David Lynch's Sublime and Surreal Perfume Commercials
An homage to Lynch’s oeuvre of fragrance ads
The world lost one of its most visionary creative geniuses last week with the death of David Lynch. Yesterday would have been his 79th birthday.
Lynch is, of course, remembered for his wildly original films, including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, as well as the groundbreaking television series, Twin Peaks. Less well known than his film and television work are the commercials Lynch filmed. He directed ads for a multitude of products, from shoes, to coffee, to pregnancy tests and public service announcements. Amongst his commercial work, his advertisements for perfume stand out. Fragrance, after all, can be a doorway into another life or another world, and the intangibility and allure of scent pairs perfectly with Lynch’s dreamlike, surreal style and his exploration of themes such as desire and fantasy.
Yesterday a friend remarked, “well, you gotta pay the bills somehow” when I told him about Lynch’s advertising work, but I think there was probably more to it for him than just the economic incentive. Lynch transformed the TV commercial into something intellectual, cinematic, and captivating, much like how he celebrated and elevated the oft-dismissed soap opera genre through his television show Twin Peaks. Before Lynch, a film director turning to television was mostly unheard of; TV was seen as “beneath” film, a step down from what was considered the loftier artistic medium for the moving image.
Connections between Lynch’s cinematic work and his commercial work abound and his perfume ads stand as a testament to his creativity. Below are a few of my favorites.
Obsession and Obsession for Men, Calvin Klein (1988?)
Lynch created four commercials for Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrances1. The series of 30 second spots feature couples with poems and prose discussing infatuation and desire from Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert and F. Scott Fitzgerald alongside the visuals. Closeups of the male face in his ad featuring a piece by D.H. Lawrence echo the final scene of his 1986 film Blue Velvet, where the camera slowly zooms out from an extreme closeup of a human ear (recalling the initial sequence that sets the events of film in motion) and lingers over Kyle MacLachlan’s lovely face.
Images fade over each other in several of the Calvin Klein ads, overlapping to create a collage-like effect that crafts psychologically-charged associations between them and driving the narrative forward. Lynch used this technique across his oeuvre, beginning with his early work. The finale of his last Obsession spot mirrors the final scene of The Elephant Man (1980) where we see the image of John Merrick’s mother dissolving and reappearing over a sea of stars.
Gio, Giorgio Armani (1992)
Perhaps the most Lynchian of all his perfume commercials, this 1992 spot for Giorgio Armani is essentially a super-short, silent Noir film. Featuring a Badalamenti-tinged score, a femme fatale character travels from her lover’s arms, to the mean streets, to a swinging nightclub, tracked by paparazzi and a mysterious man sometimes lurking in the shadows.
The ad includes a great shot towards the beginning of a man twirling, snapping his fingers, then vanishing over a single beat of the music heard later in the piece, an enigmatic sequence that invites introspection and interpretation, like much of Lynch’s work.
Opium, Yves Saint Laurent (1992)
A richly-hued homage to the opulence of YSL’s most famous fragrance (as well as female self-love). The ad drips with sensuality through sight and touch, implying that the fragrance of Opium completes the indulgent scene. The camera dives into the opening of the perfume bottle and when we reemerge the luscious climax of the Opium experience is fulfilled.
Lynch used similar shots of diving into objects or the environment to establish transitions from one state to another throughout his work. Perhaps the most notorious example is the opening scene of Blue Velvet where the camera dives into an idyllic suburban lawn, driving deeper and deeper into the ground, revealing the darkness beneath the surface. In Mulholland Drive (2001), the key transition of the film takes place when Rita opens the enigmatic blue box matching the key she discovered in her purse earlier. The camera dives into the void, the box drops, and we’ve awoken from the dream (or shifted to another reality or however you want to interpret the sequence).
Background, Jil Sander (1993)
Entitled “Instinct of Life”, this spot for Jil Sander’s fragrance for men juxtaposes a man and a panther running across an arid landscape. The spare interior environment the man emerges from is decked with objects ripe with symbolism and visual intrigue (a piano, a single lamp, a candle that extinguishes halfway through the ad) and perhaps evokes the surreal dream space of the red room in Twin Peaks (1990-1991).
Many of the techniques used here seem to foreshadow Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway. The flashing lights, abundant use of colorful, glowing smoke, and stormy atmosphere are used at key points of the feature when the main character(s) Fred/Pete transform.
Gucci by Gucci, Gucci (2008)
Lynch revisited the Mulholland Drive trope of a blonde and a brunette crossing paths in a world of glamor, and raised questions about identity in his acclaimed ad for Gucci’s 2007 fragrance. Supermodels Raquel Zimmermann, Natasha Poly and Freja Beha Erichsen, the three faces of the fragrance, bop along to Blondie’s Heart of Glass until their images dissolve and merge, juxtaposed atop each other in a trance-like rapture, unified by the waft of fragrance.
A cute short film about the shoot for the commercial offers glimpses into Lynch’s creative process. A shot of Lynch filming a cascade of gold glitter with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth is especially charming.
Lynch’s perfume commercials clearly demonstrate an understanding of and reverence for the transformative power of fragrance. While surrealistic imagery is not out of place in fragrance advertising, it is elevated and taken to an exceptional level in Lynch’s ads, and his commercials blend seamlessly into the canon of his work. Perhaps there is a lesson here we can all take away from Lynch—put the same amount of care and artistry into everything you do, no project is necessarily beneath you, all opportunities are opportunities to express your vision.
I’ve seen 1988 and 1990 listed as the date of creation for the Obsession ads.
great and much needed survey. didn’t know the making-of, it’s mesmerizing (and now moving, of course). thank you!
Great to read this again (and see advertising all in one place). Thank you! A great read.