Although he’s no stranger to the world of commercials, it’s fun to ponder David Lynch, who’s probably never picked up a game controller in his life, leading a campaign advertising one of the most-played consoles of all time. Back in 2000, Sony tapped the artist for short pieces created under an umbrella known as The Third Place, which wisely suggested that playing the company’s soon-to-be-released PlayStation 2 would place you, the consumer, in a hellscape filled with nightmarish sights and bone-rattling sounds.
So, the work of David Lynch — not something most gaming types would conflate with their much-anticipated machine, but something that leaves a long-lasting imprint nonetheless. Some Reddit users have compiled all eight of these commericals (plus one making-of), thus allowing us to revisit a stranger time in the world of corporate advertising. Watching the entirety of this run isn’t going to make the overall intention much clearer, however: certain selections make sense from a video-gaming perspective — see a new world, dive into the dark unknown, etc. — while others are nearly incomprehensible, if not without their immediate sensory pleasures. Yes, that sounds like Lynch.
Speaking of: we’ve also embedded (via The Seventh Art) an episode of Mark Cousins‘s Scene By Scene, which he’d been the subject of in 1999. The show, as past examples will evince, asks great directors to examine various scenes extracted from their oeuvre; Lynch has no shortage, obviously, and his affable character only makes this run-through all the more enjoyable.
Watch them all below: