All of the Commercials That David Lynch Has Directed: A 30-Minute Compilation

Summary

Some film­mak­ers start in com­mer­cials, hon­ing their chops in antic­i­pa­tion of mak­ing per­son­al projects lat­er. A select few go in the oth­er direc­tion, real­iz­ing their dis­tinc­tive vision before field­ing offers from com­pa­nies who want a piece of that vision’s cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy. Any­one who’s seen David Lynch’s most acclaimed work will sus­pect, cor­rect­ly, that Lynch belongs in the lat­ter group. With 1977’s cult hit Eraser­head, he showed cin­e­ma what it means to be Lynchi­an. This brought him the atten­tion of Hol­ly­wood, lead­ing to the respectable suc­cess of The Ele­phant Man and the dis­as­ter that was Dune. Only in 1986, with Blue Vel­vet, could Lynch make a tru­ly, even trou­bling­ly per­son­al film that hit the zeit­geist at just the right moment. Nat­u­ral­ly, Madi­son Avenue came call­ing soon there­after. “With the smash Blue Vel­vet, a Palme d’or at Cannes for Wild at Heart, and then the nation­al phe­nom­e­non of Twin Peaks’ first sea­son, David Lynch clear­ly estab­lished him­self as the U.S.A.‘s fore­most com­mer­cial­ly viable avant-garde-‘offbeat’ direc­tor,” wrote David Fos­ter Wal­lace in a 1997 piece on the film­mak­er. “For a while there it looked like he might be able to sin­gle-hand­ed­ly bro­ker a new mar­riage between art and com­merce in U.S. movies, open­ing for­mu­la-frozen Hol­ly­wood to some of the eccen­tric­i­ty and vig­or of art film.” Lynch’s fans in tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing must have imag­ined that he could do the same for their indus­try, and you can watch the fruits of that hunch in the half-hour com­pi­la­tion of Lynch-direct­ed com­mer­cials above. Lynch has worked for some star­tling­ly big brands, begin­ning with Calvin Klein: his trio of spots for the fra­grance Obses­sion take as their basis the writ­ing of F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Ernest Hem­ing­way, and D.H. Lawrence. A few years lat­er he direct­ed a humor­ous mini-sea­son of Twin Peaks to pro­mote Geor­gia Cof­fee, one of the top brands of canned ...