‘Thank You Judge’: the greatest music video David Lynch ever directed
The unsurpassed titan of Hollywood surrealism, experimental filmmaker David Lynch was gifted with a visionary knack for translating to screen the disjointed, narrative haze that fogs our dreams and anxious psyches, conjuring its mystical energy and smattering it across the American cultural landscape that he held such, unabashed, unironic affection for. His loss last month wasn’t just a blow to cinema but a fundamental deficit to creativity itself, a dogged bulwark against a film industry and broader cultural sphere losing itself in a corporatised, risk-averse death spiral.
An artist in the truest sense of the word, Lynch boasted a multi-disciplinary body of work beyond film, including theatre production, paintings, architectural design, and literature. His ‘second career’ was in music, however.
All mutual meeting during the making of 1986’s Blue Velvet, Lynch would collaborate with singer Julee Cruise and composer Angelo Badalamenti for the remainder of their respective lives, helping craft Cruise’s debut Floating into the Night, notably featuring the single ‘Falling’ whose later instrumental would serve as the Twin Peaks theme, and the free-jazz Thought Gang.
With such musical intuition, his services were sought among some of pop’s biggest names, from Nine Inch Nails, Chris Isaak, Moby, Interpol, and even a 30-second teaser for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous record. Naturally, Lynch would jump behind the camera for his own albums’ promos, 2011’s ‘Crazy Clown Time’ boasting a suitably chaotic backyard video befitting the single’s eerie synthpop, and last year’s ‘The Answers to the Questions’ with Chistabell captured the song’s sultry fever with its staid and frozen animated dreamscape.
Lynch’s greatest music video is also his most humorous. Forming the BlueBOB industrial blues project with audio engineer John Neff in 1998 when Mulholland Drive was being developed as a TV show, Lynch collated lyrical sketches and scraps of prose that dated as far back as two decades detailing his usual thematic motifs: the dark urbane noir and the paranoid, wayward characters that haunt Los Angeles’ spectral intersection between reality and the troubled netherworld.
Coating the LP’s dusky bluesy twang with Eraserhead‘s abrasive, Philadelphia factory rumble, BlueBOB lurches along like a sonic composite between John Lee Hooker and Iggy Pop’s smoggy The Idiot, with just a dash of alt-metal as embraced on ’97’s Lost Highway.
Released in 2001 without a single, a low-budget video was still helmed by Lynch, ‘Thank You Judge’ follows Neff around the LA suburbs reeling off the items won by his delighted ex-wife, played by Naomi Watts, including his beloved “pork and beans” cans. Like a semi-figurative monkey on his back, Lynch plays the antagonistic Billy Groper, like Devo’s Booji Boy with an extra dollop of warped masked menace, reaching its conclusion with a cavity search on his old front lawn by Groper as Neff’s ex-wife and new lover, played by Eli Roth, look on with glee.
While the BlueBOB album can slump into monotony and trundle along for longer than is welcome, ‘Thank You Judge’ is perfectly served by its warped video. It sits among Lynch’s hefty opus as illustrative of his infectiously juvenile humour.
