John Bernardy
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Everyone remembers Naido these days because she has the dubious and uncomfortable distinction of being the identity housing the “true” Diane. But do you remember her roommate American Girl, played by Phoebe Augustine? I do. And I think since they were in the same location when Cooper arrived there, it stands to reason that they’d be there under similar circumstances as well. Which means someone completely different is likely to be inside American Girl, and I think the two strongest options are Audrey Horne or Laura Palmer.
It’s also possible American Girl is Naido’s guard/protector or Bailiff in charge of keeping Diane/Naido safe. The fireplace she’s watching could be a monitoring system where messages travel to and from, and she could be a Lodge presence that isn’t actually associated with any of the Lodge presences we’ve seen before now, though I seriously doubt it. If she is a Lodge presence at all, she’s likely to be a presence we’ve seen in a different state like how the Woodsmen (and the Arm, of course) have evolved into slightly different form. I would go with this being the case except for the fact that the visage is too familiar, even to Cooper. Ronette is the only person besides Cooper and Sarah who’d seen BOB, and the only one who’d seen BOB in actual life. Not even Cooper had met BOB like that until he entered the Lodge. She has this connection with Cooper, so it’s possible that American Girl holds that form due to Cooper’s associations (assuming Cooper had something to do with the ladies’ forms), but I don’t think that’s quite it either. The room isn’t a holding cell exclusively for Naido/Diane’s protection; I think it’s a witness protection room. I think Naido and American Girl are roommates, and that means more than likely that American Girl is holding a presence inside her just like Naido is housing Diane.
Is it Audrey Horne?
American Girl was wearing red just like Audrey would, and if there’s ever an American Girl, an America’s Sweetheart among the women in Twin Peaks, I can say Audrey Horne fits that bill more than most.
In Cheryl Lee Latter’s article The Pulaski Girl, she says Ronette was the often forgotten victim in the story of Twin Peaks and in the story of BOB, especially considering how close to it she’d been. It’s almost like Ronette wasn’t actually tied to the Lodges in more than a surface level, the way the story up until now has treated her. You can now say the same for Audrey mostly because she’d literally never been tied to the Black Lodge at all before the implied rape by BOB/DoppelCooper. Ronette was a witness to Laura’s death yet kept her soul, and at a meta level Audrey was as close as you can get to being involved in the Lodges without quite crossing the threshold (among other things in this article of mine I hypothesize the scenario where Audrey would’ve been the one abducted into the Lodge by Windom Earle except for the last-minute kibosh on her and Dale’s romantic subplot).
Audrey can also be tangentially linked to the Lodge because of her association with One Eyed Jack’s. Back when Lynch introduced the brothel it was in the same exact episode as Cooper’s first on-screen dream, the first time we met the Red Room, and I believe the red drapes and classical statues present in both locations were a way for Lynch to say “as above, so below”, and he purposefully tied the Red Room to One Eyed Jack’s. The wallpaper was reused in Fire Walk With Me as well, so this pretty much seals the deal that it wasn’t just Lynch’s passing whim. And if the cherry stem ties Audrey to One Eyed Jack’s she’s one step removed from being thematically tied to the Lodge. And once the Evolution of the Arm echoed her words about the girl who lived down the lane she herself is finally tied into the Lodge.
Though even before this explicit echo by the tree we had her theme music, “Audrey’s Dance,” playing the same melody as “Dance Of The Dream Man,” just with vibraphones rather than saxophone. And when she was zapped from the Roadhouse into that white room in Part 16, the Roadhouse was playing her theme backwards, as if the Lodge itself was singing along with it the way they say anything.
And then there’s the fact that both Audrey and Diane were victims of the same Lodge creatures (meaning DoppelCooper and BOB both), and could easily be housed in a room together in a Lodge version of a witness protection program because of their shared situation. I think it’s likely, since in the real world the Fusco brothers brought up Dougie Jones being in the witness protection program, that this purple room was a Lodge-style room for the same case and their new identities were assigned to them for their own protection.
Though it’s just as likely she’s Laura Palmer.
