Room Tone (For Two)
What happens to desire when you erase the actors?
A critic once wrote that Lynch was never really interested in his characters, only in his iconography. I wanted to test that idea by taking it literally.
Working from a motel sequence in Wild at Heart, I removed every human body using generative AI tools, leaving only what the critique said mattered anyway: the fire, the candy-heart necklace, the horse-head radio statue, the objects that used to surround love and danger. Those emptied frames became 3D environments, rebuilt in Unity as a playable game where the audience controls the one thing left behind: the snakeskin jacket itself. A separate 3-minute short recuts the same material as film.
"THIS is a snakeskin jacket. And for me; it's a symbol of my individuality. And my belief in personal freedom."
Sailor Ripley, early in Wild at Heart. Without Sailor, the line has nowhere to land.
Strip out the characters and the iconography doesn't go empty. It goes strange. Emotion collapses into texture, and texture asks to be filled back in. The player becomes the absent body, projecting meaning onto objects that have forgotten their lines: desire without bodies, danger without villains, the residual heat of a scene after everyone has left the frame.