David Lynch's What Did Jack Do? Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Spare a thought, briefly, for the poor souls who were idly browsing through Netflix on January 20th, 2020 and – entirely by chance – happened upon David Lynch's short What Did Jack Do? What could they have possibly thought was happening? As the 17-minute short progressed, and they witnessed David Lynch himself interviewing a talking capuchin monkey about how the monkey may have committed a murder, did the unsuspecting viewer think that their La Croix had been spiked with LSD? That's certainly the impression one takes from What Did Jack Do?, a short film made by Lynch back in 2016, and one that is only now finding its way onto Netflix without any warning, fanfare, introduction, or the slightest whiff of context. It seems that if one were attending a David Lynch retrospective at a local art museum, or perhaps watching a Twin Peaks: The Return marathon on Showtime, then one might not be as blindsided by this wonderful, deconstructionist hunk of bizarre monkey-based noir. But appearing on Netflix the way it did, a viewer can only feel, perhaps, a dizzying sense of nightmarish disconnect from reality itself. As if your TV somehow opened a heretofore undiscovered aperture in the space-time continuum, and Plato's Realm of Ideas came spilling out in its rawest form. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/12/22/new-to-netflix-for-january-2020"] What Did Jack Do? is – like Lynch's his debut feature Eraserhead – decidedly and deliberately low-fi. It was shot in a shimmering, grainy, black-and-white, and Lynch artificially added specks of dirt to the frame to give it the feeling of a long-lost midnight film that has spent the last several decades languishing in a long-forgotten projection booth somewhere. The entire film takes place at a mystifyingly under-sized diner table whereat Lynch, playing a nameless detective, interrogates Jack Cruz (credited as “himself”) about his past. Jack is belligerent and will not cooperate. A passing waitress (Emily Stofle) mentions a killer might be in the area. The conversation between Lynch and Jack eventually steers toward a chicken named Toototabon and how deeply Jack loved her. Everyone's got something to hide, especially Lynch and his monkey. Jack's speaking is achieved via a photographic effect wherein an actor's mouth was superimposed over the monkey's face. It's not that much more sophisticated an effect than one would see in an episode of Clutch Cargo, or the “Bim Bam Boom” sequence from Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone. The effect is just – just – convincing enough to leave one completely unnerved. The voice that comes out of the monkey is strained and sounds filtered and distant, like something one might hear through an old audio cassette. It resembles a nightmare this author may have had once, long ago. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=what-did-jack-do&captions=true"] Lynch has long been a fan of film noir, and if a genre can be assigned to most of his works (Twin Peaks and Lost Highway in particular), they might be described as “deconstructionist noir.” What Did Jack Do? features, boldly, well-worn clichés and high-mileage noir axioms delivered with Lynch's near-robotic intensity. Lynch appears to be re-contextualizing noir dialogue all the way back down the evolutionary ladder, finding the childlike, hard-boiled sentiment that may still lay embedded somewhere deep within its genes. What Did Jack Do? dismantles traditional noir dialogue by condensing every single bit of it into one location, and then putting it in the mouth of a capuchin monkey. It is a difficult – indeed, perhaps an almost churlish – task to review a surrealist short by any kind of traditional standard, of course. Lynch has made a short film that is so completely and purely itself, that one cannot necessarily declare it to have succeeded or failed by any sort of rational measure. If it threw you off guard, frightened you, made you laugh, had you thinking about film noir in a more objective light, and began you on a path of doubt about the stability of the universe then it can perhaps be called a successful piece of surrealist art.

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