FWWM timeline

[LostInTheMovies]

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.

[mlsstwrt]

Hey LITM. Long time no speak!

My personal view when it comes to stuff like this is that obsessive TP fans (like us) attention to detail > DL's, etc attention to detail.

I hate inconsistencies in works that I otherwise love and one thing that bothers me about Laura's diary is in the way it conflicts with the series/FWWM (e.g. Bobby shooting a guy, which happens in very different circumstances (and a very different time) in the book compared to the film. Unless he shot two guys and Laura was just so used to Bobby shooting people that she didn't bother to mention the second murder in her diary!).

Anyway that's not a great response for the purposes of your discussion but may be close to the truth.

[Mr. Reindeer]

The alt.tv.twin-peaks timeline follows the dates in the shooting script, which contains captions for each day. It begins on "Thursday - Seven Days Before." Those of us who can do math better than Lynch and Engels will calculate that this means the script actually covers the last eight days of Laura's life, not the last seven. The script does inexplicably skip over Monday the 20th entirely.

The "liberal" rearrangement of scenes in the MP is because the MP ordering reflects the original script order, whereas certain plot points were moved around in the finished edit of the feature.

[AgentCoop]

Given that Laura is stoned out of her skull when Bobby kills Deputy Cliff, it wouldn't surprise me if she didn't remember that one at all.

[Snailhead]

It's a testament to the emotional power of the film that I have never really picked up on these things...

(Really the only thing that bothers me in FWMM is that darn wig! )