“I’m really against it in principle”: The one thing David Lynch would’ve never made in America
You’d think that someone like David Lynch, who possessed such a unique sense of artistry and integrity, would turn down an offer to make a commercial. Yet, the filmmaker made quite a few during his career, bringing his surreal style to the world of capitalistic greed.
While some filmmakers are wholly against making advertisements, seeing it as a sort of stooping, because why would you want to use your talents to encourage people to spend their hard-earned money on overpriced goods, Lynch saw no problem in transforming the very concept of the commercial. Various perfumes received the unusual Lynchian treatment, like Calvin Klein’s Obsession and Gio by Giorgio Armani, but he also took on some rather unexpected adverts.
In 1991, he directed a public service announcement video which encouraged New Yorkers to stop littering, and six years later, he accepted the job of creating a ClearBlue pregnancy test advert. Evidently, Lynch put his love of making bizarre short films into action when he was commissioned to make commercials, the weirder the better.
There have been several occasions, however, when he brought his pre-existing characters to the world of commercial advertising, like the time he used the world of Twin Peaks as the backdrop for a series of coffee adverts in Japan.
In the early ‘90s, Georgia Coffee hired the director to make adverts for their product, which involved a Japanese man who comes to the eponymous town from Lynch’s hit TV show in search of his missing wife. The director was more than happy to lend his iconic world to the adverts explaining (via Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch), “Yeah. He’d lost her. Those were really fun to do. They were only 30 seconds apiece, four of them, things have gotta move real fast”.
Taking on the challenge, Lynch produced these adverts for the Japanese market, knowing that they probably wouldn’t be seen worldwide. That was the only reason he agreed to the job, stating, “I’m really against it in principle, but they were so much fun to do, and they were only running in Japan, and so it just felt OK”.
Of course, any fan of Twin Peaks knows how important coffee is to the show’s characters, with FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper famously remarking, “This is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee”, when he takes his first sip in the Double R Diner upon arriving in the town. As he embarks on his quest to uncover who killed Laura Palmer, Cooper can often be seen drinking coffee ahead of long nights of mysterious goings-on, so Lynch only thought it fitting to take on an advert that showcased the very stuff.
“Georgia Coffee is a canned coffee. There are like 150,000 different canned beverages, or something like that, in Japan, and new ones coming out every week. It’s a huge business. But Georgia Coffee is the most popular canned coffee, and they’ve got all kinds of different flavours,” Lynch explained. Yet, his unconventional style proved to be too strange for the briefing, which is why he only made four in the end.
“The canners did not like the commercials we did. They wanted them to be more traditional, and that’s why they didn’t continue. We were supposed to do a second year and do four more 30-second spots, but they didn’t want to do them,” the director revealed. Clearly, Twin Peaks was just too weird a backdrop for a series of advertisements, even if this surreal soap opera world was what attracted the business in the first place.
