This paper offers a thorough analysis of Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures and My Crasy Life – the three films Jean-Pierre Gorin directed in the USA, where he immigrated following the dissolution of his creative partnership with Jean-Luc Godard. As Gorin, at the time, only half-assimilated to America and its culture, the subjects of this Transatlantic Trilogy echo his own outsider status. The idiosyncratic language of Poto and Cabengo, the twin girls stuck between the media trying to turn them into a news-worthy spectacle and their parents trying to use the media attention to quickly move towards achieving the American dream, allows Gorin to explore the relationship between the twins’ odd utterances and the images, including his own, being constructed around this media event. From this, he moves to the exploration of two vastly different imaginary Americas crafted by a group of model railroaders and his own mentor, painter and film critic Manny Farber, while cross-referencing their creations with classical Hollywood cinema, principally the films of Howard Hawks and William A. Wellman. Finally, Gorin films members of a Samoan street gang from Long Beach who are trying to (spiritually) reconnect with their heritage while both reveling in the empowerment gang culture brings them and mourning those who died because of it. Gorin consciously avoids portraying their lives as they tend to be seen in the media, letting the gangsters be seen and heard however they want. Through his relentless interrogation of sounds and images coming from America at its most (in)visible and (in)audible, Jean-Pierre Gorin interrogates what cinema itself can do, and how.