Percepción de los estudiantes sobre el proyecto “Cuanto Vale un Embarazo”

To date, the most famous world Lynch has built and fi lmed is the Red Room in Twin Peaks . Th e fi rst appearance of its distinctive red drapes and patterned fl oor has been described by Marc Dolan as “unlike almost any scene that had ever been depicted on television.” ²⁹ Yet, what is this iconic space? Where is it located and what does it symbolize? What architectural, cinematic and theoretical revelations might we discover?

Th ere are many possibilities. Lynch himself has described the Red Room as a place where “anything can happen [. . .] a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary.” ³⁰ By this account, the Red Room is distinctly heterotopian in nature, a place of contradictory impulses and inverted relations, capable of maintaining Black and White Lodges within its bounds. Martha Nochimson brands the Red Room “a possible site of vision, truth, and reality for the seeker,”

which emphasizes its revelatory potential within the confusing terrain of Twin Peaks . ³¹ Perhaps, then, we might consider this “site of vision” to be a version of the “Aleph” described in Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story. Th e

“Aleph” is “one of the points in space that contains all other points”—that is, a space in which, simultaneously, all other places are and can be seen, without overlapping. ³² Inhabitants of the Red Room certainly have a privileged perspective on events elsewhere in Twin Peaks, while the arena itself disturbs spatial and temporal logic. Borges’ concept has frequently inspired urban theorists, especially Edward Soja. In using the Argentine writer to explicate his concept of “Th irdspace,” Soja himself off ers another potential category for Lynch’s Red Room, a space where everything “comes together” with an “all- inclusive simultaneity.” Like Soja’s “Th irdspace,” the Red Room functions, for the residents of Twin Peaks, as a place

“simultaneously real and imagined,” a chamber where all the town’s stories coalesce. ³³ It is, to extend this reading, a kind of control suite or, as John Orr puts it, a sublime “director’s editing room.” ³⁴ Th e Red Room is where Lynch can oversee his master plan.

For such a famous location, the Red Room actually appears on screen for a relatively brief amount of time. It hosts two substantial sequences in Twin Peaks , in the second and last episodes, and then three shorter scenes in Fire Walk With Me . Th ese appearances at the beginning and end of the project confi rm its special status, while avoiding over- familiarity. What is more, among Twin Peaks ’ diverse collaborators, Lynch alone directs sequences in the Red Room, implying a particularly personal relationship with the space. Jeff Johnson has complained that “the action in the Red Room seems superfl uous, doing little to advance the story,” but this ignores the most basic premise of Lynch’s stages: something is clearly experienced here, in a location specifi cally demarcated for aff ect. ³⁵ Th ere is a radical simplicity to this logic: for Lynch, curtains and a stage are suffi cient to generate immersive drama. Aft er all the confusing conversations and wild theories about Black and White Lodges, as well as the cave drawings, maps of Tibet and unexplained portals, both the series and the fi lm return to the Red Room at their conclusions.

Let us, then, consider each of the Red Room’s main appearances in turn. It fi rst emerges as part of an elaborate dream experienced by Cooper in a Surrealist intervention at the end of Twin Peaks ’ second episode (Plate  47). Instinctively, this set- up recalls Dalí’s dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), which also features a curtained room and classical sculpture. Perhaps, Lynch suggests, the contents of Cooper’s dream will prove, aft er rigorous analysis, to hold the key to the entire narrative. Within the Red Room, it is evident that Cooper has aged dramatically, as if thrust into the future, and time remains unstable in this arena. Th e sound here is distinct, too—a warped, highly sensitive acoustics in which speech runs backwards. A sensuous mixture of styles characterizes the décor, with three Art Deco armchairs and two free- standing lights joined by a Greek statue and a globe. Further spotlights, from an unseen source, focus on the thick red curtains that enclose the space, creating an opulent bunker. Th e fl oor, composed of jagged lines, resembles electric shockwaves—a design also found in the lobby of Henry’s apartment block in Eraserhead . Intriguingly, Lynch’s fi rst fi lm was released in France as Labyrinth Man and this fl oor pattern, a typically Lynchian form of distorted repetition, implies a dangerous but consistent

pathway. Perhaps, there is a fi gure in this carpet, a solution to our many unanswered questions, if we follow it to the end. Th e Red Room’s fl ooring also recalls the terrazzo sidewalk patterns that architects such as S. Charles Lee placed outside movie palaces to entice spectators, so that cinematic design spilled into the street. ³⁶ Here, attention would be drawn to the geometry of illusion, with the ground beneath visitors becoming a platform for urban performance. In the initial Red Room sequence, Cooper is joined by a dwarf in a red suit (the Man from Another Place, according to the credits), who dances and off ers cryptic remarks, as well as a woman whom he describes as looking “almost exactly like Laura Palmer.” Alongside the disturbances to space, time, sound and speech, identity is rendered volatile within the Red Room.

