StealThisCorn wrote:I was watching the Missing Pieces again and a few more details I hadn't noticed before sparked some new curiosities I thought I might as well share.
There seems to be some kind of connection in the series with the trees and spirits ("Ghostwood", Log Lady, Josie in the drawer pull?). There's that shot of the Lodge entities dissolving into the forest tree line too. Whereas in the film there is a new emphasis on electricity, with shots of power lines, frequent electrical humming, static, and the mysterious Electrician spirit of course. Right at the beginning of the "Above the Convenience Store" extended scene, there is a zoom in of the Number 6 powerline/telephone pole and something suddenly occurred to me. In the living woods, maybe the spirits use the web of life as a conduit of some kind, but in areas of civilization where the woods have been cleared to make room for human development, what is there? Power lines and telephone poles! Made from trees and connected by wires that stretch all over continents. So maybe that is what is going on with the power line thing, they are like the trees of the city, connected by electricity rather than organic life.
Love this.
And for the moment I'll play Fernanda's role with a quote & link (though in this case I don't think they are particularly revealing, except of Lynch's love for wood and I guess some vague sense of artistic creation and assembling different objects from the same source):
"There is an abundance of fish in the sea but tonight I would like to speak about wood. There are many times in the world when the phone rings and someone is inquiring about wood. This happens primarily at lumberyards and in this case it is necessary to have a phone. It is only natural that trees are growing and that they are made of wood. Much happiness can from observing a tree and the same can be said about observing the many shapes fashioned out of wood. Quite often when we are talking about beauty, we are talking about wood."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmXkTNJzawo
When Leland first calls Teresa Banks, if you look closely, you'll see she doesn't have the ring on her finger. But she does when she calls him from the telephone booth to blackmail him. I hadn't noticed this before. So maybe Mrs. Chalfont (or the One-Armed Man perhaps?) gave her the ring after Leland started having an affair with her, knowing that BOB, inside Leland, had taken notice of her, and scheming to claim her garmonbozia for the Lodge, which BOB later stole.
Increasingly, especially watching ep. 16 a few more times and noticing the role Cooper's ring plays there, I think the ring = knowledge/wisdom/truth.
Teresa wears it when she realizes Leland's relationship to Laura. Laura receives it in a dream after coming perilously close to discovering her father is Bob (and vice-versa). The one-armed man waves it in both Leland's and Laura's faces after Leland remembers seeing Laura & Ronette in the motel room and just before Laura forces him to admit that he was home the other day when she saw Bob. Later that night, we cut between Laura remembering Teresa's ring and Leland remembering her murder. And Cooper tells Laura not to take the ring which is consistent with him being imprisoned in the Lodge by his own confusion. Hell, even the now-canonical scene of the nurse and Annie could be read in that light. The nurse takes the ring from Annie after hearing her say the bit about Cooper being in the Lodge, just like Laura did: she is now the only living, conscious person to have full knowledge of Cooper/Bob's situation even if she doesn't yet understand it. Does Teresa wear the ring when she sees Leland leave the motel? Or does it only appear on her finger when she goes back inside and cuddles with Laura and Ronette on the bed (i.e. AFTER she's put 2 and 2 together w/ Leland and she/we have seen the boy with the mask come out of the bushes and dance). If the latter, that's further confirmation of the ring's significance.
It gets trickier at the end of the film when the ring rolls into the train car and saves Laura from possession/delivers her to death (something I suspect was added in post-production with inserts and tricky editing). What new knowledge would it represent at this point? It arrives when Ronette is freed by the angel and opens the door to let the ring in so, indirectly, the appearance of a good spirit (which Laura had earlier seen disappear from her picture/life) is what delivers the ring to Laura. One could say that it is knowledge of this goodness, until now absent from Laura's world, which triggers the ring's final and crucial appearance. As I've already noted on these boards, the angel's rescue of Ronette in the train car visually and dramatically echoes Laura's rescue of Donna in the Pink Room. And Ronette and Donna have been established several times as mirrors of one another and, in turn, representatives of Laura's two sides. With that in mind, I think the appearance of the angel, the liberation of Ronette, and the delivery of the ring are Laura's realization not only of a general out-there goodness but a goodness within herself, a knowledge of the power of her own love and compassion which in this case save Ronette (& simultaneously her own "bad side").
This is consistent with love being continuously posited as the opposite of fear in Twin Peaks: Leland, along with many of the other townspeople and even Cooper himself fall or fail not because of hate, but because of fear (even when they love as well - in Cooper's case the two seem to be mixed together, but fear ultimately wins out and traps him in the Lodge). The only characters to survive the story unscathed are Andy & Lucy, Maj. & Mrs. Briggs, Bobby & Shelly...the lovers. (Bobby & Shelly's bills is even explicitly contrasted with Leo's state of primal fear in Lynch's cutaway to Leo in the cabin holding the spider-string.) The song which plays over the ending is called The Voice of Love and in the film's final movement the delivery of pain and suffering is contrasted with the delivery of love and grace with the angel's appearance.
So I think the ring is an embodiment (I'll try to avoid the loaded term "symbol") of knowledge and that the ultimate knowledge, which saves Laura, is knowledge of her own goodness, its power, and the larger goodness of the universe. This also goes well with what she says Between Two Worlds and is certainly consistent with Lynch's vision, which depicts the universe as, for all its darkness, confusion, and unhappiness, ultimately a place of great and serene beauty.
EDIT: Just checked up on FWWM. Teresa IS wearing the ring in the scene with Leland outside the motel. However, she's also carrying a tray of ice which mostly blocks our view of her left hand as she approaches Leland (I only noticed the ring by freeze-framing) and when she stops to talk to him the frame line is, conspicuously, just above where the ring would be. You can then very fleetingly see the ring on her finger as she walks away from Leland and turns back to look in his direction. Also worth noting that in the earlier Leland/Teresa scene, when he covers her eyes and asks her who he is, her left hand is also hidden (in fact her entire arm is under Leland's body). There appears to be a ring on her finger in the Flesh World photo but it looks like it's on another finger and is a simple band.
Is all of this part of Lynch's visual strategy to reveal Teresa's ring only after she learns the truth about Leland (in which case the brief one- or two-frame slip as she approaches is just a flub)? If so, it's rather brilliant and completely consistent with his unwillingness to delineate between the natural and supernatural (since the ring doesn't "magically" appear on her finger with new knowledge but rather isn't seen by us until that point; it could be or not be there). If not, I guess it's a contradiction to the idea that Teresa's ring is triggered by her knowledge of Leland.