking world and the dream.
The Evolution of the Arm (EoA) is such a symbol.
I believe the MFAP/Arm of the original run to represent the ego, the nexus of authorship of the self. Above the convenience store (especially in the Missing Pieces extended version), he sits at the table to represent a committee of impulses – the performer (dancing man), the sense of propriety (Mrs. Tremont), the need to provide by exerting will upon the world (the woodsman), etc. in an effort to remind Bob of the beauty of the world and coax him back into his place (for naught – Bob breaks free and takes control of the self… note the little man follows him into the red room, leaving all the other drives behind, with the fury of his own momentum). This is Bob taking control of Leland but also (in the collective space) consumptive impulses that wish to control and take, not caring who is harmed, taking the reins of the western world.
This take on the Arm also works in the final episode. He tells Dale in the trial’s waiting room that “when you see me again it won’t be me” – the trial will change Dale (the arm as his self). The arm works not just as a metaphor for pointing the direction that the self will go, but also as an indicator arm. The Arm’s sense of agitation indicates how much trouble Dale is in… it reflects the balance and integrity of his ego. I won’t go into the Freudian holy trinity scene (“one and the same”).
So how does the EoA work symbolically? We have the following evocations:
1) EoA looks like a nervous system/neuron with the head representing a ganglion or the focality of cognition or awareness – It represents the physical nature of the human electrical system as localizing to a seat of consciousness that is self reflexive.
2) EoA looks like part of a web/network with a node – Lynch sees the world as a vast network – a universal field, or web that humanity weaves together and lives in (“like a dream”). As the neuron relates to other neurons and creates a consciousness, each consciousness is connected by this network to others. This is like a section containing one spider in a web of billions of spiders, all connected. Electricity running through the pole wires at the Fat Trout.
3) EoA looks like a tree with a fruit – A sycamore tree for sure, but also the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Inland Empire contained a deep mythology about the Garden of Eden as an event of the creation of civilization and gender roles, brought on by an awareness of time and the need to “do.” This takes the Garden as a story of the development of awareness, the fruit being a brain-as-consciousness born of the system.
4) EoA looks like a mushroom cloud/explosion of technology – The brain in association with the nuclear cloud was a common 60s image of expanding consciousness. Now, the interconnectedness of the world is technological and the cloud a powerful symbol of the danger of rapidly expanding technology. Watchmen has a motif of skeletons or treelike splayed nervous systems against the background of nuclear explosions that is in similar territory.
Electricity.
The overlap here is profound – it draws a connection between consciousness, human connection, communication technology, and ancient archetypal stories of humanity’s origins. The evolution means that the arm, in today’s world, points in many directions – more complicated, less personal, but still maintaining the “I” at the center (lower case i, I guess… it has a dot).
So the doppelganger of the EoA (DEoA) becomes interesting. The fruit looks rotted, the “self” disassociating. The DEoA represents not an “evil arm” but loss of ego integrity and nihilism… the degeneration of meaning. Non-existence. This has all sorts of interesting things to contemplate given the new show having so much to say about aging and the state of America/the west. Whatever your political persuasion, the man in the white house is there because so many people chose to vote not for a leader but for a bomb to annihilate the system that failed them. But for good Cooper, this is the threat of loss of the good aspects to an anti-life part of his brain. This is what depression looks like, folks.
I spent 3 hours yesterday trying and failing to screencap David Lynch paintings off of The Art Life (only available on itunes) and failed (Macintosh caveat emptor) so I could discuss the visual aspects of this. It becomes obvious watching the movie that many of the surreal images present in the new Twin Peaks have their root in his paintings. There is a head hole motif present in the paintings (present all over this season), where smooth but irregular oblong orbs have asymmetrical hole and are positioned as heads. This relates to and intersects with some other Lynch visual and tactile obsessions – escaping black stuff (vapor or sludge, the "negativity), the smooth blank face with something mapped onto it (the balloon head of Inland Empite), rotting fruit (Lynch speaks of taking his father into the basement to see some of his projects, specifically a collection of fruit in different stages of composition - his father told him "David, I don't think you should have children"), the red human heart-looking thing (often floating as a head, the open ventricles looking like a monkey face), the planet with crater which may expel some sort of paste (Eraserhead, the new season), the missing/detached head, the removable faceplate (another post, given that Laura scene), the blue faced man who sometimes has a formation of flames over his head, and the monkey-ridged face (Judy).
In Lynch’s paintings, the motif appears to evoke a lack of psychological integrity, a coming apart of the psyche. This is the state you wind up in if you stay in the smelly rubber clown suit of negativity. The head becomes the focal point in this, and the DEoA is the bad brains version. It is obsessed with annihilation of the self over EoA’s generation of the self (again, the DEoA as the anti-ego). From the paintings, this is what happens when the mind destroying negativity takes over your brain, when the shadow self takes over. Consciousness and civilization seized by an urge to void (good band name, also works as a pee-pee joke).
