* (restored)
—-
Dumbland is a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series. If it is funny, it is funny because we see the absurdity of it all. David Lynch
Contents:
1. What is Dumbland?
2. Episodes
3. David Lynch’s take on animation
4. A positive review by David Shrigley
5. A negative review by Steve
6. Sisyphus and Suburbia: A Contextual Study of David Lynch’s Dumbland
Dadaist Animation by David Durnell
7. Further links
1. What is Dumbland?
Dumbland is a series of eight crudely animated shorts written, directed, and voiced by director David Lynch in 2002. The shorts were originally released on the Internet through Lynch’s website, and were released as a DVD in 2005. The total running time of all eight shorts combined is approximately a half hour.
The series details the daily routines of a dull-witted white trash man. The man lives in a house along with his frazzled wife and squeaky-voiced child, both of whom are nameless as is the man in the shows. Lynch’s website, however, identifies the male character by the name Randy and the child by the name Sparky. The wife is not named.
The style of the series is intentionally crude both in terms of presentation and content, with limited animation. (Wikipedia)
2. Episodes
Episode 1: The Neighbor
Randy makes small talk with a neighbor about the neighbor’s shed. After the neighbor mentions that he has a false arm, they are interrupted by a passing helicopter. Randy swears and screams at the helicopter until it leaves, then mentions that he has heard the neighbor has sex with ducks. A duck emerges from the shed, and the neighbor admits that he is a “one-armed duck-fucker”.
Episode 2: The Treadmill
While watching a football game on TV, Randy loses his temper when his wife disturbs him by running on a noisy treadmill. Randy attempts – with disastrous results – to destroy the treadmill. Meanwhile, an Abraham Lincoln-quoting door-to-door salesman finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, while Randy’s son manages to present dead fowl for dinner.
Episode 3: The Doctor
After Randy shocks himself while trying to fix a broken lamp, a doctor arrives to test the dazed man’s pain threshold, using increasingly violent methods, until Randy finally regains his senses and decides to do some testing of his own.
Episode 4: A Friend Visits
Randy destroys his wife’s new clothesline and throws it over the fence, causing a catastrophic car wreck. Then Randy’s friend visits and the two talk about hunting and killing things, all the while drinking, burping, and farting.
Episode 5: Get the Stick!
A screaming man crashes through Randy’s fence with a wooden stick wedged in his mouth. Sparky cheers his dad on as he tries to get the stick out. Randy breaks the man’s neck and pokes out both of his eyes before finally pulling the stick through one of his eye sockets. The horribly mutilated man rolls out into the street and is run over by a truck. Randy notes, “The fucker never even said ‘thank you’.”
Episode 6: My Teeth are Bleeding
Sparky is bouncing on a trampoline in the front room yelling that his teeth are bleeding, while the wife yammers until blood starts pouring out of her head. Outside on the street violent traffic accidents and shootouts occur. A noisy and bloody wrestling match is playing on TV. All is well until a fly interrupts Randy’s serene existence.
Episode 7: Uncle Bob
Randy is given the charge from an intimidating figure (his mother-in-law), to stay home and watch after his “Uncle Bob” at peril of having his “nuts cut out” if he does not comply. Uncle Bob proceeds to tacitly engage in increasing types of self-abuse, coughing, and vomiting, and eventually punching Randy in the face from across the room. After several iterations of this behavior, Randy anticipates Uncle Bob’s actions and preemptively strikes out at him. Almost simultaneously, the mother-in-law storms back into the room and knocks Randy through a wall. Randy spends the rest of the night up a tree until his son informs him that Uncle Bob has been taken to the hospital and Randy is now safe to come down. Bob bit his own foot off.
Episode 8: Ants
Randy is plagued by an increasing stream of ants into his home. His frustrations rise to the point that he grabs a can of insect killer and attempts to eliminate his ant problem. In his haste and anger, he fails to realize that the nozzle on the bug killer is pointed not at the ants but at his own face. He is squirted in the face with the killer for several seconds. He then falls to the ground and experiences a vivid hallucination in which the ants are singing and dancing and offering gleeful taunts of “asshole”, “shithead”, and “dumb-turd”. Randy eventually snaps out of his predicament and charges at the ants slapping at them on the floor, wall, and ceiling. He is later shown falling off the ceiling and suffering substantial injuries that require a full body cast. The final scene shows ants crawling over his incapacitated body and into an opening in the cast at his feet. Randy then screams helpless in agony as hundreds of ants march into his body cast. The most complex of the episodes, “Ants” parodies Lynch’s attempts at being a music producer in the early 1990s by featuring a singer who resembles Julee Cruise and music similar to that of composer Angelo Badalamenti (both of whom Lynch worked with on the soundtrack to Twin Peaks as well as the concert film Industrial Symphony No. 1).
