Don't you need somebody to love

The minute you walked in the joint

I could see you were a man of distinction

A real big spender

When Coyle sees Phyllis and starts talking about how “letting a woman control your life” leads to “perversion and despair, chaos,” he sounds genuinely disturbed. His voice gets airy, like he’s dissociating, like this isn’t a cautionary tale but a memory of his. He outright compares Phyllis to his mother, in between bouts of sexualizing her, likening Phyllis to a thundercloud, the thing he associates with sexual power. That petulant sniff he does when he’s calling her his “sweet mother” is the kicker; he knows he’s supposed to love this woman, he’s proud of her, he draws confidence from her, (“mama coyle raised no nancies,”) but he’s still upset. Leland looks at Gooseberry - who was a television star working with children while secretly being a serial killer, who operated in public but kept her worst crimes behind closed doors, who used her influence to get children to abuse drugs and commit parricide - and says that that’s what his mother was like. Phyllis takes him back to a part of his life that is equal parts pain, fear and arousal, she triggers something that sits at the root of his entire conception of women. They had Coyle call her a hysterical bitch three whole times for a reason, she gets under his skin.

It is extremely common for media depictions of mother-son incest to portray the son as the instigator, a reflection of the cultural impulse towards victim blaming. But Coyle casually shakes off the residual stigma of what happened to him by reminding us that being overly intimate with your mom is normal. Lots of people kiss their mother on the mouth. He’s not willing to criticize the patriarchal family structure his mother operated within, he’s staked too much on it, so instead, he zeroes in on the way she specifically misbehaved inside of it, chalks his own suffering up to an accidental misapplication of power into the wrong hands. You gotta wonder if Leland blames his father, on some level, for not controlling his mother properly, for not dominating the household like he was supposed to. That’s probably why he considers his violent attentions to be a favor he’s doing his victims; he associates punishment inseparably with love.