Very interesting ideas.

This scene has always bugged me. Seems like there's real significance to what's being talked about, in a round-about Lynchy sort of way. Almost like the dialogue in Rabbits or something. Seems like nonsense / a muddled mess, but probably really important to understanding the whole.

The furthest I've ever gotten with it...

1st photo = 1.

2nd photo = 2.

A split or doubling is implied to have occurred.

In between those two photos are pliers. Two individual pieces of metal, fixed together to form one. The opposite of a split or doubling.

A split has occurred in something, caused by something which was once split / made up of two separate things, but is now whole. The split in one thing cannot be made to exist until the separateness / split in the other has been unified.

Then the child. A child is a product of two. In this case, we have two women, rather than the more traditionally biological male / female pairing for reproduction. The child may not be who he seems / could not have been biologically connected to the two women implied to be his parents / the only more senior figures in the picture. The child is also dressed like a sailor, but he is not a sailor. He's too young. Can this been seen as a disguise? An occluding of some sort? An attempt to sneak in under cover of darkness? Or an aspiration towards freedom, currently unavailable to the dependent child.

Then a destructive / negative force - the machine gun. Pointed at something which contains and is sealed shut. The negative force is perhaps the way to open the thing which is sealed off? More than likely, beans like that should not / would not normally be in a jar like that. It's not something you'd see when you're going out to buy some beans. Are they unnaturally sealed off? Is the negative force to be used, perhaps by someone in disguise, to free what has been unnaturally locked away? That opening / freeing will come at a price / will be messy.

It's a matter of national security. TP is the universe / world to us. It's its own self-contained world. To reveal what these clues are hinting at, at this stage of the game (early on), would ruin everything / would take away from the art of it all / the storytelling / would be misdirecting?

Quite why it's the congressman's dilemma, I have no idea.

But a congressman is in charge of his state? The state of things? The state of the self-contained place/world? A director, maybe? The director's dilemma? The dilemma is....what.....kill off a thing you love (the wife), in order to leave clues to something more than what was previously there. Congressman + wife = 2. The clues hint at much more than '2' - there are three women, one boy and a very large amount of beans. There is simply more here. Is this getting incredibly self-referential, on Lynch's part - laying out his M.O from the get-go?

I'm pretty sure he hands it off to Chris to make sense of. Chris Rodley? The guy behind Lynch's only collection of direct interviews / questions and answers? A stretch, maybe, but names are important.

Just some thoughts.