3. David Lynch’s Take on Animation
“Animation is a magical thing to me. I veered off pretty quickly into live action, but I like animation, and I like Flash.”
“I think every type of medium gives you different ideas. So when you see the Flash program, it just starts talking to you. So ideas start coming along. It reminds me of early film – there’s something about it that makes your imagination kick in.”
“There’s a funky quality. You have these still pictures and when you kick the ‘go’ button, they start making movement. And it’s kind of amazing how with line drawings – and even bad line drawings – characters come alive. Sound plays a big role in that, but even silently they still work.”
“It takes me forever to do these simple animations,” says Lynch noting that many filmmakers take advantage of the tweening abilities of Flash to avoid extra work. “It kills me! I wish I was doing something so simple. I have this guy getting up off the ground and it took me three hours just to get him to stand up. There are 21 different drawings there! Sometimes with the program you can use beautiful shortcuts, but sometimes you have to draw it frame by frame. So it’s a combo, and it takes me about 60 hours to do just three minutes of the drawings, and it takes two or three days to mix it.”
Lynch does all the voices for the animation himself as he’s working. “I have a little mirror,” he says, explaining that he uses it to get the right facial contortions for his characters as they speak. “And I have a box – it’s as big as this coffee cup and just about as expensive. There are little artifacts in the voice, so for some things this box is perfect. I’m interested in real time voice manipulation – I want to sing like John Lee Hooker and I want to do it in real time.”
4. A positive review by David Shrigley
The genius of David Lynch’s Dumbland
David Lynch’s internet cartoon is weird, violent and full of farting – and that’s exactly why I love it
David Shrigley
The Guardian, Friday 24 July 2009
For me, David Lynch is a humourist. The works that Lynch is most famous for – Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks – have a distinct seam of comedy running through them: a dark one, but comedy nonetheless. Dumbland, a series of eight short animations originally broadcast on Lynch’s website, illustrates this aspect of Lynch’s art. Dumbland concerns the domestic travails of a three-toothed thug (who, according to davidlynch.com, is named Randy), and his distressed wife and son. Randy is a heavy-set and ill-groomed man with a foul mouth, a short fuse and a propensity for violence. His wife seems to be perpetually in the midst of a mental breakdown – she emits a constant quiet scream. The son is the least rendered of the three, appearing solely as an outline with eyes, nose and mouth. All Randy’s activities are weird, violent and profane, and there is a lot of very loud farting.
While the animations are as crude as can be (all are drawn on screen with a mouse) and a lot of the action seemingly juvenile, the films still bear unmistakable Lynch hallmarks: sparse dialogue, heavy ambient sound, a general sense of surreal disquiet, characters with ambiguous motives. Even if Dumbland’s visual appearace suggests comedy, the events portrayed are genuinely disturbing. For example, episode five tells the story of a man who falls through the fence in Randy’s yard and gets a stick caught in his mouth. In trying to placate his son, who is pleading for him to “Get the stick! Get the stick!”, Randy breaks the man’s neck, gouges out both of his eyes and partially cripples him before watching him get run over a truck. Randy then delivers the punchline: “The fucker never even said thank you.”
Lynch created Dumbland entirely alone: animating, voicing the characters and creating the soundtrack at home in front of his computer. Apparently each three-minute episode took him some 10 days to create, making the whole piece quite an undertaking for such an apparently modest project. As with most internet animation, Dumbland uses Flash, and Lynch says that the intuitive, DIY nature of this software recaptured the spirit of his initial forays into animation as a film student. You can even suppose that Lynch has recreated the style of his early animations by treating the film with what people are familiar with such things call a “boil”: each image is drawn several times and overlaid so that static images appear to move, or boil. This effect mimics old-fashioned hand-drawn animation – the opposite of what Dumbland actually is.
For the record, I don’t do any of my own animation; I tell myself that this task is better delegated to a professional animator who works from my original drawings. But in truth I find the fact that Lynch actually put in this amount of graft slightly intimidating. Added to that is the fact that he actually knows how to use the software, whereas I don’t have a clue. Apart from Lynch having made every aspect of the entire series himself, the thing that is really appealing about Dumbland is that it is evidence of a great artist amusing himself, a project that he just sat down and did for the fun of it without worrying about how it would be received. It is unselfconsciously daft. Perhaps a good thing if you’ve just struggled through Inland Empire.
