Nobody loves smoking more than David Lynch — except, perhaps, the French. Parisienne, first called “Parisienne People,” is a Swiss tobacco brand despite the name: in spirit, having hired Jean Luc Godard, the Coen brothers, Emir Kusturica and Lynch to direct adverts for them in the 90s, they’re appropriately Gallic.
Cigarette ads may now be as dead as the proverbial dodo, but sometimes it’s hard to argue smoking isn’t just a little cool, non?
In the spot, which helpfully appears in forward motion, i.e. in reverse, on YouTube, two men conjure and then kill a fire; laugh and celebrate a very brief and very localised rain shower; dig their hands around in the mud outside what looks like an abandoned petrol station, and then gawp in understandable amazement as a shoal of fish falls from the sky, and a cable thrashes and spews electricity like water.
In the true Lynch version, all this happens backwards, so that the ad begins — as so much Lynch does — with the electricity, and ends — as so much Lynch does — with the blast of fire. Why this ought to make us want to smoke a cigarette is as mysterious to me as Twin Peaks was to Homer Simpson, but the advert’s hellfire vision is indelible; once seen, never forgotten. Gotta light?