The easy meta-textual angle is that Naido’s actress Nae Yuuki played a role in Inland Empire off to the side of Laura Dern, and American Girl’s actress played Ronette, a role off to the side of Sheryl Lee in Fire Walk With Me. This is the kind of code that’s so overt it might be missed as too obvious, but we know how that kind of thing tends to go if you’ve read this article by Lindsay Stamhuis. A vote in favor of the obvious being the answer? The giant electric socket in the purple room that sends Dale through an electric socket to our world. Things sometimes are what they say they are.The witness protection program could just as easily apply to Laura as she was a victim of BOB and a person of interest to Cooper and therefore DoppelCooper. And American Girl was staring into the fire, almost like she was watching or absorbing it. And we all know fire is something Laura had been heavily involved with her entire life. She could be monitoring time on her watch because she knew she’d be actively removed from it by Cooper one day, and her reference to mother could be about Sarah housing a spirit banging on the door. And if Naido’s transition state is a Lodge-shaped Danish then maybe American Girl’s transition stage could be a Lodge-shaped Muffin. Then we’d know for sure it’s Laura in there (just checking your sense of humor).
If I had to put serious odds on American Girl’s identity, I’d say it’s Laura. Because the answer is always Laura (except when it’s not). I realize we’ll probably never learn the answer, and I don’t mind at all. It’s not about the answers, it’s about exploring the information we’re given and mining it for meaning.
Investigating the corners of the show always yields a richness and it proves the depth of the undercurrents beneath the surface of the show. Even if you’re still coming to terms with The Return, there is so much worth unearthing, just to see what it might yield. Twin Peaks may have been turned on its ear, but its depth of field hasn’t changed at all, except for possibly being an even deeper well to dive into. Just be careful because you may just find something.
Just out of curiosity (and without any pretentious sync), it’s interesting to make a parallel between Cooper’s escaping sequence from the Fire room in 3rd episode and Sarah’s attempt to stab the photo of Laura in the 17th. The hum in the background is actually the same in both the sequences and the “thuds” against the door match closely the stabbers on Laura’s photo. After the American Girl says “my mother’s coming” effectively in the next sequence on 17th Laura is thrown away with a scream from Cooper trying to save her. Could be anything (or nothing) but well…
I always felt the American Girl was a tulpa of Ronette. Before I saw her credit, I thought Phoebe Augustine was playing the same role. Much like the giant playing the fireman, a lot of people in The Return have doubles.
I think that’s totally reasonable an angle, and makes a lot of sense to be correct, I just went off of an interview w (I think it was Madchen) where they said some people are playing different characters than they did before, and I know that meant more like desk clerk Louie being a doctor in Vegas, but I applied to Phoebe Augustine too.
Before the credit I thought Ronette too but am big investigating potential signs of misderection.
I think it makes more sense to view these spaces as way stations on the journey between the Black Lodge and our own “world of blue,” if not products of the tug-of-war between the Black Lodge and White Lodge as each struggles to claim Dale as its own. Naido’s world is pinkish (White + Red) and American Girl’s world is purple (Red + Blue). As for the fire, I’d interpret that using the skeleton key provided by Mike: “One chants out between two worlds, Fire Walk With Me.”
Naido is in a waiting room like Dale was, and Dale presents an opportunity for her to “go out now,” just like Laura did. I think it’s significant that Naido is first shown in a shot that mirrors almost exactly Dorothy Vallens as she waits for Frank Booth. Is it a dim memory of the karmic connection between Dorothy and Jeffrey that leads Naido to help Dale? Or is it perhaps an aura of benevolence that surrounds the approaching head of Garland Briggs? Or is it Diane influencing Naido from within? In any case, Naido liberates herself by contributing to Dale’s liberation.
I suspect it was Naido’s intervention that fouled up Mr. C’s assassination plot. Everything had to be timed exactly right for Dougie/Dale to escape as he did: if Dale had exited through Electric Socket #3, he would have been a goner. The room of American Girl is closer to our own, since it is Red + Blue. This means that signals from the White Lodge are more garbled. Ronette housing Laura might be a natural result of this sort of scrambled signal. But I wonder … American Girl’s appearance resembles that of Lil. Might American Girl be one of Gordon Cole’s French lady friends sent out to assist Dale? In this instance, the scrambling of the signal would have occurred in the other direction.
Sure, I can find that plausible enough, but no more or less than mine or anyone’s angle as long as thought’s put into it. There’s a LOT of wiggle room and fascination available.
I agree that the wiggle room is vast, and I know that I personally generate new opinions pretty much any time I revisit the material. I’m having a hard time grokking the “witness protection” component of your theory – could you attempt to spell out who’s doing the protecting and why? Since confinement in a Lodge space seems pretty undesirable, I tend to think benevolent forces would use this tactic as a last resort.
