I find the parallels between Becky's drugged (?), jealous rage door shooting (six shots) and the little "hunter" boy's shooting (two shots) out of the window an interesting "comment". And there is Mr C's unwieldy "friend in the glove compartment" and Ray's hidden friend, and the Mitchum's, and our sheriff's and FBI team, including the corrupted ones, all carrying. And the atom bomb is the biggest bullet/love letter. A dark impasse.
Definitely, the scenes in this episode were a none too subtle dig at the gun lobby.
"Wild At Heart" was a commentary on violence in American society.
IMO, The Return exhibits a new kind of topicality for Lynch that I find both intriguing and compelling... It seems plausible that the young woman in the car driven by the honking woman at the scene of the RR shooting is overdosing, the second reference to an overdose on the part of a young person thus far (recall that the other took place in the highschool classroom, where the revelation of Laura's murder was first made to Donna, James and their classmates....)
Chad invites interpretation as an allegorical representation of the crisis of white male subjectivity under post-Fordist labor regimes -- that is, the myth of meritocracy/bootstrapping in the post-recession era, the stigma of white male unemployment and the psychological toll thereof...
I wonder, however, why "Sparkle" is identified as a foreign and not a domestic threat (i.e., a "Chinese designer drug" smuggled over the Canadian border). The painful truth for American society right now is that the heroin epidemic in rural communities is very much a product of the overproduction/overprescribing of opiates/opioids, a function of problematic profit motives/shareholder returns on the part of multinational pharmaceutical corporations and revenue structures for health insurers, care providers, etc.
You'd think that Lynch's critique of the encroachment of industry/modernization into the natural world (e.g., the logging metaphor of the sawmill now generalized into the existential metaphor of the Trinity test), he'd likewise do so with respect to prescription pharmaceuticals, not merely psychoactive drugs (i.e., coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana)...
...Or, perhaps this would be too topical. The allusion to The Exorcist , after all, imparts a measure of ambiguity to the putative critique of the opioid/gun violence epidemics... I'm sure Showtime is relieved!
"Wild At Heart" was a commentary on violence in American society.
Indeed! That said, I've always found Lynch's statement that Wild At Heart was a response to his impression of an ever-more violent and frightening society to be intriguing given the film was released in May, three months before the Persian Gulf War began, nine months before the Rodney King beating by the LAPD, etc. Whereas Twin Peaks was topical in that it followed on the heels of the Jacob Wetterling tragedy, the violence /madness of Wild At Heart seems prescient in hindsight...
Fire walk with