David Lynch’s suitably bizarre history with Michael Jackson: “How could someone be in makeup for ten hours?”
While plenty of directors who make incredibly weird movies come across as perfectly normal, perhaps even mundane, people in their everyday lives, David Lynch wasn’t one of them. The auteur was every bit as eccentric off-camera as the stories he told from behind it, which only helped strengthen his mythos.
Whether it was completely refusing to explain the meaning behind any of his films, developing an unhealthy obsession with the milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy, or insisting on only calling the actors from Mad Men by their characters’ names when he met them, Lynch became surrealist cinema’s favourite oddball uncle.
The idiosyncratic maverick who won acclaim, boggled minds, and baffled audiences with the likes of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and Inland Empire viewed the world in his own unique way, and there’ll never be another David Lynch. With that in mind, it’s perfectly on-brand for both of them that he’d have such an unusual ongoing relationship with another well-known weirdo, Michael Jackson.
Of course, Lynch and the ‘King of Pop’ were two completely different kinds of strange, and the two ways in which they crossed paths couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed. And yet, because they’re so famous for existing on their own plane of reality, it makes sense that their fleeting encounters would be bizarre.
Jackson may not have even been involved in the first, to be fair, after Lynch regaled the bleakly hilarious story of how he was possibly conned out of $5,000 for investing in a candy company called Chewy Nougats, which allegedly had the singer’s backing. Did the filmmaker ever see that money again? Probably not, but it’s almost self-deprecatingly Lynchian that he’d happily hand over thousands of his own money because he thought he was going into sugary sweet business with the superstar.
The second was at least tied to their respective day jobs. Throughout his career, Jackson developed a habit of hiring high-powered Hollywood directors to helm his music videos, with the likes of John Landis, Martin Scorsese, John Singleton, David Fincher, and Spike Lee all having a go.
Lynch and Jackson were nothing if not a curious combination, even if their collaboration was restricted to a single 30-second teaser for the Dangerous album. Still, once he’d agreed to do it, the transcendental meditation practitioner was left baffled by how long it took to shoot the damned thing, not to mention his obsession with John Merrick, whose life story he’d told in The Elephant Man.
“All Michael had to do was stand in one place for a few minutes, but he was in makeup for eight or ten hours,” he remarked. “How could someone be in makeup for ten hours? It’s someone very critical of their looks.” That’s an understatement when said about Jackson, and when he did eventually appear, the entire ordeal was over and done with in an instant.
“Then he stood there and we shot it and one minute later he was done,” Lynch marvelled. He’d only been in Jackson’s orbit twice, but considering those two occasions included a potential swindling and ten hours of standing around for 60 seconds of filming, the bond between them was definitely peculiar.
