Comments on .: Twin Peaks - Under The Sycamore Tree - Redux

Oh my ! That's VERY impressive ! Did you catch...

2020-02-06T12:12:13.617+00:00

Oh my ! That's VERY impressive ! Did you catch all these references by your own ? Great job anyway. Its a gold mine for ideas and concepts. Thank you !

Have of course been here before and read in a fair...

2018-02-16T16:26:22.508+00:00

Have of course been here before and read in a fairly thorough manner to supplement my interest in TP. I greatly value your work here sir - I cannot emphasize that enough, so thank you. I'm a bit, I'll use this word, obsessed, by numbers and their representative counterparts (characters standing in for numbers briefly, occurrences like this...), and would simply like to suggest for now, two things I picked up on a while ago but never committed to paper or any hard format. So we have in The Missing Pieces a scene where Chet Desmond and Stanley are exiting the vehicle to walk into Hap's diner. Now, as soon as Chet gets out of the car (slightly before Stanley), Stanley stops (as is customary I suppose), to wait for Chet so they may proceed in a pair toward the diner. There's something funny in this scene though - Once they are both caught up to one another, Chet and Stanley are aligned with the topmost glowing neon "Hal's" signage, where the apostrophe very clearly stands in as a number '9,' creating a quick, quite clear "119." Chet and Stanley, individuals walking in pair, hence our '11' constructed just momentarily on-screen, lining up very nicely from left to right to form a '119.' I noticed this in maybe my second viewing of FWWM's Missing Pieces and didn't even place a lot of importance on the oddity at first, but taking notice of the signage around the entrance of the diner, there are other "Hap's," signs which do not treat the apostrophe as a '9,' in any way whatsoever.

So... I am not yet sure, or am not yet willing to really go ahead and make some kind of determination here, some synthesis, not just yet. More to collect, more to take notice of (of course! haha). Also, and this more overt, we do very clearly see a yellow/black "911" sticker attached to the phone Mrs. Briggs uses when Sarah calls her the morning when Laura is discovered. Why am I even mentioning these things? Well, I really enjoy how you've put things together here, I enjoy anyone's mind whose able to create vast, interconnected webs of information (to me, these kinds of constructions are enthralling). If you wish to further explore some of these things with me or use any of this to your own posting, please go right ahead. Not concerned with being credited (not that what I'm saying here is necessarily novel, as I'm sure many others have noticed what I'm pointing out).

I'm finding that going back, exploring FWWM, Missing Pieces, S1 and S2, in conjunction with The Return, can be a lot of fun. I'm blown away, in many instances, by the sprawling, enigmatic qualities found in Twin Peaks. What I really need to do, since my observations are mere observations, is use clear stills, similarly to how you use images to supplement your explanations and ongoing study... I think this will really help make for more interesting connections. Plus, of course, and if necessary, use other references to flesh out whatever idea(s) I'm attempting to coalesce. Thank you again, by the way, I absolutely love your blogposts.

You might enjoy this: https://25yearslatersite.com...

2017-08-14T20:03:14.754+01:00

You might enjoy this: https://25yearslatersite.com/2017/06/21/twin-peaks-and-alchemy/

hey, heres something for you freaks to play with: ...

2017-07-05T17:39:16.910+01:00

hey, heres something for you freaks to play with: in season 3 episode 8 the "experiment's" arms are backwards when she pukes up bob. the left and right are switched.

Gah. That link is for a German translation. Apolog...

2017-07-04T22:22:47.187+01:00

Gah. That link is for a German translation. Apologies. Much, however, is said in relation to visual echoes and the double's need to confront and/or destroy itself. Seminal work that you are many leagues beyond at this point.

2017-07-04T22:21:23.830+01:00

This comment has been removed by the author.

Young Pierre, Lynch's man/men (and son) in MIB...