5. A Negative Review by Steve Anderson
“Dumbland” DVD Review
By Steve Anderson
zero stars
David Lynch isn’t exactly famous for making sense.
This is, after all, the guy who stuck Robocop into a series of baffling events involving hallucinogenic bug killer, typewriters built from insect carcasses, and massive governmental conspiracies engineered by enormous bugs in the midst of Islamic ports.
Based on the novel written by a former heroin addict.
So naturally, it should not come as even a lick of surprise that David Lynch’s overall body of work is just mind-boggling. And the mind continues to be boggled in “Dumbland.”
Though for a totally different set of reasons.
“Dumbland” is the excruciating story of a violent, abusive troglodyte of a man living in suburbia and the events that comprise his thoroughly pointless God-I-wish-they’d-all-just-get-hit-by-a-meteor-to-preserve-the-gene-pool life.
And when I say thoroughly pointless, I damn well MEAN thoroughly pointless. This movie’s alleged plot revolves around farting, child abuse, spousal abuse, farting, screaming obscenities at poorly rendered helicopters, weird sexual appetites involving ducks, and farting.
There is a LOT of farting going on in “Dumbland.” I don’t recall this much farting in “Beavis and Butthead Do America”, and that movie treated farting like a minor religious experience (remember the desert?).
“Dumbland” is the single longest half-hour I’ve spent watching a movie in some time. Every minute felt like three, and every minute felt like a hook in my skin. I found myself agreeing with Lynch’s own perception of the film: “‘Dumbland’ is a crude, stupid, violent and absurd series. If it is funny, it is funny because we see the absurdity of it all.” I agree totally. The sad part is, despite the absurdity, it’s STILL not that funny.
If there is television in hell, then “Dumbland” is what’s on. This is Thursdays at nine, right after “Richard Nixon’s Laugh-In,” but before “Cooking the Cajun Way! with Judas Iscariot.”
I don’t walk into a David Lynch movie expecting things to make sense, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask to expect a plot more coherent than “some guy too stupid to live does a lot of stuff and eventually gets his in the end.” And he does, too.
The ending gives us a lovely comeuppance for this pig-stupid throwback as he’s both beaten by relatives and a line of ants crawls into his full body cast.
All in all, avoid this monstrousity. Avoid it at all costs. “Dumbland” is exactly as advertised, and unless you’re in a mood to waste half an hour on some of the worst drivel put on DVD plastic, you will regret putting this one in your player.
I did.
6. Sisyphus and Suburbia: A Contextual Study of David Lynch’s Dumbland
Dadaist Animation by David Durnell
An Introduction to David Lynch and his animated series Dumbland
The last thing most would expect from any three-decade auteur would be the sudden, inexplicable release of a crude, vulgar, and satirical flash-animated comedy series focused unflinchingly upon the obscure goings on of a frighteningly bizarre über-dysfunctional family –but of course, David Lynch is not the average auteur. Staying well-grounded in his self-reflexive themes and motifs –though giddy in his surreal, playful and crass romp through the stereotypes of Americana dynamic– Lynch has released an eight episode animated series appositely and bluntly entitled Dumbland. The series is certainly a work of absurdity, chronicling with zeal the hyper-violent banality of a Neanderthalian alpha-male named Randy, who terrorizes his family, neighbors, and himself, all remaining perpetually enveloped in the meaninglessness and repetition of the suburban everyday and framed within Lynch’s blackly absurd comic lens. Though the series remains rooted in Lynch’s characteristic surrealism, it plunges vastly beyond most Lynch films in its puerile humor and crudeness of medium –all of which deceptively mask the real grit of Lynch’s message: a skewering of the rotted and dysfunctional nature of the American nuclear family– a family immersed in banality, and drowning in absurdity –left only to violently self-destruct. Similar to themes explored in his short film The Grandmother, and in his films Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me –all of which containing intense and nightmarish studies of the family dynamic– Lynch wishes yet again to examine the nature of absurdity, violence, and primitivism in the human condition, as well as in the family structure, using his characteristic flawless sound design, nightmarish slapstick violence, and esoteric Dadaist character behavior, with an episodic pacing and a very enjoyable disregard for any sort of polite restraint.
