Popular Culture Review 30.2
dark and lonely road leading from Villefranche ( again and again , always at night ), return to a particular spot in the forest , and apparently search for something lost . According to Steven Bruhm , “ What becomes most marked in contemporary Gothic�and what distinguishes it from its ancestors� is the protagonist ’ s and the viewers ’ compulsive return to certain fixations , obsessions , and blockages ” ( 261 ). Bruhm adds that this compulsive return “ center [ s ] on ... the problem of a lost object , the search for which ... usually has a psychological and symbolic dimension to it ” ( 263 ). In a series played out in the darkened world of a gigantic forest , Laurene ’ s compulsive return to this one spot is treated with ambiguity , for it is difficult if not impossible to determine what Laurene has lost and what she thinks she is going to find . Likely , she is searching for Marion�or clues that might reveal what really happened to the mayor ’ s daughter . The possibility does exist that she may not be looking for anything�or that she is looking for something that she is not supposed to find . After all , on one of her visits , Mayor Steiner follows Laurene to this spot , an action that Laurene misinterprets as a rendezvous with a former lover and one that raises the likelihood that there may be something at this place that the mayor does not want Laurene to find . However , given the psychological dimension of the series , perhaps the most plausible explanation for Laurene ’ s long and lonely drives to this one spot in the forest is that she is seeking to recover that part of herself which now lies buried beneath the mountain of the seeming indifference that has afforded a defense against the horror and dread generated by past experience and by the many visually rendered atrocities , embodied in the corpses of murder and suicide victims that she encounters in series one .
The other obsession-driven-compulsion that fuels Sheriff Weis ’ search for Marion and ultimately contributes to the
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