David Lynch isn’t just a filmmaker but a true multi-media artist. He’s made paintings and sculptures, has recorded music, and is an avid carpenter in his spare time. He even had his own blend of coffee and a long running comic strip. Regardless of the form his creations take, the Lynchian aesthetic is always evident. Even his work in moving pictures has never been confined to one format. Obviously, he’s had quite a great deal of success in television. All throughout his career, past and present, David Lynch has directed many short films. In 2002, a DVD collection of some of his early short films was released, originally as an exclusive through his website. This is not normally the kind of thing I would talk about for a Director Report Card but IMDb lists “The Short Films of David Lynch” as a feature, so I decided to throw it in.
The collection begins with “Six Figures Getting Sick,” also known as “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times.)” To the unaware, the short plays as one of Lynch’s more bizarre statements. We see six stone-like faces, locked in horrified expressions. Light, colors, numbers and words pass over the image. Animation fills in the blanks, outlines of hands, stomachs, and digestive systems appearing on-screen. The image seems to catch fire before the six men vomit in a purple haze. This cycles through, as the title indicates, six times. The blare of a siren plays over top. The entire presentation takes about a minute.
One of the great things about the “Short Films of David Lynch” collection is that each film has an introduction from Lynch himself, providing some production back story on each short. This is how you learn that “Six Figures” was his first motion picture, created while he was still a student at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. How it was originally a physical piece of art, a looping animation projected on a stationary statue with the sound effects provided in person.
Divorced of context, “Six Figures Getting Sick” plays like an interesting – if obviously limited – artistic statement. Even this early in his career, working with this little material, the David Lynch style is already visible. The industrial soundtrack and grotesque carved faces will be immediately familiar. The simplistic animation has an appealingly grungy quality. After one minute, you get a bit irritated with the sound effects but it’s still a memorable little short. (Though one can’t help but imagine it would be more impressive seen in person.)
That combination of live action and animation would continue with Lynch’s next short film. “The Alphabet” begins with the alphabet appearing over an abstract image of a schoolyard, accompanied by obscure music. Soon afterwards, this picturesque scene turns into a nightmare. A strange humanoid figure materializes in a bedroom while a baby squeals, before a succession of letters causes its head to bleed and fall apart. A woman – played by Lynch’s then-wife Peggy – recites the alphabet in bed, before bleeding profusely from the mouth.
With his second short, Lynch moved right into surreal horror. In fact, you can easily drawl a line from “The Alphabet” to “Eraserhead.” Both involved an incessantly noisy child and feature a soundtrack largely composed of howling wind. Both contained images of deformed bodies. Moreover, both capture the acute feeling of a nightmare. The animation is bizarre and, when combined with the screeching sound design, becomes especially nerve-wrecking. Peggy Lynch has her hair stuck to her face, her skin pale as death, looking like a Japanese ghost girl thirty years before “Ringu” existed. The combination is a four minute blast of high-intensity weirdness and unsettling horror.
Lynch would continue to mix live action and animation, as well as the horrific and the surreal, with “The Grandmother.” A young boy, seemingly named Mott, is abused and neglected by his (frequently animal-like) parents. After wetting the bed one night, he is especially badly beaten. He finds a seed, plops a mound of dirt on his bed, and plants it. Out grows a kindly grandmother, the loving parental figure the boy has always wanted. Yet this is not the end of the boy’s troubles, as not even the grandmother can keep him from confronting his cruel mother and father.
On one hand, “The Grandmother” is more thematically rich than Lynch’s first two shorts. For the first time, we see the director confronting the idea of established societal norms, such as family, breaking down and failing us. The boy’s parents are so abusive, they cease to be human, often barking and acting like dogs. You also see foreshadowing of his later work here. The rumbling sound design, desolate sets, squishy and home made special effects, and random mounds of dirt would predict “Eraserhead.” The scenes of a parent berating their child with indistinct noise brings Laura and Leland Palmer’s relationship to mind.
