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Twin Peaks FAQ
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TWIN PEAKS
FREQUENTLY ANSWERED QUESTIONS
Last revision: 7/24/91
(Many of these concern what various people said. Many thanks to Bart
J. Geraci, the man with the closed caption decoder. Thanks also to
Tom Neff for numerous suggestions and text of some entries.)
WARNING: This article may contain references to any episode in the
entire series, as it has been shown in the U.S.
Questions answered in this article:
==================================
TWIN PEAKS production details:
-----------------------------
1. a) Where is Twin Peaks supposed to be?
b) How big a town is Twin Peaks?
2. What year is the show set in?
3. a) Isn't TWIN PEAKS supposed to cover one day per episode?
b) If so, why does the moon appear to change phase so strangely?
4. Do TWIN PEAKS episodes have names? What's the best way of
referring to episodes?
5. Was there an episode broadcast January 26, 1991, in the US?
#6. Is it true that TWIN PEAKS has been cancelled? Is this the end of
# TWIN PEAKS?
7. What are "closed captions" and why are people using them to settle
arguments over exactly who said what on TWIN PEAKS?
8. How were the funny voices in Cooper's dream done?
TWIN PEAKS actors:
-----------------
9. Wasn't the Giant also on Star Trek: The Next Generation?
10. Didn't the boy with the creamed corn look an awful lot like David Lynch?
11. a) Is Miguel Ferrer (the actor who plays Albert Rosenfield) related
to Jose Ferrer, the movie actor?
b) Is this Miguel Ferrer the same one who's credited on the
recording of "Fishheads"?
12. Was the guy who plays BOB someody Lynch "found" working on the set?
13. Weren't some of the TWIN PEAKS people in ROBOCOP?
TWIN PEAKS-related merchandise:
------------------------------
14. What's this "secret diary" that people keep citing?
15. Has anybody noticed that Julee Cruise's "Floating Into The Night"
album (which includes several tunes heard in TWIN PEAKS
episodes) gives special thanks to, among other people, Bob (no
last name)?
16. I've just seen/heard about a videotape/laser-disc called TWIN
PEAKS available in Europe/Japan/etc. What is its
relationship to the series?
17. Where is there an anonymous FTP source for Twin Peaks material?
Outside issues raised by TWIN PEAKS:
-----------------------------------
18. Has anybody mentioned the possible connection between: [various things]
19. Can a person's hair really turn white "over night" like Leland's did
between the first and second seasons?
20. Haven't I heard of the White Lodge somewhere before?
21. Did you know that the book COMMUNION by Whitley Streiber talks
about the connection between UFO's and owls?
Questions on plot points:
------------------------
22. a) What language was the little boy with the creamed corn speaking?
b) What did he say?
23. a) What was that ditty Leland was singing just after his hair turned
white, and what does it mean?
b) What was Leland singing when Cooper and Truman stopped him for
driving his car erratically?
24. Who was standing outside the window while Josie was seducing Harry?
25. What were the three predictions that The Giant made to Cooper?
26. What was the poem that "Mike" recited in Cooper's dream, and later at the
sheriff's station?
27. Maddy notices a burning smell just before she's attacked by Leland/BOB.
Didn't Jacoby say he smelled burned oil in the hospital when Jacques
was killed? Does this mean that Leland was BOB when he killed
Jacques?
28. Who killed Laura Palmer?
AND NOW, ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS:
TWIN PEAKS production details:
-----------------------------
1. a) Where is Twin Peaks supposed to be?
-- It's in the State of Washington, but where exactly is not clear. In
Cooper's initial monolog to Diane as he's driving into town, he states
that it's five miles south of the Canadian border and twelve miles
west of the state line. That would seem to place it in the northeast
corner of the state. However the surrounding geography is like that
of the Cascade Mountains in western WA. References to cities such as
Seattle and Tacoma, but not Spokane, also seem to place it in western
WA. The show's creators seem to have smooshed the state so that it
all fits west of the Cascades. Many of the outdoor shots were filmed
in Snoqualmie, WA (and the surrounding area), which is in the
Cascades, not too far from Seattle. The waterfall is there; the Great
Northern Hotel is really the Salish Lodge (although it doesn't look
like the GNH on the inside--the interiors of both the GNH and the
Packard/Martell home were filmed in the Kiana Lodge); and the RR Diner
is really the Mar-T Cafe, which really does have heavenly cherry pies.
b) How big a town is Twin Peaks?
