Advertisements by Calvin Klein appear in this playlist three times, which must mean that either 1) the brand is more adventurous than most, or b) the brand has a special kind of synergy with the particular strain of strangeness we call “Lynchian.” The answer might lie in the label’s resolute American-ness, given that the Lynchian is almost always situated in Americana.
There is also something deeply Lynchian about an unexplained air, a sensation but no concrete proof, of sexual threat. The panelled rec-room, both suggestive of suburban childhood and of porn, is a Lynchian site. Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel has the same aesthetic, so that panelled rooms and hallways always make me think of Agent Cooper — and then by extension of the demon BOB, who is at times an unseen force that acts as a catalyst for violence, sexual and otherwise. In these banned ads, a voice-off camera — male — directs a string of teenage-seeming models in a stilted, strange audition. What are they auditioning for? We are not told. The tone of the interlocutor is grimly pornographic, like a child molester or a prank sex caller. There is no real obscenity in any of the ads; the filthiness, the horror, is entirely in what what we think we’re seeing.