Despite these fl uctuations, though, the Red Room maintains an atmosphere of perverse calm. Its formal arrangement, combining classical and modern motifs, feels like an eccentric living room or, like Club Silencio, a kind of avant- garde club. Th e space could easily sit within a contemporary gallery as a piece of installation art. Indeed, we can see a close resemblance to the Red Room in works such as Cildo Meireles’ Red Shift installations (1967–84), which include a room furnished with ordinary domestic fi ttings coated in red paint, and Juan Muñoz’s Th e Prompter (1988), where a platform patterned with a geometric design is overseen by a papier- mâché dwarf. Spectators can walk through Meireles’

installation, surrounded by the exuberant color, though for Muñoz’s piece an audience can only look at the stage without stepping onto it. It is precisely this tension between immersion and distance, common throughout installation art, that faces characters entering Lynch’s stages.

Lynch’s drawing and installation in the Fondation Cartier exhibition operated along similar lines.

Th e Red Room also calls to mind one of Le Corbusier’s strangest and least- discussed creations: the Beistegui Apartment in Paris ( Figure 4.3 ).

Situated on the Champs-Élysées, this was a home designed for lavish entertainment, “a frame for big parties,” as Colomina puts it, with a sound- proof projection booth included. ³⁷ Specifi cally, it is the rooft op garden and terraces that prompt comparison with Lynch’s architecture, not least because of their combination of natural elements with mechanical interventions. Here, Le Corbusier designed hedges controlled by hydraulics and a periscope that functioned as a camera obscura . Th e overall eff ect, Dorothée Imbert claims, is “a nearly perfect example of the garden as viewing platform.” ³⁸ Indeed, perception is constantly

manipulated from an elevated position so that the terrace operates as an editing suite in which Paris is the raw footage. At the highest point of the structure, Le Corbusier wilfully inhibits views of the Arc de Triomphe and instead creates an enclosed solarium—a chamber turning spectatorship inwards in defi ance of the celebrated cityscape. Within tall white walls, this outdoor arena maintains the trappings of interior space:

a false fi replace and ornate furniture, decorated in the baroque style favored by the owner, lie upon a carpet of grass.

Like the Red Room, Le Corbusier’s solarium is a minimalist stage containing disparate motifs, and is a delineated space held apart from the rest of the community. Both spaces maintain extravagant touches within a simple framework, a form of impure modernism with Surrealist overtones. Th e playful, unearthly sensations generated by these environments have an idyllic quality, too. Th e Man from Another Place tells Cooper: “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air,” before soft jazz soaks the Red Room. Le Corbusier described his ideal terrace in similar terms: “At night people dance to the music of a gramophone. Th e air is pure, the sound is muffl ed, the view

FIGURE 4.3 Appartement de M. Charles de Beistegui in Paris.

Credit: Copyright FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014.

distant, the street far away. If trees are nearby, you are above their canopy.” ³⁹ Th ese are transcendent conceptions of space. In spite of its dangers, the Red Room is a form of Lynchian utopia, “a free zone” where the director’s imagination is not restrained by narrative concerns.

Furthermore, while the Red Room on its initial manifestation seems to be a completely enclosed arena, later appearances demonstrate that here, as with Le Corbusier’s solarium, the division between interior and exterior space is complicated. Th e fi nal episode of Twin Peaks reveals that the Red Room is accessed via a circle of twelve sycamore trees, known as Glastonbury Grove, within the local woods. When Cooper enters this space, whose name hints at Arthurian legends, the vegetative cloak becomes a screen of red velvet into which the detective disappears. It is an incredible, Surreal image, with additional echoes of the draped fi gure in Bacon’s Study from the Human Body (1949). How or why particular individuals are able to cross this threshold is never fully explained. All we can deduce, to follow Foucault, is that “one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.” Nonetheless, the gateway links the natural world of Ghostwood Forest with the Red Room’s architectural fl ourish, again implying that the woods are Twin Peaks’ most potent force. Akira Mizuta Lippit has written evocatively of Lynch’s obsession with secret passages connecting diff erent buildings or realms, and the director admits his excitement at the idea that “a little opening could exist and we could go somewhere else.” ⁴⁰ Notably, Twin Peaks was a series originally entitled Northwest Passage .