-- Again, that's not exactly clear. The population sign that's shown at
station breaks and on the TWIN PEAKS sound track album cover indicates
51,201. According to _Twin Peaks Behind the Scenes: An Unofficial
Guide to Twin Peaks_, by Mark Altman, Lynch/Frost originally conceived
of it as 5,201, but the network insisted on increasing it. This has
resulted in mixed cues within the show. For instance, Twin Peaks
doesn't have a resident circuit court judge, which any town of 51K+ in
the U.S. would; it has a sheriff's department but no police department
(sheriff is usually a county rather than a city office). On the other
hand, it does have its own hospital, a fancy department store, and a
large hotel. It seems Lynch/Frost hasn't worried too much about being
consistent on this point.
2. What year is the show set in?
-- References in the first season placed it in 1989. However, _The
Secret Diary of Laura Palmer_ (see Question 14) places the action in
1990. Sources on the production team (i.e., Scott Frost) indicate
that it's been sort of miraculously moved up to 1990. Apparently, the
producers and directors have trouble keeping track of what day it's
supposed to be in Twin Peaks, never mind what year.
3. a) Isn't TWIN PEAKS supposed to cover one day per episode?
-- Yes, in general, that is the convention used. There are occasional
exceptions; at one point, three days passed in Twin Peaks between TWIN
PEAKS episodes. Sometimes an episode will start in the middle of the
night preceding that episode's "day". As mentioned in Answer 2,
Lynch/Frost doesn't keep track of what day it is as well as the fans
do. For instance, teenagers in Twin Peaks don't seem to go to school
much, but they have been seen in school on days that were supposed to
be Saturdays.
b) If so, why does the moon appear to change phase so strangely?
One "day" it's full, the next half, etcetera.
-- The moon appears to be used pretty much symbolically. There are only
a few stock moon inserts used in the series, e.g., a closeup of the
diagonal half-moon floating in a black sky. No particular effort at
astronomical accuracy is evident.
4. Do TWIN PEAKS episodes have names? What's the best way of
referring to episodes?
-- The episodes are not named. Whether it's the best way or not,
Lynch/Frost number the episodes with four-digit numbers, where the
first digit is the season number, and the others are the order within
that season. This system was apparently adopted after the pilot was
produced, so the pilot is 1000, the first one-hour episode is 1001,
and so on. However for the second season, the two-hour season
premiere is 2001.
5. Was there an episode broadcast January 26, 1991, in the USA? Were
there in fact several regional variants broadcast? Did we
learn who shot Cooper? Did Dick Tremaine die?
-- No, the 1/26 episode was a collective and spontaneous hoax started by
R o d Johnson and carried on straightfaced by numerous
alt.tv.twin-peaks posters.
6. Is it true that TWIN PEAKS has been cancelled? Is this the end of
TWIN PEAKS?
-- TWIN PEAKS has been cancelled. There will not be any more television
episodes. Lynch/Frost Productions has expressed some interest in
producing a cinema-release TWIN PEAKS movie, which would be a
"prequel," depicting events up to Laura Palmer's death, including the
Theresa Banks murder. However, this project is currently on hold, in
part due to Kyle MacLachlan's reluctance to continue as Agent Cooper
(his five-year contract covers only the television series).
7. What are "closed captions" and why are people using them to settle
arguments over exactly who said what on TWIN PEAKS?
-- Closed Captions (CC) are the text of a show's dialog transmitted on a
side channel along with the standard picture and sound signals.
Hearing-impaired viewers can install a special CC decoder on their TV
sets to display this text on the screen. This means that all the
dialog in the show is also being broadcast in written form, so that in
principle the question "What did he say?" can always be answered
authoritatively -- IF, that is, you believe that the CC's are
reliable! There are two ways CC's are created: by people who sit and
listen to a show and type in what they hear -- live events are
generally done this way -- or by people with access to the script.
Some, if not all, network shows are done the second, more careful way.
We don't know for certain that TWIN PEAKS is such a show, but the lack
of phonetic mistakes observed in the PEAKS captions so far suggests
indicate that the captioners use scripts. In particular it seems
unlikely that correct French like <<J'ai une a^me solitaire>> would
come from anywhere but a script.
8. How were the funny voices in Cooper's dream done?
-- Before shooting the scene, the actors were recorded reading their
lines. The recording was then played to them backwards, and they
memorized how to imitate it. Each shot in the scene was acted in
reverse order, with the actors saying their "backwards" lines. The
film was then reversed so that the actions came out in the right
order, and the words came out double-reversed. Unfortunately, the
words weren't very intelligible, so subtitles were added.