CooperDougie was Gerard’s workaround to getting Dale and DoppelCooper in the same place at the same time. It’s kind of like a witness protection problem in that Dale’s assigned a different identity in a different town. So it IS witness protection program, just not how detectives Fusco say. The concept is mentioned by them, and there’s a loose connection to the intent rather than the execution that works well above as below. And because there’s one happening in the world side of things, usually there’s an equal concept happening on the lodge side of things. So there’s probably another “keeping someone out of harm’s way” happening up north. Which would be another version of metaphorical witness protection. And American Girl almost has to be some kind of assigned identity if her roommate is an assigned identity different from who’s inside.
I’ve written this in a number of places so I’ll stop but I feel like everything explains everything else so why would this be different?
You’re article is incredibly well thought out and was probably the starting point in developing how I arrived at my own belief on American Girl.
I don’t see American Girl as a vessel or mask for Laura. To me, American Girl IS Laura, or whom Laura really was behind the mask played by Sheryl Lee’s Laura.
To me, Twin Peaks is the dream of William “Billy” Hastings, whom is trying to escape several facts:
1. He is a murderer
2. He is the result of his mother (Judy?) having been abused by her father
3. That he was abused by his mother in turn
4. That this did not change the fact that he was hopelessly in love with her
And
5. That he killed her. By accident.
In the real world, Hastings kills women whom remind him of his mother, but whom ultimately fail in being her. They are his blue roses.
Think of the name “American Girl”. This links to the song which drives Mr. C: American Woman.
His mother, being older, would have been the American Woman. Perhaps somehow connected to the Bosomy Woman, whom resembles the hair styling of Ronette?
However, in the dream world, he masks the victim under the guise of being blonde and blue-eyed (like the wife he doesn’t love), but in reality they were all brunettes, like his mother.
Annie Blackburne eventually became the embodiment of this act. She was the blonde, blue eyed girl Dale recklessly rushed into a relationship with, but whom, after wearing the ring (which seemed to eventually lead the wearer to some truth), she became only a blank faced body with nothing inside but a warning meant for Dale’s safety. That’s all she really was afterall, what all the visages of the blue eyed victims were: masks.
Inside of Hastings “dream” Laura, his first intentional victim, became Ronette to help further the illusion he needed to distance himself from the truth. Just as I believe that Diane, played by the blonde blue eyed Laura Dern, is still just Naido, played by the Asian Nae Yuuki, whom is really just Billy’s last victim, his secretary Betty. He killed her when he let his guard down and she saw something she shouldn’t have (the monster he was and his link to Laura possibly?), as illustrated by Tracey & Sam with the box and Miriam with Richard (both women holding 2 coffee cups at some point).
This last murder, wasn’t expected so it puts him at risk because it was sloppy and unplanned. Laura’s murder wasn’t clean either, as Carrie Page’s words in the final episode indicate.
“Odessa. I tried to keep a clean house…keep everything organized…It’s a long way. In those days…I was too young
to know any better.”
He is afraid that what will ultimately be his last murder can tie him to his first intentional one, since murders eventually have detectives examining a person’s past. We can see this in Detective Macklay having made note of Hastings’ priors (which all seemed deceptively harmless) while interrogating him.
That is why we hear the mother knocking on the door of Naido’s and American Girl’s. Laura’s mother is coming for him. This being Hastings warped mind, however, one where he hid himself as the noble Dale Cooper, he envisions his victims trying to help him. They are more or less a projection of how he saw them than a true representation, just a version of himself hiding beneath them. Just as the Bosomy Woman was played by a man.
When he sees Naido in the sherriff station though, it is an intrusion he does not want or expect. She was meant to look like Diane, the other previously unseen secretary. Seeing Naido/Betty reminds him of the truth: “We live inside of a dream.”
Maddy was a similar intrusion, one where the truth tried to leak out, when the image of his victim showed up with dark hair. We can then view her role inside of the dream, and her eventual murder on a deeper level. Maddy always lamented that everyone saw her as Laura and was even eventually murdered for her resemblance. This is the real voice of Hastings victims, whom argue that they were not their killer’s mother and he should never have seen them as her.
Who was his mother?
You answer that in your piece too.
She was the other candidate for American Girl, the character she also has ties to and resembles: Audrey Horne.
