Posted by: Dayve Yates

Found this, has some striking parallels

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1170307.The_Little_Girl_Who_Lives_Down_the_Lane

Alone in the darkened house, with only fire's glow and thirteen flickering candles for illumination, silent except for the mounting chords of a Liszt concerto, Rynn was preparing a solemn celebration. Until a knock at the door shattered sanctuary.

Rynn is the little girl who lives in the house at the end of the lane with her father-or so she says. No one had seen the poet, Leslie Jacobs, for a long time, and though the pungent aroma of Gauloise filled the parlor with intimations of his presence, no one was certain he was there:

Not Mrs. Hallet, the real estate agent who'd rented the old house to the eminent English poet and his daughter and whose formidable manner, product of her impeccable Long Island lineage, brooked no betrayals, especially not from a thirteen-year-old...

Not her son Frank, whose Halloween visit, intruding on Rynn's birthday rituals, had been more trick than treat and whose own insidious motives would soon lock them both in a perilous contest of will...

Not the local policeman who came to call and, lured by what he had seen, returned...

Not the shy young amateur magician who arrived on an errand-and stayed to become confidant and co-conspirator...

Who was the little girl who lived in such strange seclusion at the end of the leaf-swept land? Lonely and innocent seeking shelter from a hostile world? Or consummate liar? Each for his own reason, the Hallets were determined to find out. And it was then that the terrible secrets of the house at the end of the lane emerged. 

Moving with swift and shocking turnabout to a profoundly disturbing denouement, here is a fine and freezing novel of suspense that probes the subtle bonds of innocence to evil. 

OMG TY. Genius find.

Maybe this is Lynch's nod to this book that he was influenced by.  He seems to like to do that it seems.

Probing the nature of good and evil, the "heart of darkness" (Frost's words in an interview) was the goal of season 3. I think especially Lynch has a "woman question" about what is the essential nature of the female, and especially female innocence? That's Laura of course, and all the female leads in different ways, especially Audrey. Also, it's come to fruition in the character of Diane, who was just an idea in the original series. What is the power of the female and how does it get corrupted?

Addendum: Lucy in that scene where she shoots the fake Cooper. A genius moment that I've not seen anyone mention here yet.

There's also a (somewhat infamous) movie based on this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Girl_Who_Lives_Down_the_Lane

And another useful write-up here:

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/150187%7C0/The-Little-Girl-Who-Lives-Down-the-Lane.html

Posted by: WowBobWow

There's also a (somewhat infamous) movie based on this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Girl_Who_Lives_Down_the_Lane

Anyone seen this movie?

Posted by: cyndeewillow

Probing the nature of good and evil, the "heart of darkness" (Frost's words in an interview) was the goal of season 3. I think especially Lynch has a "woman question" about what is the essential nature of the female, and especially female innocence? That's Laura of course, and all the female leads in different ways, especially Audrey. Also, it's come to fruition in the character of Diane, who was just an idea in the original series. What is the power of the female and how does it get corrupted?

Addendum: Lucy in that scene where she shoots the fake Cooper. A genius moment that I've not seen anyone mention here yet.

 

Really loved how in this season the role of the female was flipped on its head. Lynch has been criticized in the past for his portrayal of women as victims and overly sexualized where as this series saw more powerful female roles. As you said what happens when women are abused,raped etc? What effect does this have on the archetypes of the black lodge? Could there once have been a good mother but now so twisted and dark has become a dark Sarah palmer experiment mother because of the wrongdoings by fathers, boyfriends etc but is it now too late to undo that?....oh my god I have to stop rambling on this forum ?

OKAY SO

I was trying to get screenshots of the Palmer House to compare them, you know, see if there's some indication that the house at the end of the finale was from a different year or something.  So I'm watching that amazing scene with Hawk visiting Sarah and of course I have to watch the whole scene because Grace Z is so good.  And there's that line,

"It's a GODAMNED BAD STORY, isn't it Hawk."

OH.  That's ANOTHER reference to things being a story.  Isn't that interesting. 

Sarah knows it's a BAD story.

Charlie wants to know if Audrey wants to end her story.

Audrey wants to know if her story is "The Little Girl that Lived Down the Lane."

The Arm echoes Audrey's line.

Are there any other characters that directly reference it being a story?  I suppose you could include Monica Belluci and the dream quote.  But I'm thinking more specifically of story lines. At least three of the above characters are likely related to the lodge.

I'm reminded of the part in The Neverending story (the book) when the childlike Empress goes to visit the old man who writes the Neverending story in his giant egg.  The two are never supposed to meet or be in the same room, because she is essentially the beginning and promise of all stories and he is the finisher of them.  It creates an endless loop.  There's also the idea of a character from the story also being a reader of the story and the reader being read about and so on.  If you were to create a sci fi version of that it might look a lot like this season.

