A trip down to DumbLand

For the last twenty-five years of his life, David Lynch struggled to get films made. It’s easy now to remember Mulholland Drive as a towering classic, as if it was always there, but it was a precarious production; a rejected tv pilot with scenes bolted (perfectly) on. Though Lynch was nothing if not voraciously creative, and so he started making films for his website, the now-defunct DavidLynch.com. Some were multi-part series and others were one-off gags; all of them pieces that, in some cases literally, came together to make his self-produced epic Inland Empire.

But that doesn’t mean these in-between films only have value in relation to the canonical feature films, to the so-called major works, in fact, there is a lot of freedom in the minor key. Free from the massive weight of expectation, an artist can explore their other, perhaps less reputable interests, for example: the fart joke.

And so, we come to DumbLand, a crude six-episode animated series made with the crudest of means. The wonkily exaggerated bodies and misaligned faces of the most charming nuclear family this side of the Palmers were drawn with a computer mouse and voiced by the great man himself, either doing a silly voice or simply pitch shifting his own.

In the fifth episode, the one most lodged in my brain, a man bursts through the family’s white picket fence with a stick in his mouth. A cartoonish concept, but rendered so viscerally you can almost feel the plank of wood pushing through his skull as he screams in unending, incomprehensible pain. The kind of pain that makes you feel like you’re no longer human, that all you are is suffering. It’s so horrible that it becomes funny, or so funny that is becomes horrible, a place much of Lynch’s work uncomfortably sits.

The brutish patriarch—who has little to say for himself beyond “I like to kill things”; if evil wears Lynch’s villains, as David Foster Wallace said, then he is evil undressed—supposedly tries to help by shaking the stick with the same force often directed at his wife, who only ever screams (there’s an awful lot of screaming).

The horrible rattling sounding is interrupted, suddenly and unnaturally, by the son—who sounds so transparently like Lynch you can’t help but picture him reading the lines and giggle—dryly repeating first “get the stick, get the stick”, then “you poked his eyes out”, “you poked his other eye out” and so on. The kind of absurd repetitions you’d expect from early internet animators like David Firth and Don Hertzfeldt, both of whom owe something to Lynch in general and DumbLand in particular.

Eventually this poor creature is turned inside out, crawling desperately away only to get crushed under a truck. To that final indignity, the father responds: “fucker never even said thank you”. It’s some of Lynch’s basest and barest work, but without the contradictory beauty he usually finds in these nightmare places he’s able to be more direct, even, in a way, discursive. He can say something simply and straightforwardly, something it’s worth saying in no uncertain terms: that America, and all its people, values and institutions, are fucking stupid.

To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.