What did Jack Do?

In 2016, David Lynch made a 17 minute film What did Jack Do? apparently for the Paris art museum, the Pompidou Center.  This short film is now available on Netflix and worth watching.

Lynch's work is all of a piece and, despite embracing an enormous range of emotional states, the formal aspects of his art, nonetheless, gives his persistent viewers some sense of coherency.  One refrain sounded in all of Lynch's films asserts that all human beings, no matter how apparently civilized, are subject to dark influences -- these forces may be exterior, in the form of derelict vagrants or wicked doppelgaengers, or interior demons.  Lynch is fundamentally Manichean -- he perceives of existence in the most stark terms of good and evil.  These traits are on display in Lynch's little parable, a beast-fable with a Kafkaesque edge.

In a stylized and angular room, a table sits in front of a window that opens onto a vaguely represented train station -- sometimes, we hear train whistles hoot and there is a murmur of crowd noise occasionally.  David Lynch, with his upthrust shock of white hair, stands over the table where a small capuchin monkey is seated.  Lynch plays the role of some kind of investigator, a cop or FBI man.  He poses a series of aggressive questions to the monkey.  The monkey, filmed in close-up, has bulging black eyes and a quizzical expression -- he speaks in a raspy, computer-generated voice that correlates exactly to the movements of his lips.  This special effect is impressive and gives the talking monkey an uncanny aspect.  Through Lynch's questions and the monkey's clipped and belligerent responses, we learn that the monkey (named Jack Cruz) is a tough-talking underworld type who has fallen in love with a chicken.  When Jack perceives that the chicken is two-timing him with someone named Max, he apparently murders the man (or creature of some kind).  The dialogue is Lynch's interrogation of the evasive and wise-cracking monkey.  At the end of the dialogue, the monkey bursts into a typically Lynchian song, a lugubrious, droning tribute to love.  The chicken wanders into a corridor next to the room in which the interview takes place.  Smitten with love, Jack runs after the chicken and, apparently, is either apprehended or gunned-down.  About midway through the film, a waitress brings two cups of coffee, one of which is filmed in enormous close-up (we see the white foam on top of the coffee gradually dispersing).  The waitress is one of Lynch's stock characters -- a comely and inscrutable teenage vamp.

During its short running time, the film embodies most of Lynch's characteristic themes:  there is the tough-talk that always slips into bizarre and absurdly stylized clichés -- this is language not as communication but as music, a duet for two Damon Runyon characters.  Lynch generally perceives music as engendering dream-like states of reverie, hypnosis, or, even, some sort of possession.  (When we play Beethoven on the piano, in some sense, our hands are possessed by the spirit of Beethoven).  In this film,  the monkey's crooning lament is filmed as if occupying an entirely different space, a whitish stage where stylized limelights converge.  And, of course, there is the waitress bearing her cups of steaming coffee, a staple in all of Lynch's movies.

The picture is beautifully lit.  Lynch smokes with the cigarette in the corner of his lips and the smoke spirals majestically around his head.  The monkey-suspect seems embattled, guilty, defensive -- at one point, Lynch points out that the monkey's pupils are dilated:  of course, the close-up of the monkey shows bulging black eyes that are nothing but pupil.  The capuchin denies the observation.  the film's most interesting aspect is its tone:  the picture isn't cute or whimsical -- rather it seems deadly serious, a sinister duel between the cop and his simian adversary, both of which who seem to understanding his counterpart all too well.