I watched the movie yesterday starring Jodie Foster, that was brilliant.

At some point, Mort Shuman looks at her and says "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" 🙂

I'm glad I called it (I'll never be able to prove it, it was on one of the Audrey threads): Laura is "the little girl who lived down the lane." No logical reason because Audrey never lived near Laura, just a feeling.

This shot down my other theory, that the "girl" could be Sarah, but it's okay, I'm happy to see my Laura theory vindicated.

This really intrigues me.

Doppleganger arm says exactly the same as what Audrey says...

Is it a doppelganger Audrey who swears at Charlie? ??

Posted by: Teo Peaks

I watched the movie yesterday starring Jodie Foster, that was brilliant.

At some point, Mort Shuman looks at her and says "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" 🙂

Good stuff. 

How (if at all) would you correlate that story to our beloved TP?

I figured the girl who lives down the lane was the girl who has the amphibian crawls into her mouth (who I assume is Judy). Which seems to go along with the theme of that book.

"here is a fine and freezing novel of suspense that probes the subtle bonds of innocence to evil."

There are some potential parallels I noticed between the 1976 film starring (a very young) Jodie Foster, "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane," and Twin Peaks. I have no idea if David Lynch ever read the book or saw the film. Perhaps the allusion was entirely unintentional. Nonetheless, where we look, we are bound to find connections. Here are some that I found: 

SPOILERS for the 1976 film ahead

Jodie Foster's love interest, Mario, is played by Scott Jacoby (probably just a coincidence, but hey...) and, more interestingly, his character is a magician ("the magician longs to see..."). 

Jodie Foster's character, Rynn, has a pet hamster named Gordon. 

The basement where all the bodies are buried, like the basement of the Great Northern, is represented only by a door leading into darkness that we never get to fully see. The audience, in both cases, is left to imagine and fill in the details of what exactly lies down there in the literal basement/metaphorical subconscious. (Though in TP, we do get to see Coop's arrival on the other side of the door towards the end of S3 as he enters the place above the Convenience Store and goes to The Dutchman to visit Teapot Jeffries. With "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane," all we ever see is the face of one of the corpses, and the rest is just darkness.) 

At the beginning of the film, Rynn is celebrating her 13th birthday and we see her lighting 13 candles, all in a circle, on her birthday cake--just like the circle of sycamores at the entrance to the Black Lodge. Apparently, "Beware the 13th sycamore" was a line uttered by the Fireman in the first episode of S3--the scene in which the Fireman gives Coop instructions about Richard & Laura, 430, etc.--but the line was deleted from the final cut. One can speculate about what the 13th sycamore might be, but a couple strong contenders would be the single white tree at the entrance to the White Lodge near Jack Rabbit's Palace, and also the Evolution of the Arm and/or the Evolution of the Arm's doppelganger, both of which appear to be thin, white sycamores similar to those at the entrances to the lodges. This is especially interesting because the Evolution of the Arm is the one who repeats Audrey's line, "Is this the story of the little girl who lives down the lane...? Is it?" 

The Bob-like villain character, played by Martin Sheen, is named Frank, and he has very Bob-like intentions toward Rynn. The film deals with both consensual teenage sexuality and also the danger of an adult man molesting a young, vulnerable, teenaged girl who she "lives down the lane" in a house all by herself. 

Both Laura and Jodie Foster's character have long, straight, platinum blonde hair and, in the film, Rynn's hair becomes one of the central aspects that creepy Frank fetishizes--even as he's dying. His last dying words, in fact, are: "You should see the way the fire lights up your hair, all yellow and gold...Such lovely hair." Throughout the film he has a preoccupation with the fire in the fireplace, and the final shot is a tight close-up of Rynn's face, as she watches Frank expire, with the firelight behind her. This reminds me of Leland dying at the Sheriff's station, realizing in his final moments the horrors Bob has forced him to enact, and seeing the light surrounding Laura as Coop uses the Tibetan Book of the Dead to guide him towards the light. 

But I think the biggest connections, for me, between this film and Twin Peaks have to do with the house itself. The house is almost like its own character in the film--perhaps the main character even. It's a white house not totally dissimilar in appearance to the Palmer House, and the vast majority of everything that happens in the film happens within the house--almost like the closed pocket universes we see throughout S3 (Ben Horne seems almost "trapped" in the Great Northern, and never leaves his office throughout the season; Audrey surely seems to be in her own universe; the Roadhouse seems almost like a parallel world with its conversations between rando people that only tangentially relate to the central S3 plots, if at all; the Richard and Laura/Carrie Page/Judy pocket universe of Odessa, TX; etc...) Nearly everyone who comes into the house, aside from the girl herself, suffers a terrible fate. 