In Twin Peaks ’ remarkable fi nale, Cooper navigates an endless series of chambers and corridors within the Red Room ( Figure 4.4 ). Th e spaces begin to blur, with Lynch overlaying images in hypnotic fashion. Cooper encounters a range of characters and their apparent doppelgängers, including his own double (Plate 48). At one point, the Man from Another Place tells him, “Th is is the waiting room,” suggesting a space of permanent transition, never to be settled. Soon enough, physical metamorphosis, duplication and injury abound; all matter is disrupted, as coff ee switches from liquid to solid; lights fl ash wildly. Th ough the tranquillity of its earlier incarnation has gone, these Red Room scenes still maintain a studied quality, enhanced by the exaggerated sound of Cooper’s footsteps and shots extended far beyond the televisual norm. Finally, the episode and the series conclude with an evil version of Cooper escaping from his confi nes to reach the Great Northern Hotel. Another Lynchian world has leaked beyond its prescribed boundaries.

What this fi nal episode implies is that the Red Room is a network of interlinked spaces—corridors and chambers that loop endlessly.

A series initiated by cartography ends with a lesson in way- fi nding inside a total architectural experience. Perhaps, then, what underpins the Red Room is the mythology of the labyrinth—one of architecture’s founding stories. Built to house a monstrous hybrid of human and animal desires in need of frequent sacrifi ce (the Minotaur/Bob), by an acclaimed architect (Daedalus/Lynch) commissioned by higher powers (King Minos/the television bosses), the Red Room seduces an intrepid explorer from distant parts (Th eseus/Cooper), inspired by a woman (Ariadne/Laura Palmer), to enter its dangerous walls. In this reading, Lynch’s placement of Greek sculpture within the Red Room acts as a nod to Knossos.

Th ere is certainly evidence to suggest a broader obsession with the labyrinth in recent years. Th eodore Ziolkowski talks of a modern

“labyrinthomania,” with 5,000 structures created worldwide since 1970. ⁴¹ According to Kathryn Milun, there are now 1,800 labyrinths in the United States alone, located in public spaces outside churches, parks and museums, and within hospitals, prisons and teenage centers. Walking

FIGURE 4.4 The Red Room set on the fi nal day of fi lming for Twin Peaks (1991).

Credit: Copyright Richard Beymer. Photograph by Richard Beymer, with thanks to Rob Wilson.

through a labyrinth—a rational space rather than a disorientating maze—

has become a therapeutic technique, which Milun places within the history of responses to agoraphobia (a condition from which Lynch has suff ered). With the emphasis it places on concentration and awareness, a labyrinth is “a little training ground, a safe space in which to experiment with recovering the public self.” Against the horror vacui of the modern American city, which Eraserhead depicts so memorably, “the labyrinth off ers contours where there was once only empty space.” ⁴²

Twin Peaks cannot be understood in quite so straightforward a fashion. Th e series is full of false pathways, dead ends and cul- de-sacs.

Strictly speaking, it maintains an architecture more akin to a maze than a coded labyrinth, although these terms are oft en confl ated. If you continue along the elongated route of a labyrinth, you will eventually fi nd the satisfaction of the center. In Milun’s analysis, this journey reveals a coherent “public self.” Twin Peaks resists such logic. However, to adapt her argument, the series’ concluding episode does off er contours as an answer to narrative abyss. When Lynch returned to direct this last installment, he was faced with a daunting web of disparate storylines. He chose neither total resolution (that is, forming all the various threads into a coherent pattern), nor absolute ambiguity (leaving these threads twisted without explanation). Instead, we are led around the series’ own internal labyrinth where the central chamber provokes an impossible encounter:

Cooper meets himself. Th ere is no therapeutic comfort to be gained from this experience, just as benign notions of community, public space and subjectivity are thwarted throughout Lynch’s work. In fact, Cooper ends the series in a kind of exuberant madness, gazing into a mirror that reveals the Minotaur in himself.

Assessing the Red Room within the history of cinema’s engagement with the labyrinth off ers further explication. Nicholas Christopher focuses on fi lm noir , a genre where labyrinthine processes operate on three levels. First, the American city becomes distorted and claustro-phobic, full of shadows, stairwells and alleyways. Second, noir plots twist around complex human interactions and metaphysical conun-drums. Th ird, noir protagonists face an interior struggle. ⁴³ Th is off ers a useful framework for Twin Peaks , which plays with many noir tropes (such as social corruption, a fl awed detective and the femme fatale ).