The Evolution of the Arm (EoA) is such a symbol.
I believe the MFAP/Arm of the original run to represent the ego, the nexus of authorship of the self. Above the convenience store (especially in the Missing Pieces extended version), he sits at the table to represent a committee of impulses – the performer (dancing man), the sense of propriety (Mrs. Tremont), the need to provide by exerting will upon the world (the woodsman), etc. in an effort to remind Bob of the beauty of the world and coax him back into his place (for naught – Bob breaks free and takes control of the self… note the little man follows him into the red room, leaving all the other drives behind, with the fury of his own momentum). This is Bob taking control of Leland but also (in the collective space) consumptive impulses that wish to control and take, not caring who is harmed, taking the reins of the western world.
This take on the Arm also works in the final episode. He tells Dale in the trial’s waiting room that “when you see me again it won’t be me” – the trial will change Dale (the arm as his self). The arm works not just as a metaphor for pointing the direction that the self will go, but also as an indicator arm. The Arm’s sense of agitation indicates how much trouble Dale is in… it reflects the balance and integrity of his ego. I won’t go into the Freudian holy trinity scene (“one and the same”).
So how does the EoA work symbolically? We have the following evocations:
1) EoA looks like a nervous system/neuron with the head representing a ganglion or the focality of cognition or awareness – It represents the physical nature of the human electrical system as localizing to a seat of consciousness that is self reflexive.
2) EoA looks like part of a web/network with a node – Lynch sees the world as a vast network – a universal field, or web that humanity weaves together and lives in (“like a dream”). As the neuron relates to other neurons and creates a consciousness, each consciousness is connected by this network to others. This is like a section containing one spider in a web of billions of spiders, all connected. Electricity running through the pole wires at the Fat Trout.
3) EoA looks like a tree with a fruit – A sycamore tree for sure, but also the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Inland Empire contained a deep mythology about the Garden of Eden as an event of the creation of civilization and gender roles, brought on by an awareness of time and the need to “do.” This takes the Garden as a story of the development of awareness, the fruit being a brain-as-consciousness born of the system.
4) EoA looks like a mushroom cloud/explosion of technology – The brain in association with the nuclear cloud was a common 60s image of expanding consciousness. Now, the interconnectedness of the world is technological and the cloud a powerful symbol of the danger of rapidly expanding technology. Watchmen has a motif of skeletons or treelike splayed nervous systems against the background of nuclear explosions that is in similar territory.
Electricity.
The overlap here is profound – it draws a connection between consciousness, human connection, communication technology, and ancient archetypal stories of humanity’s origins. The evolution means that the arm, in today’s world, points in many directions – more complicated, less personal, but still maintaining the “I” at the center (lower case i, I guess… it has a dot).
So the doppelganger of the EoA (DEoA) becomes interesting. The fruit looks rotted, the “self” disassociating. The DEoA represents not an “evil arm” but loss of ego integrity and nihilism… the degeneration of meaning. Non-existence. This has all sorts of interesting things to contemplate given the new show having so much to say about aging and the state of America/the west. Whatever your political persuasion, the man in the white house is there because so many people chose to vote not for a leader but for a bomb to annihilate the system that failed them. But for good Cooper, this is the threat of loss of the good aspects to an anti-life part of his brain. This is what depression looks like, folks.
I spent 3 hours yesterday trying and failing to screencap David Lynch paintings off of The Art Life (only available on itunes) and failed (Macintosh caveat emptor) so I could discuss the visual aspects of this. It becomes obvious watching the movie that many of the surreal images present in the new Twin Peaks have their root in his paintings. There is a head hole motif present in the paintings (present all over this season), where smooth but irregular oblong orbs have asymmetrical hole and are positioned as heads. This relates to and intersects with some other Lynch visual and tactile obsessions – escaping black stuff (vapor or sludge, the "negativity), the smooth blank face with something mapped onto it (the balloon head of Inland Empite), rotting fruit (Lynch speaks of taking his father into the basement to see some of his projects, specifically a collection of fruit in different stages of composition - his father told him "David, I don't think you should have children"), the red human heart-looking thing (often floating as a head, the open ventricles looking like a monkey face), the planet with crater which may expel some sort of paste (Eraserhead, the new season), the missing/detached head, the removable faceplate (another post, given that Laura scene), the blue faced man who sometimes has a formation of flames over his head, and the monkey-ridged face (Judy).
In Lynch’s paintings, the motif appears to evoke a lack of psychological integrity, a coming apart of the psyche. This is the state you wind up in if you stay in the smelly rubber clown suit of negativity. The head becomes the focal point in this, and the DEoA is the bad brains version. It is obsessed with annihilation of the self over EoA’s generation of the self (again, the DEoA as the anti-ego). From the paintings, this is what happens when the mind destroying negativity takes over your brain, when the shadow self takes over. Consciousness and civilization seized by an urge to void (good band name, also works as a pee-pee joke).