2017-07-04T22:02:31.633+01:00

Young Pierre, Lynch's man/men (and son) in MIB FBI black suits, atomic creation/destruction, Trinity blast photo behind Lynch, creator/destroyer of (TP) worlds. So now there are vectors to/from Pierre and Coop, Jeffries and Cole. Agent Desmond too, I suppose.

Massive work. Much respect to you. I remember writing a term paper about inscribed circles (including the spinning record) throughout TP as season 2 was unfolding. Talk about baby steps!

At the time I was very much under the "spell" of Thierry Kuntzel's Camera Obscura piece on "The Most Dangerous Game" as seen through Lacanian, autoregressive dreamlike interpretation. A bit of a classic of sorts:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.montage-av.de/pdf/081_1999/08_1_Thierry_Kuntzel_Die_Filmarbeit2.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwi4gszUwPDUAhWCHT4KHbS2BRUQFggiMAE&usg=AFQjCNE9hfa5D1RIVuo0zdvYF0tL8qkTRA

Again, however, your mental shifting, percolating and aggregating. Well, it's inspiring, and -- excuse me-- a DAMN fine cup of coffee.

Thanks again.

Wonderful post! I haven't divulged all the inf...

2017-04-14T05:30:54.564+01:00

Wonderful post! I haven't divulged all the information on here just yet, but i must stop my reading to make a suggestion considering The Waiting Room. imo The Waiting Room looks pretty much the same to us as The Black Lodge and The White Lodge.

Here's my interpretation of the part with The Waiting Room in the final episode, when Cooper first enters to hear "The Sycamore Trees" song and meets The Waiter/Giant and The Little Man he is as the latter says in "the waiting room"... however once he is given cofee (which soon turns out to be the same scorched engine oil smelling substance as referenced and used as a gateway before) and the substance is spilled, the magickian (The Man From Another Place) chants out between two worlds: FIRE.. WALK WITH ME, and at that moment we see a big burst of fire. Suddenly everything looks similiar but is not so nice and friendly anymore, Cooper have entered The Black Lodge.

The same thing happens in the film at the Convenience Store scene.. after the ring has been crafted and wed to Bob, Little Mike utters (chants out) FIRE WALK WITH ME and we see the red curtains to what is then probably the black lodge (and Bowie at least tried to follow them here, "Oh believe me I followed"). I agree with you that the end of FWWM that Laura is in the White Lodge with the angels.

The whole thread I have now looked over,too much f...

2017-04-12T01:17:20.777+01:00

The whole thread I have now looked over,too much for me to consider at once.The Blackstar thing put me on the youtube video which now has over 33,000,000 views,wow!
Attach the Lazarus video and you find,41,000,000 more views there.I tell you what Bowie was a creepy character with David Lynch involved as well I'll never get the gist of it.One thing I kept going back to was a 1983 movie called The Hunger,Bowie had a big part in the movie,the star was Catherine Deneuve,she was a vampire who survived,highly sexualized.I once saw him in concert,lot of parts to this being whatever he was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_(1983_film)

Thanks for yet another great post HLP. This is ter...

2017-04-10T22:55:06.688+01:00

Thanks for yet another great post HLP. This is terrific!
Julius

FITA- now you mention it there was a spoken sectio...

2017-04-10T22:49:10.762+01:00

FITA- now you mention it there was a spoken section in Outside where a narrator speaks of 'the room above my shop' but I always heard it as 'moon'. Of course there is the room above the convenience store in TP
Julius

Thank you, I suppose I should listen to all of tha...

2017-04-10T22:14:34.384+01:00

Thank you, I suppose I should listen to all of that album, I have not yet. Now the opening lyrics I mentioned came from a PSB remix version, the album version does not seem to have them as spoken? Also, the original video for it (the PSB remix version) is no longer on YouTube.

So there is much more than meets the eye here and it works on another level, as you mentioned in the other posting. With Blackstar video in particular, I always had the feeling of "caveat auditor", I still do not want to see all of it, nor to look at it, very creepy. It is not what it seems.

Thanks to you, HP for providing all of your excell...

