Postby Cappy » Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:09 pm
I'm still wrestling with how to interpret Sarah from Season 3 to FWWM to the original series -- not sure whether she is a hapless victim, or an otherwordly antagonist, or a regular human complicit through her denial & enabling. But just recently I've started to view Sarah, at least in the context of S3, as sort of like the crying woman that bookends Inland Empire. Trapped in a room, waiting for someone or something to let her out. Granted, Sarah does leave her living room, but most of the time she is losing her mind in front of her TV. The crying woman in IE is released when Nikki (Laura Dern) arrives and kisses her, freeing her to rejoin her family.
Sarah, in contrast, has no family left, and likely feels guilty for allowing Leland to abuse Laura. One popular interpretation is that Cooper and Carrie Page travel to Sarah's home to somehow defeat the Judy entity that inhabits Sarah, but I feel like they are in fact on a mission to free Sarah from her guilt and pain. Sarah is in a prison of her own making, and she can't leave it without some outside force absolving her of guilt. Also, Sarah has been repressing knowledge of Leland's acts since before Laura's death. I am not an expert on the human mind, but I think people that hold dark secrets sometimes wish for their secrets to be exposed, so they can be freed from the burden of them. Sometimes they subconsciously act in a way allows their secrets to be found out. Sarah cannot admit the truth of her family on her own, so she requires an outside agent to force her to see it. Cooper and Carrie Page are these outside agents, and Laura's scream allows Sarah to see and acknowledge the pain she is complicit in causing. Maybe Sarah's guilt is not absolved in the end, but she is finally freed from the burden of denying her tragedy.