Twitch Looks At The New David Lynch DVDs

The Short Films disc includes six shorts, ranging from his first art school project (Six Men Getting Sick) through to the Twin Peaks era The Cowboy and the Frenchman and the film he shot as part of a Lumiere anniversary project using the brothers’ original camera. Other shorts include The Alphabet, The Grandmother, and The Amputee. All six shorts include filmed introductions from Lynch himself, who sets things in context. All of the themes that would dominate Lynch’s later work are present here and the shorts are fascinating both as works of experimental film and as pieces of history. These are absolutely essential viewing for any Lynch fan.

Is there anything to say about Eraserhead that hasn’t been said? I think not, so I’ll limit my comments to the presentation. Lynch’s surreal classic is presented in anamorphic widescreen and while the print is not perfect – it’s getting up there in years, after all – it is pretty damn close and will never get closer. Lynch spent better than a year working on this transfer, continually pushing back the release date of the DVD until he was convinced the picture quality was as strong as humanly possible. Again, if you are a fan of Lynch this is the only version of the film to even consider owning based on the picture quality alone. There is no other edition that comes anywhere close. But there is more here than the film. Though notoriously reluctant to explain himself or his work Lynch has included a bonus labeled simply ‘Stories’, essentially a video interview running just less than an hour and a half in which Lynch tells stories about the making of the film. It’s vintage Lynch – funny, sincere and surreal – and while he remains deliberately and frustratingly obscure – I don’t believe for a second his claim that he has no memory of writing the script – it is one of those things that makes Lynch who he is and there’s so much good material included that it’s hard to hold it against him when he wants to keep certain things private.

Released at the same time as these new reduced price editions of the original DavidLynch.com releases is a new limited edition release of Dumbland, packaged in the same format box as the original releases of Eraserhead and Short Films. Frankly, I am more than a little confused that Lynch has opted to release these animated shorts rather than the far superior and, I think, more commercially viable Rabbits. The Dumbland DVD opens with a brief disclaimer from the man himself: “Dumbland is a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series. If it is funny, it is funny because we see the absurdity of it all.” That sums things up very well. Dumbland will not be for all. It will not even be for most. It will not even be for all hardcore Lynch fans. The line drawn animation is simplistic in the extreme while the story lines – a typical episode involves one man accusing another of literally fucking a duck – make the deliberate banality of Beavis and Butthead or South Park look like high art. The run time is short, with the entire disc clocking in slightly over half an hour, and if there are any extra features they are tucked away cleverly enough that I couldn’t find them. That said the shorts are very well presented for what they are and there are many who will want to snap these right up. I just can’t help but wish they’d opted for releases of Rabbits or the other assorted random shorts that have appeared on the website before doing these. Interesting, but mostly for the obsessive completist.