2017-04-10T21:14:45.829+01:00

Thanks to you, HP for providing all of your excellent analysis. Just happy to be able to contribute to the conversation.

Hallo Spaceboy is on the Outside album, an album t...

2017-04-10T21:11:33.235+01:00

Hallo Spaceboy is on the Outside album, an album that eerily relates to Twin Peaks in the sense that it is about a detective trying to solve the murder of a young girl. I always felt that Hallo Spaceboy was Bowie talking to those of us who grew up in the Moonage Daydream of the moon landing, who Don McClean called "A generation lost in space" in American Pie. I believe the moon landing was a gigantic occult ritual and I think Bowie and his perfectly timed Space Oddity was involved. He was on the Inside, even if the album Hallo Spaceboy appears on was called Outside. The Detective character is on the Outside, but Bowie knows a lot more than he lets on.

I think in Spaceboy he is wondering just how long the human race can go on in this timeloop they created where we all pretend we walked on the moon and that we are still exploring instead of just sitting doing nothing and watching TV while our "silhouettes are so stationary".

Lynch is a very difficult nut to crack. Every fra...

2017-04-10T20:58:22.061+01:00

Lynch is a very difficult nut to crack. Every frame of every scene is jam-packed with symbology and he speaks in Twilight language almost to the point of making any exoteric plot incomprehensible (see Lost Highway for instance). While I've always liked watching Twin Peaks, it always felt like it was over my head and it still feels that way. Bowie, on the other hand, seems to be revealing himself to me a little bit at a time ever since his death.

So much of his work is about the Tree of Life and about time, that I can't help feel that the two are inextricably linked. With his inclusion in the Twin Peaks mythos and lending "I'm Deranged" to the Lost Highway soundtrack, I think it is safe to say that he and Lynch were fellow occultists engaged in workings together. That leads me to believe that ultimately, time manipulation lies at the core of Twin Peaks, as well.

An album that needs to be looked at closely I think is Bowie's 1995 album 1.Outside. This album on its surface is about the abduction and murder of a young girl in an act of modern art. A character on the album is Detective Nathan Adler who delves into this mess to solve the murder ala Cooper in Twin Peaks. The references throughout lead me to believe that all of the characters including Ramona A. Stone the murderer, are just split personalities of Nathan or, as in Twin Peaks, demonic possessive spirits like Bob. The biggest track from the album is The Heart's Filthy Lesson which was featured at the end of the movie Seven, another story about murder and detectives.

The line that stands out to me is from I Have Not Been to Oxford Town, in which a character (Leon Blank - Is That Leon Da'ath?) sits in prison awaiting trial for the crime and his defense is that he had never been there. However, the most striking lyric to me has nothing to do with the murder case. It is this:

"And the wheels are turning and turning
As the 20th century dies

If I had not ripped the fabric
If time had not stood still
If I had not met Ramona
If I'd only paid my bill"

This is not the first time Bowie sang about the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. In Time Will Crawl from 1987's Never Let Me Down, Bowie sings some 9/11 resonant lyrics about the beginning of the 21st Century:

"I know a government man
He was as blind as the moon
He saw the sun in the night
He took a top-gun pilot and he
He made him fly thru a hole
Till he grew real old
And he never came down
He just flew till he burst

Time will crawl
Till our mouths
run dry
Time will crawl
Till our feet
grow small
Time will crawl
Till our tails
fall off
Time will crawl
till the 21st century lose"

Those lyrics are almost nonsensical and Bowie used William Burrough's cut-up method to write them, same method Thom Yorke uses for lyrics where you take sentences and cut them up randomly to create new sentences that create sometimes unique statements, almost like the universe is communicating to the artist, not vice versa.

I think it all relates, and without a doubt, it is creepy, because pedophilia and murder lay at the center of it all.

This is the greatest post I've ever read analy...

2017-04-10T20:12:55.332+01:00

This is the greatest post I've ever read analyzing Twin Peaks. I'm so far below (or above?) the digging you've done that I can't begin to add anything to this. Thank you and please keep writing.