We can connect American Woman to Audrey’s actress, Sherilyn Fenn, directly if we remember the famous photo of Fenn wrapped in an American flag. But depending on the series only, all the clues exist there as well, but I will center on just a few.
The Experiment’s birth of BOB and the little girl’s invasion by the frogmoth are all echoed in Audrey getting impregnated by Mr. C while she was comatose and hospitalized, following an explosion at the bank. Several echoes are seen between the events that become unnerving: money, water, sleep, explosions, impregnation.
That the bomb happened at a bank leads us to Audrey’s possible double inside of Hastings’ dream world: Teresa Banks.
BOB’s first victim.
While Yuuki worked with Dern on Inland Empire, and both Ronette’s actress, Phoebe Augustine, and Sheryl Lee were up for Laura, Teresa’s actress Pamela Gidley worked alongside Sherilyn Fenn in a film called Thrashin’. Lynch was insistent that he wanted Gidley. Banks is called a “little girl” just like Audrey and while Audrey was the Queen of Diamonds, Teresa worked out of the Red Diamond Motel. We also have that Banks, just like Audrey and the Bosomy Woman, are motel/hotel girls.
Think of what takes Dale to “Judy Land” the act of having sex, the woman in control and on top, inside of a motel room.
He wakes up the next day as a Richard.
The same name as his son with Audrey.
This all happens to the song “Mr Prayer” and Audrey was the one whom we saw praying to Dale, with a song entitled “Audrey’s Prayer” playing throughout, in the 2nd season.
I think though that, just as Irene oddly states about Teresa’s death, Hastings’ mother’s murder was an accident. Potentially fire related, and echoed in the Mitchum Bros being cleared of any wrong doing in their own hotel burning down.
But Hastings couldn’t deal with this fact, along with his conception, his mother’s abuse, both at the hands of her/his father and her abuse of him, and his feelings of love for her.
He let it destroy him in the act of his willingly destroying others, whereas he could have healed them as his alter ego does in Twin Peaks, the world he created to save his mother and him from their trauma by projecting it onto another family.
There is an overwhelming thread of mothers and sons coursing through The Return. In one we see Richard’s murder of a boy whom obviously loved the mother whom loved him back, but failed to be careful in crossing the street. In the other we see a boy, whom is neglected by his mother, but survives when he looks both ways to cross the street, only to become hypnotized by fire.
The good and loved boy dies.
The abused boy revelling in other’s deaths survives.
One last clue in the whole roles of both American Girl/Laura and Naido/Betty in regards to Audrey Horne can be found in the fact that after Laura’s death a monkey is seen shaded blue like her corpse and it whispers the name Judy.
Naido, too, is heard making monkey like sounds.
This goes back to an overlooked line from the original series. In it’s penultimate episode, Ben Horne came across his daughter sitting before a fire (in her red dress) and exclaimed: “Audrey. The most intelligent face that I’ve seen all day. You make the rest of us look like primates.”
That is how the killer views his victims. They could not live up to his mother’s memory and so they became nothing more than monkeys.
He may even view himself with this harsh, unforgiving judgement.
This also explains why there is an Experiment and an Experiment Model: a model is a replication, in less grander scale, of a specific monument etc…. of importance. The Experiment was his mother, all of the rest are models, but never the real deal.
This all better explains why a case can be made for many woman being the elusive Judy (Experiment, Naido, Laura) and not just one.
Hastings has a hard time differentiating the women he is attracted to.
Or, perhaps, as stated by Gacono & Meloy in their “The Relationship Between Cognitive Style – and Defensive Process in the Psychopath”:
“At the same time the psychopath projects internal persecutory, malevolent introjects, possibly representations of his actual parent of abuse, onto the victim. The victim is thus devalued, transformed into a “monster” through projective identification, and is now perceived as a threat.”
That is just as likely in light of the monstrous Judy.
I have question regarding your mentioning One Eyed Jack’s mirroring The Black Lodge/red room. In my latest rewatch I also noticed all three Venus statues present in the episode where Dale and Harry enters OEJ. All three statues are later shown in the Black Lodge, the last of the three (Venus of Arles) in the Return for the first time in episode 2, I think. To me, the visuals, placement and the inhibitians’ encountering of these feels very elaborate during the time we spend in The Black Lodge, so I was wondering if you could elaborate of what you make of this real world connection to OEJ – a place where we spend little time overall – and The Black Lodge, the most prominent other-worldy location in Twin Peaks.