It's not exactly mindblowing to point to Jeffrey as the film's most manipulative character — Frank Booth sees himself in him, clear as day — but after seeing another in one billion rounds of "internet dude posits that the only way to not lose young men to the allure of misogyny and fascism is to not call them on their bullshit" on social media the other day, that's what I found myself really focusing on this time out.

There is, obviously, a slight age gap between Jeffrey and Sandy — a perfectly lovestricken Laura Dern — and while the gap is vague and not inherently creepy, the fact that Jeffrey is visiting home from school, operating outside the bounds of high school student or adult with job, grants him an air of maturity and mystery that is difficult for Sandy to turn away from. He is an awakening for her, as much as Dorothy Vallens is for him, but unlike Jeffrey, who blunders into Oz because he believes he's ready to know the truth of the world, she's still a child who, despite what she hears coming from her father's office from time to time, isn't ready for any of that shit. So Jeffrey coerces her, and she, despite her reservations, goes along with him because she's in love and doesn't realize that the decisions Jeffrey is making are not in her best interest.

The most interesting stuff between them, I think, is the frisson sparked by Sandy's certainty that what Jeffrey is doing is wrong — her fascination with him, laid out in the diner scene where she says she's trying to figure out if he's a detective or a pervert, her visit to the Slow Club where she drinks none of the beer Jeffrey pours her, the way she blames herself for turning Jeffrey onto the case (which is neither true nor something Jeffrey rebuts). She's right to raise every red flag she raises, but is silenced, often by Jeffrey's insisting that he doesn't want to get her into any trouble.

The thing is, he does. Constantly. That Sandy never sees Frank Booth until his brains are splattered on the floor of Dorothy's apartment is a contrivance of near misses — she only sees her father's corrupt partner from behind, Jeffrey doesn't know he's looking for Frank at the Slow Club the first time they go — and when he thinks that universe has finally crashed into whatever he and Sandy have, when they're chased home by her ex-boyfriend Mike in a car that's kind of like Frank's except that all of the headlights are operable, the trip he lays on her is ultimately worse, as the intrusion is a naked, battered Dorothy.

It's the sort of thing that works out the way it does because ultimately Jeffrey saves the day, to the extent that there's any day to be saved. He gets to be the detective and the pervert, and while nobody has anything to say about it because everything turns out okay (thanks to Jeffrey's illegal policework and the Schwarzenegger-like artillery Lumbertown's now mostly-dead police force bring to bear on Frank's operation), there is something inextricably rotten in the heart of Jeffrey and Sandy's life together, no matter how picturesque it may seem. And yet, here we are, stuck in a world where swallowing down that rottenness is seen by many as our only bulwark against a world that's even more cruel than our own, which is already more cruel than any Lynch imagined. Fun!