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I've always liked building things. From very early on, I've been attracted to the idea of creating complex mechanisms that, once finished, could work on their own (as you can guess, as a child, my favourite toys were Lego blocks). So after high school years and first college years quite successful with mathematics, I went on studying computer science, because it seemed the logical thing to do at the time. In France, computer science ("informatique") isn't really about computers, but about working with data. Understanding how data can be analysed and manipulated, to be organized as a consistent whole that makes sense. After five months of work in a company at the end of my degree, however, I felt computer science wasn't for me (even though the company was happy with my work). Programming lacked two things very important for me : visual art and imagination.
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I've always liked the idea of imaginary worlds, especially if it's visual art, or is described enough so that the reader or viewer can imagine it visually. As a kid, the "Philémon" comics by Fred Othon Aristidès impressed me very, very much. Later, the similar "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice through the Looking Glass" books also did, of course (thanks to Walt Disney studios putting them on screen, it made me read the original author, Lewis Caroll). As a young adult, the work of H.P. Lovecraft blew me away, and later, the consistency and incredible intelligence of the first "Dune" books by Frank Herbert also got my admiration. Some authors tell you about a world and make you imagine how it looks, others show you how it looks and make you imagine the worlds. Salvador Dalí, M.C. Escher, H.R. Giger have, to me, also built virtual worlds in a way. They're some of the best known artists who did, but of course, every good artist has an interior world (recently, Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 3" was, to me, spectacular). But I'll go back to this later...
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I started studying for my Master degree anyway but knew programming and computer science wasn't what I wanted to do as a job anymore. This is when I got more and more interested into the Internet (the university I studied in had quite a wide access), because it was the ideal medium between "informatique" and art, programming and visuals. The idea to create something that could later live on its own, reacting to user behaviours from all over the world, with artistic and experimental content, was exactly what I've been looking for. Quickly, I started working on a group of web sites about imaginary worlds, that eventually were gathered under the URL 'batbad.com'. One about my work (now deleted, and replaced by a site about the "Philémon" comics), one about logic riddles presented by the Riddler (the villain from "Batman" comics), and one about David Lynch's "Black Lodge".
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This site about the "Black Lodge", created around year 1998, was then very simple. It had only a dozen of pages, each with a picture of the 'Red Room' taken from VHS copies of "Fire Walk with Me" and the last episode of the "Twin Peaks" series. The rooms were always linked together in the same way, meaning you could have drawn a map out of it. A few characters could be met, talking through looped animated GIF images used as subtitles. Eventually you'd meet BOB, who'd send you to a page with my favourite links, and that was it. The idea to do this site simply had come from my love of mazes, my realization that HTML link structure was the very same as the old "Choose you Own Adventure" books and therefore could be used the same way, and of course from my fascination for the 'Red Room' scenes in the last episode of "Twin Peaks". I quickly saw something more interesting and creative could be made out of this, using Javascript code so that links from one room to another were picked at random. After all, the idea of the 'Red Room' was that every room looked the same, and the visitor was confused and disturbed by his (or her) wandering. It worked so well I added random dialogue and random details into the rooms themselves, and, later, interactive events.
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My own interest into David Lynch's work has always been close to the idea of virtual worlds. His most interesting films in my opinion are the ones about mystery, and mystery is suggestion : the worlds described by these movies are larger than what's actually shown in them, so the viewer must figure out himself or herself the unexplained parts. It's very true of "Fire Walk with Me" for example, where many events and characters are left totally unexplained ; yet, there are very strong hints of an underlying complex plot with underground secret societies tied to supernatural events, which the FBI investigates on. This isn't the main story at all (the main story is about Laura Palmer and her relationship with her father), but this background of mystery is what makes the movie so fascinating, because the audience feels something big is going on. What's even more interesting is how all of Lynch's films about mystery are linked together. The 'cow-boy' and the bum from "Mulholland Drive", the Mystery Man from "Lost Highway", the 'lady behind the radiator' from "Eraserhead", all look like characters from the "Black Lodge". The "Black Lodge" itself isn't only in Twin Peaks : the red drapes from Fred Madison's house in "Lost Highway", the Mystery Man's cabin from the same movie, Club Silencio from "Mulholland Drive" and behind the radiator in "Eraserhead", all are places that look and work the same way as the 'Red Room'. I don't think this is because of a lack of imagination, I think it's because the concept of the "Black Lodge" is very intimate to David Lynch. I think it's part of his inner world.
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So... time passed, and in year 2002, after I moved to Paris and when many Lynch films were available on DVD, I decided to add into the "Black Lodge" scenes from other movies than "Fire Walk with Me" and the "Twin Peaks" series, and to redo the 'Red Room' scenes. There were many reasons for this, the major one being : "because I can" !!! My web sites about imaginary worlds have always mostly been about having fun with the Internet medium. They're web sites that serve no specific agenda, so they don't have to be easy to understand, and I can make anything I want out of them. It's very fun and is a welcome change from what the Internet business is about (that is, making web sites reachable by anybody, and I do write 'anybody' here). Creating a web site which purpose is to scare and confuse the viewer, to try new exciting things, is amazing relief for a web designer. There's also the challenge, of course. It was a feat, both visually and technically, to make HTML pages out of scenes from David Lynch's films. I wanted each page to stretch the scene to the size of the user's window ; for scenes shot in widescreen, horizontally, for scenes shot in 4:3, both horizontally and vertically. This means that in most pages, when you increase manually the width of your browser window, walls expand, the floor grows larger, furniture and characters move to fill empty space. It's especially noticeable with Internet Explorer.
