by “What Did Jack Do?” is a short film directed by David Lynch, released in 2017 and distributed by Netflix in 2020. It’s a surreal black-and-white detective interrogation, featuring Lynch himself as the detective grilling a suspect, a monkey named Jack Cruz, at a train station café.
The film centers on a bizarre and stylized interrogation scene. The detective questions Jack, a monkey in a suit, who is suspected of murdering a man named Max. Jack is evasive, speaking in a digitally altered human voice with stilted, noir-style dialogue. He insists on his innocence, waxing poetic about his love for a chicken named Toototabon, and offering responses full of Lynchian games and double meanings.
As the conversation progresses, the detective tries to break through Jack’s surreal deflections to find the truth. Jack sings a love ballad at one point, and the entire setting takes on a dreamlike, unsettling tone.
The interrogation intensifies until Jack finally confesses, perhaps accidentally or under pressure, though it’s never made fully clear what the actual crime was or if any of it is real. The film ends abruptly with the authorities swooping in, suggesting Jack’s arrest, and the detective watching silently.
David Lynch’s Style
Sadly, the man, the myth, the legend: David Lynch, passed away this past January, and cinephiles around the globe have remembered, commemorated, and honored his legacy ever since. He was, without a doubt, one of the most ingenious and critical minds of modern art, playing and exploring with different themes, surrealism, and all sorts of approaches to portray the rarities within daily life.
Surrealism and Absurdity: Lynch’s production company, named “Absurda”, produced this short film, and the name is no coincidence. Lynch’s style explores tension, dream logic, and absurdist humor.
- Anthropomorphism: Jack the monkey behaves and talks like a noir human anti-hero, playing with themes of identity, guilt, and performance.
- Noir Aesthetic: The setting, costumes, lighting, and dialogue mimic classic 1940s detective films, but the presence of a talking monkey leads it into parody or homage.
- Love, Guilt & Reality: Beneath the absurdity, the film hints at themes of doomed love and moral ambiguity. Especially considering Jack, in the end, claims he killed for love.
We can see Jack being evasive in the opening scene:
So, we meet in a train station.
Jack.
You know anything about birds, Jack?
Why do you ask?
It’s just a simple question.
Don’t worry.
I’ve heard the phrase, “Birds of a feather flock together.”
Yes.
A perceived fundamental.
There are, of course, exceptions.
You’ve been seen with birds.
Farm birds.
For a while, I lived near a farm.
Look at me!
Are my pupils dilated?
You’re avoiding the question.
We can embrace the anthropomorphism and dream logic in the way Jack explains how he realized he loved Toototabon, and in the moment he starts singing as if he were in a musical
That’s when I met Toototabon… and fell head over heels.
Looking back, she really was my first love.
Real love, it was.
They say real love is a banana, sweet with a golden hue.
Yes…
Toototabon was a hen.
A chicken.
I’d never been with a chicken before.
In my mind’s eye, I can still see her.
[…]
But let me tell you, you get your hands up under those feathers and feel those full breasts…
There’s nothing like it in this world.
She was the love of my life.
I’m not shitting you.
She and I lit the flame of love.
True love’s flame
Burns so bright
It’s love’s delight
Oh…
Once upon a time we danced
Once upon a time we took a chance
And fell
In love
Once upon a time
Now I long to know
The glow
Oh, I wish to know
What did David Lynch mean with this short?
Lynch always deepened on creative, unconventional stories, exploring what happens in our daily lives and how it presents itself in different ways. His work is refreshing because everything we see lately is so generic, following a specific formula. “What did Jack do?” is one of his many pieces in which he plays around with cinematic and writing elements, he’s playing, and he’s having fun by giving us a singing, evasive, and interrogated monkey. However, deep down, he’s expressing his views on how people may behave and what their personalities might be like. Think of people who are not honest, not even to themselves.
In the end, it’s mainly homage and a modern take on Noir films, and Lynch is having fun with it. He makes it absurd, just as his art usually is, perhaps a way of portraying that life itself is also absurd and filled with unexpected things. Overall, an important key is in the opening scene when Jack says he’s heard the phrase “Birds of a feather flock together” before, which he considers “a perceived fundamental”. There is commentary in the moment when the detective mentions feathers were found on the crime scene– meaning, we get influenced by those who surround us, even if we lie to ourselves about it. It is also a commentary on love and violence, especially how often we justify violence only because it was out of love or passion.
Like much of Lynch’s work, “What Did Jack Do?” operates on dream logic. Things happen not because they make narrative sense, but because they feel charged or meaningful in a subconscious way. Like situations we can understand by experiencing and feeling them, rather than putting them into words. Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s explanation on how language can only do so much to explain rational or logical things, but certain things regarding ethics, morality, mysticism, or subjective experiences are impossible to put into words. The monkey, the chicken, the train references, and the strange singing all seem more symbolic than literal, as if taken from a dream trying to resolve some buried emotional tension.
Through Jack’s performative and singing monologue, Lynch might be linking the similarities between human theatrics and animal instinct. Most importantly, he delves into the vulnerability we find ourselves in when under pressure, especially with emotions such as guilt. However, the entire short might be a representation of the inner monologues we have with ourselves, especially with our animalistic side. Lynch might be using the detective and Jack as two sides of the same psyche. The detective represents the rational mind trying to make sense of emotional chaos, while Jack is the wild, irrational, animalistic part full of guilt, longing, and contradiction.
