On David Lynch’s 74th birthday, Jan. 20, Netflix dropped a gift for all of us: a surreal short film featuring the famed director grilling a tuxedo-clad capuchin monkey suspected of murder. The 17-minute dive into monochromatic weirdness is Lynch at full-throttle.
What Did Jack Do? was filmed in 2016 for the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, where it premiered in 2017. It showed the following year at Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, but its recent home on Netflix is the first time the short has been accessible to a wider audience.
Steeped in murky dirt-speckled black-and-white, it brings to mind Eraserhead, Lynch’s first feature-length film. Spirals of cigarette smoke, wise-cracking idioms and the cop procedural set-up touch on noir hallmarks — and Twin Peaks. When a waitress (played by Emily Stofle, Lynch’s wife) brings the monkey a mug of black coffee, you might even wish Kyle MacLachlan was there to interject with a “damn fine!”
Lynch plays a detective interrogating a primate named Jack Cruz, who is suspected of murder. Set at a railroad station, he’s only able to do so because Jack’s train was delayed. The capuchin’s voice is strained and squeaky, humorously so. A human mouth is superimposed on the little fella’s face, glitching occasionally like an Instagram or Snapchat filter. The monkey’s wide-eyed expression glints with innocence. Juxtaposed with the non-sequitur-laden, combative dialogue and apprehensive head/body movements, the animal becomes something akin to a dream. This story feels pulled straight out of a faraway dimension, one where monkeys perhaps play way too much L.A. Noir.
The dialogue may be frenetic, but the longer you listen, the more a plot seems to emerge. Did Jack kill someone named Max for getting too close to his love, a chicken named Tootoabon? The story eventually boils to Jack breaking out in a song — “True Love’s Flame” — that could rival Adam Driver’s character’s musical number in Marriage Story. Let me tell you, by that point, I had lost it. My brain was trying to make sense of what I was viewing to little avail. But that’s the beauty of Lynch’s works — they often serve as a window into a one’s subconscious. This vehicle is not supposed to arrive at any concrete answers, and it would be more surprising if it did.
To give you a taste of its unabashed strangeness, here are a few lines the script has to offer:
“They say real love is a banana — sweet with a golden hue,” Jack says.
When the detective asks him, “Don’t you ever wonder about anything?” The primate retorts, “The wonder was in my heart, but you wouldn’t understand something like that.”
There’s even a moment the monkey tells Lynch to burn in hell. (A sentence I never thought I’d type!)
We can only hope that the short’s surprise release means the streaming giant is partnering with Lynch on other projects and is open to bringing experimental works to their platform. But mostly, this short is just Lynch being Lynch. If you’re a fan — or just want a dose of weirdness — What Did Jack Do? doesn’t disappoint.
This article appears in Jan 22 – Feb 4, 2020.
