WHAT DID JACK DO? (2017)

There is a monkey in a train station café, and a detective would like to know what the monkey did. David Lynch wrote, directed, edited, and stars in this seventeen-minute exercise, voicing the capuchin through audio effects and a superimposed mouth, while his then-wife Emily Stofle pours coffee in silence. The dialogue runs almost entirely on animal puns and noir one-liners. A chicken named Toototabon waits in the wings as the monkey's great love. The whole thing is in black and white, and it premiered in Paris in 2017 before reaching Netflix in 2020, which tells you most of what you need to know about its commercial ambitions.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a void. No casting agenda. No identity commentary. No economic critique, no environmental sermon, no gender politics of any kind. The waitress exists to pour coffee and then to leave. Race is not a subject. Neither is the body, the climate, nor the arrangement of labor under late capitalism. The monkey is a monkey, the chicken is a chicken, and the murder of a man named Max Clegg is the only injustice the narrative cares to pursue. This is not restraint born of cowardice. It is the total absence of interest. Lynch has other things on his mind, chiefly wordplay and the sound of his own voice emerging from a small primate.

To classify such a work is to classify a dream someone had after eating too much cheese. The cultural apparatus that scans films for messages finds nothing to scan. A curiosity remains: ninety-three percent on the aggregator, a birthday gift from a streaming service, a footnote in a long and strange filmography. Some will call it a masterpiece of the absurd. Others will call it seventeen minutes. Both are correct, and neither requires a verdict.