It is of course, however, no surprise that most critics –ranging from Lynch cult fans to structuralist cinephiles– totally miss the point of the series’ much necessary raison d’être. While structuralists attack the “crudeness” and alleged “pointlessness” of the series, using the infamous accusation of “weirdness for weirdness’ sake,” supposed Lynch fans simply relish in that alleged “reasonless weirdness,” without care or respect to any sort of real artistry or social commentary. Both camps of critical reception seem to be oblivious to the true brilliance and intensity at work here, and even more oblivious to the message, as well as Lynch’s origins: the Camus-inspired Theatre of the Absurd, the movements of Dada and Anti-Art, and the overall surrealism Lynch is perfecting, following of course in the footsteps of Buñuel and Dali. There is a lot of progression, sincerity, satire, and stark beauty in Lynch’s work –all of which impatiently ignored by critics, under the pretense of “incomprehensibility.” Lynch, however, is strikingly personal when it comes to his work –work that is more often than not extremely self-reflexive– and refuses to let any critic own his interpretation, challenging them to find their own: a radical post-structuralism and audience-trust that should be greatly appreciated, though, unfortunately, results in frustration from those who want immediate answers and understanding to everything they see –a rather languid characteristic very frustrating to the responsible cinephile. Notoriously cagey and hesitant in press conferences, Lynch remains resistant to the culture’s demand to have an easy explanation for everything, opting always to work with intuitional narratives versus logical –a rather eastern and patient approach that reflects his admiration for transcendental meditation– and refusing to fill up those beautiful pockets of vacuous ambiguity with “language” and stilted words. For to Lynch, words can never be film –and they shouldn’t try.
But Lynch’s work is by no means as esoteric as enervated audiences would have one believe. If an individual would just feel Lynch’s work versus trying to deconstruct it, new possibilities would abound, because Lynch likes to roam the hidden, layered lusts and evils of the subconscious, and certainly the meta-conscious, not simply explain them away with turgidity. Often, these pockets of ambiguous horror remain –linger– even after being filmed, which is a beautiful and stunning experience to take part in.
Read more here
http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/pages/essays/sisyphus_and_suburbia/
7. Further Links
http://thecityofabsurdity.com/digitalmedia/dumbland.html
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/726/726590p1.html
http://www.lynchnet.com/dumbland/
—-
*
p.s. Hey. ** malcolm, Hey. Cool, John’s the best. In addition to his great work, he’s also the greatest person. I love Godard, but, yeah, it’s all about films or things that have you want and need, subjectivity central. For instance, if you’d asked for my all-time least favorite film, I could easily have said ‘Dancer in the Dark’. Von Trier is one of my bugaboos. Whatever that means. C’est la. I like all your others. ‘Fat Girl’ is excellent. Maybe her best? But ‘best’ is bullshit, I guess. I don’t think an ability to act is John’s top priority when casting. I just hope he gets to make ‘Liarmouth’. Last time he talked about it, he didn’t feel too positive. Happy day! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah that teens videos is terrific, right? I’ve only watched Shudder when I was in States — I don’t … think they have it here? — but, yeah, it seemed full of charming entertainment, assuming you like the horror angle. I don’t know if you know the site Soap2Day, but there’s a shitload of movies there, new and old, that you can’t watch for free otherwise. You have to deal with a fair amount of pop-ups, but it’s worth it. I’ve gotten wind of the ‘When Evil Lurks’ buzz. Let me know it is. ** Darbs 🐜❄🐜, Hey, D. Your enthusiasms greatly outweigh any ominous effect. A Walkman, wow, nice. I think mine is covered with cobwebs somewhere. Very nice pierce. I really like that pierce on people. Very cool. How are your lips? No worries, some of the most intellectual people I know are all pierced and tatted up. It’ll be like a star turn. Oh, shit, you need your mom’s permission to get a driver’s license? Surely she’ll come around on such a basic right. Sorry you have to circumvent that power structure, bleh. I’ve heard about the bedbug thing too in the news, but I haven’t heard of any evidence that it’s actually happening. Maybe to tourists or something? I’m fine here, just a couple of pesky little mice in my pad. ** Tosh Berman, Wow, that’s wild about LC stuff being in Tom Verlaine’s library. I saw him across a gallery opening once, and I wanted to go pay my respects, but I assumed he’d have no idea about my stuff or me, so shyness won out. Damn. And he has LC#11, the best all time LC issue. And, jeez, they’re pricey. I really, really should have held onto more copies of the LC stuff. Maybe I wouldn’t have the funding problems I do. Thanks a lot, Tosh. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m game on the teaming up. We can start a whole ‘Oliver Twist’-like gang or something. You picked the world’s smallest Target, nice, ha ha. I think you’re right about handkerchiefs making a comeback for that very reason. We should start a handkerchief company ASAP, no? I hope love cured your (?) butter fingers. Love making me stop worrying that playing Mario Wonder will eat up my valuable time and just ordering me to play it, G. ** Caesar, Hi, Caesar! Oh, shit, I somehow missed your comment? I’m so sorry, I don’t know why that happened. My eyes must have been in a weird rush or something? Anyway, it’s great to see you! I’m good, just finishing Zac’s and my film and not much else, but that’s good. Thanks about the ‘Closer’ thing in the UK. Yeah, it’s nice. Unfortunately I have no power in my books getting reprinted. If I didn’t have such a lazy, checked-out agent, that would be her job, but she couldn’t give a shit, alas. Yes, I read about that extreme right guy running for the top job there. And most people support him? That is very scary, and I would say hard to believe if I wasn’t from a country where Trump is a beloved superstar. God, I hope he loses. That’s really scary. I’ll see if I can find Blanca Varela’s work in English. I love ‘Scotch Atlas’. Black Butler is fantastic. And I loved the B.R. Yeager book too. Great reads. And I’ll hunt the Lina Meruane book too. Thank you! No, I never watch TV series, so I don’t know that or any series basically. Avoiding TV is one of my ways of getting all the stuff I need to get done. Or trying to. TV is very absorbent. Well, actually, my novel ‘The Marbled Swarm’ is about a cannibal. So there you go. Again, wonderful to get to talk with you. I hope to get to do that again ASAP. Take care. ** Audrey, Hi, Audrey. Me too, about the dead attractions and their charisma. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is incredible! It’s small, so it wouldn’t take too long to go through it. Maybe in an hour or two at most, depending on how long you spend in each area. Great if you can go. There’s nothing else like it. On the VFX, we need some erasing of things (camera person visible in a window pane, and things like that), and slight enhancements of some sort on two violent scenes where someone gets punched and someone gets killed, and some haunted house enhancements, and the ghost in our film passes through people and walls and things, and we need to make that look a little more convincing. Not sure about seeing the Miyazaki, hopefully this weekend. Thanks for the ‘Bottom’ share! I’ll get it and get to it as soon as I can. Thank you!! I haven’t seen ‘Somewhere’. Cool, I’ll watch that ASAP too. Have an absolutely lovely time in LA if I don’t see you before you leave, and give my hometown a big hug somehow from me. Love, Dennis. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. For me, ‘Strange Codes’ is his greatest. Really haunting, for the reasons you state. I don’t know ‘Once More’. I’ll look for it. Luck finding that sample pack. ** Charalampos, Oh, cool, thank you so much about the pix. Uh, yeah, I guess you can email them to me. Really, thanks! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Vecchiali film, which I obviously need to do. From what I remember, ‘Pieces’ is pretty shitty. But maybe its shittiness looks good now. I hope the long night paid off. Resonance from here. ** Dee Kilroy, Thank you, Dee. I owe you an email, and I’ll write you soon. Hope all’s great in your part of the woods. ** l@rst, Hi. Lucky you to see the Harry Smith show. I can’t imagine it’ll get over here, but weirder things have crossed the pond than it. Well, I mean, finish that novel or story, man, no brainer. ** Mark, I’d sell my grandma’s left leg to an old leg collector to time-machine myself back into P.O.P. Sigh. Do cockroaches eat paper? If so, they’ll at least love what you and I leave to their posterity. ** Sarah, Hi. Yeah, my goals for my days are all to make incremental progress on goals that’ll take longer to achieve. But I think that’s a good goal? But maybe we’ll both find loaded bank vaults hidden in our walls today. It’s not impossible, pretty close to impossible, but … I do have an end of year goal: finish our film. We kind of have to. Semesters are nice. That time organisation is kind of the only thing I miss about being in school. I do like The Three Stooges. Well, I haven’t watched them in a while, but I thought they were a riot as kid. I got their autographs. But it was the post-Curly Stooges, which wasn’t as exciting. Yeah, I think Larry had a sad life too. I had a short period of being obsessed with Roller Derby back when they televised the matches, and he was always there in the audience, very elderly, sitting by himself. Didn’t seem like a happy guy. ** Nick., Pleasure. Joints make me really paranoid, but the cigarettes option is a keeper. I’ll need a lot more than 2 of them though. French chocolate rules, but Japanese chocolate rules the most. Deal, yes! ** Okay. I thought it would provide you with fun if I restored the above post made long ago by d.l. Oscar B, now best known in and to the world as the awesome artist/filmmaker O.B. De Alessi. So have said fun with it if that’s at all possible. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 