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For scenes where the camera moves to display a large area, shots have been put together to make one big picture larger than the browser window, like with the apartment of Dorothy Vallens (in that case, several different shots of the apartment, including one at the beginning of the movie and one at the end, have been used). Other difficult image effects have been made using Photoshop... the one I did on almost every shot should be unnoticeable : many details and characters have been erased. Indeed, most of the HTML pages of the "Black Lodge" show an empty room, when it's actually a rare thing in movies, so I had to remove most of the cast, or change their position (in some cases, move a character from one film to another). The most difficult, though, have been the Javascript code and the sound. Animation in this site, often interactive, is most of the time made with many JPEG images showing different steps of the animation, substituted by Javascript. It's not easy to do, and when it's interactive and features Macromedia Flash sound, it's extremely complex - including for Internet browsers themselves. Actually, for some time, the only browsers displaying this site correctly had been Internet Explorer and good old Netscape. All the other browsers didn't know how to handle ActionScript or fscommand properly (or handled neither, compatibility sometimes makes web design a chore). My biggest worry was the site not working on Firefox, which was gaining more and more popularity, but then I spotted the (small, stupid) problem in early 2006, and the site now works on all popular browsers. To have an idea of the complexity of this project, you can have a look at the technical document (in French) describing how the "Black Lodge" works by clicking here.
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I built all those features, and many random events, and wrote many random dialogues (over 450 lines), and made a few crossovers, and the number of HTML pages grew larger than 350, and I finally started to really see what I wanted to achieve with this web site. What struck me was how natural it seemed. How obvious it was that behind the "Eraserhead" radiator you'd join the 'Red Room' ; that you could meet Frank Booth and Ben from "Blue Velvet" as well as the Mystery Man from "Lost Highway" at the "Fire Walk with Me" canadian night club ; that you could hear Pete from "Twin Peaks" saying : "she's dead... wrapped in plastic" through a phone in the "Eraserhead" hall ; that the bum from "Mulholland Drive" would be standing in the same dirty room as the Tremond/Chalfont grandmother behind the picture on Laura's wall in "Fire Walk with Me"... I understood then that what I was building was, somehow, a journey into a part of David Lynch's mind. I believe artists don't feel like they're making up their stories or vision, but that they simply feel they put outside something that already existed inside of them, in their subconscious. David Lynch said it himself in a interview with Chris Rodley : that the difference between the inside and the outside is, to him, what cinema and life is about. I believe he meant it both for the characters in his films about mystery (the films I've chosen to put in the "Black Lodge" *all* have an ambiguity between an objective and subjective point of view, between the inside and the outside : was the Mystery Man made up by Fred Madison, was BOB invented by Laura and Leland Palmer, was the 'lady behind the radiator' part of Henry Spencer's imagination, was the bum in "Mulholland Drive" real or not), and that he meant it for his own creativity.
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This is something that is the core of 'batbad.com', and that's linked with the incredible revolution that happened around the beginning of this new century. I explain this into more details on my main site about imaginary worlds, 'www.batbad.com', but I'll explain it quicker here : we now live in an age where virtual worlds are getting more and more important, because of the new ease computers gave us to manipulate and create images. The renewed interest theater audiences have for imaginary worlds is obvious : "Harry Potter", the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "Dark City" and "Matrix", the new "Star Wars" trilogy, "X-men", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - seldom have we seen that much quality movies that have nearly no link with reality. They stand in a world of their own, that we may or may not explore later in a sequel (by the way, sequels in general develop a lot better than before worlds described by prequels). Even films that aren't at all about fantasy or science-fiction now use strong visuals to either put the viewer into the subjective point of view of characters, or to display a spectacular sense of style : "Requiem for a Dream" is psychological drama, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is about love and living as a couple,"Fight Club" is about the 90's, "Sin City" is film noir ; but all have a mood, narration and visuals that are tied to the phenomenon of virtual reality, either because of the way reality is shown, of because it puts the audience into the very mind of some characters. This confusion between the 'inside' and the 'outside' existed before (David Cronenberg's films for example), but mostly, it's really David Lynch that's been, in my opinion, the precursor to this new kind of films. Because of this, I believe people will understand his work better as time passes (in my opinion, this explains in part why "Mulholland Drive" was a popular success) : because people more easily get into works of imagination, have more interest for daring narration techniques, and don't think anymore there has to be a clear line between drama, horror, thriller, fantasy and entertainment. The fact "Mulholland Drive" is actually seen among the best 250 movies on the "Internet Movie Database" is amazing.
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So, I had to finish this web site to understand this, but both David Lynch and what I made out of his work are linked with the new importance visual imagination has at the beginning of this new century. I'd even say David Lynch, along with David Cronenberg, somehow started this tendency in cinema (I wouldn't go so far as saying they actually caused the whole movement, though, but they were in advance for their time) to blur seamlessly the limit between the 'inside' and the 'outside', whether it's the 'inside' of a character, our global subconscious, or the author's. Like the Krell from "Forbidden Planet", we made the 'inside' (images from the world of drives, dreams, desires and ideas, monsters from the Id like BOB or the Mystery Man) go 'outside' in a more realistic, natural and spectacular way than ever before. I think this is a fantastic thing to witness, and that great authors from the past probably would have wished to see (and use) it, too. I'm quite proud of my modest contribution to this revolution. I also think this web site will show you how genuinely gorgeous Lynch's photography is (we should push the "pause" button when we watch a DVD more often, just to look at how beautiful some movie shots are) ; and eventually, I hope it'll prove to you a web site can be different, and not sell an experience to you, inform you about an experience, or analyse an experience, but *be* the experience. Have fun.
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I'm Emmanuel
Papillon, a French web designer born in 1974 in Lyon, France.
You can see my (French) professional web design site
by 
