Blue Lady Shanghai

May 19, 2010 2:39 PM

David Lynch Directs a 16-Minute short for Dior
posted by The Whelk (25 comments total)

Dior Blue.... literally....

sorry, someone had to say it.
posted by HuronBob at 2:43 PM on May 19, 2010

Who is this David Lynch guy?
posted by shakespeherian at 2:48 PM on May 19, 2010

there is a little bag on a small table with a big light behind it !!!!!

ow my god, how menacing can a lillte movie get ??????????


*big sigh*

aren't you all a bit fed up with Lynch's O MY GOD ALL IS SO MEANINGFUL AND MYSTERIOUS would-be-cinema ?

i am
posted by Substrata at 3:00 PM on May 19, 2010

aren't you all a bit fed up with Lynch's O MY GOD ALL IS SO MEANINGFUL AND MYSTERIOUS would-be-cinema ?

You're watching movies wrong.
posted by reductiondesign at 3:02 PM on May 19, 2010 [11 favorites]

Lynch meets Chungking Express? It was wonderfully Lynchian, a phrase I feel I cannot use without quoting DFW's "David Lynch Keeps His Head,"

HAS DIRECTED music videos for Chris Isaak; has directed the theater teaser for Michael Jackson's lavish Dangerous video; has directed commercials for Obsession (1, 2,3), Saint-Laurent's Opium, Alka-Seltzer, a national breast-cancer awareness campaign, and New York City's Garbage-Collection Program.

David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third kind of territory. Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained." Lynch's movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies point at the too-facile summation that "film interpretation is necessarily multivalent" or something – they're just not that kind of movie. Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial sense of being comfortable or linear or High Concept or "feel-good." You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to "entertain" you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)

posted by geoff. at 3:10 PM on May 19, 2010 [3 favorites]

Pretty cool. I think he's been watching some Wong Kar-wai.
posted by naju at 3:11 PM on May 19, 2010

I wouldn't say it's Lynch's best work, but Marion Cotillard is amazing as always.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:14 PM on May 19, 2010

Boy does this trend suck.

I mean, I don't really care much about Lynch one way or the other, but i feel the same about this as I did about the Spike Jonze vodka movie that I had to watch on a background of vodka ads, after I sat through the pre-roll vodka ad.

Which is to say, "no." I will not watch this crap. I totally understand needing to pay the bills. Go direct a commercial, be my guest. Then use the profits to do something artistic. This is what Michel Gondry does. But don't direct some bullshit extended commercial and try to pass it off as art. You're embarrassing yourself and your audience.
posted by drjimmy11 at 3:24 PM on May 19, 2010

I've always found the amount of work and effort that goes into perfume ads to be astounding. This behind the scenes look at the Gucci by Gucci ad also directed by Lynch is fascinating. It seems remarkable to me that even for short bursts of imagery - Lynch does not use CGI. I am guessing that there are subtle nuances that will never be duplicated by CGI and that Gucci is willing to pay for full movie making skills. Chris Cunningham (perhaps best known for his heavily CGI'd work for Bjork and Aphex Twin) and his Flora Gucci work - also reflects this old school movie making skills for his ad. I was suprised that the funnels of wind and the writhing model were all done with wires and props - rather than computers.

Perfume is of course a huge business - so the willingness to spend is sky high. It is always interesting to see what happens when big bucks meets high creativity.
posted by helmutdog at 3:24 PM on May 19, 2010

I like David Lynch as much as the next guy, more so even, but ever since Inland Empire it seems like he is just making this shit up as he goes along.
posted by Mr Mister at 3:30 PM on May 19, 2010

helmutdog: I've just been working for the last eight months on the next two Gucci ads. Can only say: lots of CG in these ones. Mum's the word til end of june launch.
posted by progosk at 3:30 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I like David Lynch as much as the next guy, more so even, but ever since Inland Empire it seems like he is just making this shit up as he goes along.

I don't think there's any 'seems' about it... and I still love it.