TWIN PEAKS actors:
-----------------
9. Wasn't the Giant also on Star Trek: The Next Generation?
-- Yes, he is Carel Struycken, who played Mr. Homm, Deanna Troi's
mother's personal assistant. No, he did not play Lurch on the Addams
Family (although it has been reported that he will play Lurch in an
upcoming AF movie).
10. Didn't the boy with the creamed corn look an awful lot like David Lynch?
-- Yes, that's because he's Austin Jack Lynch, David Lynch's son. (For
handy reference, look at Gordon Cole (Cooper's boss): he's played by
David Lynch.)
11. a) Is Miguel Ferrer (the actor who plays Albert Rosenfield) related
to Jose Ferrer, the movie actor?
--Yes, Miguel is Jose's son.
b) Is this Miguel Ferrer the same one who's credited on the
recording of "Fishheads"?
--Yes, Ferrer was part of Barnes and Barnes who recorded "Fishheads"
(Bill Mumy was the other half). Ferrer and Mumy also make up a band
called Seduction of the Innocent which plays very occasionally at
comics conventions. They have also written some comic books together.
12. Was the guy who plays BOB someody Lynch "found" working on the set?
-- Yes. Frank Silva was an "on-set dresser" -- that's someone who helps
cast members with their costumes on the set, as opposed to back at the
dressing room -- when Lynch saw him and tapped him to play Laura's
demonic killer. He is credited as a dresser in the pilot.
13. Weren't some of the TWIN PEAKS people in ROBOCOP?
-- Yes, three of them: Miguel Ferrer (Albert Rosenfield), Ray Wise
(Leland Palmer), and Dan O'Herlihy (Andrew Packard). No, Clarence
Williams III was NOT in ROBOCOP!
TWIN PEAKS-related merchandise:
------------------------------
14. What's this "secret diary" that people keep citing?
--_The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer_ was written by Jennifer Lynch
(David's daughter), and is published in the U.S by Pocket Books, and
in the U.K. by Penguin Books. It is officially sanctioned by
Lynch/Frost Productions (the jacket says it is "A Twin Peaks Book").
It's supposed to be the text of the diary that was discovered in the
*second* season of the show.
15. Has anybody noticed that Julee Cruise's "Floating Into The Night"
album (which includes several tunes heard in TWIN PEAKS
episodes) gives special thanks to, among other people, Bob (no
last name)?
-- Yes.
16. I've just seen/heard about a videotape/laser-disc called TWIN
PEAKS available in Europe/Japan/etc. What is its
relationship to the series?
--It's a modified version of the series pilot, which was shown as a TV
movie in Europe. It ends differently, with the killer being caught.
The sequence which made up Cooper's dream in the series is tacked onto
the end, as an epilog labelled "25 years later". In the series, when
Cooper describes his dream to Truman and Lucy, he describes all the
action that appeared in the Euro-version that diverged from the series
action as being part of his dream.
17. Where is there an anonymous FTP source for Twin Peaks material?
-- The TP anonymous FTP site is audrey.sait.edu.au [130.220.16.88],
directory /pub/twin-peaks. You can submit things to it by uploading to
directory /Upload. The keeper is Peter Asenstorfer at the University
of South Australia ([email protected]). Anything submitted to
the Cribsheet to TP Resources (maintained by Keith Dawson,
[email protected]) also makes its way to the FTP archive.
Outside issues raised by TWIN PEAKS:
-----------------------------------
18. Has anybody mentioned the possible connection between:
* BOB and J. R. "Bob" Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius?
* All the donuts they eat in Twin Peaks, and JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner"
speech? What he literally said was "I am a jelly donut."
* Agent Dale Cooper and D.B. Cooper, the guy who hijacked a plane and
then parachuted over Washington State with a whole bunch of money
and was never found?
* Ben and Jerry Horne and Ben and Jerry's brand ice cream (in one scene
the brothers Horne are even shown eating ice cream)?
* Sarah's vision of a white horse, and Mr. Ed?
* " " " " " " " Laura' pony, Troy?
* " " " " " " " Death, which "rides a pale horse"?
* " " " " " " " heroin, also known as "white horse"
(maybe Leland/BOB shot her up with
heroin)?
* Sherriff Harry S. Truman, and the US President, and the old man
of the same name who refused to be moved off Mount St. Helens
(in Washington State) when it erupted?
-- Yes for all of the above.
19. Can a person's hair really turn white "over night" like Leland's did
between the first and second seasons?
