Twin Peaks: The Return's Mysterious Use of Audrey Horne Has Finally Been Explain

[In the Mouth of Madness]

Twin Peaks: The Return's Mysterious Use of Audrey Horne Has Finally Been Explained By Mark Frost
by Marissa G. Muller
October 31, 2017 6:44 pm
Showtime

Twin Peaks: The Return was full of mind-boggling moments to the point where it inspired more questions than answers. One of set of them centered around Audrey Horne, the precocious high schooler turned mother of town problem child Richard. Audrey's whole presence throughout the comeback season was so confusing, it inspired all kinds of theories ranging from the whole Return playing out as Audrey's dream to her being held in a mental hospital and the short man with glasses we take to be her husband, Charlie, is actually her therapist. While we may never actually find out who Billy is, we now know at least a little more about Audrey's life thanks to the new book by co-writer Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.

As it turns out, Audrey was in a coma, albeit one that lasted nearly a month after the explosion in the bank at the end of Twin Peaks season two. Her coma lasted three and a half weeks, as Vulture notes, and, like Diane, Audrey was raped by Agent Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger. Apparently it happened while she was still in the hospital and Cooper impregnated her with her son Richard — a detail we do learn in the series — causing her to delay her high school graduation, and later opt for a GED. Audrey then proceeded to take classes at a community college, while running her own beauty salon that was a favorite among the Twin Peaks locals. She shed her loner ways somewhat when she married an accountant — presumably the man we know as Charlie — “without warning.” “Witnesses close to the situation suggest that this was more of a marriage of financial convenience than affection,” writes Frost, as Vulture reports. With it came “troubling accounts of [Audrey's] public scenes, heavy drinking, verbal abuse, and sexual infidelity.”

Four years ago, Audrey reportedly closed her salon without explanation and retreated even more so from the town, Frost writes per Vulture. “he seemed to vanish from public life, into agoraphobic seclusion, or, one troubling rumor suggests, a private care facility. The Horne family spokesperson has refused to respond to all inquiries regarding her whereabouts.” So maybe it wasn't far-fetched after all to expect that "Audrey's Dance" was just in her mind and that panned shot right after to her staring in a mirror in what appears to be a mental facility was actually where she ended up, rather than at the Roadhouse.



https://www.wmagazine.com/story/twin-peaks-the-return-audrey-horne-explained

[In the Mouth of Madness]

We Actually Find Out What Happened to Audrey Horne in Mark Frost’s New Twin Peaks Book
By Devon Ivie

For viewers who tuned into Twin Peaks: The Return to eagerly find out what happened to fan-favorite character Audrey Horne, the events of the third season proved to be surprising — and, for some, even maddening — for what befell the town’s resident high-school vixen. Finally appearing more than halfway through the season, Audrey’s few scenes were dominated by prolonged chats with a bespectacled, short man who’s later identified as her husband, with her arc ultimately concluding on the jarring visual of her waking up in a bright room. “She’s clearly been in a coma this entire time,” some viewers posited. “No, she’s actually in a mental hospital,” others argued. The theories were aplenty and rife with interpretation, which was only amplified by David Lynch and Sherilyn Fenn’s silence on Audrey’s fate. (What — you didn’t expect an easy answer from them, did you?) However, thanks to the release of Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier — an established part of the series’ canon — we actually get satisfying answers about what was going on with Audrey.

With the novel structured as classified FBI files, we learn that Audrey awoke from her coma — the result of the bank-vault explosion in the season-two finale — after three and a half weeks. As we discovered in The Return, she gave birth to her demonic son, Richard, after she was raped in the hospital by Agent Cooper’s doppelgänger, which halted her plans to continue life as a normal high-school student. She received her GED and eventually opened up a popular beauty salon in the Twin Peaks area after taking some community-college courses, mostly keeping to herself and not maintaining any social relations in the town. This changed, though, when Richard turned 10 and, “without warning,” Audrey married her longtime accountant. “Witnesses close to the situation suggest that this was more of a marriage of financial convenience than affection,” the novel explains, with “troubling accounts of public scenes, heavy drinking, verbal abuse, and sexual infidelity” on Audrey’s part. Although he’s not specifically named, we can assume that this accountant is Charlie in The Return.

Audrey’s life continued along these lines for a few years (during which she consulted a mental-health professional), until four years ago, when — again, without warning — she unexpectedly shuttered her salon and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. “he seemed to vanish from public life, into agoraphobic seclusion, or, one troubling rumor suggests, a private care facility,” the novel explains. “The Horne family spokesperson has refused to respond to all inquiries regarding her whereabouts.” The rest is up for us to decide.

So, what did we learn here? She definitely wasn’t subjected to a prolonged coma, nor did she find herself trapped in the Red Room. Logic dictates — if Audrey’s final moment in The Return is any indication — that she likely suffered some sort of mental breakdown and was confined to a private unit in a psychiatric hospital, where she dreamed up that “Audrey’s Dance” reprise at the Roadhouse. Isn’t it too dreamy?
http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/twin-peaks-audrey-hornes-story-revealed-in-mark-frost-book.html