The girl also pretends that people are there when they are not in order to try to convince people that she isn't entirely alone in the house. When the friendly cop stops by for a wellness check (just like Hawk stopping by to check up on Sarah after her convenience story meltdown over turkey jerky), Rynn pretends to call to her father as though he is just up the stairs in order to try to convince the cop that she isn't living in the house all alone. She also pretends to check up on her father in his study several times, for the same purpose, throughout the film. This is very similar to the way that Alice Tremond/Mary Reber speaks to the person behind the door in the final moments of Part 18 of S3. We get the distinct sense that the facade of what Alice is presenting as reality to Cooper/Richard and Laura/Carrie is not in fact what is really going on in that house--and that there is something just behind the door, lurking, seeping, leaking from one reality to the other, and that it is much more sinister. 

In the film, this sinister thing beneath the facade is not just bodies buried in the basement, but it is a literal MOTHER--the body of Rynn's mother whom she murdered--that is buried below the floorboards. 

In Twin Peaks, it's pretty clear that the sinister thing beneath the facade is another kind of mother: Judy (within Sarah). 

I think the other potentially fruitful connection between the film and TP is the notion of the girl needing to finally save herself--because no one else is there to save her. "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane" has been called a feminist film because of its radical heroine who takes matters into her own hands. She figures out how to survive on her own after her father "walks into the sea" and doesn't hesitate to murder those who pose a serious threat to her (her mother, Mrs. Hallock, and finally, Frank). When her lover, Mario, gets seriously ill with pneumonia, she has a brief moment of doubt in herself and her ability to defend herself against predatory Frank without Mario's help. But with Mario hovering between life and death, she has to take Frank down on her own. And sure enough, when he comes creeping out of the hole in the floorboards leading to that sinister basement (the villain's face appearing from the floor as he crawls up the basement stairs...again, major Bob vibes), threatening to expose her secrets if she doesn't satisfy his pedophile fantasies, in the end Rynn has little trouble offing the dude and saving herself. 

This stands in stark contrast to a lot of the hero complex stuff surrounding some of Coop's character evolution. 

Throughout S2 of TP, we saw Coop "save" Audrey from the peril at One Eyed Jack's. Then, later in the season, he tries to "save" Annie from Windom Earle and the Black Lodge. And we see characters like Shelley, Donna, and Maddy, who in S1 and S2 seems completely reliant on men to save them from the evils of other men. Even when they think they can get themselves out of the trouble they get themselves into, they end up needing men to bail them out. 

The "Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane" reference comes up most directly in relation to Audrey in S3. She keeps trying to find the mysterious Billy, her new knight in shining armor. (Billy Zane? Is it another seepage between reality and the fiction(s) of TP, akin to having real-life Palmer House owner Mary Reber play Alice Tremond?) When she lets her guard down and reprises "Audrey's Dance" at the Roadhouse, only to have the magic spell suddenly broken by a bar fight, she runs back to Charlie and implores him to save her: "Get me out of here!" 

Both Rynn and Audrey are living in a sort of Ghostwood Forest--a house filled with ghosts, from which they either can't or don't want to escape. 

But the most obvious figure central to Cooper's hero complex is, of course, Laura.

In S2 and FWWM, we realize that Laura willingly chose to die, in a sense, in order to save herself from a worse fate. Dying was, in a way, a conscious choice she made in order to save herself from the violence of that house, and from becoming forever infected by its demons. 

At the end of Part 17 of S3, we see Cooper try--and fail--to save Laura from being murdered by Bob/Leland. His attempt to save her ends up sending her to the world of Odessa, to Judy's world, and then we watch his attempt, as Richard, to take her back to Twin Peaks to the Palmer House--to the zero point of all her trauma. In the end, whatever Carrie's scream signifies in the final moments of Part 18 (it could be interpreted both as signifying the failure of the "two birds with one stone" plan, or the success of the plan, depending on how you see it), as Carrie hears Sarah call "Laura!" and suddenly remembers who and what she is, one thing is clear: it seems that, in the end, Laura has to do this last part all on her own. Cooper stands on the sidelines, confused, lost, wondering what year it is, while Carrie seeps into Laura and lets out that bloodcurdling scream that sucks all the light, energy, and electricity out of the house. 

And all we see after that is Laura whispering a secret in Cooper's ear--the secret at the heart of it all, the "golden goose" that feeds the entire world of TP. Protecting that mystery and secrecy is integral both to TP and to "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane"--who will protect her secrets and her safety at any cost. We never really get to see what was in Rynn's basement, just as we (and Audrey) never get to hear what Tina told Charlie on the phone that was so shocking, just as we never get to hear what Laura whispered into Cooper's ear in that final moment of series. 

In the end, I think if there are real or imagined connections between the 1976 film and TP, they would be connections rooted in questions of women's dependence and independence, and the secrecy, hostility, and violence lurking just below the surface in a seemingly bucolic house.