Other than a 13-minute single-shot music video for his avant-garde band Thought Gang, David Lynch hasn’t brought any new strangeness into the world since the end of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, when Kyle MacLachlan asked “what year is this?” and Sheryl Lee let out and terrifying scream. (Don’t worry, that isn’t a spoiler. I could detail in words every single moment of the series and it wouldn’t mean squat unless you saw it.)
That ended Monday with the unexpected release of What Did Jack Do? on Netflix’s streaming service. The 17-minute film stars Lynch himself, his first time as a leading man, though he’s given himself some plum roles in the past. This time he’s a police detective in a hazy collage of film noir clichés shaking down a suspect. His scene partner is a capuchin monkey.
The monkey, credited as Jack Cruz playing himself, wears a suit (designed by “Pampered Primates” per the closing credits) and gives gruff, annoyed responses to the detective’s queries. As was the case with the recent Showtime series, Lynch leans-in to the inexpensive special effects, exploiting their plastic weirdness. So when Jack “speaks” it looks like the old superimposed fake lips that Conan O’Brien used to feature.
Shot in black and white in a dingy train station, there is a scratchy and distressed “film look” that adds a nightmarish layer to the cold hum of the omnipresent sound design. The cumulative effect is that while funny to see a talking monkey acting in a B picture, it quickly turns from a lark to dread.
It’s also quite difficult to follow the plot, which involves a crime of passion and a murdered chicken. (If you want to say fowl play, I’m not going to stop you.) Lynch and the monkey volley hackneyed phrases like “you’ll not get a free lunch around here,” “I read the papers!” and “are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?” There’s little logical flow in the dialogue, resembling more of a William S. Burroughs cut-up than a typical one act play. There are chuckles, but it is intentionally disorienting.
There’s also coffee, a Lynch staple.
When the disquiet almost becomes unbearable, the screen turns white and the monkey breaks into song. It’s a comic light and the end of the tunnel, but it quickly turns dark when his “lost love” Toototabon (a chicken) arrives. The monkey is truly heartbroken, and this is what slips him up to the detective. I can’t explain it, but it is deeply and incredibly sad.
This is, of course, the genius of Lynch, who so easily can fuse complex and often contradictory emotions, and put them on the screen in ways that look, at first, absurd or even silly, but they burrow down deep into your psyche and leave a mark.
The short is produced by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, a French museum and foundation created by Cartier International in 1984. The French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma recently named Twin Peaks: The Return, a TV show, the best film of the last ten years.