- What did Jack do? (2016-2020. Dir. David Lynch. Short). A detective interrogates a talking capuchin monkey in a café. Your response to the previous summary may depend on how familiar you are with director Lynch’s oeuvre (or perhaps with Furry stories).
A short film that is hard to classify, crossing from Noir narratives to a parody of same, to art film, to a purely… Lynch film experience.
For those viewers who are already fans of Lynch (myself included) there is all the expected ingredients: Imaginative settings that suggest more than they show, carefully measured performances (two human actors and two animals, one with a superimposed mouth), a twisting storyline that reveals itself oh-so-gradually —even a musical moment that provides a capital clue!
For fans, too, it is tempting to see this short as fitting in with what we imagine to be Lynch’s ‘cinematic universe’. Quite a few suggest that the detective, played by the director himself, is Gordon Cole from his infamous tv series “Twin Peaks”. The answer of course, is: Maybe and maybe not. What really matters is the film itself. The hypnotic, impossible to classify film.
Of course, people who dislike Lynch’s works will find everything to criticize that they already dislike about them. A disjointed, seemingly random dialogue and a story that is somehow simultaneously common and inane. Many would have found it pretentious… if the short itself didn’t refuse to take itself seriously.
Really the best way to describe this short film is to urge people to watch it, and decide for themselves.
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