FWWM timeline
Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2016 7:11 pm
I KNOW there's a thread for this already but for the life of me I can't find it so - sorry - here we go again. Mods, please feel free to move this to the proper place if you know it offhand.
Kinda pedantic but we've got as much as 12 months to kill, so here goes...
I'm curious what people make of the somewhat convoluted FWWM/Missing Pieces timeline, especially since scenes were quite liberally rearranged from the script (where we can get a firmer sense of which days are which). The logical assumption would be that - as originally planned - this is "the last 7 days of Laura Palmer" hence it takes place between the afternoon of Friday, February 17, 1989 and the pre-dawn hours of Friday, February 24, 1989. There are a few complications, however.
- Leland says "I came home Friday" referring to the events of the second day - so Laura's story must begin on Thursday, February 16, 1989.
- Is there a missing day? Alt.tv.twin-peaks skips over Monday, February 20, 1989, presumably so that Laura can go to the nightclub on a Saturday, and then out for breakfast with Leland on a Sunday. But it's worth noting that February 20 was President's Day so Laura might have had the day off from school - and this would also explain why the Pink Room was so busy on a Sunday night (though that crowd probably isn't limited to weekend warriors anyway).
- Laura's costume is usually a reliable guide to what day it is, but her red shirt pops up repeatedly. It appears on Thursday night in the finished film, a day or two after Laura's dream (so Saturday or Sunday) in the Missing Pieces, and again on Wednesday, the day she meets James outside her house in the film. She must change into it a lot! (Obviously all those scenes were originally shot to take place on the same day, a Saturday according to the script but continuity was violated for aesthetic reasons in the final cut.)
- Lynch goes out of his way to include a random b-roll shot of a church in the Missing Pieces. Why? It's one of the few non sequitur establishing shots in the assembly; maybe he just liked the look of it. Regardless of the reason, its placement clearly positions Laura's night as a Sunday rather than a Saturday. This could mean two things for the previous scene, in which Laura (in the red sweater) comforts her mother. Either that scene takes place the previous day, transitioning to the church shot to show the passage of a day, or it takes place same morning (suggested by the fluidity of the transition) - leaving Laura's "morning after the dream" scene as the only one to take place on Saturday. Either way, Saturday night is clearly - and with surprising emphasis - skipped over in both the film and the Missing Pieces.
Kinda pedantic but we've got as much as 12 months to kill, so here goes...
I'm curious what people make of the somewhat convoluted FWWM/Missing Pieces timeline, especially since scenes were quite liberally rearranged from the script (where we can get a firmer sense of which days are which). The logical assumption would be that - as originally planned - this is "the last 7 days of Laura Palmer" hence it takes place between the afternoon of Friday, February 17, 1989 and the pre-dawn hours of Friday, February 24, 1989. There are a few complications, however.
- Leland says "I came home Friday" referring to the events of the second day - so Laura's story must begin on Thursday, February 16, 1989.
- Is there a missing day? Alt.tv.twin-peaks skips over Monday, February 20, 1989, presumably so that Laura can go to the nightclub on a Saturday, and then out for breakfast with Leland on a Sunday. But it's worth noting that February 20 was President's Day so Laura might have had the day off from school - and this would also explain why the Pink Room was so busy on a Sunday night (though that crowd probably isn't limited to weekend warriors anyway).
- Laura's costume is usually a reliable guide to what day it is, but her red shirt pops up repeatedly. It appears on Thursday night in the finished film, a day or two after Laura's dream (so Saturday or Sunday) in the Missing Pieces, and again on Wednesday, the day she meets James outside her house in the film. She must change into it a lot! (Obviously all those scenes were originally shot to take place on the same day, a Saturday according to the script but continuity was violated for aesthetic reasons in the final cut.)
- Lynch goes out of his way to include a random b-roll shot of a church in the Missing Pieces. Why? It's one of the few non sequitur establishing shots in the assembly; maybe he just liked the look of it. Regardless of the reason, its placement clearly positions Laura's night as a Sunday rather than a Saturday. This could mean two things for the previous scene, in which Laura (in the red sweater) comforts her mother. Either that scene takes place the previous day, transitioning to the church shot to show the passage of a day, or it takes place same morning (suggested by the fluidity of the transition) - leaving Laura's "morning after the dream" scene as the only one to take place on Saturday. Either way, Saturday night is clearly - and with surprising emphasis - skipped over in both the film and the Missing Pieces.