The shots Guide to...David Lynch's Ads

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As well as being a director of some of the most distinctive, surreal films ever to come out of America, including at least four indisputable masterpieces in Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (but also Dune, which we just don't speak about), David Lynch has been an advertising director for hire for over 30 years, bringing his unique vision to dozens of ads for brands like Sony, Dior, and Alka-Seltzer. Here's our in-depth guide to them.

If I say 'David Lynch advert' to you, you probably have a very specific idea of what you're going to see. Juxtapositions of Americana and surreal horror, with touches of the director's great visual obsessions like fire and monstrous animals. These all exist in his ads to some extent, but his advertising oeuvre is more complicated than that.

Just like how Lynch filomography juggles mind-fuck movies like Lost Highway and Inland Empire with more standard Hollywood fare like The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, so too are there two types of David Lynch ad; ads that look like David Lynch films, and ads that just look like normal ads. You can see most of them above.

'Ads That Look Like David Lynch Films'

If one film could be said to represent Lynch's ads, it's Eraserhead, Lynch's debut. A nightmarish films about male anxiety about pregnancy, it fills its black and white frames with surreal images of disembodied heads and monsters while a swirling industrial soundscape plays: 

Compare that scene with the director's work for Sony and the New York Department of Sanitation:

Although it relies less on horror than the above-two ads, the influence of Eraserhead can also be seen in his Alka-Seltzer ad, what with its dream-association logic and disembodied head:

Another Lynch project that is referenced in his ads again and again is Twin Peaks. This makes sense; the original 1990 series was a genuine cultural phenomenon, and advertising's never met a cultural meme it couldn't drag into the ground. As such, not only do we get ads that feature elements of the series in Lynch's ads, but we get an honest-to-goodness Twin Peaks tie-in with the series' Agent Dale Cooper popping up to solve the mystery of a missing Japanese women whilst drinking 'damn fine' coffee out of a can.

Combine the talking backwards of Twin Peaks' Red Room, the fire of Fire Walk With Me and the fish that inexplicably ends up in the percolator in the series pilot and you have Lynch's ad for Parisienne cigarettes.

“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"" said Lynch about those Twin Peaks coffee ads.

'Ads That Look Like Other Ads'

What is surprising about Lynch's ad work is how workmanlike a lot of it is. For every deep dive into the subconscious, there is this ad for pasta starring Gerard Depardieu that literally could have been made by any of the lesser lights of '80s advertising.

Slightly better are the director's perfume ads. True, they look like the '80s pretentious perfume ads that have long since passed into parody, but these were among the first of their kind, and were radical in their day. However, unlike Lynch's older film work, his ads for Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent have not stood the test of time.

NEXT WEEK: We take a look at David Lynch's music videos.