That's great, and hopefully while it is not ye...

2017-04-10T17:59:39.403+01:00

That's great, and hopefully while it is not yet ready, here is one more note from me: I am not acquainted with complete Bowie opus but merely a tiny part of it. Nevertheless, the beginning of the Blackstar video to me feels like a recollection of the opening lyrics from Hello Spaceboy: "If I fall, Moon dust will cover me". So Bowie may have signalled there that he ultimately fell ("how many times does an angel fall"). And you will recall that the original Red Room scene, when we first see it, and the aged Cooper 25 years in the future, has a rather dusty floor, the floor from the show finale has a much cleaner look. And the first time it is seen (in the dream Cooper had), LMFAP is at first shaking very much like those creatures from the Blackstar video. it would be interesting if the Red Room appears dusty when we first see it in the new season.

And Copper fell too, he failed in his mission, or at least in a part of it. He may have saved Annie, but that we do not know yet. When Cooper wakes up at the end of the last episode he says that "he was not sleeping". But that is just his, I suppose, captor speaking. "I need to brush my teeth" is obviously a play on words: he needs to "sharpen" his teeth, he (Bob) is going to hunt again, he was biding his time. And in the very episode when Leland is buried, they ask where did that thing go, and for a moment camera clearly focuses on Cooper and at the very last moment veers off towards the woods.

So this season has to be about Cooper's struggle for redemption. It will be interesting to see if there are any parallels between what happens and what was shown in the Blackstar video, there may be some. I have no any foreknowledge of the new show, and I'd avoid any spoilers if I could. But I anticipate it will be much darker than the original, even though some of the humor will still be there. Ultimately, I feel after all these years that the regular Twin Peaks viewer can be compared to poor Rusty Tomaski: we are just waiting for our beer and yet Earle is about to shoot an arrow at us.

Thanks for all the additions Bingers. I will have ...

2017-04-10T12:40:30.235+01:00

Thanks for all the additions Bingers. I will have a look through them soon. I'm currently doing a "Let's Dance/Let's Rock" (Bowie/Twin Peaks) type of mash-up post - I think you're going to like it. :)

Thanks again.

Here are a few samples of Tom Waits lyrics, all fr...

2017-04-10T03:26:30.664+01:00

Here are a few samples of Tom Waits lyrics, all from the 1978 album Blue Valentine:

"poison all the water in the wishin' well and hang all them scarecrows from a sycamore tree..."

"she wore red shoes by the newstand
as the rain splashed the nickle
spilled like chablis along the midway
theres a little bluejay..."

"what you think is the sunshine is just a twinkle in my eye
that ring around my fingers called the fourth of July
when I get a little bit lonesome and a tear falls from my cheek
there's gonna be an ocean in the middle of the week

whistlin' past the graveyard steppin' on a crack
me and mother hubbard Papa one-eyed Jack

I come into town on a night train with an arm full of boxcars
on the wings of a magpie cross a hooligan night
I'm gonna tear me off a rainbow and wear it for a tie
I never told the truth so I can never tell a lie"

Talking about lost souls under the world, I think ...

2017-04-09T23:53:47.584+01:00

Talking about lost souls under the world, I think with Harold Smith there's one of those classic Hanged Man rainbow connections worth noting, in episode 7 of season 2. Right after Hawk finds the hanging Harold amongst the flowers, at the Palmer house we hear Louis Armstrong singing about "the colors of the rainbow," and then after some more time spent with hanged man Mr. Smith, there's the scene where Bobby and Shelly find out how much money they get left over from Leo's insurance, where Shelly says "forty-two" a few times.

I remembered it wrong, they are red and white trai...

2017-04-09T23:05:09.059+01:00

I remembered it wrong, they are red and white trainers in "There there (The Boney King of Nowhere)", but if you search "Radiohead red shoes" the video still comes up. https://vimeo.com/35665150

I also forgot to mention the tree that appears in all of the reverse motion shots in "I Don't Want to Grow Up" https://vimeo.com/10626238
plus the "little bluejay" in a Tom Waits song called "Red Shoes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oep_0Ai0hQg that's a live rendition of a song originally off the Blue Valentine album, where lyrics about "papa one-eyed jack" can also be found.

