Subject: Re: Statue inconsistancy
From: ingria@bbn.com (Bob Ingria)
Date: 1991-06-12, 16:08
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
Reply-to: ingria@BBN.COM

In article <7062@vela.acs.oakland.edu> rjohnson@vela.acs.oakland.edu (R o d Johnson) writes:
   In article <1991Jun11.171334.11904@panix.uucp> jhawk@panix.uucp (John Hawkinson) writes:
   >One little anomaly I noticed in the Black (/white?) Lodge scene last night:
   >  After Cooper has gone from room to room a couple times, the statue which is
   >in the hallway dissapears. Any comments?

   I thought, while I was watching it, that there's a statue at *one* end
   of the hallway and not the other.  I assumed it was put there in part
   to serve as a reference point so that we could tell which room was
   which.  At some point, though, it seemed that things got totally
   turned around and inconsistent, sort of like the scene in "Yellow
   Submarine" where Our Heroes run in one hotel room door and then out of
   the door across the corridor.

[In what follows, I'm calling the first of the red curtained rooms
that Cooper enters, ``the waiting room'', just to have some name for
it.]

The first five times Cooper goes through the hallway, there is a
statue at ``the far end'' (i.e. the end away from ``the waiting room''
or its current incarnation, and away from the camera).  Moreover,
Cooper is filmed fairly consistently: when he is moving away from
``the waiting room'' end, he is filmed from behind, moving toward the
statue, away from the camera; when he is moving toward ``the waiting
room'' end, he is filmed from the front, moving away from the statue,
toward the camera.  (This assumes there is only one statue in the
hallway(s) with the statue.)  When Cooper leaves the room where he
starts to bleed from the stomach, which was the room away from ``the
waiting room'' end, he is filmed, as usual, approaching the camera.
But there is no statue behind him.  The point of view then cuts to a
position from behind Cooper and there is no statue in front of him,
either.  I take it that the different camera angle is meant to let us
know that this is a hallway without a statue at either end.

The hallway where Cooper meets Leland is also a hallway without a
statue, since we see the hallway from Cooper and Doppel-Cooper's
viewpoints, and there's no statue at either end.  Also, I believe that
the camera position is different in this scene, and is at what was
formerly ``the far end'' of the hallway.  Since this is where Cooper
starts to run away from his Doppelganger, towards the room where he
entered the XXX Lodge, this is probably a deliberate shift in camera
point of view.  I'm not completely certain of this, however.  Up until
Cooper encounters Caroline for the first time, we see him enter and
exit each room he's in, and it's possible to chart his course.
However, we don't see him leave the room where he meets Caroline;
there is a cross-fade, to a shot of the camera panning up a hallway,
with Cooper saying ``Annie'' over and over.  At this point, it's not
clear where the next room, where he encounters Windom Earle et al, is.
In the climactic race with his Doppelganger, it looks like Cooper
crosses two hallways and goes through a room.  The last room of the
chase seems to be the original ``waiting room''.  If it is, the
Doppelganger catches Cooper at the spot where Cooper entered the XXX
Lodge (which makes sense, since ``Cooper'' then reappearsin
Glastonbury Grove.  Also, if I'm right about the orientation.  The
Doppelganger enters at a point diagonally opposite from where Cooper
entered the XXX Lodge.

-30-
Bob

``You go.''