After his devastating death, David Lynch leaves behind an extraordinary supply of art: seasons of Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and a few nightmarish PS2 commercials.
At the time of the PS2’s release, Sony wanted its latest console to feel like a gateway into a phantasmagorical “Third Place” – hallucinatory horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Haunting Ground eventually fulfilled this desire – so it tapped David Lynch to lead an ad campaign.
The resulting commercials are about as unorthodox as using a cracked teacup to convey why you should only ever pour hot water into porcelain: it’s about the character.
Video game advertisements were all bizarre in the industry’s teen years, like PlayStation’s proprietary flavored condoms, but Lynch elevated his PS2 ads to typical Lynch heights. Which is to say, far beyond the mundanity of bedroom drawers and somewhere behind the moon.
They hum with uncanny humor, the kind you find in things like Twin Peaks’ damn good coffee and cherry pie, sitting on countertops a few miles away from dead girls in dark forests. The shortest two flicker on and off like a surprising peek at someone else’s phone screen; ‘Bambi’ shows an unperturbed deer getting hit by a car and, in contradiction to what you’d expect, crushing the vehicle to bits, while ‘Rabbits’ stars a dog twitching in its sleep, running in its dreams, before falling still and letting out a wheezy snore.
The most memorable of the bunch is ‘Welcome to the Third Place,” one minute of sirens and, eventually, release. A man encounters a woman floating through space as he walks down a hallway, and she gestures that he “shh!” After, he sees his doppelganger beside him – or is it above him? – and presents him with a confident thumbs up.
“Not waking, not sleeping,” a voice creaks through a speaker as the man continues to glide. “Where are we?” The man’s head floats off. It reattaches, but then his arm floats off. Steam billows from his missing hand and reveals his doppelganger again – this time, sitting on a couch with an anthropomorphic duck and a person with one eye wrapped in a bloated, full body cast, like a caught fly in a spiderweb.
“Welcome to the Third Place,” rasps the duck, who a short, behind-the-scenes documentary reveals to be Lynch himself.
The documentary is a small glimpse of Lynch at work. We see as he observes the mystery he’s created with the quiet pleasure of a bird breaking through a whipped-cream cloud. In one moment, he commands a fire effect to begin, and when it does, he says without missing a beat, “This is so fucking beautiful.”
“He’s said it himself,” former PlayStation European marketing director David Patton explains. “He’s been living in a ‘third place’ for quite a few years.”
I’m replaying my favorite obscure PS2 game and now I miss when movie tie-ins were the norm.