Lynch, though, translates these conventions into an unfamiliar rural context, so they take on stranger undertones alongside woods, waterfalls and family homes. Furthermore, his worlds refute the cynicism of

noir fi ctions for the “wrenching authenticity ,” as Luckhurst put it, of intense emotional performance.

More intriguing comparisons lie in Stanley Kubrick’s work. Th e fi nal scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) depict a prototypical Lynchian chamber, when the astronaut Bowman encounters ageing and fetal versions of himself within a white bedroom clad in eighteenth- century décor. As with the Red Room, this space establishes dream- like spatial co- ordinates for temporal subversion. Th e symbolic weight of neoclassical architecture, with its formal arrangement of space, contrasts with the fl uid movements of identity that follow. Th ere is less sensuality in Kubrick’s architecture, which is also more glossy and poised than Lynch’s structures, yet the directors share a sense of mood and pacing that prioritizes disturbing aff ect. Th e stark, windowless rooms at the heart of 2001 and Twin Peaks are built and fi lmed for concentrated expression.

In Th e Shining (1980), the Red Room is anticipated by a tale of

“REDRUM.” Both Kubrick and Lynch display a fascination with mirroring eff ects, placing the rhythms of speech and performance in reverse as part of a larger engagement with duality. Like Twin Peaks , Th e Shining is full of replication and disturbing doubles. Just as Cooper battles his own doppelgänger, Jack Torrance is a study in darkness and light, although his patriarchal violence suggests a more fi tting comparison with Leland Palmer (who also inhabits the Red Room). For both Kubrick and Lynch, the monstrous form inside the family, the Minotaur in the living room, is the father himself. Th e Shining plays out its familial confl icts utilizing a succession of mazes. Labyrinthine patterns fl ood Kubrick’s imagery—in carpets, wall- coverings and a model maze inside the hotel. Within these complex designs, Jack’s own physical features come to resemble a bull, as Pallasma has noted. ⁴⁴ Th e fi lm ends with a nocturnal chase sequence around a large maze in the hotel’s grounds, with spotlights adding a peculiar sense of theater. Again, we see a narrative avoiding absolute resolution by threading itself through physical corridors and chambers, deferring any concrete meaning by constructing endless internal prisons—including a fi nal photographic frame for Jack’s image, which anticipates Laura Palmer’s captivity in media. Like the Red Room, Th e Shining ’s maze may not be a strict labyrinth in its avoidance of rational pathways, but it certainly manipulates the symbolic potency of the myth.

In both Twin Peaks and Th e Shining , the mirror is the object through which decisive communications are translated. Bob’s deathly presence within Leland and Cooper, as well as the murderous intentions of Jack

Torrance, are revealed by reversed images that mediate between the conventional world and the horrors of another, labyrinthine zone. For Foucault, mirrors off er a “mixed, joint experience” that leaves them poised between utopias and heterotopias. ⁴⁵ Further cinematic evidence of mirrors bridging disparate zones comes in the shape of Cocteau’s Orphée , where they act as portals between everyday life and the underworld.

Indeed, we learn “the secret of secrets” from the fi lm’s ominous chauff eur:

“Mirrors are the doors by which Death comes.” Here, another precursor to the Red Room emerges, one that has been implied before without sustained explanation. For instance, John Alexander claims, “Orpheus is the underlying myth to the Twin Peaks narrative” and it is easy to see Cooper as the legendary fi gure who negotiates a curtained underworld in search of a woman. ⁴⁶

In Cocteau’s version of the myth, the upper reaches of Orpheus’ home contain an editing suite, with messages transmitted from an attic space accessed via a trapdoor. Within this room, admission to the underworld takes place through a mirror laid upon a textured fl oor patterning almost identical to that of the Red Room ( Figure  4.5 ). Shot from above, this distorted design acts as the launch- pad for Orpheus’ subterranean exploration. Again, certain gestures must be made (gloves are essential) and rational thought is discouraged (“You don’t have to understand. You just have to believe”). Th e visual tricks employed in this maneuver and

FIGURE 4.5 Orphée (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1949): Orpheus enters “the zone.”

throughout Orphée —the sudden disappearance of characters, reversed movements and the emergence of strange spaces—all seem somewhat primitive now, but are exactly of the type still favored by Lynch, who remains content to leave his artifi ce ungilded by more elaborate

throughout Orphée —the sudden disappearance of characters, reversed movements and the emergence of strange spaces—all seem somewhat primitive now, but are exactly of the type still favored by Lynch, who remains content to leave his artifi ce ungilded by more elaborate