Though I'd have loved for Edith Evans to make an appearance.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:41 PM on May 19, 2010

I like David Lynch as much as the next guy, more so even, but ever since Inland Empire it seems like he is just making this shit up as he goes along.

Yep. And what awesome shit it is. Here's to hoping he doesn't stop.
posted by treepour at 3:47 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

confession: i was simultaneously bored, creeped out, and getting a headache from the jittery camera.

mind you i'm a dior AND marion cotillard AND david lynch fan and this made me want to avoid the blue lady dior bag like the plague. just in case it's haunted. JUST IN CASE.
posted by raw sugar at 4:06 PM on May 19, 2010

I love the cut at 1:47. Just before that, the door is shut and we see it from the outside, music muffled. Then the cut, and we're in blackness, with only the now blaring music to tell us we're inside. So good.
posted by ericost at 4:46 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Boy does this trend suck.
Lynch has been directing commercial his entire career. Probably inspired by the fact that he funded Eraserhead, in part, by way of a paper route.

...he is just making this shit up as he goes along.

I don't remember/can't find the interview where it is "revealed" that Inland Empire was directed off of a series of index cards rather than a screenplay.
posted by griphus at 5:00 PM on May 19, 2010

Didn't Bill Hicks say something about celebrities who sell things for corporations? It was about sucking something, I can't remember what, right now...
posted by CarlRossi at 5:41 PM on May 19, 2010

Might as well link David Lynch on product placement.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 6:20 PM on May 19, 2010

Can't help compare this to the early semi-animated creepfests in The Short Films of David Lynch collection, which I just got around to last month. The first three shorts definitely do that deeply unsettling thing DFW is talking about in geoff.'s quote. YouTube versions don't quite capture it, but here's Lynch's first, repetitive short from 1966, then 1968's The Alphabet, which takes things up a notch wonderfully, and then the half-hour gem The Grandmother from 1970 (that's part 3 of 5, grandma gets "born" about a minute in), an obvious precursor to Eraserhead.

Anyway, for folks who haven't seen those and like David Lynch enough to watch a Dior ad.
posted by mediareport at 7:37 PM on May 19, 2010

I definitely think it makes more sense to do commercials for money and fuck product placement. Can you imagine?

SPECIAL AGENT DALE COOPER: That's a damn fine cup of coffee!
NORMA: (Leaning over counter.) Actually, it's Folger's Crystals.
posted by snofoam at 7:51 PM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

He filmed a commercial for a home pregnancy test? Really? I have the feeling that I'm being put on here, but just the very idea of doing something seems completely Lynchian in and of itself. And then to find out the Lynch himself is actually filming conceptual Lynchian works seems almost like a double Lynchian negative, which by definition must form a "positive" non-Lynch manifold, of which the original concept must have been from Lynch himself, so it can't be Lynchian. It's like an Empedoclean paradox of Lynch-non-Lynch and oops, there goes my brain. Which is exactly what he must have intended, and then of course he must have intended that I feel that he intended it, and oops, there goes another Lynch infinite regression of the surreal. Thanks alot, jerk.

I did like the Micra ad much more than I wanted to, though. For some reason I want to believe those are Sean Young's lips and disembodied voice.
posted by the painkiller at 7:56 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, and for slightly more charming commercial surrealism check out Takashi Murakami's "superflat monogram" for Louis Vuitton. I'm sure it's been linked to on The Blue before, but I'm equally sure your Google-fu will find it before I can.
posted by the painkiller at 8:06 PM on May 19, 2010

tldw
posted by humannaire at 11:30 PM on May 19, 2010

Following Lynch on Twitter you find out he spends his weekends making things like this...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:55 AM on May 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

to find out that Lynch himself is actually filming conceptual Lynchian works

Repeated for emphasis. He was given the freedom to do pretty much whatever he wanted. No one told him, "go make Mulholland Drive with our Dior bag." He's way too smart for that kind of thing, and he knows his audience is too smart for it. Instead, he's choosing to consciously, winkingly play with the idea of what people expect from a Lynch film. Watching it with this in mind makes the whole thing infinitely more interesting.
posted by naju at 10:18 AM on May 20, 2010