The Goals of the Spirits

[BlackMoonLilith]

I posted this in another thread, but it was pretty off topic, so I figured I'd give it its own thread and allow the gender identity discussion remain that.

I always thought the Little Man's line, "With this ring, I thee wed" was meant to hint at this, that Bob was "wed" to the ring so that the fates of one impacted the other, and that this was some sort of punishment for taking the corn as Gerard would later berate Leland for. In fact, I think the entire convenience store scene is The Trial of Bob, conducted by Mike/Little Man and attended by the collected spirits and humans of the Lodge. The Tremond boy is accusing Bob, as if he's a witness on the stand, when he points and says "Fell a victim," the Log Lady's husband is agreeing (perhaps speaking for the humans?) with Mike's judgment when he slams his knee, etc.

(Oh, and I assumed the dancing black man was some Lodge form of Philip Jeffries, if only because this is presumably the "meeting" of theirs he's been to, and there's no other candidate for who/where/how Jeffires might be there, plus Lynch directly overlaps our first images of the man and the meeting with Cole's "Where the hell have you been?" and then later shows the man on screen while Jeffries says "I been to one of their meetings." Jeffries' bafflement as to WTF is going on might also explain the man's erratic behavior in contrast to everyone else's calm attitude.)

The one thing that's puzzled me until recently (although I'm still not entirely sure) is what did Bob even do? If corn is garmonbozia and garmonbozia is pain and sorrow, whose pain and sorrow has Bob been devouring that the group considers "theirs"? (I'm also leaving out if Bob taking the corn was "recent" or not given how the finale presents the passage of time to the spirits). I think Bob has been hording Leland's garmonbozia (we only see him give it up at the end of the film) but it's his encroachment on Laura that's gotten the Lodge up in arms. She's more complex, tastier, more stuffed with mixed and contradictory emotions than Leland, and if Bob gets her to accept him, it's the biggest cache of pain and sorrow imaginable, just for Bob. Mike and the other spirits wed Bob to the ring in order to give Laura a way to escape him.

And this is where I get REALLY tinfoil, but... I think the further reason they want Laura dead and not Bob is that through her death, the pain and sorrow is not limited to one person, but spread evenly throughout the town. This is where the central premise of the show and the mythology of the spirits collide. Suddenly, the grief felt throughout the pilot, from Sarah to the school principal to that girl shrieking outside the classroom window, are now the spoils of beings beyond our concepts of morality. Of course, it also backfires in that it brings Agent Cooper to Twin Peaks, a new combination of pain and sorrow that Bob ends up taking solely for himself.

Now, I know that kind of sounds depressing, well it IS depressing, and fatalistic that everything that happened was the characters being used as pawns in some sort of supernatural game, but I don't think it takes away from the individual choices and decisions the human characters who are totally unaware of this make. Even if Laura taking the ring was some sort of getting one over on Bob, it doesn't detract or change LostInTheMovie's (brilliant) theory that she only gets the ring because she created the angel that allowed Ronette to escape and Mike to throw the ring in the open car door.