David Lynch Has Twin Peaks' Red Room Memorized Right Down To The Curtain Texture [Exclusive]
David Lynch himself can be a cagey interview subject; he's not one to explain his art. However, his collaborators sometimes offer interesting insights into what makes him tick as a filmmaker. One of those collaborators is Cara Brower, the production designer for "Twin Peaks: The Return."
It's been four years since the Showtime event series took viewers back to the world of "Twin Peaks" and perhaps scrambled their brains and sent them diving down the Reddit rabbit hole for answers. Lynch, the creative genius behind "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive" (the 21st century's greatest film, according to the BBC), directed all 18 episodes of "Twin Peaks: The Return." In /Film's interview with Brower, she talked about working with him and bringing the famous red room back to life.
The red room is an extradimensional waiting room where Kyle MacLachlan's character, Agent Dale Cooper, has been known to wander. It's a place as loopy as Reddit, but with actual red curtains and black-and-white lines zigzagging across the floor. People talk backward there, but it must have been an honor to help re-conceptualize it, right? Brower said:
"Oh, yeah. Well, there was a lot of pressure, because David specifically remembers the texture of the curtains and the feeling of the fabric between his fingers. He has the colors memorized. And so, that specifically, when we were recreating some of the older sets, there was a lot of pressure to get it right."
A Photographic Memory and a Nostalgia Critique
It almost sounds like Lynch has a photographic memory or 94% recall like Truman Capote (as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote.") This isn't the first time, actually, that someone has alluded to that. In a 2017 interview with No Film School, Jon Nguyen, the director of the documentary "David Lynch: The Art Life," discussed Lynch's capacity for recalling specific conversations and images years later. He said:
"Sometimes [Lynch] would repeat stories years apart and it would be exact, down to the detail. I really believe it's because he's been meditating two times a day for the last 40 years. His brain is so clear. He does transcendental meditation two days a week. He hasn't missed a day since he began."
Lynch's work has a dream logic to it that can be challenging but rewarding depending on how invested you are in theme and mood. There are moments of lucidity and clarity, but depending on who you ask, his oblique storytelling manner might be as dissatisfying as it is deeply gratifying.
My fundamental takeaway from "Twin Peaks: The Return" was that it did make sense as a critique of nostalgia-driven entertainment. No one notices, for instance, that Cooper's tulpa, Dougie, is just repeating the same thing back to them. While arm-wrestling, his evil doppelgänger, Mr. C, notes that the "starting position is more comfortable." Even the brief return of Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) feels like a knowing subversion of fan-service. She ends in front of a mirror like Cooper in the original "Twin Peaks" finale at the end of season 2.
Ultimately, "Twin Peaks: The Return" was not the same show as "Twin Peaks," and to revisit/rewrite the past could only strand us somewhere beyond recognition.