I expect the show coming back on air will bring ar...

2017-04-09T22:34:43.348+01:00

I expect the show coming back on air will bring around some searchers seeking meaning, renewed and new interest alike, so possibly some more traffic this way. But like the one comment below this one talks about, there is a lot to take in and digest here. It's like a banquet buffet and everything looks so good you don't know where to start.

As for actors no longer with us, I do know Mark Frost's dead dad will be showing up as Doc Hayward. What I want to see is if there will be any mention of Phillip Jeffries. With the addition of Watts, I suspect Mulholland Drive references, maybe even something to confirm Laura Palmer's presence at Club Silencio. If Naomi Watts has any scenes with Warren Frost, that will be three of the Frost clan she's worked with, having already acted alongside Mark's sister Lindsay in The Ring (I thee wed!)

Sure thing, Hoss. Phonetic reversal was coming up ...

2017-04-09T20:48:13.066+01:00

Sure thing, Hoss. Phonetic reversal was coming up with the Radiohead research few months back with "Like Spinning Plates" and "Daydreaming." Then there's the b-side that comes with "Where Bluebirds Fly" on the There There single," Paperbag Writer," alluding to the Beatles song. The music video for "There There" has a stop-motion Thom doff a pair of red shoes in exchange for some enchanted forest clothes, right before he's hounded by a murder of crows and turns into a tree.

Bone Machine was also coming up, with the band and the Pixies song and the Tom Waits album. A video for a track off of Waits' Bone Machine, "I Don't Want to Grow Up," has Tom in a red high heel, time-reversed footage, red curtains, and a diner that has the B&W zigzag pattern on their lamps. Scarlett Johansson did a cut of the tune on her collection of Tom Waits covers, a couple of them featuring David Bowie.

Judy and Josie Packard (sisters) - both linked to ...

2017-04-08T13:57:55.681+01:00

Judy and Josie Packard (sisters) - both linked to the black lodge (along with Bowie). He found the ring at Judy's. Josie is Chinese...that's where "China Girl" (Bowie, Let's Dance LP) comes in. :)

Howdy Bingers...yes, I've linked that to the E...

2017-04-08T13:02:28.476+01:00

Howdy Bingers...yes, I've linked that to the EMI/Crowley Beatles and "I Am The Walrus" - and the Lennon lyric "I am he...". The latter was also referenced by "iamaphoney' and his 'rotten apple' (Beatles) series. Same goes for "Ian Iachimoe", McCartney's name spoken backwards - "Paper BACK Writer" (Red Room resonant). I like your "e-m-i" spot, though. Many thanks, again.

Anon, it's funny that you mention those aspects in this comment. Yesterday, I was watching 'Let's Dance' and spotted the diner, telegraph pole, tree, and long truck too. The telegraph pole has a type of zig-zag element at the top too. It does evoke a few of the segue shots from Twin Peaks - the logging truck passing the R&R Diner. As you say there is a "backwards' element with the "radio" and a "fan" too.

The nuclear explosion (after she puts on the shoes) denotes the start of a dream phase - where they imagine what might happen if she puts on the shoes (seems to be a social comment about consumerism). We see them trample the shoes in the same spot, after this dream phase element finishes. (Dreams etc, dreamtime aborigines). The aborigine painted men figures also look like the "giant" drawn on the owl cave map.

The ending hand shot really, really reminded me of Dune (with Cooper/McLachlan) and the hand in the circle from Paul's (McLachlan) dream/vision. Dune, a sandy desert planet - a bit like Oz/Aus in Let's Dance. Dune - Paul's father is the Duke (Prochnow), who is briefly in the Convenience Store scene FWWM.

Really great stuff guys...this is the sort of thing that I love to see here. Thank's both of you. :)