--Generally, only folklore supports this ("it happened to a friend of a
friend of mine"). Since hair above the scalp is dead matter, it can't
change color without dyes or bleaches. It's possible that a person
with mixed gray and dark hair could lose all their older, darker hair
over a short period of time (a few days or weeks) due to a physical or
psychological trauma, which would leave them with just gray hair. Or
a dark-haired person might lose all their dark hairs and grow in gray
ones over a similar span of time, but "over night" seems physically
implausible.
20. Haven't I heard of the White Lodge somewhere before?
-- Could be. Jerry Boyajian found an amazingly detailed reference to it
in an out-of-print 1926 adventure fantasy called THE DEVIL'S GUARD
(a.k.a. RAMSDEN) by Talbot Mundy. In the novel, the White Lodge is a
secret Tibetan brotherhood whose members study Life for the love of
it, combat evil, and mysteriously influence events. The Dalai Lama is
an external representative of the White Lodge. This obviously fits
TWIN PEAKS like a glove, and Lynch/Frost may have read it. There are
other references occasionally dug up; if you have a good one, by all
means share it!
21. Did you know that the book COMMUNION by Whitley Streiber talks
about the connection between UFO's and owls?
-- Yes, Streiber says that people who have been abducted by UFO's often
have "masking" memories of owls, rather than aliens (cf., Major
Brigg's only memory of his disappearance was an huge image of an owl).
Questions on plot points:
------------------------
22. a) What language was the little boy with the creamed corn speaking?
-- French
b) What did he say?
-- J'ai une a^me solitaire: I have a solitary soul (according to the
closed captions). This was also the text of Harold Smith's suicide
note.
23. a) What was that ditty Leland was singing just after his hair turned
white, and what does it mean?
-- The full lyrics of the song are:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats
and little lambzy divy.
A kiddly divy, too, wooden shoe?
Now if the words sounds queer,
and funny to your ear,
a little bit jumbled and jivy,
Sing:
Mares eat oats and does eats oats
and little lambs eat ivy.
A kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?
b) What was Leland singing when Cooper and Truman stopped him for
driving his car erratically?
-- "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from the musical _Oklahoma_. It
was the tune that Leland danced to at the Great Northern earlier in
the same episode, and which Cooper was whistling just before he and
Truman stopped Leland.
24. Who was standing outside the window while Josie was seducing Harry?
-- A number of theories have been suggested, with Jonathon (Josie's
"cousin") being the most popular; others theories include Leo, Pete,
and Andrew Packard. However, Tim Holland, the director of the episode
in question, is quoted in _Twin Peaks Behind the Scenes_ as saying it
was Jonathon (well, he says "the Oriental man", but he means
Jonathon).
25. What were the three predictions that The Giant made to Cooper?
-- (1) a man in a smiling bag; (2) the owls are not what they seem; (3)
without chemicals, he points. The giant also said something about
"Leo locked in a hungry horse," and that there was a clue at Leo's
house. However, these were not the "predictions" which were to be
fulfilled before Cooper gets his ring back. The former refers to the
fact that Leo was in jail in Hungry Horse, Montana when Theresa Banks
was killed, and the latter refers to the Circle Brand boots that were
found with the cocaine at Leo's house.
26. What was the poem that "Mike" recited in Cooper's dream, and later at the
sheriff's station?
-- "Through the darkness of future past
the magician longs to see
one chants out between two worlds
'Fire walk with me.'"
(There has been much debate over whether the second-to-last line is
"one chants out" or "one chance out". The closed captions indicate
"chants".)
27. Maddy notices a burning smell just before she's attacked by Leland/BOB.
Didn't Jacoby say he smelled burned oil in the hospital when Jacques
was killed? Does this mean that Leland was possessed by BOB
when he killed Jacques?
-- No. Later, under hypnosis, Jacoby corrected himself and said that he
smelled the burned smell just before he was attacked at the gazebo,
but not at the hospital. _Twin Peaks Behind the Scenes_ indicates
that Jacoby's attacker was Leland/BOB, although this was not revealed
in any episode.
28. Who killed Laura Palmer?
For those in places where it's been revealed, who weren't
paying attention or didn't get it, and those elsewhere who
want to annoy their friends: (Skip now if you don't want to
know.)
--Laura's father, Leland, killed her. He was possessed at the time by an
evil spirit named BOB (whose "true" face Sarah Palmer and Maddy
Ferguson saw in visions, and Agent Cooper saw in his dream.) Leland
had been a host to BOB since childhood, and had been abusing and
molesting Laura from her early teen years, if not earlier. Leland/BOB
had a habit of cutting Laura with many small cuts during their
"sessions" together; Laura died of blood loss from these wounds.
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