At the same time, you see Lynch’s stretching his earlier style to its absolute limit with “The Grandmother.” The animated sequences feel increasingly hokey. The primitive animation of bodies flying around or the sun rising feels like something out of “Sesame Street.” The combination of live actors and stop-motion animation is interesting. However, it’s sometimes comical in an ineffective way. Such as when the Grandmother is flying around the bedroom while whistling. The short also feels too long, this kind of abstraction becoming grating at about thirty minutes. You definitely get the impression that “The Grandmother” continues past its logical end point.
David Lynch's fourth short film, “The Amputee,” was produced during a pause in the filming of “Eraserhead.” It stars Catherine E. Coulson – “Twin Peaks's” Log Lady – as a double amputee. She sits in her chair and writes a meandering letter, which is narrated to the audience, recounting the vague details of some sort of romantic betrayal. Meanwhile, her nurse – played by Lynch in drag – tends to the bandaged limbs. Despite the nurse's best efforts, the stumps begin to fountain blood... Though the woman doesn't seem much bothered by it at all.
As Lynch explains in the introduction, “The Amputee” was written in a night and shot quickly to take advantage of a simple test of new film stock the American Film Institute was doing. This explains why the short is largely composed of a stationary shot. Despite its simplicity, “The Amputee” is an effectively disquieting few minutes. The rambling quality of Coulson's note, the content's angry but her delivery dispassionate, suggest the woman has gone mad. The ever-increasing flow of blood from her stumps, accompanied by gurgling sound effects, is disgusting. Yet there's an element of absurdity here too, as the nurse grows more panicked by his inability to control the cartoonish bleeding. Whether you find it hilarious or unpleasant, “The Amputee” shows Lynch's continued ability to place the surreal alongside the commonplace.
The next short presented as part of “The Short Films of David Lynch” is “The Cowboy and the Frenchmen,” which was actually a half-hour episode of the French television series “The French as Seen By...” It concerns a nearly deaf cowboy, Slim, and his friends, Pete and Dusty. Their typical day of roping and riding is interrupted when a stereotypical Frenchmen wonders into their field. At first, they are baffled by the foreigner and his suitcase full of cartoonish French possessions. However, the separate groups soon bond over their common interests and become friends as the night goes on.
Most of “The Short Films of David Lynch” is devoted to surreal horror and howling, industrial soundscapes but “The Cowboys and the Frenchmen” proves to be a refreshing respite. Lynch said his interest in the short came about when he had the idea to combine two stereotypes. So every silly joke you can think of about Frenchmen, cowboys, and Indians are combined. The escalating absurdity, of Harry Dean Stanton shouting all his dialogue and the increasing ridiculousness of the objects removed from the Frenchman's suitcase, results in a lot of laughs. Afterwards, Lynch produces a ballet of can-can dancers, lasso tricks, and kicking horses, paired with country-western crooners and rockabiliy music. It's good-natured and goofy comedy, a more gentle breed of the absurd then Lynch usually dabbles in. And it features a nice message about how more things unite us than push us apart.
“The Short Films of David Lynch” concludes with “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed.” It was originally produced for “Lumiere and Company,” an anthology film that invited fifty-six prominent filmmakers to make one minute long shorts with the very first movie camera ever created. The brief, black-and-white, silent short seems to depict police discovering a dead body behind a building. We see a series of strange images – including men in bizarre marks circling a naked woman floating in a tank – before an officer brings the bad news to what is presumably the murder victim's parents.
Considering its briefness, Lynch managed to squeeze quite a lot of dread into “Premonitions.” The central image, those odd masks and the naked woman, is definitely unsettling in that hard-to-define Lynchian manner. Even more upsetting is the final sequence. As the cop enters the room, to inform parents that their daughter is dead, he seems to bring an ominous shadow with him. The stark, black-and-white style is a natural fit for Lynch and only makes it easier for him to create a tone of oppressive doom. Especially when paired with a pounding and foreboding sound design.
Over all, “The Short Films of David Lynch” is an interesting collection for hardcore fans of the director. The first four shorts provide a fascinating look into the early days of Lynch's career. Each is compelling in their own way, showing how his talent evolved over the years and what trademarks were ingrained in him from the beginning. Meanwhile, the last two shorts show the drastically different ways the director can use his mastery of the absurd. Combined with the introductions, the DVD package is absolutely worth tracking down. [Grade: A-]
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